 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
ImmigrationReplying to this comment: explain to me WHY its not illegal to hire foreigners when there are qualified Americans and a riduclous unemployment rate.Actually, it is a legal requirement for companies to ensure that there are no qualified American applicants prior to consideration of overseas applicants. We found that one out when Vik and I toyed with entry on a work-related visa. As regards free trade and its corrosive effect on domestic employment. You can't expect corporations to behave in any way other than the way in which they are acting - corporations will act in the best interests of making as much money as possible. That's what they do. That's all they do! That's their function - they make money! Their one and only "natural" duty is to make as high a turnover for as little costs as possible, and unlike small business, their success is in many ways divorced from their product. That's why we regulate corporations, and why we must regulate corporations better, while by comparison, America was built on the hard work of small companies. The solution to this problem, as I see it, is to attatch minimum labour standards requirements to trade agreements, and attatch massive tarrifs to trade in goods and services between America and countries which have not signed and adhered to a trade agreement with the United States. Free trade - like many freedoms - is a paradox, an artifical creation that can only be sustained with care and attention, and in my view, it should be sustained only so far as it runs not contrary to America's best interests. And now, having made some statements that the liberals here will agree with, let's make one that they won't. Immigration. It's really simple. We introduce these labour standards trade agreements, and this will start to stop the migration of jobs from the top end of the economy (that's how you sell it to Republican voters) while improving humanitarian conditions worldwide (that's how you sell it to Democrats). That's the top end sorted out. But what about the bottom end of the market? What about illegal immigrants? Well - I'm not much in favor of illegal immigrants. Kick them out. You go through the legal process, or you stay out. Before you start flaming me, saying "but they do jobs no-one else wants to do - would YOU want to clean toilets?", ponder on this, my die-hard liberal friends. Why exactly is it that you think the Bush administration is taking steps to encourage illegal immigrants to stay? Here's the thing: if the illegal immigrants weren't there to do those crappy, low-end jobs, then companies might have to start paying Americans to do those jobs. The jobs need doing, whether there's a cheap, cowed, illegal immigrant workforce to do them or not. And, since a company couldn't pay Americans six cents an hour - they'd have to pay them minimum wage. But if toilet cleaners and menial jobs are paying minimum wage, then McDonalds has to pay its staff a little more, because otherwise, they may as well be toilet cleaners. And if McDonalds is paying a little more than minimum wage, semi-skilled labour can't pay peanuts, it has to pay fairly good wages. And if semi-skilled labour pays okay wages, then white-collar jobs have to pay an increased wage. All of which means that more Americans are in work and paying taxes, and thus contributing positively to the economy - and less Americans are out of work taking money out of the economy. More Americans paying taxes and not being on the breadline means more money for the Federal Government to put into programmes like Social Security, development grants to Mexico and the like, # and will make the economy sufficiently secure that we can refuse to trade with China unless and until it signs up to the minimum labour standards clauses and thus becomes eligible for a Trade Agreement with the USA. Third party sillinessAll you folks saying that you're voting for third parties and people other than Bush or the Dem nominee... The New Hampshire primaryThe Washington Post also has some interesting stats: Among the 29 percent of the electorate who said having a candidate who stands up for what he believes was most important to them, Dean defeated Kerry by more than 2 to 1.This is good news for the Dean campaign, and bad news for the Kerry campaign - it implies that voters don't entirely trust Kerry, and are voting principally with a view to the post-Iowa press clamour that Kerry can beat Bush and that Dean is finished. This view is clearly incorrect, given Dean's performance. I won't say resurgency, because the idea that it was over for Dean was wholly invented by a capricious press who complwetely failed to understand that the lesson of Iowa was that they should quit making ludicrously overblown predictions on thin evidence. Among the one-third of the electorate who said experience or beating Bush was most important to them, Kerry overwhelmed Dean by about 6 to 1. Many voters said health care and the economy were the most important issues, and Kerry demolished Dean easily among those voters.This is terrible news for the Dean campaign. It means that their message about Howard's record isn't getting accross very well, and that he's still being thought of as the radical, angry anti-Bush crusader outsider. There needs to be a real focus now on Howard's experience, his economic stewardship in Vermont, his record on Healthcare, and his policies on these areas. It absolutely astonishes me that voters regard Kerry, who has never served in an executive capacity, as being more experienced than Dean, who has a decade as a highly sucessfull Governor under his belt. The idea that Dean, who balanced his budget and still provided services and tax cuts, could be regarded as being less fiscally responsible than any Senate Democrat is astonishing. Does no-one remember why the Democrats lost Congress in 1994?! Scott Turrow: "Why I turned against the Death Penalty" |
    
|