Oh please... no president with principles who understood the repercussions would sign something into law that would destroy the economy just because he was outnumbered. If you had any principles yourself or any understanding of history you'd realize that's no excuse. Your kind of "thinking" is why this country is in the toilet today.
I don't know where you went to school, but you could use a history lesson on why CALIFORNIA has such a difficult time dealing with illegal immigration and having to exclusively foot the bill for it. It's called the Fourteenth Amendment. And Congress does nothing to enforce it. In other words, it's a FEDERAL issue. And California ( among other states ) bears the financial and sociological brunt of the Feds not enforcing our Constitution.
Yet another person that is unable to turn their BRAIN on . . . I swear, the quality of content on ET has really gone down the tubes lately. A lot of the blame rests at the feet of Alan Greenspan - - - who made two very fatal mistakes. 1.) Markets self-regulate 2.) There's no market failure Greenspan totally forgot about how central banks were crated to provide financial stability. He also had an excessive ideological belief that there are no issues of distortions on incentives. Greenspan had the ideological "blinders" on and as a result he took Ayn Rand's view of the world to an extreme. Let's face it, the last decade of "self-regulation" was a complete failure. On a similar note, people such as Phil Gramm ( Republican, Texas ) who spearheaded the legislation of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that created for credit default swaps to "trade" OTC without any oversight or clearing house, exchange, or regulation whatsoever can also share a lot of the blame. This legislation created $65 TRILLION dollars of credit default swaps that are currently "trashing" our banking system, and the legislation got through the House and Senate without even a committee hearing, or even a recorded vote back in December of 2000. How convenient. How very clever. Can you say Wolves in the Hen House?
Again, there was this ideology and assumption from Greenspan ( and others ) that the markets would "self-regulate" and that markets do not distort or ever suffer failures. That, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 is what created Enron, and Enron's ability to "game" the power grid of California during the Recession of 2001-2002. And the entire time that this was going on in the power markets . . . the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ( a Bush appointee ), Pat Wood III just sat there standing idly by. Nothing in place to temper the "greed".
Policies are not driven by ideologies and a single law isn't responsible for fraud. The fact the laws were passed showed that when you had money and connections, there was a gaping hole as big as an interstate highway to go through with your pork. Where was the SEC? It didn't do the job for things under its mandate, forget new derivatives, the SEC didn't care about old products. The whole system is rotten, that's hidden from the public for fear they will out their savings from their mutual funds, but that's basically what has happened. Such a weakened system tends to have regulators asleep at the wheel and massive fraud no one cares about (like mortgage fraud, remember that?)
So let me ask you this question, and I'm being serious when I ask it . . . Given your statement above, do you think that the single most powerful man in the United States, Alan Greenspan was "paid" off? I must admit, it is awful hard to believe his incredibly naive testimony before Congress last year in which he said that: 1.) Markets are self-regulating 2.) The Real Estate market is a local market and would never have a significant impact on the national economy 3.) Institutions would preserve shareholder equity 4.) He didn't see the "bubble" in the housing sector because wage growth and inflation were subdued.
It's not that simple. First, here's a better explanation of the 14th amendment issue: http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters4608 Second, states pander to illegals so they're not necessarily unwilling victims. A state could force a supreme court interpretation by refusing benefits. This is another example of not taking a stand for what's right, which is an alien concept to Landis82. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2317007#post2317007 This is NOT the kind of thinking our country was founded on.