Don's Tuesday Column

    THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   2/18/2014

Hypocrisy over jobs, immigrants, Benghazi

Tehama County District Attorney Greg Cohen will be the guest speaker at the Tea Party Patriots meeting tonight at the Westside Grange, 6 PM.

From my stack of items previously unremarked upon: Bizarre, logic-and-common-sense defying utterances issued from party mouthpieces in the nearly-seamless, knee jerk response by Democrats to the nonpartisan CBO (Congressional Budget Office) report on Obamacare. It concluded that Obamacare’s financial and behavioral incentives, through subsidy cutoffs, would reduce future workforces by the equivalent of about 2.5 million jobs.

Liberal apologists insisted—in their best Orwellian imitation of “freedom=slavery” newspeak—that it would be a good and laudable thing for people to work less. Much hilarity ensued on the right when some professor of “leisure studies” wrote “Why Do Republicans Want Us to Work All the Time?” These same loons once touted the benefits of “(f)unemployment” and consider rising welfare, food stamp, disability, EITC and housing subsidies to be “progress.”

Folks, a blind squirrel could deduce that when insurance rates skyrocket 40 to 90 percent due to a laundry list of mandated coverage for all policies, and when the benefit-handout-overlords’ solution to such exorbitant rates is yet another income means-tested subsidy—people will make logical choices to limit their income, or even reduce it, to get said subsidies. There’s even a disincentive for some couples remaining married when they could, as individual income-earners, qualify for government, or other people’s, money. Unintended consequences?

From a comment thread somewhere, an unidentified writer stated that if you “want to be compassionate to people” just “Get them jobs. That means hard-nosed Washington budget decisions and tax cuts … That’s how you care about people. Jobs are 70% of everything. Public health, suicide, crime, the list goes on. Employed people have better outcomes on all of these measures than unemployed people. Want to help someone? Get him a job. Leftie-mind-blowing conclusion? Tax cuts are the best public health measure.”

A related topic showed up in my email inbox: Joe Legal vs. Jose Illegal’s income stream. “Joe Legal works in construction, has a Social Security Number and makes $25.00 an hour. Jose Illegal also works in construction, has NO Social Security Number and gets paid $15.00/hour cash ‘under the table.’”

Joe Legal’s $52,000 per year is reduced by taxes, medical, dental and auto insurance, and rent, while his income disallows food stamps, housing, income or school lunch subsidies. Jose Illegal pays no taxes on his $31,200 cash income, shows up at clinics for free health care, can work the system for food stamps, rent and school lunch subsidies or even welfare, and carries no insurance, period. Mr. Legal ends up with about $7,200 to cover utilities, gasoline, etc. Mr. Illegal still has his $31,200 to cover those same expenses and however much he chooses to send out of the country to support relatives. Joe Legal works overtime and gets an extra job on weekends; Joe Illegal has nights and weekends off to enjoy with his family.

Until a double fence with an all-season road covers every traversable mile of border on the south; until biometric tracking can catch those over-staying their visas; and until all law enforcement personnel are authorized to verify legal status in every contact with the public--no one should be talking about legalizing those already here. Let Americans be assured there will be no further waves of millions of illegal border-hoppers and visa violators, and our immigration laws enforced without favor to some groups, and Americans will feel magnanimous and generous towards those already here.

From a surprising source, the Internet Movie Data Base (imdb.com for all things movie related) comes a summary of Mexico’s history of soft-despotism (in biographical notes for famous Mexican actor, Emilio Fernandez). Ruling party (PRM/PRI) presidents “maintained political control of Mexico by granting favors and concessions to their constituencies inside the corporatist party structure in exchange for worker and campesino organizations delivering votes and suppressing discontent among their constituencies.” Citizens had access, through a ruling party organizational structure, to governmental agencies to seek redress, favors, etc., but non-connected citizens never realized a satisfactory outcome from the maze of layers of bureaucracy. “The ingenious if disingenuous system worked as it gave them input, just no guaranteed output. By frustrating them within an institutional structure, federal and state governments took the fight out of them.” I suspect that Democrats, under Obama, see an upside to importing Mexican immigrants whose attitudes toward authoritarian power has been so shaped. Dems like that style.

In another emailed item, Col. Phil “Hands” Handley, USAF (Ret.) refuted the contention that help was unavailable for the besieged Americans in Benghazi. Two F-16Cs could have been scrambled and left Aviano Air Base in Italy, refueled in NAS Signorelli and arrived with the lethal intimidation of 500 20 MM rounds each, well before mortars killed Woods and Doherty while defending the CIA annex. Low passes with afterburners, even strafing runs, would have saved their lives. Hillary Clinton’s failure to protect those Americans and our Ambassador, her failure to react to defend them and her lies about it afterward are, however, an apparent resume enhancement to the Democrats.

Legal scholar Jonathon Turley was misidentified as fellow legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin in a previous column.