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The Prescience of Rick Perry
If the Obama years have vivified anything for us, it’s that progressivism is an ideology based on the assumption that incentives don’t matter. Understand that — understand the cracks in the left’s very intellectual foundations — and you’ll understand why Niebuhr-reading Harvard Law Review presidents with perfectly creased pants have a harder time discerning the consequences of public action (or inaction, as the case may be) than cowboy boot-wearing, coyote-shooting cotton farmers. From David Nakamura in the Washington Post:
In a letter to Obama more than two years ago, [Rick] Perry raised a red alarm about an influx of unaccompanied children crossing the southern border, citing federal statistics showing that the number of minors had shot up 90 percent.
“By failing to take immediate action to return these minors to their countries of origin and prevent and discourage others from coming here, the federal government is perpetuating the problem,” Perry wrote to Obama in May 2012. “Inaction encourages other minors to place themselves in extremely dangerous situations. . . .Every day of delay risks more lives. Every child allowed to remain encourages hundreds more to attempt the journey.”
Two years later, Perry’s letter appears prescient. The number of unaccompanied children at the border, which was 5,200 in 2012, has shot up to more than 52,000 this year — and it could reach 90,000 by the end of September, according to internal Border Patrol estimates.
There’s also an interesting bit of color deep in Nakamura’s piece. According to Perry’s former chief of staff, the Governor tried to give Obama a letter about border security during a 2010 presidential visit to Texas —a letter that Obama apparently refused to take and insisted be handed off to Valerie Jarrett. It’s offered in the piece as evidence that Perry was being snubbed, but I don’t know … maybe the President just thought it was important enough to hand off to someone with real power.
Published in General
Mr. Obama merely needs to stall until another failure/scandal takes what little MSM interest there is in the border issue somewhere else. Shoot some pool, make some more stupid decisions about the Middle East, Ukaine or China, a few more Lerner leaks and some pretext to attack the tea party and voila back to the steady decline trajectory instead of a dive.
The pending constitutional issue is whether the taxpayer must cover postage if the President just mails it in for most of his term.
Rick Perry wanted illegal immigrants to pay less for college than lawful American citizens living outside of the state of Texas.
Governor Perry got what he wanted.
Hah.
I think Rick Perry is proof that liberals will always play the “republicans are stupid” meme, regardless of who runs. I saw over on the Ricochet twitter bar a picture of Perry shaking Obama’s hand, and in “caption contest” style, virtually everyone (presumably liberal) had something to say about Perry being stupid. “Sorry, I can’t see you because someone put prescriptions in these make-me-look-smart glasses,” etc…
Kind of a tired old line that we’re a bunch of idiots, but it does show us how much they really have to argue on the merits, I suppose.
Leadership—Rick Perry’s shown it,
but President O—he done blown it.
With busloads of babies
infected with scabies
This coward don’t wanna’ own it.
Another classic Obama gambit…
Encourage an influx of illegals. Request $3.7 billion to deal with the problem (that’s $40,000 a person). If the Congress approves it, then use the money to improve conditions for the illegals and not for border protection or deportation…thus encouraging more illegals to come. If Congress refuses, paint them as unfeeling and inhuman.
Is there no Republican smart enough to outwit this man?
I agree. That wasn’t one of Perry’s smarter moves.
It seems to me that any Republican with a brain would be out with a visual aid showing how Obama proposes to use $3.7B. Pie chart or bar graph or both, along with a column of numbers showing all the zeros. For example, Obama wants $3.7B, but only $50M would go to border security. That presentation, on its own, has no impact. But show a pie graph and compare $3,700,000,000 to $50,000,000 and Americans will start scratching their heads. In the end, do whatever it takes to flesh the numbers out in public.
Counter BO’s demand for $3.7B with a proposal to take the funds from the foreign aid budgeted for Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico.
Troy I’ve been meaning to say for some time how highly I think of your writng & thinking. I am verydisdainful & mistrustful of Libertarians as a general rule but you threaten my presuppositions every time you put pen to paper. You’re a treasure.
P.S. thank you for the bullseye re: prez Jarrett
“… the federal government is perpetuating the problem.”
You could insert that phrase into just about every problem these days and be correct. What’s instructive about this episode is that the one single thing the government can do properly (security), they’re refusing to do … and instead they’re focusing on the things they suck at, and which perpetuate problems they’re trying to solve (i.e., social services).
This government tends to focus on ameliorating the after-effects of a problem, instead of addressing the problem in the first place. For example, they spend money on unemployment insurance, while at the same time imposing regulations that cause people to lose jobs. They want to put their foot on the brake and the accelerator at the same time.
Rick Scott just did the same thing in Florida. Pandering to illegal immigrants is a mistake. We need to improve the process of legal immigration and enforce those laws.
We should use the $3.7B Obama wants to spend in ways that will combat the root cause of the influx. If the root cause is violent guerillas and drug cartels, work with the military in Honduras and other countries to decimate them. How about drone strikes on guerillas? How about bounties on the drug cartel members? The criminals bribe police and soldiers in those countries all the time. We could do a lot of that with $3.7B and beat them at their own game. We should also set up refugee camps to contain the illegal immigrants until we can figure out if they are carrying any diseases or if they are terrorists. It seems like all we do right now is put them on a bus to wherever and help them disappear on American soil. One more thing: where is the Mexican government in the middle of all this? Why can’t we force them to stop the influx on their southern borders?
I’m going to pay you the highest compliment that speechwriters can offer: I wish I had written that.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? I recall even a number of conservatives making the argument that the in-state tuition rates wouldn’t act as a magnet — and yet here was Perry himself making the case that illegal immigrants respond rationally to incentives. I thought he was wrong about the tuition then and I still think he is today.
OK, we need BuckeyeSam in this meeting.
Does anyone really believe there are “shovel-ready” detention centers?
Thanks GW/P. For what it’s worth, I’d say I’m libertarian as an adjective, not Libertarian as a noun. I have more libertarian sympathies than most conservatives, but there are a number of issues on which I don’t take the standard libertarian line (immigration is one; foreign policy is another).
In the last decade or so, there was some talk about “neo-libertarians,” a group that was supposed to be more focused on incremental reform than philosophical absolutism (i.e., reforming Social Security rather than contending it should be abolished) and more comfortable with a robust foreign policy. The term has fallen out of circulation, but it’s probably the closest thing I’ve seen to a good shorthand for my own views.
Excellent idea. Seriously, that is something I’ll bet the Republicans and quite a few Democrats would get behind instantly!
Wouldn’t putting the children on a plane and flying them back home to reunite with their families be the most humane and practical thing to do? Isn’t that what Americans would want done if the roles were reversed?
Not that I think this will happen but if it did…who would be able to authorize such an action?
Obama insisted that Perry’s letter be handed off to Valerie Jarrett for one simple reason; later, when the letter turns out to be prescient and full of good advice, Obama can claim that the first time he heard about it was when it it was discussed on Ricochet.
Because when you are too incompetent to engage in plausible action, all you’ve got left is plausible deniability.
The stumble was in not putting the “when and only when you’ve secured the borders” in front of “then you can afford to have a heart.” I thought he did a masterful job this week of redeeming himself. Best demonstration–without obvious grandstanding– that he was someone who might know his butt from second base EVER. Although maybe you had to catch him on Hannity Thursday night for the full effect.