Friday, October 24, 2014
Shared Prosperity
LABOR SECRETARY: OBAMA WILL TAKE 'AGGRESSIVE EXEC ACTION' ON IMMIGRATION FOR 'SHARED PROSPERITY'
by TONY LEE 23 Oct 2014 463POST A COMMENT
Angst grows over Obama’s plans for action on immigration
TheHill.com
00:00 / 00:00
Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said President Barack Obama will take "aggressive executive action" on immigration, which Perez said will bring about more "shared prosperity."
Addressing the National Press Club this week, Perez, who is reportedly on the short list to be Obama's next attorney general, said the country needed to "fix our broken immigration system" with comprehensive amnesty legislation that is "big and bold" to ensure that there is "shared prosperity," which he said is a goal of his Labor Department. Though the Congressional Budget Office determined that comprehensive amnesty legislation would lower the wages of American workers, Labor Secretary Perez championed it.
Obama, after delaying his executive amnesty until after the midterms to help Senate Democrats retain control of the Senate, has said he would enact it before the end of the year. Breitbart News first reported this week that the federal government is preparing millions of identification cards for immigrants who may be given temporary amnesty and work permits via executive action.
Despite studies from Harvard Professor George Borjas and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that have concluded otherwise, Perez said amnesty legislation would also increase wages for American workers.
Perez, who worked on immigration reform with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), said he has also "spent a lot of time with folks in the Silicon Valley" in response to a question about Silicon Valley business leaders demanding immigration reform "because there is not enough workers to fill the demand for high-tech workers."
Silicon Valley companies like Microsoft are laying off thousands of American workers, even as they clamor for more guest-worker permits for cheaper foreign labor. Though numerous scholars and studies have found that America has a surplus of high-tech workers, Obama suggestedin Southern California recently that he is considering granting more guest-worker visas to high-tech companies via executive action. Perez spoke about the importance of giving more opportunities to enter the middle class, but he did not address Professor Ron Hira's concerns that massively increasing guest-worker permits for high-tech workers would "cut off" entry into the middle class for people from working-class backgrounds.
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The contradictory policies put out by this administration have nothing to do with raising the poor or strengthening the middle class. It is about creating the same flat, dull, drab existence for everyone... everyone of course except for the elite... those who, in every country and under any government live in their own version of shameless opulence. The difference between the free market approach and the authoritarian approach is that in the free market people were either elected or worked there as off to get it... in anything deviation from the free market, they find a way to suck money out of the wallets of those less connected to the government.
ReplyDeleteI largely agree with you TS, with the big difference being that I no longer believe pure capitalism will fix everything. Obama is contradictory? ALL U.S. Presidents have been contradictory and for good reason, namely to try and protect a good thing. I did quick search on the topic and came back with several stories from July of this year that referred to a lengthy speech from Republican Jeff Sessions who lambasted Microsoft for firing thousands while asking for an increase in visas for engineers. Here is one link http://www.sessions.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ID=58a0e039-7401-4ed1-a276-98e0c642cd9a
DeleteMy response is predictable, which is to say that free marketers can't have it both ways. On the one hand, they want a completely unregulated market when it comes to oversight of business, but simultaneously, they also bemoan the collapse of the middle class when jobs are outsourced, and then they erupt in full outrage when immigration is used to further crush wages. A free market is a free market. If someone wants immigration reform because it is helping to crush wages, thenthey are not a free marketer. I would think free marketers wouldn't need to be educated about this reality of what happens to the middle class in free market systems, but apparently this isn't the case.
I believe in free markets when EVERYONE is forced to compete and the competitors compete in a contest that is not rigged. Mega companies like Microsoft, Walmart, GE and on and on, use their size and influence to rig every contest they compete in. I believed in Ayn Rand's romanticism of capitalism for quite a long time until it became painfully clear to me that it is human nature to NOT want to compete for anything as long as you can find a way to win without doing so. I believe regulation should exist to do what free markets can't, which is to ensure that business continues to compete. This, of course, is anti capitalist because capitalism is a winner take all system. Competition exists for all businesses until they reach a size where they can simply buy out or squash all other competitors. Once entrenched, they are hard to unseat.
Again, everyone from liberal to conservative in this country wants it both ways. They want cheap shit, jobs that pay really good money and a sense of security and protection of their standing.
Second para doesnt' quite read correctly. My point is that those who want a sealed border with drones, tanks, and "frickin laser beams on the sharks" is a protectionist and NOT a free marketer.
DeleteHow many illegals can the US absorb and still survive?
DeleteUnfortunately you wish to confound two entirely different problems. One of course is free enterprise which seeks to bring together a willing buyer and a willing seller. While I would like to see that free exchange of both labor and product one major problem stands in the way. That problem of course is national sovereignty. The planet is a cluster of independent economies that have developed over centuries. They do not look or operate the same nor do they seek to create the same outcomes. I personally am for open borders as long as everyone plays by the same rules... those rules of course are spelled out pretty clearly in both the preamble of our constitution and the bill of rights... Until such time, I am a nationalist, an American and expect our government to look out for the interest of Americans and our sovereign nation as a whole. I no more believe in dropping our borders unilaterally, hoping that others will follow our ideals, than I do dismantling our nuclear deterrent as a show of good faith. You can call it protectionist if you like but I do not see ‘free enterprise’ when competing with a sovereign nation that uses slave labor to turn a profit nor do I think that allowing people from other countries to exploit our job markets and opportunities just to create a significant percentage of the GDP of another country is particularly right when we can’t go there and have just as much access.
DeleteYou say you are for free markets when everyone has the same opportunity. Make no mistake, most international companies founded in the US have, at one time or another been the beneficiary of some deal or legislation that has stifled their competition. US government hands down has created more monopoly than free enterprise ever has and to the extent that some companies grow to the point that they are in control of a particular market, unless they harm another in competing, which is against the law, the worst that they have done is create a superior product. But understand, without constant vigilance and work, their superior product today will be eclipsed by someone else’s product tomorrow or be made obsolete by a totally new way of addressing the problem. Do you have a problem with a company that boasts a 100 year history?
Were the government of the US to do what the commerce clause was originally intended to accomplish, they would set a level playing field between states (not intervene in the businesses that reside in those states) and insure that all states have a fair and equitable chance at competing internationally. Tarriffs should be used as before to pay for the federal government and not as some sort of punitive tit for tat.... Treaties are suppose to create the rules of equality. I can fairly say that the US government is getting worse at creating treaties for the benefit of Americans and not better.
Final Point:
“I believed in Ayn Rand's romanticism of capitalism for quite a long time until it became painfully clear to me that it is human nature to NOT want to compete for anything as long as you can find a way to win without doing so.”
I rest my case for 95% of state granted support because if people are not being motivated to be productive, they are a burden to themselves and to the hard workers who support them... and to your point, if the government would get out of the business of manipulating business and simply enforce contracts, the government wouldn’t have a long line of lobbyists and political donors knocking at its doors.
“A related form of utopianism consists of suspending general assumptions about human nature when considering agents of the state. Defenders of government are often keen to point out the harms that might result from the widespread greed and selfishness of mankind in the absence of a government able to restrain our worst excesses. Yet they seldom pause to consider what might result from the very same greed and selfishness in the presence of government, on the assumption that governments are equally prone to those very failings. It is not that statists have some account of why government employees are more virtuous than average people. Nor do they have some plan for making that be the case. Rather, it seems simply to have never occurred to most statists to apply realistic assumptions about human nature to the government itself. The state is treated as if it stood above the empirical human world, transcending not only the moral constraints but also the psychological forces that apply to individual human beings.”
ReplyDeleteMichael Huemer - The Problem of Political Authority