One of the things that's most maddening about the argument that there are plenty of good jobs out there but a shortage of skilled workers to fill them is the assumption that people who are unemployed no longer have marketable job skills, and that they need to get retrained so that they deliver more value to their future employer than a robot, a computer, or a Bengali telemarketing rep. But not all jobs can be automated or outsourced! Put it this way: there are thousands of public schoolteachers who had jobs five years ago but who don't have them now. Do we no longer need public schoolteachers? If the answer is "No," then we don't tell them they need to go back to school so they can learn to write code, but hire them back at their old jobs so the teachers remaining in places like LAUSD aren't stuck with 40 kids to a class. Yes, I know this means raising taxes on rich people, but if that's what needs to be done, then we do it. And either way, stop blaming the recession on people who didn't cause it.
---Baron V
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