Oligarchs such as
Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people
could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the
capitalist system itself.
Oligarchs such as
Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people
could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the
capitalist system itself.
A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the
environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street,
Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of wealth
from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than
tripled since he first became mayor in January of 2002.
A new Gilded Age
has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The
wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both
the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia,
where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.
The
billionaire class — the country’s top 0.01 percent of earners — have enjoyed
more than 15 times as much wage growth as America’s working and middle class
since 1979, new wage data reveals.
THERE IS A REASON WHY
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS!!! IT HAS TO DO WITH OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES,
YOURS, NOT THEIRS, DEPRESSED!
Billionaire Class Enjoys 15X the Wage Growth of
American Working Class
3:00
The
billionaire class — the country’s top 0.01 percent of earners — have enjoyed
more than 15 times as much wage growth as America’s working and middle class
since 1979, new wage data reveals.
Between 1979 and 2017, the wages of the bottom 90 percent — the
country’s working and lower middle class — have grown by only about 22 percent,
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) researchers find.
Compare that small wage increase over nearly four decades to the
booming wage growth of America’s top one percent, who have seen their wages
grow more than 155 percent during the same period.
The top 0.01 percent — the country’s billionaire class — saw
their wages grow by more than 343 percent in the last four decades, more
than 15 times the wage growth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans.
In 1979, America’s working class was earning on average about
$29,600 a year. Fast forward to 2017, and the same bottom 90 percent of
Americans are earning only about $6,600 more annually.
The almost four decades of wage stagnation among the country’s
working and middle class comes as the national immigration policy has allowed
for the admission of more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled immigrants every
year.
In the last decade, alone, the U.S. admitted ten million
legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing
population of low-wage workers. Meanwhile, employers are able to reduce wages
and drive up their profit margins thanks to the annual low-skilled immigration
scheme.
The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy
is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational
conglomerates as every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an
occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’ hourly wages
by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce reduces
Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
Mass immigration has come at the expense of America’s working
and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and
increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled
foreign nationals.
Four million young Americans enter the workforce every year, but
their job opportunities are further diminished as the U.S. imports roughly two
new foreign workers for every four American workers who enter the workforce.
Even though researchers say 30 percent of the workforce could lose their jobs due to
automation by 2030, the U.S. has not stopped importing more than a million
foreign nationals every year.
For blue-collar American workers, mass immigration has not only
kept wages down but in many cases decreased wages, as Breitbart News reported. Meanwhile, the
U.S. continues importing more foreign nationals with whom working-class
Americans are forced to compete. In 2016, the U.S. brought in about 1.8 million
mostly low-skilled immigrants.
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle
class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as
less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers
and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you
can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can
start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to
succeed in this country. Most people don’t
want to start a tech company. [Americans]
maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in
a small town … they want to be able to make a living and
then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis
added]
The problem with corporate
concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get
together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector,
for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance
between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem
and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported,
Hawley detailed in the
interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World
Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01
percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much
wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other
Americans
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the
first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax
rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The
analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower
federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class.
Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which
the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a
combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23
percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47
percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot
via the New York Times)
The
analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is
less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning
working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt
writes:
For
middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal
income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t
benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And
they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social
Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
[Emphasis added]
The
report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich
and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned
against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and
open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the
elite.
“The same
consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and
economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade,
open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national
security or for American workers or for American families or for American
principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics
for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,”
Hawley said in an August speech in the
Senate.
Billionaire ex-NYC Mayor Bloomberg takes steps to run for Democratic
nomination
The New York
Times reported Thursday that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire
ex-mayor of New York, is taking steps toward running for the Democratic Party
2020 presidential nomination.
The newspaper cited
Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson as saying: “Mike believes that Donald Trump
represents an unprecedented threat to our nation. We need to finish the job and
ensure that Trump is defeated—but Mike is increasingly concerned that the
current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that.”
Bloomberg reportedly
filed on Friday to run in the March 3 Alabama Democratic primary. That contest,
one of 14 taking place on what is known as “Super Tuesday,” has the earliest filing
deadline of any state primary. The next deadline is November 13 for the New
Hampshire primary, which is the second contest in the primary season, following
the Iowa caucuses in February.
Press reports say
Bloomberg has not made a final decision on whether he will join the current
field of 16 Democratic aspirants. But his move marks a reversal of statements
he made last March ruling out a presidential bid.
As a practical matter,
there appears to be little chance of Bloomberg winning the nomination for
himself. He would not appear in any debate because his campaign would be
entirely self-financed and therefore would not meet the requirement of
200,000-plus individual donors to qualify. Press reports indicate that he would
not seriously compete in the four initial contests in February—Iowa, New
Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina—where he has no campaign organization and
voting begins in less than 90 days.
But he could run in the
March 3–17 primaries, which will choose nearly two-thirds of the total number
of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Using his vast fortune for
campaign advertising, he could possibly win a sufficient number of delegates to
give him leverage in the event of a negotiated or brokered nomination. He would
use it to block the nomination of Warren or Sanders.
The very fact that a
potential run by a multibillionaire ex-politician garners immediate media
attention and is instantly seen as credible testifies to the immense power
exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy over American politics.
Whether or not he decides to run, Bloomberg’s move is clearly calculated to
shift the Democratic campaign further to the right.
The statement issued by
Wolfson is an expression of skepticism toward the prospects of the current leading
“centrist” in the Democratic field, former Vice President Joe Biden. While
Biden still holds a lead over Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in national
polls, his margin has shrunk and he is faltering in the initial primary states
of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden’s slump and the
rise of Warren, who is competing with Sanders to capture growing
anti-capitalist sentiment on the basis of demagogic promises and channel it
back behind the Democratic Party, is increasing the fears within the ruling
elite of a rising tide of working-class struggle. Oligarchs such as
Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people
could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the
capitalist system itself.
It is not Warren or Sanders
who concern figures such as Bloomberg, Bill Gates and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon,
all of whom have attacked calls by the two candidates for tax increases on
multimillionaires and billionaires. These long-time Democratic Party operatives
are known quantities with solid records in defense of the profit system and the
global interests of US imperialism. Rather, the oligarchs fear the rising wave
of strikes and protests in the US and internationally that these “left”-talking
Democrats are seeking to contain and dissipate.
They see in proposals
for social reforms paid for by increased taxes on the rich an intolerable
infringement on their prerogatives. They also see a danger of fueling popular
expectations and encouraging social unrest. They want to block any expression
in the 2020 elections of popular anger over social inequality.
Particularly since
Warren released her “Medicare for all” plan last Friday, the outpouring of
negative comments and warnings from corporate executives and media pundits has
increased. In the plan, which Warren is well aware will never be passed by
either big-business party, she calls for a 6 percent tax on all wealth over $1
billion to fund a government-paid and government-run universal health insurance
program.
Dimon complained on the
financial cable channel CNBC this week that Warren “uses some pretty harsh
words” about the rich, which “some would say vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft cofounder
Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US
behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of
editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed
reforms) said Wednesday, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the
capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative
companies—I do think you risk that.”
Last January,
Bloomberg, whose net worth is $53 billion, said an earlier proposal by Warren
to tax wealth above $50 million at two percent was “probably unconstitutional.”
Echoing Trump’s antisocialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the
plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an
example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
New York Times columnist and
multimillionaire financier Steven Rattner published an op-ed piece this week
headlined “The Warren Way Is the Wrong Way.” Defending the “free enterprise
system,” he wrote: “Thanks for providing us, Ms. Warren, with yet more evidence
that a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect, one brought closer by your
surge in the polls… Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech
giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in
driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated.”
Rattner was appointed
by Obama to head his Auto Task Force in 2009, where he imposed an
across-the-board 50 percent pay cut on new-hires at GM and Chrysler, along with
thousands of layoffs and cuts in retiree benefits. He was forced to leave his
post on the auto panel when he was cited on corruption charges by the
Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg’s political
career has demonstrated the fundamental identity between the two
corporate-controlled parties that comprise the US two-party system. He has
changed parties almost like he changes business suits.
Bloomberg was a
Democrat until 2001, when he reregistered as a Republican to run for mayor of
New York City because he could not win the Democratic primary. He was reelected
as a Republican in 2005, reregistered as an independent in 2007, and won
reelection in 2009, in a campaign in which he spent $70 million, a staggering
sum for a mayoral race. He remained an independent until October 2018, when he
reregistered as a Democrat, although he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and
had a primetime speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.
Besides spending more
than $200 million of his own money to get elected three times in New York, he
poured over $110 million into the 2018 Democratic campaign to help the
Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, and he has pledged to
spend $500 million in the 2020 elections.
A liberal on so-called
social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the
home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of
wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than tripled
since he first became mayor in January of 2002.
Bloomberg viciously
attacked city workers, imposing a five-year wage freeze after the 2008
financial crisis, demanding cuts in pensions and health care for retirees,
eliminating more than 6,000 teaching positions, closing 20 fire companies and
slashing youth programs, homeless services, elder-care programs, continuing
education programs, libraries and cultural organizations.
He continued the brutal
“stop and frisk” policing policy imposed by his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, and
imposed concessions on school bus strikers who struck in 2013.
This is the man praised
by Christopher Hahn, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of
New York, on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” program. Hahn, now a “liberal”
radio host, called Bloomberg an “excellent mayor for the city of New York,” and
added that he “might be just what the doctor ordered to shake this thing up right
now.”
Michael Bloomberg: Government Should
Import ‘an Awful Lot More’ Immigrants
Democratic 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg says he will
recruit “an awful lot more” immigrants “to take all the different kinds of
jobs” in the U.S. economy.
The immigrants can “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion,
our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy,” Bloomberg told reporters
without naming the American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues that
would be improved.
Bloomberg’s comments reflect the views of wealthy investors who
gain stock market wealth when the government imports more workers,
welfare-aided consumers, and extra renters into communities created by
Americans and their children.
In his comments, Bloomberg echoed the 1960s claim that the
U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country build by
similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,”
Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg, who owns roughly $55 billion in assets, has long
supported mass migration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert
Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of
investors and politicians pushed for passage of the
Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
In 2019, the group is pushing for the S.386 law
that would help investors by encouraging many more Indian
graduates to take white-collar jobs from American graduates.
Bloomberg’s group is also pushing for legislation
that would provide an endless supply of H-2A visa workers to investors in the
agriculture sector. The wage-capped workers would likely displace Americans, reduce
pressure on investors to buy high-tech farm machinery, and convert many
agriculture towns into “company towns” dominated by a single employer.
The U.S. already imports many immigrants — roughly one million
per year, even as four million Americans turn 18 and prepare to join the workforce.
“We need an awful lot more immigrants rather than less,”
Bloomberg told reporters after he filed the paperwork needed to join the
Democratic Party’s primary in Arizona:
We have to go out and actually try to recruit immigrants to come
here. We need immigrants to take all the different kinds of jobs that the
country needs – improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue,
and certainly improve our economy.
Bloomberg — who has a personal wealth of roughly $55 billion —
then blasted President Donald Trump’s campaign to block the wave of Central
American migrants sparked by the establishment’s tacit support for mass
migration:
I think what Donald Trump has done, of ripping kids away from
their [migrant] parents, is a disgrace. I think of what we’re done, where we
don’t know who we’re taking in, and we don’t help people when we’re here, is a
disgrace. I think talking about deporting 11 million people is so outrageous to
try to explain to your kids what that was all about. Our immigration system is
broken and we’re not doing anything to fix it.
In 2013, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the planned “Gang
of Eight” amnesty would shift more of the nation’s new wealth from workers to
investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would
cause Americans wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would
increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held
down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock market,
the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor]
under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,”
says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
In contrast, Trump’s opposition to Central American migrants and
to amnesty bills sought by the establishment has helped to nudge up wages for
blue-collar Americans, especially in the midwest battleground states, according
to a November 26 report posted by Bloomberg’s news
service:
Personal income growth has been surging in some political U.S.
battlegrounds, including a third of the counties in Pennsylvania — which Donald
Trump narrowly flipped in 2016 and may need to win re-election next year.
In the president’s first two years in office, a total of 325
counties representing nearly 6% of the U.S. population experienced their best
annualized income gains since at least 1992, according to data compiled by
Bloomberg News. And 127 of those are located in perennial swing states,
including Ohio and Iowa.
The New York
Times reported Thursday that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire
ex-mayor of New York, is taking steps toward running for the Democratic Party
2020 presidential nomination.
The newspaper cited
Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson as saying: “Mike believes that Donald Trump
represents an unprecedented threat to our nation. We need to finish the job and
ensure that Trump is defeated—but Mike is increasingly concerned that the
current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that.”
Bloomberg reportedly
filed on Friday to run in the March 3 Alabama Democratic primary. That contest,
one of 14 taking place on what is known as “Super Tuesday,” has the earliest filing
deadline of any state primary. The next deadline is November 13 for the New
Hampshire primary, which is the second contest in the primary season, following
the Iowa caucuses in February.
Press reports say
Bloomberg has not made a final decision on whether he will join the current
field of 16 Democratic aspirants. But his move marks a reversal of statements
he made last March ruling out a presidential bid.
As a practical matter,
there appears to be little chance of Bloomberg winning the nomination for
himself. He would not appear in any debate because his campaign would be
entirely self-financed and therefore would not meet the requirement of
200,000-plus individual donors to qualify. Press reports indicate that he would
not seriously compete in the four initial contests in February—Iowa, New
Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina—where he has no campaign organization and
voting begins in less than 90 days.
But he could run in the
March 3–17 primaries, which will choose nearly two-thirds of the total number
of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Using his vast fortune for
campaign advertising, he could possibly win a sufficient number of delegates to
give him leverage in the event of a negotiated or brokered nomination. He would
use it to block the nomination of Warren or Sanders.
The very fact that a
potential run by a multibillionaire ex-politician garners immediate media
attention and is instantly seen as credible testifies to the immense power
exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy over American politics.
Whether or not he decides to run, Bloomberg’s move is clearly calculated to
shift the Democratic campaign further to the right.
The statement issued by
Wolfson is an expression of skepticism toward the prospects of the current leading
“centrist” in the Democratic field, former Vice President Joe Biden. While
Biden still holds a lead over Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in national
polls, his margin has shrunk and he is faltering in the initial primary states
of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden’s slump and the
rise of Warren, who is competing with Sanders to capture growing
anti-capitalist sentiment on the basis of demagogic promises and channel it
back behind the Democratic Party, is increasing the fears within the ruling
elite of a rising tide of working-class struggle. Oligarchs such as
Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people
could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the
capitalist system itself.
It is not Warren or Sanders
who concern figures such as Bloomberg, Bill Gates and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon,
all of whom have attacked calls by the two candidates for tax increases on
multimillionaires and billionaires. These long-time Democratic Party operatives
are known quantities with solid records in defense of the profit system and the
global interests of US imperialism. Rather, the oligarchs fear the rising wave
of strikes and protests in the US and internationally that these “left”-talking
Democrats are seeking to contain and dissipate.
They see in proposals
for social reforms paid for by increased taxes on the rich an intolerable
infringement on their prerogatives. They also see a danger of fueling popular
expectations and encouraging social unrest. They want to block any expression
in the 2020 elections of popular anger over social inequality.
Particularly since
Warren released her “Medicare for all” plan last Friday, the outpouring of
negative comments and warnings from corporate executives and media pundits has
increased. In the plan, which Warren is well aware will never be passed by
either big-business party, she calls for a 6 percent tax on all wealth over $1
billion to fund a government-paid and government-run universal health insurance
program.
Dimon complained on the
financial cable channel CNBC this week that Warren “uses some pretty harsh
words” about the rich, which “some would say vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft cofounder
Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US
behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of
editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed
reforms) said Wednesday, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the
capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative
companies—I do think you risk that.”
Last January,
Bloomberg, whose net worth is $53 billion, said an earlier proposal by Warren
to tax wealth above $50 million at two percent was “probably unconstitutional.”
Echoing Trump’s antisocialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the
plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an
example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
New York Times columnist and
multimillionaire financier Steven Rattner published an op-ed piece this week
headlined “The Warren Way Is the Wrong Way.” Defending the “free enterprise
system,” he wrote: “Thanks for providing us, Ms. Warren, with yet more evidence
that a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect, one brought closer by your
surge in the polls… Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech
giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in
driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated.”
Rattner was appointed
by Obama to head his Auto Task Force in 2009, where he imposed an
across-the-board 50 percent pay cut on new-hires at GM and Chrysler, along with
thousands of layoffs and cuts in retiree benefits. He was forced to leave his
post on the auto panel when he was cited on corruption charges by the
Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg’s political
career has demonstrated the fundamental identity between the two
corporate-controlled parties that comprise the US two-party system. He has
changed parties almost like he changes business suits.
Bloomberg was a
Democrat until 2001, when he reregistered as a Republican to run for mayor of
New York City because he could not win the Democratic primary. He was reelected
as a Republican in 2005, reregistered as an independent in 2007, and won
reelection in 2009, in a campaign in which he spent $70 million, a staggering
sum for a mayoral race. He remained an independent until October 2018, when he
reregistered as a Democrat, although he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and
had a primetime speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.
Besides spending more
than $200 million of his own money to get elected three times in New York, he
poured over $110 million into the 2018 Democratic campaign to help the
Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, and he has pledged to
spend $500 million in the 2020 elections.
A liberal on so-called
social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the
home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of
wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than tripled
since he first became mayor in January of 2002.
Bloomberg viciously
attacked city workers, imposing a five-year wage freeze after the 2008
financial crisis, demanding cuts in pensions and health care for retirees,
eliminating more than 6,000 teaching positions, closing 20 fire companies and
slashing youth programs, homeless services, elder-care programs, continuing
education programs, libraries and cultural organizations.
He continued the brutal
“stop and frisk” policing policy imposed by his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, and
imposed concessions on school bus strikers who struck in 2013.
This is the man praised
by Christopher Hahn, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of
New York, on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” program. Hahn, now a “liberal”
radio host, called Bloomberg an “excellent mayor for the city of New York,” and
added that he “might be just what the doctor ordered to shake this thing up right
now.”
Michael Bloomberg: Government Should Import ‘an Awful Lot More’ Immigrants
Trump: Open Borders Threatens the
Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers
President Donald
Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding
that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those
gains.
“Since
the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American
worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But
for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never
happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage
gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been
particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings
rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier,
according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor
Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages
grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may
mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you
know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk
about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The
so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks
and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record
last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit
record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in
November.
Trump
gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and
employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would
threaten those gains, he added.
“Our
tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in
Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders,
flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans.
And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic
studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that
companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage
trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the
number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of
that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written. “But because a disproportionate
percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers,
including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”
Record 44.5 Million
Immigrants in 2017
Non-Mexico Latin American,
Asian, and African populations grew most
By Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler on September 15, 2018
Steven A. Camarota is the director of
research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center.
On September 13, the Census Bureau
released some data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS) that shows
significant growth in the immigrant (legal and illegal) population living in
the United States. The number of immigrants (legal and illegal) from Latin
American countries other than Mexico, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa grew
significantly, while the number from Mexico, Europe, and Canada stayed about
the same or even declined since 2010. The Census Bureau refers to immigrants as
the "foreign-born", which includes all those who were not U.S.
citizens at birth. The Department of Homeland Security has previously estimated
that 1.9 million immigrants are missed by the ACS, so the total number of
immigrants in 2017 was likely 46.4 million.1
Among the findings in the new data:
·
The
nation's immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a record 44.5 million in
July 2017, an increase of nearly 800,000 since 2016, 4.6 million since 2010,
and 13.4 million since 2000.
·
It
is worth noting that the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS),
released the same week but collected in March 2018, shows 45.4 million
immigrants, an increase of 1.6 million over the prior year. While the CPS is
smaller than the ACS, the newer survey may indicate the pace of growth has
accelerated.
·
As
a share of the U.S. population, the ACS (used in the remainder of this report)
shows that immigrants (legal and illegal) comprised 13.7 percent or nearly one
out of seven U.S. residents in 2017, the highest percentage in 107 years. As
recently as 1980, just one out of 16 residents was foreign-born.
·
Between
2010 and 2017, 9.5 million new immigrants settled in the United States. New
arrivals are offset by roughly 320,000 immigrants who return home each year and
natural mortality of about 290,000 annually among the existing immigrant
population.2 As a result, growth in the
immigrant population was 4.6 million from 2010 to 2017.3
·
In
addition to immigrants, there were 17.1 million U.S.-born minor children with
an immigrant parent in 2017, for a total of 61.6 million immigrants and their
children in the country — accounting for one in five U.S. residents.4
·
Of
immigrants who have come since 2010, 13 percent or 1.2 million came from Mexico
— by far the top sending country. However, because of return migration and
natural mortality among the existing population, the overall Mexican-born
population actually declined by 441,190.5
·
The
sending regions with the largest numerical increases from 2016 to 2017 in the
number of immigrants living in the United States were South America (up
233,696); East Asia (up 226,728); South Asia (up 216,495); Sub-Saharan Africa
(up 149,846); the Caribbean (up 121,120); and Central America (up 71,720).6
·
Looking
longer term, the regions with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were
East Asia, (up 1,118,937); South Asia (up 1,106,373); the Caribbean (up
676,023); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 606,835); South America (up 483,356); Central
America (up 474,504); and the Middle East (up 472,554).
·
The
decline in Mexican immigrants masks, to some extent, the enormous growth of
Latin American immigrants. If seen as one region, the number from Latin America
(excluding Mexico) grew 426,536 in just the last year and 1.6 million since
2010 — significantly more than from any other part of the world.
·
The
sending countries with the largest numerical increases in
immigrants in the United States between 2010 and 2017 were India (up 830,215);
China (up 677,312); the Dominican Republic (up 283,381); the Philippines (up
230,492); Cuba (up 207,124); El Salvador (up 187,783); Venezuela (up 167,105);
Colombia (up 146,477); Honduras (up 132,781); Guatemala (up 128,018); Nigeria
(up 125,670); Brazil (up 111,471); Vietnam (up 102,026); Bangladesh (up
95,005); Haiti (up 92,603); and Pakistan (up 92,395).
·
The
sending countries with the largest percentage increases in
immigrants since 2010 were Nepal (up 120 percent); Burma (up 95 percent);
Venezuela (up 91 percent); Afghanistan (up 84 percent); Saudi Arabia (up 83
percent); Syria (up 75 percent); Bangladesh (up 62 percent); Nigeria (up 57
percent); Kenya (up 56 percent); India (up 47 percent); Iraq (up 45 percent);
Ethiopia (up 44 percent); Egypt (up 34 percent); Brazil (up 33 percent); the
Dominican Republic (up 32 percent); Ghana (up 32 percent); China (up 31
percent); Pakistan (up 31 percent); and Somalia (up 29 percent).
·
The
states with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were
Florida (up 721,298); Texas (up 712,109); California (up 502,985); New York (up
242,769); New Jersey (up 210,481); Washington (up 173,891); Massachusetts (up
172,908); Pennsylvania (up 154,701); Virginia (up 151,251); Maryland (up
124,241); Georgia (123,009); Michigan (up 116,059); North Carolina (up
110,279); and Minnesota (up 107,760).
·
The
states with the largest percentage increases since 2010 were
North Dakota (up 87 percent); Delaware (up 37 percent); West Virginia (up 33
percent); South Dakota (up 32 percent); Wyoming (up 30 percent); Minnesota (up
28 percent); Nebraska (up 28 percent); Pennsylvania (up 21 percent); Utah (up
21 percent); and Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, Florida, Washington, and Iowa
(all up 20 percent).
Data Source. On September 13, 2018, the
Census Bureau released some of the data from the 2017 American Community Survey
(ACS). The survey reflects the U.S. population as of July 1, 2017. The ACS is
by far the largest survey taken by the federal government each year and
includes over two million households.7 The Census Bureau has posted
some of the results from the ACS to its American FactFinder website.8 It has not released the
public-use version of the ACS for researchers to download and analyze. However,
a good deal of information can be found at FactFinder. Unless otherwise
indicated, the information in this analysis comes directly from FactFinder.
The immigrant population, referred to
as the "foreign-born" by the Census Bureau, is comprised of those
individuals who were not U.S. citizens at birth. It includes naturalized
citizens, legal permanent residents (green card holders), temporary workers,
and foreign students. It does not include those born to immigrants in the
United States, including to illegal immigrant parents, or those born in
outlying U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico. Prior research by the
Department of Homeland Security and others indicates that some 90 percent of
illegal immigrants respond to the ACS. Thus all the figures reported above are
for both legal and illegal immigrants.
Mike
Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans
Investor,
CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says he would allow investors
and employers to hire the “the best” workers from around the world instead of
Americans.
“This country needs more immigrants
and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on
January 5.:
For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the
best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We
want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want
to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants.
The reporter did not ask Bloomberg to define “best.” But for
cost-conscious shareholders and executives, “best” is a synonym for ‘cheaper
than Americans.’
“If business were able to hire without restrictions from
anywhere in the world, pretty much every [American’s] occupation would be
foreignized,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration
Studies. He continued:
Americans would have to accept dramatically lower earnings,
whether they object or not. Not just landscapers and tomato pickers, [because]
Indians and Chinese by the millions can do nursing and accounting. There would
not be any job that would not see its earnings fall to the global average.
Bloomberg — who has an estimated wealth of $55 billion — is
trying to exempt investors and shareholders from the nation’s immigration
rules, said Krikorian. For Bloomberg, “immigration laws are not one of those
things that should be allowed to interfere in [the growth of] shareholders’
value,” he said.
“It is obviously unprecedented — but this is not obviously
different from [President] George [W.] Bush’s ideal immigration plan … [and] he
is expressing a pretty standard Republican plutocrat approach to
immigration,” he added.
Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing
workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans have are not filling.
(Applause.) We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane.
And I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American
citizens.
Our reforms should be guided by a few basic principles. First,
America must control its borders …
Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of
our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens
are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will
fill that job.
In December 2018, departing House
Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Bush’s
“any willing worker” goal, saying:
[Immigration reform needs] border security and interior
enforcement for starters, but also a modernization of our visa system so that
it makes sense for our economy and for our people so that anyone who wants to
play by the rules, work hard and be part of American fabric can contribute.
This “any willing worker” idea
encouraged Ryan to work closely — but behind the scenes — with pro-amnesty, pro-migration
groups.
Many GOP legislators echo this “any willing worker” claim when
they declare a “‘legal good, illegal bad,’ approach to migration,” said
Krikorian. That mantra is “piously claiming that illegal immigration is bad,
but is making [pro-American protections] moot by letting huge numbers of people
in legally.”
In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 election on a
promise to shrink immigration. Since then, he has forced down illegal migration
via Mexico and has largely blocked numerous efforts by business to expand the
huge inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers. Trump’s curbs on the supply
of foreign labor have helped to force up wages for blue-collar Americans —
despite determined efforts by business and investment groups to prevent wage
increases.
THERE IS A REASON WHY ALL
BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS AND WANT WIDER OPEN BORDERS AMNESTY AND NO E-VERIY!
The state of California is home to more
illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal
aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4
million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows
illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek
welfare and food stamp benefits.
Tom
Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants
13 Jan 20202,348
8:12
Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor
and Democrat 2020 candidate, wants Americans to provide cheap housing to
illegal immigrants.
“A
Steyer Administration will … ensure that all undocumented communities have
access to affordable and safe housing,” Steyer said in his immigration proposal.
Steyer’s
offer of housing is combined with promises to provide illegals with free
healthcare, plus workplace training and cultural celebrations:
A
Steyer administration … [will] provide a safe platform for immigrants to share
their culture and celebrate their heritage, foster opportunities for public
service that support new Americans, and coordinate with Federal agencies and the
private sector in order to build workforce training and fellowship
opportunities for immigrants with professional qualifications from their home
nation to help them leverage their specialized skills in the American
marketplace.
Steyer
made his promise of cheap housing to illegals even though housing costs for
many Americans forces them to rent or buy cheaper housing far from work and
friends, and are being forced to give up hopes for larger families.
But
those housing costs are high partly because the federal government welcomes one
million new legal immigrants into the nation’s cities, neighborhoods, and
schools. That is a huge inflow — four million young Americans turn 18 each
year.
But
Steyer is a billionaire investor, so illegal migrants will not be moving into
his very expensive and well policed neighborhood. The New Yorker magazine
described his house in 2013:
President
[barack Obama] flew to San Francisco on April 3rd for a series of fund-raisers.
He stopped in first at a cocktail reception hosted by Tom Steyer, a
fifty-six-year-old billionaire, former hedge-fund manager, and major donor to
the Democratic Party. Steyer lives in the city’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, in a
house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
Any
inflow of migrants will be a boon to Steyer’s fellow investors who gain from
the extra workers, consumers, and renters. For example, one gauge of real
estate investments shows a 50 percent
gain since 2015, even as Americans’ wages and salaries rose by
only about 15 percent.
Meanwhile,
Steyer’s home state is experiencing record housing prices and record
homelessness as today’s illegals enjoy the state government’s offer of
sanctuary, jobs, and welfare. The federal housing agency reported January
7 the state has about 108,000
homeless:
This
year’s report shows that there was a small increase in the one-night estimates
of people experiencing homelessness across the nation between 2018 and 2019
(three percent), which reflects a 16 percent increase in California, and
offsets a marked decrease across many other states.
…
In
terms of absolute numbers, California has more than half of all unsheltered
homeless people in the country (53 percent or 108,432), with nearly nine times
as many unsheltered homeless as the state with the next highest number, Florida
(six percent or 12,476), despite California’s population being only twice that
of Florida.
In
September Breitbart News reported the
Census Bureau showed how the state’s housing costs are pushing Americans into
poverty:
The
September 10 study shows 18.2 percent of California’s population is poor, far
above the 13 percent poverty rate in Arkansas, 16 percent in Mississippi, and
the 14.6 percent in West Virginia.
…
By
2017, for example, the government’s pro-migration policies had added 11 million
people to the state’s native population of 29 million people. The huge inflow
means that one-in-four residents are immigrants.
Numerous
studies have shown many millions of foreigners want to migrate into Americans’
society. For example, another five million Central American residents
want to migrate into the United States, according to a Gallup survey published
right after the 2018 midterm elections.
Gallup
also noted “three percent of the world’s adults — or nearly 160 million people
— say they would like to move to the U.S.”
California's poverty rate is worse than Alabama &
Mississippi, says Census Bureau. The major cause of this huge change is
immigration policy which spikes housing costs & shrinks wages -- and
delivers huge gains for investors in real-estate & corp. shares. http://bit.ly/2mgvBlW
California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs
Steyer’s promise to welcome illegals is echoed by the other
investor billionaire in the Democrats’ primary, Mike Bloomberg, the former
mayor of New York. In January, he promised to make illegals comfortable with
Americans’ money, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Well,
it’s a no brainer. You give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people.
We’re not going to deport them anyways, it’s outrageous. If you look in New
York City, we make sure that people felt comfortable, regardless of their
immigration status, to come and get city services. I was always determined that
they would not be afraid to come. Somebody could need like life-threatening
things and does not get medical care. This is not a game. You’ve got to make
sure that they’re okay.
Housing
costs in Bloomberg’s New York are very high because it has huge populations of
illegal and legal immigrants. The result is that it has a homeless population
of roughly 92,000, and also the nation’s highest rate of
homelessness, at 46 homeless for every 10,000 people.
High
housing costs also make it difficult for Americans to move into towns and
cities that have better-paying jobs, according to a 2017 study about
the rising wealth gap in the
United States. Americans “are frozen where they live,” said Tom Donohue,
the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at a January 9 meeting.
But nearly all of the Democrats in the 2020 election have called
for more migrants — without showing any concern for the impact on Americans’
housing costs.
“We
could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million people,” Joe
Biden told
Democrats at an August event in Des Moines, Iowa. “The idea
that a country of 330 million people is cannot absorb people who are in
desperate need … is absolutely bizarre … I would also move to
increase the total number of immigrants able to come to the United
States.”
Sen.
Elizabeth Warren’s immigration plan, for
example, is titled “A Fair and Welcoming Immigration System.” It says:
We
need expanded legal immigration that will grow our economy, reunite families,
and meet our labor market demands … s president, I will immediately issue
guidance to end criminal prosecutions for simple administrative immigration
violations … As President, I’ll issue guidance ensuring that detention is
only used where it is actually necessary because an individual poses a flight
or safety risk … I’ll welcome 125,000 refugees in my first year, and
ramping up to at least 175,000 refugees per year by the end of my first term.
The
impact of federal immigration policy on Americans’ housing costs is taboo among
establishment reporters. But those costs were touted by a group of investors
lobbying Congress to raise housing prices by importing more immigrants. A
booklet by the Economic Innovation Group says:
The
relationship between population growth and housing demand is clear. More people
means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less demand … As a
result, a shrinking population will lead to falling prices and a deteriorating,
vacancy-plagued housing stock that may take generations to clear
…
The
potential for skilled immigrants to boost local housing markets is clear.
Notably, economist Albert Saiz (2007) found a 1% increase in population from
immigration causes housing rents and house prices in U.S. cities to rise
commensurately, by 1%
On
January 9, Donohue noted New Yorkers blocked the plan by Amazon and the city
government to build a new corporate headquarters in the city. The residents
protested the development plan partly because it would have driven up rents and
housing costs, said Donohue. “It is a very potent issue,” he observed.
A lobbying group for investors admits mass migration
helps investors in major coastal cities but 'fails' Americans in heartland
& rural towns. So it urges less immigration? No - it urges more migration
to spike family housing prices outside major cities! http://bit.ly/2VCZYUt
NYT Boosts Investors' Campaign for More Immigrant Workers,
Consumers
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as
impoverished Americans wait
Want
some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless
encampments hovering around?
Try the
reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the
U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely
unemployable. Those
are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier.
Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold
awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the
tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these emerging shantytowns are in
blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants - Orange County, San
Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a connection? At a minimum,
it's worth looking at.
The Trump
administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development is finally trying
to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals prepare to enter the U.S. this
year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do it yesterday.
The plan would scrap Clinton-era
regulations that allowed illegal
immigrants to sign up for
assistance
without having to disclose their
status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing
have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all
applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)
database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other
welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification,
though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our
citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of
past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public
housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens
attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off
of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times
notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and some illegal immigrant
families are getting full rides based on just one member being born in the
U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S.
in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along
with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing. Plus lots of cheesy news coverage about how heartwarming it all is.
That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants
would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem
of course is that Americans who paid into these programs, and the subset who
find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact being shut out.
The
fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the virtues of illegal
immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice" for them, but the
hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are stealing from
others as they take this housing benefit under legal technicalities. That's not
a good thing under anyone's theological law. But hypocrisy is comfortable
ground for the entire open borders lobby as they shamelessly
celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the impoverished of the U.S.
out cold.
The Trump
administration is trying to have this outrage fixed by summer. But don't
imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the media sob stories,
the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays Over a Billion in Welfare to
Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
In
2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to
illegal aliens and their families. That figure amounts to 25 percent of the total
spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to Fox News.
The
state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the
country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew
reported.
Approximately
a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles
County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the
United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The
welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los Angeles County
Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food stamp costs for
the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9 billion in 2016.
The
data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than 60,000
families received a total of $181 million.
Over
58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in 2015 and more
than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert
Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the
costs represent “the tip of the iceberg.”
“They
get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can cost the
government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things like
education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February
of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution making it a sanctuary
city. The resolution did not provide any new legal protections to their
immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In
October 2017, former California governor Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into
law. This bill made California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary
state.” The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California
over the law. A federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took
effect on Jan. 1, 2018.
According to Center for
Immigration Studies, “The new law does many things: It forbids all
localities from cooperating with ICE detainer notices, it bars any law
enforcement officer from participating in the popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police from inquiring
about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some
counties in California have protested its implementation and joined the Trump
administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s
campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants did not end with the
exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is just as focused as
Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the expense of California
taxpayers.
California’s
budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One California program, which
provides free legal assistance to all aliens, including those facing
deportation, and makes California’s public universities easier for
illegal-alien students to attend.
According
to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated
12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is
a $116 billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each
year, after deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal
immigrants.
BLOG:
MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN
THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY, THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST
OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.
New
data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million non-citizens
now live in the United States.
ANALYSIS: Bloomberg engaged in corporate takeover of the Democratic Party
Mike Bloomberg is using his vast personal fortune to commandeer the Democratic Party, discarding tradition and ignoring the party establishment in an unorthodox bid to capture the presidential nomination.
The former New York City mayor is moving to leapfrog entrenched Democrats with carefully laid plans that follow time-honored rules for seeking the presidential nomination. Bloomberg’s approach is reminiscent of another billionaire candidate initially dismissed as a long shot. In 2016, President Trump crashed a crowded Republican primary, flouting party norms as he elbowed out established politicians.
Bloomberg is skipping Iowa and other early nominating contests popular with grassroots Democrats and the party's establishment. The 77-year-old media mogul is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to field massive, high-paid ground and digital operations and to blanket television airwaves across the country in a big play for 14 states that vote on Super Tuesday, March 3. He is paying for all of it out of his own, deep pockets.
“Bloomberg recognizes that a crowded field has resulted in an electorate that isn't solidly behind anyone,” said Ed Espinoza, a Democratic operative in Austin, Texas, active in efforts to turn the state blue. “Thus, the unconventional strategy of skipping the first four states might actually work this time around. And if it doesn't, it's a great launching pad for a new super PAC or 501(c)4 organization to mobilize voters for November.”
The Bloomberg campaign is less a coalition than it is a virtual shadow party. He is strictly self-funding, declining to solicit or accept donations. He is not endorsed by major liberal groups that might influence his agenda. Just 10 Democratic politicians or influential party operatives have backed him, according FiveThirtyEight’s endorsement tracker. Should Bloomberg’s gambit fail, he is promising to keep the lights on at his campaign and put it to work for whoever wins the nomination.
If the ex-mayor follows through, he could wield unusual influence over the party. The Democratic National Committee is stretched thin, underfunded and outmanned by the Republican National Committee and its robust field and data programs deployed continuously since 2014. Without Bloomberg’s help, the Democratic nominee might have trouble competing with the Trump campaign.
“There’s no doubt that to beat Donald Trump you want people going all-in,” said Neil Sroka, spokesman for Democracy For America, a liberal activist group. “But I don’t think anyone is saying that’s a good thing for our democracy.”
Democracy for America is neutral in the primary, although it's generally supportive of Bernie Sanders, a socialist, and Elizabeth Warren. The Left is suspicious of Bloomberg, whom they criticize as hailing from the party’s “corporate wing.” The Bloomberg campaign told the Washington Examiner that it has no hidden agenda. “Mike is committed to defeating Donald Trump, no matter what happens,” spokeswoman Erin McPike said. “He’s running because he’s the best person to do it.”
Bloomberg's power over Democrats is related to his money. He claims he is willing to spend $1 billion — on himself or the eventual nominee. Most of his ideas are consistent with those of the moderate-to-liberal Democratic establishment.
Trump spent far less of his own money but still wrested the party from the Washington GOP establishment based on the power of his personality and with a populist platform that appealed to conservatives and working-class voters harmed by the economy. He took a sledgehammer to GOP orthodoxy on foreign policy, trade, and other issues, while agreeing to adopt priorities such as repealing Obamacare, appointing conservative judges, and cutting taxes.
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