Christiane Amanpour's Dishonest Jobs Roundtable Avoids Immigration's Employment Damage
06/06/2011
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Maybe every Nation gets the Commentariat it deserves. But is America really so bad?

Trapped on a drive this evening I listened to ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour. It mainly featured the unemployment situation, with an interview with Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Austan Goolsbee about recent poor Job growth and then a ”Roundtable” with a panel of three of whom the most notable was Paul Krugman.

Goolsbie’s main point was that there has been some job growth.

Both the other Panelists agreed with Krugman that

for about 18 months, we've had an economy that's recovering in a technical sense, but it's not generating jobs faster than population growth. So we've basically been in a holding pattern, and that's likely to continue.
(Transcript, P4)

As Chrsytia Freeland of Thomson Reuters put it

you need 150,000 jobs a month just to tread water. And that's not taking into account all of those millions of people who lost their jobs in the recession.
As a solution, Krugman demanded more fiscal and monetary stimulus while the others mumbled about the debt ceiling and the regulatory burden.

NO ONE MENTIONED CURRENT IMMIGRATION (currently a million a year legal, perhaps 300,000 illegal, unmatched in previous slumps) even though they identified ”population growth” as one side of the equation. Restraining supply — an Immigration Moratorium - is apparently a taboo topic.

This is particularly contemptible of Krugman, who although he has a history of immigration enthusiasm, did question the 2007 Amnesty when it suited his partisan book — in the process proving he understands the process. Evidently some other element in his personal agenda takes priority over American workers at present.

If the others had the brains to understand the issue, they probably also knew mentioning it would get them repressed.

Amanpour, who of course is an Iranian/British immigrant, could have raised it herself. But she probably agrees with Matt Taibbi.

A sickeningly pitiful performance.

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