Population Control

[WinePusher]

In the Why Is Homosexuality Wrong Thread the debate has become about reproductive issues and responsible family planning.

1) Does anyone on here actually support China's One Child Policy?

2) Is population control an effective means to protect the enviroment? (As some MSNBC commentators think).

3) Do you think the United States has a population size problem?

[WinePusher]

If the goal of the stimulus was to save 1.5 to 3.3 millions jobs and keep unemployment below 15%, then that is what Obama should have said when he was trying to sell it to the public.

Instead, what we got was "unemployment would not rise above 8%" well if that was the intended goal of this "stimulus" then it has failed.

The goal was to keep us from going into a deep depression and to relieve the effects of the recession.

Then that is what the President and his aids should have told us from the beginning.

I must have corrected at least a half-dozen people on this forum already on thee 8% canard. Listen carefully so I don't have to do this for you again.

Ok, here are my sources: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/01/07/mor ... us-failed/ and http://www.frumforum.com/romer-my-plan-failed-2

Most every economist in late 2008 and early 2009 under-projected the strength of the recession. The only error, if there was one, on Obama's part with respect to his statement was in treating the conventional wisdom at that time as solid.

So you are essentially ignoring the recent Hindenburg Omen, the unpredictable stock market, the failing housing market, and the prevalence of a double dip recession as announced by Obama's Deficit Commission chair. How can you see we're in a recovery in light of all this.

Your objection is like saying that the airbags failed because the passenger got a concussion instead of only bruises when the the odometer was later found to be faulty and was reading 30 mph when the car was actually going 50. Sorry, not Obama's fault the odometer was faulty. And the airbags didn't fail either. If the airbags had not been there, the passenger would have been dead instead.

You seem to think everything would have been just fine if we had left the airbags out of the car.

Well, if the car manufacturer promised me that the worse injury that a person could get were bruises, and a person got a concussion, then I'd consider the product a failure.

Isolated examples are not documentation of the extent of crime overall try again.

Really, if we had maintained a secure border and didn't have illegals roaming around here unchecked and undocumented, those lives would have been saved. But if you really want to go down this route:

http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?p ... enters0b9c

You propose to prevent immigrant crime by closing the border. Should we prevent black crime by some policy that addresses black mobility in the country or some other strategy?

Black crime is generally committed by citizens. Citizens of this country have rights and can be dealt with in the national dialouge.

Following your logic, if I can find an example of an illegal immigrant saving a little old lady from being run over by a bus, then illegal immigration has been proven to save lives.

Ok, lets compare the number of illegals that save lives to the number of illegals that have taken lives. Your lead.

Read the article!!

Are you willing to have border guards shooting at and killing unarmed civilians trying to cross the border?

Perposterous. If that is what the article by the NY Sun claims then it's not a reliable source. There would be legal points of entry, and who says that our border patrol would be told to shoot on sight, I would be aganist that.

Are you willing to spend the additional many billions a year required to put in and staff a "Berlin Wall" across 2000 miles of border? Are you willing to refund my tax money when it doesn't work?

Yep, Democrats seem willing to spend billions on their little economic projects, but when it comes to securing our border and protecting our sovernigty they begin worrying about frivolous spending.

[Wyvern]

If the goal of the stimulus was to save 1.5 to 3.3 millions jobs and keep unemployment below 15%, then that is what Obama should have said when he was trying to sell it to the public.

Instead, what we got was "unemployment would not rise above 8%" well if that was the intended goal of this "stimulus" then it has failed.

The goal was to keep us from going into a deep depression and to relieve the effects of the recession.

Then that is what the President and his aids should have told us from the beginning.

Maybe the president and his aides had a bit more faith in the intelligence of their fellow americans that they didn't have to spoonfeed them all the reasoning behind the stimulus. People against Obama complain when he does try to explain things completely because it makes him sound like an elitist talking down to us and they complain when he doesn't explain things completely because you accuse him of lying since he didn't state specifically his reasoning is for something. Make up your mind and stick to it, do you want short soundbites that give incomplete explanations of what the administration is doing or would you rather have long detailed explanations that fully lay out the intentions of the administrations policies?

Most every economist in late 2008 and early 2009 under-projected the strength of the recession. The only error, if there was one, on Obama's part with respect to his statement was in treating the conventional wisdom at that time as solid.

So you are essentially ignoring the recent Hindenburg Omen, the unpredictable stock market, the failing housing market, and the prevalence of a double dip recession as announced by Obama's Deficit Commission chair. How can you see we're in a recovery in light of all this.

The stock market is inherently unpredictable otherwise everyone would be profiting off of it the problem is the majority of stock brokers have not been in the field long enough to have ever experienced any kind of major downturn before this. If you got into the stock market thinking it was the road to guaranteed riches your broker lied to you or you lied to yourself, but again most people have short memories and the last time there was a major bust in the stock market was around twenty years ago. With the housing market the very nature of the housing market was drastically altered when some enterprising broker looking for a new place to put his investors money came up with the idea to turn housing loans into a commodity. This in turn put pressure on lenders to loosen lending rules in order to produce more of this new commodity. The primary lenders no longer cared either way who got a loan because after that loan was commoditized they no longer were responsible for any defaults all of which set the stage for what eventually happened.

Following your logic, if I can find an example of an illegal immigrant saving a little old lady from being run over by a bus, then illegal immigration has been proven to save lives.

Ok, lets compare the number of illegals that save lives to the number of illegals that have taken lives. Your lead.

Now this is plain silly you know full well that no such statistics are kept. But on the other hand think how many megatons of food was picked by illegals over the years because very few americans would want jobs that pay so little for so much effort and think of how many lives were likely saved from starvation the world over versus the few people that have been killed over the years by the same illegals. I would like to know how you can justify spending billions on securing our southern border in order to save a few lives but can not justify universal health care in our country that would save thousands.

Are you willing to have border guards shooting at and killing unarmed civilians trying to cross the border?

Perposterous. If that is what the article by the NY Sun claims then it's not a reliable source. There would be legal points of entry, and who says that our border patrol would be told to shoot on sight, I would be aganist that.

Considering the climate around much of the border shooting them would be a mercy instead of turning them back into the desert letting them die of exposure or dehydration.

Are you willing to spend the additional many billions a year required to put in and staff a "Berlin Wall" across 2000 miles of border? Are you willing to refund my tax money when it doesn't work?

Yep, Democrats seem willing to spend billions on their little economic projects, but when it comes to securing our border and protecting our sovernigty they begin worrying about frivolous spending.

Simply put walls don't work, there's always a way around them or under them or through them. Are you willing to have a massive tax hike for this project of yours?

[micatala]

If the goal of the stimulus was to save 1.5 to 3.3 millions jobs and keep unemployment below 15%, then that is what Obama should have said when he was trying to sell it to the public.

Instead, what we got was "unemployment would not rise above 8%" well if that was the intended goal of this "stimulus" then it has failed.

The goal was to keep us from going into a deep depression and to relieve the effects of the recession.

Then that is what the President and his aids should have told us from the beginning.

I'm sorry, this is a pretty petty objection. He has always been up front about our being in a difficult situation that was going to take a while to get out of. He has provided the best information he had at the time.

I must have corrected at least a half-dozen people on this forum already on thee 8% canard. Listen carefully so I don't have to do this for you again.

Ok, here are my sources: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/01/07/mor ... us-failed/ and http://www.frumforum.com/romer-my-plan-failed-2

Let's look at this one at a time.

First the Morning Bell article.

Why did these first two economic stimuli fail? For the same reason any third stimulus will also fail: government spending does not inject any new money into the economy. Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Brian Riedl explains:

Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It is merely redistributed from one group of people to another.
…
Yes, government spending can put under-utilized factories and individuals to work–but only by idling other resources in whatever part of the economy supplied the funds. If adding $1 billion would create 40,000 jobs in one depressed part of the economy, then losing $1 billion will cost roughly the same number of jobs in whatever part of the economy supplied Washington with the funds. It is a zero-sum transfer regardless of whether the unemployment rate is 5 percent or 50 percent.

Note that the author does not provide any evidence the stimulus failed, he simply asserts that it did and goes on to explain why. And this explanation is not based on evidence of what was or was not accomplished, it simply gives a philosophical argument based on conservative assumptions. One of these is that the spending must be a zero-sum transfer. This assumption is not justified by any argument or evidence here, and ignores several things.

First, the government can borrow money. Now, you may say this is just a transfer from the future. However, given that conditions now are worse than they are on average, even though we are past the bottom of the receession, it is likely we are borrowing from a time when conditions are going to be better and thus from a time that will much more easily afford the cost, whether it comes in terms of reduced spending then or not.

Secondly, it ignores that economies grow, and so are not zero sum games. IN fact, that is how we ultimately get out of most recessions. Thus, we could say the stimulus is borrowed from the future, but that future is very likely to have MORE resources than we do today because the economy will have grown.

Now, I am not saying borrowing has no downside, and we do risk the possibility the future will not be better or not better enough to absorb the cost. Still, given the gravity of the situation, and the fact that borrowing currently has very little immediate cost due to low interest rates, and this was a good bet and I repeat, the evidence indicates it is working in the form of lower unemployment and a less drastic recession than we are likely to have had otherwise.

The other problem is he assumes the effect of moving a billion dollars from sector A to sector B of the economy will have the same amount of negative effect as positive effect. Again, this is a highly dubious proposition. It's sort of like saying the finger you stick in a small hole in the dike to prevent catastrophe costs the same amount as having the catastrophe. For example, I think the benefit of the auto bailout if measured objectively against the cost to "other sectors" of the economy will prove to be a big net plus. We saved several hundreds of thousands of jobs and two companies from bankruptcy.




Now, onto the article on Romer.

First, while I like Frum, for him to paint this as "Romer admits failure" is spin of the first order. The stimulus not having as much positive benefit as hoped for is not failure.

In fact, this article simply reaffirms what I have been saying all along.

Many Republicans have criticized the Obama administration for painting a rosy picture of economic recovery, and Romer had herself predicted that the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising above 8%.

Defending her projections, Romer argued that she correctly predicted the stimulus’ effect, but failed to accurately forecast how bad the economy would have been in the absence of the stimulus, also known as the baseline estimate:

An estimate of what the economy will look like if a policy is adopted contains two components: a forecast of what would happen in the absence of the policy, and an estimate of the effect of the policy… we, like virtually every other forecaster, failed to anticipate how violent the recession would be in the absence of policy, and the degree to which the usual relationship between GDP and unemployment would break down.

Further, Romer asserted that the current recession represents an unprecedented problem, one that continues to puzzle economists to this day.

Most every economist in late 2008 and early 2009 under-projected the strength of the recession. The only error, if there was one, on Obama's part with respect to his statement was in treating the conventional wisdom at that time as solid.

So you are essentially ignoring the recent Hindenburg Omen, the unpredictable stock market, the failing housing market, and the prevalence of a double dip recession as announced by Obama's Deficit Commission chair. How can you see we're in a recovery in light of all this.

Red Herring. I was only referring to Obama's statements regarding the 8%, which I the first of your articles did not even address.

Your objection is like saying that the airbags failed because the passenger got a concussion instead of only bruises when the the odometer was later found to be faulty and was reading 30 mph when the car was actually going 50. Sorry, not Obama's fault the odometer was faulty. And the airbags didn't fail either. If the airbags had not been there, the passenger would have been dead instead.

You seem to think everything would have been just fine if we had left the airbags out of the car.

Well, if the car manufacturer promised me that the worse injury that a person could get were bruises, and a person got a concussion, then I'd consider the product a failure.

Your misapplying the analogy. The promise was that you would only get bruises if the care was going 30 mph. If you drove it 50 and got a concussion, that is not a failure, it's a change in the parameters under which the promise was made. The fact that it still kept you alive means you should be grateful it performed as well as it did instead of carping.


And I point out again that your solution seems to be to take the airbags out of the car. How much sense does that make??

Isolated examples are not documentation of the extent of crime overall try again.

Really, if we had maintained a secure border and didn't have illegals roaming around here unchecked and undocumented, those lives would have been saved. But if you really want to go down this route:

http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?p ... enters0b9c

I will try to look at this more later, but will note that crime is going to cost us whether it is done by illegals or not. Documenting the costs does not tell us much unless we compare to the cost of crime done by legal citizens AND can document that we can reduce the net cost by throwing money at keeping ALL illegals out (as if that were possible). Now, I am open to discussion on the issue, but at this point I don't see that amping up border security is going to prevent more crime per dollar than simply putting it into law enforcement and ignoring who is doing the crime.

You propose to prevent immigrant crime by closing the border. Should we prevent black crime by some policy that addresses black mobility in the country or some other strategy?

Black crime is generally committed by citizens. Citizens of this country have rights and can be dealt with in the national dialouge.

Fair enough. I certainly accept citizens have more rights, and they should have, than illegal immigrants. However, the point is that the somewhat higher rate of crime among illegals does not necessarily justify draconian and expensive border security strategies. We should consider what the cost per crime prevented or punished is and how to best get that cost down.

Following your logic, if I can find an example of an illegal immigrant saving a little old lady from being run over by a bus, then illegal immigration has been proven to save lives.

Ok, lets compare the number of illegals that save lives to the number of illegals that have taken lives. Your lead.

The fallacy of this request has already been pointed out by Wyvern.

Read the article!!

Are you willing to have border guards shooting at and killing unarmed civilians trying to cross the border?

Perposterous. If that is what the article by the NY Sun claims then it's not a reliable source. There would be legal points of entry, and who says that our border patrol would be told to shoot on sight, I would be aganist that.

I agree, I am also against it. BUt the point is that if you are not willing to do that, the big fence and lots of people manning it STILL will not prevent all leakage across the border.

Are you willing to spend the additional many billions a year required to put in and staff a "Berlin Wall" across 2000 miles of border? Are you willing to refund my tax money when it doesn't work?

Yep, Democrats seem willing to spend billions on their little economic projects, but when it comes to securing our border and protecting our sovernigty they begin worrying about frivolous spending.

I am certainly open to comparative cost-benefit analyses. I am also not opposed to stricter security. However, it should meet some criteria.

1) Be fair and humane to the illegal immigrants. Nothing fancy, just treat them reasonably.
2) Be cost effective. If it costs $50,000 per year per person to keep a person out and $20,000 per person on average to have them here, why spend the extra $30K?





Also, I note no one has responded to my suggestions that education, particularly of females, is an effective way to reduce population growth. We an continue the immigration discussion, but that is not really getting at the crux of the issue in the OP.

[Lux]

]Also, I note no one has responded to my suggestions that education, particularly of females, is an effective way to reduce population growth. We an continue the immigration discussion, but that is not really getting at the crux of the issue in the OP.

I completely agree that education is one of the best ways to reduce population growth. It would particularly help to offer better sex education in schools were students from low income families attend.

However, this won't be enough. Birth control is expensive, and being informed about it will not help those that can't afford it. If you want to reduce population growth, you have to offer free or at least accessible birth control, period.

[Goat]

]Also, I note no one has responded to my suggestions that education, particularly of females, is an effective way to reduce population growth. We an continue the immigration discussion, but that is not really getting at the crux of the issue in the OP.

I completely agree that education is one of the best ways to reduce population growth. It would particularly help to offer better sex education in schools were students from low income families attend.

However, this won't be enough. Birth control is expensive, and being informed about it will not help those that can't afford it. If you want to reduce population growth, you have to offer free or at least accessible birth control, period.

Absolutely, and people have to realize the economic benefits of smaller families verses large ones.

[ChaosBorders]

1) The cost of labor should be relative to the effort needed to create the product.

O.o Considering how pro-capitalism you usually are, that statement makes very little sense. It is not possible to put in 10 times the amount of effort into something as those making minimum wage, but many upper level management positions make at least that much more than their bottom level workers.

It is simply immoral to hire illegals and make them work horrid hours in horrid conditions for meager wages.

Maybe, but even at the low wages they make, they still earn something like three times as much money here as they could in Mexico, assuming they could even find a job there. Sometimes there hours suck, and sometimes their conditions suck (though this is not always the case), but if it's that or have my family starve to death I'd be quite pissed off if someone decided not to give me a job just because they were worried I wasn't being treated well.

Which is why we should crack down on corporation, which refutes your premise

What do you think my premise was exactly? That they create economic benefits has nothing to do with the morality of them being hired in the first place. Cheaper labor equals cheaper and more products, which ultimately leads to greater purchasing power and more positions created in other parts of the economy.

As I've already noted though, cracking down on employers would indeed be a much more efficient way fighting illegal immigration than trying to effectively secure our borders.

2) I'm for getting rid of the criminals, as I'm sure most people are. But if one is an illegal and has a family and lives a good, law abiding life in America, I think we should give them a path to citizenship and not deport them.

Would you be in support of DREAM Act then? I think it does exactly that, but Republicans managed to filibuster it.

I dealt with this when responding to micatala. As for tax cuts, those "stimulus tax cuts" will be worthless if this administration doesn't extend the Bush tax cuts for all people.

They are worthless. Bush's tax cuts were incredibly worse. Even the extension on the majority of Americans that Obama is doing is very questionable from an economics perspective, but extending it on the top income brackets would just be absurd because it was amazingly stupid to have made those tax cuts in the first place. It did nothing for the economy and the effect it has had has been terrible.

Per wiki

The tax cuts have been largely opposed by American economists, including the Bush administration's own Economic Advisement Council. In 2003, 450 economists, including ten Nobel Prize laureate, signed the Economists' statement opposing the Bush tax cuts, sent to President Bush stating that "these tax cuts will worsen the long-term budget outlook... will reduce the capacity of the government to finance Social Security and Medicare benefits as well as investments in schools, health, infrastructure, and basic research... [and] generate further inequalities in after-tax income."

Once it is decriminalized, will it then be promoted?

By whom? So long as you continue to make active advertisement of it illegal and make sure to regulate it, I see no reason it would be any different than the cigarette industry. Well...one difference is that it wouldn't be killing almost half a million of our citizens a year. The reason it got made illegal in the first place amounts to "Lies, lies, lies and more **** lies". I did a thirteen page research paper on it in high school. Anslinger was a diabolical genius. That or insane. But I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Then why have borders if we aren't going to enforce them. Those lines define us as a nation, and we're one of the only countries that doesn't ruthlessly detain illegals that violate it.

We're also a huge country and not in the habit of just killing everyone who tries to get into our borders. Makes it rather harder and far, far more expensive.

Why wouldn't it work, in your own words.

A) A 100% effective wall will still only keep out at MOST 75% of new immigration and probably more like 60%
B) A conservative estimate of the cost of building the fence is close to 10 billion dollars, not including the money needed to purchase privately owned land they would have to build on, and nearly that much yearly to staff the fence so people don't just hop over it.
C) Even if well staffed, they would have to be prepared to just kill anyone who tried to violate it or there would simply be diversions so people could sneak across.
D) Even if they were prepared to kill anyone trying to go through or over, they would still not have a way to prevent people from just digging smuggling routes underneath it.
E) Even if you managed to stop those somehow, we have thousands of miles of coast. Take a dingy and swim awhile and the fence still isn't going to stop you.

Costly, not particularly effective, nightmare to world relations. A wall is not a cost-effective or efficient way to go.

The employers would not be tempted if the illegal cheap labor wasn't here to begin with. Cutting off the source is the best way.

Didn't in the very first paragraph of this you call for a crackdown on corporations or some such? Maybe you were referring to something else though given corporations aren't typically the ones hiring illegal workers. But regardless, seems odd that you're not in favor of cracking down on the "immoral" people. Hardly the illegals fault they gave in to temptation.

[WinePusher]

The goal was to keep us from going into a deep depression and to relieve the effects of the recession.

Then that is what the President and his aids should have told us from the beginning.

I'm sorry, this is a pretty petty objection. He has always been up front about our being in a difficult situation that was going to take a while to get out of. He has provided the best information he had at the time.

Whenever this 8% unemployment issue came up, all he has done was dodge and dive around it. At least he should have the audacity to admit this projection was a failure. But he doesn't seem to responsibility for anything.

Let's look at this one at a time. First the Morning Bell article.

Why did these first two economic stimuli fail? For the same reason any third stimulus will also fail: government spending does not inject any new money into the economy. Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Brian Riedl explains:

Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It is merely redistributed from one group of people to another.
…
Yes, government spending can put under-utilized factories and individuals to work–but only by idling other resources in whatever part of the economy supplied the funds. If adding $1 billion would create 40,000 jobs in one depressed part of the economy, then losing $1 billion will cost roughly the same number of jobs in whatever part of the economy supplied Washington with the funds. It is a zero-sum transfer regardless of whether the unemployment rate is 5 percent or 50 percent.

Note that the author does not provide any evidence the stimulus failed, he simply asserts that it did and goes on to explain why.

That is one in the same, he explains his assertion with evidence:

1) Spending money (yet alone trillions of dollars) that we don't have doesn't work or promote long term growth.
2) The ratio between the amount of money we're spending and the amount of jobs being created is small.
3) Engaging in class warfare by extending tax cuts for the middle class and not the rich is wealth redistribution is is inherently anti capitalism

And this explanation is not based on evidence of what was or was not accomplished, it simply gives a philosophical argument based on conservative assumptions. One of these is that the spending must be a zero-sum transfer. This assumption is not justified by any argument or evidence here, and ignores several things.

True, many of his arguments are philosophically based. But that doesn't mean anything, many of these policies go directly aganist our principles of capitalism and the free market.

First, the government can borrow money.

Not to the extent they are doing now. It's simply immoral and wasteful, and it will burden the next generation heavily.

Now, you may say this is just a transfer from the future. However, given that conditions now are worse than they are on average, even though we are past the bottom of the receession, it is likely we are borrowing from a time when conditions are going to be better and thus from a time that will much more easily afford the cost, whether it comes in terms of reduced spending then or not.

Essentially, you are saying "I will pay for this credit card debt by putting it on another credit card." That simply doesn't work.

Secondly, it ignores that economies grow, and so are not zero sum games. IN fact, that is how we ultimately get out of most recessions. Thus, we could say the stimulus is borrowed from the future, but that future is very likely to have MORE resources than we do today because the economy will have grown.

I'm sorry, but I know of no recessions being remedied by deficit spending. What deficit spending usually leads to is inflation, which is something we should avoid at all costs because the dollar is falling drastically behind other currencies.

The other problem is he assumes the effect of moving a billion dollars from sector A to sector B of the economy will have the same amount of negative effect as positive effect. Again, this is a highly dubious proposition.

I'm no exactly sure what you're saying here. What is being spend are out tax dollars, which have gone to bailout banks, auto companies, and fund stimulus. This gets us back to the philosophical aspect of things. When the government decides to bailout a few select industries, it would then be required that they bailout every other single failing businees. Otherwise, it would be akin to the government playing God in the free market, deciding which industries can live and which ones can fail. That simply isn't how our system operates, and that is why the author uses philosophical arguments in his source.

Now, onto the article on Romer.

First, while I like Frum, for him to paint this as "Romer admits failure" is spin of the first order. The stimulus not having as much positive benefit as hoped for is not failure.

We are pretty much worse off then we were last year, how can this thing not be considered a failure when it comes out of the mouth of the person who designed it.

So you are essentially ignoring the recent Hindenburg Omen, the unpredictable stock market, the failing housing market, and the prevalence of a double dip recession as announced by Obama's Deficit Commission chair. How can you see we're in a recovery in light of all this.

Red Herring. I was only referring to Obama's statements regarding the 8%, which I the first of your articles did not even address.

Both my articles addressed the 8% contreversy. However, your calim is that the stimulus has not failed, but is rather working as intended. That is not true, can you honestly say that we're better off then we weer last year?

Well, if the car manufacturer promised me that the worse injury that a person could get were bruises, and a person got a concussion, then I'd consider the product a failure.

Your misapplying the analogy. The promise was that you would only get bruises if the car was going 30 mph. If you drove it 50 and got a concussion, that is not a failure, it's a change in the parameters under which the promise was made. The fact that it still kept you alive means you should be grateful it performed as well as it did instead of carping.

So you're saying that no responsibility lies on the administration? Can you at least admit they didn't "gage" or "foresee" far enough into the future and take all the facts into consdieration.

And I point out again that your solution seems to be to take the airbags out of the car. How much sense does that make??

Yes, take the airbags out of the car. The airbags aren't supposed to be in the car in the first place. This specific type of car was designed by the framers to forbid airbags from interfering with the car, let the car operate on its own. ps: I'm not talking about airbags.

I will try to look at this more later, but will note that crime is going to cost us whether it is done by illegals or not.[/quoet]

Yes, but the difference is that the crime committed by illegals is 100% preventable.

Fair enough. I certainly accept citizens have more rights, and they should have, than illegal immigrants. However, the point is that the somewhat higher rate of crime among illegals does not necessarily justify draconian and expensive border security strategies.

I think it does. Building a war to clearly mark the line between two countries and prevent illegal immigration is by no means "draconian" policy.

Following your logic, if I can find an example of an illegal immigrant saving a little old lady from being run over by a bus, then illegal immigration has been proven to save lives.

Ok, lets compare the number of illegals that save lives to the number of illegals that have taken lives. Your lead.

The fallacy of this request has already been pointed out by Wyvern.

You originally brought it up, not me.

Read the article!! Are you willing to have border guards shooting at and killing unarmed civilians trying to cross the border?

Perposterous. If that is what the article by the NY Sun claims then it's not a reliable source. There would be legal points of entry, and who says that our border patrol would be told to shoot on sight, I would be aganist that.

I agree, I am also against it. BUt the point is that if you are not willing to do that, the big fence and lots of people manning it STILL will not prevent all leakage across the border.

So you're view is one of fatalism. Nothing can be done about the border therefore we shouldn't even try? We should just give up.

I am certainly open to comparative cost-benefit analyses. I am also not opposed to stricter security. However, it should meet some criteria.

1) Be fair and humane to the illegal immigrants. Nothing fancy, just treat them reasonably.

I have no problem with this. However, fair treatment does not imply free legal care, free benefits and labor rights, freedom to live openly in sanctuary cities, and the freedom to not be asked for documentation.

2) Be cost effective. If it costs $50,000 per year per person to keep a person out and $20,000 per person on average to have them here, why spend the extra $30K?

This is addressed to both you and ChaosBorders:

You both seem to be suggesting that border security would be ineffective, but we should rather crack down on employers to make sure they don't hire illegals, and we should as far as to grant them amnesty. So, we have three things going on here:

Open Borders, Amnesty combined with Welfare. We don't secure the border, we let them come here, we give them amnesty, we give them welfare. That combination doesn't work.

Also, I note no one has responded to my suggestions that education, particularly of females, is an effective way to reduce population growth.

I guess you mean sex education in schools? Sorry, but that extremely over-reaches parental rights and the government has no right to teach minors how to appropriatly have sex according to their standards. Fr

[ChaosBorders]

Whenever this 8% unemployment issue came up, all he has done was dodge and dive around it. At least he should have the audacity to admit this projection was a failure. But he doesn't seem to responsibility for anything.

The person who actually made the prediction admitted it was far off. He has admitted we're recovering too slowly and unemployment will probably keep rising a little. Personally apologizing for a faulty projection given to him by others who have already personally apologized for making it just seems redundant.

1) Spending money (yet alone trillions of dollars) that we don't have doesn't work or promote long term growth.

That depends entirely on how it is spent. Keeping us out of a great depression certainly promotes long-term growth, though doing it through deficit spending will inevitably mean that growth is slower and personally I am still worried the depression has only been delayed rather than prevented.

2) The ratio between the amount of money we're spending and the amount of jobs being created is small.

Well that depends on how you slice it. Firstly, close to 300 billion dollars of the stimulus came in the form of tax breaks. That isn't actually spending. It is, however, not very effective as far as saving or creating jobs goes.

The second issue is the word 'created'. Yes, not a ton of jobs are being created. However, millions are being saved. PolitiFact has a very good article on this subject. It's about half a year old, but we can reasonably determine how much bang for our buck we're getting from the stimulus spending.

Thus far, of the 500 billion or so in actual spending, only about 180 billion had actually been spent. For that amount, close to 1.8 million jobs had been created or saved. This works out to roughly 100,000 a job, which once taxes are factored in is closer to 70,000 a job.

This is still quite high, and had we not been likely been heading towards another great depression, I would seriously question whether the taxes earned in subsequent years from those whose jobs were saved would actually end up justifying the upfront cost. As it is, there were certainly inefficiencies (such as the tax breaks, which were nearly a complete waste), and whether the stimulus saved us or merely delayed a disaster remains to be seen.

It is fair to point out that the stimulus has many flaws. It is fair to question whether it will work in the long-term. But failure to acknowledge that in the short term it has done considerable good and quite probably saved us is simply disingenuous. It could have been better written. It could have been better executed. And it remains to be seen whether the flaws will ultimately triumph over its virtues. But there is little question that making some sort of stimulus bill was the right decision to make, and Obama should be commended on making it.

3) Engaging in class warfare by extending tax cuts for the middle class and not the rich is wealth redistribution is is inherently anti capitalism

Warren Buffet points out why this statement is nonsense. Currently the rich are paying considerably less of their total income in taxes. Just because their income tax rates are higher doesn't mean they're actually paying a greater percent of their money. Do you actually understand how are tax system works?

Not to the extent they are doing now. It's simply immoral and wasteful, and it will burden the next generation heavily.

Same thing could be said about much of our military spending. Certainly there has been waste, and it may well burden the next generation heavily, but perhaps we can cut the labels of 'immoral'.

I'm sorry, but I know of no recessions being remedied by deficit spending.

Arguably the great depression...

What deficit spending usually leads to is inflation, which is something we should avoid at all costs because the dollar is falling drastically behind other currencies.

Inflation is, for all intents and purposes, a flat tax on everyone. More than a little is not desirable, but if you refuse to raise taxes on those who can actually pay them, this is what you're going to get. Might as well get used to it.

I'm no exactly sure what you're saying here. What is being spend are out tax dollars, which have gone to bailout banks, auto companies, and fund stimulus. This gets us back to the philosophical aspect of things. When the government decides to bailout a few select industries, it would then be required that they bailout every other single failing businees. Otherwise, it would be akin to the government playing God in the free market, deciding which industries can live and which ones can fail. That simply isn't how our system operates, and that is why the author uses philosophical arguments in his source.

Also why the author is apparently dumb. Some industries have a greater impact on the economy as a whole. If they go down, everyone else does. Just because we don't want everyone to drown doesn't mean it makes any sense to bailout industries that don't effect that many people.

We are pretty much worse off then we were last year, how can this thing not be considered a failure when it comes out of the mouth of the person who designed it.

Because we would be much worse off than we are.

So you're saying that no responsibility lies on the administration? Can you at least admit they didn't "gage" or "foresee" far enough into the future and take all the facts into consdieration.

Sure, but practically no one foresaw how bad it really was. Hardly their fault they didn't realize just how much things sucked.

Yes, take the airbags out of the car. The airbags aren't supposed to be in the car in the first place. This specific type of car was designed by the framers to forbid airbags from interfering with the car, let the car operate on its own.

So we crash and die. The framers designed the car at a time the speed limits were a lot lower. If they realized how fast we were going now, they would have been idiots not to add some airbags.

ps: I'm not talking about airbags.

No kidding?

This is addressed to both you and ChaosBorders:

You both seem to be suggesting that border security would be ineffective, but we should rather crack down on employers to make sure they don't hire illegals, and we should as far as to grant them amnesty. So, we have three things going on here:

Open Borders, Amnesty combined with Welfare. We don't secure the border, we let them come here, we give them amnesty, we give them welfare. That combination doesn't work.

What I'm suggesting is that cracking down on employers would be more effective for a much lower cost. No jobs = no reason to come here. If they don't come here, they're not using our welfare systems. I question the wisdom of actually doing this because there is no indication the overall impact on our country of illegals is negative at a statistically significant level and the impact on their country would be huge and quite terrible. Screwing them over when it doesn't really benefit us is foolish.

I guess you mean sex education in schools? Sorry, but that extremely over-reaches parental rights and the government has no right to teach minors how to appropriatly have sex according to their standards. Fr

Parents clearly are not teaching their children how to use protection. As much as I'm against sex outside of marriage, the reality is most teens will have sex and those who don't know how to use protection are spreading viruses and getting pregnant. It's a public health issue and as such the government has plenty of right to step in if the parents are too ignorant, incompetent, or stubborn to do the job themselves (which statistics clearly show they have been).

[micatala]

The goal was to keep us from going into a deep depression and to relieve the effects of the recession.

Then that is what the President and his aids should have told us from the beginning.

I'm sorry, this is a pretty petty objection. He has always been up front about our being in a difficult situation that was going to take a while to get out of. He has provided the best information he had at the time.

Whenever this 8% unemployment issue came up, all he has done was dodge and dive around it. At least he should have the audacity to admit this projection was a failure. But he doesn't seem to responsibility for anything.

Once again, you ignore a case where a person has done exactly what you accuse them of not doing. I believe Obama has addressed this error, certainly his administration has.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch ... -year.html

Jake Tapper and Karen Travers report: In an interview with Bloomberg News’ Al Hunt today, President Obama says he thinks unemployment will hit 10% this year.

Will unemployment reach 10%? asks Hunt.

“Yes,� says the president.

Before the end of this year? asks Hunt.

“Yes,� says the president.

“I think that what you’ve seen is that the pace of job loss has slowed,� Mr. Obama says, “and I think that the economy is going to turn around. But as you know, jobs are a lagging indicator. And we've got to produce 150,000 jobs every month just to keep pace.�

But, he said, “we will end up seeing recovery shortly.�

In January, the incoming administration predicted in a white paper study that without a huge stimulus package, unemployment would reach just over 8%, and would be contained at under 8% with a stimulus package.

(When asked about this discrepancy, one of the authors of the study – Jared Bernstein, the top economic adviser to Vice President Biden – recently said that “when we made our initial estimates, that was before we had fourth-quarter results on GDP, which we later found out was contracting at an annual rate of 6 percent, far worse than we expected at that time.� The bottom line, Bernstein said, is that without the stimulus the unemployment rate “would have been between 1.5 and 2 points higher than it otherwise will be.�)

The article is from over a year ago, so you are bringing up old news that has already been addressed. You also continue to ignore that evidence clearly indicates the situation would have been much worse had we not acted.


In fact, the "quote" you refer to seems to have been mischaracterized from the get go.



http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 738AA32ijJ

can you show me the quote where Obama said unemployment wouldn't go past 8%?
. . . .

They are referring to a Jan. 9, 2009, report called "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" from Christina Romer, chairwoman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, the vice president's top economic adviser.

Their report projected that the stimulus plan proposed by Obama would create between three and four million jobs by the end of 2010. The report also includes a graphic predicting unemployment rates with and without the stimulus. Without the stimulus (the baseline), unemployment was projected to hit about 8.5 percent in 2009 and then continue rising to a peak of about 9 percent in 2010. With the stimulus, they predicted the unemployment rate would peak at just under 8 percent in 2009.

But in June, the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent.

In the past week, the administration has acknowledged its projections were wrong.
"The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy," Biden said. "The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures in most of the blue chip indexes out there. ... And so the truth is, there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited
There's also a footnote that goes along with the chart that states: "Forecasts of the unemployment rate without the recovery plan vary substantially. Some private forecasters anticipate unemployment rates as high as 11% in the absence of action."
That sure doesn't sound like a full-fledged promise to us.

We think its a big stretch to call the economic projection a "promise." The administration never characterized it that way and included plenty of disclaimers saying the predictions had "significant margins of error" and a higher degree of uncertainty due to a recession that is "unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity." And so we rule the statement by Cantor — and other Republicans who have said the same thing — Barely True.

So, no, your accusation that the stimulus "failed" because we went over 8% ignores the facts and even mischaracterizes how that 8% number came up in the first place.

Both my articles addressed the 8% contreversy. However, your calim is that the stimulus has not failed, but is rather working as intended. That is not true, can you honestly say that we're better off then we weer last year?

Shifting goal posts. The stimulus prevented a worse catastrophe. Thus, it is not a failure. The fact that things did continue to get worse for a time does not negate that, it is merely a result of our being in a bad recession. Again, if the person gets a few bruises, he is worse off than before. That still does not mean the air bags failed.

Well, if the car manufacturer promised me that the worse injury that a person could get were bruises, and a person got a concussion, then I'd consider the product a failure.

Your misapplying the analogy. The promise was that you would only get bruises if the car was going 30 mph. If you drove it 50 and got a concussion, that is not a failure, it's a change in the parameters under which the promise was made. The fact that it still kept you alive means you should be grateful it performed as well as it did instead of carping.

So you're saying that no responsibility lies on the administration? Can you at least admit they didn't "gage" or "foresee" far enough into the future and take all the facts into consdieration.

I acknowledge, as the administration has, that there prognostications were less pessimistic than what happened. I am not saying they are not responsible for their actions. I am saying they are not responsible for the mess we were in in January 2009, and that the actions they have taken have prevented us from being in a much worse situation than we are currently in. I acknowledge it is possible another course of action could have gotten us to this point or better at lower cost.

Now, how about you acknowledge that the stimulus and other actions have not been a total failure.

And I point out again that your solution seems to be to take the airbags out of the car. How much sense does that make??

Yes, take the airbags out of the car. The airbags aren't supposed to be in the car in the first place. This specific type of car was designed by the framers to forbid airbags from interfering with the car, let the car operate on its own. ps: I'm not talking about airbags.

I am not buying your constitutional assumptions. Maybe you can justify those.


In addition, are you willing to live with the consequences? If we take out the airbags, are you OK with 15% or more unemployment, an even tighter credit market, more big bankruptcies, a much longer and deeper recession? That, according to economists, is what we easily could have had if we had followed your prescription.

I will try to look at this more later, but will note that crime is going to cost us whether it is done by illegals or not.[/quoet]

Yes, but the difference is that the crime committed by illegals is 100% preventable.

No, it is not, as has been pointed out by Wyvern and others. Your solution is a fantasy.

Read the article!! Are you willing to have border guards shooting at and killing unarmed civilians trying to cross the border?

Perposterous. If that is what the article by the NY Sun claims then it's not a reliable source. There would be legal points of entry, and who says that our border patrol would be told to shoot on sight, I would be aganist that.

I agree, I am also against it. BUt the point is that if you are not willing to do that, the big fence and lots of people manning it STILL will not prevent all leakage across the border.

So you're view is one of fatalism. Nothing can be done about the border therefore we shouldn't even try? We should just give up.

No. I am simply for looking at all the options and picking the one that gives us the biggest bang for the buck. I think putting more resources to law enforcement would make more sense than trying to achieve the impossible goal of totally closing the border.

I am certainly open to comparative cost-benefit analyses. I am also not opposed to stricter security. However, it should meet some criteria.

1) Be fair and humane to the illegal immigrants. Nothing fancy, just treat them reasonably.

I have no problem with this. However, fair treatment does not imply free legal care, free benefits and labor rights, freedom to live openly in sanctuary cities, and the freedom to not be asked for documentation.

Well, we can talk about each of these. I am not sure we could get away with not providing any legal counsel. What exactly do you mean by benefits and labor rights? And the problem with documentation is that you don't know if you are asking a citizen or a non-citizen until after the fact. You'd have to be willing to expose everyone to being asked for their documentation.

2) Be cost effective. If it costs $50,000 per year per person to keep a person out and $20,000 per person on average to have them here, why spend the extra $30K?

This is addressed to both you and ChaosBorders:

You both seem to be suggesting that border security would be ineffective, but we should rather crack down on employers to make sure they don't hire illegals, and we should as far as to grant them amnesty. So, we have three things going on here:

Open Borders, Amnesty combined with Welfare. We don't secure the border, we let them come here, we give them amnesty, we give them welfare. That combination doesn't work.

I am not advocating for open borders. To me, that means you do nothing to stop people which is not what we are doing now. I am not in favor of large welfare expenditures for those we no are illegal. I think, to be humane, we have to support them while they are here until such time as we do send them back. We should not make any guarantees to illegal immigrants on that score. If it is cost-effective, I would be OK with deporting people who have no job here and are living off our welfare.

Also, I note no one has responded to my suggestions that education, particularly of females, is an effective way to reduce population growth.

I guess you mean sex education in schools? Sorry, but that extremely over-reaches parental rights and the government has no right to teach minors how to appropriatly have sex according to their standards. Fr

I disagree. I think one can do sex education responsibly and it is entirely appropriate for public schools to do so. I disagree with characterizing this as teaching minors how to have sex. From what I have seen, the alternative of abstinence only ed just does not work.

[micatala]

PS. Biden aknowledging the faulty predictions.


http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/200 ... strat.html