2010-08-16

Immigration vs. National Identity

I received an email the other day with a picture attached and this text:

Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907.

'In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.'
Theodore Roosevelt 1907

Every American citizen needs to read this!

You know, it's funny that these emails are often wrong in subtle ways. I know it makes me look pedantic, but the mistake in this one is almost comical because it's such a silly mistake: this letter was written in 1919, not 1907.

Granted, it hardly matters since this does accurately represent what he had to say on the subject (the Snopes article quotes other speeches and letters and has good context at http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/troosevelt.asp).

I will say, however, that this just demonstrates that this subject has been long debated. I feel no reason to agree with this attitude just because it is Roosevelt or because it is old. I come away from reading things like this with two main thoughts. For one, I think the debate about illegal immigration often gets sidetracked into racially prejudiced tirades about the attitudes and actions of legal citizens that happen to have Mexican heritage. Secondly, people seem to forget that the freedoms we hold so dear in our country also mean that people must be given the freedom to act as they choose in regards to their country or origin. Being an American means, in part, that I have the freedom to fly any flag I want, that I can say anything I want about the government and that I give assistance to anyone I want. No person or government agency can tell me how I live my life in these regards.

I think the confederate flags that many southerners fly are a great example of this. Do you think that the practice of displaying a confederate flag should be illegal? Do you think that my Asian friends in high school shouldn't have been allowed to go to Chinese School? Should I be restricted from wearing a kilt and taking my daughters to a highland dance class?

Are you ready to arrest or fine people for celebrating Cinco de Mayo? What about St. Patrick's Day? The Chinese New Year? Octoberfest? Do we need to disband the Highland Games? Should the Scottish Clan organizations be disbanded?

I self identify as German, English, Scottish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Jewish. At no point in my life have I ever thought of myself as not being an American.

These quotes are used as a sort of rallying cry, but how many people consider the logical implications of them if we take them literally? It's all great fun when it's the rights of someone else that we infringe upon, but it never feels so good when those same laws restrict our own rights. I'm not opposed to laws like this because I don't want more people to identify as American (on the contrary, I think that would be great), I'm opposed to them because I want to retain the personal liberties that I believe are the foundation of out great country.

2010-08-09

Home at Last

So Bryana came home last week all excited about the marvelous time she had at Girl Scout camp and ready to do it all over again. Other than a few bug bites, she came home intact - no bear bites or claw marks anywhere. A bear was known to live on the other side of the lake, but it had waaaay too much sense to wander near a bunch of 7 and 8 year old girls - I should have realized that bears would have the sense to be terrified of a camp full of young girls and stay far, far away. Bryana was very excited to see us and couldn't stop talking for the next hour. I wish I had an audio recording of it because she kept interrupting her own stories in order to relate another story or sing a song or tell us about about the meals, the swimming, the skit, what Tara did, what Try-its she earned, etc, etc, etc. So all my worry was for naught. Bryana was not lunch for a bear, she was not particularly homesick and she had a fantastic time.

2010-08-07

Fiscal Conservatism vs. History

A short while ago, someone sent me an email with a number of politically motivated images. One of them was simply a list:
So now we know…
"CHANGE" =
MORE Debt
MORE Taxes
MORE Welfare
MORE Regulation
MORE Government
MORE Wasteful spending
MORE CORRUPTION
Thanks Mr. President
I've put the original "claims" of the sign in the forwarded email in block quotes, in between those are my comments.

So now we know…
"CHANGE" =
MORE Debt
In the last 40+ years in this country, the only president that has run with a balanced budget (or a surplus!) was Clinton. Now, normally I would say that the congress has as much, or more, control over the budget of the country however I will point out a few things that have happened that - to me - seem to point at the Republicans as the source of the debt, not the Democrats (I'm using OMB numbers for Gross Federal Debt, some people use the public held debt instead):
1) I've heard it said that Carter started our modern deficit spending. I'm not sure the why's of that statement, since we've had a federal debt since before Carter. I think it has to do with the techniques behind the budget tricks used to fund programs in the absence of actual funds. Still, Carter's administration overall contributed very little to our modern debt comparatively. (It went from about $0.5 trillion to $0.9 trillion.)
2) Reagan's administration saw a huge amount (historically speaking at the time) of deficit spending. By 1988 the federal debt was approximately $2.6 trillion. Reagan nearly quadrupled the national debt. The blame for this I feel rests entirely on Republican shoulders due to the increase in military spending. Regardless of the justification here, the fact is that it started us on our way to a massive debt.
3) Bush Sr. didn't do too much as a president with regards to the debt one way or another. Status quo you could say... with a rather amusing foot-in-mouth moment with the "No new taxes" speech. We all say silly things at times, I suppose. At the end of the Bush Presidency the national debt was over $4 trillion.
4) During Clinton's administration he spent a lot of work trying to balance the budget. At the end of 8 years the debt was at $5.6 trillion. In other words, Clinton added about as much in 8 years that Bush Sr. added in 4. In fact, when you look at the publicly held debt (as opposed to the Gross Federal Debt) the last 3 years of the Clinton presidency saw a drop in the total debt. The surplus that Clinton successfully maintained was passed in part during a Republican held congress by Clinton vetoing the budget multiple times until spending was finally cut enough to erase the yearly deficit.
5) One of the first things Bush W. did during his presidency was to eliminate many taxes that were supporting the national budget. This started deficit spending again. Then, by starting a war or two, Bush W. managed to vastly increase the debt. Like Reagan's administration, it doesn't matter much what the justification was, this is what happened. At the end of Bush W's presidency, the federal debt was just below $10 trillion. In the last few years, the debt has grown on average nearly $1 trillion per year. Remember, this was after Clinton handed him a balanced budget. At any point the Democrats tried
6) Now with Obama in office the Tea Part starts and accuses Obama of socialism and freaks out over Democrats being bad for the debt.

If you're read this far... can someone please explain to me how you can - with any reasonable historical accuracy - blame the Democrats for the National Debt?

I know... the classic joke is that Democrats are "Tax & Spend". Unfortunately, the Republicans cut the taxes that are supporting the government programs and then keep spending!

MORE Taxes
Taxes support government spending. You can't logically complain about the debt and complain about taxes unless you have a realistic plan to cut spending. Political pundits like to talk about cutting spending but they never actually do anything about it.

Unfortunately, you only have a few things you can cut.
1) Welfare programs (medicare, medicaid, etc) that many Americans rely on. Even the Republicans have recently shied away from making realistic cuts into these programs. Time and time again public polls have showed that "real" Americans are not interested in making cuts here.
2) Military spending that our military is... well... using. This might work if we weren't in a war currently (or two) and even then, it is also not supported by public opinion polls.
3) Pork barrel projects, earmarks, whatever you want to call them could be cut... which accounts for around 1-2% of the budget. We'd lose lots of cool programs and basically get nothing from it.

By the way... a number of people screamed socialism when Obama talked about raising taxes from 36% to 39%. I like Jon Stewart's question to a guest... "At what point in that 3% did it become socialism?" Also, it's worth noting that this the same tax rate that existed during Reagan's administration. Why was Reagan not considered a socialist at the time?

Why is it that the Tea Party and the Republicans complain about Democratic tax policies when in 2009 Americans paid the lowest effective tax rate that they've paid since 1955?

The email you sent a little while ago about the tax hike set for Jan 1st, 2011 is another interesting subject. I won't dwell on it other than to say that the Democrats are between a rock and a hard place on this one. The tax cuts that Republicans put in when they eliminated Clinton's balanced budget are set to expire (as they should) and now Democrats will be blamed for either allowing them to expire or - if they renew them - be blamed for increasing the national debt. Not an enviable position.

MORE Welfare
Um... what? While this may be true, I don't follow it much. Frankly, I don't think it's changed much. it was also amusing to see - during the health care debates - Republicans attacking health care because it might hurt welfare. That was funny.

MORE Regulation
Less regulation of the Financial industry tanked our economy. During that tanking nearly every analyst and senator agreed that we haven't regulated enough. When things started looking better, suddenly the pundits were against regulation again. Let's hear it for consistency.

The banks have proven that they need to be regulated. If not, the basic human greed takes over and too few people with too much power hurt too many innocent bystanders.

MORE Government
When the Department of Homeland Security was setup, they were put in charge of some new stuff (such as the TSA), but also given purview over some existing departments, like Border Security. The congressional committees that had already controlled those departments refused to relinquish control. When the 9/11 Commission gave their report, they pointed out that a since Homeland Security briefing would potentially need to be repeated to 86 committees and sub-committees.

Now, after a number of years of Republican control, the number of committees and sub-committees is over 110. That's not reigning in government.

MORE Wasteful spending
Wasteful is, I suppose, in the eye on the beholder. At any rate, I'm not sure it's any worse now than it has been. Of course, many Republicans have complained about Obama wanting to spend money on public works projects. We have a failing infrastructure in this country... roads, bridges, dams, and causeways that are old and crumbling. Don't they think it's about time to fix some of this before more people die? Apparently not, since they can appear to be hard on spending by opposing those projects while we're hemorrhaging money in a war in a country that didn't even attack us. At least Obama is following through with those plans... even those they aren't as aggressive as I'd like.

MORE CORRUPTION
Whatever. I've heard this multiple times. I haven't seen a comparison, but I'll fall back on the "power corrupts" line of thinking. It doesn't justify it, but it does explain it. Corruption is, unfortunately, bipartisan.

Of course, some will bring up Acorn... which has a sordid history, it seems. But most of that scandal is tiny by comparison to other things that have happened in Washington. It's just a fun organization to pick on, I suppose, so that story has legs of it's own.

In conclusion

I've written a lot here and I don't expect to get a reply per se on any of this, of course... but if you should happen to, please address some of what I bring up. Believe it or not, I'm curious what other people think on these subjects. Unfortunately, merely forwarding on an email that someone else sent you doesn't tell me what you're really thinking. Nearly every email of that sort contains factual and logical errors to go along with the grammatical and design principle errors that are contained therein.

If my facts are wrong, challenge them or give me better data. If you can't validate them yourself, ask me and I'll provide links (I normally do, but other than the OMB numbers most of this was done from memory). At this point in our country's history I see people holding up "facts" in arguments that don't stand up to any sort of scrutiny at all. Claims of border violence are the new ones cropping up now... I expect to see emails about that soon as well, since I already know them to be false.

I can't reconcile the rhetoric I read in these emails with the facts that I'm able to research. That suggests that the authors don't actually care about facts, or public discourse, they only care about shouting down the other side. I frankly don't see what that accomplishes.