The justification for racial preferences in government activity continues to dwindle. We need to get Affirmative Action and other programs off the books and let people and companies be hired on merit rather than genetic makeup. Of course, we also need less government spending to be fought over. Government has no business being a major employer.

This is also an effect of society’s push to get moms away from the business of motherhood. Delay child-rearing or suffer the consequences, an ABC News article tells us today. High taxes and high costs have both mom and dad out of the home. Dual-income-no-kids families learn painful lessons about maintaining their previously affordable homes and cars when they start their families late. Having made a lot of pre-kid investments, they put the brakes on the number of kids they raise; thus the reproductive slowdown.

Changing demographics has its challenges: we have to assume less in a heterogeneous world. Family values aren’t the same from family to family. We cannot rely on secular societal institutions to preserve our values. It is a call to the church to reestablish its principles through preaching and the Word.

Board Chairman Corey A. Stewart said this week he was not surprised about signs that illegal immigrants were leaving.

“There’s no question the police have had the effect,” said Mr. Stewart, a Republican who is planning to run for lieutenant governor.

They don’t have to move far. Mr. Rainer, MD, is only an hour away.

Most of the questions are fairly simple. I don’t think this is too much to ask, especially since only six correct answers are required to pass. I could probably pass this test in Spanish.

My only gripe is that for #42, the question reads, “Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the states. What is one power of the states?” I would change that to read, “Under our Constitution, nearly all powers belong to the states under the 9^th and 10^th Amendments…”

Roll Call No. 235 shows Ohio Senators Brown and Voinovich doing a 180° from their previous votes, as well as Senator Brownback. I guess you could say they were for amnesty before they were against it.

I just read Lawrence’s comment on the previous vote being a procedural device to get to this vote. It sounds like poker, with a raise and a re-raise.

Way to go Ohio, for getting both Senators to vote No!

“We are missing up to a third of our seasonal laborers,” Dietrich Paul, president of the association of asparagus farmers in Lower Saxony, told the Sunday tabloid Bild am Sonntag. “If it continues like this, fruit and vegetable farming in Germany is in trouble.”

The problem, say German farmers, is a law pushed through in 2006 which sought to limit the use of seasonal workers from abroad and to increase the number of unemployed Germans working in German fields. Before the law, up to 90 percent of those bringing in the harvest in German fields came from Poland, Romania and other countries in Eastern Europe; the new regulation said the proportion of foreign field laborers should be scaled back to 80 percent.

There is no statutory minimum wage in Germany, and there doesn’t need to be. Germans can negotiate whatever price they are willing to get to earn to harvest asparagus, and they should. Asparagus prices will go up, and no one is to blame but German lawmakers.

There are several facets I’d like to address.

The sheltering of illegal immigrants by churches, be they Roman Catholic, Methodist, or otherwise, flies in the face of the authority given to the state by God in Romans 13:1-7. Deportation is not unjust or unfair; these people risked coming to the United States illegally. They come ahead of all the people who take years to come in legally. If the state were to engage in extermination, that’s another issue.

Illegal immigrants have sufficient incentive for risking life and limb coming to the United States but not enough incentive to do it legally.

The incentives for becoming legal have decreased: we now mandate free emergency room care for illegal aliens. We teach them in the public schools. Banks are opening accounts for them. Border towns are considering using illegal aliens as law enforcement. Some states are considering the granting of drivers’ licenses upon proof of a “matricula consular” card.

The cost of illegal immigration would not be felt so much if we did not extend our entitlements to them, but we should realize that our entitlements come as a cost to us, too. Those in government have incentive to buy votes with the availability of government services.

The barriers to legal entry are insanely long; it should not take years to become a citizen.

Some don’t want to become citizens. They want to come here, gain money over several years, and take it back home with them. These people would be better served if we weren’t so nervous about building industry in Mexico. Our own worries about job protectionism keeps some of our companies from hiring Mexicans in Mexico. With a more conservative president, socialist Mexico would do well to reduce the government take and allow more investment by U.S. private companies. The demand for labor would mean higher wages and more people staying in Mexico.

Congress is once again trying to raise the minimum wage in the next appropriations bill for Iraq. Raising the minimum wage prices citizens out of the market. Their payrolls or contract labor are reported to the IRS. Illegal aliens have no such disincentive. They assume the risk of deportation to allow the employer not to pay Social Security and incur other governmental costs. There is an effort to make employers more accountable for whom they hire; this just makes hiring people more expensive for an employer and requires significant information gathering. We need to reduce (or eliminate) the minimum wage so that those who want to work for less, can.

Currently it seems that the only reasons one should become a citizen in the United States are to vote, to avoid deportation, and to pay income tax. Given some of the things that we vote for, like big government vs. even bigger government, that’s not a real incentive for people to get legal. We cannot muster the manpower to break down everyone’s door and check for identifying documents. Finally, who wants to pay income tax?

Measures include a watch list of illegal immigrants to alert government agencies if someone applies for services to which they are not entitled and workplace enforcement teams to track down bosses employing people who should not be in the country.

Landlords could be fined up to 20,000 pounds for housing illegal immigrants in overcrowded flats.

Pilot schemes will be set up in three NHS Trusts to use government data to ensure migrants pay for care where required.

Conservatives are criticizing Reid for not working to deport illegals, but I think you have to work both sides of supply and demand. The UK (and the US for that matter) wouldn’t have to fight illegal immigration so hard if we weren’t so hell-bent on government providing free services and force-pricing legal labor out of the market.

Under the bill, every child born in California after Jan. 1, 2008, would receive the money, regardless of their parents’ income or immigration status. Recipients would repay the state’s initial $500 investment once they turn 18.

Regardless of immigration status? As if we didn’t provide enough incentive for families to come across and have their children in the States. Is the federal government going to be responsible for the increased immigration costs, as the governor would like to see happen? Indeed the federal government is constitutionally bound to protect the states from invasion (Article IV, Section 4), but California need not make the situation worse.

If families added $50 a month to the state’s initial contribution, the savings account would grow to nearly $17,500 at 5 percent interest over 18 years. Steinberg said that would promote saving money in a culture that now is carrying record levels of debt and has the lowest savings rate since the Great Depression.

Using Excel’s FV() formula, at 5%, 216 payments (18×12), $50 payments, with a $500 present value, I get:

FV(5%/12,216,-50,-500,1) = $18,760.36

Start without the $500 kick off, and I get:

FV(5%/12,216,-50,0,1) = $17,532.85

The $500 provided by the government results in $1227.51, but one has to give $500 back, so the net entitlement is just $727.51 at age 18. Hopefully this will still be enough to buy books in 2025.

When government feels it needs to legislate what should naturally be good behavior, it pays to figure out who benefits from this legislation. This forces deposits to be higher, so the banks win. They can take the deposits and make even more money. The $727.51 may seem like free money until one considers that it was confiscated from some Californians in the form of taxes.

I wonder how the interest from the forced savings will be taxed. A 1099-INT in every pot!

The project is a gold mine for anyone affiliated with Cintra Zachry, a collaboration of Zachry Construction Corporation, Spanish road management company CINTRA (Google Translate), and other firms:

Total cost of designing and building the corridor would be $8.8 billion, up from previous estimates of $7.2 billion. Private companies would pay that cost, plus fees totaling $1.9 billion, in exchange for the right to collect tolls for 50 years. The state Transportation Department would use the money on other work.

Of course, the federal government is involved:

While it’s considered a privately funded project, a third of the road construction and design costs — about $3.2 billion — would be in the form of federal transportation loans. The federal government would be repaid over 35 years, with interest.

The $3.2 billion would double the number of projects funded by Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loans since Congress created the program in 1998.

The gift keeps on giving:

Cintra Zachry will keep a special relationship with the (Texas) Transportation Department for years to come. The state paid the company $3.5 million for the master plan, and it awarded Cintra Zachry a $1.4 billion contract to build a portion of the corridor near Austin.

They also to get to revise the master plan yearly, for a yet-to-be-determined fee. Cintra Zachry also wants exclusive rights to build a rail line around Fort Worth and a highway loop around both Dallas and Fort Worth.

In Texas, they do everything big. Land grabs, government contracts, you name it. $8.8 billion is the present-day estimate. That a lot of money that could be put to other uses or not collected from taxpayers in the first place.