Tag: Politics

Getting Tough?

Good Stuff, Immigration

Whoa.  How’s this for immigration reform?

Plans are to end migrants’ automatic right to apply for indefinite leave to remain and citizenship after five years as part of a new “controlled, selective and fair” immigration system.
Instead, they face a 10-year wait unless they are able show a “real and lasting contribution” to the economy and society.
Only migrants who show their contribution through their tax returns, work as doctors, nurses or hospital staff and other public services, or outstanding voluntary service will be entitled to apply for permanent residency before the 10-year deadline.
Indefinite leave to remain and citizenship bring with it the right to welfare benefits, free healthcare, full civic rights including voting and the ability to apply for a passport.
The changes are part of a series of measures to “substantially” reduce net migration.

Here are some details.

Language skills.
Skilled foreign workers will face tougher English language tests to get entry visas. Under the proposed rules, they will be required to have the equivalent of [12th-grade] English, where they can speak “fluently and spontaneously” and “flexibly and effectively” for social, academic and professional purposes.
They had previously only been required to be at the [8th-grade] level where migrants have to be able to understand the main issues “regularly encountered in work, school or leisure” and deal with situations “likely to arise while traveling.”
Known as B-2, [12th-grade] English will also be the standard expected of anyone seeking to apply for indefinite leave and then US citizenship, as well as for overseas students.
For the first time, spouses, children or parents of successful visa applicants who want to join them in the US will have to pass language tests which require a basic understanding of English. If the dependents want to extend their visa after two years, they will have to show improvements to pass higher-level tests.

Care workers.
Care homes will be barred from recruiting foreign staff from overseas from later this year and will instead be required to hire foreign workers who are already in the US.
Care homes would be able to recruit from a pool of around 40,000 foreign staff who came on care worker visas only for their visa sponsorship to be cancelled. As explained:
“They are here and care companies should be recruiting from that pool of people, rather than recruiting from abroad. We are closing recruitment from abroad.”

Deportation of criminals.
Under these plans, any offense committed by a foreign national will be reported to ICE rather than only those crimes where they have been jailed, as is presently the rule.
It raises the prospect that migrants could be removed for lower-level offenses. At present, only foreign criminals jailed for more than a year face automatic deportation while the removal of those imprisoned for under a year is discretionary.
The change could mirror moves already announced to class any foreign national placed on the sex offenders’ register, regardless of their sexual crime or sentence, as having committed a “serious crime” with no right to asylum protections.
The new measures would also cover any foreign national arriving on a visa who was subsequently found to have committed crimes abroad but failed to declare them, or who were found guilty of any offences in the US.

Sounds pretty good, dunnit?

Okay, I need to ‘fess up. These aren’t measures proposed by the Trump Administration… but by Britain’s Labour Party.  (I changed some of the words to mislead y’all, sorry.)

But I have to say that if it passes, there’ll be massive weeping and wailing. Hence I expect that lawyers will be powdering their wigs, even as we speak.

I’m normally reluctant to recommend that we copy the Brits, in just about any endeavor;  but I have to say there are some good ideas in there.

Update:  Of course, it could all be a pack of lies.

No Surprises There

Elections, Mocking Furriners

Well, the Strylians have re-elected their left-wing Labor Party by an even larger majority than last time, so clearly they’re happy with Comrade Albanese, his fellow-travelers and their Red & Green policies.

No doubt they’ll combine massive anti-Trumpism with pleas for the US to help them fend off Chinese imperialism in southeast Asia.

Plus ça change, etc.  Hell, even the Brits are showing signs of coming to their senses — but the Strylians?  Forget abaht it, it’s just head-in-the-sand time, pour another beer on the barby and whine about the Poms beating them at cricket.

Useless fucking wankers.

My Loyal Readers from Oz — and there are quite a few — probably feel even worse about the situation than I do.

Being Patient

Bad News, Business, Economics

Like many, I suspect, I was somewhat surprised that our GDP shrank a little during Q1, especially as the job market continues to grow (despite hundreds if not thousands of government jobs ending).  However, we have to remember that we essentially started off the year in Q1 with the last remaining month of Bidenomics, and no doubt the hangover from four years of said stupidity was one hell of a handbrake to the start of the year.

Still, I refuse to be a slave to the “Q” mindset so beloved of financial types, where every fiscal quarter has to show growth even if market conditions make it impossible.  Which, I suspect, is what happened here, for all sorts of reasons.

It’s short-term thinking like this which causes trouble in the longer term.

What we do know, however, is that large corporations are moving production back to the U.S. and away from Asia (especially from China yay) to the tune of some $5.2 trillion — but those are just planned investments, i.e. promises, which will take some time to be realized.  In addition, there are planned growths in ship-building which are almost certain to revive once-moribund areas, not to mention making us both more independent in trade and more secure militarily.  But those too are still in the planning stages.

Factories don’t just spring up overnight, in other words.

Listen:  we all knew that to reverse the tide of red ink, both in government spending and the trade deficit, we would have to experience some discomfort.  And while ICE is doing well — from all accounts, over 60,000 illegals (mostly of the career criminal persuasion) have been booted out in the past three months — but as I’ve said before, that still leaves many millions more that still need to be expelled:  millions of whom, we all know, that are sucking up public money in healthcare and education, to name but two areas of ongoing concern.

The question is:  are we on the right track?

I think so.  The moves to reduce tax burdens on the majority of the population, the DOGE-inspired slashing of government spending and the efforts to cut deadwood and make both business and government more efficient — by stopping the inherent inefficiencies of DEI policy, for one — all mean that the long-term prospects for our economy look promising.

And to a large degree, the market swings caused by the tariff business are simply due to the fact that markets hate uncertainty, because they’re slaves to short-term thinking — remember, stock prices are tracked daily.  These are very uncertain times we live in.

But we need to give the whole thing more time to develop.  We didn’t sink into quasi- (and in some cases actual) socialism in a single quarter, either.  That took decades of work by socialists like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and their cohorts in Congress from even before then.  And we’re not going to reverse this tide in a single quarter.  Hell, it may take years.

It didn’t take that long for Javier Milei to effect massive changes in Argentina, but it should be remembered that taming an inflation rate of hundreds is considerably easier than doing the same to an inflation rate in the teens (as we experienced under Biden), let alone getting inflation into low single digits, which in today’s world is almost impossible and takes a supreme effort of will.

But although cheaper energy and the concomitant lowering of the prices of goods and services is going to make a difference, that’s not going to happen immediately because we still have to drill new holes, build new refineries and get more nuclear power generators online to replace the unreliable and fragile Net Zero-style solar- and wind-based power generators so beloved of the Eco-Nazis.  None of that can happen in a single quarter, either.

We’re doing the right thing — and by “we” I mean the Trump Administration, whom we voted into power.  We just need time to get it done, and not be swayed by short-term thinking.

Leading Indicators

Mocking Furriners, Politics

No, not the economic stuff like M1 or M2;  I’m talking about the old “180-degree” rule:  if what you’re doing is pissing off the right people, then do more of that.

As is happening in Europe, who are collectively [sic]  dismayed and appalled about what the Trump Administration is doing.

Of greatest pleasure to me is the handwringing coming from Britishland, where they are bemoaning our disestablishment of DEI policies.

Wait a minute, that may not be true.  I’m getting still more pleasure from the fact that the Frogs put it all into words:

“Environmental policies have been rolled back, entire government departments and bureaus dismantled, and decades-long diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives were abruptly ended.”

Yup, and you know why all this has happened, Frog-people?  Because the American voters told Trump to do it by voting him back into power.

And as for the Krauts (lol)  saying:

“From banning reporters from the Oval Office to trying to dismantle VOA, Trump’s moves against the press have sparked legal battles, with experts warning that press freedom — and US democracy itself — is threatened.”

…you assholes may want to take that “democracy being threatened” bullshit and burn it to generate some electricity for yourselves.

What the Euros are seeing is… wait for it… actual democracy in action.  Americans voted, and the government is simply doing what a majority of the voters want.

Oh, and as for those “experts” you rely on?  They’re even more full of shit than your politicians.  We don’t need experts to tell us that we have to open our borders to be flooded with criminals, foreign spies and (likely) terrorists — as you Euros have been doing for the past few decades.

And for the writers and readers of the Grauniad:  I can freely say all the above without being afraid of a visit from your English-speaking Stasi agents to warn me that I could find myself in trouble if I carry on publishing such hateful speech.

Fuck you, all of you, and the Socialist / DEI / nation-self-hating horses you rode in on.  You’re becoming irrelevant, and the only interest we have in your future is an academic curiosity as to who will conquer you first:  the Russians or the Muslims.

Please Sir, May I Have Another?

Elections, Mocking Furriners

Well, it seems as though our cousins in the Great White Place have decided that a dozen-odd (very odd) years of Justin Castreaux’s “leadership” were not enough, and have elected his replacement Mark Carney as their next Chief Wokist.

Carney, it should be recalled, was the former head of the Bank of England who will be forever remembered as the man who nearly destroyed Britain’s economy during that messy Brexit business.  Prior to that, he was governor of the Bank of Canuckistan, and is widely seen as the reason housing prices rocketed and ordinary Canuckis ended up with higher debt — the highest ever, as it turned out.  (In fairness, his policies enabled Canuckistan to weather the 2008 global recession in terms of its GDP, but at the expense of said Canuckis, who are still trying to deal with high housing costs.  I report, you decide.)

I have told the tale of back when I was still consulting, we independent consultants had a rule never to work with a startup whose principal officers (CEO, CFO or COO) had a Harvard MBA.  Carney doesn’t have one of those, but his degree in Economics comes from the same institution.  Draw your own conclusions.

There’s more, much more, including his assistance in getting South Africa (!) to participate in international bond markets while he was employed by the infamous Goldman Sachs, of the 2008 global crisis fame, although it should be noted that he left GS five years before that.

By the way, his family is a poster-child for ultra-wokery — not that this should be a disqualifier, of course, but it does point to what he comes home to every night.

Anyway, this economics whiz* is the man Canuckis have elected to be their Prime Minister for the foreseeable future, and his first public statement as PM was a strong anti-Trump message, which means that it’s unlikely that Canuckistan will ever become our 51st state.

So in that, at any rate, we Murkins can breathe a sigh of relief.

*Just FYI, the word whiz  is also a euphemism for a stream of piss.