The Democratic party is on a roll. The public wants the war to be over and Democrats want to end it for them. You’ve got to think it’s good news when the electorate wants what you want to give.
There has always been an appetite for pacifism on the left. Sometimes it was a guilty little secret pleasure to be ignored. Sometimes it has been an irresistible hunger. Today the Democrats are like a chocoholic being told that Mama’s Triple Fudge brownies are not only good for you, but you’re going to get paid to eat them.
Yup, it’s good times. They are going to let their anti-war side run wild and the public is going to love them for it.
…so why do Democrats look so scared?
The party leadership that was around during Vietnam remember what happened the last time they let loose into a full anti-war frenzy and for all the arguments about whether Iraq is another Vietnam, the political situation does have amazing similarities: An unpopular war with a large majority of the public wanting our troops to come home, an activist minority pushing the party to the left and party leaders in an “I’m more anti-war than you are” contest.
In the early 70’s Democrats heard the voice of the people and gave them what they wanted. They ended the war and expected the public would reward them. It made perfect sense, and it didn’t work.
In 1976 Jimmy Carter was able to win the White House thanks to the hangover from Watergate, but how many seats did Democrats pick up in the House and Senate? Zero. And just 4 years later Republicans had a landslide for President, a pickup of 35 seats in the House and control of the Senate for the first time since 1954.
Democrats were asking “What the [expletive deleted] went wrong?”
The problem was that they gave the public what they wanted, not what they needed. Americans don’t like seeing their neighbors get hurt, so their ‘want’ was for the war to stop, but after they got what they wanted they took a step back and realized that what the Country needed was to win. In short order, the American people decided that the Democrats could not be trusted with national security and it took the party a generation to repair the damage.
The same political dynamic is playing out in the nation today. The war has been longer and harder than the public expected and they want it to be over, so the Democrats are again yielding to their anti-war instincts and rushing to give the public what it wants.
If we succeed in Iraq the anti-war crowd will look foolish and the Democrats will suffer for it. If we fail in Iraq, just like the late 70’s the public will soon shift focus to the fact that they don’t like America loosing a war and will be looking for someone to blame. The country will again turn against the anti-war movement and the Democratic party will pay the price.
Democrats have ignored the lessons of history. They think they are flying high. That’s how falling off a cliff feels until you hit the ground.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
The Jobs Americans Won’t Do
The justification for the President’s temporary worker program is that there are some jobs that American’s just won’t do.
Farmers argue that they need unskilled immigrant workers because without them, crops will rot in the fields and food prices will skyrocket. In California’s San Joaquin Valley in 1960 under the Bracero guest worker program 56,000 unskilled Mexican farm workers picked 2 million tons of tomatoes. When that program ended in 1964, did crops rot in the fields? Did ketchup become a luxury good?
Of course not. Farm owners started to invest in automation. The result was that 5,000 high skilled, high wage workers were able to harvest 12 million tons of tomatoes. Nearly six times the harvest with one tenth of the workforce. Put another way, that’s a productivity increase of over 6,000%. If our health care system had that kind of productivity increase, we wouldn’t be worried about the future of Medicare.
It’s a perfectly understandable pattern. American industry has little incentive to invest in labor saving automation as long as there is an unlimited supply of low skilled, low wage workers.
But what about jobs that can’t be automated? If we don’t import cheap, unskilled immigrant labor, who is going to clean our hotel rooms?
If low wage immigrant workers were not available, Hilton would not close it’s hotels. They would respond to supply and demand in the labor market and pay a U.S. worker trying to support her 3 kids the $15/hour she needs to pay the mortgage and finish her education.
Low wage immigrant labor does not make these jobs possible. It just makes them possible at low wages.
The other argument for a temporary worker program is that if we give people a legal channel to work in the U.S., there will be less illegal immigration. It will reduce pressure on the Border Patrol and let them focus their resources on the few people still trying to cross the border illegally.
There’s just one problem with this argument. It’s called math.
A 2005 Pew Hispanic Center national survey showed that 46% of Mexicans would cross the border into the United States if they had the opportunity. Out of a population of 109 million, that makes 50 million Mexicans who with varying degrees of intensity, want to come here. Subtracting 400,000 legal guest workers, still leaves 49.6 million who want to come here and are willing do it illegally.
A guest worker program can only reduce illegal immigration if it absorbs a large fraction of the pool of potential illegal immigrants. Given that the population of Mexico, Central and South America is over half a billion, no temporary worker program can ever be large enough to put a meaningful dent in illegal immigration.
If the goal of a temporary worker program is to subsidize business with low wage workers, then it may have merit, but we need to be aware that there will be a price. That price will be reduced productivity and lower wages for U.S. workers.
Farmers argue that they need unskilled immigrant workers because without them, crops will rot in the fields and food prices will skyrocket. In California’s San Joaquin Valley in 1960 under the Bracero guest worker program 56,000 unskilled Mexican farm workers picked 2 million tons of tomatoes. When that program ended in 1964, did crops rot in the fields? Did ketchup become a luxury good?
Of course not. Farm owners started to invest in automation. The result was that 5,000 high skilled, high wage workers were able to harvest 12 million tons of tomatoes. Nearly six times the harvest with one tenth of the workforce. Put another way, that’s a productivity increase of over 6,000%. If our health care system had that kind of productivity increase, we wouldn’t be worried about the future of Medicare.
It’s a perfectly understandable pattern. American industry has little incentive to invest in labor saving automation as long as there is an unlimited supply of low skilled, low wage workers.
But what about jobs that can’t be automated? If we don’t import cheap, unskilled immigrant labor, who is going to clean our hotel rooms?
If low wage immigrant workers were not available, Hilton would not close it’s hotels. They would respond to supply and demand in the labor market and pay a U.S. worker trying to support her 3 kids the $15/hour she needs to pay the mortgage and finish her education.
Low wage immigrant labor does not make these jobs possible. It just makes them possible at low wages.
The other argument for a temporary worker program is that if we give people a legal channel to work in the U.S., there will be less illegal immigration. It will reduce pressure on the Border Patrol and let them focus their resources on the few people still trying to cross the border illegally.
There’s just one problem with this argument. It’s called math.
A 2005 Pew Hispanic Center national survey showed that 46% of Mexicans would cross the border into the United States if they had the opportunity. Out of a population of 109 million, that makes 50 million Mexicans who with varying degrees of intensity, want to come here. Subtracting 400,000 legal guest workers, still leaves 49.6 million who want to come here and are willing do it illegally.
A guest worker program can only reduce illegal immigration if it absorbs a large fraction of the pool of potential illegal immigrants. Given that the population of Mexico, Central and South America is over half a billion, no temporary worker program can ever be large enough to put a meaningful dent in illegal immigration.
If the goal of a temporary worker program is to subsidize business with low wage workers, then it may have merit, but we need to be aware that there will be a price. That price will be reduced productivity and lower wages for U.S. workers.
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