seriously cited with only credible labor economists, from Academia, every research paper thoroughly checked for accuracy. We have a real problem with objectivity on this topic with a lot of beliefs and little focus on real data.
So, please let's stay out of the politics on this topic because it could destroy the site, believe it or not....
With that caveat, here is what I know, you'll love it..
It depends.
Nice huh? The reason is labor markets are dynamic, not black and white issues. For example, if you have an illegal family living here for say 12 years.....working in the undergound economy, cash under the table (and this is huge, a major section of underground economy is fueled by illegal labor), and assuming they are just living, working here and so on, well, for that length of time odds are they are already integrated in many ways into the economy/society, so if you give them "amnesty" or whatever you want to call this crap, then....
that income could be taxed, plus removed from the underground economy.
So, because they have been here a long time, they are probably not displacing anyone as well as spending a reasonable percentage of disposable income into the U.S. economy...so I would guess they would pop up in the tally as a net economic benefit, but in this case.
Also, that would (assuming the DOL actually gets it together enforcing U.S. labor law and stops abuses) remove this 12 yr. present family from potential exploitation for someone here has no rights to complain for the most part, esp. on Workman's comp......so all things being equal, they would now have to pay taxes but....they would get other benefits....hard to determine if that helps out of not (when you get to low wages so much is taken out of your paycheck, it's often more profitable to work for cash under the table, underground economy)....but odds are that family would be better off overall economically.
Now if they had been using fake SS numbers of IDs or whatever....AND claiming earned income credit, yet using cash under the table .....well, it's probably going to be less profitable to be into the U.S. official tax system for them, better for us....
But on the other hand, if you have illegal labor being used to displace workers, undercut wages and so on...
well, for U.S. workers that hurts and odds are lower wages significantly....
Then you have the issue of a host of other social safety net benefits...I believe last I saw it's longer to qualify as a U.S. citizen than a Mexican citizen for SS...
so, in a nutshell, there isn't anything black and white in here, requires a lot of analysis and I haven't even gotten to remittances yet.
So, lots of data to look at, which is why I hope we put the focus on that and not on the screaming, flaming rhetoric.
This topic is such a cess pool for flaming screaming rhetoric as it is and then we have a situation where so often there is no black and white answer to determine the economic impacts. Awful huh!
but getting a little more serious, it might be interesting to plot a graph of all sorts of major economic policy and to note how much of it has zero change from the past administration in practice.
they kind of are matching duals of each other. Maybe we can have a joint category for media spin machines of different flavors.
Hey, just my little personal list....I said this as a joke, but now I'm wondering if this might be a good outlet and a lot of fun for people's rage and frustrations...
if "immigration reform" comes up as a major agenda item..
EP is officially banning the use of keywords "racist xenophobe". The reason is to put the focus squarely on the stats, the economics of it, the data, the realities, wages, and so on for on this topic, like no other, does the focus get off on labor economics and onto a hell of a lot of name calling, misinformation.
Sure, we can point to illegal employers, lobbyists who strategically came up with this idea to import illegal labor to union bust, going back to the 1980's, the underground economy....all of it...
I'm just sayin' that's a whopping number! LA county is amazing, something like 48% are on social services along with the estimates that LA county has huge percentages of illegals...
Your comment proposes that nation-states should allow some sort of global input into policy....whereas nation-states are made up of citizens....so you are implying citizens of other nations should determine U.S. policy...
If your comment is that other nations poop on their citizens....well, it's obviously true in Mexico where there were almost riots in the streets last election and mass accusations of rigging the elections...and the obvious metric of a 50% unemployment rate.
Firstly, he's a sportscaster and it shows. Secondly, his daily name calls, often vaguely hidden as simply personal vendetta. He has this beyond partisan superficial view, he's inaccurate, he cherry picks some thing from others and engages continuously in personal attack, on air, he's gotten his paid for commentator's fired because they dared say something he didn't personally approve of...and he's supposedly a jerk to women to boot, evidenced by the beyond belief misogyny shown to Hillary Clinton during the primary.
Also to point out that any political flavor can have it's embarrassing asses.
Seriously, as much as I despised the Bush administration, glued to the TV watching the corporate takeover of the nation and the beyond belief snow job when invading Iraq by all of the media....when Olbermann did his "special comments" on Bush, I just would cringe in embarrassment....
that guy is simply not Edward R. Murrow and it's so embarrassing to watch him take Murrow's famous speech against the "communist witch hunt" Congress was doing and defile it to such an ongoing degree.
Seriously, MSNBC reruns that stupid, information void show over and over while Dylan Ratigan, who has some very good information, does not get rerun.
Remember, we're non-partisan so one must consider the virtual tar and feather for all points of misinformation and masking smears....that avoid the real details and facts, esp. on economics.
How about when captured at border - give them a choice - either sign up become 'documented' with a real social security number and w/some permanent immigrant status or face deportation. This only addresses those currently busted people.
It seems to me that having people documented would go a long way to addressing many issues regarding tax revenue and wage laws. As for impact on supply of labor - again it would help to have documented workers and giving them rights under minimum wage laws.
I will always be suspicious of anyone who blames immigrants for our troubles.
All through history society has looked for scapegoats. You can always tell a scapegoat by the fact that they have no political power.
Infidels are bringing down the wrath of Gawd.
Jews are poisoning the wells and stealing the babies.
Immigrants are corrupting our culture, stealing our most menial jobs, and living off of welfare.
If you want to start pointing fingers, then point them at the people who created our political policies and leads our economy.
Pointing fingers at people who are locked out of the political process is a useless distraction. It reminds me of how the southern aristocrats would intentionally divide and cause friction between the poor white from the blacks during Jim Crow days.
Rebel, how about creating a virtual "tar and feather" list.
Maybe I can even put together a flash where folks can tar and feather someone in cyberspace. ;)
Here's my tar and feather candidates:
1. Alan Greenspan
2. Thomas Friedman
3. credit ratings agencies
4. Congress with a handful of exemptions
5. Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama administrations
6. Salaried Lobbyists
7. Larry Kudlow
8. Phil Gramm
9. Jagdish Bhagwati
10. Keith Olbermann
Supposedly there is about $10.5 billion per year spent on illegal immigration/immigrants in CA. Think at least they might consider deporting at least a few felons and enforcing the law where illegals are not supposed to be getting social services just a tad?
I mean I hate to say this and there is no doubt that state is just plain FUBAR, I call it the gouge ya state, but I mean $10.5 billion. That's huge!
If someone is all poed I'm pointing this out, give me another budget buster that is larger or some sort of other economic stupidity in that state to counter. Surely there are many!
Either that or just plain legalize marijuana and have a massive new cash crop (or do both).
This is just the guidelines of EP, we're trying to focus on the facts, the stats, the quantifiable. There are plenty of other sites doing personalities and while public personalities such as Geithner, Summers and so on are fair game on EP, the idea here is to get the focus on what's really important, what affects us economically...
which is HUGE in terms of all other things and that's what is so often missing on blogs.
So, that's why I'm saying this. Who cares what some other sites say, it's not EP's function to do daily "call out"...
our goal is to create an online space where regular folk, anyone (and that includes Harvard Professors and we do have some posting here), can write on economic topics, policy and have some discussion..
The idea of EP is to get the focus not on emotional generalities but on specifics, to dig around for very detailed, quantifiable details ....
because this is precisely how the middle class gets screwed....we do not pay attention to the details and legislation has to be the worst.
and it's tough...esp. on legislation to watchdog those details but even in daily economic reports, as you can see by your comment...
the spin is in and it's major. But the actual data says something different quite often. Just look at existing home sales from yesterday as an example, or last week's state unemployment numbers...
So frankly there is a lot of things out there I personally ignore because they do not give me too much insight and are often wrong, things that are consistently wrong, ya know, I stop paying attention. ...hey, it's 2009 and you can DIY economic analysis these days, with just a little personal education and that's because so much of the data/databases are online now. I mean you have to understand what you're looking at, so why bother reading those who are consistently incorrect and playing "graph o rama cherry pick"?
There are a host of diligent economics folk out there who are doing an exceptional job....experts economists, and they are using the blogs because either you cannot fit this kind of analysis in a 2 minute sound byte on cable news and/or the blogs allow one to write up details for immediate viewing. They put their Academic research on line too.....it's just a matter of getting the general public to start focusing in on this and not say, what Tiger Woods did with his gonads (or latest person du jour or whatever the non-story 24/7 story is).
The bigger the failures the bigger the bonus I guess. I know when my company loses money there is no joy in mudville but when these people drive the companies into the ground its bailout and bonus time.
What America is this? What free market is this?
Baby Bush signed the largest check in US history to a small group of bankers with by law no oversight or accountability. Obama has stepped in and continued welfare for the wealthy. The biggest non accountable quasi/mutant government/private monopoly money printer, the Fed, has printed trillions and no one can even second guess them because they have ABSOLUTE suthority over the public's money supply.
Liars, cheats, deceivers all of them.
When you steal wearing jeans its a crime. When you steal wearing a suit its a lawsuit if even that.
There has been NO accountability. Where is it? Can you name an major actor in this crisis who has been held accountable for their actions? And accountability could be a number of things - criminal, civil or just plain disgorgement of huge bonuses received during the build-up of bubble. The Nation this past week listed another obscure actor: John Dugan - A Master of Disaster. John Dugan is the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC defended predatory and subprime lenders instead of regulating them:
As head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Dugan played a leading role in gutting the consumer protection system, allowing big banks to take outrageous risks on the predatory mortgages that led to millions of foreclosures.
"For years, the OCC has had the power and the responsibility to protect both banks and consumers, and it has consistently thrown the consumer under the bus," says Harvard University Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. "The result has not only been no consumer protection but also a collapsed banking system. That is why we so urgently need a separate agency in Washington that is specifically focused on protecting families from credit tricks and traps."
There are a lot of big national banks that are being bailed out by the FDIC that were regulated by Dugan's OCC. But again NO accountability - he still has a job.
I found this post by post by Prof. Hamilton @ Econbrowser. Notice the graph (for some reason I couldn't post it here) which shows that improvements in inventory management have had on inventory investment as a % of GDP.
My theory is that inventory investment or restocking won't save us.
So, take it with a grain of salt for obviously Venezuela having a high CDS spread is probably more about politics.
Why are the credit ratings agencies given as much credibility as ever without any reforms?
Maybe I should have put this into a comment because I have to agree, just going off of the CDS markets, pricing and spreads....as if these global trades are based always in reality (cough, cough).
seriously cited with only credible labor economists, from Academia, every research paper thoroughly checked for accuracy. We have a real problem with objectivity on this topic with a lot of beliefs and little focus on real data.
So, please let's stay out of the politics on this topic because it could destroy the site, believe it or not....
With that caveat, here is what I know, you'll love it..
It depends.
Nice huh? The reason is labor markets are dynamic, not black and white issues. For example, if you have an illegal family living here for say 12 years.....working in the undergound economy, cash under the table (and this is huge, a major section of underground economy is fueled by illegal labor), and assuming they are just living, working here and so on, well, for that length of time odds are they are already integrated in many ways into the economy/society, so if you give them "amnesty" or whatever you want to call this crap, then....
that income could be taxed, plus removed from the underground economy.
So, because they have been here a long time, they are probably not displacing anyone as well as spending a reasonable percentage of disposable income into the U.S. economy...so I would guess they would pop up in the tally as a net economic benefit, but in this case.
Also, that would (assuming the DOL actually gets it together enforcing U.S. labor law and stops abuses) remove this 12 yr. present family from potential exploitation for someone here has no rights to complain for the most part, esp. on Workman's comp......so all things being equal, they would now have to pay taxes but....they would get other benefits....hard to determine if that helps out of not (when you get to low wages so much is taken out of your paycheck, it's often more profitable to work for cash under the table, underground economy)....but odds are that family would be better off overall economically.
Now if they had been using fake SS numbers of IDs or whatever....AND claiming earned income credit, yet using cash under the table .....well, it's probably going to be less profitable to be into the U.S. official tax system for them, better for us....
But on the other hand, if you have illegal labor being used to displace workers, undercut wages and so on...
well, for U.S. workers that hurts and odds are lower wages significantly....
Then you have the issue of a host of other social safety net benefits...I believe last I saw it's longer to qualify as a U.S. citizen than a Mexican citizen for SS...
so, in a nutshell, there isn't anything black and white in here, requires a lot of analysis and I haven't even gotten to remittances yet.
So, lots of data to look at, which is why I hope we put the focus on that and not on the screaming, flaming rhetoric.
This topic is such a cess pool for flaming screaming rhetoric as it is and then we have a situation where so often there is no black and white answer to determine the economic impacts. Awful huh!
but getting a little more serious, it might be interesting to plot a graph of all sorts of major economic policy and to note how much of it has zero change from the past administration in practice.
they kind of are matching duals of each other. Maybe we can have a joint category for media spin machines of different flavors.
Hey, just my little personal list....I said this as a joke, but now I'm wondering if this might be a good outlet and a lot of fun for people's rage and frustrations...
hmmmmm.....
if "immigration reform" comes up as a major agenda item..
EP is officially banning the use of keywords "racist xenophobe". The reason is to put the focus squarely on the stats, the economics of it, the data, the realities, wages, and so on for on this topic, like no other, does the focus get off on labor economics and onto a hell of a lot of name calling, misinformation.
Sure, we can point to illegal employers, lobbyists who strategically came up with this idea to import illegal labor to union bust, going back to the 1980's, the underground economy....all of it...
I'm just sayin' that's a whopping number! LA county is amazing, something like 48% are on social services along with the estimates that LA county has huge percentages of illegals...
Your comment proposes that nation-states should allow some sort of global input into policy....whereas nation-states are made up of citizens....so you are implying citizens of other nations should determine U.S. policy...
If your comment is that other nations poop on their citizens....well, it's obviously true in Mexico where there were almost riots in the streets last election and mass accusations of rigging the elections...and the obvious metric of a 50% unemployment rate.
is the reason why I would add Rupert Murdoch and Faux News including Faux News Business.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
He's got another amusing post, Greece is to California as....
Firstly, he's a sportscaster and it shows. Secondly, his daily name calls, often vaguely hidden as simply personal vendetta. He has this beyond partisan superficial view, he's inaccurate, he cherry picks some thing from others and engages continuously in personal attack, on air, he's gotten his paid for commentator's fired because they dared say something he didn't personally approve of...and he's supposedly a jerk to women to boot, evidenced by the beyond belief misogyny shown to Hillary Clinton during the primary.
Also to point out that any political flavor can have it's embarrassing asses.
Seriously, as much as I despised the Bush administration, glued to the TV watching the corporate takeover of the nation and the beyond belief snow job when invading Iraq by all of the media....when Olbermann did his "special comments" on Bush, I just would cringe in embarrassment....
that guy is simply not Edward R. Murrow and it's so embarrassing to watch him take Murrow's famous speech against the "communist witch hunt" Congress was doing and defile it to such an ongoing degree.
Seriously, MSNBC reruns that stupid, information void show over and over while Dylan Ratigan, who has some very good information, does not get rerun.
Remember, we're non-partisan so one must consider the virtual tar and feather for all points of misinformation and masking smears....that avoid the real details and facts, esp. on economics.
we increase our tax base and help with social security if we properly document many of the illegal immigrants?
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
How about when captured at border - give them a choice - either sign up become 'documented' with a real social security number and w/some permanent immigrant status or face deportation. This only addresses those currently busted people.
It seems to me that having people documented would go a long way to addressing many issues regarding tax revenue and wage laws. As for impact on supply of labor - again it would help to have documented workers and giving them rights under minimum wage laws.
Just saying.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
It seems to be more of a top/bottom issue than a left/right issue.
I read once (sorry can't remember the source) that Obama/Bush are 2 waiters for the same chef.
Besides being melodramatic he's pretty innocuous. I would've had Rupert Murdoch on their before him.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
I will always be suspicious of anyone who blames immigrants for our troubles.
All through history society has looked for scapegoats. You can always tell a scapegoat by the fact that they have no political power.
Infidels are bringing down the wrath of Gawd.
Jews are poisoning the wells and stealing the babies.
Immigrants are corrupting our culture, stealing our most menial jobs, and living off of welfare.
If you want to start pointing fingers, then point them at the people who created our political policies and leads our economy.
Pointing fingers at people who are locked out of the political process is a useless distraction. It reminds me of how the southern aristocrats would intentionally divide and cause friction between the poor white from the blacks during Jim Crow days.
Rebel, how about creating a virtual "tar and feather" list.
Maybe I can even put together a flash where folks can tar and feather someone in cyberspace. ;)
Here's my tar and feather candidates:
1. Alan Greenspan
2. Thomas Friedman
3. credit ratings agencies
4. Congress with a handful of exemptions
5. Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama administrations
6. Salaried Lobbyists
7. Larry Kudlow
8. Phil Gramm
9. Jagdish Bhagwati
10. Keith Olbermann
Supposedly there is about $10.5 billion per year spent on illegal immigration/immigrants in CA. Think at least they might consider deporting at least a few felons and enforcing the law where illegals are not supposed to be getting social services just a tad?
I mean I hate to say this and there is no doubt that state is just plain FUBAR, I call it the gouge ya state, but I mean $10.5 billion. That's huge!
If someone is all poed I'm pointing this out, give me another budget buster that is larger or some sort of other economic stupidity in that state to counter. Surely there are many!
Either that or just plain legalize marijuana and have a massive new cash crop (or do both).
ya all, I'm aware we have a ton of lurkers (readers who do not comment) as well as a group of anonymous comment people who comment say once a week.
Ya all, consider creating an account on EP so you can track your comments and we can identify you by some freaky, funky name you made for yourself.
While you know what you said, anonymous comments are all lumped in together, we cannot differentiate one anonymous drive by from the next one.
So, come on, join in, you help add to EP, give good input, intel, be nice if you had an account!
This is just the guidelines of EP, we're trying to focus on the facts, the stats, the quantifiable. There are plenty of other sites doing personalities and while public personalities such as Geithner, Summers and so on are fair game on EP, the idea here is to get the focus on what's really important, what affects us economically...
which is HUGE in terms of all other things and that's what is so often missing on blogs.
So, that's why I'm saying this. Who cares what some other sites say, it's not EP's function to do daily "call out"...
our goal is to create an online space where regular folk, anyone (and that includes Harvard Professors and we do have some posting here), can write on economic topics, policy and have some discussion..
The idea of EP is to get the focus not on emotional generalities but on specifics, to dig around for very detailed, quantifiable details ....
because this is precisely how the middle class gets screwed....we do not pay attention to the details and legislation has to be the worst.
and it's tough...esp. on legislation to watchdog those details but even in daily economic reports, as you can see by your comment...
the spin is in and it's major. But the actual data says something different quite often. Just look at existing home sales from yesterday as an example, or last week's state unemployment numbers...
So frankly there is a lot of things out there I personally ignore because they do not give me too much insight and are often wrong, things that are consistently wrong, ya know, I stop paying attention. ...hey, it's 2009 and you can DIY economic analysis these days, with just a little personal education and that's because so much of the data/databases are online now. I mean you have to understand what you're looking at, so why bother reading those who are consistently incorrect and playing "graph o rama cherry pick"?
There are a host of diligent economics folk out there who are doing an exceptional job....experts economists, and they are using the blogs because either you cannot fit this kind of analysis in a 2 minute sound byte on cable news and/or the blogs allow one to write up details for immediate viewing. They put their Academic research on line too.....it's just a matter of getting the general public to start focusing in on this and not say, what Tiger Woods did with his gonads (or latest person du jour or whatever the non-story 24/7 story is).
The bigger the failures the bigger the bonus I guess. I know when my company loses money there is no joy in mudville but when these people drive the companies into the ground its bailout and bonus time.
What America is this? What free market is this?
Baby Bush signed the largest check in US history to a small group of bankers with by law no oversight or accountability. Obama has stepped in and continued welfare for the wealthy. The biggest non accountable quasi/mutant government/private monopoly money printer, the Fed, has printed trillions and no one can even second guess them because they have ABSOLUTE suthority over the public's money supply.
Liars, cheats, deceivers all of them.
When you steal wearing jeans its a crime. When you steal wearing a suit its a lawsuit if even that.
There has been NO accountability. Where is it? Can you name an major actor in this crisis who has been held accountable for their actions? And accountability could be a number of things - criminal, civil or just plain disgorgement of huge bonuses received during the build-up of bubble. The Nation this past week listed another obscure actor: John Dugan - A Master of Disaster. John Dugan is the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC defended predatory and subprime lenders instead of regulating them:
There are a lot of big national banks that are being bailed out by the FDIC that were regulated by Dugan's OCC. But again NO accountability - he still has a job.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
I found this post by post by Prof. Hamilton @ Econbrowser. Notice the graph (for some reason I couldn't post it here) which shows that improvements in inventory management have had on inventory investment as a % of GDP.
My theory is that inventory investment or restocking won't save us.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
and a model that includes CDS pricing.
So, take it with a grain of salt for obviously Venezuela having a high CDS spread is probably more about politics.
Why are the credit ratings agencies given as much credibility as ever without any reforms?
Maybe I should have put this into a comment because I have to agree, just going off of the CDS markets, pricing and spreads....as if these global trades are based always in reality (cough, cough).
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