Immigration and the DREAM Act (and some general snarkiness)

Just wanted to share this link with anyone who happens to stumble upon this blog. I found it profound.


"It's worth noting that the southwestern portion of the United States just was Mexico, once upon a time. There is an undeniable economic and cultural continuity between Mexico and the United States. The border distorts and disrupts it, but it cannot and will never put an end to it. The pattern of traffic between these two countries is not something to choke off, but something sensibly to regulate and rationalise."


and


"The DREAM Act sends the message that although American immigration law in effect tries to make water run uphill, we are not monsters. It says that we will not hobble the prospects of young people raised and schooled in America just because we were so perverse to demand that their parents wait in a line before a door that never opens. It signals that we were once a nation of immigrants, and even if we have become too fearful and small to properly honour that noble legacy, America in some small way remains a land of opportunity."


Ok, what follows is a rant, a vent. I have really smart, reasonable friends that may disagree with the some of the points I make in the second half of this post. Also, there are reasonable disagreements on the issues I bring up. What I see right now, almost systemically, however, is something really wrong in the Republican party. I think it comes from some combination of corruption from being in power for too long and this crazy Obama is a socialist, power over country sentiment, and FOX news/AM talk radio that's brought them where they are today.

So, I just need to do it :-). Feel free to ignore all of it. No offense if any of these issues feel targeted at you. I'm venting :-).

How many issues have the Republican party demogogued over the last 10 years or so, to the point of unreasonableness, let's just count a few off the top of my head:

• Immigration: Hard working Mexicans drain our society's resources! Let's stop every single Mexican from entering our country despite unrelenting market forces!


• Banking: The great recession was caused by Barack Obama who took office after it began! By the way, it had nothing to do with unregulated bankers who took advantage of lax regulation to gamble the world's reserves making record profits on both the downside and the upside! But hey, regulating banks is always a bad idea - resist!


• War: Preemptive invasion on the cheap - but don't worry we'll be welcomed as liberators and Democracy will flourish wherever we decree it.


• Nuclear Proliferation - Its not enough to fight the war on terror, Russia is and will always be our enemy. Just say no to START - let's keep the Cold War going! By the way, Europe sucks too!


• Health Care: There is a market solution to elderly - kick them off of medicare, give them a voucher (that will not rise with medicare inflation, and I'm sure some for-profit insurance company won't mind giving them insurance with that voucher despite the fact that an elderly person will likely cost much more than any voucher will cover.


• Health Care Part II: Same thing for anyone with a chronic condition. But there's a free market solution for every problem!


• Tax Cuts: Tax cuts always increase revenue! (Need I say more - well for some people I do :-)


• Education cuts improve education quality - no need for reform, its magic! Teachers work harder when you pay them less money - and they will surely pay for their supplies out of pocket.


• Tax cuts for the wealthy: The wealthy are the only drivers for our economy -despite the fact they make up 1% of our economy, but they control something like 20% of our wealth - so they must know what they're doing right? So, if you want to boost the economy, put more money in their pockets and they will magically guide our economy into the next century.


• Global Warming: Its fiction because, well if its wasn't then we recognize their are no free market solutions for global warming and anything without a free market solution doesn't exist.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Some idle thoughts on global warming

This is an odd time to be talking about global warming admittedly. National and global politics is primarily focused right now on the economy, our middle east wars, and the health care debate. But there is a cap and trade bill out there and it will eventually (sometime in 2010?) be considered. But mostly, I've had this interesting debate with some facebook friends who seem to be pretty steady in the camp of global warming deniers.

Really, Megan McArdle sums up pretty nicely my feelings of how most people see this issue in this blog post with this comment:

"Also in the WTF category, Pew says there was a fourteen point drop in the number of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that anthropogenic global warming is real. I mean, maybe 45 million Americans spent the last year reviewing the scientific evidence on Global Warming and changed their minds. Certainly, a lot of laid-off workers have some time on their hands. But this doesn't really seem a spectacularly likely explanation of the phenomenon.

I can only come up with two explanations for this phenomenon: one, that many Americans are happy to embrace a symbolic belief in global warming as long as there is no danger that anyone will do anything about it. The other is that Americans don't know what they want, and also, enjoy messing with pollster's minds."

Global warming is an incredibly complicated issue that aligns quite nicely within the natural boundaries of the cultural war this country has been fighting since the 1960's. The liberals are always looking for new ways to put the reigns on the excesses of the free market. And environmentalists have a deeply embedded agenda and, as such, have a deep interest in preserving the environment even when it takes some pretty significant market sacrifices to do it.

Of course the conservative agenda is quite opposed to both points of view, believing in the free market likes it is some kind of religion; that all of our problems can be attributed government regulation. Obviously, I'm simplifying the positions of both sides, and I know that folks in both camps have authentic and sophisticated points of view. But just go with me right now for the sake of discussion.

The science behind global warming is complicated. This article gives a very high level history of some of it and makes an interesting proposal on how to deal with its consequences. Obviously, written in 2000, its incredibly dated, but the points it makes are still valid today, I think.

I am not a climatologist (obviously) and I have only a very superficial view of the science of global warming. But I have read fairly extensively over the years on the subject, and my impressions are that the scientific evidence that CO2 emissions have caused and will continue to cause a warming of the earth's temperature is pretty overwhelming. I do get the impression that there are some significant and serious scientists dissenters to this point of view, but I don't have a good understanding of their exact position on the subject.

I also feel that though the earth seems to be warming because of human activity, the solutions on how to address this are politically difficult and mostly not feasible, at least right now in our current political climate.

The problem is that global warming is so subtle. Global temperatures vary from year to year and from region to region pretty randomly and for a large number of reasons. The slow upward trajectory the earth is currently on is completely unnoticeable so it has no impact on the average person's day to day life. You can say that the severe weather we are seeing is a result of warming, but this is difficult to prove. We have always had hurricanes on this good earth of ours, it's impossible to say that Hurricane Katrina, say, would not have happened if not for the Industrial Revolution.

Which leads to another point, cheap oil is at the foundation of our economy. Any attempts to make it more expensive will definitely be noticed and will have a deep global economic impact. Also, to really be serious about reducing carbon emissions, it requires global cooperation that is virtually impossible to get. Basically you are telling emerging economies to stop growing so fast. Because as these countries begin to prosper, there per capita carbon footprint will grow as well, more than negating any marginal efforts we make through cap and trade.

But still I'm in favor of cap and trade. Because I believe the answer to the global warming problem is innovation in both alternative energy sources and in energy conservation. I believe this innovation is well within our reach and adding a small amount of tax on carbon will help make those energy sources more competitive, spurring greater levels of venture capital money in that direction.

But why the fervor among the global warming deniers? I do believe those who are pushing for significant political solutions to solve the global warming problem are inclined to over-reach. I believe that they have been guilty of manipulating the data to make their case more appealing. I think this instance of over-reach have fueled the denier's conspiracy theory that the whole thing is a hoax designed to take away freedoms and to grow the government. This point of view, by the way, has some truth to it.

But as a caveat to this entire discussion, I am far from an expert on this issue, and am open to moving my opinions in any direction as I receive more information. I think this issue is both important enough and complex enough to warrant a bunch more humility from both sides.