Lee and Schumer: Strange Bedfellows Agree on Immigration Bill

Did you ever think you'd see the day when a tea party activist, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), and a New York liberal, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), could not only agree on something, but co-sponsor a narrowly crafted immigration reform bill? YIKES!!

Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY)

Well, stop the presses. . . it's happened today. They are introducing significant immigration reform legislation that congeals around an idea no one has ever brought up before. Let's bring foreign nationals and their investment dollars into the United States legally, and encourage their purchases of residential real estate to lift real estate prices by introducing some demand into the vast inventory of foreclosed, government-owned homes on the market currently.

It's a legitimate effort to boost housing prices that have not only languished, but continued to decline in some afflicted areas. There are strict provisions to bring capital into the U.S. without granting an automatic path to citizenship. Simultaneously, the bill will introduce some much-needed revisions to speeding up visa applications by installing technology (video-conferencing) to speed up processing.

It's a well-thought-out approach in a narrow segment of a complex immigration pie, but it's a good first step. Schumer says the bill's provisions have won endorsements from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Travel Association, the American Hotel and Lodging Association, and the U.S. Olympic Committee.

In a press release explaining the bill, Lee's office said:

"The Visa Improvements to Stimulate International Tourism to the United States of America Act (VISIT-USA Act) would remove bureaucratic red tape that stifles travel and investment in the U.S. For instance, the bill would reduce barriers for Canadian and Chinese visitors whose consumer spending provides a lift to the U.S. economy. The bill would also expedite priority visa applicants, introduce videoconferencing as a means to screening foreign nationals, and make major changes to visa procedures for U.S. allies in the fight against al Qaeda."

Lee released another statement, clarifying the details of the proposed legislation. It's not intended to be a comprehensive approach. Rather, like eating the elephant one bite at a time, Lee and Schumer have found AN area of agreement (ONE ONLY) around which they can cobble legislation in a constructive way.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT)

Lee says buyers under the provisions of the proposed legislation will not be allowed to purchase a home by taking out a mortgage. They must pay up front and in cash in order to qualify. They will not create additional risk in our financial system, nor will they create a stream of interest payments to our major banks. The plan is not intended to go through the banks, a plus to those who view banks as the evil empire.

He also says this bill does not create a new market that did not exist previously. Foreign buyers accounted for roughly $82 billion of American real estate purchases in the most recent year tracked by the National Association of Realtors. "A full quarter of those buyers came from our neighbor to the north, Canada, with whom we share the world’s longest open border," explains Senator Lee.

The purpose of this bill is to support a free market method of increasing demand for housing at a time when so many working-class Americans who are underwater on their homes are desperate for prices to rise again. We all know the big-government programs to assist banks and borrowers have failed to work.

Lee concludes, "I am sponsoring this bill because I know that it makes economic sense while protecting American citizens."

Great idea. Kudos to the honorable Senators for coming up with a creative and innovative way to bring a foreign infusion of investment capital into our struggling economic system and to come up with a free-market solution to helping reduce the deficit.

After I saw the headline, overcame my shocked initial response and dived a little deeper into the detail, I like it!

But then, I like Mike (still do).

Top Four Reasons Liberalism is Failing

I hate to be the messenger of bad news -- I'm always looking for the bright side.  However, there are hard data now emerging to suggest the liberal agenda advanced by President Barack Obama for the past eighteen months is failing miserably.  It isn't just your imagination.  I have been stunned -- more honestly AMAZED -- that we have been revisiting socialist ideas as the way to heal America's economy.  I thought we had grown up in our thinking.

But I digress.  Here are the top four reasons I'm seeing:

1.  The housing market is still in dire straits despite all the bailouts and the stimulus legislation that's been thrown at it.  Instead of the government trying to solve this problem, letting foreclosures proceed and the market finding its own bottom, the administration has actually slowed the readjustment in pricing by artificially trying to prop it up.  The first-time home buyer tax credit expired in July.  The result from this artificial "prop" to housing pricing was predictable, reaffirming we haven't found the bottom yet.  This week, the National Association of Realtors reported July sales of existing homes fell by 27 percent from June of this year and by 25.5 percent compared to July 2009.  The annual sales rate of 3.83 million homes, they stated, was the lowest since NAR began keeping track of sales in 1999.  Further, the Commerce Department reported July sales of new homes fell 12.4 percent from June and by 32.4 percent compared to July 2009.  The annual rate of 276,000 new units sold is the lowest since 1963, when government records were first kept.  The source of the plunge is no secret: July's numbers reflect the first month when existing home sales received no boost from the home buyer tax credit.

2.  New automobile sales are drying up after the ill-fated "Cash for Clunkers" program ended.  Again, it was an artificial "fix" that didn't fix anything.  New automobile sales tanked when the program ended.  General Motors' sales dropped 36 percent in September 2009 compared with August.  Ford collapsed by 37 percent, and Chrysler sales dropped by a similar percentage, 33 percent.  So who's benefiting in the car market?  It's not the manufacturers of new vehicles.  Used car sales have rocketed up this year, and your local mechanic is doing a land office business.  Because everyone's credit has been dinged, people are hanging on to their used cars and getting them repaired or buying a lower-priced used car.  It can be traced to the government's intrusion into the marketplace.  When does the government finally wake up to the reality that you can't provide a "free lunch" to everyone?  When you provide this grab bag of goodies with borrowed money from the Chinese, you don't create new wealth in the U.S.  All that happens is the government moves money around from one "pocket" to another, but nothing of value is being created.  It's Economics 101.  Unfettered markets would find the right places to put the money without a government-mandated program.

3.  Stimulus spending isn't stimulating much at all. Government spending does not stimulate economic growth. All it does is move resources away from one sector of the economy to another. Pick any "central government" in the world -- their track record for correctly and efficiently allocating resources is abysmal.  The USSR, with a GNP 1/6 the size of the U.S. economy in the 80s was outspending us in military spending 3:1.  We all know how Ronald Reagan exploited that disparity and convinced Mikail Gorbachev their priorities were going to bankrupt them.  All Reagan had to do to end the cold war was to convince them we were not the least bit interested in their destruction.  Remember "MAD?"  It was the acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, and it was flawed.  When government attempts to allocate resources, jobs are lost, not created, in the shuffle and the transfer of the resources.  Why liberals can't see this simple fact is hard to fathom.  I was astounded back in February 2009, when I heard President Obama, say:  "This is not something that we're just doing to grow government. We're doing this because this is what the best minds tell us needs to be done." That statement is either naive or intentionally misleading.  Evidence from past history suggests exactly the opposite.  The "best minds" in today's administration must be dead wrong in their assumptions.  Forty-five years ago, when he was still Governor of California, Ronald Reagan asserted: "Anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we're always 'against' things — we're never 'for' anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so."  I told you he was the "common sense purveyor," remember?  You could lift that line right out of today's headlines -- "The Republicans are the party of 'No.'"  Things haven't changed much.

4.  The Home Affordable Modification Progam has been a dismal failure.  I was invited to participate in the program last year -- one year ago this month -- by making three months of reduced mortgage payments during a "trial period."  So I made the first three trial payments, then the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth without so much as a word about what was happening to my loan.  Finally, four months ago I was told I was approved for my modification, and to be sure to look for my new modified mortgage papers in the mail "within a matter of days."  You guessed it -- nothing yet, and we're now in the second year of waiting patiently for President Obama's rescue package.  Some stimulus.  At a meeting last week with leading economic bloggers, attended by Obama's economic advisor, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the program designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure was discussed.  Not surprisingly, the "best minds" in government judged "HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock."  Really?  Because it "helped banks" it's a success?  Really?  And what about the little people?  How's that been working out so far for all of you? 

Shocked at the admission that HAMP was meant to bail out banks and not help owners, Media Matters fellow Duncan Black wrote: "When Liberalism Doesn't Work It Discredits Liberalism." 

Liberalism is not working. Socialism is a failed experiment.  Charles Krauthammer weighed in on this topic in the Washington Post.  As usual, he nailed it on the head with even more ammunition than I've used here.  The sooner we leave it in our rearview mirror, the sooner the American economy can get back on track unaided by its government's "best minds." 

We'll find out in the coming months just how discredited it is in the eyes of the American people.  The best gauge you can watch is what happens in the mid-term elections on November 2nd.  And, yes, I AM wishing time away until then. . .