[E]ven our Commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand:
neither seeking nor granting exclusive favours or preferences;
consulting the natural course of things;
diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of Commerce,
but forcing nothing;
establishing with Powers so disposed;
in order to give trade a stable course.
George Washington
Immigration, Conservatives and the GOP
I usually have a lot of respect for the Heritage Foundation; I have sometimes quoted their work during the life of the blog; I thought former Sen. DeMint, as the conservative/Tea Party lead in the Senate, would bring more leadership for more limited government, free markets and other pro-liberty priorities, including immigration reform. I expected to hear the organization talk about removing arbitrary constraints keeping employers away from producing lower-cost goods and services enabling Americans and foreign consumers to stretch their money.
We are a nation of immigrants; my own ancestors immigrated from French Canada during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Remember how this country all but sacrificed an entire generation of its best and brightest to the insanity of the Civil War, the only country that did such in eliminating the evil of slavery? Did the US economy collapse? Let us remember history:
From the era of Reconstruction to the end of the 19th century, the United States underwent an economic transformation marked by the maturing of the industrial economy, the rapid expansion of big business, the development of large-scale agriculture, and the rise of national labor unions and industrial conflict.
An outburst of technological innovation in the late 19th century fueled this headlong economic growth. Mechanization brought farming into the realm of big business as well, making the United States the world's premier food producer--a position it has never surrendered.
Indispensable to this growth and development were an unprecedented surge in immigration and urbanization after the Civil War. American society was in transition. Immigrants arriving from southern and eastern Europe, from Asia, Mexico, and Central America, were creating a new American mosaic.OK--got it? Some of the strongest economic growth in our history; why wouldn't we want that now, versus the tepid growth of the last 12 years?
Jason Richwine, co-author of the controversial Heritage piece, which assessed, in a dubious long-term fashion, the relative drain on government social programs, primarily assuming a zero-sum scenario on the economy, resigned. George Will has written an eloquent essay, as usual, pointing out the deficiency and inconsistency of conservatives using static analysis for immigration, but dynamic scoring (rightly so) for tax policy. (By dynamic scoring, we estimate the economic effects of broadening the tax base through tax reform, including tax cuts.) Will seems cautious on the issue of labor protectionism or what progressives often deride as a race to the bottom. I'm more worried about low birth rates and an aging population; we need all kinds of workers, not just upper-level. I want to radically expand quotas and make them proportional to the host country's population. This does not mean an unlimited immigration policy; the problem I have is that we have erred to the downside, not the upside, and low immigration hurts economic growth. Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek does an excellent job explaining the issues here and here.
Just a mild criticism here to Don: "the end of the line" rhetoric is mostly used in context of citizenship. not necessarily legal residency or a temporary work status; the fundamental principle is one of the rule of law, equal protection.
Final note: what's even worse than Romney's performance last fall among Latinos was his poor showing with Asian-Americans. (I once wrote my good Indian friend from San Jose, now a naturalized citizen, saying I couldn't understand the appeal of Obama and other progressive Democrats; he didn't really respond other than to assert his own political independence, although he acknowledged the reality.) I suspect there's a cultural element at play: there is a certain meritocracy in many cultures where education and rigorous exams are the ticket to a comfortable middle-class lifestyle of government employment. Those who don't make the cut may face brutal competition living day-to-day in struggling private economies. I suspect the American public sector may be seen in a similar undeserved fashion. In some Asian cultures, there is a huge emphasis on family, so when conservatives complain about family immigrants crowding out merit-based immigrants, they see the GOP sponsoring an anti-family policy. I'm more interesting in broadening the pipeline so both objectives can be accommodated. I think that the GOP needs to do a better job marketing itself, to promoting virtues like self-reliance, hard work, and thriftiness; pro-family policies; pro-small business; education reform, etc.
GIGO: A Deeply Flawed Transportation Study
(HT John Stossel) In 2011 there was an horrific World Wide Tours bus crash in the Bronx that killed 15 people and injured 17 others. World Wide Tours operates in a fairly new business model for intercity travel, curbside (vs. traditional terminal-terminal), sometimes called 'Chinatown' (the name originates from the business model's introduction by Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in 1997). Just like any publicity-seeking politician promising a government solution to exploit any widely-reported tragedy, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a local Congressman sought a National Transportation Safety Board investigation into fatalities of these "dangerous" curbside bus companies. Several months later the NTSB released a study to Schumer's liking; Bloomberg's headline was "Chinatown Buses’ Death Rate Said Seven Times That of Competitors".
I, like any competent applied statistician, am wary of the biasing effect of anomalies--particularly including a multi-fatality incident like the Bronx tragedy, where of the few accidents involving at least one fatality, multiple fatalities are unusual. Aaron Brown, a hedge fund statistician, immediately smelled something fishy because we would need a large universe of fatal bus incidents, especially involving Chinatown buses for adequate statistical power. What's tragic is that nearly a quarter of Chinatown buses have been subsequently shut down by the Feds, whom, probably like Chuck Schumer, could never pass a Stat 101 course. Brown rightly calls the study 'statistical malpractice'. It's bad enough that the study specifically includes an emotional appeal like an exhibit of the Bronx tragedy--a red flag to any serious researcher. One Brown quote is telling:
It’s pretty hard to believe that the curbside bus industry could grow to overtake conventional intercity bus carriers in less than a decade while killing so many of their customers, and without anyone noticing. And if it is true, shouldn’t the NTSB have said something before 15 people got killed in the Bronx?...The NTSB report told an entirely different story than the headline figure... The main pieces of data are that curbside carriers have 25% fewer accidents per bus than conventional carriers, and 30% fewer accidents with injuries. You won’t find these anywhere in the text or figures; you have to combine data from different tables and charts with a little arithmetic."Jim Epstein of Reason provides a more comprehensive critique of the study. The NTSB was uncooperative and simply responded that they stand by their results; the lack of transparency is an immediate red flag--and I seriously doubt the NTSB paper would ever have been published in any peer-reviewed journal.
For starters, they counted 37 accidents during the study period involving curbside buses in which there was at least one fatality. When I rebuilt the study data and contacted the companies involved, I found that, in 30 of those 37 accidents, curbside buses were not involved. In fact, 24 of those 30 misclassified cases involved Greyhound’s conventional bus fleet.The reference to Greyhound is notable, because Epstein found two traditional terminal-service operators, Greyhound and Peter Pan, have a joint venture BoltBus to compete in the Chinatown market; they got classified as curbside operators--while the BoltBus service itself did not have a single fatal accident. Epstein notes another oddball classification of New Jersey Transit (but not other transit systems) in the study.
Epstein goes on to rattle off several other flaws: overlap of 95% confidence limits, the use of a notoriously unreliable self-report federal dataset, and no reference to miles traveled, a key variable in transportation studies.
One difference of note between the Brown and Epstein pieces: Brown assumed the Bronx accident was in the study, but Epstein writes that the NTSB claimed that the Bronx accident was not yet available for their study data; what then was the purpose of including the relevant exhibit in the report? In yet another fascinating footnote, Epstein points out over 70% of bus-related fatal accidents are in the public sector, i.e., school buses and mass transit. Where's Schumer's sense of outrage? Never mind one is far more likely to die in an auto accident than on a commercial bus.Again, where's Schumer's outrage? All he has done is lower the supply of safer commercial buses; we know from supply and demand the result--higher-costing bus service... Now bus customers know whom to thank--not to mention people dying in car accidents because a bus option was not available...
Political Humor
An original:
- A Minnesota attorney was suspended for 2 months for billing his divorce client in part for their own intimate time together. Question: doesn't that make him a member of both of the world's oldest professions?
- "[Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’ exempt organizations unit] confirmed that employees at a Cincinnati IRS office in 2012 flagged 300 applications for tax-exempt status, and a quarter of those were from the conservative groups. When asked for an exact number, and whether it was safe to assume that 75 applicants were Tea Party or patriot groups, Lerner said, “I’m not good at math.”" [Not smarter than a fifth grader, but qualified to be an IRS manager.]
[Between high taxes and inflation, who will be able to afford to overeat?]
Musical Interlude My Favorite Groups
Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band, "The Promised Land"
