Immigration reform and the national debt | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: Jim Bispo's weekly column appears in the Beaufort Observer.

    What's not to like about the Immigration Reform Bill being drafted by the "Gang of Eight"??

    I'll tell you. Ms. Schumer's boy Charlie is involved in it and it is his staff doing the drafting. Surely you don't need to know any more than that about it to be suspicious. These are the folks who write his speeches with all the good sounding stuff in them. These are the "invisible folks" who tell him what to think As soon as he reads the words they have written for him, they are his. Until then they belong to whomever on his staff wrote them. As an aside, do you suppose that could be called Congressional plagiarism (i.e. taking someone else's work for your own)?? The long and short of it is that it is what the staff thinks that seems to control what the elected representative says (frequently without thinking).. They all do it. Do you suppose that makes it OK?? There are those of us who don't think so.

    As I said, they all do it; some better than others. Probably the best writing and reading is for and by the Prez. He pretty much says the right things. It is truly unfortunate that he almost never does what he says. At the same time he is easily the worst at "riding across" a glitch in the Tele-prompter operation. Ms. Schumer's boy Chuckie is pretty good at reading what his staff gives him and is able to B.S. his way across a Tele-prompter malfunction. Probably the worst at reading what his staff tells him to think is Harry Reid. It seems as though he simply has trouble reading. Never mind convincing anyone that what he is saying (i.e. "reading") is worth listening to. Monotones tend to have that effect. One must read well to be even plausibly believable (as Thomas Sowell might say). Reid simply does not read well.

    But I digress...

    When the Dems were struggling to get Obama Care passed, we heard a lot about the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and their "scoring" of the bill. (They call it scoring - more straight forward folks would call what they do "pricing it out".) The CBO is supposed to be non-partisan and even handed in providing the Congress honest analyses of the cost of various legislative proposals. And they likely are.. What not so many folks seem to have picked up on is the fact that they price out what they are told to price out using the usually very carefully phrased assumptions they are provided by the "invisible" people (i.e. the "staffers").. The result very frequently is that by "adjusting" the assumptions (as was so adroitly done when ObamaCare was being touted) the numbers turn out the way the proponents want them to turn out. The result is we have a group of presumably honest folks (the CBO analysts) giving the American public largely dishonest results (pretty much as directed by the politicians or their staffs). Does anyone see anything wrong with that picture??

    And, as the Gang of eight continues to work to get the votes necessary to pass immigration reform, the bill gets longer and longer. (That would be "bill" as in legislative proposal as well as "bill" in terms of cost to the long suffering American taxpayers.) Reportedly our congressional representatives are now looking at something in the neighborhood of one thousand pages. Do you suppose the increase has anything to do with goodies for "holdouts" (Think CornHusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase) Don't tell me, it's beginning to look like another one of those bills that we have to pass to find out what's in it. The last time we did that, it doesn't seem to have turned out so well. Do you suppose anyone learned anything from that experience?? But this time there is a difference. The big difference is that the last time a great deal of the delegated implementation authority went to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (Kathleen Sebalius). This time it seems to be going to the Secretary of Homeland Security, (Janet Napolitano). Yikes!! That would be the same person who almost single handedly seems to have cornered the ammunition market.. (Tried to buy any ammo lately??) The change in the implementation responsibility looks a whole lot like a distinction without a difference. Hmmm..

    And so it would seem to be with the pricing of the Immigration Bill being considered. We are being told that the bill as currently configured will save us a lot of money over ten years. The Prez was even scheduled (as of 6/24) to tout the savings in a speech supporting the bill. Without knowing just what assumptions the CBO was instructed to use in their scoring exercise, it is impossible to judge the efficacy of their "findings". But with Schumer and his people writing the libretto and the Anointed One delivering the narrative it would certainly be judicious to be suspicious. (Surely experience would have taught us by now to be careful about trusting those two.) It begins to look like the same folks who provided the assumptions against which ObamaCare was priced out by the CBO are busily dreaming up assumptions that will make the Immigration Bill being drafted look like it is not only "free", but results in saving the government money. It's too bad these folks aren't as good at "running things" as they are at misleading the taxpayers.

    I suppose you could start out with the notion that none of the "illegals" who are here are employed and they will be as soon as they are handed "work permits" or whatever. At that point, they will begin paying taxes (and getting nothing for it beyond a chance to get on the road to citizenship). It would not be difficult to posit a scenario in which the immigration bill will result in a "profit". That would put the (formerly illegal) workers in the same boat as all the young people who at this point in their lives don't tend to run up big health care bills and therefore don't have too much need for health insurance but will be forced to buy health insurance anyway. (Neither cohort will be getting much for their money.) That, together with a judicious use of an unelected "death panel" to pass on (read - "restrict") the big dollar procedures seniors will otherwise need, is intended to keep Obama Care "whole". And while we're talking about that, how many more illegals do you suppose we would have to welcome into our country (so they can work and pay their taxes in addition to paying the "fine" we keep hearing about) to allow us to completely pay off our national debt?? Hmmm...

    D'ya Think??