March 2, 2008 - It was a super busy Sunday for me. I started the day cutting coupons, and then went to Publix to buy some groceries. My total bill was about $46, and I "saved" about $32 from coupons and items on sale. Not too bad, I say. And the best part was that $11.50 of that $46 was a donation bag that Publix will donate on my behalf to someone who needs the contents. Otherwise, my bill would have been about $35 after $32 in coupons and discounts. So I went home, and Casey and Jamie came over to join Ellie and I for waffles for breakfast. Then I went to Home Depot and Radio Shack to get some pieces to put up my surround sound speakers. I've been putting this project off for nearly a year, so I figured while it was cool enough outside still, I would go up in the attic and wire up those speakers. It ended up being a terribly difficult task, involving lots of complicated wiring maneuvers to get the wire down to the place I needed it in the wall. After 3 hours of that project, Mike came over and we went to Taylor to play disc golf. Then it was a quick shower and a trip to Safety Harbor for church, followed by dinner at Ellie's mom's house and then back home to struggle another night with my dogs jumping up and off the bed all night. Continuing my discussion of "the issues" that the Presidential candidates are discussing, I am going to touch on immigration today. As far as I am concerned, this country was founded on the right for anyone to enter our country seeking a better life for themselves, a life they couldn't achieve in their previous home country. Whether they are coming from Canada, Mexico, Europe, Africa, Asia, it doesn't matter, there are a lot of people who want into our country. This is a great thing. It means our country has more to offer than other countries. We should do everything we can to allow as many people into our country as want to be here. This means we need to beef up the number of people processing applications for the immigration department, which creates jobs and is good for the economy. This means we need to improve our technology that allows the immigration department to share and acquire the information they need for reviewing the details of people entering our country. This creates jobs and improves our economy. The new people entering our country will have the opportunity of joining our work force. Mostly, these people will enter at the bottom of the ladder, which helps reduce payrolls by having a larger stock of low wage workers to choose from. This also allows for more established Americans to move up the ladder as companies grow to meet the new demands that a larger population requires. Again, more jobs, and a better economy. At the same time as there are lots of benefits to immigration opening up, there are dangers. As disgusting as it is to imagine, there are people who want to come into our country just so that they can cause as much destruction as possible before their own demise. While it is not always possible to predict the people who would do such things, there are things that can be done to prevent these people from entering our country. The most obvious way is to secure the borders of our country. The saying "tall fences make great neighbors" is quite appropriate here. While we like our relationship with Canada and Mexico, and the coasts seem far distances from foreign countries, we have an obligation to erect a boundary that can only be crossed at secured checkpoints. With a secure wall, whether it is physical or virtual (a network of motion activated cameras, for example, and border security that is able to deploy to the zones that are broached fast enough to respond to the illegal crossing), we will be able to ensure that everyone who enters the country does so in a legal and documented manner. Building this wall will no doubt cost a lot of money. But let's put things in perspective here. We are fighting two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) to "take the fight to them rather than letting them come to us". I estimate the US continental border to be about 12,000 to 15,000 miles all the way around. This includes our border with Mexico, Canada, and the oceans and gulf of mexico. This does not include Alaska, Hawaii, or any of our territories, such as Puerto Rico. Let's double the number 15,000, which gives us 30,000 miles of border to secure, which should cover all territories and the other two states. It is estimated that in Iraq alone we have spent about $500,000,000,000 already on the "war". This does not include future costs the US will be for obvious lawsuits, VA care for all the wounded soldiers, etc. Okay, so $500 billion goes into 30,000 about 16.7 million times, meaning that we could have spent about $17 million dollars a mile securing our borders. This also works out to about $3,150 per foot!!! We could have spent $1,000 per foot (this is a seriously nice wall we're building folks), earmarked another $1,000 a foot for college scholarships, and sent everyone in America a check for about $600. EVERYONE, all 300 million people. This would have...yes, you guessed it, created jobs, which would have helped our economy. Now I won't pretend that the war hasn't "helped" our economy, but it has been quite destructive to our economy as well. More on this tomorrow, possibly.