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Mitt Romney’s Ground Crew and The Clash of Stupid Federal Laws

Poorly Synchronized Laws Left A Mess On Mr. Romney's Lawn

By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  October 19th, 2011 at 01:30 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

When society bars business-people from making intelligent economic decisions arbitrage and unethical behavior will result. People respect illogical and unworkable legal decisions as much as they eagerly volunteer to drive new, electrical cars from Government Motors. They don’t. They run businesses that won’t. Businesses that try are frequently victims of their own code of honor and wind up in bankruptcy court.

I certainly don’t praise or respect contractors who knowingly and deliberately seek out illegal aliens to staff their crews, but I also don’t pretend this happens solely due to The Gold Man’s Greed. Three things conspired to help make the presence of non-US Citizens on Candidate Romney’s old ground crew a regrettable, but highly likely occurrence.

1) The US Federal Immigration Laws facilitate law-breaking and make honorable compliance a significant personal and economic burden.
2) The Federal Minimum Wage Laws and expensive personnel regulations impose hourly labor costs that are greater than the perceived economic value of many difficult, menial tasks that fall within the skill set of people who are under-educated and barely speak English.
3) The consumer base is unwilling to pay a price level for these tasks commensurate with what would make the legal workforce an affordable one to hire.

As a result of these convergent dumbness factors, the following outcomes are possible.
1) Businesses and contractors who typically do hard, sweaty outdoor work are unable to meet the wage requirements and find some other way to earn a buck. Mr. Romney is required to become more intimately acquainted with Mr. Lawn Boy.
2) Mr. Romney and all his neighbors express dismay that you just can’t find good help these days. They voluntarily pay people twice and three times as much as they previously did just to make sure good, happy All-American boys were out there busting tail and learning The Protestant Work Ethic.
3) And, oh yeah, behind door #3, we get 12 million illegal aliens waiting at strip malls all over America to be picked up for a day of low-wage, off-the-books piece work on some fine, upstanding citizen’s lawn.

Number three is frequently the situation we have right now. Rational people can either view this as a problem or a solution. If you place paramount importance on America being a nation of laws not men, this is a problem. If you believe that America is a nation where rational, entrepreneurial-minded people should be allowed to work hard and improve their lot, we have a solution. If you simultaneously hold both beliefs; Houston, we have a Fustercluck!

We have this fustercluck because well-meaning laws have been passed with insufficient comprehension of how they would interact with other well-meaning laws. Everyone has a heart, most of us even have brains, but nobody had the foresight to discern the synergetic impact on the labor market of poorly-managed borders, strong labor regulations and a generous minimum wage. A lot of decent people believe that neither of these situations, in and of themselves, represents anything wrong or iniquitous.

The resulting illegal immigration problem facilitated arbitrage by struggling, and ethically dubious business enterprises. They had to provide an affordable service to stay afloat, yet the required minimum wage and other employment costs of legally eligible hires made this task too difficult for their management abilities. The temptation to cut corners and pick up a fresh, new, untraceable crew of illegals every morning won out. The cheaters got cost base relief and could undercut the prices that were required to obey the prevailing employment laws.

Illegal aliens are now how the landscape work gets done in Modern America. This is part of how the U3 rate in the legal, registered work force stays plastered at 9% or higher. And just to make this completely clear, these illegals do not steal anyone’s jobs. At $20.00 an hour in labor costs, none of these jobs would exist. Very few consumers would pay the price level for menial, low-skill work that these costs would entail. Without a porous border and a badly-managed legal immigration policy, most of these illegals would be citizens (either in the US, or back home in El Salvador or Mexico).

So yes, Mr. Romney, we can’t have this while you are running for office. And yes, Governor Perry, it may have been a bit underhanded to nail this one to Candidate Romney’s forehead. However, both of these fine and upstanding gentlemen could use this debate as a teachable moment.

Imagine how much better and more enlightening the next GOP debate would be if both of these Great Americans walked into the room with competing solutions? It would be awesome if someone could at least try to fix the problems created by the negative synergy between immigration policy and chronic unemployment amongst the least skilled workers in Modern America? That embarrassing problem is my biggest objection to how Candidate Romney used to get the lawn mowed.

COMMENTS

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  • deives

    Last night Rick Perry looked foolish digging up this old story about Romney’s landscaper and then spinning it in away that only voters that do not pay attention might buy it. But who was really watching the debate? Not those voters who only “check in” in the final weeks of the Presidential Election.

    BIG MISTAKE GOVERNOR PERRY!

    • texabama

      and seemed to come in by way of Texas). I’m surprised that no one has hit Romney on the “other” illegals…like the two Kenyans living in public housing in Massachusetts. They’ve been there since Romney was governor.

      • Repair_Man_Jack

        A lot of Eastern Europeans have illegally immigrated to the US after the fall of The Soviet Union and it’s satellites as well.

    • izoneguy

      Here is the gold plated quote from Romney that Perry extracted from his “attack”.

      ?So we went to the company and we said, look, you can?t have any illegals working on our property. ?I?m running for office, for Pete?s sake. We can?t have illegals!??

      Solid Gold for TV spots my friend.

      Can’t wait to see Perry yelling at Obama……

      • jackdaniels11

        of energy for attacking Obama’s policies as he does for attacking Mitt’s religion and poor decisions that were made by a company that he contracted to do his yard work.

        Rick Perry is using talking points from the Boston Globe, the only newspaper more liberal than the New York Times.

        Notice how Rick Perry takes the time to tell Herman Cain, a candidate who has publicly called Perry an “unacceptable” candidate, “Herman, I love you, brother” before telling Herman politely that his 9-9-9 plan is unworkable. Rick could use that same amount of civility with Romney if he chose to.

        Rick is campaigning simply to prevent Romney from getting the nomination. I have no doubt that Rick would endorse Herman Cain before he would endorse Romney even though Cain will never vote for Rick Perry.

    • retire05

      to point out Romney’s duplicity on this issue? Romney did the same thing to Guiliani and Huckabee, only to lose to McCain.

      If you are going to be pounding on someone else over illegal immigrants working in the U.S., you need to be sure they are not working at your own house.

  • http://pocketchangeproductions.net/ anotherindyfilmguy

    It is a foreseeing of what Romney will face in the general election. The MSM will do it’s best to tear apart any Republican candidate once the general election hits to protect and help any democrat that candidate is up against. If any candidate has issues during the primary those issues are going to be magnified tenfold once election time rolls around. Look at how the MSM treated Palin and then imagine for a moment all the possible permutations/perversions that those issues can be taken to by the MSM when it is in full campaign mode.

    I wouldn’t say any particular candidate is completely hOpeless based on that but each issue raised in the primaries is only a tiny minnow compared to the whale it’ll be made out to be when the winner of the primary is running against the MSM and the democrat candidate.

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      Some people get upset at the negativiity. I look at this from an economics standpoint. Buth GOP and Dem strategists have way more info than we do. If we impose an information assymetry on ourselves during the Primaries, we get ripped apart in the general when the Dems bring out all the garbage and toss it against the wall to see what sticks. It’s better to price it all in before we nominate.

      • gekster

        As I told another poster who was complaining about dragging out all the dirt, it is best to do it now, so when the primaries actually do get here, we have a clue about the candidates we will be picking.
        Best to find out now than later.

        • Repair_Man_Jack

          Let’s vet this guy before we have our very own John Edwards Problem.

    • deives

      Amen!

  • retire05

    and found a couple of high school boys who did lawns on Saturdays. They worked pretty cheap, and did a great job. Both were saving for college, and doing lawns didn’t interfer with school or football practice. That is the way is used to be always. Some kid in the neighborhood came to your house with his dad’s lawnmower and weed whacker and you paid him $10 to keep your grass looking good. Now all those little darlings are too busy with X-box to waste time learning what it is like to earn a living before they hit the real world.

    As to Romney, I have said it before (2007) and will say it again; he held the highest elected office in his state, and had a responsibility to make sure that the contractors he hired were operating within the law. But now it has come out that not only did his lawn service hire illegals, which Romney did nothing about, but it was an inside deal with the lawn service owner being a member of Romney’s church who also got state contracts for lawn service.

    Romney was not just some ordinary working schlub who frequented a restaurant that had illegal help back in the kitchen. He was governor. And he had a responsibility to turn that company over to ICE when he knew the owner was willfully breaking the law. He didn’t do that. Instead, Romney got busted AGAIN a year later by the Boston Globe. Romney’s response? He was giving the lawn service a “second chance.”

    What no one talks about is Romney’s hypocracy. He went after Guiliani for NY being a sanctuary city, only for the Globe to report, the very next day, Romney was still allowing the use of illegal labor on his own property. And even after he got busted, the second time, Romney put out a hit piece on Mike Huckabee over in-state tuition (sound familiar?) right after the Huckabee upset in Iowa, which backfired in his face on Super Tuesday.

    You don’t hold one candidate to a standard when you don’t walk the walk. Romney seems to think he can.

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      I used to be that guy that pushed his lawnmower around the block for a few extra bucks on Saturday. Romney seems to have set himself up but good if he launched into Rudy on the same issue.

    • Adjoran

      Declaring a city a zone free from enforcing federal law, versus hiring a contractor who hired illegal workers, promised never to do it again, but did it again anyway?

    • texabama

      I think it’s more than just a double standard. I think it’s the sense of entitlement. He deserves to be President because…well just because. Your examples certainly keep me from supporting Romney, but even more so is the story about transporting the family dog on the roof of his car for more than 12 hours. I know this is an old story, but if this is how he feels about the family pet then I have some real issues with his compassion as a human being.

      • jjhlh1

        Romney’s history of animal cruelty concerns me greatly. How people treat animals shows their true character.

  • texas214

    in some ways many of us are guilty of the same “crime’ as Romney. If you’ve bought a new house anywhere in the southern half of the US over the past 15 years, I’m sure there was plenty of illegal employees who were working on the construction. We all knew it and knew that that prices were kept in check because of this.

    I’m not suggesting anything by my comment other than the fact with 12+ million illegals working in this country by default we all are guilty of Romnet’s “crime” when we eat a vegetable picked by an illegal and never know it.

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      All of the things you just mentioned have been thrown up as obstacles to the new Alabama immigration law. People are even talking about putting more convicts on work release just to get the crops in. Make Americans expensive enough, and nobody with a brain will hire one for a simple manual labor job.

      • texas214

        that with unemployment statistics exaggerated for those with out a college education, greater for those who didn’t finish high school and worse for those between the ages of 16-25, there are plenty of available workers. Much as with Cain’s comments that they just don’t want to work.

        • Repair_Man_Jack

          the realm of political policy. Once the horse has been lead to water, the cow-poke has done the best he could.

          • louisnatale

            The regulatory paperwork and taxes on labor are what keep illegals working. If hire a legal citizen to clean toilets in foreclosed houses, 1) Payroll service like Paychex is $75 per two weeks 2) overtime 3) Got to keep signed time card on file 4) if he gets hurt, or decides to pretend to be hurt, big problem for me 5) if he decides Im a raciest or sexist or some such nonsense, he calls the labor board big problem for me 6) workman’s comp is 5k per year 7) taxes, his and mine, mean I have to pay him 50% more than he will walk with. 8) If he pisses me off enough to fire him he get 2 years of unemployment payoff. The list goes on and on. All this stuff makes hiring a legal employee the dumbest thing I could do. If these things change (999 seams like a good start) the unemployment rate would drop like a stone.

          • Repair_Man_Jack

            That the price of a minimum wage employee was typically $20/hr once you burdened the rate. What you tell me makes it sound like a small business (no allocation base) could logically end up paying something ont he order of 400% or $35/hr for privelege of hiring a $7/hr worker. Insane.

    • texabama

      I lived in Illinois for almost three years (after having lived in Texas) and was very surprised by the numbers of Mexicans I saw “up north”. This is no longer just a border state issue and it’s naive to think Gov Perry is the only candidate that should get drilled on it. The reality is that the federal government has allowed this to happen over several decades and has actively worked against the states when they try to combat it. Just look at the blow back that Arizona and Alabama have gotten for example.

  • texas214

    whether or not Romney hired a company that had illegals, what I want is a candidate to tell me his proposed solution to the problem and so far NONE of them have really addressed the problem.

    Yeah, building an electrified fence and sending them all back makes for good sound bites but neither is a long term solution.

    Amnesty NO!, Need for workers, unfortunately given the laziness of our society, yes.

  • nycmiddleman

    Home Owners and other “customers” should not be insulated from breaking the law. At a certain point YOU are culpable for what your contractors do. Period.