Today's favorite is a posting from 2007 on Senator Inhofe's Minority Blog.  I chuckle every time I read this:

MIT’s Richard Lindzen called fears of manmade global warming ‘silly" and debated PBS’s Bill Nye "The Science Guy" and the controversial Weather Channel host Heidi Cullen on last night’s Larry King Live.

Lindzen corrected several of Nye's claims regarding climate science. "We are simply saying that if you wish to issue scare remarks, you should make them accurate, according to the science," Lindzen told Nye.

At one point, CNN host Larry King cautioned Nye against making a bet with Lindzen over who was correct about the science of global warming. 

"[Lindzen's] from M.I.T. he knows what he's talking about,"  King warned Nye.

Lindzen mocked fears of global warming by comparing them to children’s imaginations. "I think it's mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves," Lindzen said.

I'm sorry, I'm bad, I just can't help myself.  It still tickles me.

The Internet is a great thing that can serve to keep people connected across great distance.  It allows people to share stuff.  It creates a freedom of information flow that allows ideas to flourish or die as they will on their own merit.  But there are also some problems in how it impacts our ability to engage in rational debate. 

It is natural for a person to gravitate toward information that validates their own opinions.  There is a certain satisfaction in seeing one's own conclusions arrived at by others.  The problem is that the Internet allows people of all political stripe to isolate themselves in echo chambers of their own political opinions.  It is easy to seek out validation and close off the mind to any contrary opinion and soon there is no debate and no exposure to external ideas and those ideas themselves begin to get more and more extreme as the various factions walk themselves out to more extreme positions.  We don't have "the coffee shop" anymore where people of all opinions gather and talk and we listen to each other and develop opinions over time.  Now we sit in that coffee shop, pull out the computer and engage in conversation over the net with groups of people sitting in other coffee shops who agree with us.

When we do engage in conversation with others having different opinions, we too often end up in a situation where we are simply flinging mud at each other and not listening to what they are saying.  And so in that respect the Internet can act as a polarizing factor rather than a bringing of people together.  We end up talking at each other instead of talking with each other.   The problems are seen in both the left and the right.  Go to any of the major sites on the left (Kos would come to mind) and speak some heresy there and see how quickly you are excommunicated or how vile the language becomes.  The same is true on places on the right.  I remember a site I used to frequent but don't anymore because one of the people who ran the site threatened to ban me because I disagreed with him.

I tend to hang out on places leaning more to the right than to the left because overall I find a more reasoned level of discussion that tends not to spiral into profanity and name-calling, or at least not as quickly.  Personally I would consider my politics more libertarian (little l) than anything else.  I don't believe government is our guardian that is here to "take care of" people.  I believe government programs tend to reinforce and enable dependence on them rather than give people what they need to succeed.  They are a way of basically buying votes.  But I have problems with some of the aspects of our political right, too. 

I have trouble with any political group that wants to use the law or the courts to dictate culture.  America is a very diverse place.  There are liberal communities and there are conservative communities and there are communities in between.  A locality should be free to enact laws and policies that reflect the values in that locality without fear of someone in Washington shoving their values down the throats of the local population far from DC.  One of the reasons why Reagan was so popular was his tolerance.  He wasn't out to use Washington to set the social agenda of the country.  His idea was that local jurisdictions should be free to enact their laws and the people should then be free to "vote with their feet".  In other words, everyone should be able to find a place to live that reflects their own views, even if those views aren't popular nationally. 

The notion was to get government off the backs of the people and federal government off the backs of local governments. But there are people of all political stripe who for some reason can't stand to see someone else living a different set of values.  It seems as if they think that when they see a community with different values, it somehow diminishes their own or something.  You have political parties that want to codify their social agenda in federal law and use mandates on the states to enforce those social issues.  I am against that.  Tulsa should be free to live their community values and Seattle theirs. 

Internet communities tend to amplify this polarization and provide positive feedback which ends up walking all sides farther afield. And in the meantime there is no venue left where a rational discussion of all people can take place and the best ideas of all sides can be blended together.  A good idea can come from anywhere but I don't think any one side has a monopoly on good ideas.  The migration of discussion from the local coffee or barber shop to the internet venues of today has taken away the sort of "stone soup" approach to local political debate and has also removed a moderating influence.  When people of all stripe are talking together in a rational fashion, there is a certain moderating influence on all of them.  A person gets some real exposure to how different their ideas might be from a lot of other people.  If you are in a room with only people who think the same, you have no clue and the group can walk itself out into oblivion as it breathes its own exhaust.  I see that on both the right and the left.  How do we fix that?  No idea, but I did want to call attention to it.

I will assume that everyone reading this is familiar with the subject matter of this posting.  The problem I am having is in my attempting to find the right context into which to place this report.  Maybe the fact that I am having so much trouble finding that context is an indication of a problem.  My initial reaction to the report was that it was an amateurish production obviously meant for "internal" government use and not intended for public release.  Knee-jerk reactions to the report from the usual sources were quick to develop and appeared quite emotional. I tend to discount most initial reactions to things like this because they are generally very emotionally charged and are often more of a limbic reaction than a deliberate, thought out response.  I am convinced that this report would have been much different had it been designed for public release.

The greatest concern I have isn't so much what the government will do with the report but has more to do with the attitudes that generated some of the language in it and what other people will attempt to do now that it has been made public.  I have already seen an increase in the labeling of anything to the right of the political spectrum as "right-wing" in the past few days.  CNN referring to FNC as the "right-wing" outlet when reporting on the tea party events today is one example.  Since the report linked "right-wing" to extremism, there is going to be a move afoot to, in the minds of the recipient of the message, subconsciously link anything to the right as extremist by referring to it as "right-wing".  So CNN referring to FNC now as "right-wing" is meant to convey that FNC is part of the dangerous movement of extremists that the report was warning about.  I suspect you are going to read and hear the phrase "right-wing" much more often for the next few months than you ever heard it before.  "Right-wing" will replace "conservative" in the lexicon of the left-leaning media.

I was, for the most part, on board with AJ Strata's reaction that the knee-jerk was overblown and the howling from the right was a bit over the top.  But something came out today that has begun to change my mind on the issue.  In an article in the Washington Times today, the Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee (Rep. Bennie G. Thompson D-Mississippi) said that he was “dumbfounded” such a report would be issued. Now I am not sure if he means "dumbfounded" that such a report would be generated or that it would find its way into the public domain.  In any case, the most telling statement he made was, to quote the Washingtin Times article:

“I am particularly struck by the report’s conclusion which states that I&A ‘will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months to ascertain with greater regional specificity the rise in rightwing extremist activity in the United States with a particular emphasis on the political, economic, and social factors that drive rightwing extremist radicalization,’” Mr. Thompson said, demanding to know what types of activities DHS had planned for “the next several months.”

Now if the Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee doesn't know what the plans of the DHS are and isn't sure what to make of the wording of the report and finds himself "dumbfounded" by it, it means he is also having trouble understanding in what context to place this report.  I have no choice but to assume that the chairman of the oversight committee for the agency involved would have a lot more information than I on what might be going on with regards to the agency's activities.  And so if he is having trouble understanding this, then I am very worried.  This isn't the reaction of some "right-wing" nincompoop in their underwear, that is the reaction of the senior member of the oversight committee who is a Democrat.  So something feels very, very wrong here.

There is a lot more to be said on this but things are still developing.  To say a whole lot more would be going off on some speculative tangent.  I don't know if this report was modified significantly during the first few months of the Obama administration or if the title had been something different but was recently changed.   

But there is one thing I think I can comment on.  That is the title of the document. “Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment".  I do not doubt that and here is why.  What has been happening with our government taking over financial institutions through the use of bailout money to gain a controlling equity position and then refusing to take repayment of the bailout cash, the de facto firing of corporate executives, the regulation of executive compensation, the use of state Attorneys General to hound executives with veiled threats (the fact that an Attorney General of a state is hounding you is by itself a veiled threat) to return compensation that is legally their property according to a mutually agreed contract is certainly NOT going to cause any fueling of left-wing extremism.  The left-wing extremists would see the government making progress toward their goals.  The government is acting in a left-wing extremist manner.  It is as if President Obama is a socialist Santa Claus delivering to them Christmas in February and granting presents beyond the left's wildest dreams.  Of course it isn't going to fuel any left-wing radicalization.  The actions of the government recently have been to validate the predictions of the wildest of the far-right lunatic fringe and will serve to validate their message.  So yeah, the economic and political climate the current government has created will very likely fuel a resurgence in radicalization and recruitment because they are validating the message of the lunatic fringe.  And by lunatic fringe I mean people even further afield than Ron Paul.  So in that respect the report is probably accurate.

The immediately preceding observation coupled with the "dumbfounded" oversight Chairman give me cause for great uncertainty.  I won't say that I am afraid, but I will say that I am deeply concerned and that we all have reason to be.  We need someone to shine some light in there and find out just exactly, as Mr. Thompson from Mississippi puts it, what activities the DHS has planned over the "next several months".

Something here isn't passing a basic smell test.

Merchant ships are crewed by civilian employees of transportation companies.  They are not military or even paramilitary personnel.  They are not under the command of military authorities or the President.  At no time in our modern history have crews of merchant vessels been armed.  Even during World War II, the crews of merchant vessels were not combatants.  At that time the US Navy created a branch called The United States Navy Armed Guard who served aboard merchant ships in a defensive role.

Maybe it is time to consider the reactivation of the Armed Guard to defend merchant shipping in areas where the risk of piracy is high.  This could be done through the US Naval Reserve and the size adjusted according to need.  We could protect any ship provided they fly the American flag while the Armed Guard was aboard.  Their mission would be to protect the ship and crew from attack, provide surveillance of the shipping lanes, and coordinate a greater response when required to do so.  They would be under the direct command of military authorities.

I believe this is a better alternative than simply arming the crews of merchant vessels.  Armed crews are not under military command and their training and skills would vary widely from one shipping carrier to another.  Activating the Armed Guard would put in place a standard level of training and a predictable level of expertise and response procedures in the area of operations.

Captain Phillips exchanged himself for the return of his crew.  His ship and its cargo arrived safely at its destination.  He escaped his captors twice and the second time regained his freedom.

God bless you, Captain Phillips. 

There is a certain sense of validation when one sees an article where someone else has independently reached the same conclusion one reached themselves.  In this case I was reading an article on wind power which explains how it has the potential to actually increase CO2 emissions rather than reduce them.

Let's compare wind with nuclear for a moment to illustrate this point.  Energy is added to the grid when a nuclear plant is built without any increase in CO2 emissions from energy production.  Nuclear generation operates 24 hours a day, day in and day out. Nuclear plants operate most efficiently at nearly full output and are slow to throttle up and down with load.  Excess energy generated in off hours is dumped as heat.

Now lets compare that to a modest wind field, say 100 megawatts of power.  What happens when the wind isn't blowing?  People are still going to need to see in the dark, pump water around, wash their clothes and cook their food.  First of all, in order to get an average of 100 megawatts of actual generation, you need to install between  350 to 900 megawatts of generating "capacity".  This is because even when the wind is blowing, the units do not always generate at full rated capacity.  Add in turbines that are down for maintenance reasons or iced over or otherwise not producing and you get average generation very much below rated "capacity".  Figures for actual generation are between 10 and 30 percent of capacity depending on who you listen to.  So lets split the difference and say you need to install 500 megawatts of capacity to average 100 megawatts of generation.  

Ok, so we switch our new wind turbine field onto the grid and ... nothing happens because it is a calm day.  No power is being generated.  But demand is still there so it dawns on us that we must build a 100MW fossil fuel plant to pick up the slack for when our field isn't operating because we have sold 100MW of power to people and we had better deliver.  Mrs. Finkenstarkle isn't going to care that the wind isn't blowing, she has two kids to get fed and ready for school and she needs electricity to do that.  You still have to meet demand.  So you fire up your 100MW fossil fuel plant and burn, say, natural gas until the wind starts to blow.

Now the breeze comes up and you can start to throttle back the gas turbine but the winds are "light and variable" which means the output is all over the place.  You start getting 200MW out of the system and so you take the turbine offline and just as you do that the output drops to 50MW so you need to start it back up again.

The electricity demand for next Thursday afternoon at 3PM can be accurately predicted within a reasonable margin of error.  The electricity available from wind next Thursday afteroon at 3PM is anyone's guess.  That is the fundamental problem.  Supply must be reliable.  The nature of wind is that it is very unreliable.  In order to provide a reliable source of power, one must augment the wind generation with conventional capacity.  Had nuclear been chosen instead of wind, there would be no need for a fossil backup plant and CO2 emissions would be greatly reduced.

All of this, of course, is based on the notion that CO2 emissions are harmful in any way which nobody has shown to date to be true.  But that is a whole other post.

Ice shelves grow out onto the surface of the ocean.  They continue to grow until they become unstable and break off from the movements of the tides and currents and storms.  Then they drift away and melt and new shelf then begins to form.  There is no such thing as a "stable" ice shelf over geological time.

It is interesting to me that we have a lot of media hype about a piece of a shelf that is ready to break.  Antarctic sea ice has been at record high levels recently.  One of the things that makes an ice shelf more likely to break at the shore interface is its becoming large. If the ice was not as extensive, it wouldn't be as likely to break off and drift away.  And the more extensive the ice, the larger the pieces that break off.  So when it gets colder and the ice shelves extend farther out from land, larger pieces eventually break off.  Larger pieces break off because there is more ice *to* break off.

The ice is constantly flexing with the tides.  Currents push it.  Winds push it.  Over time it weakens at the "hinge" point where it meets land. At some point it breaks.  If it didn't break, we would have ice all the way to South America. We don't. Because it breaks.

You know it and I know it.  Nothing.  That is what will happen.  All this Security Council brouhaha is about making nothing appear like something.  They will issue statements, there will be speeches, maybe even a strongly worded letter or two where we will tell North Korea that if they don't knock it off, we will be really, really, upset. 

And North Korea knows nothing will happen to them of any great consequence because the world community is incapable of really doing much of anything about anything other than increasing the carbon footprint of a certain New York address though increased CO2 emissions during a flurry of speeches.

The UN is about *talking*.  They will always condemn direct action because it cuts them out of the "talking" business.   The North Koreans say that if the UN doesn't mind its manners, the NorKs will pull out of talks.  Talks are what the UN does.  If everyone pulled out of talks, the UN would go out of business.  The UN must be scared to death that North Korea might pull out of talks.  Heck, it might mean an entire group of people at the UN with nothing to do.  They won't get to appear in news articles anymore and soon people will forget who they are and stop inviting them to the best cocktail parties.  But as long as they can keep things in a perpetual crises that doesn't actually involve direct action, they can remain in the spotlight as vital UN negotiators.

Lets be honest about some things.  The North Korean military has not fired a shot in anger in nearly 50 years. Their people are starving.  Last I read, half of their Army conscripts are either too emaciated or suffer from mental retardation due to chronic malnutrition to serve in the armed forces.  Our best weapon might be a bulgogi bomb.  We blast them with tasty beef and when they stop to gorge themselves, we make a run up the penninsula erecting field transportable Kentucky Friend Chicken stands in our wake. Would the people resist us if we fed them?  But alas, no such thing would happen because it would result in the end of "talks" which is, after all, what government at the global level is really all about. 

The really sad thing is that not fighting probably kills more people in the long run than invading them would.  But judging from the UN's reaction to problems in places like Darfur and the Congo, they seem to be in the starvation business anyway.  The North Korean people might be beyond the tipping point now.  They might not be able to rise up and topple their tyranical oppressors if they wanted to.  They are starving and their mental capacity is diminished through malnutrition.  They probably couldn't rise up at this point even if they really wanted to.

The longer I live, the more strongly I come to believe that the UN is a very cruel organization.

What will happen?  Absolutely nothing.  Just watch.

UPDATE:  This just in ...

SEOUL/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations failed to agree a response to North Korea's rocket launch despite pressure from Washington and its allies for action, showing the reclusive state had succeeded in dividing the international community.

So it looks like they got an entire day of talking in!  No action came of it.

For the past two consecutive months the temperatures in the Arctic region is below average (1979 to present).  Last month the average temperature of the arctic was about 0.6 degrees below normal for February as measured by satellites.  This month they are about 0.4 degrees below normal.  In fact, the arctic has been cooling at a fairly significant rate since 2005 according to RSS satellite measurements.

This is significant for a couple of reasons.  The first is that according to IPCC projections, temperatures since 1998 should not only be rising, the rate of rise should be increasing.  By this point, 2009, we should be in a range where it would be nearly impossible to get below "average".  Secondly, according to IPCC projections, the polar regions should be much more pronounced in this rise than anywhere else. In other words, it should be even more difficult to get "below average" temperatures in the polar regions than in the temperate or tropical regions.  But here we are.

Ice continues to recover from the 2007 wind anomaly that blew a significant portion of arctic ice into the warmer Atlantic where it melted. The ice in the arctic is today at about the same level it was in 2004.  Recovery will continue this year because there will be more old ice which stands up to the summer sun better than newer, saltier ice.

In fact, RSS satellite measurements show significant global cooling since 2006.  Sea levels also stopped rising in 2006.  Sea temperatures have been falling since 2004 and the sun is currently in a "deep minimum" though we don't know if it will be a "grand minimim" like the Dalton or Maunder minimims.  All signs point to continued cooling for the near future.

UPDATE: Seems ice thickness as measured by the US Army is averaging about a half a meter thicker this year than last year.  You can follow arctic sea ice extent at this link.

President Obama is most confusing to me.  He appears to want to redefine the role of government.  It seems that Congress is now debating a mandatory "volunteer" obligation for Americans (is it "voluntary" if it is mandatory?).  Another bill being hashed out would allow the Treasury department to regulate the compensation of any company it deems is in need of such regulation.  So in this sense we are having government take control of segments of American life that were traditionally handled by civic organizations or free markets. 

At the same time President Obama wants to rely on the United Nations for the response to yesterday's missile launch by North Korea.  In this example he is passing the responsibility for our security to people who we don't elect and who do not answer to us.  The UN answers to nobody.  The various delegations answer to their own political leadership but the UN itself is unelected.  If we don't like what they do, we can not toss them out on their ear.

So here we have government grabbing functions that were traditionally handled in the private sector and abdicating a key role of our government (our security) to a group of diplomats who would want to transform themselves into unelected legislators of a world government answerable to nobody. 

Another bothersome issue is the one of using bailout cash to ensnare private entities in government micro-management schemes.  More bothersome is that our government does not seem to want to allow these private entities to return the bailout money even when they are able to.  In fact, some of these private companies never needed and never spent the money to begin with and want to return it but our government apparently doesn't want to allow them to.

Am I the only one looking at the news and finding themselves squinting a little and saying "whaaaaat?".

As I predicted in my previous post some months ago, the North Pole didn't melt this year.   In fact, as I write this, Arctic ice area has recovered to the average ice coverage for this date since 1979.  There is more ice in the Arctic than there has been on this date since 2002.

You don't have to take my word for it, either.  In fact, you can follow along as the season progresses.

All the media hype notwithstanding, this year's arctic ice isn't going to disappear.  In fact, there is today more ice in the arctic than this day last year.  In fact, there is almost 1 million square kilometers more.  In fact, there is more ice today than there was on this date in 2006 and in 2005.  There is more melting to be done but we are, this week, in the period of greatest melt and 2007 is losing ground to 2007.

The loss of ice over the past couple of years appears to have been more to do with changes in wind patterns than with changes in temperature.  Arctic air temperatures have not been unusually warm and ocean temperatures globally have cooled somewhat in the past few years. It appears that the winds pushed more of the ice than usual past Greenland into warmer waters where it melted away.  This year's wind patterns are apparently more benign in that regard.

This past winter showed the fastest and most extensive sea ice recovery every documented. Media outlets have been reporting that since this year's ice was new ice, it would be easier to melt.  That is because first-year ice has a higher salt water content and melts at a lower temperature. Multi-year "old" ice is also more compressed and denser causing it to melt more slowly at a given temperature.  It seems this year's ice is thicker than previously thought and this summer has not been as sunny in the arctic resulting in lower melt rates than predicted.

The major media can be expected to pick up on this story and widely report this year's great arctic ice recovery ... well ... probably when we see Satan on skis.

On 13 July 2008, 45 paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade along with 25 Afghan soldiers defeated a coordinated attack by 500 Taliban in Kunar province Afghanistan. Nine of the paratroopers were killed and 15 were wounded leaving 21 paratroopers and 21 Afghan soldiers to fight off an attack of 500 enemy.  Not only did they manage to kill dozens of the enemy, they also succeeded in repelling the assault. 

Ladies and gentlemen, this generation of Americans have stood and answered the call with amazing heroism.  Words fail me in my attempt to describe the pride and the gratitude in my heart.  The 173rd is based in Italy.  There will be no homecoming here in the US.  But if any unit in this war deserved a parade, it would be those of the 173rd Airborne Brigade.  What an amazing group of young Americans!

Well, first of all, it has been a long time since I wrote a blog entry here.  Life has been hectic with the tragic loss of a spouse, suddenly being a single parent of two elementary schoolers, and changing jobs in the middle of that adjustment.  But we adapt and life goes on. Now to blogging!

I thought something was fishy with the employment numbers released today when all I heard on the radio on my way home from work was that the US "lost" some 60,000 jobs but no mention was made of the unemployment rate.  So I went and looked it up a few minutes ago and as I suspected, the unemployment rate was unchanged from last month.  How, you might ask, can the economy "lose" 60,000 jobs and the employment rate remain unchanged?  Easy; companies are cutting unfilled positions.  They are eliminating jobs that they have been unable to fill.  And this phenomenon is going to become more common as more of the "baby boom" generation retires.  We are going to see a period where workers will be leaving the workforce at a faster pace than people are entering.  In other words, the reverse of the situation we saw in the 1960's and 1970's when we had more people entering the workforce than the economy could absorb and saw rising unemployment.

All of the reports seemed to be grasping for bad news.  They were along the lines of "while unemployment remained steady at 5.5%, May's rate jumped by the largest amount in ...". In other words, they had to reach back a couple of months and regurgitate May's bad news.

The perceptions of what constitutes a good economy and what constitutes a bad economy were formed back when we had the largest single generation of Americans in history in the job market.  That generation is now on its way to retirement.  A 5.5% unemployment rate is right at the edge of "optimal" unemployment rates.  4.5% to 5.5% is considered the desired range that is sustainable over time.  The double digit unemployment rates of the late 1970's is apparently gone from the American memory.

The loss of jobs when an economy is losing workers is actually a GOOD thing.  You do not want a situation where unemployment drops much below 4.5% because then there aren't enough workers "between jobs" for business to hire new workers simply to replace ones that leave over the normal course of career advancement.  Below 4% you get into a situation where businesses begin to "bid up" salaries in order to attract what labor you can get and that labor is probably less qualified because at that point, all the people who are sharp at what they do are already working.  That was the situation in Silicon Valley during the dot-com bubble.  Companies could not find workers at any price and the salaries being paid to even entry-level employees were through the roof.  That situation is not sustainable over the long term for an economy as a whole.  What actually happens is that companies start trading workers around as they bid salaries up.

So today's unemployment numbers really aren't such bad news at all.  Business cut 60,000 jobs but they were either unfilled positions or a corresponding number of people who had been out of work in May had been able to start new jobs or a combination of both.  The place where I work added two new job openings in the past month and we have two positions to fill due to people changing jobs on their own.

The retirement of the baby boom is going to challenge all the notions we have about economics.  We are going to see people retiring in droves within the next few years.  Businesses are going to have a hard time finding the labor to fill those positions.

Happy Independence Day!

I hear a lot of highly charged rhetoric when it comes to the proposed immigration bill and I sense a lot of emotion in the argument from all sides.  I want to take a moment to share a view from a different perspective that is not based so much on political position and is one of basic mathematics and economics.

The unemployment rate in the US is currently a little under 5%.  When unemployment drops too low, business has a hard time growing because they can not expand without difficulty.  When all people in a given field are working, a business must raise wages to attract a worker away from another business. This results in everyone raising their wages to keep the workers they have and raising their prices to pay for it.  And so begins a spiral of inflation as wages and prices go up but one's standard of living doesn't improve in real terms.  A pool of unemployed acts as a lubricant on the economy to allow business to operate without causing wage-based inflation.

There are 6.8 million unemployed Americans according to the Department of Labor.  Depending on who you listen to there are 12 to 20 million illegal workers here.  If they were deported, our economy would face a disaster.  We don't have enough unemployed to take the jobs of the illegals.  In fact, America is going to be facing an increasing worker shortage as the boomers leave the workforce.  The generation coming up to replace them is smaller in number.  The boomers are still the largest single generation in our population.

I understand that people should not benefit from breaking a law and it bothers me that we might be letting some off the immediate hook with this proposed legislation but to do otherwise at this point might be cutting off our nose to spite our face.  We can turn the Mexican border into a fortress but that solves nothing.  We still have 12-20 million undocumented workers here and the influx of them would be cut in half but their numbers would still continue to increase.  Only half of illegals cross that border.  You can not deport them because it would hurt the economy and cost a lot of money.  You can't imprison them because we don't have the prison space.  You can't fine them because most are already living hand to mouth.

We need to know who is here.  We need to have them documented.  We need to create some serious incentive for them to get registered.  They need to pay their share of tax, particularly social security tax.  The boomers are going to be needing it. As much as I hate the thought of allowing someone to skate, I also believe that there is a time and a place where an adult must look at things and decide on a course that might be unpleasant but in the long term interest of the country.  I believe this proposal is better than anything I have seen to date in finding a way not to wreck our economy yet getting those people some kind of status where they can be kept track of.

In the 1970's and early 1980's our economy struggled as the boomers started coming into the workforce in great numbers.  Unemployment was high. Business was unable to expand at the pace that new workers were entering the workforce.  Many of our attitudes toward foreign labor are based on that era that we lived through.  Things are changing and in a hurry.  We are soon going to be faced with exactly the opposite problem. Our economy is going to shrink if we don't find a source of additional workers.  A guest worker program is the best option that I can see available at the moment.  Tossing out 12 million workers would leave about 6 million unfilled jobs in this country.  There is simply no way any of us can afford that.