Raul Labrador's Immigration Discussion Shows He's not an Economist

      I mean he's evidently never heard of the idea that correlation doesn't prove causation.

      "And here’s the quote of the day, from GOP Rep. Raul Labrador:

Asked if leaders are too “gun shy” about a government shutdown, the Idaho Republican was clear. “I think they are and I don’t understand why,” he said. “We had a shutdown a year ago, and we just got the biggest majority we’ve ever had in the House since 1928, and one of the largest majorities we’ve ever had in the Senate. So I don’t understand their reasoning for taking anything off the table.”

      "Sure — it isn’t like a government shutdown has any practical consequences or does harm to actual Americans."

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/12/02/happy-hour-roundup-494/

      I understand Sargent being turned off by this lack of empathy-but Labrador is a Republican so how is this a surprise? But it's also a terrible economic analysis: just because they won a big majority doesn't mean the government shutdown helped them achieve this, Of course, any real economist would be appalled by just how uneconomic the GOP immigration proposal is. You might point out that they have no proposal. Just so:  by default then their actual proposal is the status quo. As has been explained many times at the end of the day Obama's action doesn't actually change the number of people who will be deported every day, it just narrows the pool of people eligible to be deported. 

      What Obama's EO actually does is some clarity on just which 300,000 illegal immigrants out of the total 11 million outstanding such undocumented immigrants are in danger of being deported-no one including the GOP has come close to saying that all 11 million should be sent back. 

     What we are also getting clarity on is what it means to be a conservative: at least on its U.S. GOP variety, what it means more and more is being the reactionary party. Think about the GOP opposition to all things Obama. What that amounts to is they are for nothing but they are very clear that whatever it is he's for-they're against. 

    So on immigration they are criticized for having no plan: but they do, it's the iimmigration status quo, basically keeping people so scared they 'self-deport.' 

    It's the same on every other part of the President's legacy they are so scornful of. Whether ACA, or Dodd-Frank, or the new carbon agreement with the Chinese, they simply want to bring us back to the way things were back before Obama was President-ie, back to when Bush was President. 

  This is not a recipe for victory considering how unpopular Bush remains. Ironically one of the few issues that Bush was right on-immigration; his legacy on education  also is not all bad-they are in the process of seriously blowing. The reason they are so angry about Obama's EO is that he's really scored a major winner on this one. 

     http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/01/voices-gomez-obama-immigration/19613735/