-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The Florida Chamber of Congress cites out-of-date error rates and concerns over identity theft as the basis for their objection to mandatory E-Verify.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: They [corporations] don’t [pay taxes], you and I do when we purchase a product from them.
By that same logic I can claim that WE don’t pay taxes, because we demand higher wages to work for companies in order to cover our taxes. So its the companies that end up paying all the taxes! In fact for the companies I owned, it was my signature on my corporate check that got sent to the IRS for withholding; not the employee’s. That money came out of my bank account. I was responsible, as well, if I missed a tax payment the IRS would come after ME, not my employees.
Your argument is just silly; employees demand more, comapanies charge more, employees demand more to get the same purchasing power, companies charge more to earn the same profits, ad infinitum, but since people have relatively stable wages and companies have relatively stable prices, obviously a balance is reached between them. Both companies and workers pay taxes.
@Roco: Here’s Microsoft, they have a 40% operating margin.
That is because they are an effective monopoly; it was actually higher in the past. Roads are an effective monopoly as well; as are the lands they are built on. If I did not take the most efficient path between me and my work, it would cost me an extra hour of drive time and about three dollars every week.
Monopolies charge monopoly prices, and if the roads were privately owned, you can bet their operating margin would be monopolistic; and without any laws to prevent collusion, you’d have an OPEC style road owners association that would set prices at the white-knuckle point: Enough to really piss you off but not enough to make you give up your job.
Who would stop them? Competition would be impossible; try to build another road between me and the university, without the power of eminent domain, and you will have to buy out and demolish several hundred million dollars worth of apartments, homes, and businesses, and deal with the final holdouts that hold your business plan hostage for extortion level pricing. Nobody in their right mind would do that, because with competition on a road the profits would be miniscule and the capital expenses would never be recovered, and your competitor (whose expenses were long ago recovered) would drop his price to break-even (or less) until you just went out of business. He might even get his buddies in the road cabal to refuse access to your new road.
That is the point of a Trust, after all, that by avoiding competition everybody can extort more from the rabble, and by sticking together they can preserve their Trust and kill off new competition while it is still in the crib.
This is why free markets do not work; there are myriad ways to compete that do not benefit the consumer at all, and in fact extort the consumer.
@Buddha: …all the way to the body bag
Ha! Good imagery, and spot on.
@Roco: We all use our local roads. You benefit from roads you never drive on, because others use those roads for free to deliver goods to your benefit. The roads in Seattle reduce the costs of software produced in Seattle, and used in Miami or NYC.
If we all pay for roads, and all get roads, then it doesn’t make a difference if it was one pool, EXCEPT that one pool has the greatest economy of scale in getting all the roads built; it can best leverage the work of expert road builders and geologists in designing and building roads.
The same goes for government services. You benefit from them even if you don’t use them directly, and if everybody is using only a dozen of a thousand services, it isn’t always the SAME dozen, and the overlap means everybody gets the services they particularly need. People on the Mexican border seldom need the expertise of an expert in forecasting snow, people on the Canadian border seldom need the expertise of an expert in tornadic damage limitation, and people on the East coast don’t need earthquake experts like they do on the West coast, and on and on.
But we can put all those people together, let them share a supercomputer none of them could afford on their own, and help everybody by virtue of better forecasting.
It’s your dogs that can’t hunt; I notice you avoid all the other points to concentrate on the only one your ideology can (incorrectly) address.
Now there’s an idea. Put his objectivist words where his mouth is and move to a place where the strong tyrannize the weak without restraint and see how he likes it. I’m betting he’d regret the decision all the way to the body bag, OS. Or since there is no infrastructure to provide body bags as a public health service and the dead notoriously don’t pay their own way, a shallow desert grave. Perhaps simply left out for the scavengers.
He could try Somalia.
Uh huh. Sure that’s how that works. cough cough cough Sherman Anti-trust Act cough cough cough Glass-Steagall Act cough cough cough
Games without rules are not games and societies without laws are lawless and soon cease to be societies.
Again, if you don’t like paying taxes? Renounce your citizenship and move to a place with no taxes. Good luck finding one.
free markets are not god, they are just efficient mechanisms for voluntary transactions.
Government plays the role of God picking winners and losers and creating regulations which favor one industry or individual company over another.
Tony C:
“1) The government provides services profit-free. If you tacked on 35% profit for every government service that benefits you, your paycheck would be gone before you got all of them.”
Very doubtful. I don’t use all the services government provides yet I pay for them now. In fact I use a very small percentage of all the services government provides.
So your dog don’t hunt. By the way most private companies could only hope to make a 35% profit. After taxes of course, which goes to the lie that corporations even pay taxes. They don’t, you and I do when we purchase a product from them.
Otteray Scribe:
“You want to drop money in the slot every time your pilot talks to the air traffic control system?”
That is not necessarily the only option. How about private controllers paid for by the airlines? Then the fee is wrapped up in your airline ticket. I should think private airlines would have a vested interest in keeping the skys safe.
The same can be said for a number of services like that. It is quite easy to do. Government cannot keep doing things the private sector should be doing.
What does the Department of Agriculture do? The SEC was most ineffective in preventing Madoff from stealing from his clients.
That score again . . .
Reality 1
me, Me, ME!/I don’t wanna!/Free Markets Are God -4
@Roco: fee for services is the alternative. You use them you pay as you go.
Fee for services won’t work for several reasons; if you’d been reading I have given every one of them:
1) The government provides services profit-free. If you tacked on 35% profit for every government service that benefits you, your paycheck would be gone before you got all of them.
2) You benefit from law enforcement even if you are never victimized; the people in jail for murder aren’t murdering you to steal your wallet, the people prevented from driving drunk aren’t running over your kids. Likewise, the free road you never drive on may, unbeknownst to you, have carried parts for the furniture in your house, or even products you don’t use directly at all but businesses you use DO, (like toner for a brand of business printer you don’t own), and thus that reduced shipping cost benefits you.
3) The combinatorics and time delay problem make inspections impossible. The cinammon apple danish behind the glass at my local pastry shop contains the products of dozens (and for many products hundreds) of suppliers. The flour has been in contact with machines at three companies, and then possibly a paper supplier for the bag it came in, it sat in a staging warehouse for a month, it was on trucks. Same for every ingredient there: The sugars, the fruit, the butter and dairy, the salt, the cinammon.
If the Danish gives you colon cancer, you won’t know it for months. You cannot trace the problem at all; the possibilities are too endless. Which means if a crime was committed in giving you colon cancer, it is concealed, and even in your crazy world of self-interest, it IS in the self-interest of somebody to commit a crime for profit if they are 99.9% certain they will never be held liable for it.
4) Contracts will prevent you from suing. The fee-for-service crowd forgets one thing: Contracts cut both ways. They always see themselves as the heroes of their story, the tough negotiator playing supplicant suppliers off of each other to score a near-criminal great deal.
The reality is the opposite. It typically costs a shitload of money to start a consumer-oriented business, which means a dearth of competitors.
If safety and liability were ONLY a matter of negotiation, what would happen instead is exactly what you see in the software and digital music industry; recently lampooned on South Park: You can’t buy a $5 item without first agreeing that you won’t sue for any reason ever, and the selling company has zero liability for anything ever.
Why would product companies do anything different? The pastry shop will be like Microsoft or Apple or any other software license you read; if you want to eat the danish then do so at your own risk. If that costs them customers it won’t be for long, eventually those customers get hungry and want to buy food, and nobody will sell them any prepared food, or ingredients, or raw food, or live food, so they cave and sign and buy the damn danish.
If you think some competitor will come along and change that game, the evidence is against you. As a consultant, I have seen billion dollar companies sign $25M contracts for software within which bugs could literally kill patients; and those contracts also exclude any liability for the death of patients whatsoever (to the point of laughably outrageous exclusions). Why sign? Why can’t the company attorneys that have spent decades negotiating contracts shift any liability at all? Because the number of suppliers can be counted on one hand, and none of them will accept liability.
You will see the same thing with a danish: Sign the electronic release of liability or get out of the way, a less difficult customer is waiting.
The same would go for a routine doctor visit: “Oh, you want to negotiate my liability? I’ve got a waiting room full of patients and I’m booked solid for the next three months; and now I don’t want to treat you because I am concerned you are litigious, so find another doctor. NEXT!”
Then off you go to some hack that doesn’t know what the hell he is doing because under the fee-for-service program, he just bought his M.D. license from a for-profit operation that had a 75% off sale going.
5) The for-profit system of services has no closure. If everything is for-profit, then there is an endless explosion of double-checking and legal maneuvers to verify you will get what you want without deception. For their own survival every citizen would have to be a contract attorney.
If I want to buy a house, I have to hire an inspector to check on my builder, and an agent to ensure my inspector isn’t a hack, and another guy to check on my agent, and none of them will ever agree to liability or a guarantee, so I never get to anybody I can believe will even be impartial, because they are all explicitly there to earn a buck and [in your system] there are no laws to prevent anybody from favoring the highest bidder and keeping that favoritism a secret.
The only practical way to close that off and get some real damn work done is by law. Here is the building code: If you break it you ARE liable, and you cannot escape that liability with a contract. Here is the food safety code: If you break it you ARE liable, and you cannot escape that liability with a contract.
I will also note that historically there have been plenty of opportunities for fee-for-service operations to arise in this country, including for roads, food and drug safety, building fire safety codes and inspections, and many other governmental functions.
They simply did not happen. The idea that they will magically appear is bunkum; many had over a century to appear and just never did, or if they did they failed as for-profit enterprises.
“Airlines wouldnt provide some way to coordinate traffic absent the government?”
**************************************
Short answer, no. For example, the airlines only represent a percentage of the users of the airways system. How would you like the trucking industry to take over the highway system? Tell you when and how you could drive your car on the roads, which would no longer be public? Same difference. Forget about privately owned vehicles, airplanes, boats and the like. The only entity big enough to coordinate everything, and with the enforcement power, is a government.
It is hard to discuss anything with someone who is concrete minded, incapable of thinking in the abstract, knows little or nothing of economic history and who thinks things happen because of the vast generosity of corporations.
Sheesh!
Tony,
“First, the expenses are well defined”
Correct me if im wrong but doesnt it take a post graduate education to understand the collosal tax code we have? I would not call that “well- defined”. Not only that but you completely gloss over the ability of the central bank to inflate the money supply and dilute the purchasing power of the few dollars im left holding when the government is done deciding where my paycheck should go.
“Your share is not determined by benevolence, but by a fixed rule of how much you owe for the infrastructure you used that allowed you to earn the money in the first place.”
By your own admission my use of these things is irrelevant to how much i pay for them. It is determined by laws. If it is determined by law then i cannot reduce my expense by reducing my consumption like i could with any good or service on a free market, i must change a law to alter my “payments” to the government. This isnt even conistent with your own stated philosophy that everyone be governed equally. If I travel the road one day a week and someone else travels the road 5 days a week, dont we both pay the same amount for its use? How is that equality?
Ottery,
Your entire screed is nonsensical. Airlines wouldnt provide some way to coordinate traffic absent the government? They would have no incentive to make sure their planes and their passengers werent falling out of the sky every 5 seconds? As for the rest of your rantings ill merely direct you to the bastiat puzzling quoted. Simply because the government does not provide those things does not mean they will not be provided. Besides that, from your own description of the state of affairs it seems the government does a shitty job of providing those things to begin with.
Roco, pay as you go is totally unworkable. How many toll booths do you plan to put up? You want to drop money in the slot every time your pilot talks to the air traffic control system? Here is a for instance: You are using the ATC system whether your feet ever leave the ground or not. It keeps airplanes from running into each other and the debris from falling on your house. Everyone pays taxes to the government and it is used where it is needed. Right now, with all the tax cuts, we have bridges falling into the Mississippi river and the levees failing. Do you want the bridges falling into the river next time you go on vacation? Then there are all the other reduced services we can no longer expect from the government. Call 911 and see how long it takes for them to respond with an emergency vehicle at your location. Our local law enforcement agencies are having to use cars with well over two hundred thousand miles on them because low taxes do not raise enough money to pay for essential gear. And our Republican county commissioners refuse to even consider raising taxes. Would you want to be the officer who has to drive one of those cars at high speed on a mountain road responding to a shooting in a home? We lost two officers recently because their worn out patrol car could no longer take a curve like it did when new. But the county commission damn sure saved the taxpayers some tax money.
ekeyra:
keep being stubborn, you are mighty good at it. Nothing like using Tony for a mop, he must be rather tired of having his head handed to him.
Tony C:
“That is your full-on idiocy, is thinking that because you were born you are entitled to use this system without paying for it. You are on a free ride and do not even realize you are taking a free ride, or how extensive that free ride is.”
now that is just idiocy on your part, fee for services is the alternative. You use them you pay as you go. No one is suggesting you receive free services from the government. Who pays for government? You and I do in the form of taxes. What I am saying is that people should pay for the services they use and those services, as many as possible, should be provided by the private sector instead of government. Why should I pay for a bridge in Idaho which I will never use? It should be paid for by the people who use it. If it doesn’t make sense financially to put it there, then either move or find another way to work.
I don’t owe some guy in the middle of Idaho money for a bridge which 12 people use.
You need to increase your reading comprehension.
@ekeyra: First I am in no position to determine what expenses I incur this way,
In this country you are in such a position: First, the expenses are well defined and change very little; so it is not difficult to determine at all what your prices should be to earn some specific amount of money after expenses.
Second, it is not a “gift” at all, the laws are set and the government is prohibited by law from taking any more than the law allows; and they obey that law assiduously. If the law says your bill is $500, they cannot (and do not) arbitrarily take $600. Your share is not determined by benevolence, but by a fixed rule of how much you owe for the infrastructure you used that allowed you to earn the money in the first place.
That is your full-on idiocy, is thinking that because you were born you are entitled to use this system without paying for it. You are on a free ride and do not even realize you are taking a free ride, or how extensive that free ride is.
You are just a moron, a stubbornly selfish child.
@ekeyra: Does it make my criticisms of power invalid simply because i do not dream of imposing my will on my fellow human beings?
Yes, of course it does.