-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
While Republicans have been trying to leech the credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, President Obama has upstaged them by laying out his immigration reform plan. This is a signature political issue that the Republicans have tried to make their own. However, the E-Verify program will test whether they really want to solve the problem or whether, like bin Laden, they’re more interested in maintaining the issue for its political usefulness.
The E-Verify system looks for a match between the name and SSN of the worker who applies for a job. If there’s a mismatch then the worker may be undocumented, or the worker has to contact the SSA to get the records corrected. The E-Verify program, if widely implemented, would dramatically reduce the incentive for illegal entry.
However, business hates it. The Florida Chamber of Congress has succeeded in getting mandatory E-Verify removed from a Florida immigration reform bill. Republicans are caught between their business overlords and the Tea Party.
The Florida Chamber of Congress cites out-of-date error rates and concerns over identity theft as the basis for their objection to mandatory E-Verify. Could it be there’s another reason? Maybe it’s because businesses can take advantage of the illegal’s vulnerability and pay them less than the minimum wage and violate work safety rules, as pointed out in Obama’s recent speech.
The error rates for E-Verify are steadily improving with most errors occurring due to typos and changes in names or citizenship that are not reported to the Social Security system. Workers need to get these errors fixed in order to receive their full Social Security benefits to which they are entitled.
The problem with identity theft occurs when an undocumented worker uses someone else’s (matching) name and SSN when applying for a job. That problem has been solved by something called “E-Verify Self Check” where individuals can access their status before applying for a job. The system knows whom you’ve worked for over the years and can ask the kind of questions that only the legitimate worker would be able to answer correctly. Therefore, workers can be verified and identity thieves won’t be able to verify their data.
Another problem for E-Verify is the case of Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting that is before the Supreme Court (Kagan, J., recused). At issue is a 2006 Arizona statute, the Legal Arizona Workers Act that requires all employers to participate in the E-Verify program, which is preempted by a federal law that specifically makes that system voluntary. The law was signed by then-governor of Arizona Janet Napolitano, now the Secretary of Homeland Security, the department that runs E-Verify. What you have is the Obama administration’s Solicitor General arguing against the most effective tool in the administration’s arsenal against illegal immigration.
As pointed out by Justice Ginsburg during oral arguments:
How can Arizona take a Federal resource, which the Federal Government says is voluntary except in certain circumstances, and turn it into something that’s mandatory?
The E-Verify Modernization Act of 2011 seeks to make E-Verify permanent and mandatory. It will be interesting to see if the bill suffers the same fate as the Florida legislation.
H/T: VC, Miami Herald, Adam Serwer, Daily Finance.
Roco: In any situation, that is exactly how it works. The city, county, state or federal government owns the infrastructure of which we speak. The contractor may have their own inspector, or not, as the case may be.
In the case of a bridge, their inspector tells the appropriate bureau chief (owner) a bridge or pipeline needs work, and will make recommendations to fix the thing. Then, the agency issues an RFP for bids on the replacement or repair. There will be no inspections by the contractor until the work is under way. Having been an inspector myself many years ago, I can tell you that contractors want to get the thing done by any means possible and as cheaply as possible. No contractor ever tried to bribe me, but I am aware of both bribes and threats of physical harm by contractor’s goons.
This is one reason government inspectors are absolutely necessary. I have seen, first hand, how contractors and builders try to cut corners if they think they can get away with it.
Your view of how things work is most naive.
“Three times net income is exactly the average debt for about 100 million households.”
Does that include their house? If it doesnt they are fucked 6 ways to sunday and so are we becuase those of us who dont have that kind of debt will end up paying for them.
So what you are saying is that government inspectors would take bribes from government employed contractors doing government work.
Another reason to have a free market solution for fixing our infrastructure.
Oh yes because being the middle of economic downturn worse than the great depression is prosperity.
Otteray Scribe:
“You miss the point. It was a design flaw in the bridge that, when corrosion degraded the bearings and underlying structure, the bridge fell into the river.”
I didn’t see anything about corrosion causing the problem. It clearly says design flaw and over loading due to retrofitting.
It also wasn’t a bearing that failed, it was a gusset plate.
A bearing is a support, a gusset holds 2 or more pcs of steel together.
Here is what I found on the subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gusset_plate
http://www.childs-ceng.demon.co.uk/parts/bearing.html
@ekeyra: I dont even see how you could come to that conclusion without being heavily medicated.
Three times net income is exactly the average debt for about 100 million households.
Clearly the vast majority of Americans disagree with you. So do the vast majority of businesses, by the way, most of them also financed their startups with massive debt. They also borrowed their way to prosperity.
“Conflicts of opinion could then be worked out in some rational manner.”
Like payoffs.
Which is exactly what would happen whenever a bribe or kickback is cheaper than actually fixing the problem.
pete:
“i’m guessing you believe that with no inspectors or regulations everything would run smoothly?”
No, not at all. I think the owners should hire the inspectors to insure no conflict of interest between the inspection agency and the contractor who is paying the fee. The very idea the contractor should pay for quality control for the owner isn’t too swift.
The contractor should have his own in house quality control and the owner should hire their own. Conflicts of opinion could then be worked out in some rational manner.
Tony,
“To further ground the debt issue in reality
It seems the average American family has borrowed its way to prosperity, and sees appropriately applied debt of three times their annual spendable income as a good smart investment that is both serviceable and will ultimately more than pay for itself, even when they count the interest.”
Ok, so I read 3 trillion instead of 13 trillion when i looked up GDP. It was late, I was tired, so my percentages are off. That still doesnt mean being 3 times your income in debt is not insanity. I dont even see how you could come to that conclusion without being heavily medicated.
Blouise:
“We could steal some of it back from the Afghans … and we could rescind the welfare tax breaks on the oil industry … and we could tax the putridly ripe wealthy … and we could fine the hell out of Wall Street … and we could cut the salary of all members of the U. S. House and Senate … and we could scam the Chamber of Commerce out of some of their foreign cash … and … geez, we’d be rich!”
Some of those are good ideas but they do not yield sustainable levels of revenue. subsidies to corporations should be eliminated but as I noted above corporations do not pay taxes, you and I do.
So all in all your ideas would create a small one time increase in revenue but would probably lead to long term shortages of revenue. When you take from the private sector you take away the ability to create jobs which reduces the amount of revenue to the government which causes them to want to increase the amount of taxes which reduces the number of jobs created which reduces the amount of revenue………
You miss the point. It was a design flaw in the bridge that, when corrosion degraded the bearings and underlying structure, the bridge fell into the river. The point was that the bridge had been declared a problem more than ten years before it fell into the river, and if the money had been spent to fix it, it would not have fallen.
As for more taxes not being needed to repair stuff; where will the money come from, considering the agencies in charge of the infrastructure are strapped? Voluntary contributions from citizens? Free work provided by contractors?
Otteray Scribe:
” As for the I-35 bridge, “…Since 1993, the bridge was inspected annually by Mn/DOT, although no inspection report was completed in 2007, due to the construction work. In the years prior to the collapse, several reports cited problems with the bridge structure. In 1990, the federal government gave the I-35W bridge a rating of “structurally deficient,” citing significant corrosion in its bearings. Approximately 75,000 other U.S. bridges had this classification in 2007.””
I believe that is not correct. If I remember correctly it was a design flaw.
But I will acknowledge there are bridges which are in disrepair and need to be replaced or retrofitted. Also a good deal of underground sewer needs to be replaced. So yes there is a problem but more taxes arent going to fix it.
“The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was the inadequate load capacity, due to a design error by Sverdrup & Parcel and Associates, Inc., of the gusset plates at the U10 nodes, which failed under a combination of (1) substantial increases in the weight of the bridge, which resulted from previous bridge modifications, and (2) the traffic and concentrated construction loads on the bridge on the day of the collapse. Contributing to the design error was the failure of Sverdrup & Parcel’s quality control procedures to ensure that the appropriate main truss gusset plate calculations were performed for the I-35W bridge and the inadequate design review by Federal and State transportation officials. Contributing to the accident was the generally accepted practice among Federal and State transportation officials of giving inadequate attention to gusset plates during inspections for conditions of distortion, such as bowing, and of excluding gusset plates in load rating analyses.”
http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2008/HAR0803.htm
Sverdrup is a very good engineering company and has been around since the 20’s I think.
Whoops, the private sector made a mistake and government didnt catch it. Where have I heard that before. So government oversight is what we need to protect us?
By the way here is an example of what the private sector can do:
http://corporate.emporis.com/?lng=3
To further ground the debt issue in reality; the average American Household has pre-tax income of $52K and an after-tax income of $38K, and carries a total debt load (mortgage, credit cards, student loans and consumer loans for furniture and appliances and cars) of $115K, which is 3 times their annual after-tax income. The bulk of that borrowing was for infrastructure (house, cars, furnishings and education).
In fact it is this infrastructure that allow the average household to be financially productive. It seems the average American family has borrowed its way to prosperity, and sees appropriately applied debt of three times their annual spendable income as a good smart investment that is both serviceable and will ultimately more than pay for itself, even when they count the interest.
I think this was probably understood, but to be clear I should have said, “…and just as we deal with problems created by our parents and grandparents, future adults will deal with problems created by their parents and grandparents.”
@ekeyra: Wow, you can’t do arithmetic either. How sad for you.
For 2010 the GDP of the USA is $14.66 Trillion, per year. Our current national debt is $14.32 Trillion.
So in more relatable terms, our debt is 98% of one year’s worth of our income. Until recently we’ve been paying an average of 1.6% interest on that debt; but since 2009, due to the wondrous complexities of the international financial crisis, we’ve been paying less than 0.5% interest.
As for your bigger numbers, they are bullshit scare numbers too, because you are talking about “unfunded liabilities,” meaning estimates of money we will be required to pay out by law (such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid or government pensions) that have no specific tax to pay for them, or that we know will exceed the taxes designated to pay for them (like Medicare as the baby boomers age past retirement).
1) Note the word ESTIMATE, different reasonable models vary by 20% or more.
2) The liabilities in question are spread over decades, so divide by 25 or so, and that also means
3) The present value is less than any scare number, due to regular future inflation, and
4) The models do not take into account cost-saving technologies and discoveries in health care, which (IMO) is still a very young science.
For example, the common modern robot has an average lifetime cost (includes purchase price, maintenance parts and labor, downtime for repairs, and fuel costs) of about 25c per hour. Their capabilities are still increasing roughly with Moore’s law and exponentially; a factor of 1000 in about 15 years. So I doubt the models for our future healthcare costs include replacing 2/3 of the hospital staff with 25c per hour robots and assistants.
(For example, one of the specific applications the IBM research team envisions for Watson, the Jeopardy robot, is medical diagnostician. Like the Gregory House character, without the emotional baggage, ten times as accurate and fifty times faster.)
All of which is to say, so what?
The primary driver of the national debt is conducting five or six wars on our credit card. But we are not living beyond our means, we can still easily afford the interest. The “unfunded liabilities” are entirely manageable on an annual basis, and temporary in nature to boot: As my generation (the baby boomers) dies out, expenses will decline and revert to the average.
We do not leave that problem to our “children,” calling them children is just demeaning and patronizing. We leave that problem to fully capable adults just like ourselves, and just like us they will deal with problems created by our parents and our grandparents.
However, by virtue of our work here they should be better informed, better educated, equipped with better technology and far more options for dealing with the problems than we currently imagine, and the most prudent course of action we can take is to invest whatever it takes to make sure that is the case, even if we have to go deeper into debt to do it.
No one said we have to come up with 22 trillion dollars right away. That would be impossible, but a good start would be to go back to a pre-Reagan tax structure and cut back on runaway military spending on stuff the military does not even want. A good start would be to use long range planning instead of wasting time on stuff that makes good sound seven-second sound bites on the evening news.
I hate to be the wet blanket on the “soak the rich” circle jerk you guys have going on, but you do realize there is not enough wealth in the entire productive capacity of the planet to meet the unfunded liabilities of the federal government, much less repair the 22 trillion in infastructure. The GDP of the us is around 3 trillion a year. Thats less than 5 percent of the 65 trillion (low ball estimate) of government debt and a tenth of what we would need for maintenance costs. Its also assuming you dont waste any on frivolous things like, you know, food. The GDP of the world as a whole is around 58 trillion dollars. Even if you took every last dime from everyone on the globe you’d still come up short. Dont let that ruin your dreams of taking those evil rich people’s money though. You can still do that, but you’ll still be unsatisfied and then who will you have left to blame?
Besides … I’d love to scam the Chamber out of some of their foreign cash … those guys are down right creepy.
Have any of you ever hung out with them? Any exposure that last more than 5 minutes makes my skin crawl.
I’m serious. A bath in Purell is the only way to get the smell off.
Tony C.,
Yep … hell, they wouldn’t even miss it.
@Blouise: We should make the rich pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as the middle class does. Between sales taxes, income taxes, property taxes, medicare and medicaid and SS and gasoline taxes and ALL taxes and fees (and fines) paid by the middle class, about 50% of their income is paid in taxes. If the rich also paid 50% of their income in total taxes, we’d solve the budget and deficit problems toot sweet.
For example, Warren Buffett computes his total tax bill at 17% of his income; primarily because the main source of income for the wealthy is capital gains (including dividends) that are taxed at only 15%.