Posted on 02/04/2006 4:38:34 AM PST by Tyche
Making a strong pitch for America to stay competitive in the face of emerging economies such as India and China, President George W Bush has urged the Congress to raise the number of H-1B visas that allow companies to hire foreign workers for scientific and high tech jobs.
"Congress needs to understand that nations like India, China, Japan, Korea and Canada all offer tax incentives that are permanent. In other words, we live in a competitive world. We want to be the leader in this world," Bush said in a speech in Minnesota on Thursday.
To fill vacant jobs in the US, Bush urged the Congress to lift current limit on H-1B visas that allow foreign workers to get jobs in the United States. The Congress in 2005 capped at 65,000 the number of H-1B visas, a third of the 195,000 allowed during the technology boom.
"I think it's a mistake not to encourage more really bright folks who can fill the jobs that are having trouble being filled here in America, to limit their number. So I call upon Congress to be realistic and reasonable and raise that cap," Bush said, but did not say by how much he wanted the limit lifted.
He said that one part of the agenda to stay competitive was to study math and science, a theme he touched on in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday.
"It's one thing to research, but if you don't have somebody in that lab, well… And so I got some ideas for the Congress to consider. The first is to emphasize math and science early, and to make sure that the courses are rigorous enough that our children can compete globally," Bush said in a speech at the 3M Corporation.
He said there are more high-tech jobs in America today than people available to fill them. "So what do we do about that? And the reason it's important -- and the American citizen has got to understand it's important -- is if we don't do something about how to fill those high-tech jobs here, they'll go somewhere else where somebody can do the job."
"There are some who say, we can't worry about competition. It doesn't matter, it's here. It's a real aspect of the world in which we live," he said.
"And so one way to deal with this problem, and probably the most effective way, is to recognize that there's a lot of bright engineers and chemists and physicists from other lands that are either educated here, or received an education elsewhere but want to work here. And they come here under a programme called H1B visas," Bush said.
He said America should not fear competition. "It's important for us not to lose our confidence in changing times. It's important for us not to fear competition but welcome it."
Senior administration officials noted that the number of H-1B visas has fallen to 65,000 which in their estimation was 'too low' and that it was imperative 'to bump that up.'
". . . some of reports have called for increases of 10,000; others between 20,000 and 40,000. So there is a number of options on the table to be considered. But we'll work with Congress on that," said Claude Allen, assistant to the President for domestic policy.
State governments take a cut of "capital gains". The Federal government does as well, except for a few escape clauses.
Agree.
You have a particular state in mind? One that takes a cut of home sale profits under $500,000 for a married couple?
No, that's not it.
I wish I had - but I do emphasize (sic) with them - they are being screwed by the owner class, as the owner's take advantage of the their usually inherited positions to plunder the worker class of their activity, ingenuity, and productivity. It is time to push back, to gain some equity in what we produce.
This might be it:
The value of a product equals the amount of labor that goes into making it. For example, if a factory buys some wood for $50 and then uses $100 worth of labor to turn it into a table, the fair price for the finished table is $150. Any excess that the factory charges - any profit - is thus a theft from both workers and consumers; and as this stolen value accumulates, the factory owner gets to exploit society on an ever larger scale. Or as Marx puts it in his own high style, "Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks."
Well, Pennsylvania will take 3% or so of the "profit".
That sucks. Most states take the AGI number from the Feds, a few like to take away the exemptions the Feds give us.
Cool, you're from PA too, I'm here in the Pittsburgh area!
All they know is their stupid punch lines or how much special interest money they got.
I would say based on my experience, when things get explained out to those 'ill effected' they at least try to understand, at least in general.
The ones you describe... the uber ultra Reagan-was-a-panzy-liberal types there is no talking to them.
My position is that Free Trade in its proper sense is not a bad thing. First we have to understand what Free Trade is. In the midst of them screaming over the top of each other both sides tend to eagerly forget that definition.
This crap is getting worse than Roe V. Wade except its not the left vs. the right. Its nothing more than a divisive bunch of crap. The difference between Roe V Wade and trade is that there are non religious based facts involved. IE Whats morally right by me might not be accepted by others... however 2+2=4 no matter who the heck you are.
There is no semblance of balance when talking to the ultra righter than Reaganites.
The difficulty in shutting those @ssholes up is that they won't shut up long enough nor listen to a response.
They know the outcome they want and will cry and scream over the top of everyone and call everyone else condescending names until 'everyone accepts' their point of view.
Who cares about the science involved. They want what they want and no matter what they are going to scream until they get it. Even when they are wrong they scream and call names and refuse to listen. Anyone who wants to get a word in is a doom and gloom liberal panzy. Anything that doesn't kowtow to their arrogance is blown off as useless.
These jerkwads are going to be the decline of the Republican party if we let them be in charge of much of anything.
Astute observation. We're living through the end of the kind of society that Ayn Rand described in Atlas Shrugged.
The people who create things, produce things, or just plain make things work - are the enemies of the non-producing socialists who control the reins of government and big business. This bunch of counter-productive socialists also includes the RINO neo-cons who, (according to Irving Crystol, who coined the "neo-con" label), were liberals who had become disenchanted with the more extreme Democrat liberals in the late '60s and '70s, so they moved into the Republican party and took it over.
Now the Republican and Democrat parties are both controlled by liberals with only minor differences on foreign policy. The liberals of both parties are anti-American, pro-socialist, and uniformly globalist.
Outsourcing and the importing of H-1B workers haven't affected the incomes of many Education majors, or Sociology, or Psychology, or History majors, or students of any of that other fluff. Most of these people don't create anything, or produce anything, they don't fix anything, and they could't make anything work if their life depended on it. But they dominate the management ranks of government and corporations, and they dominate the political ranks in both major parties. They decide who gets hired, who gets fired, and who gets replaced with foreigners, who gets taxed the most for the least, and who benefits from monsterous government and bureaucracy, and who gets crushed.
The primary targets of outsourcing and the importing of H-1B visa workers have been Computer Science, Business, Engineering, and technical professionals who create stuff and make stuff work, and on down to the workers and supervisors on the shop floors.
Academia and government are exempt from caps on H-1B visas. They can, and do, bring in many thousands that are not even counted in the official reports. They don't care how many come in, because they have ever-expanding budgets, and they can "create" whole new bureaucracies to absorb as many guest workers and immigrants as can get in the country. Corporate managers don't care that nothing works, so long as their salaries and bonuses benefit from the cheaper labor. The IRS suspects they are losing billions of dollars from H-1B fraud, but has decided it is easier to clamp down harder on American citizens to make up for their shortfalls.
It is just like the train-wreck scene, in living color.
Charging American students the same price for education as students in China or India have to pay would be a good start. (scholarships and college debt forgiveness?)
Neither of this items are related to the economic interests. How convenient. If Democrats did not betray their base (Reagan Democrats are part of it) and did not promote atheism, homosexuality and abortion, they would be winning by landslides like FDR did.
I am curious, do you think that such thing as exploitation exists? If so, how do you define it?
That seems ironic to me. The nurse field is filled with H-1C and even H-1B foreigners.
I hope me kids go to engineering school.
Not every net growth is good. For example the system in which one family lives on 70K a year while the other lives on 30K a year is better than the one where one family lives on 100K a year while the other lives on 10K a year.
Also the larger size of economy is not always better - the day you merge USA with Latin America you will get significant instant "increase".
Majoring in science and engineering isn't the problem. We already have those people. The problem isn't education or training. The problem is that nobody's being honest. The problem is that these people are being brought here - not to fill vacancies for dificult to fill positions. They're being brought here to replace American workers. That is the bottom line and the reality that Bush et al do not want to discuss honestly.
The president seems to be dedicating himself through lies and deciet to a war against American workers. At best, I'd say that is ill advised. At worst, well, war is hell..
The fact is we are in a global economy and are going to have to compete in the same like it or not.
If we cannot do that we are well and truly screwed like that or not.
Sitting around crying and begging someone to protect us from it because we are, after all, Americans serves no purpose whatever because it is FAR to late for that in any case. The genie is out of the bottle and there is no getting him back in!
We can waste more time exploring all the reasons for that if we wish but what we REALLY need to do is what Americans always have done, suck it up, stop whining, and go to work!
If you must blame someone blame me and others like me, who are a good deal older than you and who were far to busy making our own way in the world to pay attention to what our political leaders were doing to us for far to long. That great sin has allowed our public education systems to become the cesspools of mediocrity that they have become amoungst many other things. I have tried my best to atone for my sins in that area for a long time now and have just begun to make a little progress I think. There is ample work yet to be done however and those of us whoare largely responsible for the condition we currently find ourselves in are not going to be around to get all that needs doing done. YOU are going to have to do it yourselves like it or not!
Our president is a good man and I will not sit idly by and see him trashed for simply pointing out the obvious. The enemy is not G. W. Bush. The enemy is, as was pointed out long ago by that great philosopher POGO, us. Only we can fix it!
There are two courses open to us. We can either get busy and prepare ourselves to compete globally, requiring that we get our own house in order in every aspect, or we can not do that and continue on the path to destruction we currently find ourselves on.
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