Economics
Presidential ignorance is a curse…
You may remember many moons ago I posted about American citizenship, and whether or not a citizenship exam should include questions on things like sports, world events, and cultural awareness. Now in this bloggers humble opinion, these things are not a true measure of whether or not a person will be a good American.
I would rather have every aspiring American citizen take an ethics test and be done with it. In fact I’d like to see every young American, not just immigrants be required to take a federally mandated ethics test when they reach legal age, before they are allowed to be considered a legal adult. I think the country would benefit from this more than anything else. The rest of it is almost inconsequential by comparison.
Almost. There are many positions where I think a broader, more comprehensive test of ones knowledge, ethics, social awareness and general knowledge of world events and character should be a mandatory requirement. High ranking police and military are a couple that come to mind some of them. Even your average street cop should ideally have comprehensive periodic psych evals, as well as more ethics and social training. But most important of all, President of the United States of America should be one of those positions that requires all of the above.
Before you ever get to see elections, or even start running for president, I think you should, at the very least, be able to demonstrate significantly above average ability on an IQ test, as well as a comprehensive knowledge of social, political and world issues. This should be a requirement for the position.
Why? Because ignorance has absolutely no place in a presidential office. No self respecting IT department would hire a professional bricklayer for their server administration. Nor would a construction company hire a nerd for manual labor. Why does the same not apply for the oval office? People with that kind of power need to know how to use it intelligently. And when I read some of the (many) questionable things our outgoing president has to say, It is clear to me that he is lacking in that department:
In a speech defending his administration’s Iraq policy, Bush said former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s brutality had made it impossible for a unifying leader to emerge and stop the sectarian violence that has engulfed the Middle Eastern nation.
“I heard somebody say, Where’s Mandela?’ Well, Mandela’s dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas,” – [Reuters]
Saddam killed all the Mandelas?!? You know, any country as great as this one really ought to be run by someone who has a modicum of awareness about important world leaders, events, issues, etc. I’m all for presidency being open to any American citizen, but shouldn’t there at least be some sort of IQ requirement? World knowledge? Social awareness? How about the basic ability to form coherent, meaningful and intelligent sentences?
The presidency should be open to everyone, but at the same time, becoming president should be a highly selective process. I don’t believe that it should be solely the domain of highly educated aristocrats though. Lord knows we don’t need more classism. But I think that maybe the presidency shouldn’t be an option for your common, average everyday ignoramus either…
Mandela still alive after embarrassing Bush remark – [Reuters]
Only YOU can prevent Illegal Immigration…
Republican presidential candidate and former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani made what i thought was a rather bold statement:
“We can end illegal immigration. I promise you, we can end illegal immigration,” the former New York mayor said at a community center — the first of the day’s two stops in this early voting state.
Giuliani said he would require a uniform identification card for foreign workers and students and create a central database to track the legal status of visitors to the country. He told the crowd of more than 300 that 12 million immigrants have entered the country illegally.
“That’s a lot of people to walk over your border without being identified,” he said. – [Yahoo/AP]
Ok so I have one question. Has he seen the size of our borders lately? It isn’t exactly a short stretch of barbed wire fencing. You know, anyone who has successfully been mayor of NY has to have something going for them. But his recent actions have cast a serious shadow on opinion of both his competency and honesty. If it were so easy to stop illegal immigration, it would have been done already.
Instead, it appears he will simply be one of those people who employ sweeping, indiscriminate, invasive and ultimately useless legislation that attack everything but the source of the problem, just like everyone else, especially the current administration.
I mean, the database idea is pointless because by definition, we don’t have any info on illegal immigrants. They don’t exactly register with the authorities after jumping the fence.
And as I pointed out earlier, America has a lot of border ground to cover, it’s not such an easy task to watch all of it. I don’t see where he has come forward with a good solution for anything…
The only way to stop illegal immigration is if we stop hiring illegal immigrants. Stop giving them jobs. Stop giving them benefits. Stop making it worth their while to cross the border. I don’t think that is going to happen. Nor do I necessarily think it should. They have become a significant part of our workforce. I think we need to figure out a way to integrate the ones that are here, and then provide some sort of incentive for new immigrants to do migrate legally. Because clearly, prohibition isn’t working…
And before you say “Grant them amnesty? Give them an incentive? Preposterous!” think about this. How much of your tax dollars is already currently going to giving illegal immigrants health care? Do you want them to be able to put their share of that cost back into the tax pool? Or do you want to just keep carrying their share of the economic burden for them?
Giuliani vows to stop illegal immigrants – [Yahoo/AP]
China’s gentler, kinder side…
China has banned crude birth control advertising slogans for it’s national one child per family policy:
China has banned crude and insensitive slogans promoting the country’s ‘one-child’ family planning policy, such as “Raise fewer babies but more piggies,” which have stoked anger in rural areas, state media said Sunday.
China’s 28-year-old family planning policy limits most urban couples to just one child and allows some families in the countryside to have a second child if their first is a girl.
Critics say that has led to forced abortions and sterilizations and a dangerously imbalanced sex ratio due to the traditional preference for male heirs, which has prompted countless families to abort female fetuses in hopes of getting boys. – [Yahoo/AP]
Now the real reason I posted this was not because of the slogans, but because of the interesting detail that it seems that many Chinese families are aborting female fetuses in order to get boys.
It seems to me that, after a few generations of aborting female fetuses, your overall population production ability would drop dramatically. Which could be a good thing to begin with, but could turn bad really, really, quickly.
And it would suck to try and find a wife if you are a guy, because your selection would be slim to none. I really hope the Chinese what they are doing…
China bans crude birth control slogans – [Yahoo/AP]
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