Thread: Thanks Trump
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Old 05-08-2019, 09:02 AM   #94
Perfectlap
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Starter986 View Post
Those are great sound-bites and talking points.

What's your position on illegal alien immigration law violations?
talking points? those are basic macroeconoic figures that any analyst can cite off the top of his head proving that this is NOT a "booming" economy..
The easiest way to debunk the myths that Trump spews about "the greatest economy ever" is to simply point out that the Labor Force Participation rate was 62% when Trump came down the escalator to announce his candidacy at Trump Tower in 2016. He said 62% under Obama was "terrible ". After two years of Trump's corporate tax cuts, trade war tariffs and historic deficit spending where is the labor force participation rate today? the same!!! The percentage of Americans working for a living has not improved a lick... nearly 40% of this country are NOT working for a living. When an economy is actually booming that number is going UP not waffling a tenth of a point here and there, up and down. The number of hours in a workweek is another revealing figure, that's also stuck at 35 hours since Trump took over. Wage increases similarly are stagnant, nothing more than 0.1% movement. Some raise! And for all his talk of trade wars the ISM manufacturing index is LOWER today than when Obama was in office. Have you been following the cratering of auto sales? Down 6-8% depending on who is reporting. A sudden drop in auto sales is NOT a sign of a booming economy. I'd be hard pressed to come up with a single leading or lagging indicator that has shown robust and continuous improvement consistent with what we usually seen in an expanding boom economy like in the Reagan and Bill Clinton eras.

so what about immigration? WE NEED MORE!! There are close to 80 million baby boomers who are ageing out of the workforce that are not being replaced with new workers at anything near the level needed to sustain even our lackluster 2-3% GDP growth. If Trump woke up tomorrow and said "you know what screw ICE let's just give every single undocumented worker legal status with working papers and approve another 10 million waiting to come in".... the country would still be short of replacing all the manual labor that has aged out of the workforce by tens of millions. But are we making it easier and not absurdly expensive to bring in these workers? Heck no. The GOP has blocked every single immigration reform bill that has hit the floor of Congress since the 1965 Immigration Act. Every last one. Even when Reagan and Bush tried to move the needle forward their own Republican party blocked them. The only immigration reform the GOP is interested is lowering legal immigration and making it next to impossible financially.

There has not been a single period of economic expansion in this country's history without a significant increase in low skills immigrant workers. What most don't realize is that we only permit 300k to 400k legal work visas per year when U.S. employers need to hire several million per year. After a decade of obstructing immigration reform that deficit has piled up so high that the typical wait for a low skills worker is several decades long and costs the equivalent of a year's wages just for the privilege of waiting decades for an answer one way or another. Another thing people don't understand is that each country no matter how many people we illegally hire from that country receive the same share of work visas under the current absurdly low caps. Mexico and the rest of Latin America will get the same percentage of visas of the total available as a wealthy country with few if any citizens looking for work in America. Basically if you don't already have an immediate relative who is not already a naturalized citizen (lawful permanent resident is not good enough) you can't even get on the line to wait 20 years. Those people hopping fences would need to wait nearly 60 to 80 years under the current backlog that perpetuates itself with such small numbers or work visas granted.

But let's not fix the immigration system let's spend $40 billion on a wall a.k.a. the symptom of the immigration problem instead of addressing the root cause. And by the way the number of illegal crossings are still at decades lows even with the recent spike. When the Reagan and Bill Clinton economies were surging at 7-8% GDP growth in their best quarters and we were short of workers again the undocumented were pouring over the border at 1.6 million a year. Today we're only at a quarter of those figures. We allowed it to hit a million illegal crossings in the 80's and 90's because the economy was so on fire that we needed the workers no matter what. They made it only a misdemeanor to cross illegal for a reason. So that employers wouldn't be hiring felons which would put the employer in serious legal jeopardy. And no neither Trump nor the GOP for all their anti-immigration propaganda have yet to propose making illegal crossing a felony THE FIRST TIME and not just for re-entry after formal deportation. Why? because the biggest employers of undocumented workers are Republicans!! Look at how many of the Republican farming states have backed a federal mandate to require e-verify for all workers statewide. Zero. With that system in place an undocumented worker is discovered within days. But the loss of agricultural, restaurant and hospitality workers would be severe to these low population states. It's so easy to call B.S. on all this immigration hysteria. Simply ask why their Republican senator has not introduced a bill to both raise illegal crossing to a felony and pushed for universal e-verify. But build that $40 billion dollar wall!!
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Last edited by Perfectlap; 05-08-2019 at 09:15 AM.
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