>Does "defund the police" ring a bell? Do you have ANY idea how much damage that did? Show me where Sanders or Warren or AOC or any other prominent progressive denounced the notion of defunding the police.
>Or AOC and "birthing persons". Do have ANY idea how much Democrat support for the absurd demands of the trans cult (men are women and can take the prizes at womens' events, must be admitted to womens' shelters and prisons) are hurting Democrats?
Prorgressives salt the earth and then wonder why crops don't grow.
It is more of a slow-moving natural disaster, and you are right to blame the internet. But I object to public schools stepping on the accelerator! (Again, google "gender identity" and your local public school district if you don't believe this is happening.)
I will just say this: no other form of body dysphoria is treated by the medical community with powerful body-altering drugs and surgery. I believe the language of cults is one of the few tools we have to understand this bizarre societal phenomenon.
You just accused FdB of building straw men, and immediately followed by saying that the Democrats message is "We want high gas prices AND to have in-depth conversation about genitalia with your 6 year old without your knowledge." Do you not see any irony here? Do you not think that the right wing outrage machine isn't spoon feeding you straw men constantly?
Listen, I’m not a proponent of teaching young kids about gender identity (although I’m sure it happens far less than Tucker Carlson would have you believe). But it’s absolutely not the same as “in depth conversation about genitalia.” That’s an extremely hyperbolic straw man. Classic right wing fear mongering.
The green new deal is extremely divisive among Democrats (see Freddie’s post). You’re taking a complex debate about a complex set of policies and dumbing it down to “THE COMMUNISS DEMOCRAPS WANNA RAISE THE PRICE OF GAS.” An extremely bad faith and reductive straw man.
Teaching young kids about gender identity is all the rage now. If you don't believe that, try googling "gender identity" and the name of your local public school district.
Also, regarding this statement: “ deBoer talks about "their media" while completely failing to address what "his media" is doing. I wish deBoer would write a post about what he thinks about the Right based on evidence.”
Freddie criticizes left media all the time. It’s easily one of the most prominent topics on this blog, and I suspect one of the reasons that you’re here. So I’m not sure exactly what you want with this statement. I agree, I would also like for him to write about the mouth frothing nature of right wing media, since he really never does that.
I just posted this, but Kevin Drum has the exact opposite perspective. In terms of deviation from the median voter it is liberals who are way off base, not conservatives.
Judging from the right-wing sources I read, a lot of Republicans truly believe the exact opposite: they think that Dems are far more ruthless and far more willing to fight dirty than they are, and that they need to toughen up in order to compensate. Both sides are partly right, because both can point to bad behavior on the other side and (unfortunately) use it as a pretext to indulge their own worst instincts.
That being said--as someone who considers himself a centrist but grew up surrounded by lefties, the "we learned it from watching you!" theory of Democratic assholery does not ring true to me. Most human beings are tribal and xenophobic to one degree or another. You could argue that Republicans lean into it more, but it's not hard to find on the Democratic side either; they didn't need Republicans to teach them. I know plenty of leftists with hate in their hearts and "Kindness is Everything; All are Welcome" signs on their lawns. They see themselves as open-hearted and loving, but they wouldn't deign to piss on a white male Republican if he was on fire. That's their prerogative, I suppose, but I wish they'd stop kidding themselves. It's easy to love those that you are already inclined to be sympathetic towards, and much harder to extend legitimate kindness and understanding to those you don't like...but if you're not at least trying to do so, then stop pretending that you think "kindness is everything," please.
As for gerrymandering-- I live in a deep blue state that is gerrymandered within an inch of its life to shut out Republicans to the greatest degree possible. The state is infamous for its cynical, corrupt Democratic political machine and has been for a long time. Democrats in this state have always done just fine in coming up with ways to play hardball and grant themselves political advantage. I am extremely skeptical that they needed inspiration from Republicans on this score or any other.
Yeah. I hate participating in political internet discussions, but I feel like the “Electoral College / Senate favors republicans” thing needs constant pushback.
Most of my life, when the working class were solidly democrats, the electoral college and Senate favored Ds. There wasn’t any caterwauling then. So you want larger majorities in the Senate? Start caring again about what people in the Midwest want and think. You think people in the Midwest are garbage racists whose opinions need to be stamped out? Thank god for the structure of the Senate.
Yes, and right now the Republicans, armed with the fillibuster, are the only thing preventing the passage of the totally insane Equality Act, which is supported by all Democrats.
The unfair advantage is not favoring republicans. It’s favoring rural white states over populous urban ones. Of course democrats can choose to appeal to that voter base and the advantage disappears, and I obviously thing that tactically they should do that, but it doesn’t change the inherent problem that the majority viewpoints and states with denser, less white populations will continue to go underrepresented in the federal government.
The roots of this issue go back to the original conflict between Virginia, the California or Texas of colonial era politics, and smaller states like Rhode Island. The "compromise" part of the Connecticut Compromise is the thing to focus on here, because without it there probably wouldn't be a United States.
People always forget this. They also forget that states are sovereigns. They are not administrative entities of the federal government, but have power to enact their own laws, levy taxes and do much of the same as the federal government.
I listened to a Charlie Sykes interview the other day, and it was all just a lefty and a never-Trumper congratulating themselves on not understanding things that they could have figured out with a cursory amount of reading.
But then, I've had more than a cursory amount of reading about people only wanting sex, and I still couldn't suspend my disbelief long enough to get much sense out of Freddie's post on it. So who am I to talk? (Maybe I'm a person who decided that concepts important enough *for me to give an interview on* were worth reading up on)
When you mention Charlie Sykes, please think of Scott Walker, because Charlie's radio show was instrumental in enabling union-buster Walker to become governor of WI.
I can't help but feel that most Americans do not want radical change from government, in either direction. They want the trains to run on time and that's it.
I wouldn't be too hard on people. I have wanted change, but, like I pointed out with Obamacare, people ask for one thing, but the end up with something twisted that in the long run actually goes in the opposite direction. I've seen that game play out many times:
-Obamacare (already mentioned)
-tax hikes on the "rich" that end up hitting the middle and working class
-regulation that is supposed to save us from the abuses of large corporations but really only makes it harder for small businesses to function
-the "COVID relief" act that helped very few people on the ground but was a slush fund for those who didn't need it
-the "infrastructure bill" that Obama passed in 2009 or so that was supposed to save us from recession by employing a bunch of people to fix roads and bridges, forgetting conveniently that there are only so many companies that have the equipment to do that, and one of them that is headquartered near where I live actually *closed* one of its offices and laid people off to make more money
-the fact that we "saved" the economy in 2008 and 2009 for the big corporations while regular people lost their homes and jobs
After a while, you start to understand that literally every time they promise they're making "material change," it ends up hurting regular people and enriching those that have been causing the problems. That is why you take someone who in philosophy like me is a liberal but I grudgingly vote like a conservative these days because every time the Democrats said they were "helping," they were really only helping themselves. And, yes, I have a lot of problems with Republicans and am really a political orphan, but the older I grow, the more I really do appreciate gridlock in government.
So how is a system not broken when you're locked into voting for one of two corrupt parties? If you don't vote, you're allowing the system to continue. If you do vote, you're tacitly acknowledging the legitimacy of the system, even if you vote third party. Effective third parties are not an option with the current campaign finance system and the stranglehold the two parties have on state election laws. The only way to change is through the parties themselves, but honestly tell me how well that works. I don't see how anyone can look at this system and say it's not broken. It might be salvageable, but it is definitely not working. And that is the reality that most people see and why they are jaded.
I'm not sure what you mean by my worldview is "incongruous." Incongruous with what? The real incongruity is as follows: voting for either party is capitulation, but it's also the only way (other than violence) to change the system. And if you want "material change" on a large scale, you're going to have to change the system. Is it hopeless? No. Things do occasionally change, slightly. But suggesting that people tend to be moderate in their views and want incremental change is not a "grim fucking view" but instead a realistic one based on experience with our (or any really) system.
Also I am not quite sure that there is a difference between "fucked" and "broken," unless you somehow think that the system as it is is not really broken but functioning much as it was always meant to. I don't know that I'd really disagree with you, but I'd say that's even more "grim" than thinking it's broken. If it's broken, it can be repaired. If it's simply working as it was always meant to, then we're all pretty much "fucked" (what pretty debate language you have) without a violent revolution.
Just picking one out because I have a personal anecdote: my sister opened a restaurant in the fall of 2019. The COVID relief act kept her afloat, and kept her from having to fire anyone. I sincerely doubt that's unique.
For your sister's story, I know several others that, that didn't happen for. In the town where we live, we lost several restaurants due to the COVID policies. I also know people who couldn't get on unemployment because they were self-employed, so they were expected to either transgress the "rules" or starve. So while some of the money got where it was going, a lot didn't. Hence all the businesses we lost.
One can be *for* a thing in principle but against a thing in *practice*. For example, roughly 70% of Americans were *for* a no-fly zone over Ukraine until someone told them it would involve direct confrontation with Russians that might escalate to a world war. Then the number dropped to something around 25%, if I'm not remembering wrong.
Reasonable people, as you put it, don't fall for slogans. "Universal healthcare," like "affordable healthcare," is a slogan. I want the details before I make up my mind. I also understand where I live. I fear that what you call "universal healthcare" I would call "a money pit for Big Pharma and Big Healthcare at the expense of bankrupting the country." That's how Obamacare worked out.
But I think the desire to actually make the health care system affordable for everyone, including taxpayers, is universally popular, as much as anything is.
Half of the voters vote republican. I think more than half the country would go for medicare for all, but lots of people don't vote. A gigantic number of people. And that number is even higher in the midterms. We don't get to vote on anything but politicians, so we're at their mercy.
Polling consistently shows that a supermajority of the public is happy with their health care and it's been that way for decades. After Obama got killed in the midterms Chuck Schumer came out and publicly criticized him. What people cared about was the slow economic recovery while health care has never been high on the list of anyone's priorities except for political activists.
Maybe the reason that the US never does anything about the health care system is because that's actually way down on the list of priorities for most citizens?
He's right that it's mostly incoherent but at the same time the public tends to have pretty good taste. I don't agree with the popular position on everything but I tend to agree with the popular position a lot more than I do the actual reality.
I think it depends on what one considers coherent, right? I mean “keep your government hands off my Medicare“ is incoherent in an obvious way, but in a basic way it’s a backward way of saying “I’m happy with how things are.”
Seems like average people don’t give much of a fuck about most of the culture war issues; we just want to be left alone but taken care of when we’re ill and able to pay the bills.
Example: Trans issues are interesting for me to consider especially since I know a few trans people (two of whom are kids) but if I had a kid in my family who came out as trans it would matter more to me personally. Right now I simply care that parents maintain their rights as parents while kids have a healthy way of expressing gender nonconformity. But if people in my party start calling me a bigot and transphobe I’ll get turned right off any support of the issue. Things are less incoherent when you consider human nature.
Erin, surely you know that supporting parental rights (eg, parents must be informed if teachers change their kid's pronouns) does indeed make you a bigot and a transphobe in the eyes and minds of much of the left.
They support it in the abstract, try to implement in real life and watch what happens. It's not "free", someone has to pay for it, and someone has to decide how much the providers get paid. And there is zero consensus on the answers to "who pays how much" and "who gets paid less".
I'd be perfectly happy to slash military spending to zero and instead pay for much better health care for all. But what fraction of the country would agree with that?
Universal health care (and by the way, does that include illegal immigrants, or not? Somebody has to decide, and then sell the decision to the public!) involves trade-offs, either much higher taxes, or much less spending on other things.
Spell out what those taxes and/or cuts are, and watch support plummet.
What Majorsensible said. The real question isn't do you want universal healthcare, the question is how do you pay for it?
Around 60-65% of poll respondents were happy with their health care. The 30% that said they weren't has plenty of room for a lot of people. That doesn't change the fact that there is no urgency behind health care reform because a majority don't care.
Now here is where I'm going to once again be a Debbie Downer. I was once a big fan of single payer or a nationalized health system. But then I saw what happened with "Obamacare" or the morbidly ironically named Affordable Care Act. Outside of a few good things (eliminating lifetime caps and getting rid of riders for preexisting conditions, for example) it ended up making the very people who caused the problem even richer and left them with no accountability at all and put us at the mercy of their whims. I have no illusion that if we ever had single payer it wouldn't simply bankrupt an entire country rather than just some individuals because you still wouldn't make the people who cause the problem responsible for the problem. Instead you would simply give them an even bigger money tree grove to pillage. It's just not going to work in our money driven system. You figure out how to keep these people from owning our politicians, and we might have a chance. But as it is now, no.
Eliminating the private insurance industry goes a long way to driving down costs, setting hard guidelines for hospital billing so they can't individually bill every item/service and setting floors for basic services & procedures would help as well.
What hampered the ACA was trying to keep the private insurance industry in business and maintain the profit incentives that medical industry has enjoyed. Billing by hospital groups and doctors varies wildly for the same procedure and it really shouldn't. You should be choosing a doctor based on quality of service and outcomes not because they're cheaper than another or happen to be 'in network'.
A baseline insurance policy (Medicare for All) that you can take with you anywhere and everywhere without worrying about being "in network" is doable and wouldn't break the bank. And require every healthcare provider to accept M4A full stop. Eliminating the income tax cap on high-income wages would help as well. The average American would jump at a policy that was simple to understand and less complicated than the crap foisted on America by the large insurance groups like BCBS and Cigna.
Lastly, stop the stranglehold on the number of licensed doctors pumped out every year. The shortage of healthcare professionals is a combination of artificial shortages (meant to keep salaries high), retirement, and burn-out.
You can drive down costs somewhat, but claims still have to be processed. And then there's the big issue of exactly what is covered. My sister-in-law died after her private insurance refused to pay for an "experimental" treatment that, while relatively new, had an excellent track record. Whether this and a zillion other treatments like it get paid for, or not, now becomes a political question. Good luck with that! Also, expanding coverage to the large number of people without insurance now, and giving them full coverage for everything, is going to cost a LOT. Where will that money come from? Wherever it is (new taxes on somebody, cuts to somebody's current budget), there will be cries of outrage from those negatively affected. And what about illegal immigrants? Are THEY covered? That should be a fun debate!
The details MATTER, hugely. And we've not even begun to try to work out these details.
I don't disagree with you. Processing claims can be done w/ contracts but that's different than what private insurance does now which is deny every claim first. I also think the inconsistency with which hospital groups and healthcare providers bill for the same procedure is a racket.
For example, my 2yr had to get tubes put in. One ENT quoted $12K, another quoted $8K for a 20 min procedure!
I think expanding M4A is a step in the right direction and you could certain increase the medicare taxation rates to bring in more revenue but you have to couple that with more preventative care as well. People waiting 3 yrs before getting diabetes treated isn't a cost saving measure.
W/ the regards to illegal immigrants, I think you'd have to set up a separate program but leaving the current system of utilizing the ER room for colds and ear infections isn't the best way to save $ either.
I think we all saw how difficult the sausage making was on the ACA that it seems like we can't make another effort. But I think simply expanding the eligibility for medicare (at least for a baseline policy) would be a reasonable step that most people could get behind. As it stands, the GOP resistance to any progressive policy is a huge roadblock.
Having friends abroad really recalibrated my sense of what a "functional healthcare system" looks like. I realize "let's have the healthcare system most developed countries take for granted" is apparently a radical and unpopular opinion right now in the States, but it seems like something activists could probably sell? Without seeming super-radical? Just take the space/time in media dedicated to whatever "why pistachio nuts serve white supremacy" column and replace it with "here's yet another ordinary person who did everything right but got completely fucked over by America's healthcare system due to circumstances outside of his control".
I worked in Canada for a while and the first question people ask you when they figure out you're an American is about the health care system. And then they trot out the horror stories.
My Canadian coworkers are fascinated that you can have a six-figure, salaried gig, and still have to pay thousands of dollars for a life-saving drug. It's not a competition, but holy hell would I rather have something better than what we have now.
Right see, this is why I was such a fan of Bernie 2016. He was capable of saying "let's move far enough left to live like our peers of the developed First World" without tipping over into General Leftoidism or baking Koch Bros/Bryan Caplan libertarianism into his platform.
There's also the hard working French Canadian guy who pays 50% of his wages taxes, yet had to get his gallbladder surgery done in the US, and then had to get the stent removed in the US ... why, because the Canadian health care system is so awesome. I know that guy.
Canadians don't have an awesome health care system, they have an awesome government censorship system. Half the shit we discuss here on Freddie's blog would land us in criminal court in Canada. Anything you say about the government in Canada is liable to land you in court looking at a jail sentence.
Is this problem unique to Canada? I'm just wondering whether the citizens of France, UK, Germany, etc. face the same onerous wait times. If yes, then where do they go? Do they also come to the US for their gallbladder surgeries? And if the citizens are unhappy with the system, do they not have any ability to change it? I mean, these are mostly, I think, democracies. As for the US, we have to be able to find a happy medium between some longer wait times and type one diabetics dying from a lack of insulin. I don't know the answer, but we can't pretend that things are just fine as they are in the US.
In the UK, people buy supplemental medical insurance. You can get denied an ambulance ride in the UK, and there's an ability to stop and hold ambulances off hospital property ... that's a result of people complaining about over flowing A&E (emergency rooms).
Yes, that whole insulin thing is a problem, but this is a new problem created by congress. I'm pretty sure you won't like the new-new solution any better. History says the insulin price fixing program just starting up, will lead to disasterous shortages. Go and read the real story about "Let them eat cake."
I lived in the UK, wait times in some places can be onerous. Though my MIL had colon cancer and she had surgery within two weeks. They do a good job of prioritizing surgeries. Yes, you might have to wait a while for a hip or knee replacement, but they will do what they can for you to lessen the pain in the meantime. But cancer or something mroe urgent? Top of the list. The NHS has been purposely underfunded and restructured into a mess by the Tories. But when you poll the average UK voter, majority say they would happily pay more taxes IF those taxes went directly to the NHS. By the way, my tax burden was similar to what I would have paid in the US.
Alternatively, I had British friends who lived in Germany for some time and they said the healthcare system there was well-organized compared to the NHS.
Germany’s system is fantastic. It also isn’t free - medium high earners pay d close to 900€ a month for statutory insurance. Psychiatric care is almost non-existent and birth control isn’t covered by insurance. But standard care, cancer treatment, etc is amazing.
So I work in Alaska with a Canadian driller. He needed a gall bladder operation. Couldn't get it in Canada, had to get it in Alaska. The surgeon had to put in some kind of stent to keep things open. The stent needs to be removed within about 6 months. So this guy tries to get the surgery scheduled ... they can't give him a date, and tell him to come home and wait and they'll call him. What, they think he can sit around not earning money because they might call him? No, that clock is ticking, complications will happen if it goes on too long. Canadian healthcare won't pay for the surgery in Alaska, and they can't give him a date in Canada. So he bites the bullet and pays to have it done in Canada. Now he swears he's not paying Canadian taxes. There's also some thing about if you stay outside of Canada over 6 months, Canadian healthcare will be canceled.
Wow one story. Are you suggesting that the American system in which my father died because my parents couldn’t afford his care is better? I now live in a European country in which care is abundant and while not free (we pay mandatory insurance) it’s equal, accessible, and good.
I'm Canadian and have lived here my whole life. The only person I know who has had to go the US for healthcare is a high school classmate's sister with Lyme Disease, because Ontario's healthcare system does not cover diagnostics or the experimental treatment she wanted.
Our healthcare system is not perfect, and there are many areas that are in desperate need of improvement (our underfunding of hospitals is in part why we had so little surge capacity for COVID waves), but I'd choose it in a heartbeat over the American system. And I have several Canadian friends who live/work in the US with good employer insurance plans who complain about it constantly too.
Also, I know a lot of Canadians who say a lot of shit about all three levels of government and none of them have gone to jail.
Easy to say when US healthcare is just a short drive away in the event you get rejected/waitlisted. If the USA adopted Canadian-style healthcare, what are we supposed to do when some "equity" program decides that our heart surgery will have to wait 18 months because people who look like us owned slaves 100 years ago? Drive to Mexico?
Can you point me to anywhere in the world with socialized health insurance where they've waitlisted people solely because they were white?
Also, even in Canada, to some extent our healthcare is privatized. Eye, dental, prescription drugs, assistive devices, physio, most mental health care -- all through private insurance. In Ontario, hospitals are predominantly privatized non-profit corporations (though doctors themselves are paid through the Ontario Health Insurance Plan), and there's a bunch of private for-profit clinics.
A couple years ago, I had a random cyst in my lip -- not at all life-threatening, just kind of uncomfortable and unsightly. My doctor told me it'd be an 8-10 week wait to get it removed through public healthcare, so I ended up going to my dentist and having the oral surgeon there remove it; it was partially covered by my workplace insurance, and I paid the rest out of pocket.
Seeing as two-tiered healthcare is pretty common in other wealthy countries, and given the predominant influence of rich people on US politics, I find it extremely difficult to believe that if the US adopted Medicare For All that there wouldn't be a private option if you didn't like what the public option was offering.
It depends if one is advocating for a vague "let's just do something else," which is vague and cannot be critically analyzed, or a specific "let us do it like this one country" which gives us a concrete policy proposal but also something concrete that can be criticized.
Extremely few countries have the "medicare for all, no private insurance" that Bernie wanted.
Ok, but I'm perfectly willing to support Bernie's thing as a bargaining chip against, well, the shit we actually constantly get: a parasitical, rent-seeking insurance industry propped up against the interests of literally everyone else, to "create jobs".
They don't run on time so nobody knows they exist.
When I worked in Manhattan one of the locals told me that the R stood for rarely and the N was for never. I thought that was amusing because that was exactly the opposite of my experience.
I loved the train system when I lived in Chicago. Not perfectly reliable, but as reliable as anything I experienced living in Germany. Just, you know, confined to one city as opposed to running beautifully and affordably across the entire country.
The Twin City's train is great too; maybe just because it's relatively new, but it's the nicest public transit I've ever been on. It'd be nice if they could expand it...even if we never got a interstate program for light rail, even just have the states cooperate to link their networks would be an improvement.
The L stands for "late to work again," the J stands for "janky and covered in human feces," and the M stands for "maybe, if you're lucky" God I miss New York!
Damn, if only the administration in power had tried to advance legislation providing billions of dollars in funding for upgrades to rapid transit systems and development of high-speed rail, I’m sure that would have passed with flying colors on both sides of the aisle. Everybody being so excited about the trains running on time, and all.
The reality is, no one will want to take the train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. For starters, you can't get around Los Angeles without a car. Why pay $240 for a once a day 4 hour train ride, when you can pay $79 and SouthWest will get there in 45 minutes, with flights every hour or so, and you can choose your airport.
This was sold as a great leap into the future ... but Californian's just don't take the train. We have trains, fancy vacation trains which very few take, and these trains run on subsidies. We have commuter trains which smell very strongly of urine, and we can't seem to get them cleaned up. What people don't realize, is this is secretly a commuter train the very wealthy Silicon Valley people suckered voters into funding. This will take highly paid tech workers from low cost central valley farming communities and whisk them into their Silicon Valley jobs at 200mph, all on someone else's dime. Now that's a Win-Win situation.
Commuter trains are a genuine good that should be built and subsidized, not sure why you think a train that was "only" used by workers to get from affordable parts of the state to high-paying jobs would be a bad thing.
Also I take Caltrain every day and have zero horror stories, urine or otherwise. BART is a local system, not a train, so your insistence that its issues must be all train issues makes no sense.
And this is what people always miss. Just because they're elected to office doesn't make them saints. In fact, the type of person who can and wants to run and be elected to office is typically the same type of person who really shouldn't be trusted to run a popsicle stand much less a nation or any other public entity.
Americans like change but incrementally and so slow they don't notice the changes. Which means that any sort of centrist-left lurch in policy is branded as radical change by the Republicans. I mean, re-instating Clean Air rules was branded as a communist take-over yet Americans like clean air.
"Look, we changed things a little bit, and nothing bad happened, let's change them some more."
Gay marriage swept across the country pretty fast in historical terms, certainly faster than black civil rights. This was for many reasons but certainly in part because people could see it happening in phases and nothing broke.
I was a former centrist who fought with the "Bernie bros" all through 2016. Yes, I know how bad that was. Took 2020 for me to figure out what was what. I do remember a moment where Bernie said he was opposed to "identity politics." At the time I thought that was BAD because of course I was on the other side - the Hillary people were almost ALL about identity politics. Bernie and his movement have folded into the centrists now, as far as I can tell, and have given up that fight. Probably because AOC embodies both worlds - DS and identity politics. Right now, though, it's all collapsing. All of it. The future of the Democrats is bright I think. They just have to get the boomer class out of the way. They're living the last gasp of what JFK started in 1960. It's time to rethink it but they can't with Pelosi et al in their way. So ultimately, the people who are in their 30s now will rise and the path for them will no doubt be to take the country in a more progressive direction. This will be easier once the old guard is gone. Until then, America will most definitely be handed over to the Right.
Yes I agree with that and I read his site too. But I'm talking a very long time from now, with a whole new generational shift. By progressive I don't mean "defund the police" or open borders. I mean more or less some sort of government stipend or free college or whatever. Andrew Yang's version of the UBI as robots take over the work force, etc. But before this country even thinks of going in that direction, it IS going to be years and years of Republican rule. Like it was after 1968-1992 (Jimmy carter's reign notwithstanding). The pendulum is about to swing hard right, no doubt about it. I will be very old before Democrats get another shot at power...
Ha! I think the opposite. Let the crazies continue on politicking while having few if any children and let the normies have more and more children. It's nice to think this will fix things, but I'm not sure it will. I tend to believe Taleb's the most intolerant minority wins.
The gerontocracy in the Democratic Party is definitely a sign of the party’s ills. At the same time, the political assumptions of the young will lead to a situation in which it will be impossible to achieve cohesion and unity to accomplish anything. So the Republicans will rule unchallenged.
If you look at the imbedded chart, it's clear that most Americans are firmly in the middle...some lean left, some lean right, but not very far in either direction. That leaves progressives in a very minority position. They can't get anything done because the majority doesn't agree with them
He's wrong because that implies an actual policy coherence Americans just don't have. Huge numbers of Americans will say that believe in small government and then express support for all manner of expensive new programs, and don't even think of touching Social Security and Medicare. Self ID just isn't that meaningful for most people because most people don't have an internally consistent ideology.
The problem with popular support for expensive new social spending programs is that polling has consistently shown a drop in support if a follow up question about funding is asked.
I propose that there is a problem in framing here. Universal child care on its own, for example, isn't really a conservative or liberal issue. Who wouldn't want free child care for working parents? The political schism shows up with how you pay for it, whether the relative benefit to society outweighs the costs associated with new taxes. In a hypothetical science fiction future where robots provide all the care giving I would expect opposition to government funded child care centers to evaporate.
In terms of generational change there is an argument that what is most salient about voting preferences is race, not age. Young white voters have more in common with older white voters than with minority voters who are in their same age group.
If that is the case then Democrats should be terrified of the ongoing shift in preference for Hispanic voters to the Republicans.
The Democrats do not understand Hispanic voters. Cases in point: Tom Perez , grandson of Trujillo supporter (DR) was DNC chair. Daniel Perez (GOP FL State Leadership) is Cuban. Analysis of the preferences and background of Hispanic candidates is important. Dems need to know that all Perez names are not the same in voting patterns (or any other Hispanic name, for that matter).
I have a Dem friend who signed up to write letters encouraging people to vote - and she was sent this long list of people with hispanic surnames from the Miami area. Even she, who's never been there, had a lot of questions about whether this was a good Dem strategy.
The last time I made calls for dems I got a list of people in NJ who were all over 80 and not one answered the phone. Big waste organizing the lists and trying to make calls.
You're one of the few people I can read that I think I would mostly disagree with but never feel insulted by, so I appreciate the perspective. I think your view of immigration is too rosy. People who want open borders don't understand how that is going to be misused by the people in power, and no I'm not talking about "diluting" votes. I'm talking about the fact that the bad economic actors who have consistently undercut the American worker by sending jobs abroad are now trying to undermine the American worker at home and call them "racist" and "xenophobic" if they point out that a glut of people willing to work for next to nothing and/or work outside the system will further erode wages. I know you'll say, but we can make laws, to which I'll ask, When have we ever done that when the same people who benefit from this abuse of immigrant workers and American workers own the politicians? You have to work with the world as it is.
The other thing I laugh at is your vision of the Republicans. Yes, there might be some "zealots" among the Republican voters and a few in Congress, some MTG's (who I find to be a half a degree off bubble but still someone of more principle than most). But for every MTG or Rand Paul (who also seems to have a few principles), there are a dozen McConnells, Grahams, Kinzingers, and Cheneys, who blow with the political wind and are more worried about what donors will think than their own party constituents. So I think you paint the Republican Party as something quite different than it is.
I believe we could all benefit from allowing substantially more legal immigration from Latin America. First, because desperate people are crossing the border anyway--if they come with papers, they can work legally with a minimum wage and protections. Immigrants from Latin America can connect with a large Spanish-speaking community and churches, and their culture tends to be compatible with the US.
Most importantly, the birth rate in Latin America is higher than ours, and this will be important due to our aging population and low birth rate. We will need more young people to grow the economy and support the older generations. This benefits business and workers.
I also favor immigration from other parts of the world, but to me more legal immigration from Latin America (and amnesty for those already here) would be an easy win and an improvement on the current situation.
The problem that I see is that imported labor from Latin America currently is disproportionately blue collar. Any time that you increase supply versus demand costs drop. That holds true for goods and services and it also holds true for labor. Working class wages have been stagnant for decades compared to white collar work and I question whether additional competitive pressure would actually be a benefit to the country at large.
However, the biggest chunk of legal immigration right now is from Asia and is probably due to skilled migrants in fields like tech and medicine. A little wage pressure on physicians and programmers at this point is probably not a bad thing, especially if it makes it easier to get a doctor's appointment.
I've been in tech for more than 20 years and I remember the hysteria about off-shoring from when I first started working. During that time the number of immigrants from India and China has exploded in the US, the number of campuses and foreign workers has exploded, and my salary and the salaries of overseas tech workers has doubled multiple times so I am a little jaded with regards to warnings about foreign competition.
I appreciate your experience but I've read liberal (so generally pro-immigration) takes with numbers about how many IT students can't find work or have been replaced by visa holders. But having seen your other comments, I'm rather curious about the issue now, so thank you.
My experience has been it's absolutely replaced hurt jobs and wages at the lower end such as folks monitoring network alerts, frontline phone support, low level QA and bug fix programming jobs but once you're past the early part of your career as an American then it's all gravy. The issue here is that those relatively low level jobs are where many in the tech field get their start especially those without an expensive software engineering degree.
I got my start the industrial automation world and wanted a normal life and to come off the road. I took a substantial pay cut and worked 2nd shift in a NOC (Network Operations Center) basically watching alerts, doing basic troubleshooting/triage, escalating to real engineers, and helping manage outages. It paid 45K a year which wasn't terrible especially with the basic skill set needed and I worked my way to a better job in just under a year by studying at home and tinkering with VMs and code on the 3rd monitor at work.
This is a valuable pipeline for many people and also for the American tech industry. We don't need to outsource these jobs, it's unnecessary and hurts us as we lose a valuable feeder program to a great career as well as decent jobs in the meantime. These simply aren't high skill jobs that we lack native talent to perform.
I understand at least some of these jobs can/would be done remotely as is often done, however currently there's plenty of it being done in country by imported labor. Again these are jobs that Americans can do with a minimum of training or education if their skills aren't already there.
There's not a need to allow people in specifically to fill these jobs, it's done as a cost cutting measure. If companies want to hire cheap foreign labor then go for it but our government shouldn't enable it with low cost H1B visas or other alternatives.
Reducing the number of H1-B visas is one option but the better choice is raising the minimum salary for them which is keeping in line with the original idea of getting truly high skilled workers here that are in short supply even globally let alone in the US.
I believe the Trump admin did that right before the transition however I'm not sure if it went into effect or not. I'll need to check.
To be clear I'm fine with importing labor that's actually difficult to come by and where we have a documented shortage. My wife came here with T1 visa as a RN from Canukistan (Canada), we were struggling to get nurses well before Covid and it's even worse now. Hell if you're a high end Database engineer then yeah come on over we literally can't get enough of you but it should be what the country needs as a whole and not what brings down labor costs for large telecom companies.
A lot of people have gone into IT who shouldn't have, and when they come out they have a degree but aren't really worth a shit. If you're lucky you can pick that up in an interview. My theory is that's who's bitching about visa holders taking their jobs, that high profile Disney story notwithstanding.
Yeah and have you noticed there are very few workers over the age of 50?
When workers reach that age, they get laid off. Its too easy to replace them with a couple of H1Bs who will work like slaves ... because they're basically indentured.
At a "tech" company? Maybe. But the issue is that the reason the tech market is so good is because tech workers have become janitors. They are ubiquitous in businesses regardless of the industry--finance, retail, tech, whatever. That wasn't the case when I started out and it's a phenomenon that guaranteed there would be more jobs than candidates.
And in my specialty, databases, the DBA's have always been greybeards. I think there's a rule that says that you can't be a DBA unless you over 50.
Agreed. All the UMC who want more immigration are fine with it because they don't believe it affects them. Once they start seeing their jobs taken over by nonimmigrant visa holders, then we will see how vociferously pro-immigrant they are.
But the immigrants from Latin America are coming regardless. Without legal documents they are more likely to accept subsistence wages and cause downward competitive pressure on wages. Also, right now we are struggling to find enough workers in service jobs.
They certainly did come under Trump. 2020 was a down year because of COVID, but if you look at the statistics there wasn't much of a change from 2016 (Last Obama Year) to 2019 (Last Trump Non-Covid Year).
Granted, 2021 was a large increase under Biden. But I would say the phrasing should be "They increased under Biden" rather than "They decreased under Trump"
*Edit for more nuance:
FY 2017: First year of Trump, they did drop quite a bit probably due to Trump rhetoric on immigration
FY 2018: Pretty average compared to Obama years
FY 2019: Actually much larger than Obama years
So, overall, tends to balance out. People may have been scared away by Trump's immigration rhetoric for a year, but it didn't last.
I mentioned Trump primarily because he is the most likely Republican candidate in 2024. For that reason his record at the border, especially in contrast to Biden's, is especially relevant not only to the election this November but also for the presidential race in 2024.
Why are you comparing only to Obama? How about Bush? Clinton? Bush's father? and in what proportions? I am an immigrant myself who has lived in the US for almost 60 years.
I went to public high school in Texas.....the demographics were vastly different then.
They come under every president, including Trump. I agree that it’s increased now under Biden, but that is probably a combination of people perceiving that it will be easy under Biden and of covid restrictions changing. I agree that running on immigration is stupid but the democrats are already going to lose for a million stupid reasons so it doesn’t really matter what they say.
Im going to be honest, I struggle to care who wins anymore.
Then let wages increase to make those service jobs more attractive. I don't see why businesses are entitled to the cheapest labor they can get. If they can't stay in business without illegal labor, then they shouldn't be in business.
And that's the market, and that's fair. And if there's a pool of workers willing to work for $5 bucks an hour, just about everyone is going to grab for cheap workers because to do otherwise means being undercut by the competition.
But, if no one can hire someone for less than 12 or 15 or whatever, then that doesn't happen, and that's the new floor. Make the illegal labor very hard to get and businesses will have to operate without it.
Maybe. McDonalds is trying that, with kiosks replacing cashiers. My guess is that this is going to backfire, and they'll lose business to places that keep cashiers and raise wages high enough to attract labor. A guess, though, mostly based on my preference for being served by people.
That's fair -- I'm not an economist, so I could be wrong. But my hope would be that amnesty and legal immigration would raise wages because people wouldn't be working for less than the minimum wage.
I don't know the tech world at all, but I agree about medicine. In fact, we have a shortage in some important specialties.
The underlying issue is supply versus demand though. Amnesty may force employers to pay the legal minimum wage but no matter what you are still increasing the size of the pool for blue collar workers.
Tech is just stupid. An example: before the pandemic I had a co-worker who got to hang out on Google's campus for six weeks to shadow one of their senior data scientists. So she was getting paid to learn (she has since left the company btw for greener pa$ture$).
Tech companies catering in breakfast and lunch is pretty standard now, but Google did it better. For lunch a professional chef would show up with a bunch of raw ingredients. Then everybody would take a break to cook up a meal in the kitchen which they would then all eat together.
True, but you also increase consumer spending and demand for goods and services. And reduce the negative economic effects of a declining population, which is what we would have without immigration since Americans aren't having kids.
It's obviously complicated, and the impact varies by sector and location. But I hope we'd be able to make it work.
For an open borders schema, sure. But if that's not the case then the total number of immigrants each year is going to be capped. And in terms of spending 100,000 engineers and doctors are going to have much more purchasing power than 100,000 construction workers or gardeners.
Nitpick: had been stagnating. The lowest quintile has actually done the best in the COVID recovery, and (last I looked) were the only group outpacing inflation. That's the "nobody wants to work anymore" problem. A lot of employers are offering a 2019 deal to workers who can now demand better.
The last I checked that lowest quintile is no longer outpacing inflation and it was more an issue of low paid workers in specific industries rather than the entire cohort.
The other issue is that interest rate hikes from the Fed are designed to slow down the economy and force people out of work. More people out of work means employers can offer lower wages. Whether or not this approach works given the current labor force participation rate is an interesting question but it is pretty clear that the US is in for a series of rate hikes this year in an attempt to combat inflation.
I completely agree. I really struggle to understand the intense opposition to boosting legal immigration from Latin America. Culturally, they are VERY adaptable to American values, they are at least as likely to be conservative as they are liberal, they are largely Christian, they can contribute positively to the economy. I can understand not wanting illegal immigration but why the resistance to boosting legal pathways?
Polling has consistently shown strong support for legal immigration regardless of political party. In fact I believe it was Pew that showed increased support for legal immigration among Republicans during the Trump years.
The problem is that there is a strong open borders faction in the Democratic Party. And one of their tactics is to deliberately muddy the waters by conflating legal immigration--which literally everyone supports--with illegal immigration, which is far more controversial.
It's hard to take these polls seriously when you don't know how the questions are framed and which populations were polled. Americans are generally ignorant of our immigration system and if they have more substantive knowledge, I believe the polls would come out differently.
At a minimum the polling would seem to indicate that there is a very real difference in support for legal immigration versus the illegal variety. If you are a proponent for more legal immigration then activists who are trying to muddy the waters by lumping both legal and illegal migrants into the same bucket aren't doing you any favors.
As a lifelong D, I concede that some Ds have indeed tried to erase the distinction between legal immigration and illegal immigration, to the advantage of the illegal form. For the record, Trump has tried to do the same thing, to the disadvantage of both forms. In the 2016 R platform, the chapter on immigration celebrates the legal form, but opposes the other form. Trump, needless to say, refused to abide by the platform.
You're completely wrong. First, I'm in California, and of Mexican immigrants who came to the US ... Spanish California in 1774. Later, those pesky Americans came and ruined everything ... but I digress.
But I'm totally Americanized, as are my parents, grandparents were, except for some darker skin, and a predilection for tortillas ...
The recent immigrants from Central and South America, are nothing but super people. Typically kind and generous ... they do deserve better than we treat them. However, they do come with some faults. California is the poorest, and least literate state in the union because of them. Not to disparage them too much, the causes are cultural. Predominately immigrants come from poorer northern Mexico where the opportunities are not so good. Since technical opportunities are not so good there, most ... the vast majority have little education. They speak little English, and despite hailing from a Spanish speaking country, often little Spanish, instead speaking Indigenes dialects, which is not very helpful at all.
Typically, older teens will come here to work for a year of two. Send money back home to take care of Grandma ... whatever. He bunks in an apartment with some friends/co-workers for a while. The work is good, the money is fantastic ... compared to home. Next year looks good too. Then he meets a girl, and next year, maybe they'll go home ... and that doesn't happen, then there's a wedding, and a child, and reasons to stay. And they're a super sweet family, and you can't help but to love them. But they don't put much value in education, its not in their culture, not like with Asians. Some Mexicans do get good educations and really advance, but its atypical. In California, even an illegal alien can get a free college education. Do they take advantage of this? No.
Last November, I went into two stores looking for clothes pins. None of the staff in those stores spoke English, and this was in the town of Hayward in the East Bay Area ... its "pinzas de ropa" by the way.
I’m a Californian as well, and married to someone with a similar background (Mexican that was here in US territory before the Anglos). The one thing I dispute about your post above is that some of the problems you are relating are directly caused by the fact that there are so few paths to legal immigration. Of course it makes the immigrant population more transient. I also think that if they had a legal path and were more invested in this country as a true home they would be taking more advantage of the university resources etc. When you are an underground community that is never going to be legally allowed to be here, or even if that’s what you believe is true, then it’s hard to think in terms of going to university etc. Everything feels like a vulnerability to getting caught and deported. I’ve known a lot of undocumented immigrants from many past years working in restaurants and fear is a huge demotivator when it comes to making oneself known to the state by, say, applying to universities. But when kids do grow up here they assimilate very quickly.
You say the same thing I hear all the time, but you completely miss my point. While you belief may be sincere and heartfelt with the best of intentions, you're missing the reality. We don't *need* this glut of workers and why should they be relegated to minimum wage jobs, which is increasingly the large percentage of what we have? You're basically suggesting a de facto wage-slave class. The *only* reason wages are rising at all is the shortage of workers. If you alleviate that shortage through the artificial introduction of outside workers, the system gets worse for all, native born and immigrant.
I just want to clarify that when I mentioned the minimum wage, I meant that legal workers can't be paid less than the minimum wage. Not that immigrants should only work minimum wage jobs.
Another benefit is that immigration increases the number of consumers who spend their wages (vs. hoarding income). In theory, this increases demand and grows the economy.
Yes, but if you're going to have a quota in terms of total migrants per year why not devote that quota to skilled laborers in fields like tech or medicine?
1. Wages are only stagnant in the sense that blue collar wages have been frozen for years while white collar workers in the top 20% have been making a killing. In terms of wage pressure it is the professional class that should see increased competition.
2. The purchasing power of those skilled immigrants is probably going to be significantly larger than somebody working in a field like landscaping.
Then immigrants need housing, and we're pretty short on housing. But we could rip up a few more farms and natural areas and build more homes. Then we'll need more electricity, and that's a mess. We can't build reliable, so we have to build solar, that means more blackouts. Then we'll need more water, which we're way short of already. This drives down the quality of life.
So we let more people on the lifeboat than the lifeboat can hold so everyone can drown? See this is what the economic bad actors depend on: people like you who feel so good about talking about morality while they're laughing all the way to the bank. Each country takes care of its own, just as each family takes care of its own. There's a reason why you put your own oxygen mask on first on the airplane.
I would love to help out every last destitute, impoverished person on Earth. Unfortunately, that's not possible, so we have to draw a line somewhere, right? Presumably we couldn't absorb, say, a billion people. What about 500 million? What about one million? There has to be /a/ line, right?
I've said this before, but my mom's family living in what is now New Mexico (Hispanic) didn't have to immigrate. In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo made them U.S. residents. Another way to change demographics.
My husband, who considers himself and is considered by most people he meets to be Latino, has one white grandparent, one Native American grandparent (Cherokee and Chickasaw), one “Mexican” grandparent that came from an Arizona family that became US residents with G-H and who became and American citizen with statehood in 1912, and one grandparent that actually immigrated here from Mexico in the early 20th century and fought in WWI. I think of this background every time people talk offhandedly about the “Latino population” as if it is a uniform democratic.
Why should immigrants from Latin America get priority? There are plenty of people from around the world are desperate and would love to have the opportunity to come to America. I disagree with the cultural compatibility with America but if that's what standard we are going to use, then we should use it worldwide and not limit to one part of the globe.
And honestly Latin Americans are no more culturally compatible than most Asian ethnicities or even Middle Easterners. The religions might be different, but most people seem to be searching for the same thing.
Because we share a land border with Mexico. Right now, people come from Latin America without papers and work for less than the minimum wage, and that’s bad for everyone. It’s not fair, but it would be less of an economic shock to legalize and document what is already happening vs. opening up to people who otherwise couldn’t get here.
I also want immigration from other places. My spouse is from Asia, and I’m glad she’s here. I just think LA is low-hanging fruit because of the border situation.
I don't think a shared border should drive our immigration policy. If it did, then we should only prioritize Mexicans, not Latin American generally. I'm not swayed by the they are coming anyway argument so we should just let them in and give them green cards. It encourages further illegal immigration and undermines our rule of law.
Does prioritizing Mexicans means Mexican citizens only or those who enter the US from Mexico? I have many illegal immigrants in my extended family and community and most have come through Mexico, though they live on another continent. I don't think people realize just how porous our border is and how Mexico aids illegal immigration to the US. It benefits Mexico because they get people in Mexico who spend money there but who have no intention of staying in Mexico.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this issue, but to answer your question I meant all of LA (not just Mexicans) because people come from many LA countries and enter through Mexico. I know some people come from overseas and enter through Mexico, but since you can travel from LA by land, the majority of immigrants crossing the southern border are from Mexico & LA.
Your policy prioritizes persons from a certain region which happens to correspond to race roughly. What if the US choose another standard - say Europeans -- because of their cultural compatibility and historic ties to the US. Would this be racist? I'm not picking on you - just trying to tease how different standards are treated differently based on their effects. If cultural compatibility is what we care about, then immigration should favor Anglo countries and Western Europe.
I don’t think they should get priority, I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’m in favor of increased immigration across the board. I was only expressing that I am particularly confused by conservatives stringent opposition to Latin American immigration when it seems like a net positive for their image of the country as a family oriented, conservative, Christian country.
I agree that it seems like racism although I hesitate to just assume and that’s why I would like to understand. FWIW evangelical Christianity is becoming increasingly prominent in central and South American groups and rapidly replacing Catholicism.
Also for people who are hesitant about Catholics they definitely put a lot of them on the Supreme Court! I’m a Catholic myself, so I’m not being derogatory, I just don’t believe that Catholicism carries the stigma on the religious right that it once did, politically (theologically is a different story of course). Conservative Protestants and Catholics seem quite allied politically these days.
There's a reason people flee Central American countries: because countries full of Central Americans are awful places to live. A United States that becomes more Central American by population will become more Central American by character.
This is a statement utterly without evidence. Most immigrant groups assimilate in a generation. What damage did Southern and Eastern Europeans do to the American character? What damage have Mexicans done to the national character?
It's not without evidence at all. Central American countries have significantly lower living standards than the United States by almost every measure: infant mortality is a big one, life expectancy as well. Income and housing are poorer across the board. The educational outcomes of Central America are jaw-droppingly poor. Political corruption is endemic in the region. Organized crime is a fact of life in several Central American cities in a way that it's not in the United States. There are certainly good aspects to life in Central America, but for people who enjoy the American way of life, you'll find the contrasts very, very striking.
For all that they're terrible at building functional modern nation-states, Central Americans aren't stupid: they know that they have a much better chance to live a secure, prosperous life in the US than they do at home. This is why there's a huge stream, millions strong, wanting to leave Central America for the US, and only a trickle in the other direction (usually of people who have roots in the country in question and who are going back to live in a gated community on US dollars; or wealthy American retirees planning the same.)
I'm answering your question as written: what damage was caused by Southern and Eastern Europeans to the American character. I'm not addressing any good or neutral aspects here because you didn't ask. There are some, but not in scope of your question:
Southern European immigration introduced, for the first time, large-scale anarchist violence to the US. While anarchism wasn't born in Italy nor brought from there to the US for the first time, large-scale bombing campaigns were overwhelmingly conducted by Italians. (Leon Czolgosz, US-born, broke the mold by being of Polish extraction.) Organized crime, too, went from a mid-sized presence in American cities to a gargantuan one - again, mostly at the hands of Italians, but other ethnic groups, such as Eastern European Jews, were not underrepresented either.
Mexico isn't part of Central America, politically speaking. Mexicans, in the aggregate, tolerate corruption and illegality much moreso than do "legacy" Americans, as a quick look at the Texas and Arizona borderlands will confirm. (Again, I'm restricting this to a negative, as that was your question.)
Assimilation in a generation is a meaningless statement. Minnesota Scandis are 'integrated' but still a recognizably distinct people with distinct religious and social practices.
Oh, now. This is special pleading. What we call corruption has taken many forms in our history, and wasn't always seen as corruption. Read up about what pre-Civil War elections were like, and what Southerners (true-blue Anglo Saxons and proud of it) got up to with one another before you make such generalizations.
That's not what special pleading is. I was asked to provide bad characteristics and I did so. This neither denied that:
1) there were good characteristics
2) the native stock also had bad characteristics
3) that the native stock's bad characteristics might be comparable to those of the immigrant stock (although in the case of political corruption, I would argue that for the undoubted failings of the native stock they have built a society that's far more resilient to corruption than most people of the world have managed.)
I agree. Ditch the visa lottery system, offer a points based system for certain fields (that would, say, privilege a Mexican with a diploma who speaks A2/B1 English), and revisit the family-chain system.
When PMC yuppies hear "more immigrants" they think "cheap au pairs and ethnic restaurants!"
When working class people hear the words "more immigrants" they think "fewer jobs, less money, longer lines."
I am generally all for immigration, but I don't pretend that no tradeoffs come with looser immigration, or that the burdens or benefits associated with those tradeoffs are evenly distributed.
I would say it gives away the game. If people really considered immigration a problem, they would make eVerify a condition of employment and rigorously enforce it. If the jobs dried up and getting into the US without documents just meant that you were broke and without recourse, almost no one would try it.
The fact that it's done with walls and border agents just show that it's a combination dumb show for the rubes and jobs program.
Unfortunately, I doubt the construction companies picking up vans full of workers in the parking lot of Home Depot every morning are doing any sort of "verification" (or ever would).
That's enforcement then. And it wouldn't need to be a ton of it. Get some workplace compliance agents, check the parking lots and the job sites and farm fields and bust the *employers*. Knowingly hiring someone without doing a check results in jail time. Wouldn't even really have to be all that much jail time.
Once this changed from a risk free way to cut costs to a way to cut costs that might land you in jail for 30 days, it would dry up. This isn't impossible stuff, it's just that we've built an economy on exploiting poor people from south of our borders to get very cheap labor, and everyone in power knows it and no one wants to change it.
Narrator: "Joe the Contractor has a job to do: Building America."
Joe: "I want to hire Americans, but nobody wants to do this kind of work!"
Narrator: "But Big Government wants to put a stop to that!"
Joe: "I was jailed for trying to put food on my table! I was Building America! I was helping people!!"
Narrator: "Wharton McAsshole wants to return to Building America! He will tell Big Government to shove their anti-American regulations where the sun don't shine!"
"Vote for me in November. I'm Wharton McAsshole and I approve this message!"
I agree. We talk about immigration as if its just a nice thing to do, but there are substantial costs associated with it. Democrats would do better to advocate for immigration by articulating what resources are needed to support it, and how they will support communities that will absorb in-Coming Americans.
She supposedly represents Wyoming and she voted to impeach Trump and is now sitting alongside Kinzinger wagging her finger and fretting about "insurrection" on the "January 6th committee," being slobbered over by Democrats. If she really represented Wyoming rather than wanting to cater to some imaginary "unity" confluence between "moderate" Republicans and Democrats, she wouldn't be doing that. So, yes, Cheney blows with the wind; she just is too dumb and disconnected from the state she represents to actually know which way that is. At least Adam Kinzinger is smart enough to know when to abandon ship.
Sorry, should have responded sooner! Don't know why I didn't see the notification for your own reply.
I agree that she is getting slobbered all over by Democrats. And I get where you are coming from when you say she is out of alignment with Wyoming, at least when it comes to Trump.
But from my perspective, automatically slobbering all over Trump is actually blowing with the political winds too. Why does Trump equal Republican and no one else does? She has been a conservative for much longer and has stayed that course ideologically - with her votes for conservative legislation and against progressive legislation. Keep in mind that she voted WITH Trump's conservative agenda more times than most of the people slobbering all over Trump now. This is because she does NOT blow with the winds when it comes to the conservative agenda. It is the agenda that matters in the long run, not the person. Trump is a person, not the avatar of conservativism. It is Trump who appears to change upon a whim, not Cheney.
During the Trump administration, I saw many Democrats go to pieces over Trump's personality. My perspective was different: Trump was often successfully enacting reasonable conservative goals (and even a couple progressive ones), despite whatever he was doing and saying that triggered everyone. Post-Trump, I see the same going to pieces, but it is coming from Republicans now. I read your comment about how supposedly dumb Cheney is and I get the impression that it is Trump that is more important to you than actual conservative values. Because Cheney believes in actual conservative values, and she demonstrates that with her votes, which are out of alignment with those Democrats who are slobbering all over her. To me, it is actually Republicans like you that are blowing with the political winds, by seeing fealty to Trump as the only way to blow.
While I appreciate your reply and see most of your point (as I've heard it over and over), suggesting that Cheney has "actual conservative" values when she is all for wars, has completely faith in our "intelligence" agencies, is more worried about Russia than say Google's algorithms or Twitter and Facebook censoring, and thinks a riot in the capital is tantamount to trying to topple government is not understanding what I think "conservative" values are about. She's a neo-con, which is pretty much like a neo-lib. Neither are the old-style conservative or liberal. That's what I mean by she "blows" with the wind. She, like her father, will gladly surrender her "conservative values," if she thinks it will make her a buck or put her in good with the right people, just like Kinzinger. The dumb part for Liz Cheney is she thinks that big money will save her from voters. He figured it out and jumped ship. And I never thought Trump was conservative. He's a populist, by accident or design. He simply ran on the Republican ticket because that is the party more amenable to populism at the moment. Trump is useful for exposing things in government people would rather not see, but that doesn't make him a saint as I'm not even sure he's figured out what nerve he touched on in people. However, it is what makes people like Cheney hate him, because she's one of them that he exposed.
Ah! I now completely understand. Especially when you frame her as a neo-con. I agree that she is has a neo-con perspective much like her father. Your points about being all for wars and big money are really what drove home to me where you are coming from. I also agree that neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism are basically the same thing. Thank you for your response, I genuinely appreciate it.
This is just a general impression, but it seems like Republicans are more willing to experiment with different messages and see what sticks – they try some sane ones, they try some insane ones, but if something's not working they abandon it and look for something new. The CRT thing that stuck was preceded by many, many failed messages about wokeness etc. I'm sure there are (or were) plenty of Republican operatives who wish Trump's insane messaging hadn't been the one that worked, but now that it has they're going with it.
Needless to say that has its downsides, but Democrats seems far more likely to hash out the specifics of a message either in closed-door meetings or on elite twitter, and then try to impose that message on the electorate; they can't really iterate on it because of all the arguments it took to get to the final draft. As a result, only someone like Bernie can tweak his message because he's largely in control of it, but everyone else is stuck with something terrible designed by committee because that's what the boardroom/Twitter approved and now they're stuck.
Yeah, my conservative brother in law was talking gay marriage the other day, and explained: "We lost. I wish we hadn't, but we lost and there's no point having that fight anymore."
Of course, I don't know if there are any equivalent liberal issues - even something like rent control or Clinton era policies like workfare are still in play. Maybe Defund the Police, which seems to have become a dead letter since Biden won the primary.
Gun control comes to mind. It was a live issue back in the 80s, then it wasn't, and now every state has concealed carry and many states have constitutional carry, which is concealed carry without a license (iiuc). If you had suggested the 2022 gun status quo in 1983 people would have accused you of creating a ridiculous strawman.
Post Newtown there has been a bit of a zombie gun control movement, but it didn't go anywhere or accomplish anything.
True, but Biden keeps pushing it - I think he just announced a gun control effort this week.
Granted, reversing gay marriage would take a constitutional amendment, so maybe it's not a fair comparison, but you don't hear DeSantis or Cruz fighting that fight. They typically move on to stuff that they think will test well, although probably the primary system means that stuff like "Don't Say Gay" polls better in the primaries than it will in the general.
"True, but Biden keeps pushing it - I think he just announced a gun control effort this week."
Oh ye gods and little fishes. I wonder if there will even be a party left in January 2023. The next Republican speaker is going to have a 60 vote majority.
Have been reading you for some time, with pleasure and profit. Was surprised to see that you're a "let 'em all in" guy. What else in the hard left agenda do you endorse? (Food for a future column? Or maybe I missed the one that covers this matter.)
Here's a simple argument (from Michael Huemer). Suppose John is desperately hungry. He wants to walk downtown to a deli to buy a sandwich, which the deli owner would be happy to sell to him. You, out of a dislike for John or a strange protectiveness over this deli, want to stop him: you make a sincere threat to John that if he attempts to go to the deli, you'll beat him up and force him away. John, too hungry to care, goes anyway and you follow through on this threat.
Beating John up was wrong; indeed, even making the threat was wrong. It would still be wrong for you to do that if, say, you had grown up near the deli and considered John the wrong kind of person for the neighborhood. It would still be wrong to beat him up if what John wanted from the deli was not a sandwich, but a job from the deli to pay for future sandwiches. It would be wrong even if John was one of your competitors (beating up the other applicants is not the right way to secure a job).
It's then really hard to see why John's not being a citizen, the deli's being across a country's border, would be a reason to beat him up and force him to go home. Clearly, if I got all of my friends together and we collectively beat up John, this would still be wrong. A moral wrong does not somehow become acceptable when a bunch of people are complicit in it. And I cannot see how any aspects of nationhood would change the moral calculus (getting a bunch of our friends together and holding a democratic vote to determine that we would beat up John if he tries to go to the deli is just ganging up with some extra steps).
This is hard to respond to because you've just asserted which is at issue, that somehow nations and governments are morally different from neighborhood gangs in a way that makes it okay for them to beat up people for trying to get sandwiches while it would be wrong for a gang to beat them up. But it's really mysterious what is supposed to make that difference. Sure, the people in the nation might have been, in some sense, there first (just ignore the natives), but that doesn't matter morally: if I get to a deli early in the morning, that doesn't give me a right to keep other people out. The people of a nation may in some sense think of themselves as a unified people, but that doesn't matter morally: if me and my gang wear hats and call ourselves the "Deli Protectors," that doesn't make it okay to beat people up. So what actually is the difference supposed to be?
Notice that borders are doubly coercive. They coerce people outside, forcing them to stay out, but they also coerce people inside. The deli owner was happy to sell John a sandwich, but under the iron rule of our gang he has to turn him away under the threat of further violence.
By the way, I don't think this is really an argument by analogy. It's just an illustration of the following straightforward argument.
1. It is wrong for an individual or collective to use violence or the threat of violence to prevent people from taking peaceful action to meet their needs.
2. The enforcement of borders is precisely the use of violence or the threat thereof to prevent people from taking peaceful action to meet their needs.
3. It is wrong to enforce borders.
Defenders of borders must think there's some exception to this general rule, that nations somehow have a right to oppressive violence that individuals or collectives otherwise lack, but it's hard to fathom why that would be true.
I'll grant that casting is rough and ready. I don't have a principled way of spelling out exactly what rights people have nor what the exceptions to those rights are. "Peaceful" is more or less the same first-order approximation as the non-aggression principle which doesn't exactly work for the reasons you suggest (it can't capture property rights for one). What I think this does get you is a presumption: people usually have a right to be left to do as they will, absent strong reasons to prevent them. (Incidentally, I don't think it is possible to "ground" my moral intuition; it's not possible to do that for any basic intuitions. The best one can do is provide examples and statements that illustrate and hopefully elicit the intuition in others.)
I don't know why I am being accused of living in some fantasy where there's no competition over resources. All I need is that there are moral limits to the ways in which you compete. It's okay to secure a job by persuading the company in an interview that you are the most qualified. It's not okay to secure that job by killing prospective competitors. It's also not okay to secure the job by making it impossible for competitors to show up (e.g. by erecting a barricade around their house).
I've clarified in a comment (not sure how to link Substack comments) a bit upstream about how to reconcile what I've said with the recognition of a right to private property, so I won't recount it. What's weird about this dialectic is that it's my interlocutors who are making the stronger moral assumptions. Everyone would grant that the way we treat, say, illegal immigrants, would be horrifically immoral if done to our fellow citizens. If Biden declared a law tomorrow mandating that people from Ohio were not allowed to enter the rest of the country for work, and that an ICE-equivalent would be established to find, deport, and detain illegal Ohioans, it would be obvious to all that this law and its enforcement are morally horrific. What I want to know is what is so different about non-Americans that supposedly makes it okay to treat them in this way?
This is a sincere question, not a snarky one: By that logic, would it be wrong to evict a homeless person who somehow got into my house and took up residence on my couch, if he was otherwise polite and nonaggressive about it? If not, why not? He's just meeting his needs, after all, and a wall or locked door is a type of border. We don't even have to go that far--if a homeless encampment sprung up in my backyard, would I have any grounds to evict them, under your logic as described above?
I am not saying that my front door or property line are perfectly analogous to a national border, but the principles you've articulated here seem broadly incompatible with keeping anyone out of anywhere as long as they're not actively hurting anyone.
I'll grant you have a right to private property and can justly coerce (or have the police do so on your behalf) people to control their use of your property. But there are limits to that right. Two are relevant here.
1. You don't have a right to forbid people from using property that is not yours.
2. You don't have a right to forbid people from crossing through your property if doing so would seriously deprive them.
The first one should be obvious. Here's the motivation behind the second principle: imagine that a developer buys up all the land surrounding a homeless encampment. There is no way to leave the homeless encampment that does not cross through his property. He really does not want homeless people on his property, they drive prices down, so he hires armed guards to ensure no homeless people cross onto his land. As a result, all of the homeless people starve (except for the few the guards shot for trying to cross his property).
I think this is tantamount to mass murder. It would still be wrong, just less so, if the deprivation was much less (e.g. the encampment were self-sufficient but some of its inhabitants wanted to leave to visit their family or live better elsewhere).
So I don't think it works to say that enforcing borders is just enforcing our property rights. For one, such a claim would involve illicit legislation of how individuals in a country can use their property. Why can't a company invite an immigrant to work at their office? Or a landlord invite them to rent her apartment? Where do their compatriots get the right to tell them they can't use their private property in this way? If you say instead that we own the border or the land around it, and are just exercising our right to keep people out, this violates the second principle. Our right to our property cannot come at serious curtailment of people's liberties elsewhere.
I think, though -- and this is NOT a long-considered completely thought out opinion; this is my gut-level response -- while it’s wrong to beat up John, of course, it becomes more understandable if he’s walking into your home, making himself a sandwich and you’re worried about having enough food tomorrow for yourself. While the saintly thing to do would be to empathize with John, and while the plain fact is that he is every bit as worthy of being fed as you are, you’re still a human animal with instincts to protect your own food in your own home. Your animal self-interest will tend to prevail over your saintliness and empathy.
When I think of the usual folks who want to let everyone in (and I am not speaking for or about Freddie-- he has a nuanced take on things and so I’m sure he has a well-reasoned argument for this as well) they’re professional folks whose sandwiches John is typically not coming for. They’re often working-class folks who fear that John is coming to collect sandwiches (or education or health care or affordable housing) at their expense as taxpayers (or as competitors for jobs whose wages are depressed by surplus workers).
Two responses. The conciliatory response is that the argument above is for a moral principle rather than a political proposal. You can think that something is morally wrong without thinking anyone right now should try especially hard to abolish it. For example, I think most uses of animals in agriculture, as a food source, are wrong, but I'm not crazy enough to think that anyone has a chance of passing a law enforcing veganism on the population or that it would be a good idea to even propose it. Likewise, open borders is not a position I would want to have to run on, certainly not on its own. Open borders might only make sense politically given sweeping redistributive policies that take the economic burden off the working class, but I don't expect anything like that for generations.
I think open borders is the morally correct position even absent the changes in condition that would make it politically possible. Depriving someone of an opportunity to earn a wage is little better than theft; just as it's wrong (if sometimes excusable or understandable) for one poor person to steal from another poor person, it is wrong for one group of poor people to deprive another of jobs. It's not clear that we disagree here.
It's the same as David Bier and Alex Nowrasteh I expect. The poor people of the world who come here will increase their standard of living and that's a net good. The impact on the lower classes will be small and if it's not, then UBI + more welfare to keep them happy.
Could you please spell out what you have in mind here, so that readers can decide how sustainable it is. E.g., the "lower classes" you speak of: Do you use this term to denote just the members of the people who already live in the U.S.? Or to denote the members who are already here, plus those who will be arriving here once the border has been opened? How will the UBI and additional welfare measures be financed? Bernie Sanders has opposed opening the U.S. borders. I wonder if it is because he has asked himself such questions.
From what I understand, some who support de facto open borders generally believe that those who immigrate to the US will have rights to work and travel but no voting rights (at least for a set period of time to avoid them voting welfare for themselves) and would be barred from receiving welfare (again I think for a set period of time) and the lower classes, meaning those who are citizens and LPRs based on income level, would get some mixture of cash and in-kind benefits. This is very generalized and of course lacks the detail that is critical, but the general theme I would say is that newbies get rights to work/travel and limited welfare/voting and the incumbents get welfare to keep them from getting restless/angry over the economic effects.
Bernie previously said that open borders was a Koch theme but changed his tune when running in 2016. He's basically done a 180.
Open borders is a utopian ideal that isn't practical in today's world, like most ideals. The point in believing in open borders is not that you want it enacted today, you want the world to move in a direction where it's possible to enact it. A country may never actually achieve open borders due to the large amounts of inequality worldwide but you could still want it to move further towards that goal rather than away from it.
As for an argument as to why, a simple one could be "the USA is one of the best countries on the planet, the more people that live here, the better".
A solid base hit - maybe even a triple. So bring the runner home with a complementary piece illuminating the evident abandonment of class concerns by the vocalizers/ figureheads/pols that constitute the leadership cohorts in both wings. Anyone seriously interested in diagnosing the electoral weaknesses of the Dems has to account for that. I think they lost their way somewhere between bracing, blazing idealism and the crude calculus of political expediency. Being out of touch with people you refuse to listen to was always bound to have political consequences.
Matt Stoller and Thomas Frank have written about how the Democrats abandoned the working class 50 years ago to be the party of the meritocracy. They just used to pretend to still care about the working class.
Prof. Mark Blyth coined the phrase "global Trumpism" back in 2016, talking about populist revolts worldwide. He claims that people only go with right-wing populism when not allowed to have left-wing populism.
The neoliberal oligarchy and their useful idiots of the PMC are opposed by both.
I agree it is the worst of both worlds, but for a slightly different reason. What I believe the country needs is a party that is for the average worker, pro social safety net, pro law and order, anti-oligarchy, anti-warmongering, a sane fair immigration system with reasonable limits and enforcement of the border. Instead we have a Democratic Party that is beholden to completely insane cultural wokery, but also to the superwealthy, open borders in practice although they won't admit it, anti-worker, and never saw a dumb war they didn't want to start. And the Republican Party is even more so, just minus the wokeness, but culturally obnoxious in other ways.
Some of my preferences are "left" and some are "the center" but I don't really slot into either of those things easily.
Sure. The 2016 version at least. Unfortunately he has conceded a lot since then on illegal immigration and culture war nonsense. I voted for him twice though and I would again.
Yglesias has a good post today https://www.slowboring.com/p/rigorous-accurate-policy-analysis?utm_medium=reader2 that argues that leftist goodness is possible but you might have to prioritize and recognize some trade offs. But we have an activist culture now that demands “allyship” and that everything has to happen or nothing does.
But to critique the moderates- it’s insane that a small group of moderates in the House blocked consideration of Medicare negotiating for drug prices as part of BBB. That’s an insanely popular policy and it’s infuriating that we couldn’t prioritize that and push it forward.
If it's "insanely popular", why do all Republicans oppose it? Why aren't those Republicans voted out of office for opposing this insanely popular policy?
Answer: it's not actually insanely popular. It's just something people who will talk to pollsters on the phone SAY, but don't actually mean, because they will take no action (like voting for a Democrat) that would make it happen.
There is one area where both Left and Right agree, the country is run by oligarchs and they pay almost no taxes and they should be taxed more. And this is where the biggest difference between the parties emerge, Democrats are MORE willing to raise taxes on the rich ( not too much though just a tiny bit ) and Republicans absolutely oppose it. Republican party oppose raising taxes on the rich on principle even if their base demands it. Right now, that is the basic philosophical difference between the parties.
For the Left, their demand for student debt relief is not popular. Most voters reject even though the students genuinely are victims of a predatory loan system. Public colleges in ALL levels should be free for ALL time, funded by taxpayers. One time debt relief is neither efficient, nor fair.
Agree with this but will just add a couple of things: you’re right that Republicans oppose raising taxes on the rich but they also recognize this is unpopular so they have enough message discipline to try to change the subject away from that, at least during campaigns. That’s an important lesson we can learn from them.
I think student debt is a symptom of a much bigger problem - college cost - and we would be better served addressing that vs just trying to go after the debt issue. But that’s a much larger debate and one that I think will get somewhat uncomfortable as it will mean having difficult conversations about resources with parts of our coalition that share our cultural values.
Yes, no doubt, difficult conversations with the Democratic coalition of which only a tiny percentage go to college. All other OECD countries fund higher education through taxes because education is what makes a country.
I will quote myself from a comment below:
>Does "defund the police" ring a bell? Do you have ANY idea how much damage that did? Show me where Sanders or Warren or AOC or any other prominent progressive denounced the notion of defunding the police.
>Or AOC and "birthing persons". Do have ANY idea how much Democrat support for the absurd demands of the trans cult (men are women and can take the prizes at womens' events, must be admitted to womens' shelters and prisons) are hurting Democrats?
Prorgressives salt the earth and then wonder why crops don't grow.
It is more of a slow-moving natural disaster, and you are right to blame the internet. But I object to public schools stepping on the accelerator! (Again, google "gender identity" and your local public school district if you don't believe this is happening.)
And here's a personal story that well illustrates the horror of it all: https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name
Hellena's follow-up analysis posts are also well worth reading.
I will just say this: no other form of body dysphoria is treated by the medical community with powerful body-altering drugs and surgery. I believe the language of cults is one of the few tools we have to understand this bizarre societal phenomenon.
You just accused FdB of building straw men, and immediately followed by saying that the Democrats message is "We want high gas prices AND to have in-depth conversation about genitalia with your 6 year old without your knowledge." Do you not see any irony here? Do you not think that the right wing outrage machine isn't spoon feeding you straw men constantly?
Listen, I’m not a proponent of teaching young kids about gender identity (although I’m sure it happens far less than Tucker Carlson would have you believe). But it’s absolutely not the same as “in depth conversation about genitalia.” That’s an extremely hyperbolic straw man. Classic right wing fear mongering.
The green new deal is extremely divisive among Democrats (see Freddie’s post). You’re taking a complex debate about a complex set of policies and dumbing it down to “THE COMMUNISS DEMOCRAPS WANNA RAISE THE PRICE OF GAS.” An extremely bad faith and reductive straw man.
Teaching young kids about gender identity is all the rage now. If you don't believe that, try googling "gender identity" and the name of your local public school district.
https://www.discovery.org/education/2021/06/02/the-radical-reshaping-of-k-12-public-education-part-1-gender-redefinition-self-selection/
Also, regarding this statement: “ deBoer talks about "their media" while completely failing to address what "his media" is doing. I wish deBoer would write a post about what he thinks about the Right based on evidence.”
Freddie criticizes left media all the time. It’s easily one of the most prominent topics on this blog, and I suspect one of the reasons that you’re here. So I’m not sure exactly what you want with this statement. I agree, I would also like for him to write about the mouth frothing nature of right wing media, since he really never does that.
I just posted this, but Kevin Drum has the exact opposite perspective. In terms of deviation from the median voter it is liberals who are way off base, not conservatives.
https://jabberwocking.com/if-you-hate-the-culture-wars-blame-liberals/
Judging from the right-wing sources I read, a lot of Republicans truly believe the exact opposite: they think that Dems are far more ruthless and far more willing to fight dirty than they are, and that they need to toughen up in order to compensate. Both sides are partly right, because both can point to bad behavior on the other side and (unfortunately) use it as a pretext to indulge their own worst instincts.
That being said--as someone who considers himself a centrist but grew up surrounded by lefties, the "we learned it from watching you!" theory of Democratic assholery does not ring true to me. Most human beings are tribal and xenophobic to one degree or another. You could argue that Republicans lean into it more, but it's not hard to find on the Democratic side either; they didn't need Republicans to teach them. I know plenty of leftists with hate in their hearts and "Kindness is Everything; All are Welcome" signs on their lawns. They see themselves as open-hearted and loving, but they wouldn't deign to piss on a white male Republican if he was on fire. That's their prerogative, I suppose, but I wish they'd stop kidding themselves. It's easy to love those that you are already inclined to be sympathetic towards, and much harder to extend legitimate kindness and understanding to those you don't like...but if you're not at least trying to do so, then stop pretending that you think "kindness is everything," please.
As for gerrymandering-- I live in a deep blue state that is gerrymandered within an inch of its life to shut out Republicans to the greatest degree possible. The state is infamous for its cynical, corrupt Democratic political machine and has been for a long time. Democrats in this state have always done just fine in coming up with ways to play hardball and grant themselves political advantage. I am extremely skeptical that they needed inspiration from Republicans on this score or any other.
Yeah. I hate participating in political internet discussions, but I feel like the “Electoral College / Senate favors republicans” thing needs constant pushback.
Most of my life, when the working class were solidly democrats, the electoral college and Senate favored Ds. There wasn’t any caterwauling then. So you want larger majorities in the Senate? Start caring again about what people in the Midwest want and think. You think people in the Midwest are garbage racists whose opinions need to be stamped out? Thank god for the structure of the Senate.
Yes, and right now the Republicans, armed with the fillibuster, are the only thing preventing the passage of the totally insane Equality Act, which is supported by all Democrats.
The unfair advantage is not favoring republicans. It’s favoring rural white states over populous urban ones. Of course democrats can choose to appeal to that voter base and the advantage disappears, and I obviously thing that tactically they should do that, but it doesn’t change the inherent problem that the majority viewpoints and states with denser, less white populations will continue to go underrepresented in the federal government.
The roots of this issue go back to the original conflict between Virginia, the California or Texas of colonial era politics, and smaller states like Rhode Island. The "compromise" part of the Connecticut Compromise is the thing to focus on here, because without it there probably wouldn't be a United States.
People always forget this. They also forget that states are sovereigns. They are not administrative entities of the federal government, but have power to enact their own laws, levy taxes and do much of the same as the federal government.
I listened to a Charlie Sykes interview the other day, and it was all just a lefty and a never-Trumper congratulating themselves on not understanding things that they could have figured out with a cursory amount of reading.
But then, I've had more than a cursory amount of reading about people only wanting sex, and I still couldn't suspend my disbelief long enough to get much sense out of Freddie's post on it. So who am I to talk? (Maybe I'm a person who decided that concepts important enough *for me to give an interview on* were worth reading up on)
When you mention Charlie Sykes, please think of Scott Walker, because Charlie's radio show was instrumental in enabling union-buster Walker to become governor of WI.
Why is that advantage an *unfair* advantage?
I can't help but feel that most Americans do not want radical change from government, in either direction. They want the trains to run on time and that's it.
I wouldn't be too hard on people. I have wanted change, but, like I pointed out with Obamacare, people ask for one thing, but the end up with something twisted that in the long run actually goes in the opposite direction. I've seen that game play out many times:
-Obamacare (already mentioned)
-tax hikes on the "rich" that end up hitting the middle and working class
-regulation that is supposed to save us from the abuses of large corporations but really only makes it harder for small businesses to function
-the "COVID relief" act that helped very few people on the ground but was a slush fund for those who didn't need it
-the "infrastructure bill" that Obama passed in 2009 or so that was supposed to save us from recession by employing a bunch of people to fix roads and bridges, forgetting conveniently that there are only so many companies that have the equipment to do that, and one of them that is headquartered near where I live actually *closed* one of its offices and laid people off to make more money
-the fact that we "saved" the economy in 2008 and 2009 for the big corporations while regular people lost their homes and jobs
After a while, you start to understand that literally every time they promise they're making "material change," it ends up hurting regular people and enriching those that have been causing the problems. That is why you take someone who in philosophy like me is a liberal but I grudgingly vote like a conservative these days because every time the Democrats said they were "helping," they were really only helping themselves. And, yes, I have a lot of problems with Republicans and am really a political orphan, but the older I grow, the more I really do appreciate gridlock in government.
So how is a system not broken when you're locked into voting for one of two corrupt parties? If you don't vote, you're allowing the system to continue. If you do vote, you're tacitly acknowledging the legitimacy of the system, even if you vote third party. Effective third parties are not an option with the current campaign finance system and the stranglehold the two parties have on state election laws. The only way to change is through the parties themselves, but honestly tell me how well that works. I don't see how anyone can look at this system and say it's not broken. It might be salvageable, but it is definitely not working. And that is the reality that most people see and why they are jaded.
I'm not sure what you mean by my worldview is "incongruous." Incongruous with what? The real incongruity is as follows: voting for either party is capitulation, but it's also the only way (other than violence) to change the system. And if you want "material change" on a large scale, you're going to have to change the system. Is it hopeless? No. Things do occasionally change, slightly. But suggesting that people tend to be moderate in their views and want incremental change is not a "grim fucking view" but instead a realistic one based on experience with our (or any really) system.
Also I am not quite sure that there is a difference between "fucked" and "broken," unless you somehow think that the system as it is is not really broken but functioning much as it was always meant to. I don't know that I'd really disagree with you, but I'd say that's even more "grim" than thinking it's broken. If it's broken, it can be repaired. If it's simply working as it was always meant to, then we're all pretty much "fucked" (what pretty debate language you have) without a violent revolution.
Just picking one out because I have a personal anecdote: my sister opened a restaurant in the fall of 2019. The COVID relief act kept her afloat, and kept her from having to fire anyone. I sincerely doubt that's unique.
For your sister's story, I know several others that, that didn't happen for. In the town where we live, we lost several restaurants due to the COVID policies. I also know people who couldn't get on unemployment because they were self-employed, so they were expected to either transgress the "rules" or starve. So while some of the money got where it was going, a lot didn't. Hence all the businesses we lost.
One can be *for* a thing in principle but against a thing in *practice*. For example, roughly 70% of Americans were *for* a no-fly zone over Ukraine until someone told them it would involve direct confrontation with Russians that might escalate to a world war. Then the number dropped to something around 25%, if I'm not remembering wrong.
Reasonable people, as you put it, don't fall for slogans. "Universal healthcare," like "affordable healthcare," is a slogan. I want the details before I make up my mind. I also understand where I live. I fear that what you call "universal healthcare" I would call "a money pit for Big Pharma and Big Healthcare at the expense of bankrupting the country." That's how Obamacare worked out.
But I think the desire to actually make the health care system affordable for everyone, including taxpayers, is universally popular, as much as anything is.
Half of the voters vote republican. I think more than half the country would go for medicare for all, but lots of people don't vote. A gigantic number of people. And that number is even higher in the midterms. We don't get to vote on anything but politicians, so we're at their mercy.
Polling consistently shows that a supermajority of the public is happy with their health care and it's been that way for decades. After Obama got killed in the midterms Chuck Schumer came out and publicly criticized him. What people cared about was the slow economic recovery while health care has never been high on the list of anyone's priorities except for political activists.
Maybe the reason that the US never does anything about the health care system is because that's actually way down on the list of priorities for most citizens?
He's right that it's mostly incoherent but at the same time the public tends to have pretty good taste. I don't agree with the popular position on everything but I tend to agree with the popular position a lot more than I do the actual reality.
I think it depends on what one considers coherent, right? I mean “keep your government hands off my Medicare“ is incoherent in an obvious way, but in a basic way it’s a backward way of saying “I’m happy with how things are.”
Seems like average people don’t give much of a fuck about most of the culture war issues; we just want to be left alone but taken care of when we’re ill and able to pay the bills.
Example: Trans issues are interesting for me to consider especially since I know a few trans people (two of whom are kids) but if I had a kid in my family who came out as trans it would matter more to me personally. Right now I simply care that parents maintain their rights as parents while kids have a healthy way of expressing gender nonconformity. But if people in my party start calling me a bigot and transphobe I’ll get turned right off any support of the issue. Things are less incoherent when you consider human nature.
Erin, surely you know that supporting parental rights (eg, parents must be informed if teachers change their kid's pronouns) does indeed make you a bigot and a transphobe in the eyes and minds of much of the left.
They support it in the abstract, try to implement in real life and watch what happens. It's not "free", someone has to pay for it, and someone has to decide how much the providers get paid. And there is zero consensus on the answers to "who pays how much" and "who gets paid less".
US federal government already spends more on healthcare than on defense. For fiscal year 2020 we spent [1]:
* $769B on Medicare
* $458B on Medicaid
* $714B on Defense
Medicare and Medicaid combined are $1,227B.
Our national healthcare problem is a cost problem. The US spending on healthcare, both public and private, is far higher than any other country. Just look at the figures in https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries-2/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budge
So it's better for healthcare to be just as wasteful as defense spending, to make it all even?
I'd be perfectly happy to slash military spending to zero and instead pay for much better health care for all. But what fraction of the country would agree with that?
Universal health care (and by the way, does that include illegal immigrants, or not? Somebody has to decide, and then sell the decision to the public!) involves trade-offs, either much higher taxes, or much less spending on other things.
Spell out what those taxes and/or cuts are, and watch support plummet.
What Majorsensible said. The real question isn't do you want universal healthcare, the question is how do you pay for it?
Around 60-65% of poll respondents were happy with their health care. The 30% that said they weren't has plenty of room for a lot of people. That doesn't change the fact that there is no urgency behind health care reform because a majority don't care.
Now here is where I'm going to once again be a Debbie Downer. I was once a big fan of single payer or a nationalized health system. But then I saw what happened with "Obamacare" or the morbidly ironically named Affordable Care Act. Outside of a few good things (eliminating lifetime caps and getting rid of riders for preexisting conditions, for example) it ended up making the very people who caused the problem even richer and left them with no accountability at all and put us at the mercy of their whims. I have no illusion that if we ever had single payer it wouldn't simply bankrupt an entire country rather than just some individuals because you still wouldn't make the people who cause the problem responsible for the problem. Instead you would simply give them an even bigger money tree grove to pillage. It's just not going to work in our money driven system. You figure out how to keep these people from owning our politicians, and we might have a chance. But as it is now, no.
Eliminating the private insurance industry goes a long way to driving down costs, setting hard guidelines for hospital billing so they can't individually bill every item/service and setting floors for basic services & procedures would help as well.
What hampered the ACA was trying to keep the private insurance industry in business and maintain the profit incentives that medical industry has enjoyed. Billing by hospital groups and doctors varies wildly for the same procedure and it really shouldn't. You should be choosing a doctor based on quality of service and outcomes not because they're cheaper than another or happen to be 'in network'.
A baseline insurance policy (Medicare for All) that you can take with you anywhere and everywhere without worrying about being "in network" is doable and wouldn't break the bank. And require every healthcare provider to accept M4A full stop. Eliminating the income tax cap on high-income wages would help as well. The average American would jump at a policy that was simple to understand and less complicated than the crap foisted on America by the large insurance groups like BCBS and Cigna.
Lastly, stop the stranglehold on the number of licensed doctors pumped out every year. The shortage of healthcare professionals is a combination of artificial shortages (meant to keep salaries high), retirement, and burn-out.
You can drive down costs somewhat, but claims still have to be processed. And then there's the big issue of exactly what is covered. My sister-in-law died after her private insurance refused to pay for an "experimental" treatment that, while relatively new, had an excellent track record. Whether this and a zillion other treatments like it get paid for, or not, now becomes a political question. Good luck with that! Also, expanding coverage to the large number of people without insurance now, and giving them full coverage for everything, is going to cost a LOT. Where will that money come from? Wherever it is (new taxes on somebody, cuts to somebody's current budget), there will be cries of outrage from those negatively affected. And what about illegal immigrants? Are THEY covered? That should be a fun debate!
The details MATTER, hugely. And we've not even begun to try to work out these details.
I don't disagree with you. Processing claims can be done w/ contracts but that's different than what private insurance does now which is deny every claim first. I also think the inconsistency with which hospital groups and healthcare providers bill for the same procedure is a racket.
For example, my 2yr had to get tubes put in. One ENT quoted $12K, another quoted $8K for a 20 min procedure!
I think expanding M4A is a step in the right direction and you could certain increase the medicare taxation rates to bring in more revenue but you have to couple that with more preventative care as well. People waiting 3 yrs before getting diabetes treated isn't a cost saving measure.
W/ the regards to illegal immigrants, I think you'd have to set up a separate program but leaving the current system of utilizing the ER room for colds and ear infections isn't the best way to save $ either.
I think we all saw how difficult the sausage making was on the ACA that it seems like we can't make another effort. But I think simply expanding the eligibility for medicare (at least for a baseline policy) would be a reasonable step that most people could get behind. As it stands, the GOP resistance to any progressive policy is a huge roadblock.
I'm with you. And the trains don't run on time, so that's why we get all this political distraction.
what trains, LOL
How about if the trains didn't hemorrhage money? Or on time? Or faster?
In California, we're hemorrhaging billions, and still don't have the trains.
The problem is, trains running on time would be a pretty radical change!
Having friends abroad really recalibrated my sense of what a "functional healthcare system" looks like. I realize "let's have the healthcare system most developed countries take for granted" is apparently a radical and unpopular opinion right now in the States, but it seems like something activists could probably sell? Without seeming super-radical? Just take the space/time in media dedicated to whatever "why pistachio nuts serve white supremacy" column and replace it with "here's yet another ordinary person who did everything right but got completely fucked over by America's healthcare system due to circumstances outside of his control".
I worked in Canada for a while and the first question people ask you when they figure out you're an American is about the health care system. And then they trot out the horror stories.
I lived in Canada for 15 years. They have plenty of their own healthcare horror stories.
My Canadian coworkers are fascinated that you can have a six-figure, salaried gig, and still have to pay thousands of dollars for a life-saving drug. It's not a competition, but holy hell would I rather have something better than what we have now.
That’s interesting because last I knew prescription drugs are not covered by the government in Canada unless you’re hospitalized.
Right see, this is why I was such a fan of Bernie 2016. He was capable of saying "let's move far enough left to live like our peers of the developed First World" without tipping over into General Leftoidism or baking Koch Bros/Bryan Caplan libertarianism into his platform.
There's also the hard working French Canadian guy who pays 50% of his wages taxes, yet had to get his gallbladder surgery done in the US, and then had to get the stent removed in the US ... why, because the Canadian health care system is so awesome. I know that guy.
Canadians don't have an awesome health care system, they have an awesome government censorship system. Half the shit we discuss here on Freddie's blog would land us in criminal court in Canada. Anything you say about the government in Canada is liable to land you in court looking at a jail sentence.
Is this problem unique to Canada? I'm just wondering whether the citizens of France, UK, Germany, etc. face the same onerous wait times. If yes, then where do they go? Do they also come to the US for their gallbladder surgeries? And if the citizens are unhappy with the system, do they not have any ability to change it? I mean, these are mostly, I think, democracies. As for the US, we have to be able to find a happy medium between some longer wait times and type one diabetics dying from a lack of insulin. I don't know the answer, but we can't pretend that things are just fine as they are in the US.
In the UK, people buy supplemental medical insurance. You can get denied an ambulance ride in the UK, and there's an ability to stop and hold ambulances off hospital property ... that's a result of people complaining about over flowing A&E (emergency rooms).
Yes, that whole insulin thing is a problem, but this is a new problem created by congress. I'm pretty sure you won't like the new-new solution any better. History says the insulin price fixing program just starting up, will lead to disasterous shortages. Go and read the real story about "Let them eat cake."
I lived in the UK, wait times in some places can be onerous. Though my MIL had colon cancer and she had surgery within two weeks. They do a good job of prioritizing surgeries. Yes, you might have to wait a while for a hip or knee replacement, but they will do what they can for you to lessen the pain in the meantime. But cancer or something mroe urgent? Top of the list. The NHS has been purposely underfunded and restructured into a mess by the Tories. But when you poll the average UK voter, majority say they would happily pay more taxes IF those taxes went directly to the NHS. By the way, my tax burden was similar to what I would have paid in the US.
Alternatively, I had British friends who lived in Germany for some time and they said the healthcare system there was well-organized compared to the NHS.
Germany’s system is fantastic. It also isn’t free - medium high earners pay d close to 900€ a month for statutory insurance. Psychiatric care is almost non-existent and birth control isn’t covered by insurance. But standard care, cancer treatment, etc is amazing.
As a Canadian, I ask, respectfully: what?????
So I work in Alaska with a Canadian driller. He needed a gall bladder operation. Couldn't get it in Canada, had to get it in Alaska. The surgeon had to put in some kind of stent to keep things open. The stent needs to be removed within about 6 months. So this guy tries to get the surgery scheduled ... they can't give him a date, and tell him to come home and wait and they'll call him. What, they think he can sit around not earning money because they might call him? No, that clock is ticking, complications will happen if it goes on too long. Canadian healthcare won't pay for the surgery in Alaska, and they can't give him a date in Canada. So he bites the bullet and pays to have it done in Canada. Now he swears he's not paying Canadian taxes. There's also some thing about if you stay outside of Canada over 6 months, Canadian healthcare will be canceled.
So yeah, there's some shit.
Wow one story. Are you suggesting that the American system in which my father died because my parents couldn’t afford his care is better? I now live in a European country in which care is abundant and while not free (we pay mandatory insurance) it’s equal, accessible, and good.
I'm Canadian and have lived here my whole life. The only person I know who has had to go the US for healthcare is a high school classmate's sister with Lyme Disease, because Ontario's healthcare system does not cover diagnostics or the experimental treatment she wanted.
Our healthcare system is not perfect, and there are many areas that are in desperate need of improvement (our underfunding of hospitals is in part why we had so little surge capacity for COVID waves), but I'd choose it in a heartbeat over the American system. And I have several Canadian friends who live/work in the US with good employer insurance plans who complain about it constantly too.
Also, I know a lot of Canadians who say a lot of shit about all three levels of government and none of them have gone to jail.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/free_speech_is_dead_in_canada_the_persecution_of_christian_activist_bill_whatcott.html
None of that stuff is Whatcott criticizing the government, it's basically all him handing out flyers about how terrible LGBTQ people are.
Easy to say when US healthcare is just a short drive away in the event you get rejected/waitlisted. If the USA adopted Canadian-style healthcare, what are we supposed to do when some "equity" program decides that our heart surgery will have to wait 18 months because people who look like us owned slaves 100 years ago? Drive to Mexico?
Can you point me to anywhere in the world with socialized health insurance where they've waitlisted people solely because they were white?
Also, even in Canada, to some extent our healthcare is privatized. Eye, dental, prescription drugs, assistive devices, physio, most mental health care -- all through private insurance. In Ontario, hospitals are predominantly privatized non-profit corporations (though doctors themselves are paid through the Ontario Health Insurance Plan), and there's a bunch of private for-profit clinics.
A couple years ago, I had a random cyst in my lip -- not at all life-threatening, just kind of uncomfortable and unsightly. My doctor told me it'd be an 8-10 week wait to get it removed through public healthcare, so I ended up going to my dentist and having the oral surgeon there remove it; it was partially covered by my workplace insurance, and I paid the rest out of pocket.
Seeing as two-tiered healthcare is pretty common in other wealthy countries, and given the predominant influence of rich people on US politics, I find it extremely difficult to believe that if the US adopted Medicare For All that there wouldn't be a private option if you didn't like what the public option was offering.
It depends if one is advocating for a vague "let's just do something else," which is vague and cannot be critically analyzed, or a specific "let us do it like this one country" which gives us a concrete policy proposal but also something concrete that can be criticized.
Extremely few countries have the "medicare for all, no private insurance" that Bernie wanted.
Ok, but I'm perfectly willing to support Bernie's thing as a bargaining chip against, well, the shit we actually constantly get: a parasitical, rent-seeking insurance industry propped up against the interests of literally everyone else, to "create jobs".
My headline preference:
“Gridlock in Washington!”
“Nothing getting done, says top party officials”
Wait, we have trains!?
They don't run on time so nobody knows they exist.
When I worked in Manhattan one of the locals told me that the R stood for rarely and the N was for never. I thought that was amusing because that was exactly the opposite of my experience.
I loved the train system when I lived in Chicago. Not perfectly reliable, but as reliable as anything I experienced living in Germany. Just, you know, confined to one city as opposed to running beautifully and affordably across the entire country.
The Twin City's train is great too; maybe just because it's relatively new, but it's the nicest public transit I've ever been on. It'd be nice if they could expand it...even if we never got a interstate program for light rail, even just have the states cooperate to link their networks would be an improvement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html
The L stands for "late to work again," the J stands for "janky and covered in human feces," and the M stands for "maybe, if you're lucky" God I miss New York!
We have trains. I've ridden Bay area rapid transit. Standing in puddles of urine. Do you think your trains will be much better?
Damn, if only the administration in power had tried to advance legislation providing billions of dollars in funding for upgrades to rapid transit systems and development of high-speed rail, I’m sure that would have passed with flying colors on both sides of the aisle. Everybody being so excited about the trains running on time, and all.
Oh, we've provided billions of dollars for upgrades to rapid transit systems ... just in California alone. All that money got sucked down the political downer holes, lost and gone forever. Go read the NY Times puff piece, or the hard hitting San Jose Mercury News take a dump on the project. https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/01/19/editorial-newsoms-big-lie-about-californias-high-speed-rail/
The reality is, no one will want to take the train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. For starters, you can't get around Los Angeles without a car. Why pay $240 for a once a day 4 hour train ride, when you can pay $79 and SouthWest will get there in 45 minutes, with flights every hour or so, and you can choose your airport.
This was sold as a great leap into the future ... but Californian's just don't take the train. We have trains, fancy vacation trains which very few take, and these trains run on subsidies. We have commuter trains which smell very strongly of urine, and we can't seem to get them cleaned up. What people don't realize, is this is secretly a commuter train the very wealthy Silicon Valley people suckered voters into funding. This will take highly paid tech workers from low cost central valley farming communities and whisk them into their Silicon Valley jobs at 200mph, all on someone else's dime. Now that's a Win-Win situation.
Commuter trains are a genuine good that should be built and subsidized, not sure why you think a train that was "only" used by workers to get from affordable parts of the state to high-paying jobs would be a bad thing.
Also I take Caltrain every day and have zero horror stories, urine or otherwise. BART is a local system, not a train, so your insistence that its issues must be all train issues makes no sense.
What's the over under on inflation getting to double digits?
We pay thousands of people—not to work—do you think instead we could pay a few to mop the trains, and rake the parks? Nooo.
Unions
nothing wrong with timely trains, right?
We have low expectations of what government can accomplish
And this is what people always miss. Just because they're elected to office doesn't make them saints. In fact, the type of person who can and wants to run and be elected to office is typically the same type of person who really shouldn't be trusted to run a popsicle stand much less a nation or any other public entity.
Do you think business can enact sweeping social change?
As an American, I must ask: What are these "trains" you speak of?
Americans like change but incrementally and so slow they don't notice the changes. Which means that any sort of centrist-left lurch in policy is branded as radical change by the Republicans. I mean, re-instating Clean Air rules was branded as a communist take-over yet Americans like clean air.
"Look, we changed things a little bit, and nothing bad happened, let's change them some more."
Gay marriage swept across the country pretty fast in historical terms, certainly faster than black civil rights. This was for many reasons but certainly in part because people could see it happening in phases and nothing broke.
I was a former centrist who fought with the "Bernie bros" all through 2016. Yes, I know how bad that was. Took 2020 for me to figure out what was what. I do remember a moment where Bernie said he was opposed to "identity politics." At the time I thought that was BAD because of course I was on the other side - the Hillary people were almost ALL about identity politics. Bernie and his movement have folded into the centrists now, as far as I can tell, and have given up that fight. Probably because AOC embodies both worlds - DS and identity politics. Right now, though, it's all collapsing. All of it. The future of the Democrats is bright I think. They just have to get the boomer class out of the way. They're living the last gasp of what JFK started in 1960. It's time to rethink it but they can't with Pelosi et al in their way. So ultimately, the people who are in their 30s now will rise and the path for them will no doubt be to take the country in a more progressive direction. This will be easier once the old guard is gone. Until then, America will most definitely be handed over to the Right.
+100 for citing Ruy Teixera.
Yes I agree with that and I read his site too. But I'm talking a very long time from now, with a whole new generational shift. By progressive I don't mean "defund the police" or open borders. I mean more or less some sort of government stipend or free college or whatever. Andrew Yang's version of the UBI as robots take over the work force, etc. But before this country even thinks of going in that direction, it IS going to be years and years of Republican rule. Like it was after 1968-1992 (Jimmy carter's reign notwithstanding). The pendulum is about to swing hard right, no doubt about it. I will be very old before Democrats get another shot at power...
Democrats need to have more children.
Ha! I think the opposite. Let the crazies continue on politicking while having few if any children and let the normies have more and more children. It's nice to think this will fix things, but I'm not sure it will. I tend to believe Taleb's the most intolerant minority wins.
The gerontocracy in the Democratic Party is definitely a sign of the party’s ills. At the same time, the political assumptions of the young will lead to a situation in which it will be impossible to achieve cohesion and unity to accomplish anything. So the Republicans will rule unchallenged.
If you look at the imbedded chart, it's clear that most Americans are firmly in the middle...some lean left, some lean right, but not very far in either direction. That leaves progressives in a very minority position. They can't get anything done because the majority doesn't agree with them
Plus self described conservatives poll at ten points higher than self described progressives.
Joe Manchin took a lot of heat recently for stating that the United States is a center right country and has always been so. How is he wrong?
He's wrong because that implies an actual policy coherence Americans just don't have. Huge numbers of Americans will say that believe in small government and then express support for all manner of expensive new programs, and don't even think of touching Social Security and Medicare. Self ID just isn't that meaningful for most people because most people don't have an internally consistent ideology.
The problem with popular support for expensive new social spending programs is that polling has consistently shown a drop in support if a follow up question about funding is asked.
I propose that there is a problem in framing here. Universal child care on its own, for example, isn't really a conservative or liberal issue. Who wouldn't want free child care for working parents? The political schism shows up with how you pay for it, whether the relative benefit to society outweighs the costs associated with new taxes. In a hypothetical science fiction future where robots provide all the care giving I would expect opposition to government funded child care centers to evaporate.
Most people, no matter where they are on the political spectrum, aren't policy wonks. That's why "social issues" become flare points
In terms of generational change there is an argument that what is most salient about voting preferences is race, not age. Young white voters have more in common with older white voters than with minority voters who are in their same age group.
If that is the case then Democrats should be terrified of the ongoing shift in preference for Hispanic voters to the Republicans.
The Democrats do not understand Hispanic voters. Cases in point: Tom Perez , grandson of Trujillo supporter (DR) was DNC chair. Daniel Perez (GOP FL State Leadership) is Cuban. Analysis of the preferences and background of Hispanic candidates is important. Dems need to know that all Perez names are not the same in voting patterns (or any other Hispanic name, for that matter).
I have a Dem friend who signed up to write letters encouraging people to vote - and she was sent this long list of people with hispanic surnames from the Miami area. Even she, who's never been there, had a lot of questions about whether this was a good Dem strategy.
The last time I made calls for dems I got a list of people in NJ who were all over 80 and not one answered the phone. Big waste organizing the lists and trying to make calls.
Ouch. The truth hurts.
You're one of the few people I can read that I think I would mostly disagree with but never feel insulted by, so I appreciate the perspective. I think your view of immigration is too rosy. People who want open borders don't understand how that is going to be misused by the people in power, and no I'm not talking about "diluting" votes. I'm talking about the fact that the bad economic actors who have consistently undercut the American worker by sending jobs abroad are now trying to undermine the American worker at home and call them "racist" and "xenophobic" if they point out that a glut of people willing to work for next to nothing and/or work outside the system will further erode wages. I know you'll say, but we can make laws, to which I'll ask, When have we ever done that when the same people who benefit from this abuse of immigrant workers and American workers own the politicians? You have to work with the world as it is.
The other thing I laugh at is your vision of the Republicans. Yes, there might be some "zealots" among the Republican voters and a few in Congress, some MTG's (who I find to be a half a degree off bubble but still someone of more principle than most). But for every MTG or Rand Paul (who also seems to have a few principles), there are a dozen McConnells, Grahams, Kinzingers, and Cheneys, who blow with the political wind and are more worried about what donors will think than their own party constituents. So I think you paint the Republican Party as something quite different than it is.
I believe we could all benefit from allowing substantially more legal immigration from Latin America. First, because desperate people are crossing the border anyway--if they come with papers, they can work legally with a minimum wage and protections. Immigrants from Latin America can connect with a large Spanish-speaking community and churches, and their culture tends to be compatible with the US.
Most importantly, the birth rate in Latin America is higher than ours, and this will be important due to our aging population and low birth rate. We will need more young people to grow the economy and support the older generations. This benefits business and workers.
I also favor immigration from other parts of the world, but to me more legal immigration from Latin America (and amnesty for those already here) would be an easy win and an improvement on the current situation.
The problem that I see is that imported labor from Latin America currently is disproportionately blue collar. Any time that you increase supply versus demand costs drop. That holds true for goods and services and it also holds true for labor. Working class wages have been stagnant for decades compared to white collar work and I question whether additional competitive pressure would actually be a benefit to the country at large.
However, the biggest chunk of legal immigration right now is from Asia and is probably due to skilled migrants in fields like tech and medicine. A little wage pressure on physicians and programmers at this point is probably not a bad thing, especially if it makes it easier to get a doctor's appointment.
Thank you. This. Though you should see what the H1-B Visa program did to our IT-trained workers. It's creeping further up the ladder.
I've been in tech for more than 20 years and I remember the hysteria about off-shoring from when I first started working. During that time the number of immigrants from India and China has exploded in the US, the number of campuses and foreign workers has exploded, and my salary and the salaries of overseas tech workers has doubled multiple times so I am a little jaded with regards to warnings about foreign competition.
I appreciate your experience but I've read liberal (so generally pro-immigration) takes with numbers about how many IT students can't find work or have been replaced by visa holders. But having seen your other comments, I'm rather curious about the issue now, so thank you.
My experience has been it's absolutely replaced hurt jobs and wages at the lower end such as folks monitoring network alerts, frontline phone support, low level QA and bug fix programming jobs but once you're past the early part of your career as an American then it's all gravy. The issue here is that those relatively low level jobs are where many in the tech field get their start especially those without an expensive software engineering degree.
I got my start the industrial automation world and wanted a normal life and to come off the road. I took a substantial pay cut and worked 2nd shift in a NOC (Network Operations Center) basically watching alerts, doing basic troubleshooting/triage, escalating to real engineers, and helping manage outages. It paid 45K a year which wasn't terrible especially with the basic skill set needed and I worked my way to a better job in just under a year by studying at home and tinkering with VMs and code on the 3rd monitor at work.
This is a valuable pipeline for many people and also for the American tech industry. We don't need to outsource these jobs, it's unnecessary and hurts us as we lose a valuable feeder program to a great career as well as decent jobs in the meantime. These simply aren't high skill jobs that we lack native talent to perform.
I understand at least some of these jobs can/would be done remotely as is often done, however currently there's plenty of it being done in country by imported labor. Again these are jobs that Americans can do with a minimum of training or education if their skills aren't already there.
There's not a need to allow people in specifically to fill these jobs, it's done as a cost cutting measure. If companies want to hire cheap foreign labor then go for it but our government shouldn't enable it with low cost H1B visas or other alternatives.
Reducing the number of H1-B visas is one option but the better choice is raising the minimum salary for them which is keeping in line with the original idea of getting truly high skilled workers here that are in short supply even globally let alone in the US.
I believe the Trump admin did that right before the transition however I'm not sure if it went into effect or not. I'll need to check.
To be clear I'm fine with importing labor that's actually difficult to come by and where we have a documented shortage. My wife came here with T1 visa as a RN from Canukistan (Canada), we were struggling to get nurses well before Covid and it's even worse now. Hell if you're a high end Database engineer then yeah come on over we literally can't get enough of you but it should be what the country needs as a whole and not what brings down labor costs for large telecom companies.
A lot of people have gone into IT who shouldn't have, and when they come out they have a degree but aren't really worth a shit. If you're lucky you can pick that up in an interview. My theory is that's who's bitching about visa holders taking their jobs, that high profile Disney story notwithstanding.
Yeah and have you noticed there are very few workers over the age of 50?
When workers reach that age, they get laid off. Its too easy to replace them with a couple of H1Bs who will work like slaves ... because they're basically indentured.
At a "tech" company? Maybe. But the issue is that the reason the tech market is so good is because tech workers have become janitors. They are ubiquitous in businesses regardless of the industry--finance, retail, tech, whatever. That wasn't the case when I started out and it's a phenomenon that guaranteed there would be more jobs than candidates.
And in my specialty, databases, the DBA's have always been greybeards. I think there's a rule that says that you can't be a DBA unless you over 50.
This is not my experience.
Same. I was flat panicked in 2001 that my safe, reliable major would turn out to be worthless.
Agreed. All the UMC who want more immigration are fine with it because they don't believe it affects them. Once they start seeing their jobs taken over by nonimmigrant visa holders, then we will see how vociferously pro-immigrant they are.
I recall programmers were quite bitter about the H-1B program.
But the immigrants from Latin America are coming regardless. Without legal documents they are more likely to accept subsistence wages and cause downward competitive pressure on wages. Also, right now we are struggling to find enough workers in service jobs.
They didn't come under Trump. And if you want to talk about a potential disaster for the Democrats this November that is probably salient.
They certainly did come under Trump. 2020 was a down year because of COVID, but if you look at the statistics there wasn't much of a change from 2016 (Last Obama Year) to 2019 (Last Trump Non-Covid Year).
Granted, 2021 was a large increase under Biden. But I would say the phrasing should be "They increased under Biden" rather than "They decreased under Trump"
*Edit for more nuance:
FY 2017: First year of Trump, they did drop quite a bit probably due to Trump rhetoric on immigration
FY 2018: Pretty average compared to Obama years
FY 2019: Actually much larger than Obama years
So, overall, tends to balance out. People may have been scared away by Trump's immigration rhetoric for a year, but it didn't last.
I mentioned Trump primarily because he is the most likely Republican candidate in 2024. For that reason his record at the border, especially in contrast to Biden's, is especially relevant not only to the election this November but also for the presidential race in 2024.
Why are you comparing only to Obama? How about Bush? Clinton? Bush's father? and in what proportions? I am an immigrant myself who has lived in the US for almost 60 years.
I went to public high school in Texas.....the demographics were vastly different then.
They come under every president, including Trump. I agree that it’s increased now under Biden, but that is probably a combination of people perceiving that it will be easy under Biden and of covid restrictions changing. I agree that running on immigration is stupid but the democrats are already going to lose for a million stupid reasons so it doesn’t really matter what they say.
Im going to be honest, I struggle to care who wins anymore.
Then let wages increase to make those service jobs more attractive. I don't see why businesses are entitled to the cheapest labor they can get. If they can't stay in business without illegal labor, then they shouldn't be in business.
That doesn't work, because MammaBear shops around for the lowest prices. Hence MommaBear causes lower wages.
And that's the market, and that's fair. And if there's a pool of workers willing to work for $5 bucks an hour, just about everyone is going to grab for cheap workers because to do otherwise means being undercut by the competition.
But, if no one can hire someone for less than 12 or 15 or whatever, then that doesn't happen, and that's the new floor. Make the illegal labor very hard to get and businesses will have to operate without it.
Edit: careless grammar mistakes
So much this.
In many cases, if wages increase the work will simply disappear.
Maybe. McDonalds is trying that, with kiosks replacing cashiers. My guess is that this is going to backfire, and they'll lose business to places that keep cashiers and raise wages high enough to attract labor. A guess, though, mostly based on my preference for being served by people.
Exactly. And California has 37% illiteracy rate because of immigration. I went to two stores last year where none of the workers spoke English
There is a bit of a discussion on that here:
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/finding-a-path-to-progress
That's fair -- I'm not an economist, so I could be wrong. But my hope would be that amnesty and legal immigration would raise wages because people wouldn't be working for less than the minimum wage.
I don't know the tech world at all, but I agree about medicine. In fact, we have a shortage in some important specialties.
The underlying issue is supply versus demand though. Amnesty may force employers to pay the legal minimum wage but no matter what you are still increasing the size of the pool for blue collar workers.
Tech is just stupid. An example: before the pandemic I had a co-worker who got to hang out on Google's campus for six weeks to shadow one of their senior data scientists. So she was getting paid to learn (she has since left the company btw for greener pa$ture$).
Tech companies catering in breakfast and lunch is pretty standard now, but Google did it better. For lunch a professional chef would show up with a bunch of raw ingredients. Then everybody would take a break to cook up a meal in the kitchen which they would then all eat together.
True, but you also increase consumer spending and demand for goods and services. And reduce the negative economic effects of a declining population, which is what we would have without immigration since Americans aren't having kids.
It's obviously complicated, and the impact varies by sector and location. But I hope we'd be able to make it work.
For an open borders schema, sure. But if that's not the case then the total number of immigrants each year is going to be capped. And in terms of spending 100,000 engineers and doctors are going to have much more purchasing power than 100,000 construction workers or gardeners.
They don't work for less than minimum wage. The fines for paying sub-minimum wage are huge, and then you have to pay back wages anyhow.
Nitpick: had been stagnating. The lowest quintile has actually done the best in the COVID recovery, and (last I looked) were the only group outpacing inflation. That's the "nobody wants to work anymore" problem. A lot of employers are offering a 2019 deal to workers who can now demand better.
Otherwise, fair point.
The last I checked that lowest quintile is no longer outpacing inflation and it was more an issue of low paid workers in specific industries rather than the entire cohort.
The other issue is that interest rate hikes from the Fed are designed to slow down the economy and force people out of work. More people out of work means employers can offer lower wages. Whether or not this approach works given the current labor force participation rate is an interesting question but it is pretty clear that the US is in for a series of rate hikes this year in an attempt to combat inflation.
I completely agree. I really struggle to understand the intense opposition to boosting legal immigration from Latin America. Culturally, they are VERY adaptable to American values, they are at least as likely to be conservative as they are liberal, they are largely Christian, they can contribute positively to the economy. I can understand not wanting illegal immigration but why the resistance to boosting legal pathways?
Polling has consistently shown strong support for legal immigration regardless of political party. In fact I believe it was Pew that showed increased support for legal immigration among Republicans during the Trump years.
The problem is that there is a strong open borders faction in the Democratic Party. And one of their tactics is to deliberately muddy the waters by conflating legal immigration--which literally everyone supports--with illegal immigration, which is far more controversial.
It's hard to take these polls seriously when you don't know how the questions are framed and which populations were polled. Americans are generally ignorant of our immigration system and if they have more substantive knowledge, I believe the polls would come out differently.
At a minimum the polling would seem to indicate that there is a very real difference in support for legal immigration versus the illegal variety. If you are a proponent for more legal immigration then activists who are trying to muddy the waters by lumping both legal and illegal migrants into the same bucket aren't doing you any favors.
If you are a proponent for more legal immigration and vote for republicans, your elected officials aren’t doing you any favors either.
I am not disputing that polling shows that. I’m talking about what the elected representatives in the Republican Party actually DO.
As a lifelong D, I concede that some Ds have indeed tried to erase the distinction between legal immigration and illegal immigration, to the advantage of the illegal form. For the record, Trump has tried to do the same thing, to the disadvantage of both forms. In the 2016 R platform, the chapter on immigration celebrates the legal form, but opposes the other form. Trump, needless to say, refused to abide by the platform.
You're completely wrong. First, I'm in California, and of Mexican immigrants who came to the US ... Spanish California in 1774. Later, those pesky Americans came and ruined everything ... but I digress.
But I'm totally Americanized, as are my parents, grandparents were, except for some darker skin, and a predilection for tortillas ...
The recent immigrants from Central and South America, are nothing but super people. Typically kind and generous ... they do deserve better than we treat them. However, they do come with some faults. California is the poorest, and least literate state in the union because of them. Not to disparage them too much, the causes are cultural. Predominately immigrants come from poorer northern Mexico where the opportunities are not so good. Since technical opportunities are not so good there, most ... the vast majority have little education. They speak little English, and despite hailing from a Spanish speaking country, often little Spanish, instead speaking Indigenes dialects, which is not very helpful at all.
Typically, older teens will come here to work for a year of two. Send money back home to take care of Grandma ... whatever. He bunks in an apartment with some friends/co-workers for a while. The work is good, the money is fantastic ... compared to home. Next year looks good too. Then he meets a girl, and next year, maybe they'll go home ... and that doesn't happen, then there's a wedding, and a child, and reasons to stay. And they're a super sweet family, and you can't help but to love them. But they don't put much value in education, its not in their culture, not like with Asians. Some Mexicans do get good educations and really advance, but its atypical. In California, even an illegal alien can get a free college education. Do they take advantage of this? No.
Last November, I went into two stores looking for clothes pins. None of the staff in those stores spoke English, and this was in the town of Hayward in the East Bay Area ... its "pinzas de ropa" by the way.
I’m a Californian as well, and married to someone with a similar background (Mexican that was here in US territory before the Anglos). The one thing I dispute about your post above is that some of the problems you are relating are directly caused by the fact that there are so few paths to legal immigration. Of course it makes the immigrant population more transient. I also think that if they had a legal path and were more invested in this country as a true home they would be taking more advantage of the university resources etc. When you are an underground community that is never going to be legally allowed to be here, or even if that’s what you believe is true, then it’s hard to think in terms of going to university etc. Everything feels like a vulnerability to getting caught and deported. I’ve known a lot of undocumented immigrants from many past years working in restaurants and fear is a huge demotivator when it comes to making oneself known to the state by, say, applying to universities. But when kids do grow up here they assimilate very quickly.
You say the same thing I hear all the time, but you completely miss my point. While you belief may be sincere and heartfelt with the best of intentions, you're missing the reality. We don't *need* this glut of workers and why should they be relegated to minimum wage jobs, which is increasingly the large percentage of what we have? You're basically suggesting a de facto wage-slave class. The *only* reason wages are rising at all is the shortage of workers. If you alleviate that shortage through the artificial introduction of outside workers, the system gets worse for all, native born and immigrant.
I just want to clarify that when I mentioned the minimum wage, I meant that legal workers can't be paid less than the minimum wage. Not that immigrants should only work minimum wage jobs.
Another benefit is that immigration increases the number of consumers who spend their wages (vs. hoarding income). In theory, this increases demand and grows the economy.
Yes, but if you're going to have a quota in terms of total migrants per year why not devote that quota to skilled laborers in fields like tech or medicine?
1. Wages are only stagnant in the sense that blue collar wages have been frozen for years while white collar workers in the top 20% have been making a killing. In terms of wage pressure it is the professional class that should see increased competition.
2. The purchasing power of those skilled immigrants is probably going to be significantly larger than somebody working in a field like landscaping.
I’m not sure that bringing in tons of foreign skilled workers to Silicon Valley has been a net positive for society, actually.
Then immigrants need housing, and we're pretty short on housing. But we could rip up a few more farms and natural areas and build more homes. Then we'll need more electricity, and that's a mess. We can't build reliable, so we have to build solar, that means more blackouts. Then we'll need more water, which we're way short of already. This drives down the quality of life.
Surely the fact that immigration would raise the incomes of new immigrants should be an equally powerful consideration in its favor.
Um, why? As a wholly practical real world matter, why?
Because immigrants have interests that matter morally.
So we let more people on the lifeboat than the lifeboat can hold so everyone can drown? See this is what the economic bad actors depend on: people like you who feel so good about talking about morality while they're laughing all the way to the bank. Each country takes care of its own, just as each family takes care of its own. There's a reason why you put your own oxygen mask on first on the airplane.
I would love to help out every last destitute, impoverished person on Earth. Unfortunately, that's not possible, so we have to draw a line somewhere, right? Presumably we couldn't absorb, say, a billion people. What about 500 million? What about one million? There has to be /a/ line, right?
Selling universalism to localists is always a dicey proposition
I've said this before, but my mom's family living in what is now New Mexico (Hispanic) didn't have to immigrate. In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo made them U.S. residents. Another way to change demographics.
My husband, who considers himself and is considered by most people he meets to be Latino, has one white grandparent, one Native American grandparent (Cherokee and Chickasaw), one “Mexican” grandparent that came from an Arizona family that became US residents with G-H and who became and American citizen with statehood in 1912, and one grandparent that actually immigrated here from Mexico in the early 20th century and fought in WWI. I think of this background every time people talk offhandedly about the “Latino population” as if it is a uniform democratic.
And most Latino friends I have are like your husband and me. Also many veterans!
Why should immigrants from Latin America get priority? There are plenty of people from around the world are desperate and would love to have the opportunity to come to America. I disagree with the cultural compatibility with America but if that's what standard we are going to use, then we should use it worldwide and not limit to one part of the globe.
And honestly Latin Americans are no more culturally compatible than most Asian ethnicities or even Middle Easterners. The religions might be different, but most people seem to be searching for the same thing.
I think republicans are pretty non sensical for opposing legal immigration from those places as well.
Because we share a land border with Mexico. Right now, people come from Latin America without papers and work for less than the minimum wage, and that’s bad for everyone. It’s not fair, but it would be less of an economic shock to legalize and document what is already happening vs. opening up to people who otherwise couldn’t get here.
I also want immigration from other places. My spouse is from Asia, and I’m glad she’s here. I just think LA is low-hanging fruit because of the border situation.
I don't think a shared border should drive our immigration policy. If it did, then we should only prioritize Mexicans, not Latin American generally. I'm not swayed by the they are coming anyway argument so we should just let them in and give them green cards. It encourages further illegal immigration and undermines our rule of law.
Does prioritizing Mexicans means Mexican citizens only or those who enter the US from Mexico? I have many illegal immigrants in my extended family and community and most have come through Mexico, though they live on another continent. I don't think people realize just how porous our border is and how Mexico aids illegal immigration to the US. It benefits Mexico because they get people in Mexico who spend money there but who have no intention of staying in Mexico.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this issue, but to answer your question I meant all of LA (not just Mexicans) because people come from many LA countries and enter through Mexico. I know some people come from overseas and enter through Mexico, but since you can travel from LA by land, the majority of immigrants crossing the southern border are from Mexico & LA.
Your policy prioritizes persons from a certain region which happens to correspond to race roughly. What if the US choose another standard - say Europeans -- because of their cultural compatibility and historic ties to the US. Would this be racist? I'm not picking on you - just trying to tease how different standards are treated differently based on their effects. If cultural compatibility is what we care about, then immigration should favor Anglo countries and Western Europe.
I don’t think they should get priority, I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’m in favor of increased immigration across the board. I was only expressing that I am particularly confused by conservatives stringent opposition to Latin American immigration when it seems like a net positive for their image of the country as a family oriented, conservative, Christian country.
I agree that it seems like racism although I hesitate to just assume and that’s why I would like to understand. FWIW evangelical Christianity is becoming increasingly prominent in central and South American groups and rapidly replacing Catholicism.
Also for people who are hesitant about Catholics they definitely put a lot of them on the Supreme Court! I’m a Catholic myself, so I’m not being derogatory, I just don’t believe that Catholicism carries the stigma on the religious right that it once did, politically (theologically is a different story of course). Conservative Protestants and Catholics seem quite allied politically these days.
There's a reason people flee Central American countries: because countries full of Central Americans are awful places to live. A United States that becomes more Central American by population will become more Central American by character.
Votebanking and endemic corruption in Irish-American urban enclaves, among other things.
I'm sure there were good things, too, but you asked about the bad.
i think the potato famine may also have had a bit to do with it.
This is a statement utterly without evidence. Most immigrant groups assimilate in a generation. What damage did Southern and Eastern Europeans do to the American character? What damage have Mexicans done to the national character?
It's not without evidence at all. Central American countries have significantly lower living standards than the United States by almost every measure: infant mortality is a big one, life expectancy as well. Income and housing are poorer across the board. The educational outcomes of Central America are jaw-droppingly poor. Political corruption is endemic in the region. Organized crime is a fact of life in several Central American cities in a way that it's not in the United States. There are certainly good aspects to life in Central America, but for people who enjoy the American way of life, you'll find the contrasts very, very striking.
For all that they're terrible at building functional modern nation-states, Central Americans aren't stupid: they know that they have a much better chance to live a secure, prosperous life in the US than they do at home. This is why there's a huge stream, millions strong, wanting to leave Central America for the US, and only a trickle in the other direction (usually of people who have roots in the country in question and who are going back to live in a gated community on US dollars; or wealthy American retirees planning the same.)
I'm answering your question as written: what damage was caused by Southern and Eastern Europeans to the American character. I'm not addressing any good or neutral aspects here because you didn't ask. There are some, but not in scope of your question:
Southern European immigration introduced, for the first time, large-scale anarchist violence to the US. While anarchism wasn't born in Italy nor brought from there to the US for the first time, large-scale bombing campaigns were overwhelmingly conducted by Italians. (Leon Czolgosz, US-born, broke the mold by being of Polish extraction.) Organized crime, too, went from a mid-sized presence in American cities to a gargantuan one - again, mostly at the hands of Italians, but other ethnic groups, such as Eastern European Jews, were not underrepresented either.
Mexico isn't part of Central America, politically speaking. Mexicans, in the aggregate, tolerate corruption and illegality much moreso than do "legacy" Americans, as a quick look at the Texas and Arizona borderlands will confirm. (Again, I'm restricting this to a negative, as that was your question.)
Assimilation in a generation is a meaningless statement. Minnesota Scandis are 'integrated' but still a recognizably distinct people with distinct religious and social practices.
Oh, now. This is special pleading. What we call corruption has taken many forms in our history, and wasn't always seen as corruption. Read up about what pre-Civil War elections were like, and what Southerners (true-blue Anglo Saxons and proud of it) got up to with one another before you make such generalizations.
That's not what special pleading is. I was asked to provide bad characteristics and I did so. This neither denied that:
1) there were good characteristics
2) the native stock also had bad characteristics
3) that the native stock's bad characteristics might be comparable to those of the immigrant stock (although in the case of political corruption, I would argue that for the undoubted failings of the native stock they have built a society that's far more resilient to corruption than most people of the world have managed.)
I agree. Ditch the visa lottery system, offer a points based system for certain fields (that would, say, privilege a Mexican with a diploma who speaks A2/B1 English), and revisit the family-chain system.
At risk of repeating myself again:
When PMC yuppies hear "more immigrants" they think "cheap au pairs and ethnic restaurants!"
When working class people hear the words "more immigrants" they think "fewer jobs, less money, longer lines."
I am generally all for immigration, but I don't pretend that no tradeoffs come with looser immigration, or that the burdens or benefits associated with those tradeoffs are evenly distributed.
I would say it gives away the game. If people really considered immigration a problem, they would make eVerify a condition of employment and rigorously enforce it. If the jobs dried up and getting into the US without documents just meant that you were broke and without recourse, almost no one would try it.
The fact that it's done with walls and border agents just show that it's a combination dumb show for the rubes and jobs program.
Unfortunately, I doubt the construction companies picking up vans full of workers in the parking lot of Home Depot every morning are doing any sort of "verification" (or ever would).
That's enforcement then. And it wouldn't need to be a ton of it. Get some workplace compliance agents, check the parking lots and the job sites and farm fields and bust the *employers*. Knowingly hiring someone without doing a check results in jail time. Wouldn't even really have to be all that much jail time.
Once this changed from a risk free way to cut costs to a way to cut costs that might land you in jail for 30 days, it would dry up. This isn't impossible stuff, it's just that we've built an economy on exploiting poor people from south of our borders to get very cheap labor, and everyone in power knows it and no one wants to change it.
Heh, I can see the political ads now:
Narrator: "Joe the Contractor has a job to do: Building America."
Joe: "I want to hire Americans, but nobody wants to do this kind of work!"
Narrator: "But Big Government wants to put a stop to that!"
Joe: "I was jailed for trying to put food on my table! I was Building America! I was helping people!!"
Narrator: "Wharton McAsshole wants to return to Building America! He will tell Big Government to shove their anti-American regulations where the sun don't shine!"
"Vote for me in November. I'm Wharton McAsshole and I approve this message!"
I agree. We talk about immigration as if its just a nice thing to do, but there are substantial costs associated with it. Democrats would do better to advocate for immigration by articulating what resources are needed to support it, and how they will support communities that will absorb in-Coming Americans.
Precisely how and when has Liz Cheney blown with the political winds?
She supposedly represents Wyoming and she voted to impeach Trump and is now sitting alongside Kinzinger wagging her finger and fretting about "insurrection" on the "January 6th committee," being slobbered over by Democrats. If she really represented Wyoming rather than wanting to cater to some imaginary "unity" confluence between "moderate" Republicans and Democrats, she wouldn't be doing that. So, yes, Cheney blows with the wind; she just is too dumb and disconnected from the state she represents to actually know which way that is. At least Adam Kinzinger is smart enough to know when to abandon ship.
Sorry, should have responded sooner! Don't know why I didn't see the notification for your own reply.
I agree that she is getting slobbered all over by Democrats. And I get where you are coming from when you say she is out of alignment with Wyoming, at least when it comes to Trump.
But from my perspective, automatically slobbering all over Trump is actually blowing with the political winds too. Why does Trump equal Republican and no one else does? She has been a conservative for much longer and has stayed that course ideologically - with her votes for conservative legislation and against progressive legislation. Keep in mind that she voted WITH Trump's conservative agenda more times than most of the people slobbering all over Trump now. This is because she does NOT blow with the winds when it comes to the conservative agenda. It is the agenda that matters in the long run, not the person. Trump is a person, not the avatar of conservativism. It is Trump who appears to change upon a whim, not Cheney.
During the Trump administration, I saw many Democrats go to pieces over Trump's personality. My perspective was different: Trump was often successfully enacting reasonable conservative goals (and even a couple progressive ones), despite whatever he was doing and saying that triggered everyone. Post-Trump, I see the same going to pieces, but it is coming from Republicans now. I read your comment about how supposedly dumb Cheney is and I get the impression that it is Trump that is more important to you than actual conservative values. Because Cheney believes in actual conservative values, and she demonstrates that with her votes, which are out of alignment with those Democrats who are slobbering all over her. To me, it is actually Republicans like you that are blowing with the political winds, by seeing fealty to Trump as the only way to blow.
While I appreciate your reply and see most of your point (as I've heard it over and over), suggesting that Cheney has "actual conservative" values when she is all for wars, has completely faith in our "intelligence" agencies, is more worried about Russia than say Google's algorithms or Twitter and Facebook censoring, and thinks a riot in the capital is tantamount to trying to topple government is not understanding what I think "conservative" values are about. She's a neo-con, which is pretty much like a neo-lib. Neither are the old-style conservative or liberal. That's what I mean by she "blows" with the wind. She, like her father, will gladly surrender her "conservative values," if she thinks it will make her a buck or put her in good with the right people, just like Kinzinger. The dumb part for Liz Cheney is she thinks that big money will save her from voters. He figured it out and jumped ship. And I never thought Trump was conservative. He's a populist, by accident or design. He simply ran on the Republican ticket because that is the party more amenable to populism at the moment. Trump is useful for exposing things in government people would rather not see, but that doesn't make him a saint as I'm not even sure he's figured out what nerve he touched on in people. However, it is what makes people like Cheney hate him, because she's one of them that he exposed.
Ah! I now completely understand. Especially when you frame her as a neo-con. I agree that she is has a neo-con perspective much like her father. Your points about being all for wars and big money are really what drove home to me where you are coming from. I also agree that neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism are basically the same thing. Thank you for your response, I genuinely appreciate it.
This is just a general impression, but it seems like Republicans are more willing to experiment with different messages and see what sticks – they try some sane ones, they try some insane ones, but if something's not working they abandon it and look for something new. The CRT thing that stuck was preceded by many, many failed messages about wokeness etc. I'm sure there are (or were) plenty of Republican operatives who wish Trump's insane messaging hadn't been the one that worked, but now that it has they're going with it.
Needless to say that has its downsides, but Democrats seems far more likely to hash out the specifics of a message either in closed-door meetings or on elite twitter, and then try to impose that message on the electorate; they can't really iterate on it because of all the arguments it took to get to the final draft. As a result, only someone like Bernie can tweak his message because he's largely in control of it, but everyone else is stuck with something terrible designed by committee because that's what the boardroom/Twitter approved and now they're stuck.
Yeah, my conservative brother in law was talking gay marriage the other day, and explained: "We lost. I wish we hadn't, but we lost and there's no point having that fight anymore."
Of course, I don't know if there are any equivalent liberal issues - even something like rent control or Clinton era policies like workfare are still in play. Maybe Defund the Police, which seems to have become a dead letter since Biden won the primary.
Gun control comes to mind. It was a live issue back in the 80s, then it wasn't, and now every state has concealed carry and many states have constitutional carry, which is concealed carry without a license (iiuc). If you had suggested the 2022 gun status quo in 1983 people would have accused you of creating a ridiculous strawman.
Post Newtown there has been a bit of a zombie gun control movement, but it didn't go anywhere or accomplish anything.
True, but Biden keeps pushing it - I think he just announced a gun control effort this week.
Granted, reversing gay marriage would take a constitutional amendment, so maybe it's not a fair comparison, but you don't hear DeSantis or Cruz fighting that fight. They typically move on to stuff that they think will test well, although probably the primary system means that stuff like "Don't Say Gay" polls better in the primaries than it will in the general.
"True, but Biden keeps pushing it - I think he just announced a gun control effort this week."
Oh ye gods and little fishes. I wonder if there will even be a party left in January 2023. The next Republican speaker is going to have a 60 vote majority.
Have been reading you for some time, with pleasure and profit. Was surprised to see that you're a "let 'em all in" guy. What else in the hard left agenda do you endorse? (Food for a future column? Or maybe I missed the one that covers this matter.)
Here's a simple argument (from Michael Huemer). Suppose John is desperately hungry. He wants to walk downtown to a deli to buy a sandwich, which the deli owner would be happy to sell to him. You, out of a dislike for John or a strange protectiveness over this deli, want to stop him: you make a sincere threat to John that if he attempts to go to the deli, you'll beat him up and force him away. John, too hungry to care, goes anyway and you follow through on this threat.
Beating John up was wrong; indeed, even making the threat was wrong. It would still be wrong for you to do that if, say, you had grown up near the deli and considered John the wrong kind of person for the neighborhood. It would still be wrong to beat him up if what John wanted from the deli was not a sandwich, but a job from the deli to pay for future sandwiches. It would be wrong even if John was one of your competitors (beating up the other applicants is not the right way to secure a job).
It's then really hard to see why John's not being a citizen, the deli's being across a country's border, would be a reason to beat him up and force him to go home. Clearly, if I got all of my friends together and we collectively beat up John, this would still be wrong. A moral wrong does not somehow become acceptable when a bunch of people are complicit in it. And I cannot see how any aspects of nationhood would change the moral calculus (getting a bunch of our friends together and holding a democratic vote to determine that we would beat up John if he tries to go to the deli is just ganging up with some extra steps).
This is hard to respond to because you've just asserted which is at issue, that somehow nations and governments are morally different from neighborhood gangs in a way that makes it okay for them to beat up people for trying to get sandwiches while it would be wrong for a gang to beat them up. But it's really mysterious what is supposed to make that difference. Sure, the people in the nation might have been, in some sense, there first (just ignore the natives), but that doesn't matter morally: if I get to a deli early in the morning, that doesn't give me a right to keep other people out. The people of a nation may in some sense think of themselves as a unified people, but that doesn't matter morally: if me and my gang wear hats and call ourselves the "Deli Protectors," that doesn't make it okay to beat people up. So what actually is the difference supposed to be?
Notice that borders are doubly coercive. They coerce people outside, forcing them to stay out, but they also coerce people inside. The deli owner was happy to sell John a sandwich, but under the iron rule of our gang he has to turn him away under the threat of further violence.
By the way, I don't think this is really an argument by analogy. It's just an illustration of the following straightforward argument.
1. It is wrong for an individual or collective to use violence or the threat of violence to prevent people from taking peaceful action to meet their needs.
2. The enforcement of borders is precisely the use of violence or the threat thereof to prevent people from taking peaceful action to meet their needs.
3. It is wrong to enforce borders.
Defenders of borders must think there's some exception to this general rule, that nations somehow have a right to oppressive violence that individuals or collectives otherwise lack, but it's hard to fathom why that would be true.
I'll grant that casting is rough and ready. I don't have a principled way of spelling out exactly what rights people have nor what the exceptions to those rights are. "Peaceful" is more or less the same first-order approximation as the non-aggression principle which doesn't exactly work for the reasons you suggest (it can't capture property rights for one). What I think this does get you is a presumption: people usually have a right to be left to do as they will, absent strong reasons to prevent them. (Incidentally, I don't think it is possible to "ground" my moral intuition; it's not possible to do that for any basic intuitions. The best one can do is provide examples and statements that illustrate and hopefully elicit the intuition in others.)
I don't know why I am being accused of living in some fantasy where there's no competition over resources. All I need is that there are moral limits to the ways in which you compete. It's okay to secure a job by persuading the company in an interview that you are the most qualified. It's not okay to secure that job by killing prospective competitors. It's also not okay to secure the job by making it impossible for competitors to show up (e.g. by erecting a barricade around their house).
I've clarified in a comment (not sure how to link Substack comments) a bit upstream about how to reconcile what I've said with the recognition of a right to private property, so I won't recount it. What's weird about this dialectic is that it's my interlocutors who are making the stronger moral assumptions. Everyone would grant that the way we treat, say, illegal immigrants, would be horrifically immoral if done to our fellow citizens. If Biden declared a law tomorrow mandating that people from Ohio were not allowed to enter the rest of the country for work, and that an ICE-equivalent would be established to find, deport, and detain illegal Ohioans, it would be obvious to all that this law and its enforcement are morally horrific. What I want to know is what is so different about non-Americans that supposedly makes it okay to treat them in this way?
This is a sincere question, not a snarky one: By that logic, would it be wrong to evict a homeless person who somehow got into my house and took up residence on my couch, if he was otherwise polite and nonaggressive about it? If not, why not? He's just meeting his needs, after all, and a wall or locked door is a type of border. We don't even have to go that far--if a homeless encampment sprung up in my backyard, would I have any grounds to evict them, under your logic as described above?
I am not saying that my front door or property line are perfectly analogous to a national border, but the principles you've articulated here seem broadly incompatible with keeping anyone out of anywhere as long as they're not actively hurting anyone.
I'll grant you have a right to private property and can justly coerce (or have the police do so on your behalf) people to control their use of your property. But there are limits to that right. Two are relevant here.
1. You don't have a right to forbid people from using property that is not yours.
2. You don't have a right to forbid people from crossing through your property if doing so would seriously deprive them.
The first one should be obvious. Here's the motivation behind the second principle: imagine that a developer buys up all the land surrounding a homeless encampment. There is no way to leave the homeless encampment that does not cross through his property. He really does not want homeless people on his property, they drive prices down, so he hires armed guards to ensure no homeless people cross onto his land. As a result, all of the homeless people starve (except for the few the guards shot for trying to cross his property).
I think this is tantamount to mass murder. It would still be wrong, just less so, if the deprivation was much less (e.g. the encampment were self-sufficient but some of its inhabitants wanted to leave to visit their family or live better elsewhere).
So I don't think it works to say that enforcing borders is just enforcing our property rights. For one, such a claim would involve illicit legislation of how individuals in a country can use their property. Why can't a company invite an immigrant to work at their office? Or a landlord invite them to rent her apartment? Where do their compatriots get the right to tell them they can't use their private property in this way? If you say instead that we own the border or the land around it, and are just exercising our right to keep people out, this violates the second principle. Our right to our property cannot come at serious curtailment of people's liberties elsewhere.
I think, though -- and this is NOT a long-considered completely thought out opinion; this is my gut-level response -- while it’s wrong to beat up John, of course, it becomes more understandable if he’s walking into your home, making himself a sandwich and you’re worried about having enough food tomorrow for yourself. While the saintly thing to do would be to empathize with John, and while the plain fact is that he is every bit as worthy of being fed as you are, you’re still a human animal with instincts to protect your own food in your own home. Your animal self-interest will tend to prevail over your saintliness and empathy.
When I think of the usual folks who want to let everyone in (and I am not speaking for or about Freddie-- he has a nuanced take on things and so I’m sure he has a well-reasoned argument for this as well) they’re professional folks whose sandwiches John is typically not coming for. They’re often working-class folks who fear that John is coming to collect sandwiches (or education or health care or affordable housing) at their expense as taxpayers (or as competitors for jobs whose wages are depressed by surplus workers).
Two responses. The conciliatory response is that the argument above is for a moral principle rather than a political proposal. You can think that something is morally wrong without thinking anyone right now should try especially hard to abolish it. For example, I think most uses of animals in agriculture, as a food source, are wrong, but I'm not crazy enough to think that anyone has a chance of passing a law enforcing veganism on the population or that it would be a good idea to even propose it. Likewise, open borders is not a position I would want to have to run on, certainly not on its own. Open borders might only make sense politically given sweeping redistributive policies that take the economic burden off the working class, but I don't expect anything like that for generations.
I think open borders is the morally correct position even absent the changes in condition that would make it politically possible. Depriving someone of an opportunity to earn a wage is little better than theft; just as it's wrong (if sometimes excusable or understandable) for one poor person to steal from another poor person, it is wrong for one group of poor people to deprive another of jobs. It's not clear that we disagree here.
It's the same as David Bier and Alex Nowrasteh I expect. The poor people of the world who come here will increase their standard of living and that's a net good. The impact on the lower classes will be small and if it's not, then UBI + more welfare to keep them happy.
Could you please spell out what you have in mind here, so that readers can decide how sustainable it is. E.g., the "lower classes" you speak of: Do you use this term to denote just the members of the people who already live in the U.S.? Or to denote the members who are already here, plus those who will be arriving here once the border has been opened? How will the UBI and additional welfare measures be financed? Bernie Sanders has opposed opening the U.S. borders. I wonder if it is because he has asked himself such questions.
From what I understand, some who support de facto open borders generally believe that those who immigrate to the US will have rights to work and travel but no voting rights (at least for a set period of time to avoid them voting welfare for themselves) and would be barred from receiving welfare (again I think for a set period of time) and the lower classes, meaning those who are citizens and LPRs based on income level, would get some mixture of cash and in-kind benefits. This is very generalized and of course lacks the detail that is critical, but the general theme I would say is that newbies get rights to work/travel and limited welfare/voting and the incumbents get welfare to keep them from getting restless/angry over the economic effects.
Bernie previously said that open borders was a Koch theme but changed his tune when running in 2016. He's basically done a 180.
Open borders is a utopian ideal that isn't practical in today's world, like most ideals. The point in believing in open borders is not that you want it enacted today, you want the world to move in a direction where it's possible to enact it. A country may never actually achieve open borders due to the large amounts of inequality worldwide but you could still want it to move further towards that goal rather than away from it.
As for an argument as to why, a simple one could be "the USA is one of the best countries on the planet, the more people that live here, the better".
A solid base hit - maybe even a triple. So bring the runner home with a complementary piece illuminating the evident abandonment of class concerns by the vocalizers/ figureheads/pols that constitute the leadership cohorts in both wings. Anyone seriously interested in diagnosing the electoral weaknesses of the Dems has to account for that. I think they lost their way somewhere between bracing, blazing idealism and the crude calculus of political expediency. Being out of touch with people you refuse to listen to was always bound to have political consequences.
Matt Stoller and Thomas Frank have written about how the Democrats abandoned the working class 50 years ago to be the party of the meritocracy. They just used to pretend to still care about the working class.
Along the same lines, The Tyranny of Merit ((written, ironically, by a Harvard philospher) helps explain the elite-curated mess we're in.
And now the working class has abandoned them. Sadly, for Trump.
Prof. Mark Blyth coined the phrase "global Trumpism" back in 2016, talking about populist revolts worldwide. He claims that people only go with right-wing populism when not allowed to have left-wing populism.
The neoliberal oligarchy and their useful idiots of the PMC are opposed by both.
I agree it is the worst of both worlds, but for a slightly different reason. What I believe the country needs is a party that is for the average worker, pro social safety net, pro law and order, anti-oligarchy, anti-warmongering, a sane fair immigration system with reasonable limits and enforcement of the border. Instead we have a Democratic Party that is beholden to completely insane cultural wokery, but also to the superwealthy, open borders in practice although they won't admit it, anti-worker, and never saw a dumb war they didn't want to start. And the Republican Party is even more so, just minus the wokeness, but culturally obnoxious in other ways.
Some of my preferences are "left" and some are "the center" but I don't really slot into either of those things easily.
Sure. The 2016 version at least. Unfortunately he has conceded a lot since then on illegal immigration and culture war nonsense. I voted for him twice though and I would again.
He's *old*. Who is around in the younger generations to replace him, in those qualities?
Yglesias has a good post today https://www.slowboring.com/p/rigorous-accurate-policy-analysis?utm_medium=reader2 that argues that leftist goodness is possible but you might have to prioritize and recognize some trade offs. But we have an activist culture now that demands “allyship” and that everything has to happen or nothing does.
But to critique the moderates- it’s insane that a small group of moderates in the House blocked consideration of Medicare negotiating for drug prices as part of BBB. That’s an insanely popular policy and it’s infuriating that we couldn’t prioritize that and push it forward.
If it's "insanely popular", why do all Republicans oppose it? Why aren't those Republicans voted out of office for opposing this insanely popular policy?
Answer: it's not actually insanely popular. It's just something people who will talk to pollsters on the phone SAY, but don't actually mean, because they will take no action (like voting for a Democrat) that would make it happen.
There is one area where both Left and Right agree, the country is run by oligarchs and they pay almost no taxes and they should be taxed more. And this is where the biggest difference between the parties emerge, Democrats are MORE willing to raise taxes on the rich ( not too much though just a tiny bit ) and Republicans absolutely oppose it. Republican party oppose raising taxes on the rich on principle even if their base demands it. Right now, that is the basic philosophical difference between the parties.
For the Left, their demand for student debt relief is not popular. Most voters reject even though the students genuinely are victims of a predatory loan system. Public colleges in ALL levels should be free for ALL time, funded by taxpayers. One time debt relief is neither efficient, nor fair.
Agree with this but will just add a couple of things: you’re right that Republicans oppose raising taxes on the rich but they also recognize this is unpopular so they have enough message discipline to try to change the subject away from that, at least during campaigns. That’s an important lesson we can learn from them.
I think student debt is a symptom of a much bigger problem - college cost - and we would be better served addressing that vs just trying to go after the debt issue. But that’s a much larger debate and one that I think will get somewhat uncomfortable as it will mean having difficult conversations about resources with parts of our coalition that share our cultural values.
Yes, no doubt, difficult conversations with the Democratic coalition of which only a tiny percentage go to college. All other OECD countries fund higher education through taxes because education is what makes a country.