Archive for April, 2010

The Federal Solution to Illegal Immigration

Posted by Daniel Griswold

A silver lining of the Arizona immigration law is that is has turned up the heat on Washington to re-examine federal policy. As I’ve made the rounds of talk radio shows today, one of the questions that keeps coming up is just what changes should be made in federal law to tackle illegal immigration. Glad you asked.

In brief, the single most effective change would be to expand opportunities for legal immigration, including for low-skilled workers who make up the large majority of the illegal population.

I make the case for comprehensive immigration reform in an op-ed in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.

For a more comprehensive case for comprehensive reform, see the lead article I wrote for the current issue of the Albany Government Law Review, titled “Comprehensive Immigration Reform: What Congress and the President Need to do to Make It Work.”

Tuesday Links

Posted by Chris Moody

  • Surprise! The “financial reform” bill is full of kickbacks to well connected cronies: “The public needs to understand that, far from protecting the little guy and sticking it to the fat cats, this bill keeps good, old-fashioned political patronage alive and well.”
  • When did this happen? “Historians find long-lost clause of U.S. Constitution giving federal authorities unlimited jurisdiction over the American palate.” Oh wait, it didn’t.

HouseLive.gov Video: Wait and See

Posted by Jim Harper

The potential of streaming video from the House of Representatives is so great that my first impression of the House’s new video offering, HouseLive.gov, has been disappointment. There is much room to improve HouseLive.gov, and I hope it will improve.

At first, I couldn’t find any video that was actually live. (That would inject a bit of irony into the name, eh?) But there is live video: On the homepage, scroll down to the top of the “Most Recent Sessions” chart. If the top of the list has an item called “In Progress,” the House is in session. Clicking the video link will get you live video from the House floor.

(Don’t be fooled by the “Subscribe to Live Feeds” box. Those are RSS feeds, which are “live”—as in regularly updated. They’re not live video or audio.)

Most people will probably access this from the House clerk’s familiar “Floor Summary” page, which has near-real-time updates about House activity. But that page says “Streaming video is not available for this session.” That’s a hiccup that should be easy to fix.

Selecting a past day, one can watch the video of that day, but in my early tests, you had to watch the video from the beginning. I don’t think many people are going to watch 10 hours of video to pick up their representative’s remarks on the bill to congratulate Camp Dudley of Westport, New York, on its 125th anniversary.

I’ve been testing in Firefox. In Internet Explorer, I got some links that do things. It appears you will be able to navigate around a day’s video based on the activity of the House. That is, you can jump to where the House began debate on the Camp Dudley bill.

Hopefully, the system will work in standards-compliant browsers, not only Microsoft’s. I note that the video currently plays only in Windows Media Player or Microsoft’s Silverlight. I’ll leave it to friends better versed in video to critique the selection of formats, but I have doubts about these two as being the best, and most open, available.

Beyond junctures in House debate, there should be more tagging to make the video useful. Not only should you be able to navigate via House activity, you should be able to navigate by bill number, and by member of Congress.

When you do navigate around, I don’t see that the “share” link changes. This needs fixing so that people can direct friends and colleagues to key portions of debates. In fact, you should be able to link to any point in the video. Ideally, there should be an embed function that allows defined segments of video to go into blog posts and such. That latter one is a big ask, but Congress is a big, important institution.

It’s early yet. Maybe these things are in the works or on the drawing board. Rolling HouseLive.go out in “beta,” getting feedback, and fixing it is A-OK. But sometimes government agencies set a course and have a hard time changing after that. The Thomas legislative system, brilliant as it was for 1995, still isn’t publishing bill data in good formats, and a private provider has had to take up the slack.

HouseLive.gov is better than nothing. It can be much, much better than it is.

Seven (Free-Market) Ways to Boost U.S. Exports

Posted by Daniel Griswold

President Obama has committed his administration to the ambitious goal of doubling U.S. exports in the next five years. I don’t believe the government should be setting such targets—the rate of growth of U.S. exports should be left to the marketplace—but I am all for the administration seeking ways to expand the freedom of U.S. companies to sell in global markets.

In the “Economic Watch” column of the Washington Times today, I suggest six policy changes that will help American producers sell more of their goods and services abroad. None of them involve subsidies, threats of sanctions, or other government involvement.

Among my suggestions: enact into law the three free-trade agreements that have already been negotiated, repeal the trade embargo against Cuba, keep trade peace with China, and set a good example by keeping the U.S. market open.

If I could have added another suggestion (alas, space in a real newspaper is limited), it would be to issue more visas for trade delegations visiting the United States. Under misguided notions of national security, we make it more difficult than it should be for delegations from China and other  markets to visit the United States to inspect U.S. goods offered for sale. But like the other suggestions, this one is politically challenging as well.

If the president wants to boost exports, he will need to show the necessary leadership to remove the government-imposed barriers that still remain.

Mismanaged States Blame Messenger

Posted by Mark A. Calabria

Mismanaged municipal and state governments around the country are finding a new target to blame for their own self-inflicted wounds:  the growing market for credit defaults swaps (CDS) on municipal debt.

A municipal credit default swap would be a derivative that pays off in the event of default by a specific state or a default on one of said state’s debt instruments.

As reported in today’s Wall Street Journal, a handful of state treasurers are demanding information from Wall Street firms on who exactly is “betting against” these states.

It should come as no surprise, except to state officials, that the major buyers of these CDS are the very bondholders investing in their state.  In fact the availability of municipal CDS will likely increase the demand for municipal debt.  Just speaking for myself, there’s no way I’d buy debt issued by California if I couldn’t at least hedge some of that credit risk

Of course states complain that “betting on a default creates a perception of risk,” as if there wasn’t already a widespread perception of risk to investing in municipal debt of certain states.  The states also express concern that adverse movements in the price of CDS could impact their credit ratings, and hence their cost of borrowing.  Given the slow speed of which credit ratings moved on sub-prime mortgage debt, I am not sure that cities and states have much to worry about rating agencies being “too aggressive”.  If these states had even a small understanding of how markets work, they’d understand the rating is just one element that goes into pricing.  Witness the large spread in yields of similarly rated debt.  No rating, or credit default swap price for that matter, is going to fool investors into believing that many American local and state governments are just anything other than mini versions of Greece.

Downsizing on Glenn Beck

Posted by Tad DeHaven

Fox News’ Glenn Beck Show recently spent a week featuring Chris Edwards and the Downsizing Government website.

The following video provides highlights of Glenn’s discussions with Chris on how we can downsize the federal government:

We applaud Glenn’s efforts to shine a spotlight on the urgent need to rein in the federal government before massive spending, deficits, and debt bankrupt the country.

Advice to Tea Partiers

Posted by Chris Moody

The Tea Party movement may endure, but its endurance will be a testament to its ability to understand that cutting government means having a long-term focus, says John Samples, author of the Cato book The Struggle to Limit Government.  In a new video, Samples outlines an assessment of what Tea Partiers should do if they want to sustain an effort to cut government.

He offers five pieces of advice for members of the Tea Party movement:

1. Republicans aren’t always your friends.

2. Some tea partiers like big government.

3. Democrats aren’t always your enemies.

4. Smaller government demands restraint abroad.

5. Leave social issues to the states.

Misguided Fears of Crime Fuel Arizona Immigration Law

Posted by Daniel Griswold

Arizona’s harsh new law against illegal immigration is being justified in part as a measure to combat crime. The murder of an Arizona rancher in March, allegedly by somebody in the country without documentation, galvanized support for the bill.

The death of the rancher was a tragedy, and drug-related violence along the border is a real problem, but it is a smear to blame low-skilled immigrant workers from Latin America for creating a crime problem in Arizona.

The crime rate in Arizona in 2008 was the lowest it has been in four decades. In the past decade, as the number of illegal immigrants in the state grew rapidly, the violent crime rate dropped by 23 percent, the property crime rate by 28 percent. (You can check out the DoJ figures here.)

Census data show that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than their native-born counterparts, as I unpacked a few months ago in an article for Commentary magazine titled, “Higher Immigration, Lower Crime.”

The Case for Auditing the Fed

Posted by Cato Editors

Recently, the Federal Reserve has significantly altered the procedures and goals that it had followed for decades. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has introduced a bill calling for an audit of the Fed.

Remarkably, there is significant opposition to such oversight, and the political prospects for undertaking such an audit are relatively bleak. In a new paper, Cato scholar Arnold Kling examines the processes and outcomes on which an audit should focus, and looks at opposition to the audit:

We should document why the Fed took each step, what the expected results were, and whether those results were achieved. …The profit or loss of the Fed’s investments would provide a very helpful indicator of whether the Fed’s actions served the economy as a whole or merely transferred wealth from ordinary taxpayers to bank shareholders.

Read the whole thing.

Obama for Entrepreneurs, but Not American Ones

Posted by Chris Edwards

Entrepreneur.org ran an article today that begins:

This afternoon, President Obama addressed the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship organized by the Department of State and the Department of Commerce … designed to promote entrepreneurship in Africa, the Middle East, and South, Central and Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Obama signed into law a health bill, which includes a massive new mandate on businesses to file billions more tax returns for their routine business dealings. Obama supports a financial regulatory bill that could kill the angel investment industry, and thus end angel support of start-up businesses. Obama supports raising the top two income tax rates, even though 44 percent of the income hit will be small business income. And Obama supports raising the capital gains tax, even though a lower gains rate has been crucial to the success of high-tech entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley elsewhere.

The Obama administration and today’s Democrats are driven by regulatory zeal, lust for higher revenues, and apparent ignorance of the workings of the market economy. I don’t think they planned it this way, but their anti-market actions are accumulating cut by cut, threatening major long-term damage to America’s standard of living.

Chilean Government Now Wants Higher Taxes on Junk Food

Posted by Juan Carlos Hidalgo

Following Rahm Emmanuel’s advice of not letting a crisis go to waste, the new center-right government in Chile now wants to extend the permanent rise in tobacco taxes—supposedly adopted as a measure to finance post-earthquake reconstruction—to foods with high concentrations of salt and trans fat [in Spanish]. Jaime Malañich, the Health Minister, said that the earthquake is opening up an opportunity to implement a measure that would increase the government’s revenue and fight obesity and that has been considered for many years.

My colleague Ian Vásquez wrote a few days ago that, by announcing unnecessary tax increases as post-earthquake reconstruction measures, the recently-inaugurated administration of Sebastian Piñera was quick to disappoint those who expected a bold move toward strengthening free market policies that have made Chile a Latin American success story. If these announcements are any guide, expect more disappointments.

Monday Links

Posted by Chris Moody

  • An overview of the economic reforms necessary for a transition to liberal democracy throughout Africa.