Many pundits have been telling us that the reason that workers are not getting jobs is that employers cannot find workers with the skills needed for the positions available. I have regularly ridiculed this position, since if it were true we would see sharply rising wages in some sectors as employers competed for the limited group of workers who have the necessary skills. Of course we don’t see any major sector of the labor market with rapidly rising wages.

However, I must now reconsider this view. David Brooks presented compelling evidence that employers cannot find workers with the necessary skills.

One of the themes of people like Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo as well as many other mayors and governors around the country is how things are so bad economically that the states must cut back in so many services, laying off teachers, first responders, cutting Medicaid eligibility, rolling back unemployment benefits, and generally destroying both the social safety net and wages and benefits for state workers. Yet here it is, New York City can incur millions of dollars in overtime costs going after unarmed, mostly peaceful protestors (according to this from WNYC it was over $5M by late October), yet city agencies are scrambling for funds:

Five people were arrested in Madison, Wisconsin at the Capitol yesterday, amid a march of thousands led by former Sen. Russ Feingold.

While we have been frantically playing defense against relentless assaults on multiple fronts, from anti-union legislation to draconian anti-choice laws to the attempted privatization of Medicare, the selling off of public assets to the private sector has received little attention.

The one thing every interviewer should know about Kentucky’s Republican Senator Mitch McConnell is that he never answers any question he’d rather duck. But today he revealed he’s willing to risk a US credit default to force hundreds of billions in slashed Medicare benefits.

You would think that a sentient President of the United States would be embarrassed, ashamed, and contrite after one of the more mindless and destructive governmental performances in years.

Nope.

We’re spending an average of $55 million a day to bomb Libyans while, as Bittman says, people here are going to bed hungry.

On the heels of massive public demonstrations in Wisconsin and Ohio after Republican governors over-played their hands in seeking to destroy collective bargaining for public employees and make punitive cuts to education, Florida may be next in line. Tuesday, March 8 has been designated the day to “Awake The State“, with over thirty demonstrations planned across the state, spanning from Key West to Pensacola. There will even be multiple demonstrations in Tallahassee and Miami.

Decades ago, when we understood we were at war, the ratio of government debt to the economy was vastly larger than it is today. We used deficit spending to win the war and save the economy. Yet we defeated the world’s most evil regimes and emerged as the strongest nation in the world. Despite that debt, or actually because of the foundations it set, we embarked on one of the greatest, most broadly shared expansions of human prosperity in history. Today’s nihilist coalition doesn’t want you to know that.

Last night, the House Republican caucus held emergency meetings in the basement, only emerging late to say they reached an agreement on a spending cut plan for Fiscal Year 2011, one that would cut spending $100 billion below the Obama Administration’s 2011 request. Because Obama’s 2011 request never came to pass, however, the proper comparison is to the 2010 levels, and this cut would be $58 billion from those.