Boycott CA and all those that boycott US laws and interests

Post Reply New Topic

I call BS. If you shop at Wal-Mart, you benefit immensely from cheap labor. Same if you like to eat. We have very cheap food here. Low quality, but cheap. People's standard of living suffers because of greed at the top, not because of illegals.

That'd work perfectly if people on welfare and the unemployed were all just so eager to break their backs for minimum wage, and if those people who currently employ illegals were just honest stand-up guys who would gladly pay their workers a legal wage and still sell their product at a competitive rate, even if it meant cutting into their own profits.

In reality, American citizens will not do the work illegals do for the pay they do it for. And people who employ illegals depend on their cheap labor. Now I'm not against workers getting a fair wage, but that would mean an overhaul of our entire system, and of our social conventions. Namely, we'd first need to get business owners to accept reasonable profits instead of all expecting to get ridiculously rich off other peoples' work. Second, we'd need to get the American public to stop expecting cheap things. Places like Wal-Mart would have to go down completely. Under a system where workers are paid a solid living wage, massive discount stores like that could not exist. Goods just couldn't be that cheap. If we want workers to earn a fair wage, then we need to be willing to pay more for things.

We need to do that first, then there will be no place for illegals. Just kicking them out without changing our system won't do any good, it'll only cause the businesses that depend on them to collapse, and certainly not to start employing citizens.

Markets tend to seek equilibrium, because ultimately jobs need doing and people need jobs. The situation can be argued back and forth endlessly but low paying, low prestige jobs will continue to exist and be filled because we fat Americans ain't giving up our drive-through deathburgers and maid service and roof repair.

I think that it would be beneficial if our national propaganda machine would seed the public with some positive "every job is worth doing, the garbage man deserves respect because he keeps your neighborhood clean, etc" type messages, because I think prestige and our culture of ridicule and disrespect are a major force keeping citizens from pursuing low prestige jobs. That, and it seems everyone expects that no matter what you earn it's necessary to have an iphone, a huge lcd tv connected to a $80/mo cable+data plan, and a car under 10 years old (that they don't maintain because nobody knows how anymore, or cares to) and so forth. Everyone should aspire to have the life they want.. but frankly a culture in which the poorest people have equivalent possessions to the wealthiest is functionally communist even if not labeled as such.

Wrong-o.

The illegal alien nannies I was talking about in Southern California? They make over $30,000 a year, working 40-50 hours a week. That's $12-15/hr after tax.

That would be quite enough to attract Americans - legal nannies in Massachusetts, which is too far from the border to have a lot of illegal Mexicans, make about the same $30,000 a year after tax - but that corresponds to $40,000 a year before taxes if you pay taxes, which makes legal nannies uncompetitive in Southern California.

That does perhaps explain why California is so outraged, though - they prefer an economy where they can save $10,000 a year per worker by avoiding the federal taxes that most other regions of the country have to pay.

that's a negation with pizzaz!