That's socialism in a nutshell.
Regardless of your opinion on socialism overall, the GOP would cheer Marjorie Taylor Greene leading an LGBTQ parade in honor of black gay atheists across the entire state of Alabama before they allowed that to happen.
You are correct, but those issues have no bearing on the fact that those people still would have no idea what their food would cost if they were paid a fair wage, and would likely not be willing to accept it even if you could mathematically prove that it was correct.
The gap between what most undocumented immigrants get paid vs. what a US citizen or permanent resident would get paid for the exact same work (assuming everything was above board) is absolutely gigantic. Especially in the agriculture and construction industries. Even if you took 100% of the rest of the corporate greed out, the price increases associated with paying them a fair wage would still send prices far higher than most people would be willing or even able to pay.
Look at it this way.
A quick google search shows that the average construction worker gets paid $25 an hour. Factor in benefits and you're figuring $35 effective. Let's say that, among the rest of the crew, A construction company hires 2 undocumented workers to do the low-level stuff for $10 an hour to cut a few corners and keep within budget. (A not-uncommon practice in the industry, to say the least. I'm sure some hire many more than that.)
A house takes about 6 months to build. So those two workers would work 40 hours/week for 26 weeks, for a total of 1040 hours, or 2080 hours between the two of them. The company pays them $20,800 under the table.
Had that construction company hired two union employees to do the same work, those workers would have been paid $72,800 in pay and benefits. That's over $50,000 difference. Those costs would be tacked on to the cost of the house. A house that normally would sell for $150k would now be priced over $200k. That's not corporate greed. That's just math, and the true cost of what it would take to pay them a fair wage. If the owners were planning on renting out the property, this would probably result in the resulting rent for the property being about $500 a month higher, and even if the property were broken out into several apartments, you'd probably be still talking about tacking on a couple of hundred a month per apartment.
Whether it's morally right is irrelevant. The price increases even after you factor out the things you correctly mention also have an impact would still likely be significantly higher than most people would be willing to accept and would likely cause severe negative impacts in the economy.
Wait, just hear me out, if we wait for the concentration camps to fill up with immigrants and political prisoners, they can provide the same labor FOR FREE while also providing a nice sum for the private prison firms that, in turn, grease the prison-to-profit machine!
All this with the added bonus that some of the labor will already be skilled. It’s brilliant!!
I actually thought of this myself, non-sarcastically. Maybe this is some kind of attempt to push out the undocumented and replace them with prison labor, especially since the Constitution still allows for prisoners to be used as slaves. And given this country's history, a part of me was surprised that prisoners being used as farm labor wasn't already the norm. My guess is that it would simply be too much of a logistical nightmare to monitor the workers to prevent them from escaping, and if you've gotta pay the guards to watch the prisoners, that kinda defeats the point. At that point, might as well just pay regular workers instead of dealing with all the BS and risks associated with using convicted criminals. Using criminals involuntarily would also run the risk of one of them contaminating the food supply (which, according to some prison documentaries, is not uncommon in prison kitchens to the point where staff members won't eat food if it even if it came in contact with the prison kitchen due to the risk of contamination). A prisoner contaminating the food out of revenge or just for their own amusement wouldn't mean that C-Block won't get dessert today. It affects the food supply of millions of people.
That said, I'm sure Trump will try this. And then food costs will go up anyway because the overhead costs and the costs and risks associated with watching over the prisoners will exceed what the farmers were paying the undocumented workers, and Trump will still somehow tout it as a win.
The problem isn’t about what consumers are willing to pay for food.
This is how I can tell when people have either a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem or are severely underestimating the size of the problem.
For example, an apple costs around $0.20 right now. Which means that the supermarket is probably paying the wholesaler around $0.10, and the wholesaler is probably paying the farmer about four cents if he's lucky. Let's just say that $.02 of that is labor and $.02 is other costs not related to this discussion.
(Note that I do not have any clue about how much undocumented workers are paid, how much fruit they can pick, etc. I am making these numbers up for merely easy-to-understand illustrative purposes, But the underlying point would still hold if you plug the real numbers in instead.)
Let's save the farm employs one undocumented worker for $5.00 an hour. He picks 10,000 apples over the course of a week, which breaks out to 2 cents an apple. Now let's say he has to pay that employee a fair wage plus benefits. We're probably talking about $15.00 an hour in wages, and $7.50 an hour effective for benefits period that comes out to $22.50 an hour. If that employee is still only picking 10,000 apples a week, That comes out to a price of $0.09 an apple. Which means even if the rest of the farmer's costs stayed the same, he is now selling that 4 cent apple for about $0.11. The wholesaler is going to pass that cost onto the supermarket which means the apple they were previously selling for a dime now costs $0.22. The supermarket is going to do the same thing, so that means that the apple that you paid $0.20 for before now costs probably north of $0.40. So if you buy a bag of apples, you can expect the cost of that bag of apples to go up by around $3 to $4 per bag.
This probably doesn't sound like a lot. Maybe you'd be OK with paying 3 to $4.00 more for that bag of apples. But here's the thing. Now do that with oranges. Then carrots. Than every other fruit or vegetable you buy.
Then do the same with meats. Because they're getting hit with a double whammy: not only do they have undocumented workers that are now being paid significantly more than before, but the costs of their feed that they feed the animals also just doubled. Which means one way or the other the price of your meat is going to go up by a lot.
Now do the same thing with every other grocery item you buy that requires food grown on farms. That three to $4.00 per Item now adds up to a $100 to $200 spike in your grocery bill. And if you go shopping twice a month, you're talking about a $200 to $400 spike in the price of your food. At a minimum. I believe my estimates are conservative.
I am not a fan of all of the people who take copium by saying “This is it! This is the thing that will take Trump down!” with every passing day. But I believe if you tell people that they can expect the price of their groceries to go up at a minimum $200 to $400.00 a month, Even I think that might be enough to get his supporters to yank him out of the White House by the short and curlies. Remember the price of eggs at their peak? Imagine telling people that that's now the new floor. Imagine the impact when restaurants have to start doubling their prices. Imagine the elderly, who in some cases already are foregoing medication to pay for food, only to find out that they still wouldn’t be able to eat. When the price of a McDonald's value meal starts at 20 bucks just for their basic 2 burgers and a fry. And that's only the beginning. I cannot begin to describe what kind of unforeseen side effects we could also expect throughout the economy.
People in the US have literally never had to pay a price for food that would be based on paying the workers a fair wage. We have been exploiting the undocumented for literal decades if not a century, and before that we had literal slavery. This has lead to a Society of people who have no idea how much their food would cost if they were paying the workers a fair wage, and would not accept it if they did because the price would be so high that it would seem unrealistic even if you could prove it to be mathematically correct. A shift like that would have an impact on literally every aspect of our economy in ways that I do not think our economy would be able to withstand, even if it is the morally correct thing to do.
Here's the big problem. The elephant in the room that nobody is willing to talk about. The elephant that is and will forever prevent the issue from ever being solved.
Farmers aren't worried about the lack of immigrants willing to pick the crops. They're worried about the lack of immigrants willing to pick the crops at a wage that they are willing to pay. Very important distinction between the two. And that wage is often far below minimum with no benefits or employee protections. They could start hiring people at fair market wages, allow them to establish unions, and receive benefits. But that labor cost would be far, far higher than they're paying now, and would likely lead to a sharp rise in food prices that the general public would likely not be willing to accept. Farmers have to consistently dodge the question of why not just hire US citizens and legal immigrants because they can't answer them without admitting that they pay sub-minimum wages in violation of numerous laws and that paying regular citizens competitive wages would lead to huge spikes in food prices. This is because the vast majority of the public does not understand that the low food prices they're accustomed to is because the farm industry has been exploiting immigrant labor for decades if not centuries, and have never had to learn what food would cost if workers were paid competitive wages and benefits. So the idea that competitive wages would lead to higher food prices is literally a foreign concept to a lot of people, because they've never had to deal with it.
Which is where we end up in a catch-22. Actually, several catch-22s.
Someone has to pick the crops. Pick one. Do you want undocumented immigrants doing it under the table with sub-minimum wages, no benefits, and no protections? Or do you want legal immigrants and US citizens doing the work with full pay, benefits, and protections but significantly higher food prices? If there were a way we could get the best of both worlds, farmers would be doing it already.
And Trump himself also has a problem. By trying to find a "solution" to this, he's essentially admitting that the only way to keep food prices low is to employ (and allow farmers to exploit) the very undocumented immigrants he is trying to deport. He's essentially admitting that our entire agricultural industry is dependent on the US essentially willfully turning a blind eye and ignoring its own immigration, discrimination, and employment laws. He's tacitly admitting that enforcement of his own policies would lead to a spike in food prices that even he acknowledges would be unsustainable, either due to higher labor costs, lost crops, or both. He basically has to come off as looking ultra-tough on immigration while being forced to acknowledge the need of the very people he's trying to deport. This isn't exclusive to Trump. Any president would face the same dilemmas. It's why previous Presidents have largely avoided the entire subject like the plague outside of giving some political talking points that they never actually act on.
We, as a country, need to start to fully understand and decide what we want. Do we want the employment practices of the agricultural industry to be above board, even if it leads to significantly higher food prices? Or do we acknowledge that our agricultural industry is entirely reliant on a supply of immigrant labor willing to work at sub-minimum wages and that maybe getting rid of all the brown people isn't such a good idea after all. Because if that's the case, we need to adjust our immigration laws and employment guidelines accordingly. Maybe we need a special class of immigrants who get a work permit only to work on these farms, and their visas become revoked if they become unemployed. Maybe a path to citizenship where if they come and work on the farms for X years at sub-minimum wages, they become eligible for a permanent visa where they can work anywhere?
I don't know the solution. But I do know that as long as both sides keep tiptoeing around the reality of the situation, the problems will never get solved.
This baffles me. I just can't see where, as a world leader, I would ever allow a foreign government access to my country's banking system at all, let alone just yank money out of someone's account. I'd be telling the US exactly where they can stick that idea. If they have a problem with a US citizen not paying taxes, then the US can handle it if and when that person sets foot on US soil.
I'd be curious as to how much revenue this generates for the US government. I'd also love to see other countries start rescinding these permissions in retaliation for Trump violating established trade deals. It might not be enough to get Trump to back down, but I still see it as a good opportunity to get bad policies off the books that should never have existed in the first place.
Countries need to start doing shit like that even if only to send a message to Trump and the US that no, the US doesn't actually rule the world. It'll never happen, I know, but one can dream.
The lawmakers argue that only Congress has authority to create, restructure, and abolish federal departments and agencies by constitutional mandate and through a long-established legal precedent.
The problem is that Congress has largely willingly ceded that authority to Trump, and the Supreme Court has largely kneecapped our court system's ability to step in.
The Department of Education is statutorily mandated and cannot be unilaterally abolished by the President.
Given that he literally has control of all three branches of government, and the other two branches are actively allowing him to do it, I'd say that yes, it can be unilaterally abolished by the President. Doesn't matter what a piece of paper says. If those who are tasked with upholding the law are unwilling or unable to do so, the law effectively doesn't exist. Saying that he "can't" do something implies that there is someone out there who is both willing and able to stop him.
Here's a question I have never understood about this. I understand all of this if you are planning on returning to living in the US at some point. But if you've moved to a foreign country with no plans on returning to the US, why are you still paying taxes? What is stopping you from telling the US government to go pound sand?
I'm not meaning to sound sarcastic. It's a legit question. I don't know how any of this works and the issues surrounding it. Because I would think that if I lived in a foreign country I'd be telling Uncle Sam where he can stick his tax bill. That's kinda the whole point of leaving. What prevents people from doing this, especially if they don't plan to return to the US?
Here's the list:
Cowards. Our media are fucking cowards.
So is every other institution.
I have literally never understood it from day one of Trump's descent down that ladder. From day one, people have played Trump's games by Trump's rules, then wonder why they keep losing. It's not just our colleges and media centers. It's been our businesses, our tech industry, our legal system -- both civil and criminal, and even other world leaders. For some reason, in the end, they all blink and just give Trump whatever he wants. I don't know if it's out of fear, a sense of appeasement, or whatever. But not one of them has learned yet that appeasement DOES. NOT. FUCKING. WORK. All it does is make him come back for more. Appeasing him just makes him believe that whatever he wanted in the first place is his by divine birthright.
Negotiating with this man DOES. NOT. FUCKING. WORK. He has openly admitted that he doesn't honor his side of agreements, believing that he can use even that as a negotiating tactic, on the belief that you'll return to the negotiating table if you want to receive even a part of what you were promised in the first place. He believes that conceding anything is an admission that you knew he was right about everything in the first place, or you wouldn't be negotiating at all.
You can't give this man chances. One judge already gave him ten fucking chances, and it still didn't change his behavior. Then the judge went on and proceeded to do fuck all about it, and wondered why Trump just amped up the rhetoric. Why shouldn't he? The judge blinked and proved he had a whole lot of nothing. And so has every judge who has ultimately sat on the bench with a stupid look on their face when Trump all but said "Fuck you, what are you going to do about it?". Why should Trump respect them when their answer so far has been "Nothing."?
If you're going to go on TV and denounce Trump, then go from the podium right to the negotiating table to give Trump exactly what he wants, you can't be surprised that this is the end result.
Can you do something about it? Because if you can't, Trump won't care about whether you "accept" it at all. As far as he's concerned, he'll just stuff your ass into the first plane heading out to whatever 3rd world country he struck a deal with. The rest is your problem.
I'm not underestimating it at all. I'm saying that my point would still fully stand even after the corporate greed and wealth extraction was taken into consideration. People severely underestimate the impact that this has on prices.