Immigrants make us… Richer.
https://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1755323296902451279?t=Vr-s_5TwF3rSE94Tri1hcg&s=19
Numbers are over 10 years.
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Or we try to make sure more fetuses become workers. Oh wait…
Of course they do. Children cost money to raise and those costs are born by society. When you take in an immigrant worker and their family what you get is a worker that cost money to create essentially for free. Heck children are so hard to come by in the US right now the fact that the immigrants sometimes bring children with them is a bonus.
All of this, of course, is built on the assumption that more GDP = better. In real life green card workers are frequently essentially indentured to their employers and thus help put downward pressure on wages and working conditions. The problem isn’t that Polish/Sikh truckers are in any way worse than native born truckers, in fact on average in my considerable experience they’re a decent bit better, the problem is that because that immigration is allowed the native born truckers have to compete with those people on a combination of price and service.
It’s good for consumers and companies and bad for employees basically. That’s a trade we’ve taken way too often for the last 50 years and now being a worker in this country is pretty shit.
I don’t think immigrants are in any way to blame for the impacts they have on the labor market, but I do seriously despise anything that somehow gives them less labor rights than their native born coworkers. Second class citizens in the workplace are bad for everyone. While it’s obvious that northern factory workers in 1860 weren’t being harmed at anything like the scale that enslaved workers in the deep south were, they were definitely suffering negative consequences from having to compete with a neighboring workforce that could be treated as livestock rather than as people.
I would like it if those hyper ambitious/hard working eastern European dudes in Chicago could work anywhere rather than just for the company that sponsored their visa. They might opt to be truck drivers still, but their additional negotiating power would result in them being (significantly) more expensive and thus less of a problem for other workers.
We probably shouldn’t allow offshoring either honestly. Trade is not a neutral thing it has winners and losers. That it is made out to be a net positive for the population of this country to be the worlds consumer of last resort is a great example of how badly using the wrong metrics to measure things can go wrong. GDP absolutely goes up when you’re the consumer of last resort, but the impacts on he labor market, and the resulting quality of life impacts for the bottom 60%, are substantially negative.
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Yes but normally we have to explain it, this is the first time I’ve seen the CBO come out and factually state it.
Agree with most of your post, would also add that a lot of immigrants pay taxes into stuff they can’t collect benefits from. They subsidize stuff like Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid.
Yeah I’m wildly not in favor of that as well. What happens when they get old? Sick? Someone in the US ends up paying for it or they just die… Our ER bills are as high as they are, ok mostly because of capitalism, but also because it’s the place the hospital gets legally forced to provide medical care to people without some kind of health plan like immigrants.
We should be open to taking anyone with useful skills and we should be welcoming about it. They shouldn’t have any restrictions that put them on a different playing field than native born workers. Ironically 100% for the benefit of the native born workers.
I might as well come out of the closet about being a full bore protectionist, which is what I am and have been since college. Comparing the theory vs the actual impacts of ‘free trade’ (which wasn’t actually free trade the other countries were putting up all kinds of trade barriers which we were aggressively pretending only hurt them) was one of the main things that broke me wrt econ. It’s really fucking hard to square the lived experience of anyone in the bottom 60% from 1975 or so to present with the idea that allowing unlimited imports from places with borderline free labor and no environmental/labor regulations was good for everyone. It was actually a complete disaster that absolutely crushed entire cities and states… we gave up millions of high quality union manufacturing jobs and in exchange we got cheaper versions of the stuff that used to pay for those high quality union manufacturing jobs. The net cost/benefit to the median US family was a pretty good sized negative number.
And that was the point. The outsourcing of the entire US manufacturing sector was primarily about gutting the American labor movement by forcing it to compete with people who hadn’t had a labor movement yet. Fortunately it’s now 2024 and most of the places that used to have cheap labor are now not cheap when you factor in labor + logistics vs US labor + logistics so that trend is finally starting to unwind.
Basically any work done by any of the Austrian/U of C (the milton friedman ones not the behavioral people those people are doing good work actually) guys over the course of the last century was roughly equivalent to studies from cigarette company lobbyists proving cigarettes don’t cause cancer. It turns out when you read a bunch of those papers in a short time period, you didn’t grow up middle class+, and your background is being a professional gambler this really stands out in a wildly unsubtle way. And when they start trying to defend it with patent bullshit it just confirms what your eyes, intuition, and logic are telling you. And once I noticed how deep in the foundations of economics a lot of these really dangerously false assumptions were it was well and truly over.
It would be like physics if force = mass * acceleration was instead written as force = mass * k which is the assumption that acceleration always equals 7 because that makes it easier on me the physicist. Except it’s like this everywhere you look once you start looking.
To actually read economic stats you really have to fully understand what they actually measure and not just take it on faith that the standard analysis is at all correct, because it probably isn’t. GDP is a terrible measuring stick for the health of an economy, the unemployment rate doesn’t capture how easy/hard to get a decent job, and the inflation rate does a terrible job of measuring cost of living. Trade can be good or trade can be bad, the devil is in the ramifications of the trade deal. Businesses very much do not trend toward competition they trend towards monopoly. Government regulation can be astoundingly positive or astoundingly negative. The quality of execution of a policy is very often a much bigger contributor to its success or failure than any of the ideals of the policy.
It’s simultaneously morally wrong and our best argument to get racists to support legal immigration. Win the first battle, then make the next battle giving them a fair shake on benefits, imo.
And with regards to all the free trade arguments really amounting to screwing labor to benefit the wealthy, I’m with you but again we’re just hemorrhaging blood from so many wounds at once, I think winning as many battles as we can beats trying to moonshot all of them at once. We will have the moonshot to fall back on once Boomers die off anyway.
The damage on trade is mostly fully done at least for this generation. There’s a reason the labor movement is mounting a comeback, it’s because competing with Chinese and Korean high tech manufacturing workers on cost isn’t actually all that hard anymore. In fact the cheap workers in that equation are the non union US plant workers in the South. Which makes sense when you realize that the objective of everyone in state and local government in the south is to keep labor cheap. They literally fought a war to keep the labor livestock at one point lol.
Their descendants are not more sophisticated, they’re the same fucking people lol. Make stuff out of cheap labor and cheap raw materials and then sell it in a market with higher prices/costs = profit. Such innovative titans of industry they are lol. If that means a meaningful fraction of Mississippi can’t have clean drinking water that’s a price they’re willing to pay to keep labor cheap.
China was sending us massive amounts of basically free shit for a couple of decades, think that is indeed a good deal and would have been super easy to have that benefit everyone in America. Just tax Walmart, Apple, Amazon, etc. at a reasonable level with no loopholes and then do the UBI. Of course, instead we let them pay essentially zero taxes.
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It wasn’t free. It was cheap. Very cheap. Because there was almost no labor cost in it. In exchange for that the entire rust belt rusted and the price of labor totally decoupled from productivity. I’m not disputing that the consumer won from the trade policies, that was how they sold those trade policies. I’m saying the worker got absolutely annihilated, and on the whole the income side of most people’s lives is more important than the relative price of non essential consumer goods.
Workers are consumers, my friend. If Xi Jinping personally handed you a free iPhone then of course it is a win for you as an American. Think it would be rather foolish to not allow you to accept it because someone in Ohio wanted to sell you an iPhone.
What would be sensible is to make you report the value of the iPhone as taxable income. We could then use those taxes to employ workers in infrastructure projects, building housing, etc. And oh btw, Xi Jinping is also going to send us all the building materials we need for dirt cheap 
This is the actual lie that the elite told. That they would do stuff analogous to the above to make it a win for everybody. They did nothing of the sort, in fact they went in the opposite direction and did everything they could to help the winners take more and more in every which way possible.
The theory of free trade is quite attractive and it comes quite close to realization in the real world, imo. The actual correct criticism is one step above from a realist, political economy perspective. That the winners are going to use their wealth to buy political power to rig things more in the favor and that with less union dues, etc. being collected, the workers will lose political influence. And this trend of things being more and more rigged for the elite will continue to spiral. This is certainly what happened in the US. Was it inevitable? 
As long as capital is portable but labor and raw materials aren’t it was always going to happen. What wasn’t inevitable was this behavior being actively encouraged and subsidized by the government.
Combination of that and Citizens United, which I guess could be seen as an extension of that, is where we are. In a perfect world, of course taking the cheaper shit and then taxing the winners and making the middle class and working class whole would be a preferred outcome… But this isn’t a perfect world, unfortunately.
Jesus Christ, this special counsel report on Biden is fucking horrendous. He’s almost certainly going to get impeached over it, and he might actually be convicted and probably should be convicted/removed.
From WaPo:
Ultimately, the report said a jury would find Biden to be a sympathetic figure and “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur said it would be "difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” the report said.
He apparently shared it with his ghostwriter and admitted he knew it was classified.
The report noted that in a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in early 2017, shortly after his term as vice-president ended, Biden said he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” At the time, Biden was living in a rented home in Virginia.
“Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023,” the report said.
From the report:
Hoping this take ages better than milk: this is going to be a nothingburger. It will obviously get pointed to loudly by a bunch of people who were never voting for Biden, but it’s not going to cause anyone to vote for Trump instead of Biden.
Looks pretty 
on paper but honestly think giving someone hard time for not being able to remember dates particularly in some sort of deposition type setting is a little harsh. I would struggle relaying dates of various employment off the cuff.
It may decide some votes, but not a ton. But he’s not polling great, he’s not fit for office, do Dem senators consider the unthinkable?
We’re not talking dates we’re talking, “Was I Vice President in 2013? What about 2009?” levels of holy shit.
Isn’t that just asking him what dates he had a job? (Like obviously he has some cognitive decline and he needs to know that sort of stuff being president but lot of normal folks could miss if asked what dates they were in a job)
Yeah but it’s not like an exact date situation, it’s the year. And it’s not some random job, it’s the vice presidency. And he can work backwards… “Well, I won the presidency in 2020, Trump won in 2016, so Obama had two terms 2008 and 2012, so I was in from 2009 to 2017.”
And we’re not talking about whether he’s competent to have power of attorney or live on his own, we’re talking about whether he’s competent to be the President of the United States.
Regarding impeachment and removal…
49 R’s
Manchin
Sinema to the highest bidder
Can someone who wants to be president put together 9 more votes? Some sort of alliance of two or three blue state Dems who will jump into the primary if he’s removed and can leverage four to six more votes? There might also be a few principled, “Well I’d vote to remove Trump for this, so I have to…” votes because Dems.
Do I think it’s likely he’s removed? No. Is it possible? Yes, 5-10% chance imo.
I mean, he’s obviously declining, go talk to literally anyone over 80, this is totally normal stuff. It’s a disgrace he’s the nominee.
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