Author: George Shaffner

Fear of Immigrants

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By Miranda Park

My parents fled to America after Seoul, South Korea’s capitol city, fell to the Communist North Korean army the third  time. I understand why so many men, women, and children from failed states are so desperate to find asylum here, but I also understand why so many Americans are afraid that millions of asylum-seeking immigrants will overrun our country. Here are the grim facts:

1) The US population increased by 1.1 million from July 2019 to July 2020, only 0.3%. One million were immigrants. No immigration, no growth. (Is that good for the US economy?)

2) There are about five million full-blooded Native Americans living in the United States. The other 98.5% of us are partial or full-blooded immigrants or their descendants.

3) First- and second-generation immigrants are less likely than the rest of Americans to commit crimes. (See Note 1 below.)

4) First- and second-generation immigrants added $2 trillion (that’s trillions with a “t”) to the US GDP in 2016.

5) From the years 2000 to 2011, unauthorized immigrants paid $35 billion more into the Medicare fund than they consumed. (See Note 2.)

In short, there are no rational arguments against allowing a million immigrants to enter the US every year, but there are strong economic and compassionate arguments for allowing it. Nevertheless, about a third of the American electorate, commonly known as Republicans, are staunchly opposed to immigration in general and Central American immigration in particular—because Joe Biden got 66% of the Latino vote in 2020, up from Hillary Clinton’s 65% in 2016. If Latinos vote, Republicans lose, but it’s not really that simple, is it?

Eighty-seven percent of Blacks voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Sixty-three percent of Asian Americans voted for Biden in 2020. Although a small minority, Native Americans may have put Biden over the top in Wisconsin and Arizona.

If minorities vote, Republicans lose. See “voter suppression.”

Notes

Note 1: Many of the figures above were excerpted from a 2017 report by the Center for American Progress, which sounds like yet another PAC funded by secretive billionaires, conspiracy theorists, or Russian oligarchs. It’s not, and all their figures are referenced. I urge you to visit their website.

Note 2: If you follow the train of thought from 5) above, then one of the best ways to fund Medicare is to let more immigrants into the US.

Fresh Faces

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By Hugh-Griffin-Banerjee

Editor’s Note: Hugh wrote this article in 2018. The message hasn’t changed one whit.

If the latest polls are a fair indication, Americans of voting age are less than enthused about the legislative gridlock in Washington. According to a survey conducted by The Economist, 9% of Americans approved of Congress, 71% disapproved. In the same survey, 38% of Americans believed the country was moving in the right direction; 53% believed the country was on the wrong track. Both results correlated highly with a survey by Reuters.

Voters are registering their dissatisfaction at the polls:

  • In November of 2016, Donald Trump, hotelier, reality-TV star, and archetypal un-politician, was elected President of the United States. He defeated Hillary Clinton, a former First Lady, US Senator, and Secretary of State.
  • In a special election held in March of this year, 33-year-old Conor Lamb, a Democrat, defeated 60-year-old Rick Saccone, a Republican, in a Pennsylvania Congressional district that Donald Trump won by 20 points. Mister Lamb was a federal prosecutor but had no legislative experience. Mister Saccone was an eight-year veteran of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
  • In June, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a publisher and educator, defeated 56-year-old Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District. Mr. Crowley was a 19-year veteran of the US House of Representatives. (See Note 1.)

Inexperience, it seems, is in vogue, and that’s intriguing because it’s the opposite of what we value in the workplace. For a moment, imagine that you’re a businessman or businesswoman:

  • If you need a lumberjack, would you hire a florist?
  • If you need a ranch hand, would you hire a mechanic?
  • If you need a surgeon, would you hire a barber?
  • If you need a carpenter, would you hire an arsonist?

That’s not to say that we at The Near-Canada Gazette are steadfastly opposed to inexperience. Steve Jobs had no management experience when he founded Apple, neither did Larry Page nor Mark Zuckerberg. (See Note 2.) But Jobs, Page, and Zuckerberg were products of a well-financed, highly refined system that produces nine failures for every success.

By all means, vote for honest, donor-independent candidates with a strong sense of duty, respect for the rule of law, and an understanding of history––like Conor Lamb and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But remember what we got when too many voted for a half-cocked TV celebrity named Donald Trump.

Notes

1) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was purged from the New York voter rolls, thus unable to vote in the 2016 Democratic primary.

2) Steve Jobs was CEO of Apple for 17 years. Larry Page founded Google (now Alphabet) with Sergey Brin in 1998. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004.

A Bulletproof Solution

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By Hugh Griffin-Banerjee and Melvin Bass (the Introvert)

We at the Near-Canada Gazette are wont to stray beyond the orbit of conventional thought from time to time, and it occurred to us, rather Melvin and me, that there’s a better way to protect our schoolchildren from mass murderers than arming teachers: bulletproof vests for every pre-k, kindergarten, grade-school, and high-school student in America.

Bulletproof vests cost as little as $200 and as much as $2,000 each, but more than half of the 50 million bulletproof vests required to save our schoolchildren would be smaller than those made for adults, and they could be bought in bulk. So let’s assume for the moment that the average cost per copy would be in the neighborhood of $400.

Bleeding-heart liberals would doubtless argue that our children would be more afraid of being gunned down by an armed maniac than less because, well, they’d be wearing body armor to school. There’s a solution for that: Make bulletproof vests fashion accessories. Young boys and girls could pick “SpongeBob Square Pants” or “Dora the Explorer” vests for example; older students could choose likenesses of rock stars, sports legends, or indicted government officials.

Colorful, age-appropriate vests would be more expensive than the usual black, black, or camo, but the protection of our children would be a relative bargain nonetheless. If the 50 million vests we need could be procured for an average of $400 each, the total cost to taxpayers would be a mere $20 billion. But wait; there’s more. Bulletproof vests have a useful life of five years, so the amortized cost would be circa $4 billion per annum, or 5.9% of the US Education Department’s $68 billion budget!

To summarize: The bulletproof safety of America’s schoolchildren could be bought for less than 6% of the Education Department’s annual budget. What pray tell are we waiting for?

Logic Abuse

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By Hugh Griffin-Banerjee and Melvin Bass the Introvert (who’s an expert on the topic)

To the surprise of no one, some number of our right-of-center Congressmen continue to insist that the approval of a 90-day extension of the FISA warrant to surveil poor Carter Page was “politically motivated”, thus the process as a whole was irretrievably broken.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved more than 35,000 FISA warrants since its founding in 1978. It doesn’t matter whether the Carter Page warrant was “warranted” or not; the claim that the process is broken because a single error was made is, from a rhetorical standpoint, exactly like saying:

  • Charles Dickens was a hack because he got one bad review; or
  • Tom Brady is a second-rate quarterback because a wide receiver dropped one of his 10,600 passes; or
  • Honda makes unreliable vehicles because one of the 4.8 million they sold in 2017 had a broken dome light.

We could go on, but you get the picture. All of the above are examples of a rhetorical fallacy called “generalization from the particular.” Simply put: “If one of many is x, then all are x.”

Generalization from the particular is a tool commonly used by politicians of all stripes because it’s invisible to the ears of millions of gullible Americans. If we at The Near-Canada Gazette had our druthers, then at least one of the 3,000 pundits appearing daily on national TV would have used the trumped-up FISA controversy as a teaching moment so that fewer voters would be hoodwinked by this egregiously fallacious device.

To our knowledge, none of them ever have.

Note:

1) The discerning reader will have noticed that we mixed a metaphor. That does not mean that we mix all metaphors.

The GOP v. Democrats – Jobs, the Rematch

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By Hugh Griffin-Banerjee and Miranda Park

Years ago, we emailed a good friend a set of data comparing Republican and Democratic economic performance since the Carter years. Our friend, a committed Republican, wasn’t fond of the results. He sent a reply that read, “I think I can tell when someone’s cherry-picked the data.”

For the record, we of The Near-Cana Gazette let the numbers speak for themselves, but we’ve been on the lookout ever since for simple, straightforward metrics that shed a brighter light on the GOP’s economy-management expertise. As luck would have it, Miranda stumbled across a Wikipedia piece titled, “Jobs Created during US Presidential Terms.” The article covers a great deal of ground, but one section in particular caught our eye: a chart showing average annual non-farm job growth per presidential term.

We couldn’t resist the temptation. We had to know whether the results would correlate with the conclusions we published in “GOP v. Democrats, Part III: Jobs.” In our minds, we thought there was a teensy chance that the Republicans would win this time, even though they were drubbed when the yardstick was unemployment.

According to Wikipedia, the annual Rate of non-farm job growth per presidential term since 1977 but prior to th=was as follows:

President Party Term Annual Growth
Carter Dem 1977-81 3.21%
Reagan I GOP 1981-85 1.47%
Reagan II GOP 1985-89 2.80%
GHW Bush GOP 1989-93 0.45%
Clinton I Dem 1993-97 2.85%
Clinton II Dem 1997–01 2.33%
GW Bush I GOP 2001-05 0.02%
GW Bush II GOP 2005-09 0.24%
Obama I Dem 2009-13 0.23%
Obama II Dem 2013-17 1.85%

On average, the annual rate of non-farm job growth during the five Republican terms before the Trump Reign of Error was a shade less than 1%. Over the same period, the average annual rate of non-farm job growth was a shade more than 2% during Democratic administrations.

The usual quibbles apply. Our favorite: The newly elected president’s policies take a year or so to have an impact on the market. Our opinion: That’s true to an extent, but the latency varies and is largely subjective, which makes it impossible to measure. Our second favorite: The president is a tool of Congress. They make the rules; he (or she eventually) breaks them. Our opinion: The policies that affect job growth are generally determined by the president and then watered down by a detached, misinformed Congress.

The (empirical) job-growth bottom line: Republicans 1%, Democrats 2%.

To date, we’ve used four nonpartisan, easy-to-understand metrics to compare the health and welfare of the US economy under Republican and Democratic presidents from 1977 to 2017. The result: Democrats 4, Republicans 0.

We’re not giving up. Sooner or later, we’re bound to encounter a barometer of economic performance that favors GOP presidents and doesn’t antedate the invention of the pocket calculator. In the meantime, we’ll look forward to another nasty-gram from the American Association for the Advancement of Innumeracy. You can support their cause by sending donations to their parent company: Fox News.

Update: According to data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.19 million jobs were created in 2017, Trump’s first year in office and a splendid result by any measure. In contrast, 2.34 million jobs were created during President Obama’s last year in office, or about 7% more than Trump’s first. Sadly, three million jobs were lost during the entirety of the Trump Reign of Error. As before, we’d give The Donald some slack because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he and his cronies so cocked up the management of it that we’re disinclined to do so.