In the 2 July 2010 issue, the New York Times reports that, Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage.

[M]anufacturers who want to expand find that hiring is not always easy. During the recession, domestic manufacturers appear to have accelerated the long-term move toward greater automation, laying off more of their lowest-skilled workers and replacing them with cheaper labor abroad.

Now they are looking to hire people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker.

…

The Obama administration has advocated further stimulus measures, which the Senate rejected, and has allocated more money for training. Still, officials say more robust job creation is the real solution.

But a number of manufacturers say that even if demand surges, they will never bring back many of the lower-skilled jobs, and that training is not yet delivering the skilled employees they need.

…

Christina D. Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said the skills shortages reported by employers stem largely from a long-term structural shift in manufacturing, which should not be confused with the recent downturn. “I do think that manufacturing can come back to what it was before the recession,” she said.

-RichardH

In the 1 July 2010 issue of the New York Times, Gail Collins suggests two candidates for the title, ‘The Most Unhappy Fellow’.

(1) Senator Scott Brown (R, MA):

Brown ran as a sort of populist man of the people, but in April, he told The Boston Globe that he couldn’t support the then-current version of the [finance reform] bill. When asked what he wanted changed, Brown said: “Well, what areas do you think should be fixed? I mean, you know, tell me. And then I’ll get a team and go fix it.”

It was at this point that we began to suspect that Massachusetts’s junior senator is not a deep thinker.

Brown came around and voted for the bill when it passed the Senate. Then he backed away when it came out of conference committee because the conferees had added a tax on big banks.

Which Brown claimed he could not support. This was at the same time that he was refusing to give the Democrats a final critical vote on extending unemployment benefits. We have here a populist man of the people playing the role of friend to the big banks while not being particularly helpful to the long-term unemployed. What can I tell you? The guy is extremely popular in Massachusetts. Maybe it’s because he drives a truck.

The Democrats dove back into conference and got rid of a $19 billion tax just to make Brown happy. Now he says he’s going to spend the upcoming holiday recess pondering the bill’s implications.

(2) House Minority Leader John Boehner:

[In an interview with The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review] Boehner dismissed the financial reform package as “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” Once again, Democrats did the happy dance.

“That’s right,” said President Obama at his town-hall meeting on the economy in Wisconsin. “He compared the financial crisis to an ant. The same financial crisis that led to the loss of nearly eight million jobs.”

Boehner also called for means-testing Social Security so that retirees with “substantial non-Social Security income” don’t get payments. This should be popular with upper-middle-class Republican voters, whose great complaint has always been that the government insists on giving them too much money.

Perhaps most interesting was his attack on the Obama administration’s attempts to impose a moratorium on deep-sea drilling. “The deep-water drilling — maybe there’s a reason there to pause till we know what happened and we can make sure we can prevent it from happening again,” Boehner said. “But all of this other drilling that’s going on down there in the more shallow waters — there’s no reason to have a moratorium.”

This is actually a perfect description of the Obama policy. It was as if Boehner had denounced the health care reform law by saying that it would probably be a good idea to require people to have insurance and subsidize it for the poor, but that there was absolutely no reason to nationalize all the hospitals and have them run by the Army. Boehner looked burned-out in the interview, like a sullen college student sitting through a boring seminar. A very tanned, puffy-eyed, 60-year-old college student.

And to find out what Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC talk-show host and former Republican congressman, thinks Representative Boehner’s problem is, read the end of Collins’s article.

-RichardH

In the September 1975 issue of The Atlantic, Sanford Ungar wrote The Man Who Runs the Senate about recently deceased Robert C. Byrd.

-RichardH