The Lowell Sun has endorsed Marisa DeFranco for U.S. Congress in the 6th Congressional district. (That’s not our district, Sturbridge).  The part that the DeFranco emphasized in the email that I received is quoted below from the editorial.

DeFranco would implement heavy fines against employers who exploit immigrants, increase border and port security with targeted inspection goals over the next four years, double the number of immigration judges to process cases and deport immigrants with felony convictions, and create a path to legalization — not citizenship — for undocumented immigrants who refuse to go through the same process as legal immigrants. She’d also create an “essential worker visa’ similar to the seasonal visa that exists now.

The system is broken but “we’re not going to deport our way out of the problem,” says DeFranco, who opposes amnesty.

DeFranco campaign to unseat Tierney and defeat three other rivals in the race is an uphill battle. In our view, however, she’s articulated the best ideas to change Washington’s partisan culture and get things done. The Sun endorses Marisa DeFranco in the Sept. 9 Democratic primary race for the 6th Congressional District.

I have long supported fixing the immigration issue on the employer side of the problem rather than on the employee side.  As far back as 2006, I have been publishing on the subject.

I am not so much a fan of some of the other things The Lowell Sun likes so much about her.  When I was growing up, the paper was pretty heavily Republican oriented.  I have no idea how much the paper has changed since I left Lowell for good in 1967.  If they still carry even an iota of their previous leanings, then maybe I can understand why they like the other aspects of DeFranco’s campaign that they mentioned.  I don’t so much disagree with what DeFranco says on these other issues.  It is the way she  says it that I think is a little off. (Or at least the way The Lowell Sun interprets it.)

Naked Capitalism has the fourth installment, Real Fiscal Responsibility 4; Carter: Education Reform, in its series. I think the greatest contribution of the series so far, and it is only beginning, is the insight quoted below.

This pattern was reinforced further by the activities of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The relatively new CBO (established in 1974) evaluated pending or proposed legislation based on whether their models projected fiscal neutrality for that legislation. But, it was never part of its charge to evaluate legislation passed or pending for its impact on the various aspects of public purpose. So, CBO, in its very purpose and mission, has been directed at a faux problem of fiscal responsibility rather than any of the real ones that actually exist. And its very formation represents a misdirection of the Congress away from real problems that are aspects of public purpose and toward two proxies, the debt subject to the limit and the annual deficit which are not real problems related to the public purpose of the Federal Government. We need an end to that kind of orientation. And the Government during the Carter period mostly reinforced it.

I have high hopes that this series will refocus the discussion on what really are the legitimate public purposes of our government. We need to re-examine the tactics we invented in another time to accomplish the public purpose. We need tactics that meet the challenges of the present time.

New Economic Perspectives has the third installment, Real Fiscal Responsibility 3; Carter: Inflation and Health Care, of its series. I’ll just excerpt one quote that addresses my complaint about the second installment.

Cost-push inflation cannot be eliminated without killing the economy if one relies on increased taxes, reduced Government spending and high interest rates, which is the deficit hawk prescription. All that will and did do is to move toward macroeconomic and microeconomic austerity. The way cost-push inflation has to be fixed is through bringing alternative sources of supply, wage and price controls, and rationing online.

I guess I had outsized expectations for this explanation. The comment I posted, slightly edited, is shown below.

Thank you for saying what Carter should have done to rein in Cost Push Inflation.

The explanation was not as overwhelmingly irrefutable as I had hoped. Perhaps that was a bit much to expect.

Wage and price controls had been tried by Nixon and Ford as my faulty memory tells me. It did not work for them. You alluded to the enforcement by a Carter staff that was only 10% the size of what Nixon had. So how come it didn’t work for Nixon either? Admittedly the size of the staff doesn’t guarantee success of a poorly conceived program.

Rationing of gasoline happened almost automatically with the long gas lines, alternate day purchasing, and more. Of course, I don’t remember any rationing of other pertroleum based products.

Of course, in WWII there were many more far-reaching and effective programs to hold down inflation. I even have now come to understand how selling war bonds was not a way of financing the war, but was a way of controlling inflation.

As for Reagan’s solution to the problem. I always attributed it to the near depression he caused. This cut the demand for oil so much that it broke OPEC’s ability to control the prices. That was a very effective way of ending cost push inflation, although at the price of great pain to a lot of people. So, despite talk of supply side economics that was supposed to increase supply without the need to have increasing prices, it was actually demand side economics that worked – cut the demand for oil so prices would stop rising. I have not done any research on the myriad factors that could have been responsible for the end to inflation, so I could very well be wrong in my story, no matter how plausible it might sound to me.