America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN JOE BIDEN AND THE NAFTA DEMOCRATS HAND SOCIAL SECURITY TO 50 MILLION ILLEGALS THEY WILL HAND CITIZENSHIP TO?
The experts at the Tax Foundation fret that the current debate about extending the debt ceiling has lost track of the fact that Social Security is a major contributor to our growing deficit and debt crisis.
They may be right about the fiscal ADHD on Capitol Hill, however, let’s make sure we are keeping track of the right discussion. It is true that both the growing deficit and long-term stability of Social Security are valid concerns that should draw the attention of Americans. These issues deserve the attention of all voters -- just not in the same sentence.
There is a structural difference between the challenges implied by the debt ceiling discussion under consideration on Capitol Hill and the financial imbalances of Social Security. The former is a matter of how much money Congress spent in the past that we didn't have, while the other is a problem of how much money the program will not spend in the future.
Typically, not spending money does not drive deficits.
So, there is a bit of sleight of hand. The experts of today are worried that voters at some point in the future might decide to pay beneficiaries scheduled benefits regardless of the program's ability to pay them. The politicians of today on the other hand are worried that voters won’t step in, leaving a generation of voters wondering what happened to the sacred trust of which politicians are so enamored.
It is possible that voters in the future will take on the obligations of the past. If it happens, the ensuing deficits are a matter of public choice. You can't blame Social Security entirely if voters in the future voluntarily turn off the kill switch.
That decision carries a pretty big price tag. Based on the last trustees report, Social Security expects to reduce benefits to the level of revenue received by the program in 2033 (2032 if you ask CBO). That means that a woman turning 80 years old today generally expects to live long enough to see benefits reduced by 24 percent.
None of this is really surprising news. Pretty much all Americans have known for 30 years that Social Security would come up short in the 2030s, a prospect that has earned annual reminders. If Congress does nothing about the future path of the program, beneficiaries of the present day will get checks reduced if Washington follows the current path.
That is the promise, and has been for 30 years. From the latest report, trustees recommended that “lawmakers address the projected trust fund shortfalls in a timely way in order to phase in necessary changes gradually and give workers and beneficiaries time to adjust to them.”
Yet the voters have elected Congress after Congress to stand to the side as the program’s finances have continued to unravel. At this point, congressional inaction accounts for roughly 2/3rds of the problem we face today. We vote for people who do nothing.
You may not like the outcome where your check shrinks, but ultimately the blame starts in the mirror. Whoever you are, and wherever you live, most voters have played an integral role in the stagnation of Social Security reform over the past 40 years. We have voted for the guy who promises to keep us from getting what we are promised. Right now, many Americans are lining up behind a presidential candidate who has promised to stand to the side.
Given these choices, no one can really be surprised if future voters allow the program to keep the promises it has made.
Voters generally do not like the promise that they have. So, they tend to ignore it. They have also ignored the terms of Social Security, which the Supreme Court clarified in 1960. If you contribute today to cover the cost of current retirees, maybe a future generation will do the same when you are too old to work.
Politicians by and large want to protect seniors from getting what they were promised. To that end, they are talking about passing the benefit reductions currently promised to current seniors on to future retirees. Essentially, let's agree with ourselves that our children will take the benefit cuts that we will not discuss. It is genius -- provided that our children do not notice.
As it is, I am not worried that voters or policymakers in Congress have lost sight of the staggering costs that Social Security might add to the government’s fiscal crisis. What worries me is the number of people who believe that Congress will step in at the last moment with fairy dust and Easter eggs to prevent older voters from getting what they have been promised.
Brenton Smith (think@heartland.org) is a policy advisor with The Heartland Institute.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according toan August 2022 pollcommissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
Biden hides the truth at the border — he’s letting in thousands By Mark Krikorian New York Post, May 31, 2023 Excerpt: But as in so many other areas of government policy, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is set on brazenly violating the immigration law and the Constitution until somebody stops it.
AMLO and Biden: Agents of Immigration Chaos By Phillip Linderman American Conservative, May 26, 2023 Excerpt: As Biden’s initiative played out over months, President Lopez Obrador, for once, issued no protest, apparently as oblivious as his American counterpart to the looming unintended consequences. Blinded by his own open-border ideology, the stubborn AMLO seems never to have analyzed the impact of Washington’s unilateral migrant policies on Mexico’s national sovereignty. Much more subtle than previous Yanqui strong-arm tactics, President Biden was nevertheless blithely unleashing powerful outside forces that would trample Mexico.
The Atlantic Magazine: The Feds Use Migration to Cut Wages
The federal government uses immigration to suppress Americans’ salaries and wages, according to an article in the Atlantic, which is a very pro-migration and establishment magazine.
The federal policymakers believe that “labor is just another commodity, like wood or oil, and Americans are best off when it is plentiful and cheap,” the June 2 article says.
Author Oren Cass, the founder of the mainstream American Compass think-tank, wrote:
American public policy has largely managed to keep things that way. Over the past 50 years, as both parties supported the entry of millions of unskilled immigrants and the offshoring of entire industries, America’s per capita gross domestic product more than doubled after adjusting for inflation. Productivity of labor rose by a similar amount, and corporate profits per capita nearly tripled. Yet over the same time period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly earnings of the typical worker rose by less than 1 percent.
The massive distortion is revealed by the declining share of new wealth that goes to employees since about 1970.
Amid migration, technological centralization, and outsourcing to China, U.S. employees’ share of new wealth dropped 10 points from 1970 to 2014 — from 51.6 percent to 41.9 percent — according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Employees’ share jumped 1 point up under President Donald Trump’s lower-migration policy. But their share seems to be declining again under President Joe Biden’s easy migration rules.
A May 4 report from Cass’ American Compass showed how migration allows investors to minimize pay to workers:
From 1972 to 2022, real corporate profits per capita rose 185%. GDP per capita rose 141%. Productivity rose 135%. The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers rose 1%. How is that even possible?
It is possible because employers will tend to raise wages under one, and only one, condition: when they cannot hire the workers they need at the existing wage. All of labor economics turns on that simple fact.
This post-1970 economic shift has moved many trillions of dollars from wage earners to investors from 1970 to 2023, thrilling investors and their allies.
The establishment’s cheap-labor bubble burst in 2020 when the coronavirus crash blocked the supply of new migrant workers. The resulting shortfall allowed many Americans to change jobs in search of higher wages.
Cass wrote:
In the coronavirus pandemic’s aftermath, for the first time in a long time, many employers are discovering that they can’t fill jobs at the low wages they’re accustomed to offering. “We hear from businesses every day that the worker shortage is their top challenge,” Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said last May. This is the precise circumstance under which wages might finally rise. Instead, the business community is looking to government to get them out of a jam, and leaders on both sides of the aisle seem only too eager to help.
The article carried an online headline, “A Labor Shortage is a Great Problem to Have.”
WATCH: Rep. Lee: “No Border Security Bill Until GOP OKs Even More Migrants”:
@USHouseJudiciaryGOP / YouTube
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But now President Joe Biden and his deputies are dramatically opening the inflow of foreign workers via legal, quasi-legal, and illegal migration routes.
“Immigration is a [policy] lever,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Axios.com in December 2022. “We’re down a million immigrants a year — that’s a workforce that we need.”
“There are businesses around this country that are desperate for workers [and] there are … desperate workers in foreign countries that are looking for jobs in the United States, ” Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, said on May 11.
“We’re working with the State Department on and DHS [Department of Homeland Security] … to make it easier for [college-graduate migrants] that have these skill sets that we think can really contribute to implementing these new policies, that we can bring them in faster,” White House official Katie Tobin said on May 15.
Cass continued:
This is a grave mistake—politically, economically, and morally. If employers are struggling to find workers, they should offer better pay and conditions. If that comes at the expense of some profits, or requires some prices to rise, well, that’s how markets are supposed to work. In most other contexts, capitalism’s proponents celebrate how the market creates incentives for businesses to solve problems. In that respect, a labor shortage is a great problem to have. Only by challenging employers to improve job quality and boost productivity will we find out what the market’s awesome power can achieve for American workers and their families.
Cass, however, did not offer a term to describe the federal government’s policy of lowering wages via migration.
The migrant inflow has successfullyforced down Americans’ wages and alsoboosted rentsandhousing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to therising death rateof poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow alsoreduces the politicalcloutof native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves fromthe needsandinterestsof ordinary Americans.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according toan August 2022 pollcommissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
WAR ON THE AMERICAN WORKER FOR CHEAPER WAGES. IS THAT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS?
U.S. Companies Plan over 400K Layoffs as Democrats Claim Business Needs More Foreign Workers to Hire
Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Companies in the United States have announced, so far this year, more than 400,000 layoffs — more than the layoffs announced in all of last year. The job cuts come as Democrats, on behalf of business special interests, demand more foreign competition in the labor market for employers to hire.
The employment data, collected by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. and published in Bloomberg, shows that roughly 417,500 layoffs have been announced from January through May by U.S. companies across sectors such as technology, banking, retail, and media, among others.
Compare those announced layoffs in just the first five months of this year to the 364,000 total layoffs announced in all of 2022. In tech, there have been almost 140,000 layoffs announced this year so far. This is only slightly fewer than the 169,000 layoffs in tech in 2001.
“Companies cited economic conditions and cost-cutting for more than half of the layoffs announced this year,” Bloomberg noted.
RELATED: GOP Rep. Hunt: Democrats’ Migration Pushes Americans into Poverty:
@USHouseJudiciaryGOP / YouTube
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At the same time, Democrats across the U.S. have suggested that business special interests complain about so-called labor shortages and thus the tens of thousands of border crossers and illegal aliens that President Joe Biden’s administration is admitting into the nation every month ought to be given immediate work permits.e email you provide. You may unsubscribe at any time.
“We have one message, let them work,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) told the Biden administration last month of the thousands of migrants who have arrived in the city since last year. “That is our clear message that we are sending. We must expedite work authorization for asylum seekers, not in the future, but now.”
Migrants camp out in front of the Watson Hotel after being evicted on January 30, 2023 in New York City. Migrants who have been staying at the Watson Hotel since arriving to NYC were evicted over the weekend to be relocated to the recently opened up migrant relief center for single adult men at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. The ones who refused have been camping out in front of the hotel since eviction. Several migrants who agreed to the relocation returned, complaining of lack of heat and bathroom space. (Leonardo Munoz/VIEWpress via Getty Images)
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has issued similar sentiments.
“… at the same time, we have this historic labor shortage, we also have this unprecedented influx of individuals arriving in New York — all of them legally seeking asylum,” Hochul said. “They’re eager to work, they want to work, they came here in search of work.”
WATCH: “Gyms Are for Children!” NY Parents Protest Plans to Use Public Schools for Migrant Shelters:
Christopher Leon Johnson via Storyful
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In Washington, DC, Democrats recently repeated many of the same talking points from the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce used to demand an endless flow of foreign workers whom jobless Americans would be forced to compete against.
“We’re ignoring the Business Roundtables of America who are crying out for employees to work alongside Americans,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) said during a committee hearing last month. “Let me be very clear, we have jobs for Americans, we have tech jobs for Americans, teaching jobs for Americans, law enforcement, firefighter jobs for Americans, but we’re a growing nation.”
As Breitbart News has chronicled, Biden has grown the U.S. payrolls by adding millions of foreign-born workers to the labor market while the share of native-born Americans in the labor market has continued to decline.
WATCH: Rep. Lee: No Border Security Bill Until GOP OKs Even More Migrants:
@USHouseJudiciaryGOP / YouTube
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John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
California State Senate Passes Bill to Give Illegal Migrants Unemployment Checks
California’s State Senate passed a bill last week to give unemployed illegal migrants $300 weekly unemployment checks for up to 20 weeks, despite the fact that the state faces a $32 billion budget deficit.
California’s fiscus has fallen in the space of one year from a surplus of $100 billion, partly based on federal cash for coronavirus relief, to a staggering deficit of $32 billion.
In his revised budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) cautioned legislators to maintain “prudence.” But under SB 227, “excluded” workers who are in the country illegally would be able to receive $300 per week in benefits.
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California’s unemployment insurance program is already controversial, having lost $30 billion in fraudulent claims during the pandemic. The state recently defaulted on a federal loan to cover a shortfall in benefits.
Now, the Washington Free Beacon reports, the bill, SB 227, proposed by State Sen. MarÃa Elena Durazo (D-Agoura Hills), has passed the State Senate and moves to the Assembly, with heavy potential implications:
Under SB 227, unemployment fund officials would be barred from asking for claimants’ social security number eligibility or contacting past or present employers to verify their job status. Instead, applicants would self-attest that they meet the requirements for the weekly checks: having earned at least $1,300 or worked at least 93 hours over three months. Acceptable documentation would include tax returns, transaction logs on payment apps, and receipts that show a commuting pattern.
The State Senate passed the measure just months after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) said the undocumented migrant influx could “break” California.
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The Golden State already offers free health coverage and driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. More than two million illegal immigrants live in California.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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