There is a debate raging in the population about issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Most people are opposed to the idea, at least according to the polls. Among our elected officials the matter is mostly split along party lines. Me, I don't care one way or the other. I was struck about something that I read in the Washington Post yesterday on the subject of licenses for illegals. The Post says in an editorial in their November 18, 2007 edition, that giving licenses to illegals is good public policy, which the Post defines as fewer uninsured drivers, fewer fatal accidents and fewer drunken drivers on the road. The Post cites Gov. Bill Richardson's observation that in his home state of New Mexico, the number of uninsured drivers on the road has declined from 31% to 11% since they began to license illegals. That seems compelling to me and good public policy. However the Post seems to confuse correlation with causation in this paragraph; A report prepared for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety gives a sobering assessment of those consequences. The report, based on data collected in the 1990s, says that unlicensed drivers are almost five times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than drivers with valid licenses and that 20 percent of all fatal accidents involve at least one driver without a valid license. Such drivers are also more likely to operate vehicles under the influence of alcohol. Licensing drivers does not in and of itself make them safer or more likely to obey the traffic laws. In fact, an alternative explanation for the high number of unlicensed drivers involved in fatal motor vehicle accidents is that they have no license because of a history of driving unsafely. The same is far more likely for drunken drivers. The only safety statistics that seem relevant when talking about licensing illegals, is the safety record of unlicensed illegals. Anyway, as I said, I don't really care too much one way or the other. Generally, I am on the side of people trying to earn a decent living and to better themselves. In other news, Son Sneed and I went to his ECT procedure this morning at the crack of dawn. The poor guy is having to have a series of six procedures, three this week and three the next, because his depression has returned. Hopefully, he will feel better as a result of this series of treatments. There was an article in the paper here yesterday morning about the State of Arizona paying people to care for their disabled spouses at home. At first blush, it seems like a ridiculous idea. Daughter Sneed was astonished that the state was doing it. Her thinking is that people should take care of their own. My first take was similar, but the State is going to pay someone in most of these cases anyway and probably far more to boot. so, I guess from a strictly pragmatic point of view, it makes sense. But it does leave an uneasy feeling. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky