Category Archives: jobs

Some Questions about the Labor-Chamber of Commerce Accord on Immigrant Labor

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Over the last few days, Big Labor and Big Business have reached a working agreement on one the last (apparently) sticking points in the immigration reform idea being worked by the Immigration Gang of Eight in the Senate.  This agreement, which centers on low-skill “guest workers,” has the following outlines.  These guest workers

  • would be paid the higher of the prevailing industry wage as determined by the Labor Department or the actual employer wage
  • would be allowed to pursue a path to citizenship and to change jobs after they arrived in the United States

Moreover, the visas

  • would be issued under a W Visa program that would start at 20,000 visas, rise to 35,000 visas in the second year, 55,000 in the third, and 75,000 in the fourth.  In the fifth year, the program would expand or shrink based on the unemployment rate, the ratio of job openings to unemployed workers and various other factors.  A maximum of 200,000 guest visas would be granted each year after the fourth, with a maximum of 15,000 visas per year for some construction occupations
  • although low-skilled construction workers would be included, trades like crane operators and electricians would be explicitly excluded
  • one third of all visas available in any given year would go to businesses with fewer than 25 employees

Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, says of this agreement

We have created a new model, a modern visa system that includes both a bureau to collect and analyze labor market data, as well as significant worker protections.

I have a number of questions about this.

  • Why do we need another government bureaucracy to assess this program and to determine the allowed limits—and wages—to the expanding and contracting visa program?  Why not let the free market determine the demand for labor?
  • Why do we need a minimum wage—which suppresses hiring?  Why not let the market for those low skills determine the wages paid?
  • Why does this guest worker program need a special path to citizenship?  If the immigrants are here legally, and if they’re allowed to stay and to change jobs, they already have the existing citizenship path that any other legal immigrant has.
  • Why do we need a quota on visas?  If the end game is to let the program expand or shrink based all those government-assessed factors, why not, instead, let it expand or shrink more responsively and efficiently based on market factors: demand for labor as driven by demand from consumers and businesses for the product on which that labor will work?

To abuse an old sitcom’s tag line: hold it.  I don’t think you’ll like this picture.

More Obama Sequester in Action

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A few of items.

Congressman Ted Poe (R, TX) is wondering about sequester cuts to tuition aid for our military veterans while we continue to send education aid to Pakistan.  The Marines, for instance, had spent $47 million tuition aid in 2012, while nearly $13 million went to Pakistan for “higher education.”  And then, post-sequester, the Obama administration committed another $37 million to the Pakistan program.

Hmm….

And there’s this example of Obama cynicism.  Recall that the US Department of Agriculture would be forced to “furlough” a significant portion of its meat inspectors, among other personnel.  In the meantime, though, and again post-sequester, the Obama administration

continues to pursue a “partnership” with the Mexican government to “raise awareness” about food stamps among immigrants from that country.

In complete disregard for current immigration law that says immigrants can’t come in unless they are, or can reasonably be expected to be, self-supporting.

And this:

School officials on Native American reservations across Minnesota are forced into making cuts to their current budgets in anticipation of sequester cuts.  These  are programs that had been making progress, improving high school graduation rates by the small, but concrete, 3% per year.

But in post-sequester DC, a six-figure income position was created for a former aide to Congressman Charles Rangel (D, NY) with the important title of Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans.

Apparently some uses for post-sequester money are more important than others.  Especially when there’s political gain to be had.

Never His Fault

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Once again, President Barack Obama is scuttling away from his responsibility.  This time, he’s throwing his Secret Service under the bus.

You’re all aware that Obama cancelled for the duration all White House tours by the public, and that he did it because of Evil Republicans and their Satanic Sequester.  After the hoo-raw over his cancellation and the sheer pettiness of it, he’s started crawfishing.

He now is insisting “that the Secret Service was behind the…suspension of White House tours.”  When he passed on this little tidbit to the Republican caucus with whom he was meeting, the response he got was a round of “ahaaaaas.”

Obama, in response, told the lawmakers: “Hold on guys, we just talked about respect.”

Sorry, Ace.  You get respect the same way any American does: through actual deeds.  You certainly don’t get it because you think you’re special.

The Secret Service works for Obama; he doesn’t work for them.  They may have made their recommendation, they may have told him their “decision.”  But it was his—overriding—decision to accept their position.  He could have overruled them; it was entirely his choice not to.

This is just cowardice.

Magical Thinking

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Well, that didn’t take long.  President Barack Obama already has failed his test.

The Progressives’ idea of a budget is out of the Senate Budget Committee, now, and on the Senate floor, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) will do his best to thrust it home with as little debate allowed as he can achieve.  Here’s the summary table (and scroll down a bit to this table; sorry you have to crane your neck); the whole thing can be viewed, in piecemeal form, on the Senate’s site:

Notice that.  Aside from continuing to gut Defense, overall spending continues apace, President Barack ObamaSenator Patty Murray (D, WA), the Budget Committee’s Chair, demands even more taxes from working Americans than he got in January, and our national debt explodes.

The Democrats want, with an absolutely straight face, to increase spending every year–$3.6 trillion in FY 2014, $4.05 trillion in FY 2016, and so on to $5.7 trillion in FY 2023, a 62% increase over the current level for FY 2013.

Reading the fine print in one of those piecemeal parts at the Senate site, we see that the Progressives want to create a(nother) $100 billion program aimed at generating new jobs, again by funding infrastructure work.  Of course, we know Obama already tried this, repeatedly, throughout his first term.  As he’s already confessed, “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” and as those earlier programs demonstrated, the jobs aren’t there at any time in his government programs.  This is magical thinking.

And it turns out Murray lied about those taxes, too, cynically understating them at “only” an additional $975 billion.  The Weekly Standard has this table, provided by a staffer for the Senate Budget Committee’s (Murray’s committee) minority membership:

Murray cynically understated Obama’s tax demands by fully one-third.  These $1.5 trillion in new taxes, combined with the $600 billion in new taxes Obama got at the start of the year, adds up to $2.1 trillion in new taxes being demanded in just these two and a half months.

Progressives just can’t stand to not raise taxes.  Their addiction to OPM is palpable.

And that debt.  The Progressives fully intend to explode it to $24 trillion by 2023, with annual interest payments running nearly to $800 billion.  This also assumes the market would be willing to buy such risky debt at those rates.  But then Obama denies, ostrich-like, that there’s any urgency to our debt fiasco.  This is more magical thinking.

All of this is predicated, too, on Obama’s/Murray’s pipedream of a GDP annual growth rate over the next 10 years of 4.2%-6.6% each year—rates we’ve never sustained in any 10 year period in our history.  With all of this taxing and spending taking money out of the private economy—the economy in which Americans actually live, work, and die—positing such rates is…wrong.

Matched with the $975 billion in claimed spending cuts, this isn’t even the balance about which he’s been yammering.  This is more…magical thinking.

This proposal is a disaster waiting to happen.

Obama’s Other Face

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President Barack Obama is giving the appearance of wanting a bipartisan, compromise deal on our budget, deficit, and debt.  Is this real, this time, or just another version of the idle chit-chat and outright lies he’s passed off for the last five years?

The Wall Street Journal offers some metrics for assessing his behavior this time around.

  • Will he drop his demand for a tax increase outside of tax reform?  This has no chance of passing, and his continued insistence will poison the chance of any budget deal.  On tax reform he has willing GOP partners in Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp and Ohio Senator Rob Portman, but the formula has to be lower rates in exchange for fewer loopholes.  Any additional revenue will have to come from the faster economic growth that will follow.
  • Will he agree to a flexible, generous guest-worker program on immigration?  The AFL-CIO wants a restrictive program with a political body determining when there is a labor shortage and how many visas can be granted in specific industries.  Anything close to the AFL-CIO plan won’t stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming to the US for work, but it ought to kill reform in Congress.
  • Will he put more than token entitlement reforms on the table?  As we wrote last week (“Obama’s Not So Grand Offer,” March 8), the President’s Medicare proposals don’t begin to solve the health-care spending problem.  Short of Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan, the only chance for reform worth the name is “comprehensive cost-sharing” that forces individuals to confront at least some of the costs of their own care.

These sound like a pretty good test to me.  It looks, from the Senate Democrats’ budget proposal, like he’s failed the test.