Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Personal Asides: “Will” Scores First With Jonathan Swift but Lots of You Have Invaluable Comments on “A Modest Proposal”...On the Bible Translations Some Engrossing Views, Too!...and Gingrich Scores with a Tough but Do-able Immigration Plan that Tops Bu

gingrich200
swift
According to the time clock on this Blog, a correspondent named “Will” scored first with the Jonathan Swift answer, proposing that an end to Irish famine would come when the Irish are allowed to eat their own children which spurred such horror that his satire achieved its goal…But other correspondents were superbly informed as well. Mike Butler recalled correctly that Swift was the author of Gulliver’s Travels…Cal Skinner, an expert in so many things, had the right answer. Bob in P. F. says it’s ironic that by his anecdotal view with this devastating satire, Swift has reached more people than Milton and Shakespeare…Charles Ryder has an excellently researched answer, saying that in this age of abortion a student of his read Swift’s proposal, didn’t realize it was satire and wrote a paper enthusiastically endorsing the idea!

Respondents to the Biblical article were far more literate on the Good Book than I. WPD, always an interesting correspondent, points out that the English version of the Navarre Bible uses the Revised Standard Version in its “Ignatius” print…While this is not on the Bible, Jason has sent a thoroughly engrossing long e-mail in response to Jim Leahy which I will print and extends his thanks for this Blog’s encouragement of spirited debate among conservatives as well as on the radio show. Thanks, Jason…Bob in P. F. likes the Wolf Blitzer-Bill Schneider parody of Lincoln and Washington but points out that in contrast to George W. Bush, Lincoln went directly after his attacks and wasn’t harmed by faulty intelligence. Oh, but he was, Bob, if you read “Team of Rivals”. Bob also recommends readers going to Springfield and to pay attention to the critical gossip against Lincoln in the White House walking tour (excellent idea)…

Frank Nofsinger in Connecticut reminds me that in my weekly column in “The Wanderer,” the nation’s oldest national Catholic weekly, I list this Blog which is how he found it. Of course! I forgot!...Frank also points out that he recalls the King James version does not contain the books of Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, Wisdom and Baruch. Protestants’ Ecclesiastes he says is the Catholic Sirac. Really?...

Sorry, the President’s Speech Really Didn’t Do the Job.

No one can accuse me of being sour on this president: I’ve already said that in my estimation he will go down as a very great one, indeed. But from all reports, his speech last night didn’t accomplish much except to spur more cynicism on immigration. Moreover an assistant secretary of Homeland Security, appearing on the Hugh Hewitt show downplayed the president’s stand with such boldness that one has to ask if there is any discipline in the administration on this issue. The points that I would have hoped he would make are these:

First, I think the American people want us to control the border—not with a temporary stop-gap measure with the National Guard which will serve for a short time, but with a real solution. Of all the proposals, I think the best comes from Newt Gingrich (who held forth enticingly on “Meet the Press.”). Gingrich is a great national resource as a man with vision (but I wouldn’t allow him near the presidency for a minute). To which I add: include a fence or wall and a substantial beefing up of border security with the National Guard only a stop-gap measure until the permanent security force is built up. Second, get tough with employers who are hiring illegals, recognizing that assuredly these businesses have been allies of the Republican party—but that should not deter the crack-down. Third: creation of a worker visa program with background check, a biometric card with a retinal scan that makes it almost impossible to falsify with the card run by either American Express or Visa or MasterCard since Homeland Security is too drowned in bureaucracy to manage the program.

Gingrich would illegals to go home long enough to apply for the card with biometric and to sign a contract stipulating that they will obey the law, pay taxes and agree that they will be removed from this country within 48 hours if they break the agreement. Says Gingrich: “The Senate [bill] is requiring them to pay a fine to the government larger than the cost of flying home. Remember, I’m saying to people who came here illegally, `We’re going to allow you legally to go home and apply legally for the card. But we are not going to allow people to start their career in America by breaking the law.” Gingrich blistered the Senate bill by saying it creates “three classes of people. If you’re here less than two years you have to leave. If you’re here two to five years you can stay but under certain circumstances . If you’re here five years you get to stay. For the first time in history, we’re going to create a forgery industry to prove you’re breaking the law longer.”

With respect to the thought that Gingrich is forcing mothers and fathers to go home and leave the kids (who are citizens having been born here), Gingrich responded: “In the age of jet airplanes, you [can] phase this in over three years. There are ways to do this that can be humane, compassionate, caring. You take the most difficult cases and decide on humanitarian grounds to have a handful of exceptions. But for you to establish the principle that we’re now going to reward those who have broken the law the longest [it means] we’re now going to create an entire forgery industry so people prove they’ve been here as long as possible, breaking the law and [you send] a signal to the entire planet:

“Show up in the U. S. for the next amnesty. It was three million last time. It’s going to be—by the way—in a study to come out from the Heritage Foundation—[under the provision of the Senate bill] between 30 and 50 million people [will be] ultimately allowed to become citizens under the extended family provision in this bill. Thirty to 50 million people!...Fifty-three percent of all Hispanic Americans, people who have citizenship, agree with the provision that you should enforce the law. Remember, many of them have relatives who’ve been sitting at home, waiting and obeying the law, hoping to get a legal visa. And now they’re about to be told that somebody who has been breaking the law for eleven years has a better place in America than somebody who waited back home to obey the law to come to the U. S. legally.”


What I would do were I Bush is to sit Gingrich down in a room and devise a solution that implements this idea. I knew him when he was a back-bencher in the House: a true genius, with white, fuzzy hair and a whining voice who probably is the brightest conceptual thinker on public policy in the U. S. today. He wants to run for president; he shouldn’t; he cannot handle power (first thing he did as Speaker was to try to sell a book; second was to fall in love with a staffer). But that’s the weird way genius sometimes runs. Remember even now, the Democrats are crafting slogans for November, 2006 and not coming up with concrete ideas. Who has heard Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid’s answer to the immigration crisis? (Or to Iraq, for that matter?).

Your ideas on Gingrich’s plan. I must tell you: he’s sold me!

18 comments:

  1. Frank Nofsinger is at best only partly correct when he says that some books in the Catholic Old Testament are not included in the King James Version. These books (called "Deuterocanonical" by Catholics and "Apocrypha" by Protestants) are the ones that the Catholic Church regards as part of the canon of sacred scripture, but which Protestants exclude from their canon.

    Actually, the original King James Version contained the Deuterocanonical books. It was only in later editions, including most present-day editions published by Protestants, that they are excluded.

    It is possible to obtain a KJV Bible with the Deuterocanonical books, or to obtain the KJV of these books as a separate volume.

    -WPD

    ReplyDelete
  2. If we really want to eliminate evasion by illegal aliens and their employers, it's time we arranged for a biometric ID card for all Americans and legal aliens.

    Because Americans are paranoid about ID cards, we call our functional, official ID a "Driver's License". Because Americans are paranoid about having a federal ID number, we call it a "Social Security" number.

    It's time to get real about the demands of law enforcement in a modern society.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tom, I regret that I did not catch your contest on Jonathan Swift on time; I knew it right off the bat.

    Swift was one of the most famous Anglo-Irish writers of the 18th century and is, indeed, considered the greatest satirist in English of all time. (Anglo-Irish referring to the native or resident Irish of English and Anglican ancestry.) An Anglican clergyman and Irish-born, Swift was a graduate of Trinity College, the most ancient and distinguished University in Ireland, the dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, and a sometime Tory politician. Swift's reputation is such that his statue is one of two that flank the main entrance to Trinity College in Dublin, the other being that of fellow Irishman and Trinity graduate, Edmund Burke, the British politician and writer known for his "Reflections on a Revolution in France" and as a seminal conservative political thinker. As a conservative of Irish descent, it is gratifying that this great university continues to honor these two great conservatives. Could we even imagine Yale or Harvard granting two conservatives such preeminent places of honor?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rather than Gingrich's "more big government" solution, how about taking a page from the EC.

    For example, you can drive back and forth from Poland to Germany, pretty much whenever you want. If you are a Polish contractor, and want to go home, get in your car and go home. But be sure, you will pay your taxes in Germany if you work in Germany, discouraging even the heartiest Pole from taking up permanent residence.

    Rather than having pinheads in Washington patrolling the border, making double secret ID cards, building multi-billion $ fences etc...how about

    1) Simplified 36% Tax for Guest Workers covering both Social Security and income tax.
    2) But you have to pay it as an employer. You can't just skip it.

    The Tax system drives the average American crazy. Immigrants could share our miserable load of taxes, and be perfectly legal to work here, balancing the demand for emmigration with the demand for immigrants.

    JBP

    ReplyDelete
  5. A few points on immigration:

    1. We must eliminate birthright American citizenship. We are the only major industrialized country who honors this. Newborns should not be American citizens unless one or both of the parents are legal American citizens.

    2. The entire border must be secured before anything else is done on the immigration front. It is impossible to develop a plan without controlling the border first with a real wall / fence and permanent force strong enough to cover the border with planes / drones - not this bogus so called virtual fence. Is Israel building a virtual fence? Do the Koreans have a virtual fence? Did the Chinese build the great virtual fence to keep out the Mongols?

    Until those first two goals are accomplished, we will continue to have little to no control over the future of this country. Immigration is an important issue. We must develop a plan to allow law abiding immigrants who will contribute to our country in a manner that benefits the American people – not a stop gap plan to appease the Mexican President and the protesters organized by far left wing factions here.

    ReplyDelete
  6. WPD is correct, but I might add that these books were placed between the Testaments (after Malachi and before Matthew) and labeled "Apocryoha", (uninspired writings), to denote the committees' belief that they were not held in the same regard as the Old and New Testaments.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm all for doing something about illegal immigration and borders that are too susceptible to being crossed by terrorists, but analogizing Mexican/Central American immigration that is driven almost purely by economics and (a) invading Mongol hordes (as the Chinese put it) or (b) Palestinian suicide bombers is overwrought - at best. And while I don't deny that far left wing factions were out and about during the immigration rallies (any reason to protest Bush is fine by them), it's just not serious to think that Bush is interested in appeasing them - and, in fact, they are NOT AT ALL appeased by last night's speech. Check out the ACLU's official stance on biometric cards and National Guard troops on the border, for instance. These were right-fringe ideas just 10 years ago, and now we have Dick Durbin immediately agreeing to them in the otherwise lame Democratic response (theme: "Everything the president proposed was fine by us, but we oppose the plan as a whole because it was proposed by a Republican president").

    ReplyDelete
  8. 50 years ago there were hardly any "federal officers" on the border. Why didn't we have this huge influx from south of the border then?
    Because the state and local law enforcement asked to see your green card if you had a accent or could not speak english when you were pulled over. When you wanted to sign your kids up for school you had to show your green card etc... Come on, as a conservative it bothers me to have thousands more federal agents or militarizing the border when we don't have to. We want smaller government we should be careful not demand the government expand.
    As usual our country had this problem solved until the PC crowd took over! We don't want to hurt somones feelings by asking for a green card? Have congress pass a law saying people have to show papers to get services from the federal government the same for the state. Instead we have Dick Durban, Obama, Blago, Daley and the little pip squeek telling the illegals nobodys going to be arrested for breaking the law.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Mr. Leahy,

    If your surname betrays you correctly, your great-grandfather, much like mine was getting off the boat from a mismanaged British Ireland 150 years ago, to virtually NO immigration controls because the country was smart enough in those days to realize that we needed Irishmen to dig ditches, build railroads, and keep house.

    If "state and local law enforcement asked to see your green card if you had a accent" in those days, the officer would have been popped on the side of their head with a shillelagh, if they got away that lightly.

    Unemployment is lower now, and inflation is comparable to what it was in the years of huge immigration from Europe. Why are we trying to stop it?

    JBP

    ReplyDelete
  10. John Powers - why are we trying to stop it? Nearly one-quarter (24.5%) of California’s current $38 billion state budget deficit stems directly from immigration. One quarter!!! They are a drain, not an advantage, on our economy. This comes to over $1000 in annual extra taxes per household in California.

    The 1995 findings of Harvard economist George Borjas [George Borjas, “The Economic Benefits from Immigration,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995 - http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~GBorjas/Papers/Ec... ] were confirmed by the National Research Council’s 1997 report The New Americans: essentially all the increase in Gross Domestic product [GDP] brought about by immigration is captured by the immigrants themselves, in the form of wages. Virtually no benefit accrues to native-born Americans.

    Borjas estimates that each 10% increase in immigrant workers reduces native wages by about 3.5%. About 14% of employed workers in 2002 were immigrants. So the reduction in native wages attributable to immigrants that year was approximately 4.9% (35% of 14%).

    We owe our fellow American brothers. Not illegal alien invaders. Our poorer and middle class Americans are the ones being devasted by immigration.

    ReplyDelete
  11. John Powers - why are we trying to stop it? Nearly one-quarter (24.5%) of California’s current $38 billion state budget deficit stems directly from immigration. One quarter!!! They are a drain, not an advantage, on our economy. This comes to over $1000 in annual extra taxes per household in California.

    The 1995 findings of Harvard economist George Borjas [George Borjas, “The Economic Benefits from Immigration,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995 - http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~GBorjas/Papers/Ec... ] were confirmed by the National Research Council’s 1997 report The New Americans: essentially all the increase in Gross Domestic product [GDP] brought about by immigration is captured by the immigrants themselves, in the form of wages. Virtually no benefit accrues to native-born Americans.

    ReplyDelete
  12. John Powers - why are we trying to stop it? Nearly one-quarter (24.5%) of California’s current $38 billion state budget deficit stems directly from immigration. One quarter!!! They are a drain, not an advantage, on our economy. This comes to over $1000 in annual extra taxes per household in California.

    The 1995 findings of Harvard economist George Borjas [George Borjas, “The Economic Benefits from Immigration,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995 - http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~GBorjas/Papers/Ec... ] were confirmed by the National Research Council’s 1997 report The New Americans: essentially all the increase in Gross Domestic product [GDP] brought about by immigration is captured by the immigrants themselves, in the form of wages. Virtually no benefit accrues to native-born Americans.

    ReplyDelete
  13. John Powers - why are we trying to stop it? Nearly one-quarter (24.5%) of California’s current $38 billion state budget deficit stems directly from immigration. One quarter!!! They are a drain, not an advantage, on our economy. This comes to over $1000 in annual extra taxes per household in California.

    The 1995 findings of Harvard economist George Borjas [George Borjas, “The Economic Benefits from Immigration,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995 - http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~GBorjas/Papers/Ec... ] were confirmed by the National Research Council’s 1997 report The New Americans: essentially all the increase in Gross Domestic product [GDP] brought about by immigration is captured by the immigrants themselves, in the form of wages. Virtually no benefit accrues to native-born Americans.

    Borjas estimates that each 10% increase in immigrant workers reduces native wages by about 3.5%. About 14% of employed workers in 2002 were immigrants. So the reduction in native wages attributable to immigrants that year was approximately 4.9% (35% of 14%).

    ReplyDelete
  14. (Sorry for the multiple "Part 1" postings - my screen locked up for a bit and I must have hit Submit a couple extra times)

    Your 36% tax is a start. A supply-side solution is simple: if we subsidize illegals we will get more of them.

    There should be no more in-state tuition. If they want their kids educated here, let them pay a tuition. Prop. 187 was the right idea.

    If we tax illegals we will get less of them. They will self-deport.

    Remittances to the entire region increased to $32 billion. This represents an acceleration of an already large growth rate, bringing the increase since 2000 to almost 40%. Remittances to Mexico increased 18% in 2002 and they account for about one-third of the total ($10 billion).

    Remittances are not taxed now. Taxing remittances could be similar taxing e-commerce. Or you could slap on a flat fee on all remittances.

    http://www.iadb.org/mif/V2/files/MIFPagerfeb2003eng.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  15. (Sorry for the multiple "Part 1" postings - my screen locked up for a bit and I must have hit Submit a couple extra times)

    Your 36% tax is a start. A supply-side solution is simple: if we subsidize illegals we will get more of them.

    There should be no more in-state tuition. If they want their kids educated here, let them pay a tuition. Prop. 187 was the right idea.

    If we tax illegals we will get less of them. They will self-deport.

    Remittances to the entire region increased to $32 billion. This represents an acceleration of an already large growth rate, bringing the increase since 2000 to almost 40%. Remittances to Mexico increased 18% in 2002 and they account for about one-third of the total ($10 billion).

    Remittances are not taxed now. Taxing remittances could be similar taxing e-commerce. Or you could slap on a flat fee on all remittances.

    http://www.iadb.org/mif/V2/files/MIFPagerfeb2003eng.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  16. An unguarded, unsecured border is as big a threat to our security as China and Israel faced.

    Not only do the majority of the drugs into America but anyone including terrorists can come in here illegally and attack America again.

    We don't need a "virtual" wall with 6,000 toy soldiers who are there for decoration purposes - they are not allowed to enforce or detain illegal aliens. We need an actual wall manned by the tens of thousands of perminent border patrol workers needed to enforce zero tolerance stopping at least 1/2 million more illegal aliens than have crossed the border the past several years.

    Bush has no excuse for not enforcing the border. It was his and his backers wish to allow millions of illegals into the country during his first 5 years in a bipartisan scheme against the American people. Democrats feel they will get the majority of their vote so they go along.

    The representatives are supposed to represent America and Americans and they have failed again in this amnesty scheme.

    ReplyDelete
  17. (Liam, Leahy...are all the people that think "Washington DC knows best", of Irish heritage?)

    Everyone pays property tax. You cant get around it regardless of your immigration status. Property tax pays for schools (sort of). In-state tuition makes sense on a pay-as-you-go basis.

    I have 0 confidence in Californians managing much of anything. When you read how much money is spent on social services, remeber the complete lunatics writing the checks in these cases couldn't manage a hot dog stand, let alone $38 Billion budget.

    Taxing remittances is more complex than taxing income. Why not get the cash up front, and let the market regulate itself?

    JBP

    ReplyDelete
  18. Everyone pays property taxes but:

    1. Most immigrants are not property owners.
    2. Here in Illinois we've offered in-state tuition to children of illegals; words cannot describe how ridiculous that is.
    3. The property tax swap proposal will make the citizen pick up even more of the tab for illegals' education.

    Sorry, not buying it. Slap a tax on illegals, and you will get fewer of them. Subsidize them and you will get more of them.

    Besides, subsidizing them is not letting the market working itself out.

    ReplyDelete