Replies

Good article.

Larry Kudlow was making the same points the other day.

Fence or no fence, what's all the fuss about?

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/larrykudlow/2006/05/18/197947.html

Amazingly, the Senate has passed another amendment to limit temporary workers to a mere 200,000 per-year, even though numerous studies say we need at least twice that amount. The Upper Chamber is also limiting the volume of skilled H1B workers, primarily engineers and scientists. These workers are crucial to American competitiveness, and if allowed into the country at much higher levels they would throw off more than enough tax revenue to finance public services for unskilled H2B immigrants.

Why legislators fail to understand the economics of this problem is beyond me.

Due to the demographic shift being caused by the baby boomers, the ratio of working-age persons in the U.S. to retirees aged 65 and over will drop like a stone from the current 4.7:1 ratio to 3.5:1 by 2030, and 2.6:1 by 2040. With the Social Security and Medicare trust funds going bankrupt, how will we manage with so few workers per retiree? Will we let our whole economy stagnate like France, Germany, Italy, or even Japan ? All of these countries suffer from shrinking workforces and top-heavy government taxation.

Well, the U.S. could maintain a 4:1 ratio of workers to retirees by admitting an additional 57.5 million workers over the next nineteen years, according to analyst William Kucewicz. This would result in an average annual population increase of less than 1 percent and a total of only 16.4 percent more than the 350 million projected by the Census Bureau for 2025.

With the Social Security and Medicare trust funds going bankrupt, how will we manage with so few workers per retiree?

I suppose killing those stupid programs isn't even a fit topic for discussion.

P.S. There are no 'trust funds' for either of the programs you mentioned. Any politician who says differently is lying.

With the Social Security and Medicare trust funds going bankrupt, how will we manage with so few workers per retiree?

If the goal was to generate tax revenue out of immigrants, we would not be granting permanent residence to poorly educated, low skill, low wage Mexicans. Such individuals are a significant fiscal net drain.

If we wanted to shore up our fiscal situation we would be deporting illegals, to make room for high education legal immigrants of our choosing.

The push for amnesty does not come out of fiscal concerns, it originates elsewhere. The Social Security excuse is a shibboleth to justify the unjustifiable.