Terra Extraneus

I hate to be pessimistic, but the United States Senators running for the Presidency of the United States are not businessmen, and never have been, and thus, the bailout will fail. For example, during the debate Tuesday night, Senator McCain claimed he was in favor of the bailout so there could be sources of credit for businesses, especially small businesses, so that they could borrow to make payroll. Senator Obama did not disagree.

Line up every banker and venture capitalist that wants to lend money to a business so it can make payroll. It will be a very short line. Usually, when any business is borrowing to make payroll, assuming such a thing can be done even in the best of times, the business is doomed. Apparently, both of our major party candidates will spend tax dollars even on the futile, or else, they do not know where the line of futility lies. I do not know which is more worrisome. It was like a scene from Doctor Strangelove, only about money.

Of course, Tom Brokaw is not a businessman. He did not remark on the error, if it was one. The studio audience had been sworn to silence, or else, were picked because they would not know enough to know better. Either way, the silence was “golden.”

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There seems to be some fear that many eligible taxpayers will not receive their tax rebates because they did not file a 2007 tax return. An old friend sent around an email indicating that some of the people that might not have filed a 2007 return could include disabled Social Security beneficiaries and disabled or retired veterans otherwise receiving benefits, as well as others. Thus, it is time to check in with these folks and make sure they get their money by filing a return.

Please access these links for special filing instructions and a sample Form 1040A (.pdf) that highlights the simple, specific sections of the return to fill out.

Of course, the tax rebate probably would not be needed if Americans financed their federal government with sales tax receipts rather than income taxes. But, that is a topic for another day.

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[Average Americans] understand the economy differently – and view it much more negatively – than Bush Administration officials, Wall Street analysts and conservative economists who stress positive macro-economic statistics. Indeed, nothing raises the public ire more than the elites saying this is a good economy, which seems to deny the hard work and inventiveness of people who raise their living standards against the odds. However, conservatives are not alone in this disconnect with the public on the economy, as liberal elites portrayal of Americans as passive victims also alienates their intended audience. These liberal elites underestimate Americans’ emphasis on personal responsibility and greatly overestimate the degree to which they see themselves as victims in the current economy.

The above is an excerpt from one of two studies recently made available online by the Economic Policy Institute:

• “The Economic Disconnect: How Both the Left and the Right Get It Wrong,” Dec. 5, 2006, 11 pages.

• “Talking Past Each Other: What Everyday Americans Really Think (and Elites Don’t Get) About the Economy,” December 2006, 64 pages.

Some excerpts from Economic Disconnect:

• The opening excerpt above.

• “Americans are dissatisfied with the national economy, and are doubtful it will improve in the future. This is an economy defined by its inability to produce rising incomes in the face of growing financial pressures, though people are proud of their efforts to overcome these systemic obstacles.”

• “Over two thirds of the country view the economy negatively. … The public’s central perspective is of a middle class in decline, badly squeezed between rising costs, reduced benefits, and stagnant earnings. The public holds out little hope for the economy improving any time soon, suggesting that these current problems may reflect a structural change.”

• “Americans see themselves as largely on their own in the current economy, but they are eager for the government to take on a more active role to help ease their financial burden in areas such as health care, energy and education and support greater regulation of the corporate interests that are seen as contributing to these rising costs.”

Here is a press release which summarizes Talking Past.

Also, here is a link to a recent post I wrote regarding middle-class economics: “Who’s in the Middle Class, How Much Do They Make — and How Much is Left Over?”

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See: “Part 1: Should We Feel Sorry for the Middle Class?”
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Are you a member of the middle class? Am I? An intelligent discussion of the travails of the middle class is not possible unless we define the term. Yet there is no consensus among economists or the general public regarding who makes up America’s middle class.

American Demographics magazine reported:

The majority of Americans define themselves as middle class, regardless of their actual income level. This perception is obviously off-base, but with no official definition, it’s hard to pin down how much Americans overestimate their middle-class status.

Similarly, the Washington Times reported:

There is no real definition of the middle class in the United States, assert economists and sociologists, who say “middle class” always has been more of a state of mind than an actual economic status. Even the U.S. Census Bureau has no official definition.

One organization defines the middle class as composed of those families who make $25,000 to $100,000 a year. That range is absurdly broad. Surely it is obvious that the $25,000/year family, e.g., two wage-earners working full-time for $6/hour, is in a different economic class than the $100,000 family.

HOW MUCH DO THEY MAKE?
The most sensible approach is to let simple mathematics define the “middle class.” Divide all households into groups based on household income, and the middle group is the middle class. Those who use this approach commonly divide the nation into quintiles (five equal groups), but that method creates a middle group that is much too small to satisfy our common perception of who is included in the great middle class.

Let’s see what we get by dividing U.S. households into three or four equal groups. Splitting U.S. Census Bureau 2005 income distribution data into quartiles, the “poor” and “lower class” consist of the 25% of households with income of $23,000 or less, and the “upper class” and “rich” are the 25% of households with $80,000 or more. That makes the middle class the middle 50%, half of the nation, having household incomes from $23,000 to $80,000. Now we’re getting somewhere. However, that gives us a middle class that is still too broadly defined; the lower end of it includes two-income families scraping by on minimum wage.

We achieve a more meaningful definition of middle class by dividing U.S. households into three equal groups, with the middle group — households in the $30,000 to $67,500 range — composing the middle class. That correlates well with the median household income, $46,326 in 2005, which is very close to the exact middle of the middle class as I have defined it.

So, alert the media, distribute the memo and bang the drums of the blogosphere: America’s “middle class” has now been concisely and coherently defined as composed of the middle third of households, based on total household income, which in 2005 consisted of those families making $30,000 to $67,500 a year.

IS THE MIDDLE CLASS WEALTHY?
Is that a lot of money? This series on the “Middle Class Trap” was prompted (more…)

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Are America’s middle class citizens victims of “economic injustice” in a system that has become “broken?” Or, rather, is the American middle class composed of greedy materialists who “serve mammon rather than God?” Those are the choices offered in a debate between Joe Carter and Dan Edelen. Guess I’ll jump into the fray.

Joe Carter is a writer for the evangelical conservative Family Research Council, and Carter’s Evangelical Outpost was named Best Religious Blog in the 2005 Weblog Awards (and is on TerraX’s “must read” blogroll). Dan Edelen is a Christian freelance writer who writes the blog, Cerulean Sanctum.

A debate between the two began on Monday with Edelen’s post: “Politics, Economics and the American Church.” Edelen wrote that an overlooked reason for the Republican Party’s poor showing in last week’s election is economic discontent among the middle class. “It’s still the economy, stupid!” Edelen wrote.

Middle class voters smarting from job losses and inequities in the economy voted with their wallets, not with an eye toward Iraq, terrorism, or any other topic.

Describing it as an “economic justice issue,” Edelen cited the dilemma of the U.S. middle class: inflation, mounting debt, second mortgages, the necessity of two incomes to make ends meet, lack of job security and nonexistent savings. Meanwhile, the top 1% of the wealthy own almost all the wealth, and corporations’ top execs enjoy skyrocketing income.

Faced with this gloomy scenario, Edelen proposes:

I believe that our churches must start working toward some kind of money pool to help fellow congregants who fall on hard times. With so many families’ money highly leveraged, and the reality that the middle class is fighting a losing battle against rising costs, something needs to be done on a macro level to fix some of the financial injustices people face today. But the pulpit is silent. … Who in the Church in America speaks out against the real problem, our broken system?

Edelen concludes his post with this grim prophecy:

All it takes is a minor recession … With so many precariously perched families with no savings, high credit card debt, loans taken against homes of decreasing value — it won’t take much. Church, are we ready? Truly? Time to wake up and start preparing for that day. It’s coming faster than we think.

Carter, who describes himself as Edelen’s friend, took issue with his buddy’s post, which he labeled “absolutely bizarre.” As a matter of fact, Carter called Edelen “sinfully hubristic” for expressing such a view. (more…)

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Due to immigrants, it seems, doctors and nurses are not hired, raises are not given, and obsolete medical equipment is not being updated. Is it possible immigrants are milking the system even more than the poor citizenry? Or, is this assertion an example of corrupt race hatred?

One of my favorite magazines, World Magazine, reported in its September 16, 2006 issue, in an article by John Dawson, that the border states and their hospitals are paying for the medical treatment of thousands of illegal aliens. Federal law requires, according to World, that the border hospitals treat through their emergency rooms anyone that seeks aid, regardless of ability to pay or citizenship.

But, this has been the law of the land for many years. In Oklahoma, for example, 800,000 state citizens, at last report, a third of the state citizenry, use Oklahoma hospital emergency rooms as their primary source of medical treatment and the taxpayers of Oklahoma pay their bills because the indigent patients cannot. Indeed, only a few years ago, the Oklahoma legislature projected that the cost of the medical treatment of these 800,000 state citizens carried with it the risk of destabilizing the state budget, or devouring it. This was true in Oklahoma without so much as a mention of immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

Federal promises to cover the costs of immigrant medical treatment, just like older promises to cover the costs of medical treatment of citizen indigents, have been unmet, according to World Magazine. Border states and hospitals claim to be in crisis mode because of these costs, just as Oklahoma hospitals have been in perpetual crisis due to the cost of caring for the poor and uninsured.

Would illegal aliens cross the border to obtain medical care if they could get it at home? United States churches apparently have not seen fit to provide medical care south of the border. Foreign aid apparently does not provide medical care south of the border.

Sadly, World Magazine did not compare the present “immigrant medical care crisis” to the pre-existing “indigent citizen medical care” crisis. World Magazine did not compare the border states to the interior states. As a result of the poor methodology, World Magazine defaulted to prejudice and concluded the immigrants were draining the medical resources of the land, even though poor citizens had the same impact on the system. World Magazine concluded the immigrants were levying a “stealth tax” on the unfortunate border states and their hospitals, but failed to mention the same “stealth tax” the citizen poor were levying in prior years. Finally, World Magazine did not inquire further as to the failure of North American Christianity to address the medical needs of the citizen poor, much less the immigrant poor.

How did World Magazine miss the mark so completely? There is only one logical explanation. Prejudice.

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In my article, “Let’s Make English Official Language, No Matter What French-Lovers Say,” I responded to Rep. Ernest Istook’s proposal to declare English our official language. Istook, Oklahoma’s 5th District congressman, is a Republican candidate for governor this year. In response to that article, Stephen Heggy has commented:

This sounds like more of a vote-getting ploy to cater to the rural groups in Oklahoma. Istook has to fight the pro-Democrat farmers and this is one way to do it (sadly).

Mr. Heggy is a freshman political science major at Oklahoma State University. He also happens to be the son of one of the authors of this blog.

Stephen, I’m not sure you are right that Istook’s nativistic attitude plays better in rural Oklahoma than in the suburbs (like the OKC suburb of Warr Acres, where Istook lives). Here in the Southwest, rural citizens are becoming increasingly accustomed to living and working alongside Hispanic immigrants (whether legal or otherwise) from Mexico and other Latin American countries. I think perhaps it is in the suburbs where you are more likely to find those people who so dearly cherish sameness. Same houses, same cars, skin the same pale shade of brown, and the peculiar longing for just one language.

In rural Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and the states west of here, immigrants have become a vital part of the economy, especially in such sectors as farming and meat-processing. The Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group, has prepared an excellent 44-page report, Unauthorized Migrants. According to that report:

• About 65% of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. are employed. That includes all unauthorized migrants: men, women, children and senior citizens. About 92% of the adult male illegal immigrants are employed.
• How are they employed? 33% in the service industry (e.g., hotels, domestics, food service); 17% in construction and extraction; 16% in production, installation and repair; 3% farming.

More importantly, looking at it from the perspective of the rural economy:
• Unauthorized migrants comprise 23% of all workers employed in U.S. farming occupations.
• They comprise 12% of all workers in meat-packing and meat-processing occupations.

On Monday, millions of citizens and immigrants participated in rallies across the country objecting to the draconian immigration measures desired by those on the far right. Rallies took place in such places as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Garden City, Kansas.

Garden City, Kansas? That’s right, demonstrations were staged in several Kansas cities, including 3,000 protestors in Garden City, a city of 30,000 in Southwest Kansas that is nearly 50% Hispanic. Garden City is the site of a huge Tyson meat-packing plant as well as other food manufacturers.

This blog comment by a Kansas resident is instructive:

They [Garden City] are about 20 years ahead of many other meat packing cities out there. My own hometown, Great Bend, continues to have a dwindling population. Vrtually the only newcomers are Hispanic, and let me tell you, they were NOT greeted with open arms when I was in high school 15 years ago. It was embarrassing and shameful. I’m pleased to say that slow but steady changes in attitude have occurred, now that people in the town recognize that most of the new businesses and homeowners are Hispanics. My own xenophobic parents have started praising the “hard working attitude” of these folks, and rave about their cooking. My linguistically challenged mother started taking conversational Spanish classes.

My impression of Garden City is that they recognized this earlier than most small western Kansas meatpacking towns, and offered incentives for migrants to become locals, including things like assisting them in obtaining loans to start businesses and own homes. The migrant-turned-community member is who will make or break these small, dying towns. Embrace the influx of migrants and turn them into townies, or turn the cold shoulder, and watch your town continue to wither and die.

But the Stepfordites are so enamored of pale skin and the Queen’s English that they are willing to cut off their own upturned noses to spite their faces. They have not given much thought to what would happen to our economy if we somehow deported all 12 million illegal immigrants overnight. Conservative columnist George Will calculates that it would take 200,000 buses in a caravan stretching bumper-to-bumper from San Diego to Alaska to deport all illegals. Besides, Will observes, “There are no plausible incentives to get [them] to board the buses.” In “Guard the Borders - And Face Facts, Too,” Will writes:

Conservatives should want, as the president proposes, a guest worker program to supply what the U.S. economy demands — immigrant labor for entry-level jobs. Conservatives should favor a policy of encouraging unlimited immigration by educated people with math, engineering, technology or science skills that America’s education system is not sufficiently supplying. And conservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal immigrants on a path out of society’s crevices and into citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives absurdly call this price tag on legal status “amnesty.”

But I doubt that most white suburbanites care much more about the fate of rural America than they care about the needs of foreign-born workers. So let me talk about something middle-class and upperclass suburb-dwellers care about: cost of living. According to the aforementioned Pew report, from 20% to 30% of many construction-related skills are provided in the U.S. by unauthorized migrants. We’re talking about painters, roofers, dry-wallers, tile-layers, cement and brick masons and the like. So, before you pack up all of those illegals and send them back home, you better make sure you have all of your home remodeling and repair projects done. And if you’re planning on trading up to a nicer home, you better do it now. Because once you remove all the illegal aliens, the cost of construction, maintenance and repair in the suburbs is going to go sky high. Now are we talking about something you care about?

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Good piece by columnist Maggie Galagher on the immigration/border debate. An excerpt:

“Don’t call me anti-immigration. Count me among the 17 percent of Americans in the new Pew poll who say they’d support raising the legal immigration quotas. I’m also vigorously opposed to any law that criminalizes charity for people who need food, clothing or medical care. But I do want one thing from Congress: Come up with a plan to secure our borders. What about the 12 million people already here? As far as I can tell, they are not a crisis. Certainly the pro-immigration lobby says these people are good for the economy, so why the urgency about documenting them?”

Galagher cites poll numbers which show the American people are conflicted on this hot issue. See the whole piece: “Politicians Ought to Start at the Border to Fix Immigration.”

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