With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, the Bush administration has begun quietly rewriting federal regulations to eliminate barriers that restrict how foreign laborers can legally be brought into the country.

The effort, urgently underway at the departments of Homeland Security, State and Labor, is meant to rescue farm owners caught in a vise between a complex process to hire legal guest workers and stepped-up enforcement that has reduced the number of illegal planters, pickers and middle managers crossing the border.

“It is important for the farm sector to have access to labor to stay competitive,” said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. “As the southern border has tightened, some producers have a more difficult time finding a workforce, and that is a factor of what is going on today.”

Los Angeles Times

These people are coming legally, so I have no issue with this in that regard, but I have a better solution to this problem.  How about Congress cancels all of the welfare checks instead.  I bet we won’t have a shortage of farm workers then.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson promised fiscal conservatives Friday that he’d trim the cost of government by slowing the growth of Social Security benefits. Stepping squarely onto an issue long known as “the third rail of politics,” the Republican presidential candidate said, almost in passing, that changing the formula that adjusts Social Security benefits to keep pace with the cost of living would keep the program solvent over the long term.

While he wasn’t specific, numerous academic studies have concluded that the only way such a plan could work is if it slashes future Social Security benefits by one-fourth to one-half below what’s promised under current law.

“We could have the same level of Social Security benefits, for example, and adjust the cost of living increases to cover inflation,” Thompson told the Americans for Prosperity Foundation convention, and that “would solve the problem for probably 75 years.”

McClatchy

Something has to be done soon, that is certain. I don’t really know that reducing the current benefits is the right way to go, but it might be a start. Personally, I think they need to start making the case about privatizing Social Security again. It will lead to a far better return to our money and eventually do away with the current system which is a 1930s system trying to work in the 21st century. It simply can’t and it won’t. The Democrats flat out lied to the American people about what privatization would do and as usual the GOP spinelessly retreated on the issue with virtually no fighting back at all.