The Atlantic employs a blogger to write about the economy. She's not an economist and she's often just plain full of shit. (I know, that's the pot calling the kettle "black" but, 1. I'm not paid to write about the economy and 2. when I do write about the economy I try not to base policy critiques on personal anecdotes.) Her latest idea is to kill worker retraining programs for older people and to give incentives to companies to train workers.
The first part is cold hearted. It is saying, "You worked in a factory for 25 years and lost your job through no fault of your own. You are in your 50's and have no good prospects for a job. You are not worth retraining."
The second part sounds reasonable until it's applied. Companies will suddenly require extensive training for jobs that never required training before... just to get the subsidy. The training will likely be lame and include lots of on-the-job training which simply means the worker is doing the job with a part of his paycheck coming from the government and not the company.
Republicans had a similar idea for a sub-minimum wage in the 1990's. Allow McDonalds to pay workers less than the minimum wage for 3 or six months to encourage them to train new workers. It takes a day to train someone to flip burgers so employers would hire 16 year-olds at lower wages, employ them to work for six months, and cut their hours once they had to pay them more.
I'm not trying to start a flame war with a professional blogger. It's simply disappointing that The Atlantic - home of world #1 blogger (Andrew Sullivan) and one of the best political reporters (Marc Ambinder) - can't get a better blogger on economics.
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