"using existing resources" and without offering overtime hours to employees.

***

Ah yes you've got to love the corporitization of the foreign service. Good grief. I'm sure this won't affect turnover at all.

I agree a good issue for Dean when he discusses foreign policy and economics. I mean if the Chamber is against this and the immigrant rights groups are against it, that's a winning issue.


I see Homeland Security as one issue that Dean could have the hardest time overcoming. An attack on this policy will surely be misconstrued by Republicans. In my opinion, Dean will have to stick closely to the point that this is an important security increase that deserves extra funding.


Once again misplaced scrutiny. Exempting any Country is as wrong-minded as targeting others. It makes doing business in the US much more difficult and immigrating 'Evil Doers' a tad more inconvenient. Who is fooled by this garbage, certainly not the people that mean to do us harm. I think an arguing point can be made that the money it will take to do these face-to -face interviews may be better spent reinstating slashed funds for first responders.


To follow up with a back-of-the-envelope economic impact calculation:
let's say this discourages 5 million people from visiting the country each year. Let's say each of them would have spent $2000 on each visit. This means the direct decrease in GDP is $10 billion. A guess for the multiplier for foreigner dollars spent in the U.S. is 5, which would mean that these measures will cost the U.S. $50 billion in lost output. And that's just the simple economic costs.

Of course the costs of increasing overtime would be a tiny fraction of that. The figures in the article suggest that 15 million people a year will have to be interviewed, up from around 7 million. That's 8 million people new people being interviewed. Let's say each interview lasts an hour. That gives us 8 million man-hours of time required. Let's say State Dept. overseas overtime costs $100/hr. That means paying for the overtime would cost $800 million. Let's be even more conservative and round this up to $1 billion. So for want of $1 billion, GDP will drop $50 billion. How many jobs lost does this translate to? If 2/3 of output goes to wages (the rest is returns to capital), this is $33 billion in lost wages. If average salaries are around $30,000, this translates into 1 million jobs lost!


Who cares if anything Dean does is "misconstrued by Republicans"? They will misconstrue it for no other reason than to make Dean look bad. We can't operate from a position of worrying about how the Republicans will misconstrue and misrepresent us.

I think Dean can WIN on the issue of homeland security by simply pointing out, repeatedly, how Bush has failed to truly implement significant improvement in homeland security. This would include pointing out how Bush is more interested in cutting taxes than he is in funding these efforts.


I'm of the opinion that the sleeper issue for Dean is loan forgiveness for college students. It can be done at random. But take a billion from the tax cuts he plans to restore and simply forgive or pay off those debts. That would result in a lot of happy voters. The other thing I'm worried about here is what will it matter if the House and Senate remain in GOP hands? Does he have a set of principles the entirety of the dem party can run on?


A good find. I don't know if this is a good issue by itself, but in my opinion it is a GREAT example of what he's talking about when he discusses the issue of Bush not funding security - and he could use it to reinforce his point.


Chris wrote: "Who cares if anything Dean does is "misconstrued by Republicans"? They will misconstrue it for no other reason than to make Dean look bad. We can't operate from a position of worrying about how the Republicans will misconstrue and misrepresent us."

HOORAY FOR CHRIS!!!!!!


Meanwhile: "[An OMB official] told Congress earlier this year that the Bush administration wants to expand contracts going to veteran-owned businesses and 'is working hard to place the interests of small and new entrants to the procurement system at the forefront of our policy.'

"Yet since the Bush administration took office, the federal government’s performance in this area has been exceedingly poor.

"Data obtained from the government’s Federal Procurement Data System shows that the overall share of federal contract dollars flowing to veterans has fallen by nearly half since 2000, from close to 1 percent that year to about 0.5 percent in fiscal 2002, the last year for which statistics are available.

"Particularly galling to veterans groups is the failure of the Defense Department to address the issue."


It seems to me the Republicans treatment of veterans could be a nice talking point. The Republicans just keep sending them off to war for extended periods ( Like the guys who thought they were coming home from Iraq, but aren't, 150,000-200,000 troops may be there for years) and at the same time they leave them out of the tax cut. (most noncoms in army make less than $26,000, were not included in $400 taxcredit per child. That may have just been corrected today) Veterans benefits get cut so people, who more than likely, don't have a son or daughter in the service can have a tax cut. Patience points out veterans are getting fewer govt contracts under Bush adm. At time when we are asking the most of people in the service, the Republicans treat them with the least respect. Another one of those say one thing and do another the Republicans are so good at.


Maybe I didn't make it clear enough in my original post that I think (and Dean could certainly say) that it's absolutely reasonable and perhaps even sensible to have more stringent interview requirements, but we've got to commit the resources to do it. Homeland security on the cheap is not going to do it.

On my blog I've titled this "Operation Piss Off the Planet and Kill One Million Jobs." I'm soliciting input from economist friends to fine tune the numbers that go into the calculation. Since my calcs are conservative, I think a more precise calculation will show even greater job loss.


On the street I hear a lot of people asking where Dean stands on immigration. Can't find anything on this on the official Dean campaign site. Anyone have any links or info on this?


I recall something about immigration came up in the Iowa forum, but I can't recall what he said, and unfortunately there's no transcript out there.


Thanks for the math Gabriel.
There is so much to pick on with GW's bungling of International issues.
If we can make a meme out of 'Bush has failed to secure our borders' we can get into some good, hairy arguments with the "Iraq was bad and we made it good' idiots.
It gives us a chance to beat up the 'Pro-War Wins Elections' crap.