"Nuking The Economy
Immigration Numbers Outnumber US Job Growth By 7,000,000
By Paul Craig Roberts
1-27-7
Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics re-benchmarked the payroll jobs data back to 2000. Thanks to Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services, I have the adjusted data from January 2001 through January 2006. If you are worried about terrorists, you don't know what worry is.
Job growth over the last five years is the weakest on record. The US economy came up more than 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth. That's one good reason for controlling immigration. An economy that cannot keep up with population growth should not be boosting population with heavy rates of legal and illegal immigration."(snip)
(snip)"Economists who look beyond political press releases estimate the US unemployment rate to be between 7% and 8.5%. There are now hundreds of thousands of Americans who will never recover their investment in their university education.
Unless the BLS is falsifying the data or businesses are reporting the opposite of the facts, the US is experiencing a job depression. Most economists refuse to acknowledge the facts, because they endorsed globalization. It was a win-win situation, they said.
They were wrong.
At a time when America desperately needs the voices of educated people as a counterweight to the disinformation that emanates from the Bush administration and its supporters, economists have discredited themselves. This is especially true for "free market economists" who foolishly assumed that international labor arbitrage was an example of free trade that was benefitting Americans. Where is the benefit when employment in US export industries and import- competitive industries is shrinking? After decades of struggle to regain credibility, free market economics is on the verge of another wipeout.
No sane economist can possibly maintain that a deplorable record of merely 1,054,000 net new private sector jobs over five years is an indication of a healthy economy. The total number of private sector jobs created over the five year period is 500,000 jobs less than one year's legal and illegal immigration! (In a December 2005 Center for Immigration Studies report based on the Census Bureau's March 2005 Current Population Survey, Steven Camarota writes that there were 7,9 million new immigrants between January 2000 and March 2005.)"(snip)
If you believe the "structural unemployment" guesstimates are accurate at levels of 7-8.5% of the 'working age' US population, then you're talking about somewhere around 14 million Americans who are depending on the US gov't (i.e. US taxpayers) for maintaining their standard of living. At the same time, you're talking about another 7 million illegal immigrants who are either working under the table or are also dependent on the US gov't (i.e. US taxpayers), or some combination of the two. Given a total official US population of 300 million, this means that something like 1 in 12 people in America are leeches on the US economy in terms of national averages. In specific states which have concentrations of 'structurally unemployed' and illegal aliens i.e. California, Illinois, New York etc. the leech factor is undoubtedly considerably higher !
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