Monday, February 10, 2020

CA GOV NEWSOM SAYS LINDSEY GRAHAM AND McCONELL ARE DANGEROUS AND NANCY PELOSI SHOULD BE BURNED AT THE STAKE LIKE ANY wITCH


CA Gov. Newsom: Lindsey Graham ‘an Embarrassment,’ McConnell ‘Dangerous’

1:33

Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) criticized Republican senators who supported President Donald Trump on ABC’s “The View” on Monday, going as far as to call Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) an “embarrassment” and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “dangerous.”
Newsom said, “Hey, I’m not going to turn into Lindsey Graham. I’m going to stand on principle. I’m going to fight for our adverse populations, fight for women’s rights, for the environment, for my kids and grandkids. We’re going to stand up to a bully. We’re not going to capitulate. We’re going to do the right damn thing. We’re not trying to put a crowbar in the front wheel of his agenda, but at the same time, our folks, we’re going to have their backs, and he needs to know that. Again, we’re winning. We’re not losing. So you know what? Damn it. We need people to stand up on principle. We need people to stand up for a cause.’
When Co-host Joy Behar asked why Republicans do not stand up to Trump, Newsom said, “They’re legitimately scared.”
Behar asked, “Lindsey Graham is that scared?”
Newsom said, “He’s an embarrassment. He’s an embarrassment. He really Is.”
Asked about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Newsom said, “Mitch McConnell is dangerous, not just an embarrassment.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN


Time for classless, clueless Pelosi to go

For nearly ninety minutes, Americans of all races, ages, ethnicities, and occupations listened to President Trump highlight specific achievements of his first three years in office during his State of the Union address.  For nearly ninety minutes, those same Americans watched Speaker Pelosi sit in her chair on the dais, refusing to stand up, refusing to applaud, playing nervously with her dentures, shuffling the speech copy back and forth like she was confused reading a Waffle House menu, while obstinately making faces at her caucus when President Trump spoke.  And to top it off, when President Trump closed out his SOTU 2020 speech claiming that American excellence is back; that America is strong once again; she tore up the speech copy like my 4 year-old grandson after he is told he cannot watch another cartoon.
She is classless.  She is unworthy and undeserving of the title The Speaker of the House of Representatives.  The people of Northern California who elected her should be ashamed.  The Congress should censure such classless actions.
So, I ask Ms. Pelosi:  What contents of President Trump’s SOTU 2020 were so objectionable?  Was it any of the numerous economic successes of the country since 2016?  Completed trade deals with three world mega-powers?  Seventy percent growth in the stock market?  Historical low unemployment for nearly every racial or ethnic group?  Historic levels of Americans in the workforce?  Historical levels of Americans off of welfare-based economics?  Historical levels of women entering the workforce and securing new employment? Promises of protections for religious freedoms?  Promises to take care of and to celebrate hard working officers and agents of America’s law enforcement agencies… state, local, and federal?  Promises to take care of Americans first by ending streaming immigration of citizens of other nations with no reasonable asylum claims? Promises to end senseless warfare placing American troops at risk?  Promises to protect Americans abroad and at home by eliminating the heads of terrorist organizations responsible for killing thousands?
Or, was it the tributes to American service men and women, both fallen and alive?  Tributes to emerging world leaders seeking to bring amazing, history-rich countries from socialist oppression into a modern, successful economic system where individual freedoms are valued and celebrated?  Tributes to Americans who faced dire poverty, drug addiction, and homelessness, but who chose to turn their lives around as successful business owners?
Or perhaps she was consumed by a more basic reason as she sat there looking at the failed House Managers, the know-nothing Squad, and 150 other Democrat party sheep (many of whom probably yearn for the Democrat party of just a few years ago), a reason that is nothing more than a pure and utter disdain and hatred of President Trump (and his successes) after three years of wasted and failed efforts to end his presidency without cause or justification?
Ms. Pelosi’s time in Congress should be over.  After years of self-dealing and profiting off of her position, her city is a cesspool of economic waste, homelessness, public drug use, and a sanctuary for illegal immigrants and criminals.  As a Northern California homeowner, I have had enough.  #PelosiOUT.

Pelosi’s Lack of Decorum Is A Revelation


Professor Jonathan Turley of Georgetown University Law School wrote in The Hill of the Speaker’s State of the Union behavior, “Pelosi has shredded decades of tradition, decorum and civility that the nation could use now more than ever.” He also described her with the words “petty,” “distempered,” and “inappropriate.”  She failed to introduce the President properly, and then was particularly out of line when she tore up his speech after grimacing and showing petulant expressions throughout the President’s speech.
Turley asserted that she should resign from office as the Speaker as her breaches of decorum at the State of Union were the worst of all those he has criticized over the years. For Turley, it is important because decorum is a kind of unifying glue. It is the fallback M.O., the detachment whereby differences of person and policy are transcended in our republic.  He might just as well have called for the entire Democrat caucus to resign and be replaced by people of honor and integrity.  It is at that point that the analysis seems to fade into fantasy. 
Sadly, at this time in history, Turley’s view is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Instead of decorum being the way unity is maintained as in the past, decorum now serves mainly as a mask covering a profound dislocation, a profound disunity.  Her lack of decorum and the unconscionable, implacable hostility of the Democrats of the House and Senate reveals the extreme political animosity that presently afflicts our country. 
We are faced with an incredible disunity, so intense that no appearance of unity in the form of decorum can cover it up.  The grim face of that disunity appeared at the State of the Union address, and was most visible in the egregious behavior of Speaker Pelosi.  

Decorum is only one aspect of unity, but can never substitute for unity. If unity of purpose, of conscience, and of our varied constituencies is not present then decorum becomes a mere cover-up.  Our national motto is e pluribus unum not e pluribus decorumatum.

Decorum has morphed over the past few decades into being a mask over the truth that laws have been passed and policies enacted that have not been of the people, by the people nor for the people.  Ill-conceived and destructive policies have been implemented and decorum is only the veneer of “bi-partisanship.”  

The jungle rot of the past 40-50 years of identity politics, globalism (i.e., the dilution of our national sovereignty), shift in our national identity – for approximately half the citizens -- from land of opportunity to land of exploitation, out of control immigration (fueled by our ever-expanding welfare system), and the decline of education owing to circumvention of the Tenth Amendment and the leftist ideology of too many educators, have all taken place behind the closed door of “decorum.”

“Decorum” was in place when China was admitted to the WTO.  This giant step towards globalism took place under Democratic initiatives that carried over into the Bush administration.  This admission made it easier for multinational corporations to open new markets in the Peoples’ Republic of China, but it also made China wealthier, and enabled the tyrants heading up that country to consolidate their power.  We aided and abetted tyranny thereby, but because of decorum – to maintain a veneer of gentlemanly acceptance – the utter horror of that decision was not brought to the fore. Bi-partisanship and decorum merged to create a false face of “progress.”

There was a ridiculous decorum shown by Pres. G.W. Bush when he was vilified incessantly as Hitler and insulted day and night by the Dems.  Unlike Pres. Trump, he did not say a peep. He remained above the fray, determined not to stoop to the level of his critics and the mean-spirited ones who heaped scorn upon his word choice errors and scorned him publicly and incessantly as a mental midget.

Decorum was in place by upping federal invasion of local prerogatives in education with the No Child Left Behind legislation and with Race To The Top Moneys. These initiatives enabled federal leverage on state education policy via implementation of social engineering through Common Core.  Not only are the educational premises of this program dubious, but students must answer 400 personal questions which go into a federal database permanently.

When this writer was growing up prior to 1973, both major parties accepted the value of every life, including the unborn.  Some objected, but it was a moral norm not to abort babies although many still did so.  The Republicans, believing in decorum, did not denounce Democrats relentlessly, nor did they organize protests against the Democrats at their conventions for their stand on this issue.  Yes – children can be dismembered and killed because mommy lacked self-control and couldn’t stay in a vertical position, and then, feeling that a newborn will interfere with her party life or other indulgences and comforts decides to do away with the child.

Just as the cultural Marxists have aspired to destroy the American family, we see Obergefell v. Hodges allowing the marriage of two men or two women cutting against thousands of years of family identities in all tribes, nations, cultures, and continents. But decorum says there will be differences of opinion on the most controversial matters, and we must applaud politely for the rights of others with whom we disagree.  How can homosexual marriage be considered a Constitutional right when it was voted down in 36 states including twice in California?  Education, birth, and marriage are not governed from Washington under the enumerated powers; yet, at present, they are so governed with relatively little pushback. Why so little pushback? The answer: decorum.

Professor Turley’s concern for decorum is a call to continue the false face of a false unity and a false message to the American people.  When candidate Trump called Hillary a crook, he broke all decorum since Hillary had been a First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and Presidential nominee of the Dems. With a resume like that, calling her a crook was deemed by many as rude and unacceptable. Yet, many of us loved that insult of her majesty, Ice Queen of Narnia. The days of decorum as a valid hiding place were coming to an end. We all know a “fish rots from the head down.”  Nancy revealed herself at the State of the Union as the source of the stinking, rotten, soulless behavior of the Leftocratic House. Her “mistakes” are actually a revelation.

"The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas."





On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.

ifornia Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
December 20, 2019
California
Economy, finance, and budgets
“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-

feudal kingdom, with 
the nation’s widest 

gap between middle and upper incomes—72 

percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 

percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly 

half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles 

or 
San Francisco, which now has the highest 

property crime rate among major cities. California

hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of 

course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.

This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur described the American as “this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context.

State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has 

sued the administration numerous times over 

immigration policy while he helps ensure 

California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal 

immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal 

residents have received driver’s licenses, and 

they qualify for free health care, too. 

San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants 
Such radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to 

help them move up. But today’s educators appear more 

interested in political indoctrination than results. Among the 

50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-

income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, 

that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who 

leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, 

rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and 

proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk

about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate 

Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably TexasTennesseeNevadaColorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe NationU.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change course is now.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of UsHis book on the return to feudalism will be released next year.


Report: California ‘Entirely’ Responsible for Nation’s Rise in Homelessness

Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty
20 Dec 20192,076
2:41
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported Friday that the nation’s homeless population rose 2.7% as of January 2019, an increase it said was “entirely” driven by a rise of 16.4% in the state of California.
The Associated Press reported:
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is reporting its third consecutive increase in its homelessness projection, based on a summary of its annual report obtained by the Associated Press.
President Trump has been highly critical of the homeless problem in California, and HUD said the increase seen in its January snapshot was caused “entirely” by a 16.4% increase in the state’s homeless population.
“As we look across our nation, we see great progress, but we’re also seeing a continued increase in street homelessness along our West Coast where the cost of housing is extremely high,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said. “In fact, homelessness in California is at a crisis level and needs to be addressed by local and state leaders with crisis-like urgency.”
In the January 2018 count, almost 553,000 people were counted as homeless. That number rose to about 568,000 this year.
The number of homeless veterans, and the number of homeless families with children, dropped.
It is not clear whether the rise in California is wholly California’s fault. Homeless people from other states often relocate to California, partly because the winter weather is more tolerable (though also because of generous welfare benefits).
President Donald Trump has proposed federal intervention in California to help solve the problem. HUD Secretary Ben Carson recently visited the state to assess the problem.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Breitbart News on Thursday evening that the homeless crisis is “an embarrassment, it is unacceptable. And we’ve got to own it, we’ve got to own up and solve it.”
Volume 90%

However, he has pushed back against federal intervention, saying more federal money is needed, but not federal control.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

In a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by about 12.5 percent. In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor force, American workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent.

 

 

Bernie Sanders: ‘Of Course’ Cheap Illegal Workers Drive Down U.S. Wages

Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
 14 Jan 2020326
3:30
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) admits cheaper illegal alien workers drive down wages for America’s working and middle class but continues to support amnesty for illegal aliens, decriminalization of the United States-Mexico border, and throwing out President Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” executive order.
Sanders navigated through the issue during an interview with the New York Times, attempting to explain his previous statements where he has admitted that opening the U.S. border is detrimental to the nation-state and has slammed the concept of hemispheric open borders.
During the exchange, Sanders says “of course” cheaper illegal alien workers hired by businesses at “$5 an hour” will “lower wages” for America’s working class, who are often looking for entry-level jobs.
“Yeah, if you’re being paid $5 — if you’re being paid $5 an hour, now of course it’s going to lower wages,” Sanders said. “Why would I hire at a higher wage?”
Later in the interview, though, Sanders backs away from immigration’s wage-suppression impact on Americans and focuses on a $15 minimum wage — suggesting that illegal aliens be legalized and paid the same wage as Americans.
“All I am saying is that if for whatever reason, I’m paying you $5 an hour, okay,” Sanders said. “You don’t think that’s going to lower the wages that she gets?”
Legal immigration levels, where 1.2 million mostly low-skilled legal immigrants and hundreds of thousands of foreign visa workers are admitted to the country annually, have driven the number of foreign born workers in the U.S. to its highest level since 1996. This is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who enter the country every year.
Most immigrants to the U.S. immediately begin competing for blue-collar and white-collar jobs against millions of Americans who want full-time employment.

No Labor Shortage: 11M Americans Out of Work but Want Full-Time Jobs



Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s current mass legal immigration system burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants. Similarly, research has revealed how Americans’ wages are crushed by the country’s high immigration levels.
For every one percent increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’ occupations, their weekly wages are cut by about 0.5 percent, Camarota finds. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.75 percent since 17.5 percent of the workforce is foreign born.
In a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by about 12.5 percent. In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor force, American workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent.
Likewise, every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of low-skilled U.S. occupations reduces wages by about 0.8 percent. Should 15 percent of low-skilled jobs be held by foreign-born workers, it would reduce the wages of native-born American workers by perhaps 12 percent.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

 

Report: California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24

Middle-class wages in progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.

“Earnings for California’s workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In 2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146 billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says, even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s pro-immigration policies:
 In just the last decade alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults are working full-time.
Specifically, inflation-adjusted median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35 hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
The wage and housing problems are made worse — especially for families — by the loss of employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by cutting costs. The report says:
Many workers are being paid little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In 2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45 an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007, the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title “Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%.


The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J 

NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving Machines



.
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.S

THE INVITED INVADING HORDES: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."

"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."

PAUL BEDARD - THE STAGGERING COST OF MEXICO'S OCCUPATION AND LOOTING - Should we be helping our own instead?

 

Record $135 billion a year for illegal immigration, average $8,075 each, $25,000 in NY

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/record-135-billion-a-year-for-illegal-immigration-average-8075-each-25000-in-ny/article/2635757

 

by Paul Bedard | 
The swelling population of illegal immigrants and their kids is costing American taxpayers $135 billion a year, the highest ever, driven by free medical care, education and a huge law enforcement bill, according to the the most authoritative report on the issue yet.
And despite claims from pro-illegal immigration advocates that the aliens pay significant off-setting taxes back to federal, state and local treasuries, the Federation for American Immigration Reform report tallied just $19 billion, making the final hit to taxpayers about $116 billion.
State and local governments are getting ravaged by the costs, at over $88 billion. The federal government, by comparison, is getting off easy at $45 billion in costs for illegals.
President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and conservatives in Congress are moving aggressively to deal with illegals, especially those with long criminal records. But their effort is being fought by courts and some 300 so-called "sanctuary communities" that refuse to work with federal law enforcement.
The added burden on taxpayers and the unfairness to those who have applied to come into the United States through legal channels is also driving the administration's immigration crackdown.
The report, titled "The Fiscal Burden Of Illegal Immigration on U.S. Taxpayers," is the most comprehensive cost tally from FAIR. It said that the costs have jumped about $3 billion in four years and will continue to surge unless illegal immigration is stopped. It was provided in advance exclusively to Secrets.
"Clearly, the cost of doing nothing to stop illegal immigration is far too high," said FAIR Executive Director Dan Stein. "President Trump has laid out a comprehensive strategy to regain control of illegal immigration and bring down these costs," said Stein. "Building the wall, enhancing interior enforcement and mandating national E-Verify will go a long way in bringing these ridiculously high costs under control," he added.
Over 68 often shocking pages, FAIR documents the average $8,075 in state, local and federal spending for each of the of 12.5 million illegal immigrants and their 4.2 million citizen children.
Broadly, the costs include $29 billion in medical care, $23 billion for law enforcement, $9 billion in welfare, $46 billion for education.
Just consider the cost of teaching an illegal alien child who doesn't speak English. FAIR estimates an average cost of over $12,000 a year, and that can reach $25,000 in New York. Add to that welfare, health care, school lunches, and the per student price soars.
In state costs alone, California leads the list at $23 billion per year, followed by Texas at $11 billion, and New York at $7.4 billion.
And it also documents the taxes paid and how they don't come close to offsetting the costs. What's more, FAIR noted that 35 percent of the illegal population operate in an underground economy hidden from tax collectors. And worse, employers hire illegals and either pay them cheaply or under the table.
"The United States recoups only about 14 percent of the amount expended annually on illegal aliens. If the same jobs held by illegal aliens were filled by legal workers, at the prevailing market wage, it may safely be presumed that federal, state and local governments would receive higher tax payments," said FAIR.
Key findings pulled from the report:
·                     The staggering total costs of illegal immigrants and their children outweigh the taxes paid to federal and state governments by a ratio of roughly 7 to 1, with costs at nearly $135 billion compared to tax revenues at nearly $19 billion.
·                     The nearly $135 billion paid out by federal and state and local taxpayers to cover the cost of the presence of 12.5 million illegal aliens and their 4.2 million citizen children amounts to approximately $8,075 per illegal alien and citizen child prior to taxes paid, or $6,940 per person after taxes are paid.
·                     On the federal level, medical ($17.14 billion) is by far the highest cost, with law enforcement coming second ($13.15 billion) and general government services ($8 billion) third.
·                     At the state and local level, education ($44.4 billion) was by far the largest expense, followed by general public services ($18.5 billion) and medical ($12.1 billion).
·                     The top three states based on total cost to state taxpayers for illegal immigrants and their children: California ($23 billion); Texas ($10.9 billion), and New York ($7.5 billion).
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com