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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