Originally Posted by
wibblefox
It just doesn't matter, 25% is not going to make a difference. There's nearly as much margin of error normal yields. It's not the end of the world.
taking you at your word....
Before: |MOE Lower Bound |Mean | Upper Bound
After: |Lower Bound |Mean | Upper Bound
right, this stuff isn't hard to understand
Originally Posted by
wibblefox
Yes this will cause the world to implode... Just kidding, people who need money will go where the money is, jobs will get filled, the market will adjust, same as always...
...Not every American has a job
Yeah, at most 5% according to your figures, and I think realistically we can both agree that because illegals themselves contribute so little to the economy as we have seen from previous figures, a more realistic figure for the economic downsizing might be 0.5% even if you were being generous.
Actually, that's 5% according to your figures. To simplify things, I've been using your sources.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but a ton of suddenly open farming, construction, and janitorial jobs aren't going to make old people come out of retirement, students quit school, stay-home mothers decide to send their kids to daycare, or the disabled miraculously healed by the grace and love of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ in order to work these GREAT manual labor jobs that in all likely hood aren't even near where they live (farming is by definition rural area work - the majority of the US population likely isn't within commute distance of a farm, although I'd have to look that up).
That is, just because there are open (and generally undesirable) jobs doesn't mean people who aren't interested in getting jobs (aka not in the labor force) will suddenly decide to get a janitor job at their kids school (aka join the labor force). Unemployment rates will likely change, but labor force participation rates (which I've been careful to use this whole time) have no good reason to change in order to supply the newfound demand in the job market.
Originally Posted by
wibblefox
Corn is mostly used in processed foods in the USA, if there was a price hike it would likely be in luxury goods not in staple foods. Let's be honest here, imported fruit and veg is cheaper anyway. I don't think there are too many people living off corn alone.
And certainly meat is more than 25% more expensive than corn...
Not sure if you knew this, but processed foods ARE the the American staple foods. You're going to be pretty hardpressed to play down the significance of corn and soy in America.
Just as an aside:
http://www.cheatsheet.com/life/18-su...tml/?a=viewall
Originally Posted by
wibblefox
I think you'd be surprised, most people are trash at budgeting, and they think of stuff like coke, chips, vidya games, new clothes, as necessities not luxuries. Not sure if you realise this but before electricity came around there /were/ people. Worst come to worse you could just switch off your tv and go to sleep when the sun goes down.
But no, I'm sure your family lives on beans, rice, and other dirt cheap staples, and has perfect savings in all areas right? What a shame that you are too poor to maintain your luxury lifestyle, maybe try living within your means next time...
Thanks for the personal finance tips. I didn't realize people survived before 1930, that's amazing.
Except that's not really applicable when you look at the big picture of, "When prices for necessity goods rise, Americans have less spendable income for other things."
Which is absolutely true, you can't dispute that.
It should naturally follow to say some of the lower and middle class American families will fail to be able to pay their other expenses because they needed to put food on the table.
Pretending like everyone is perfect and will spend amazingly is a beautiful fantasy world, but if that's your mindset you need to take another look at reality.
Originally Posted by
wibblefox
As discussed previously illegals have significant negative impact on the economy because of their proportionally lower spending. The assertion that illegals are somehow 'good' for the economy is not supported by any facts other than "they sure do work a lot" (albeit at illegal wages and in illegal working conditions)...
But... WAIT! You mentioned before that a storm had an impact on your country's economy! A storm couldn't have spent any money!!!! How could it possibly have impacted the prices of goods!!!!!!!
lol wait that's right, an economy is more than money. it includes human decisions and real assets, of course of course. you got me off track for a second thinking that the economy was only a bunch of people arbitrarily spending money
I know you'll try to read into this and it'll be kinda annoying, but slaves weren't paid AT ALL. They still had a tremendous impact on the southern economy because they enabled their.... 'employers' to make a lot of money off their labor.
In this case, without these workers prices of necessity goods such as all domestically grown and harvested foodstuffs would potentially inflate by 25% (since you're so sold on 25% I'll take your word for it). Obviously, that'd be bad for middleclass families that are already struggling to make it paycheck to paycheck.
I don't know how many times I need to go over this.
Originally Posted by
wibblefox
IMO if you want to make that argument with even the slightest bit of legitimacy, you should say "we should change the law" not "we should not enforce the law".
You must be kidding, I said from the getgo that I supported immigration reform. In fact, at the very end of my last few posts I've mentioned that I supported altering the barriers and processes to make citizenship more available. It should go without saying I also support similar changes to the processes for getting work visas.
Originally Posted by
wibblefox
If it's too expensive to enforce the law maybe we should just get rid of all laws, maybe get rid of border patrol, maybe the military too, tbh why do we even have the DMV, holy shit think of the $$$ we could save if we disbanded the entire gov't and sold all gov't assets!
What
could
possibly
go
wrong
Thanks for that, I laughed.
Obviously you should understand the difference between what would be pragmatically silly and potentially damaging enforcement & socially beneficial enforcement of existing laws.
Deporting 11 million people would be overly expensive and would remove 7 million people from the work force. Building a wall on top of that would, again, be overly expensive AND likely be pretty useless, since most illegal immigrants gain that status because they overstayed their visa. There aren't many potential positives that can come from that, except to say we enforced the law for the sake of enforcing the law. (there is the elimination of some social ills - i.e. illegal immigrants having an unusually high crime rate, but again I don't think getting rid of that is worth a 25% hike in the price of groceries, a 14% hike in the costs of construction labor, etc.).
It's a pretty different situation when you're dealing with murderous criminals, business regulations, and the laws in place to protect this country's citizens.
Originally Posted by
wibblefox
They are humans afterall... Not sure what point you are trying to make, but no one is saying that illegals are akin to beasts of burden. The point being discussed is whether or not the law should be enforced.
Don't forget that African American graduation rates are still not normalised after decades, so don't be too quick to assume you can normalise illegals more easily. You are making a lot of unfounded assertions, it puts your arguments on very very shaky ground.
could
It's generally accepted that community wide socieconomic and employment ails are what disproportionately effect the graduation, criminality etc. rates of the black population.
I'm not saying it's a snap of the fingers, I'm saying if we wanted to prop up the population of 11 million people that are contributing to our economy every day and integrate them into our society (of which we've made no efforts to do with the black population - the drug war was designed to disproportionately target minorities (which it's done fantastically) and the crime bill of '94 has also helped trap the black population in a self defeating cycle), then we could likely normalize their graduation rates over the course of a couple decades.
It was a side comment just meant to highlight that we'd be better off integrating the illegal immigrant population, and I don't think it's particularly unreasonable.
Originally Posted by
wibblefox
2.) Entirely speculation http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/...-dropouts.aspx many social ills have ties to poor socioeconomic conditions on some level, this is simply a prediction made on data already gathered on preexisting conditions in america
3.) They are not the backbone, they are just the cheapest option at the lowest end of the spectrum. Legals outnumber illegals 3:1 even in the farming industry, right? The idea that humanitarian, legal, and sovereignty issues should take a back seat to profit frankly disgusts me. Illegal immigrants being paid illegal wages for working in illegal working conditions is not something that a developed nation should proudly declare is their 'backbone'. Nice try with the strawman, but I've quite profusely declared for a while that I'm more interested in the level they populate the labor force than how much anyone is payed. These people make up a significant chunk of our workforce in the industries everyone in the country benefits from the labors of, and I call them a backbone of our agricultural and construction industries because of it. I fully support us treating them right and curbing the illgained profits of industries that take advantage of their situation by legalizing their labor - just a reminder that i'm the one who wants to give them the protection of our labor laws, and you're the one who wants to see them deported to whatever hell hole they ran away from in the first place.
I dispute your final assertions, I doubt economic contribution can truly be seen as positive, and I certainly doubt it outweighs the social and job market negatives, among others.
Well, I don't agree that their total economic contribution is actually a net negative, but without any ways to quantify the social negatives and these mysterious others we'll just have to unfortunately agree to disagree.
Originally Posted by
wibblefox
And so your solution is that EVERYONE should be an asshole who knows jack shit about their nation?
To me this is the stupidest kind of logic. "He doesn't know shit so I shouldn't either!"... If he jumped off a cliff would you too? Come on mate, is this even supposed to be an argument? What am I even reading.
You really should be more fair to yourself. Conjuring up an argument I never made and then chastising yourself for it is harsh.
In any case, it's not an argument, it's an opinion. People are people, and if there are people who sit around stupidly like entitled idiots and pretend they're the most american people ever while immigrants work their ass off to gain citizenship, I'll obviously think there's a problem there. If we deported the natural born people who can't meet the same standards immigrants need to meet to gain citizenship, maybe I'd change my tune on strict standards.
Getting tired of going back with you on this, so I hope you'll forgive me if we just agree to disagree here on all of this.