O Say Can You See ............

Well it’s time to play catch up after the long July 4th weekend and I’ll write about stuff that’s on my mind and then we’ll see if there’s a common thread to be found. If there is, so much the better but if the effort is too much for me, please understand.

On the evening of the Fourth, after a good dinner at a local resort, we sat outside to watch the firework display which was accompanied by recorded music as diverse as Lee Greenwood’s “G-d Bless the USA” and various Sousa marches and I began to think.

Clearly immigration is on the minds of all right-thinking Americans and none more than the beleaguered state of Arizona which found out yesterday that the Federal Justice Department is filing suit in order to head off the implementation of our new anti-illegal law.

Note that I said “anti-illegal” as Arizona is no more anti-legal immigration than anywhere else in the country. On the contrary, we celebrate legal immigration as the backbone of this country’s strength and we welcome the skills those immigrants bring. And I know because many decades ago I was one of them.

Now I don’t think of myself as a “huddled mass” but you get my drift. I am so grateful for the opportunities that this land has offered me and it is therefore possible that I am more patriotic than many native-born citizens.

So as I listened to and watched “the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air”, I offered this to my dining companion. It may well be that legal immigrants look at this country as personified by Independence Day in a different light than do those who were born here. Not better or worse but different.

She, my dining companion, is native born and seemed to think that there may be something to the hypothesis because so much is taken for granted by those who’ve always known what it means to be an American and that assumption is perfectly natural. But immigrants, for the most part, remember their previous lives and every July 4th recalls so vividly why we came here and what we sought and what we found.

Of course, there are some immigrants who can’t seem to stop looking back while they point out that which they see as shortcomings within their adopted land. To them I say go back to whatever you miss so much and I also feel sorry for them because they don’t feel that swell of pride of being an integral part of the greatest social and political experiment in history.

Then yesterday, in a seemingly unrelated circumstance I was involved in a short but heated discussion about the current political scene and I was able to add a corollary to the hypothesis cited above.

I was faced with three staunch liberals who tried to tell me that the budget deficit Obama has foisted on us was really all George Bushs’ fault.

Let’s say your first wife is a spendthrift and shops the two of you into near bankruptcy and you file for divorce. But that doesn’t make the debt go away and then, in a second marriage, you come to the curious conclusion that the cure for your financial woes is to triple your previous debt.

Huh?

Because that’s what Obama has done and he’s still got a wallet full of new credit cards.

And my adversaries didn’t stop there but want to see even more “stimulus” money on top of the trillion or so we’ve already spent in spite of the fact that it has produced very few jobs in total and out of those most are in the public sector. Why is it that so many liberals cannot or will not recognize that public sector jobs consume wealth which has to be paid for by private sector jobs which create it?

Liberals don’t like facts and much prefer “feelings” and the few items that follow from the June report of The Institute for Supply Management, ISM, underscore why that is.

125,000 Americans lost their jobs. That means more than 3 million Americans have lost their jobs since President Obama signed the stimulus bill

The U.S. workforce shrank by 652,000, meaning that nearly 8 people left the labor force for each private sector job created. 124,000 of those workers were simply discouraged and have given up trying to find a job. Over the past 12 months, more than 400,000 Americans gave up looking for work.

The 83,000 private-sector jobs added in June is 209,000 jobs below the "replacement level" of 292,000 new jobs a month required to get unemployment back to 5%. In fact, for every one million Americans out of work in June, only 5,600 private sector jobs were filled.

The average time needed to find a job rose to 35.2 weeks. This average time figure is unprecedented in the post-war era.

ISM's employment index fell to 49.7% in June (below 50% means the jobs sector is declining)

When I pointed out that we didn’t have the money for such a lavish spending plan one person, who in the past has referred to Obama as a “Genius”, had the answer. “Print It”, she announced triumphantly. It was at this point that I decided that further discussion was pointless.

Then on the way home it seemed to me that it is liberals, whether native-born or not, who see this country’s “faults” first while conservatives see its strengths.

Clearly this is not absolute and I’m sure you could come up with exceptions as could I but I would suggest it’s not a bad working hypothesis to be going on with.

Well I see a common thread but I'll leave you to find your own if you so desire.

Happy Birthday America!