Some fireworks on the teevee pundit shows this week. Mary Matilin and George Will butted heads with Paul Krugman on This Week.

And Lawrence O’Donnell called out Newt on Meet the Press —

At least Krugman is getting on the teevee.

Ezra thinks the “fiscal cliff” compromise will have the tax rates for the wealthy going up some, but not all the way to the pre-Bush 39.6 percent. He also thinks the Dems will allow the Medicare eligibility age to go up to 57 67, as a sop to the Republicans.

Krugman —

I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that this is just a case of creeping Broderism, that it’s a VSP fantasy about how we’re going to resolve this in a bipartisan way. Because if Obama really does make this deal, there will be hell to pay.

Yeah, these bad ideas are bad ideas. As far as the tax rates are concerned, seems to me the Dems have the Grey Old Peckers by their boy parts, and we’ve still got more than three weeks to the cliff.

And Ezra himself explains why raising Medicare tax rates is a bad idea:

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(During the recent election campaign, Republicans tried to scare the old folks into voting for Romney by shrieking that Obama was cutting Medicare. And of course, Republicans wanted to win that election so they could cut Medicare.)

Why compromise on Medicare? The thinking seems to be that while it’s a bad idea, and would create real hardship for some folks, the pain would be narrowly spread and the deal would have little effect on the economy. But if they do this, the Dems had better get something really fat and juicy in return. And nothing fat and juicy enough is coming to mind.

I’m still breathing. I’m calling my new home the “ant farm” because right now it’s a maze of packing boxes. I’ve been too busy to do much in the way of unpacking.

Stuff to read —

Republicans Not Coping Well With Election Results

Karl Rove and Dick Morris are persona non grata at Fox, for now.

Dick Armey and FreedomWorks split.

I’m going to miss living next door to a Dunkin’ Donuts, although I was far from a regular customer. It was certainly handy this morning, since my coffeepot is packed.

Here’s a very righteous rant that you might like — Lucky to Have a Job.

You don’t know how much stuff you have until you haul it out of the closets and cupboards and try to pack it into boxes. Where the bleep did all this stuff come from?

The fiscal cliff theater going on in Washington strikes me as a ton of fun, and I wish I had more time to follow it.

As near as I can tell, the Republicans are refusing to negotiate while complaining that the President is refusing to negotiate. They say the President’s offer is not “serious,” but they have made no offers at all. So what does that make them?

They seem to think that “negotiating” means they can wait until the President offers them a package they like. However, the President has made it plain he is done negotiating with himself. The ball is in the GOP court.

Jonathan Chait says the Republicans are hoping that when the deadline for the “cliff” is nigh, the President will panic and give them what they want, which is to gut Medicare, Medicaid, etc. They are counting on fiscal hawks among the Dems to pressure the President to cave. He might, but I’m betting that he won’t.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are putting out signals that they want John Kerry to be the Secretary of State nominee. Y’know, the guy they swift-boated in 2004 and complained that he was too weak to run foreign policy is suddenly a man of integrity and international experience, as opposed to that Susan Rice bimbo. It’s worth noting that if John Kerry resigned his Senate seat it would be filled through a special election, and Scott Brown looks like a logical choice to run for it.

Do McCain and Graham know that lots of people are publicly making fun of them?

The continued hypocrisy/stupidity/absurdity of the pile on of Susan Rice is just plain off the charts.

I agree with Digby, that a lot of this is coming from the Right’s obsession/compulsion for payback.

Just as they convinced themselves that Whitewater was their Watergate, they think Benghazi is their 9/11 commission. I assume they persist in this endless round of idiotic payback politics because it’s just in their nature. It serves a political purpose too, of course. It’s a great distraction and destroys comity and purpose on the other side as even liberals with common sense start abandoning the field either because they buy into the “smell test” theory or figure they should cut their losses.

But in the end, I think it’s just because the right wing personality is one that holds grudges forever and always always hits back, no matter how long it takes.

I also agree with Ed Kilgore that a lot of this is about distracting the base from their recent election humiliation. And I say this sounds like a plan —

If congressional Republicans keep trying to take new hostages for their participation in fiscal talks—you know, the debt limit, Obamacare—at some point the administration might want to retaliate and say the GOP must call off its Benghazi witch hunt if it expects the president to sit down and negotiate with them. The frantic effort to find a “scandal,” not any actual scandal, is really becoming a major embarrassment to the credibility of the United States.

It ought to be an embarrassment to the Republican Party, which is managing to make itself look like a bigger collection of brainless stooges than usual. But they’re too oblivious to reality to be embarrassed.

Some Republicans in Congress are putting on quite a show these days, boldly declaring independence from Grover Norquist while still refusing to raise tax rates on the wealthy. For example, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee was widely praised for proposing a bold compromise that amounts to the same right-wing snake oil. After oozing some conciliatory prose, Corker makes this offer —

The proposal includes pro-growth federal tax reform, which generates more static revenue — mostly from very high-income Americans — by capping federal deductions at $50,000 without raising tax rates. It mandates common-sense reforms to the federal workforce, which will help bring its compensation in line with private-sector benefits, and implements a chained consumer price index across the government, a more accurate indicator of inflation. It also includes comprehensive Medicare reform that keeps in place fee-for-service Medicare without capping growth, competing side by side with private options that seniors can choose instead if they wish. Coupled with gradual age increases within Medicare and Social Security; the introduction of means testing; increasing premiums ever so slightly for those making more than $50,000 a year in retirement; and ending a massive “bed tax” gimmick the states use in Medicaid to bilk the federal government of billions, this reform would put our country on firmer financial footing and begin to vanquish our long-term deficit.

In other words, no increase in tax rates for the wealthy; cut salaries and benefits for federal employees; pass Mitt Romney’s version of Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan; and mess with Social Security, which isn’t part of the budget.

I say they can take this “compromise” and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

I’m going to have to check on the “bed tax” issue; I thought it was something some states did to raise matching funds required to receive Medicaid dollars, and while it may be a bad way to raise money, I don’t see how you can call it “bilking.” But maybe I’m misunderstanding it. And it seems to be happening mostly in “red” states, anyway.

Anyhoo — Krugman addresses the question of why Republicans are so all-fired determined to not raise tax rates —

The contortions Republicans are going through in an attempt to avoid raising tax rates are quite something, and they pose something of a puzzle: why are they making noises about raising revenue by limiting deductions, while still screaming bloody murder at any hint of a rise in tax rates?

One possible answer is that they’re still imagining that they can pull a fast one — that they can sell supposed revenue raisers that don’t actually raise much revenue, or that they can find a way to renege on whatever agreement might be reached by appealing to the various interests with a stake in particular deductions.

That was my thinking. But there’s another possibility — a proposal is floating around that would effectively stick the upper middle class with higher taxes but protect the genuinely wealthy. Billmon describes it as turning the upper middle class into human shields to protect the wealth of the wealthy. He continues,

So what’s going on here? Well, now that Comrade Norquist has been purged from their ranks, the Republican Politburo appears to have decided that if revenues must be raised, it should be done in the way suggested by their last presidential nominee (the one whose name is currently being methodically erased from the RNC’s official records).

To this end, various GOP apparatchiks are touting the idea of using deduction caps and/or clawback mechanisms (which would deprive high-income taxpayers of the benefit of the lower rates applied to the first few chunks of those incomes) as a substitute for raising the top marginal rate all the way back to the same confiscatory level (39.6%) that prevailed during the Clinton economic hell hole years.

You may recall that during the campaign a cap on itemized deductions (mortgage interest, state income tax, charitable contributions, etc.) was offered up by He-Who-No-Longer-Exists as the solution to his $5 trillion arithmetic problem — except that whereas Mitt wanted to use the money to pay for even lower marginal rates, the GOP Politburo has now adopted the Left Deviationist line that tax increases on the wealthy are OK as long as they don’t harm “incentives” for “job creators” — i.e. don’t raise the top marginal rate.

Billmon explains all this in more detail, as does Nate Silver (lots of math!) and Josh Marshall. Those guys explain the actual proposal better than I can. But it boils down to sticking people who make $250,000 to $400,000 a year with higher taxes as a kind of bait-and switch that would allow the very wealthy to keep their current tax rates on their millions and millions.

What the bleep is wrong with these people?
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Personal note — I have sold my co op and signed a lease on a rental apartment, and I am moving on Monday (six days!) and have a ton of other work to do beside that, so posting will be a bit hit and miss over the next few days. Please do drop by and talk among yourselves, though.

From time to time I hear that employers have a hard time hiring skilled workers, which never makes sense to me. Now we know what the problem is. Via Krugman, see Adam Davidson, “Skills Don’t Pay the Bills.”

Eric Isbister, the C.E.O. of GenMet, a metal-fabricating manufacturer outside Milwaukee, told me that he would hire as many skilled workers as show up at his door. Last year, he received 1,051 applications and found only 25 people who were qualified. He hired all of them, but soon had to fire 15. Part of Isbister’s pickiness, he says, comes from an avoidance of workers with experience in a “union-type job.” Isbister, after all, doesn’t abide by strict work rules and $30-an-hour salaries. At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years of good performance. From what I understand, a new shift manager at a nearby McDonald’s can earn around $14 an hour.

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.

Davidson goes on to say that most of the people who are still doing these high-kill manufacturing jobs are in their 50s. Younger people understandably don’t see the point in getting trained for jobs that don’t pay any better than McDonald’s. And at least fast-food jobs are not going to be sent overseas. So the young folks who have the math and computer skills manufacturers need are looking elsewhere, and the fake skills shortage is likely to turn into a real skills shortage.

Krugman writes,

And this dovetails perfectly with one of the key arguments against the claim that much of our unemployment is “structural”, due to a mismatch between skills and labor demand. If that were true, you should see soaring wages for those workers who do have the right skills; in fact, with rare exceptions you don’t.

So what you really want to ask is why American businesses don’t feel that it’s worth their while to pay enough to attract the workers they say they need.

What about the competition of overseas labor? Krugman addresses that, too in an essay he wrote several years ago. As he says elsewhere, this area of the impact of global competition on wages is his “home field.”