heywood on 16/9/2022 at 01:54
You know what, I think the biggest problem with Trump is not Trump himself, it's that he made it trendy for dirty lying cheating ignorant sleezebags to get into politics.
We've got a whole bunch of them here in NH, like Don Bolduc. He just won the Republican Senate nomination after spending the last year telling everyone that the 2020 election was fraudulent and calling our Republican governor a communist sympathizer and supporter of terrorism. Then literally one day after he won the primary, he suddenly "has done a lot of research on this" and says the election was not stolen and Biden was the legitimate winner. Come on, how stupid can voters be?
Tocky on 16/9/2022 at 01:55
They can come live near me (the brown folks not the dirty lying cheating ignorant sleezebags). Plenty of farmers need help and I would much prefer hard working honest people instead of rednecks on disability who do meth and shoot guns in indiscriminate directions while my grandkids are outside playing.
Starker on 16/9/2022 at 02:01
Quote Posted by RippedPhreak
I just think it's funny that you're defending a bunch of white multi-millionaires that are suddenly all in a tizzy because some brown folks showed up in their town.
Apparently they opened up their church to them and got them food and water and bedding, so it turns out even white rich shitlibs still have more moral backbone than all the brown immigrant haters AKA "their political opponents".
Tocky on 16/9/2022 at 02:10
Way better than that Joel Osteen who closed his church doors when folks in New Orleans needed shelter.
Hey what about we trade the evangelicals who want to spread Gods word and the rednecks who want to shoot brown people? We get people attempting to escape poverty and violence and they get those who want to spread the word and kill them at the same time. Praise Jesus you are saved drug gangster- BANG- now go to heaven.
demagogue on 16/9/2022 at 02:44
I remember in the early years of the Afghanistan & Iraq wars, the southern evangelical churches around me were silent on the increasingly credible reports and later clear evidence of torture coming out. That seemed like such low hanging fruit to me for a church to take a moral stand on that nobody could dispute, but they weren't only just silent, they were still taking such a strong line in favor of the wars.
I suppose the trend had already started much earlier in the Contract with America period with Pat Buchanan, et al., but for me that was a clear line they crossed that they couldn't come back from with any kind of moral standing. Or I guess more concretely, that was the occasion where I felt betrayed by my own church taking the line they did, and I was honestly surprised that pretty clear moral considerations were (suddenly from my perspective at least) not part of their thinking.
To put it in terms we're talking about here, I was kind of depressed that the megachurch form overran the community-sized churches & their culture historically connected to New England, although I'm kind of heartened to know that form is still limping on there.
heywood on 16/9/2022 at 02:58
In all seriousness, migration is up because we have the biggest labor shortage in at least a generation thanks to the COVID pandemic. There's a lot of businesses everywhere, especially in the service sector, who are still operating below capacity because they can't hire. And work visas are still being granted at a much lower rate than just a few years ago.
It wouldn't make a difference if there was a wall spanning the entire length of the Mexican border. It would be like trying to hold back water with cheesecloth. I lived in Australia for 3 years. As a percentage of the population, it has twice as many migrants as we do, and it's an island!
A smart person would try to tackle the labor shortage through efforts to increase the labor force participation rate back to pre-pandemic levels, along with expansion of temporary H2B visas. The labor shortage is the #2 cause of inflation, second only to excessive monetary stimulus. But smart people keep losing Republican primaries because the ignorant people who followed Trump into the party want to burn witches.
EDIT: To be fair, there's a subset of the Democratic party who don't want to reach any kind of grand bargain on immigration either. They're in the way as well, but the difference is that they don't resort to demagoguery.
RippedPhreak on 16/9/2022 at 03:04
There's no such thing as a labor shortage. That is corporate propaganda to get you to accept low wages. If no one wants to work a job for the wage you're offering, then you just need to raise the wage. Like magic, suddenly workers will appear to take the job.
...unless you bribe politicians to keep the border open and have an endless supply of slave labor.
heywood on 16/9/2022 at 03:13
Right, like there's no anthropogenic climate change either. To put it bluntly, you guys are information proof.
RippedPhreak on 16/9/2022 at 03:18
How can you not get that if you offer shit money, no one wants to work the job? And that if a company offers more money, more people will show up to do the job. Are you actually not processing this?
And the climate is constantly changing, whether people are driving cars or not. I mean, you believe there were Ice Ages in the past right?
demagogue on 16/9/2022 at 03:24
Why are conservatives socialist mercantlists now?
Do you even believe in capitalism, bro?
Reagan wept.
Edit: Sigh, fine. Wages equilibrate & rise on both sides of the border with increasing efficiency that lifts the entire regional market. If you beggar Mexican or Latin American labor, you're only depressing your own largest markets.
Edit 2: I have zero faith that raising wages and labor rights is what you really care about. People that care about labor rights don't froth at the mouth to throw millions of people out of work and expel them from a stable living situation, and rising wages ultimately have to come from economic efficiency. You don't just print more money and it magically has more value. This is like Hayek 101 stuff. Economic efficiency requires 4 freedoms of movement: goods, services, capital, and labor. That should have also been a Normal Rockwell "4 freedoms" painting defining America's values.
Edit3: And how do you stop employers from outright abusing their employees? You have a minimum wage and labor laws and enforce them, which having a labor force petrified into silence and afraid of the police is definitely not helping.
