Thread: Awful economy? How wonderful!

Awful economy? How wonderful!
By Dan Moffett

Palm Beach Post Columnist

Sunday, January 04, 2009

The Bush administration wants you to be aware of all the wonderful benefits that a tanking economy can bring.

You should know that fewer people are dying on the nation's highways because high unemployment and volatile gas prices mean fewer people are driving.


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Fewer cars on the road helps reduce pollution. Who says the Bush administration doesn't care about the environment? American families aren't wasting their money on foreign vacations and instead are renting fine American movies and enjoying educational reality TV shows. It's a great opportunity to learn life lessons from Jeff Conaway, Bret Michaels and Sharon Osbourne.

Many troubled couples are rejecting costly and messy divorces and are choosing to continue living together in consuming, dehumanizing, affordable misery instead.

Complaints about unfair hiring practices have plummeted because no one is hiring. You don't hear people worrying about a shortage of housing in middle-class neighborhoods anymore because there are plenty of empty homes and the middle-class is getting a lot smaller.

The amount of cheap and dangerous stuff imported from China has been dramatically reduced. The number of newspapers also has fallen sharply, so millions of trees will be spared the trip to the paper mill.

The Bush administration deserves its share of the credit for delivering the benefits of economic implosion to the nation. But it seems reluctant to claim all of them.

Last week, for example, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff announced that the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has fallen sharply. Mr. Chertoff cited three reasons for the decline: The new border fence which now spans about 550 miles; the growing ranks of federal agents, up about 6,000 on the border; and tougher workplace enforcement that has led to the arrests of about 5,200 workers, more than 10 times the arrests of six years ago.

Mr. Chertoff barely mentioned the biggest reason for the declining numbers. Border crossings have fallen to a 30-year low because the U.S. economy has fallen at least as far.

Illegal immigrants aren't coming because there aren't any jobs. In fact, many illegal immigrants are choosing to return on their own because their economic prospects south of the border look better than staying here.

It makes no sense to pay $3,000 or more to a smuggler and risk your life hiking through the desert when there's no job prospects on the other side. While the fence, the new agents and the arrests have had an impact, nothing deters economic refugees as much as a bad economy.

Mr. Chertoff won't be remembered for his awareness of the obvious. We were reminded of that three weeks ago when an investigation by one of the agencies he oversees, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, turned up an embarrassing fact.

It turns out that, for the last three years, Mr. Chertoff has paid a Maryland-based cleaning company $185 every few weeks to clean his suburban Washington home.

Federal investigators found the company hired illegal workers, which means either illegal immigrants dusted Mr. Chertoff's coffee table and scrubbed his kitchen, or they directly enabled those who did.

Americans need to hear more about the Bush administration's high-level research on political hypocrisy and how a tanking economy is really making life better for us all.

Dan Moffett is a former member of The Post Editorial Board. His e-mail address is moff1013@aol.com



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as long as illegal immigration is reduced ...we are all the better for it in the short and long run.

Along the same line as Bush's wonderful reframing skills ( reframing is taking bad situations and stating them as if they were positive). It's a darn good thing, Bush is leaving office so that the American people don't have to use there hard earned money to go to Washington and buy tar and feathers and a hand rail to remove him from office. Just think about all the money the American tax payer will save!

And too, American citizens, won't have to take any time off from work as they will need that job and tax revenues to spread their wealth along with the cow manure that the next criminal president Obama has stated he intends to burden us with, etc. I'm sure Obama's use of our tax dollars will make us all forget about the depression our greedy political and coporate tycoons dumped on us.

And just think, after Bush is gone, we will have a president that isn't even a legal naturalized citizen, it will be just like having an illegal in the white house! What an adventure!

Want to boost the economy? Get rid of the 20-30 million Illegal aliens, you'll lose atleast 1 trillion in debt right there, plus open up millions of jobs for unemployed americans. Thats the best economic stimulus package, better than printing money and increasing hyper-inflation.