Mexican Drug Smugglers to Trump: Thanks! : Crouched in the spiky terrain near this border city, a veteran smuggler known as Flaco points to the steel border fence and describes how he has taken drugs and people into the United States for more than three decades. His smuggling techniques include everything from throwing drugs over in gigantic catapults to hiding them in the engine cars of freight trains to making side tunnels off the cross-border sewage system. When asked whether the border wall promised by President Trump will stop smugglers, he smiles. “This is never going to stop, neither the narco trafficking nor the illegals,” he says. “There will be more tunnels. More holes. If it doesn’t go over, it will go under.” What will change? The fees that criminal networks charge to transport people and contraband across the border. Every time the wall goes up, so do smuggling profits.
The Health Care Disaster Is Really About Taxes : I have been a critic of Obamacare since it became law, but the Republican alternative is worse in nearly every way. The American Health Care Act, which was narrowly passed in the House last week, would worsen Obamacare’s problems rather than fix them. Coverage would be disrupted for millions almost immediately, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of a previous iteration of the legislation.
To Be Great Again, America Needs Immigrants : What makes America great? The standard answers point to qualities that the United States is said to have in greater abundance than its peers in Europe and Japan. There are the innovations that pour out of Silicon Valley companies and elite universities, the flexibility of a work force relatively unconstrained by union rules, the dynamism of entrepreneurs less hamstrung by an oversize welfare state and of a more mobile population willing to move to where the cutting-edge jobs are mushrooming. In short, the standard innovation theory of American exceptionalism is all about qualities that make each worker more productive.
What a surprise that Donald Trump needed a white collar crime defense lawyer.