UPDATED: Displacing America (Ready To Outsource)

IMMIGRATION, Labor, Nationhood, Outsourcing

The open-border fetishist often has a job lobbying, broadcasting or litigating, and feels nothing for Americans who don’t have work, unless they are migrants. This prototypical character will dismiss the following figures from Patrick J. Buchanan’s column, “Is This Our America Anymore?”, with a correlation-is-not-causation quip:

Buried in the Oct. 30 Washington Post was a bland headline: “Report Points to Faster Recovery in Jobs for Immigrants.” [by Shankar Vedantam]
The story, however, contained social dynamite that explains the rage of Americans who are smeared as nativists and xenophobes for demanding a timeout on immigration.
In the April-May-June quarter, foreign-born workers in the U.S. gained 656,000 jobs. And native-born Americans lost 1.2 million. [VDARE.com note: See Pew Confirms VDARE.COM On American Worker Displacement, By Edwin S. Rubenstein]
From July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010, foreign-born Hispanics gained 98,000 construction jobs. Native-born Hispanics lost 133,000. Black and white U.S. construction workers lost 511,000 jobs.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, from Jan. 1, 2000, to Jan. 1, 2010, 13.1 million immigrants, legal and illegal, entered the United States, a decade in which America lost 1 million jobs.
From 2008 and 2009, the figures are startling. In 24 months, 2.4 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrived, as U.S. citizens were losing 8.6 million jobs.
Query: Why are we importing a million-plus workers a year when 17 million Americans can’t find work? Whose country is this? .”

I confess, however, to developing reservations about the American work force. These misgivings, some of which were voiced in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” are based on my limited, but fairly consistent, contact with what I’ve dubbed “The North American Personality.” Personally, I’m ready to outsource. Later.

UPDATE (Dec. 19): Here are the OECD’s ratings of “Student Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science.” The US scores statistically significantly below the OECD average on the mathematics scale. That’s all you need to know. The top scoring countries across the board are Shanghai-China, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong-China, and Singapore.

Just last week, international financier Jim Rogers told Judge Andrew Napolitano of “Freedom Watch” that he moved to Singapore because, among other reasons, the people have a wicked work ethic and they save their money. He likened the Asians of today to Americans in the 1950s. The Americans I’ve had to interact with professionally (irrespective of political persuasion) hold highly inflated opinions of their meager abilities, are slack, full of attitude, lazy, and quite rude.

Something I could not figure out: They complain about not having money, but refuse the odd job offered to them (from these quarters) as if it were beneath them.

Tax Cuts? Baloney! Government Burden Has Grown

Debt, Government, Republicans, Ron Paul, Taxation

I understand why trusted and trustworthy representatives such as Ron Paul would vote for the tax-cut deal that has passed the Senate today (Wednesday).

Ron Paul: Pro, in an interview with Andrew Napolitano.

I certainly want to support the tax extension… they may put enough stuff in there to make me reconsider, but right now I would not want to participate in raising taxes on people.

[Via Slate]

As POLITICO put it: “House Republicans trying to tamp down discontent in their ranks from fiscal conservatives are issuing a simple message: This isn’t the bill we would’ve written, but it’s good enough.”

At work is the dreaded “compromise,” a word that sounds good, but is not: “the only time you want your representative to reach across the aisle is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat.”

Since the above are my fighting words—political compromise is always a blow to principles—I’m with Peter Schiff, with some reservations. I disagree that “the compromise extension of the Bush era tax cuts” amounts to a “$900 billion package.” Tax cuts are never a cost. Since taxation is theft, a thief that has failed to secure the loot for himself has no right to write-off his losses. besides, money that is not taken by the state is money liberated, saved from waste. (The extension of unemployment benefits in the Bill did not amount to $900 Bil.)

“In truth however, there are no real tax cuts in this proposal. The true burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes but how much it spends. Since this deal ensures that government will be more expensive next year than it was this year, American citizens will have to shoulder the added cost. Just because Congress has decided to deliver the bill with debt rather than current taxes does not mean that the spending will not be paid for. The only thing the plan accomplishes is to alter the means by which government spending is financed.”

Gross Domestic Income? Never Heard of It

Capitalism, Political Economy

There is a reason Keynesians, to whom consumption is everything, never speak of the “flip side of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)”: Gross Domestic Income. The wellsprings of wealth are savings, investment and production. Why would proponents of a political theory that champions a credit-fueled, consumption-based bondage to government wish to encourage the power shift—intellectual and political—that comes with that understanding?

“What Does Gross Domestic Income – GDI Mean?
The sum of all income earned while producing goods and services within a nation’s borders. Gross domestic income (GDI) is a lesser-known calculation stat used by the Federal Reserve to gauge economic activity based on income. It differs from gross domestic product (GDP), which gauges economic activity on expenditure.”

If you can get past the grating tones, the following clip is also instructive:

Co-Equal, Or Colluding, Branches of Government?

Constitution, Federalism, Government, Healthcare, Law, States' Rights, The Courts

The problem with the Commonwealth of Virgina’s pleasing legal victory in challenging the constitutionality of Obama’s “healthscare” is this: The individual mandate and much of the health care bill may be manifestly violative, but most of the limits the Constitution placed on the federales (and the courts themselves) are no longer upheld by the courts (or by Congress, that other co-equal branch of government), starting with the Tenth Amendment.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So, as PBS’s News Hour reported, once again so well (appending as it always does a PDF document of the Decision), “Federal judge Henry Hudson ruled Monday afternoon that a major provision of the health care reform law is unconstitutional. In his decision, the judge sided with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who argued that the Congress does not have the authority to require Americans to purchase health insurance. ‘The Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution,’ Judge Hudson wrote.”

But along could come the Supreme Court Justices and nullify the health-care preferences of the people of Virginia. That’s because the framers’ constitutional dispensation is now nothing but a sad joke. The Appellate Court could beat the SCOTUS to it.