Working class Liberals - you're actually WILLING to let this happen to you?

[4est_4est_Gump]

While cynical politicians prattle on about protecting the American dream, they’re working together to destroy it. If these elected officials care so much about reducing poverty, why are they working so hard to import more of it from around the world? Leaders in both political parties have thrown struggling Americans under the bus to feed the cheap illegal-alien labor machine.

The working poor are the biggest losers in D.C.’s amnesty game. U.S. Civil Rights commissioner Peter Kirsanow has been a lonely voice warning about the impact of mass illegal immigration and perpetual amnesty on low-income black Americans. “The country’s economic woes have disproportionately harmed African Americans, especially those with little education,” he warned this spring. “The economy has a glut of low-skilled workers, not a shortage,” he said, which is driving wages down.

Stagnant wages and depressed economic growth affect working poor Americans of all colors, while illegal-alien amnesty beneficiaries cash in. Steve Camarota and Karen Ziegler of the Center for Immigration Studies reported last month that “since 2000, all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population. Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.”

President Obama has already granted administrative amnesty to an estimated 2 million illegal aliens and renewed “temporary” work permits for 520,000. The administration is planning an expansion that would grant amnesties to at least 6 million more lawbreakers.

Where is the opposition? Appeasement Republicans refuse to support Texas GOP senator Ted Cruz’s on-target proposal to repeal Obama’s “DREAM” magnet and Alabama GOP senator Jeff Sessions’s clarion call to block any more executive amnesties as a precondition to border-bill negotiations. According to my sources on the Hill, the staffs of Senators McCain, Flake, and Murkowski met privately and opposed any changes to Obama’s DREAM passes for illegals — which makes them willing and suicidal accomplices in the perpetual Democratic voter-recruitment drive. On the House side, GOP House speaker John Boehner is also openly opposed to stopping the DREAM nightmare.

There are no longer two separate parties in Washington. There’s just one big Amnesty Inc. conglomerate addicted to Big Business donations and Big Government grievance politics. The Obama White House needs to buy off Hispanic voters, keep immigration lawyers employed, and secure a left-wing permanent ruling majority. Establishment Republicans need to pay off the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pander to minority lobbyists, and curry favor with open-borders CEOs led by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.

The real crisis is not at the border. It’s being fomented inside our nation’s capital. The “border crisis” is a bipartisan D.C. catastrophe of craven politicians abandoning their constitutional duties to defend our sovereignty and put American workers first.

Michelle Malkin, NRO

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

What happens if there is no such thing as a working class Liberal to answer?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Real employment usually cures the liberal mind. It endures in the government workplace, tho.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

 

[Busybody]

no juan cares

 

[Ishmael]

Michelle has it nailed..........again.

These people coming in will serve no useful purpose here beyond making the lives of the lowest quintile of CITIZENS even more miserable than they already are.

Ishmael

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Michelle has it nailed..........again.

These people coming in will serve no useful purpose here beyond making the lives of the lowest quintile of CITIZENS even more miserable than they already are.

Ishmael

Maybe their fellow Liberals want them unemployed and angry.



Get that base MOTIVATED!

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

STALIN murdered the Russian middle-class then starved the proletariat and peasants, to feed the bureaucrats and military.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You're WILLING to let this happen to you?

The U.S. is getting poorer and has been doing so over a sustained period. That is a first in the history of this country, and it has all kinds of dire consequences, including an inability to continue funding the level of welfare currently promised. Unless this trend can be reversed, there is little point in talking about income inequality, at least in terms of taking more from the doers and providing it to the less well-off. Atlas Shrugged showed where that leads.

The Great Recession had a serious impact on all percentiles in the graph above. All are down from 2007. Liberals want to focus on how much better the "rich" are doing versus how poorly the "poor" are doing. The implication is that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor. This ideological nonsense is politically convenient and diversionary. There is no fixed pie where someone who gets a larger piece does so at the expense of someone receiving a smaller piece. That is only possible where government determines who the winners are.

The mindset of the loony left is that those at the bottom are not getting their fair share. The reality is that the government dole has locked them into this position. Ben Franklin recognized the corrosive effects more than two centuries ago:

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

Human nature has not changed since Old Ben made his observation. What has changed is the ability of politicians to buy votes with taxpayer money. The poor are merely collateral damage in the quest for office and greater power.

The distribution at the top is not independent of government. The more government controls the economy, the more important it is to "have a friend in government." It used to be what you knew enabled you to succeed. Today, it is increasingly who you know. Crony capitalism (there is no such thing, but there is "crony government") adds to whatever differences in income distributions are due to ability, occupation, luck, risk-taking and motivation.

Anyone who believes that government helps the poor need only look at the effects on the 25th percentile. Even before the Great Recession hit, this group was the only one failing to keep up. This result should not be interpreted as the need for more help, but the need to re-examine the entire structure of the Welfare State.

Matters Are Actually Worse Than They Appear

Were the economy and its components growing at a real rate of 2 - 3%, then median net worth presumably would be growing at a similar rate. Let's do some quick arithmetic based on the graph above. According to the report, median net worth in 2003 was $88,000. From the graph, it is approximately 25% higher than it was in 1984. That would mean that median net worth in 1984 was approximately 88,000/1.25 or $70,400. Compounding that forward 29 years would produce what one might expect the median net worth to be at the end of 2013. At 2% that number would be $137,500; at 3%, $182,400. Instead, it is only $56,300.

Based on these quick calculations, American's median net worth has been reduced by 60% to 70% from what might have been expected. How is this possible?

There are several reasons. I would argue that most of the blame goes to government:

Government is taking a much bigger share of the economy.
Government understates inflation which results in an overstatement of real GDP.
Taxes are higher, especially on capital gains which are unadjusted for inflation and taxed as if they were true gains.
Government interventions have destroyed the economy's ability to grow.
Government transfer payments have reduced the workforce, spreading a reduced output over more people.
Government's encouragement of the use of debt has created behavior not in the best interests of unsophisticated citizens.

There are other reasons, some that are not related to government although I suspect they have minimal effect. Regardless, the fact is that the U.S. is becoming poorer by the day. For much of this period, people maintained their spending levels by borrowing or consuming capital. The good times of the last twenty years were nowhere near as good as we pretended they were. Now we must pay the piper and hope that government can be reduced back to an affordable level of spending and regulation.

This Knowledge Is Not New

Economists, particularly at the Federal Reserve, are fond of saying their models no longer work. That is one of the most disingenuous statements ever made by the economics profession. Unfortunately this profession has the same integrity as their masters, the politicians, who basically bought them lock, stock, and barrel.

There is nothing new in economics. The fundamentals of human behavior have not changed. Econometric models evolved to describe history. They were deliberately correlated with outcomes. That was the measure of a "good" model, how well it fit the data. But the economy is not some large production machine that can be manipulated by altering inputs. The economy is millions and millions of individual decision-makers who respond directly to incentives and disincentives. These have nothing to do with the aggregate variables that government focuses on.

If individual incentives and disincentives remain reasonably constant, the aggregates tend to remain in relationship with each other. Once you begin changing incentives at the micro-economic level, then behavior changes and the correlations are altered. The model no longer describes reality.

The fallacies of macroeconomics were known and rejected long before John Maynard Keynes was born. His contributions were nothing new. What gained them credibility was the desperation of the political class to do something that might end the Great Depression.

Adopting something on such a basis is not rational. It is the same desperation exhibited by those looking for a cure for a terminal disease. They believe in quacks out of desperation.

...

The political class always despised economists because they recognized and criticized their political fantasies. The description "dismal science" came from their realistic approach to political dreams. Now that the political class has coopted the economics profession to the point where bribery can get them whatever opinion they want, they use economists to further these political fantasies. Any economist dependent on the government cannot be an honest man without risking his livelihood.

Monte Perelin, American Thinker

 

[JohnnySavage]

An anchor baby talking about how DC is destroying the country by letting people who lived their whole lives here, stay.

Irony!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

An anchor baby talking about how DC is destroying the country by letting people who lived their whole lives here, stay.

Irony!

Her parents got her the legal way.

This is an old slander easily disproved...

They all, the whole family, actually produced and paid taxes.

This is the lowest possible form of argument and why I never believed, for a second, your claim to being an actual conservative.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Her parents got her the legal way.

This is an old slander easily disproved...

They all, the whole family, actually produced and paid taxes.

This is the lowest possible form of argument and why I never believed, for a second, your claim to being an actual conservative.

Her parents left the PI pregnant with the purpose of giving birth here. How is that any different than what some women from Mexico are doing?

It's not about liberal or conservative; it's about hypocrisy.

 

[Ishmael]

Her parents got her the legal way.

This is an old slander easily disproved...

They all, the whole family, actually produced and paid taxes.

This is the lowest possible form of argument and why I never believed, for a second, your claim to being an actual conservative.

His debate style belies any claim he may make to conservatism.

Ishmael

 

[JohnnySavage]

His debate style belies any claim he may make to conservatism.

Ishmael

Yea, because you, 4est, Miles, Jenn and BB are such excellent debaters.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

His debate style belies any claim he may make to conservatism.

Ishmael

I agree. He equates actual professional work visas with sneaking over the border.

They really had no choice as to when she was born.

 

[Ishmael]

I agree. He equates actual professional work visas with sneaking over the border.

They really had no choice as to when she was born.

I was referring to his propensity to attack the poster/author rather than discuss the substance. Just as he did in reply to my post.

Sooooooooo predictable.

Ishmael

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Her parents left the PI pregnant with the purpose of giving birth here. How is that any different than what some women from Mexico are doing?

It's not about liberal or conservative; it's about hypocrisy.

I had people like you pegged long before you actually even arrived:

A_J's corollary #5, “When lacking reason and sound argument, the New Age Liberal charges headlong into ‘debate’ with emotional cries of Hypocrisy. The New Age Liberal is, of course, immune to and incapable of Hypocrisy. That would require hard and fast standards.”

You always think you're so new and clever, but all you are is old, stale and highly predictable.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I was referring to his propensity to attack the poster/author rather than discuss the substance. Just as he did in reply to my post.

Sooooooooo predictable.

Ishmael

Wanna bet he's one of the "we're a nation of immigrants" contingent?

A_J's corollary #3, “The New Age Liberal maintains contradictory positions comfortably compartmentalized. (This is because the New Age Liberal is a creature that believes in consensus as a short-cut to an examination of the facts and a reasoned judgment about said facts. Corollary #2.)”

 

[JohnnySavage]

I was referring to his propensity to attack the poster/author rather than discuss the substance. Just as he did in reply to my post.

Sooooooooo predictable.

Ishmael

Ummmm.... I didn't even say a word to you, and you said:

His debate style belies any claim he may make to conservatism.

Ishmael

*shaking head*


Carry on among yourselves.

 

[JohnnySavage]

It's comical to see you guys pretending to take the intellectual high road, while at the same time doing all the ascription and name-calling you seem to loath in others.

It's impossible to have a discussion with any of the GB "conservatives" because you guys are so wrapped into your self-delusions. The half-dozen or so of you generally have nobody to talk to but yourselves; which is ok, but you seem to think the reason for that is because you are so intellectually superior to everyone else.


I'm done (again). I'll check back with yinz in a few months.

 

[RobDownSouth]

I had people like you pegged long before you actually even arrived:

A_J's corollary #5, “When lacking reason and sound argument, the New Age Liberal charges headlong into ‘debate’ with emotional cries of Hypocrisy. The New Age Liberal is, of course, immune to and incapable of Hypocrisy. That would require hard and fast standards.”

You always think you're so new and clever, but all you are is old, stale and highly predictable.

Notice how the Chief did NOT refudiate SavageJohnnySavage's anchor baby statement.

He can't, because even the Chief knows its true....the best he can do is deflect.

Self-loathing Michelle Malkin has always been a "do as I say, not as I do" wingnut, and that has enormous appeal to not-Republicans and glibertarians.

It's comical to see you guys pretending to take the intellectual high road, while at the same time doing all the ascription and name-calling you seem to loath in others.

It's impossible to have a discussion with any of the GB "conservatives" because you guys are so wrapped into your self-delusions. The half-dozen or so of you generally have nobody to talk to but yourselves; which is ok, but you seem to think the reason for that is because you are so intellectually superior to everyone else.


I'm done (again). I'll check back with yinz in a few months.

#AscriptionAgain is all they have

 

[RobDownSouth]

I was referring to his propensity to attack the poster/author rather than discuss the substance. Just as he did in reply to my post.

Sooooooooo predictable.

Ishmael

Compare that to Malkin's passive-aggressive "let's have beaners and working class democrats fight!"

#DivideNConquer

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

Her parents got her the legal way.

This is an old slander easily disproved...

They all, the whole family, actually produced and paid taxes.

This is the lowest possible form of argument and why I never believed, for a second, your claim to being an actual conservative.

Illegal immigrants pay taxes too.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You guys need to step up your game.

You're making LT look positively brilliant.

Touab, hope you wander in here and read Johnny after what I talked to you about this morning...



... another "conservative/centrist" who not only went to the Liberal gambit, but the actual verbiage while ignoring the actual topic...



A_J's corollary #14, “The Modern Moderate/Conservative is defined by the enthusiasm, and self-congratulatory cries of ‘reasonable,” displayed in taking up a position held by the New Age Liberal after they have abandoned that hard-won cultural victory for one even more to the Left.”

 

[Ishmael]

Illegal immigrants pay taxes too.

"Squarwk illegals pay taxes, illegals pay taxes, squarwk"

They consume more than they pay. They are a net drag on the economy.

Ishmael