PrestoPundit

Glenn Reynolds:

The incompetence and venality of America’s political class surprises even those of us who are paying attention.

The disgrace of the Bush Administration:

One of the negative consequences of the Department of Homeland Security’s push for shamnesty is its shrinking credibility. From the dog-and-pony show raids before shamnesty hit the Senate floor to the smearing of opponents during the legislative debate to the inaction of “emergency” border security appropriations after the bill’s defeat, DHS and its chief Michael Chertoff have abandoned principled enforcement of immigration laws for cynical, open-borders politicking.

We won’t forget the frenetic smear campaign that Chertoff waged against principled opponents of the Bush-Kennedy immigration disaster. We won’t forget that while global jihad marched on, Secretary Chertoff was more worried about the availability of cheap lettuce pickers than about terrorist operatives slipping past our air, land, and sea borders.

Dead in the water.

The Harvard economist takes a look back at the immigration debate and the Bush Administration. Quotable:

Maybe those who faulted the Bush manner of governing — its arrogance, its lack of intellectual curiosity, and its obsession with having its way regardless of inconvenient facts — were right after all.

Also this:

let’s finally all join in and admit the obvious. There is no doubt that making it easier for more and more workers to enter the labor market will lower wages. “Demand curves slope downward” should be the new rallying cry. Perhaps now the economists at the CEA and elsewhere can recover from their amnesia regarding this fundamental law of economics.

Amity Shlaes explains why FDR was bad for the U.S. economy — including this incredible story:

At some points Roosevelt seemed to understand the need to counter deflation. But his method for doing so generated a whole new set of uncertainties. Roosevelt personally experimented with the currency — one day, in bed, he raised the gold price by 21 cents. When Henry Morgenthau, who would shortly become Treasury Secretary, asked him why, Roosevelt said that “its a lucky number, because its three times seven.” Morgenthau wrote later: “If anybody ever knew how we set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened.”

Lets hope this is a continuing theme of the last years of the Bush Administration. Read about it here.

If the topic is the Kennedy-Bush amnesty bill, the answer is very likely no.

We already know that the White House has its information all wrong about the amnesty bill. Now we’re learning that most of the various Senators have very little knowledge of what they are voting on. Pathetic.

Teaching Hayekian monetary eoonomics to a new generation of central bankers:

[Hayekian] economics, has enjoyed a .. revival in the last decade, most prominently at the Basel, Switzerland-based BIS, which has few formal banking duties but is an important talking shop (it is sometimes called the “central bankers’ central bank.”) The BIS’s leading [“Hayekian”] is a Canadian, William White, the head of the bank’s monetary and economic department .. In a 2006 paper Mr. White wrote that under [Hayekian] theory, “credit creation need not lead to overt inflation. Rather…. the financial system … create[s] credit which encourages investments that, in the end, fail to prove profitable.” This leads to an “an eventual crisis whose magnitude would reflect the size of the real imbalances that preceded it [because] the capital goods produced in the upswing are not fungible, but they are durable. Mistakes then take a long time to work off.” He argued that in recent decades, “financial liberalisation has increased the likelihood of boom-bust cycles of the [Hayekian] sort.”

.. “Virtually no one foresaw the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the crises which affected Japan and Southeast Asia in the early and late 1990s, respectively,” it begins. “In fact, each downturn was preceded by a period of non-inflationary growth exuberant enough to lead many commentators to suggest that a ‘new era’ had arrived.”

It notes that “the prices of virtually all assets have been trending upwards, almost without interruption, since the middle of 2003 .. There seems to be a natural tendency in markets for past successes to lead to more risk-taking, more leverage, more funding, higher prices, more collateral and, in turn, more risk-taking… [S]uch endogenous market processes … can, indeed must, eventually go into reverse if the fundamentals have been overpriced.”

Apart from financial imbalances, the report argues the world economy also displays dangerous misallocations of capital. In its “recent rates of credit expansion, asset price increases and massive investments in heavy industry, the Chinese economy also seems to be demonstrating very similar, disquieting symptoms” to Japan in the 1980s. “In the United States, it is the recent massive investment in housing that has been unwelcome from an external adjustment perspective. Housing is the ultimate non-tradable, non-fungible and long-lived good.” In other words, the U.S. could be stuck with a lot of houses that are hard to sell to each other and impossible to sell to foreigners, and won’t need replacement for a long time.

What does the BIS say central bankers should do? Essentially, relax their single-minded focus on price stability, and tighten monetary policy when “a number of indicators — not just asset prices but also credit growth and spending patterns — are simultaneously behaving in a manner that indicates increasing exposures.” In other words, when easy credit is fueling excesses, raise interest rates to end the party ..

Bush’s self-described amnesty plan is headed for passage in the Senate.

I feel terribly sad for every American who has sent a loved one abroad to die for a President and Congress who have not and will not secure the country from terror attack — and are happily replacing them on the job and in the the voting booth with uneducated, low-wage foreigners, including gang members, convicted criminals, terror suspects, and drug runners.

a check.

Take a moment and give one of these Senators a call today.

amendment to Bush-Kennedy Amnesty package. Quotable:

for purposes of the operation of the civil rights laws of the United States, new immigrants to the United States subject to the Secure Border, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 shall not be considered to be “historically disadvantaged,” “underrepresented,” or to be in a “protected class” and shall not be entitled to any preferential or remedial employment goals, educational admissions goals or contracting goals by any entity subject to the civil rights laws of the United States.

Powerline smacks down the President’s Council of Economic Advisors on the economics of immigration. Quotable:

This is a topic that requires thorough analysis and debate. The fact that the administration’s eminent economists can only find a net positive effect on our economy and on our fiscal future — although not on our least-skilled workers — by conflating legal and illegal immigrants, Ph.D.s and roofers, does not suggest that we should be in any hurry to enact “reform” legislation of the sort now being proposed.

And economist George Borjas identifies appalling dishonesty in the technical analysis. Quotable:

Imagine the headlines had the CEA reported that immigration during the 1990s led to a $280 billion loss for pre-existing immigrants! This is not the spin the White House was looking for, but it is a direct implication of the spin they did put out.

Robert Rector takes the “libertarians” to school on the economics of importing the world’s poverty class to America.  Quotable:

There is a rough one-to-one fiscal balance between low-skill immigrant families and upper-middle-class families. It takes the entire net tax payments (taxes paid minus benefits received) of one college-educated family to pay for the net benefits received by one low-skill immigrant family. Even Julian Simon, the godfather of open-border advocates, acknowledged that imposing such a burden on taxpayers was unreasonable, stating, “immigrants who would be a direct economic burden upon citizens through the public coffers should have no claim to be admitted” into the nation.

There is also a political dimension to the transfer state. Elections in modern societies are, to a considerable degree, referenda on the magnitude of future income redistribution. An immigration policy which grants citizenship to vast numbers of low-skill, low-income immigrants not only creates new beneficiaries for government transfers, but new voters likely to support even greater transfers in the future.

The grant of citizenship is a transfer of political power. Access to the U.S. ballot box also provides access to the American taxpayer’s bank account.

We can’t expect The President and his hired flacks to care much about any of this.  However, at some point it might be hoped that there is at least one intellectually serious “libertarian” economist who will address these issues.  Just don’t hold your breath.

More deception from the Bush Administration on the amnesty package. You know someone has a bogus argument when much of it is made-up baloney and a good deal of the rest is ad hominen attack.

In response to criticisms of his amnesty plan, the President has suggested that the American people are racists. For their part, the American people believe the President is incompetent when it comes to border security and the enforcement of our immigration laws. Little more than 1 out of every 10 people believe the President is doing a good job on immigration. My guess it that this fight is one the President is going to lose. The American people are not a racist people — and the President’s administration of the border is a national joke.