08-30-2016, 10:51 AM
(08-26-2016, 03:32 PM)Anthony Wrote: Yeah I'd say that cutting off immigration has worked out great for Japan - where any unemployment rate above 4% is indicative of a "lost decade."
And Trump would cut the top tax rate from 39.6% to 33%. Big deal. Gary Johnson would cut their taxes to basically nothing: If a super-richie makes $50 million in a year and spends $50,000 of it, you do the math under the Fair Tax - and its "pre-bate" is a red herring if ever there was one: The soon as the usual moral judgmentalists point out that it would give Skid Row bums and druggies free money to indulge their pathologies, the pre-bate is toast, and then the poor pay the full 30%.
Only 47% of them pay taxes already? You mean that a single taxpayer with no dependents who makes $10 an hour is part of the top 47%? Really?
And if you're thinking ahead to a future Presidential run, maybe it's a good idea to join those 15 votes against that bankruptcy bill?
Japan's "lost decade" is now going on 20 years plus and while unemployment hasn't risen that much, millions have lost full time jobs with benefits to become temporary workers without any benefits. Wage growth has not only been stagnant like in the US but has actually fallen. This is even after heroic Bank of Japan bank monetary policy and PM Abe's fiscal stimulus that makes whatever the US or even Europe has done milquetoast in comparison.
While the "lost decade" was kicked off by over-investment in real estate, its continuance for 20+ years is all about a lack of demand driven by rapidly aging population and lack of immigration.
The impact of immigration, legal or not, is very complex and most people's belief systems concerning it are absolutely backwards. Here's just one example of facts that are counter-intuitive to most people -
Illegal Immigrants Don't Lower Our Wages Or Take Our Jobs
Quote:According to an April 2015 symposium on the effects of illegal immigrants in the Southern Economic Journal, illegal immigrants actually raise wages for documented/native workers. Meanwhile, rules preventing illegal immigrants from getting driver’s licenses raise our car insurance premiums and E-Verify requirements raise the cost of doing business and reduce employment.
Using data from Georgia, Julie Hotchkiss, Myriam Quispe-Agnoli, and Fernando Rios-Avila find that documented workers’ wages rise with increases in the share of undocumented workers in a worker’s county and employed by their employers. The biggest boosts are for workers in low- and medium-skill firms that hire a lot of undocumented immigrants with an even larger boost for workers in low-skill firms with a lot of undocumented workers in the county and industry.
Why? The law of comparative advantage says we get more productive when we have more trading partners, and the arrival of undocumented workers with limited English skills frees up low-skill American workers who can then specialize in tasks that require better English. In July, I had the honor of sharing the stage with Ann Coulter, and fellow Forbescontributor Rick Ungar on Fox Business’s Stossel show, and I got to explain how unskilled immigrants make us more productive at the end of the show.
Some states make it harder for undocumented workers to get driver’s licenses. Mauricio Caceres and Kenneth P. Jameson estimate that drivers in states with these restrictions pay an average of about $17.22 (in 2009 dollars) more for car insurance because they are surrounded by more uninsured motorists.Many states are hustling to attract foreign investment. Alabama, where I live, has given lots of money to foreign manufacturers (Mercedes and Airbus, for example) in order to entice them to locate in Alabama. Catalina Amuendo-Dorantes, Cynthia Bansak, and Allan A. Zebedee report results suggesting that even after controlling for possible confounders E-Verify reduces states’ ability to attract investment from foreign companies, with employment growth at foreign affiliates falling by 3-4.7%.
Shifting the symposium’s focus to the labor market, Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny estimate that E-Verify lowers wages for unauthorized male Mexican immigrants, raises wages for US-born Hispanic men, increases the labor force participation rate of undocumented Mexican female immigrants, raises employment for Mexican-born naturalized citizens, and has essentially no effect on whites’ earnings.
E-Verify compliance is costly, which could reduce total employment. In the final contribution to the symposium, Sarah Bohn, Magnus Lofstrom, and Steven Raphael conclude that the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act reduced employment among low-skilled Arizona workers, albeit with higher wages for those who are still employed. They find that the law did reduce Arizona’s population of undocumented immigrants, but with the negative unintended consequence of reducing employment opportunities for those they were trying to protect from undocumented immigrant competition.
The researchers are careful to discuss the limitations of the papers in the symposium, but the the results are broadly consistent with existing evidence on the effects of immigration. Anti-immigration voters and candidates are on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of social science on this: opening the borders—even just a little bit—could make a huge difference for the world’s poor while making Americans richer as well.
