So Arizona has this new "Immigration Law"

"Obama Blasts Arizona Law"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703709804575202110136576160.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_3#printMode

This new law makes illegal immigration a "state crime and requiring police to question people about their immigration status if officers suspect they are in the U.S. illegally." Then Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, and Obama started getting into it.

Brewer: "Decades of inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unacceptable situation," (She thinks its Obama's fault for not securing the borders)

Obama: Its your state that's "misguided" this law is going to "undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans."

Then Randy Pullman, chairman of the state Republican party, added his biter two cents.

Randy: "President Obama chooses to be critical, yet doesn't provide any constructive solutions to our nation's border problems."

The President plans to address immigration on a federal level before the November elections. Democrats in Congress also plan on moving an immigration law that will allow millions to become citizens. ""There will be a blowback from this, and the White House realizes what is happening," said Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi. He is conducting surveys on the issue for several immigrant advocacy groups."" Charles Schumer, democrat, and Lindsey Graham, republican, are also working together on immigration legislation. However, in Arizona's case immigration is a pressing matter. It is a main point of illegal entry for drug and human trafficking, and people are getting killed at the border. Ms. Brewer seemed to have more resistance to the bill, but her elections are coming up and she wants to keep her voters happy, so she signed it anyway.

"""The Arizona law appears to be unconstitutional, said Karl Manheim, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has written about states' past attempts to regulate immigration. "States have no power to pass immigration laws because it's an attribute of foreign affairs. Just as states can't have their own foreign policies or enter into treaties, they can't have their own immigration laws either.""""

Terms:

unconstitutional- a law or piece of legislation that goes against what is in the Constitution

illegal immigration- the flow of immigrants into the U.S. illegally as undocumented persons

blowback- repercussions, consequences

"Obama Focuses on Three to Fill the Fed Board"

And one of them is a woman from San Francisco!

Janet L. Yellen is the President of the Federal Reserve in San Francisco, and I was just there today for the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Ms. Yellon's main goals are to restore economic growth and create jobs. She is a contender for the second position on the Fed, after Ben Bernanke. There are three positions open on the central bank board of governors and the other two choices are Peter A. Diamond and Sarah Bloom Raskin, the first an economist and the other a lawyer. "“What they’ve done is try to put together a package of people who play to different strengths: analytic economics with Yellen; a broader economic perspective with Diamond; and then, clearly, a focus on consumer protection with Raskin,” said Randall S. Kroszner, a formed Fed governor who knows all three."" This is an important time to be a part of the Fed; it has been doing some big things like purchasing 2 trillion dollars in mortgage related securities in order to lower interest rates.

Ms. Yellen seems like a cool person, so I am excited for her and wish her the best. Susan Phillips served on the reserve board with her in the nineties and said “Janet had a prepared, written statement and she’d be working on it right until she gave it. And I knew that, because I was sitting right next to her.”

Many leftist government members want these new members to really focus on accountability for the reserve and the banks in order to get the economy straight again, and I agree!

I predict that Yellon, and the others will get the spots and we will be hearing about their future choices.

Terms-

Microeconomics- the study of all the small pieces of the economy

Macroeconomics- the study of economics from a broad perspective

The Federal Reserve- government agency that regulates banking and sets monetary policy

"The Worldwide war on baby girls"

http://www.economist.com/world/international/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15636231

You should watch Children of Men. And read this blog.

This article discussed the effects of the sex ratios in the countries China, India, and South Korea. In China the government set a "one-child policy" which has caused many families to choose a make for their one child. Girls are either aborted or killed after birth. In five to ten years, one in five Chinese men will not be able to get married. The increased rate of young, and unmarried men, in these countries has several negative effects. It increases the crime rate as well as rape and prostitution rates. China also has the highest rate of female suicide between ages of 15 and 34, researchers believe this is because they are sad about killing their female babies. However, there is some hope because South Korea has presented sexual equality in the media more and the sex ration has begun to be more normal.

This has many economic effects. One that the article mentioned is that in order to be promoted most men really need to have a wife and children. Another way this has effected the economy in these countries in that families are saving more money. Families with sons are saving money so that they will appeal to prospective wives. In India, the price of a dowry has gone down, but the price of a bride price has raised.

This is a great ethical, political, and economic issue. Fertility rates are lowering around the world and it is truly scary. I predict that as these issues of sex ratios continue without change, it will change the world as we know it.

I think this expert from the article tells it all:

"XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’” "

Terms-

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS)

Sex ratio- the ratio of males to females

Dowry- money given from the family of the bride to the groom

Bride price-money given from the family of the groom to the family of the bride

Story time! It all started with Alexander Hamilton and the First Bank of the United States ....

Two Minute Replay of the Banking History of the United States

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122360636585322023.html

As I said it all started with Alexander Hamilton, and there was his bête noire: Thomas Jefferson. Now Alexander Hamilton wanted a strong central government, complete with power and money. He was Washington's right hand man during the Revolutionary War and he was deeply concerned by how ineffective the new American government was at providing for the soldiers. He also knew his way around the magic land of math because he managed a counting house in his early teens. "Hamilton wanted to establish a central bank modeled on the Bank of England. The government would own 20% of the stock, have two seats on the board, and the right to inspect the books at any time. But, like the Bank of England then, it would otherwise be owned by its stockholders."

So Alexander Hamilton = central banking. However, the other guy, Thomas Jefferson, had a fervid hatred for banking. "He hated commerce, he hated speculators, he hated the grubby business of getting and spending (except his own spending, of course, which eventually bankrupted him). Most of all, he hated banks, the symbol for him of concentrated economic power." Jefferson's efforts to destroy central banking have made lasting impressions on the American economy today, i.e. the recession, i.e. thanks a lot.

"Really then what happened?!" Hamilton establishes Bank of the United States in 1792. ". It was a big success and its stockholders did very well. It also provided the country with a regular money supply with its own banknotes, and a coherent, disciplined banking system." President Madison establishes another in 1816, after the War of 1812. Then comes the big bad Andrew Jackson. (Remember him from the Trail of Tears? which killed thousands of Cherokee Native Americans. He said to the Supreme Court 'John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!') He absolutely hated banks and killed central banking for another 73 years.

Then the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, but that wasn't much good because it was too weak. Then after the gargantuan Great Depression, the Federal Reserve was completely reorganized in 1934. At last, the Great States of America had the central bank it needed to prosper and economic peace covered the land for 60 years. There were some other bumps along the way- "wildcat banks", the National Banking Act, inflation in the 1960s, the panic of 1987, the creation of the FDIC, and interstate banking finally allowed in the 1990s. Then all the banks got over excited with their loans, which were encouraged by the government, and this whole recession mess began.

Good night and sweet dreams.

Terms

Bête noire- (n.) someone that someone especially dislikes, dreads, or avoids; nemesis

Fervid- (adj.) burning with enthusiasm or zeal; extremely heated

Gargantuan- (adj.) of immense size, volume, of capacity; enormous, prodigious

That Only Solves Half the Problem

"Not Grass-Fed, but at Least Pain-Free"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/opinion/19shriver.html

By Adam Shiver of the New York Times

A "bone chilling" read indeed. Adam Shiver is "a doctoral student in the philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program at Washington University." And he proposes a new method of solving animal cruelty, since "we cannot avoid factory farms altogether." Scientists have researched how mammals feel pain, and apparently there are "two separate pathways for perceiving pain: a sensory pathway that registers its location, quality (sharp, dull or burning, for example) and intensity, and a so-called affective pathway that senses the pain’s unpleasantness. " The second pathway is located in the brain's anterior cingulate cortex, and scientists have successfully removed this pathway from the brains of lab mice. Shiver describes that the mice, know where the pain is in their bodies and what it feels like, but they do not avoid it or feel its "unpleasantness." He claims that scientists will soon be able to do the same with cows and pigs.

The worst part about reading this article is that it be probably happen in the future. I should not be surprised because humans have often used science as a way to cut corners around solving problems. Instead of getting rid of factory farms, corporations could pacify animal cruelty activists by stating that the animals simply feel no pain.

However, it is not so simple. Factory farming causes many more problems that this will not address at all. 1. Environmental pollution with the huge amounts of methane gas the cows emit. 2. The huge amounts of manure that are released into rivers, causing the destruction of ecosystems. 3. The animals will still be treated exactly the same, cruelly, and many will still be skinned alive on the assembly line.

So I say to you Mr. "Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less."- that's BS. Grass fed, organic, fresh, happy, free range meat is the only solution.

Terms-

Factory farming-

a system of large-scale industrialized and intensive agriculture that is focused on profit with animals kept indoors and restricted in mobility

Neuroscience-

the field of study encompassing the various scientific disciplines dealing with the structure, development, function, chemistry, pharmacology, and pathology of the nervous system.

Anterior cingulate cortex-

the frontal part of the cingulate cortex, that resembles a "collar" form around the corpus callosum, the fibrous bundle that relays neural signals between the right and left cerebral hemispheres of the brain.

"Judging Stimulus by Job Data Reveals Success" Blog #3

One year ago, Congress passed a stimulus bill.

And then we all lived happily ever after.

Ok, we might not have lived happily ever after, but we might have overlooked some of the successes of Congress's stimulus bill. Although the unemployment rate remains around 10 percent, this bill employed around two million people. IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody's Economy.com "all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs." Other successes of the bill have been overlooked due to their slow process, like state aid to build roads and buildings, and the aid to unemployment benefits and tax provisions has gone unnoticed.

Congress is now debating a new "jobs bill" because the previous bill saved jobs but did not create any new ones. However, David Leonhardt argues that harsh critics of the bill are misguided. "This is the money that has kept teachers, police officers, health care workers and firefighters employed." Consumer spending has also risen since February, and "the billions of dollars in in tax cuts, food stamps, and jobless benefits, in the stimulus have still made a difference."

Another fact supporting the bill's success in the history of financial crises. Usually the unemployment rate will drop for five years before beginning to rise again. While because of the stimulus plan the jobless rate is "expected to begin falling consistently by the end of this year."

"It prevented things from getting much worse that they otherwise would have been," Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight's chief economist, says. "I think everyone would have to acknowledge that's a good thing."

International Adoption: Saviors or Kidnappers?

"Amid catastrophe in Haiti, a new controversy about adoptions."

Adoption is a touchy subject. Everyone feels differently about it and probably strongly stands by that opinion. But I think we can all agree that when children are being considered "orphans" when they still have families, and then adopted by parents in other countries never be seen or heard from again, something isn't right. This is the case in several countries including Haiti, Chad, the Darfur region of Sudan, Romania, China, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, and Guatemala.

Now in many cases adopting children from other countries is not a bad thing at all. These children have no home and they often end up with loving, financially stable parents. Especially in America, "where parents adopt more foreign children than all the rest of the world." The problem is that the countries with the highest inter-country adoption rates also have some of the weakest governments in the world. The adoptive parents are supposed to send reports of the children to their home countries, and these reports are not enforced or if sent, kept track of. "Many critics of inter-country adoption cite experiences in Romania... of the 30,000 children adopted by foreigners between 1990 and 2000, around 20,000 are now untraceable..." This is the problem on every one's mind: human trafficking. Where are those children now?

Remember when we learned about supply and demand? Well, I do! That is how this article relates to economics. These children are in high demand. At some adoption agencies the process "may cost more than $30,000." Guatemala was "once the source of 5,000 annual adoptions, mainly to America." And "about 10,000 foreign adoptions a year take place in China." And when a country, like Romania, suspends its inter-adoption policy, the adoption agencies simply move to another country where the laws are less strict, like Moldova or the Ukraine. Because these children are in such high demand, the adoption agencies are rushing to supply. For example, the Christian group that tried to take 33 children across the Haiti border "where they apparently hoped to build an orphanage." They had no paperwork, and it turned out that many of the children had families. The same thing happened in Chad when a French agency, Zoe's Ark, was accused of kidnapping 103 children. "Many turned out to be local children, and not orphans."

I am not saying every inter-country adoption agency is bad. Adoption is a beautiful thing. But when the children are taken from homes that already exist, to other countries and strange faces, the matter needs to be investigated, the problem needs to be solved, and the children need to be protected.

Terms-

Inter-country adoption- a family in America adopts a child from another country, such as Haiti

Law of supply- if other things stay the same, the quantity supplied will increase as the price increases

Law of demand-amount of a good or service that people are willing or able to buy. When price changes, the demand either rises or falls.