Mike Randolph

Mike Randolph
Beginning Score: 300

Score History:

10/22/07: +2 Points for liking puppies.

New score = 302.


11/15/07: Mike Randolph answered questions. Point deductions, anyone?



11/19/07: As far as I can figure, Mike Randolph's only score-able offenses during this round of Q & A were his promises for complete tax-funded health care and giant walls blocking Mexicans and Canadians from entrance.

So here are my initial recommendations: -4 Points for the "exchange education for health care" concept:

“Children are the future, remember — we don’t have to worry about them yet. People are mad at their HMOs now. Let’s deal with the present.” Socialists think that the government should solve everything. I think that the government should pick a few things and solve them completely.

The problem I have with that statement is that it implies tax dollars can be taken from some source and spent on a resource more efficiently than if we used private dollars to buy the resource. In other words, whose tax dollars are going to pay for the health insurance for the middle class? I can understand taxing the reasonably rich to pay for a service for the reasonably poor, but when everyone gets health care, what's the point in taking $300 a month in taxes from a guy who makes $60,000 a year to buy him $300-a-month health insurance? My point, basically, is that government trying to solve a problem completely will cause more problems than an incomplete solution, in this particular case.

For the record, though, I wanted to give him credit for suggesting we remove universal education funding and balance it with increased universal health care funding. Unfortunately candidates can't gain points (except that once, see "Puppies.") and the two ideas are too different to cancel each other out.




And second, the border wall:

"...grant amnesty, then close off the borders completely with a ten-foot-high fence. It’s fair, it’s doable, and it gives a firm deadline to anyone who currently can’t decide on a homeland. It also creates a whole lot of domestic jobs (we’ll do Canada along the north AND the Alaskan border for good measure). "

Ooooooooh..... Mike Randolph has committed a fatal economics error. I'm assuming he means that building a wall will require a lot of laborers - which is true, but tax dollars come from somewhere. If our economy could function better with more money in the government's hands, then what's the point of capitalism?

Besides, who exactly would be willing to build this wall? Not private companies using immigrants, because illegal immigrants have suddenly been granted amnesty and are employable in the legitimate job market. That leaves, mostly, able-bodied young men - immigrant or otherwise - who all suddenly face higher opportunity costs, since the particular skills required to build large walls makes them very employable in the construction sector, which likely would pay anywhere from $10 to $20 per hour. Put simply, amnesty, paired with the variance from skilled (legal) pay in Mexico & the U.S, would raise the cost of building a wall by, let's say, 50%, if not greater (some large part of the difference between minimum wage and the construction wage, we'll assume...) In theory it would be smarter to contract Mexican firms to build the wall on their side of the border. Wouldn't that be offensive? I don't know about the Canada side, though...

On top of this is the crowding-out effect on private sector wages, which means that construction type jobs will have to raise their salary offers to individuals in order to compete with the new "wall building" market. This means higher general construction costs, which is reasonably important to the economy, and in an era of higher competition and declining real estate, cost increases are more likely to convert to profit losses instead of inflation, which means slower job growth, if not job losses.

So we'll get longer-term job losses in the economy, higher inflation due to no influx of low-wage (illegal immigration) labor, and a whole bunch of human & natural resources lost, all for the purpose of building a giant wall that is designed to stifle free [human resource] trade, and will therefore hurt our economy in countless more ways than I've already described.


So I was about to say -16 Points, but Mike Randolph definitely shows some cleverness with total amnesty. Clearly his intentions aren't all bad, so I think I'll recommend -8 Points, just because the value lost from near-zero future immigration would be pretty substantial.

So that leaves us with -4 and -8, total of -12 Points.



NEW SCORE (Unless somebody feels otherwise...) = 290.


[...Waiting for more...]