NAFTA and Mexican ImmigrationIt was supposed to be the magic wand that took care of immigration. The North American Free Trade Agreement was to make Mexico rich and create enough employment incentives to keep its people at home. It has been anything but. More than ten years after the signing of the treaty, economic growth has been anemic in Mexico, averaging less than 3.5 percent per year or less than 2 percent on a per capita basis since 2000; unemployment is higher than what it was when the treaty was signed; and half of the labor force must eke out a living in invented jobs in the informal economy, a figure ten percent higher than in the pre-NAFTA years. Meanwhile, jobs in the runaway maquiladora industry that left the United States to profit from free trade and cheap labor commonly pay close to the Mexican minimum wage of U.S. $7.00 per day, an amount so small in the now “open” Mexican market as to force people into informal jobs or across the border.
Julie Lynem: Affordable doesn’t mean low prices - Local - San Luis ObispoSan Luis Obispo County is making some inroads in housing affordability, at least in a small way.
It moved from the nation’s second to the third least affordable metropolitan area in the fourth quarter of last year, edged out only by San Francisco and New York, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index.
But that news gives Jerry Rioux, executive director of the nonprofit San Luis Obispo County Housing Trust Fund, little reason to celebrate. “More people can afford to buy, but compared to where it should be, we’re still horrible,’’ he said.
Roughly 20 percent of homes sold in the fourth quarter were affordable to a family earning the median income of $67,000 considering a median home sale price of $376,000, according to the index.
OpEdNews » Sean Hannity's Ridiculous War against SocialismRefuse to send your kids to socialized public schools and universities; refuse to use socialized roads and highways; refuse to call upon socialized police and fire departments; shut down the socialized air traffic control; refuse to visit socialized national parks; tell grandma that her Social Security and Medicare will have to be sent back to the government; demand the immediate dismantling of our socialized American military. Sarah Palin and her supporters in Alaska should refuse all forms of "redistributed wealth" by sending back their checks from the socialized oil program there.
Send it all back. I'm sure the entire roster of Neo-McCarthyite pundits enumerated above -- Limbaugh, Scarborough, Hannity and the like -- have already forgone their usage of these socialist services so we can assume they've figured out a ways to get by. How hard can it be really? I mean, who needs roads when there are hot-air balloons and jet packs. Socialist fire departments? A house fire will eventually burn itself out, won't it? As for the pre-socialist 50-percent poverty rate for the elderly? If we can put a man on the Moon (also a socialist program), we can invent some bootstraps that'll fit over grandma's therapeutic stockings.
2 Kids + 0 Husbands = Family - Some Mothers, Single by Choice, Stick Together - NYTimes.comIN 1960, UNMARRIED MOTHERS accounted for about 5 percent of births in the United States. Now they are having almost 40 percent of the country’s babies. About half of these women are on their own, and the other half are living with a man at the time of the birth, according to Pamela Smock, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The stock characters of the explosion of out-of-wedlock births are feckless fathers and hapless young mothers. It’s true that most unmarried mothers are still in their 20s — and less often in their teens — and have no more than a high-school education. But as television’s Murphy Brown predicted in the 1990s, an increasing number of unmarried mothers look a lot more like Fran McElhill and Nancy Clark — they are college-educated, and they are in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
