The Right Side of the News

Is that some heart I see in there? Good. Not "require" but offer the suggestion."Hey, Joaquin, You wanna start some citizenship classes?""I take tres el trabajo from gringo. No tienen tiempo."Besides, they are here to add their culture to the others we have in this country by the hundreds. They are here to make our history with us. Don't worry about the language thing. Mom and Dad can just get by in a supporting culture. But the kids...They will absorb both cultures like the proverbial sponge. A couple more generations and they're just regular 'mercans' trying to get to the office on time for once this week, except with maybe a little more soul. More guns in the workplace?Maybe not.

Because, Love, this society has been giving its money to multi-billionaires, in huge $100bn chunks, every year for the last 30 years. Now the top 2% have, literally, 98% of the money in this country. There isn’t enough left to go around to keep the poor folks from needing 2,3 jobs just to earn the purchasing power your father earned with one.

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How do you explain this situation of people having to have more than one job in order to survive? That was not the case until fairly recently. My father supported a family of six on his own income and he didn't make a lot of money. That situation pretty much persisted through the years I was married and raising my daughter too. When did that change and why?

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The central issue is that wages are a cost and in a capitalist system there is pressure to keep costs down. There are a number of ways that has played out, but that is the underlying reason.If there is a way to do a job cheaper, through automation, moving it abroad or replacing workers or reducing benefits somebody will do it. They will do it for profits or to keep prices down or because it is the only way to stay in business.One thing you ought to think about is Minimum Wage - and what happens every time there is a move to increase it.

Do you really believe that?

Do you really believa all that? Where did you learn it?

But America has always been a capitalist system, so why wasn't this a problem until the last few decades?

Nothing to believe. Known facts.The problem is nothing I cite here, even the Fed's own numbers, will be acceptable to you since all sources are tainted by closet communist influences perpetrated by Satan.

Perhaps the biggest thing - on that side - is that automation and foreign competition - in many ways - have cost a lot of the jobs that paid reasonably well. Minimum wage service jobs are generally hard to automate and can’t be sent abroad. And minimum wage is just too low to live on.There are many changes that have enabled that, including improved technology, industrial development in other countries, lower trade barriers and so on.The rise of the “gig economy” where workers are low paid “contractors” with few - if any - benefits, hasn’t helped.(Uber is the big example of that. And they are working hard on self-driving cars so they can eventually get rid of their drivers anyway.)

Huh? This is an unexpected descent into sanity and compassion, even empathy. What happened to (paraphrasing), "All illegals should be deported"? Why do you think this particular illegal immigrant shouldn't be deported but instead be helped to become legal? Because you know him and think well of him?Stop and think about this a minute. Probably most illegal immigrants have American citizens who know them and think well of them - they're gardners, landscapers, farm workers, maids, house cleaners, etc. Shouldn't they be helped to become legal, too? If not why not? Surely you don't consider yourself the only proper judge of job performance and character.People are the same the world over. Immigrants are no more likely to be rapists, drug dealers and criminals than Americans, and the statistical data we have says they're less likely . They have the same hopes and dreams as Americans, which are a rewarding and successful life for themselves and their families. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do that here and contribute to our economy (and your Social Security and Medicare), which will soon be surpassed as the largest in the world by China, and only because China has a larger population. The slower our population grows the sooner China will pass us. Every illegal immigrant is an individual case. Everyone is in favor of secure borders that make only legal immigration possible, but 100% effectiveness will never be a reality, especially since all it takes is overstaying a visa, the most common form of illegal immigration. After an illegal immigrant has built a successful life here, what sense does it make to destroy that life? And there's still the right to request asylum that any immigrant can make at a legal point of entry or, if already illegally in the county, to any member of law enforcement.Even though everyone favors secure borders and sees the risks of encouraging illegal behavior, what sense does it make to deport an illegal who has been here 10 years, has a family, and has a job making productive contributions to our economy. Why should it be required that immigrants become citizens? If instead of the term immigrant we substitute the term resident alien, it makes no sense for all resident aliens to become citizens. Here's an example from my own experience: a family moved into our neighborhood from Germany because the father was assigned by his company to be their American representative. After five years they returned to Germany. The father was just one of many aliens with H1-B visas who fully intend to return to their native country at some point, or who wish to remain a citizen of their home country even though they live here in the US.Think about it. If you decided to live out the rest of your life in Paris, why should you have to become a French citizen to do that? It already is for all candidate citizens under 50. Of course unassimilated groups build the nation, and have built the nation. Chinese immigrants built the western railroads. We are still the melting pot. Adult and older Immigrants assimilate more slowly than children, and the children usually assimilate completely. That is how immigration works and how it has worked throughout our history. It was never the general case that foreign language immigrants arrived, learned English in a year, and voil, they're assimilated. Rather, they were drawn to ethnic enclaves (e.g., Chinatown) that eased the transition of their family into the American mainstream over a generation or two.Many immigrants are never going to "assimilate" in every way you mean, though. Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus are not going to become Christians. Indians and Vietnamese are not going to begin sitting down to meals of steak and potatoes. They're not going to give up their love of soccer and cricket. Immigrants will change America, just as they always have. Where walls make sense according to the experts then we should put up walls. No one should have any problem with that. I would question the judgment of anyone who claims there are no points on our borders where walls make sense.But, as you've been told time and again, much of our southern border with Mexico is the Rio Grande. It makes no sense to wall ourselves off from the Rio Grande. And huge portions of the property along this border is privately owned and would have to be taken away from their owners by eminent domain. The lawsuits would go on for years and even decades. And seriously, you really think walling ourselves off from this river is a good idea: --Percy

Before the late 1800's we were an agrarian society and monetary income wasn't so nccritical. Then, in the "glided age", the rich ran roughshod over the poor more than they do now. The economic stimulus of two world wars helped a lot, except for the Great Depression.But the Republicans have greatly increased their war on the poor and are totally beholden to the rich. The myth of lazy people living high off the hog on government assistance Reagan started has also hurt.

If that happened then that would represent your opportunity to present the rest of the data and facts. You instead post what you've heard from your long list of right wing pundits, prognosticators and crazies.The reality is that you don't really feel comfortable dealing in data and facts. We have yet to hear if you now understand that no pensions were lost in the bankruptcies of those California cities, that there was an actual for real California budget surplus for last year, and that we all recognize that California has a severe underfunding problem with its major pension funds.--Percy

*Only* $14,000/year in the early 1970's? Are you kidding me? That was a damn fine salary back then. $14,000/year in, say, 1973 would be $77,000/year in today's dollars. The image you presented is of a different gap, the one between productivity and wages. You probably want something more like this: --Percy

I kind of like Wikipedia's definition:

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In Internet slang, a troll is a person who starts quarrels or upsets people on the Internet to distract and sow discord by posting inflammatory and digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses and normalizing tangential discussion, whether for the troll's amusement or a specific gain.

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Seems to fit you well.--Percy

I'm for taking individual cases into account as much as possible.As for the Rio Grande why do you all focus on the problematic parts when the border patrol would be happy for a wall at many locations that wouldn't be problematic? The right kind of wall in those locations would cut down on their work keeping track of illegals and drugs and whatnot, and I'm sure they have the brains to deal with different situations differently, so if a wall, or a certain kind of wall, doesn't work at the Rio Grande, they'll need some other methods there. Meanwhile the wall will work for the places where it will work. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No, I'm always serious about what I post.