If only people wanted jobs

Today, the Oklahoman ran what is, on the surface, a rather inoffensive letter from B. Max Dubroff of Edmond. (Unrelated aside: Going by first initial-middle name-last name is TOTALLY cool. No sarcasm. If I could get away with it, I totally would.)

As I said, this is not-- on the surface-- the typical plutocrat/theocrat letter that the paper loves to print. It starts out, though, using some of the lamest rhetorical devices there are:

While the media focus on the minimum wage, we hear little discussion about skills and education development. The cart has gotten before the horse! If the horse isn’t strong enough to move forward, it won’t, no matter how nice or attractive the cart is. There needs to be more focus on preparation for existing jobs that employers are having difficulty finding qualified people to fill.

Ugh. So we get the "cart before the horse" thing-- it's a perfectly fine idiom. But then he tries to force some more metaphor out of it and it gets awkward and forced, and doesn't related to his final thought, that somehow, there are lots of open jobs that are unfilled because people just don't have the right preparation.

It's a common thought among many, but the question is: is it true? The short answer is NO. AS Krugman notes:

But the belief that America suffers from a severe “skills gap” is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true. It’s a prime example of a zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die. 

Nevertheless, we get this from Mr Dubroff:

People who have the skills and character that employers need won’t be worried about minimum wage, because of healthy competition that will drive higher pay. One way to see an increasing emphasis on developing skills and education is through a workforce investment board. These boards bring together leaders from business, education, economic development and other agencies to ensure workforce development and job training programs meet the needs of employers.

And there it is: the zombie idea trotted out using standard "the market cures everything" phrasing. Never mind that most of the discussion about minimum wage is about low skill jobs like those offered at Wal-Mart of McDonalds, according to Mr Dubroff, if we just trained people in new skills, they could go to (better?) jobs, and the low-end, no-skills places like fast food establishments would-- through the miracle of the free market!-- be forced to offer higher wages.

Unfortunately, this is a pernicious idea that, Krugman states, "does a lot of harm" to American workers:

Think about what we would expect to find if there really were a skills shortage. Above all, we should see workers with the right skills doing well, while only those without those skills are doing badly.

 Of course, this just isn't the case. And that's the point.

Yes, workers with a lot of formal education have lower unemployment than those with less, but that’s always true, in good times and bad. The crucial point is that unemployment remains much higher among workers at all education levels than it was before the financial crisis. The same is true across occupations: workers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007. 

Some employers do complain that they’re finding it hard to find workers with the skills they need. But show us the money: If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills. In reality, however, it’s very hard to find groups of workers getting big wage increases, and the cases you can find don’t fit the conventional wisdom at all.

 You can read Krugman yourself and see that he's right. What's important here is that this is the sort of lazy line that the slightly sane section of the right wing plutocracy likes to push: if people would just get the right skills, they could all find work. The reality, though, is that this is just a distraction from what really would fix things: government spending on important things like infrastructure, education, and, hell, even the military.

That's because right now, the problem isn't unskilled workers-- it's demand. No demand means no one needs to hire new people-- regardless of if you are a grocery store cashier, a nurse, or an electrical engineer. But when demand goes up, all of those jobs come back into play.

The Oklahoman has always had its economics wrong, as it continually argues for low taxes on the super-rich, no regulations on business, and limited rights for the worker. Suggesting that our employment problem is just a skills issue allows the Oklahoman and its plutocratic overlords to pretend that they are Very Serious People about something, instead of admitting that really addressing the problem means, well, taxing the super-rich a bit more to expand government investment in the country's infrastructure, and making sure that the lower classes have access to things like real healthcare and affordable education.

Mr Dubroff's letter isn't atrocious like most Plutocracy Now! letters are to the Oklahoman-- you know: Obama is a socialist, we are going to end up like Greece (remember when that was a meme among right-wing idiots??), Nazi Germany is right around the corner, etc., etc., etc. But while it is stated without harsh zealotry or hyperbole, it still pushes an argument (our unemployment problem is just because workers don't have the right skill-sets!) that has no factual support. But that meme lets the plutocrats off the hook for higher taxes to pay for things we really need, and the end result is that thousands of Oklahomans-- people who read this paper-- remain out of work when they could be employed. If only some greedy plutocrats cared.