The crisis that is not a crisis, immigration. As I understand it, there are two parts to this border crossing thing. One part is the drug smuggling. Given the size of the American drug habit, we are looking at convoys of container ships making their way into this country. We are definitely not talking about a bunch of guys with loaded back packs sneaking across a river. The other part consists of people who are tired of living in poverty, who want to come here to improve the living conditions for themselves and their families.
We can take care of the first category fairly quickly. There is not a fence anywhere on this earth that would be tall enough to stop the drugs that are literally pouring into the U.S. Given the profit these drugs produce, there is enough incentive to suck vast quantities across the border. There is also a very sophisticated distribution mechanism set up to sell these drugs. It is a shame they do not pay taxes on these billions of dollars in drugs.
Taking just a moment to examine this, addicting drugs only become a problem when you cannot get them. If people could get them from a pharmacy at a reasonable price then they would not be stealing and prostituting themselves in various ways to get them. Crime would go down and side effects could be managed. The huge profit in drug profiteering would vanish and the cartels could go legit. Don’t for a minute think that if heroin was legal that all kinds of new people would try it. I could have, many times. It was simply not on my “to do” list, as would be the case with most people. In any event, the drugs coming into this country would no longer be smuggled and could be regulated.
With the drug thing under control, the only other problem is people seeking a better life. I do not see that as a problem. This country can always use people willing to work hard. The reason that there are so many people out of work is that the wealth of this country is in the hands of too few people who have most of what they need. Nobody is spending any money because, as I just said, they have all the things they need or they have no money. The reason that people have no money is not because a few Mexicans, or even a lot of Mexicans, have snuck across the border and grabbed up all the cherry jobs.
The reasons that nobody has a job are twofold. One answer is that most of the manufacturing jobs in this country have been shipped to Mexico, China, or some other third world country where labor costs are way down. It’s not the brown people who stole the jobs, it’s the 2-5% of the white people who stole those jobs and took them overseas. It is that same 2-5% who are screaming patriotism (the last refuge of scoundrels) and are trying to make the poor whites hate the poor Mexicans, so no one will notice them, the 2-5% whites with all the money.
How did they get all your money—several ways. They got some of it through bail-outs and bonuses. Yes, they took all the hard earned tax dollars and they put it right into their checking accounts. Another way they got your money was to sell you houses that they knew you couldn’t afford or they got you to take out a second mortgage on your house that they knew you couldn’t afford and when you defaulted, they took your money and your house. The third way they got your money was to take your job and peddle it overseas so they would not have to pay you or the government. They were able to make the same widget that you used to make for pennies on the dollars they used to pay you. And then, they brought those widgets back to this country and they sell them at the same high price that they used to sell for, when you used to make them. And, that tremendous cost saving, the profit from paying somebody from Sri Lanka to make your T-shirt, goes straight into the pocket of the CEO and his friends.
I have decided I am a true, flaming socialist. I look around and I see people who live in a simple house. They have their water heater turned down until it is practically just a storage tank. They can’t mix cold water with it when they shower because then it would be too cold. If they are lucky, they set their A/C at 78F and do not adjust it for anything. Their electric bill is $200 a month or more. I have seen them walk away from the prescription counter because their diabetes medication was too expensive. I saw an old person unable to purchase his blood pressure meds. This is not right, in my eyes.
This is not right in my eyes when I read about people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to put a 500 gallon aquarium in their home because they can no longer “Wow” their friends with their motorcycle or car collections. Where they pay someone a thousand dollars a week to come in and feed their fish and dip in and remove the dead ones. Here, go ahead and read about the inane people that spend thousands of dollars on a lighting system that lets them choose between 64 different colors to cast their specifically bred, colorless fish so they will take on the various hues of their “James Bond” like lighting system. These are the people who took your jobs away. These are the people who stole your homes and your tax dollars, AND, for the most part, created the horrible deficit we are saddled with. When W took over, the government was operating at a surplus.
Remember the end of the Clinton years where everyone had a good job? Bush’s two wars and tax cuts for the very rich is what put us into debt. He ran up the debt for 8 years and when Obama tried to spend some money to try and make sure people had health care and a job, the Republicans went ballistic about overspending. Go figure. So, if you are poor and white or brown or black, and you try to figure out how to pay your electric bill, just remember that the 2-5% are trying to figure out what color to make their fish. No kidding go read about the inane people. And, remember this, it is not the 12 million (3.8% of the total U.S. population) illegals who took your job, it was those inane folks above. Imigration is not the problem, those 2-5% fish people are.