Even anti-tax economists like Milton Friedman admit that not all taxes are equally bad. The question is how much the tax tends to distort consumer prices. Pollution taxes actually make consumer taxes more reflective of social costs.; Land and Monopoly taxes are the least destructive general taxes capable of obtaining a lot of revenue.

The federal government is the entity most capable of regulating really large business entities, but a corporate/concentrated land tax(say a land tax with substantial household exemption) could be raised up until the point it crashed land values. The thing is, if that land tax increased was accompanied by a reduction in more destructive taxes like the B and O tax and sales tax, the climate for most businesses in WA would improve. Sure, Bill Gates might pay $1/Million year for that huge $30 million house and Microsoft might find its corporate taxes going up quite a bit, but can they really find a location like WA for less money?

Washington Real Estate taxes are low compared to Oregon--and some economically viable states like New Hampshire-so those taxes could easily be raised.
Whenever you see land appreciating in value, that is a sign there is a potential revenue source the government is ignoring. Perhaps we ought to have real estate taxes with a high exemption of say $1 Million per family. I think Bill Gates and Paul Allen could pay a LOT more property tax than they do now before they would consider moving to another state.

Marijuana could be easily legalized-and appropriately taxed.

The taxes I'd like to eliminate are the B and O tax and sales tax.

I've lived in WA for 13 years.

UC Berkeley is a public institution with obligations to support the public interest. The real question here is how the people of California really benefit by having an institution that is more international vs. one that isn't.

I agree there are cases in which it is warranted to award visas. Usually it is being done simply because it seems cheaper to University to hire a foreigner to develop local talent. On the whole, Ph.D level jobs pay pretty poorly in the US because there is a huge pool of foreign Ph.D. folks that want to get into the US(which gets 10 Million applications for immigration rights each year).

When possible, I do think it is often better for US students to have instructors that come from a similar cultural background-particularly for earlier courses where communication skills are important. I understand the need to learn to deal with other cultures-but I think that is best done when folks have a solid base. I also understand that sometimes literally the only people that know something are foreigners--and when that is the case, I think visas are warranted _for purposes of developing local talent.

The problem is the US is no longer developing local talent because the US has made all but a few professions requiring advanced training rather unattractive to Americans.

I think you'll find those categorizations are not entirely accurate if they were examined carefully. H-1b visas by research and educational institutions are exempt from the cap-and I think there is a tendency to classify visas as "educational" for those purposes.

The area in which there was potential negligence was allowing any workers on which a good background check cannot be done to manage data that is highly confidential. There is a contradiction between US Hippa regulations on the management of confidential information and US regulations that tend to discourage background checks. I think this sort of thing happened much less regularly when background checks were more a fact of life in the US for any management of sensitive data in government institutions(that has been greatly curtailed in recent years).

I have reservations about the US relying heavily on foreigners for occupations requiring graduate training in general-I think we should instead pay CEO's less, have fewer attorney and accountants and make positions that require substantial training more viable for Americans. I wouldn't object to a smaller better managed program similar to Singapore does-I just don't think the current mass system is desirable or sustainable.

Anyhow, I see no evidence that US professionals have historically been subpar. The expansion of H-1b has not be accompanied by massive increase in US wages or even shareholder equity. I don't see that the US is more a technical leader than it was pre-H-1b.

I think if you look, the economic protections for unskilled workers are considerably greater in Japan, Singapore, South Korea-and those are all highly competitive economies without a trade deficit or massive government borrowing-and they don't have the huge resource base the US has.

The folks in the US that are most highly paid relative to world standards and US median income are corporate executives, some folks in protected professions(Japan has a tiny fraction of the attorneys the US has) and some occupations like entertainers. The very wealthy in the US are enormously coddled by international standards relative to the economic base in the US. US doctors make quite a bit more than French doctors-and the US arguably has worse health care.

"It's a shame that our people don't want higher educations to work in a high-tech field. Many of the people who I know that didn't attend college work in the Oil Patch, choosing short term returns over education."

If you are starting out in India or Pakistan, there is a huge incentive to get Canadian or US citizenship. If someone already had citizenship rights, the additional payoff from getting a technical education is minimal. The way Singapore handles this:
a company can get all the foreign workers they want-quickly, but they will pay 2-3 times as much in taxes as the wages they pay those workers. I also don't think Singapore would let foreigners manager critical infrastructure without very careful consideration.

First off, I NEVER said all H-1b workers are criminals. I said it is impossible to do a background check on workers from India-or other similarly corrupt countries.

Every US worker could be replaced by workers from India or China at less than 25% of current costs. Does that mean they should be?

We will never see more US workers going into technical professions as long as those occupations are provided immigration preferences at no cost to the employers-and there thus will be little incentive to improve the US educational system or invest in advanced education for Americans.

Do you really want to say there is no connection between recruiting technical workers upon whom no effective background check can be done and security breaches?

I think the question should at least be examined closely. Enron BTW made some rather strange investments in India-and was an H-1b intensive shop.

Noone has done a comprehensive analysis here-in part because the companies that bought H-1b legislation have specifically made reporting standards inadequate for such an analysis.

I don't think most H-1b workers are involved in fraud-but if the H-1b program only allows a few terrorists or criminal organizations to put a few people in place that way-that is enough to cause big problems.

I don't think anyone upon whom a good background check can't be done should be allowed anywhere near sensitive data or critical infrastructure. Workers from Japan, Singapore, the EU can be given real background checks. Workers from more corrupt countries simply cannot.

The University of California at Berkeley is also a heavy user of H-1b visas. The last 8 year, UC Berkeley has applied for 977 H-1b Visas. It isn't clear how many of these related to their computer staff-but traditionally about half of all H-1b visas are used for that purpose. It is simply not credible to bring numerous foreign workers from places where you can't even reliably do a background check(people are regularly declared dead in India and simply can't sort it out) and expect to maintain any semblance of security.

The management of UC Berkeley should be investigated for criminal negligence.

I thought this was a good post. The difference is that wealthy folks with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder are more likely to have the social graces to cover it up-or can be surrounded by minions that cater to their disorder.

A lot of technical workers traditionally got attracted to tech work because of limited social graces. When they get into the corporate world, often they'll take their queues from the higher ups-and do so quite literally and without a lot of finesse.

In a nutshell, I don't think the problem is solved by beating up on some poor kid getting out of college. What needs to be looked at is who are running major American companies.

Corruption in general is very much part of south Asian culture. I would suggest taking a look at Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index. I don't think that the security mechanisms companies like PWC are used to are really applicable in a difficult situation like India. I'm not saying that all Indians are corrupt. I'm saying that there is enough of this sort of thing that it is a VERY different problem than dealing with Americans-which is hard enough.

Lots of folks managing stuff like systems that handle credit card data, insurance data have those kinds of options. There are also niches of that type in companies like Microsoft and Cisco-which are both heavy users of H-1b visas-and the various big financial firms and accounting firms.

I've worked both on a credit card fraud detection system and in an investigation of a crooked insurance company CEO that involve PWC doing the audit(kind of a mini-enron). I'm not saying that all H-1b visas are being used in those types of situations-but right now, there are no security regulations preventing it from being done and PWC is a heavy user now of H-1b visas as are many basic technology providing companies.

I personally think that is a serious potential security hole. When I worked in the credit card fraud detection system, we had gangs that were doing serious social engineering to commit credit card fraud on a large scale-and many of those gangs were based overseas.

These folks are virtually a privatized branch of government. The US elites depend on companies like PWC to understand what is going on in big organizations. If PWC is compromised, that means the US elites are effectively flying blind.

Now, personally I think use of H-1b workers for critical financial infrastructure is stupid. It is impossible for an American to do a good background check on someone in/from India.

Nobody really knows how they will react when they have a chance to steal millions of dollars. Putting a young guy far from home into the position where he can do that-and the costs are born by citizens of a country he may not identify much with isn't doing that country or the young guy any favor.

Senator Phil Gramm said something similar.

I'd love to find the quotes from both-they seem to have disappeared from the web.

I think the real question here is what is the right way to really encourage innovation? I think there is an argument for having a way to grant visas to serious innovators-but you need to have some additional incentives to balance things out for US citizens or you wind up pushing US citizens out of specific jobs markets. I wrote about the economics of this phenomena here-and discussed how we might make something that would work.

The economics behind Phil Gramm's and Tim O'Reilly's thinking is rather crude and remarkably self-serving. The one of the first big advocates of talent immigration was the Frank Galton-who was advocating it as part of a general eugenics policy. The thing is, there is a very good case that in the short term, immigration tends to benefit the wealthy like O'Reilly and Gramm's donors(and it is clear that there is political support for immigration among the wealthy in the US according to a variety of polls). Analyzing the long term case for immigration much trickier, in part because the people evaluating the case are often descendants of the immigrants themselves when there is a chance to do an evaluation. Real "controlled experiments" in this area don't really exist.