We have no idea how many of the homeless are illegal immigrants, but we do know that homeless shelters in big cities will not cooperate with blanket ICE searches for illegals.
Shelter workers are trained to request a warrant for a specific individual, and without that, they are told to keep ICE at bay.
The extent to which the ACLU and pro-illegal immigration organizations have gone to educate homeless shelters about how to deal with ICE indicates that the presence of illegals in these shelters is not insignificant.
Shelters are all-too-often in lesser supply than the demand for accommodations, especially during winter in brutal climes in places like Chicago.
Having walked the frigid streets of that city going from shelter to shelter in search of a homeless relative, I know something about the dynamics of how the homeless survive the unforgiving cold where a place in a shelter can mean the difference between freezing to death in the street or waking up alive.
Competition for safe harbor is fierce. And the homeless line up and prance in the cold to stay warm long before the shelters open.
American citizens -- even veterans, mothers, and children -- compete equally with illegals. This is the consequence of our so-called policy of “compassion” enunciated by open-border billionaires like Beto O’Rourke and liberal virtue signalers.
O’Rourke would like to send $5 billion to the failed states that have produced the immigration crisis. How many billions would solve our own humanitarian crisis of homelessness?
Illegal immigrants do not compete for resources or jobs with billionaires or smug middle-class professionals who drip with compassion and want to bring them into America in ever larger numbers.
But on the streets of our cities, illegals compete with the most vulnerable people in our society, just as decades ago when Cesar Chavez saw an unending supply of cheap illegal labor being a threat to the wellbeing of his union members.
A CEO that I know speaks insufferably of her support of “immigrants” and DACA, but she will never have to face competition from anyone crossing the border illegally. Her well-paid position in a Silicon Valley startup and her stock options are not at risk. But America’s homeless sleeping on the streets and in shelters, just a mile from her trendy townhouse in a gated San Francisco complex, will compete with these people for the basics of survival.
To date, their cause is not part of the 2020 Democrat political agenda. But an unceasing demand for more resources for the illegals charging the border is. No one discusses a limit on the resources to be allocated to illegals -- to feed, house, and clothe them.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D, Ca) can grandstand before the klieg lights by grilling those responsible for homeland security and immigration about conditions at the border, but she will not seize the bully pulpit for the thousands of homeless living under the Oakland maze not far from where she was born and a few miles down the street from where she went to law school.
The conditions of both our veterans and vulnerable youth living on the streets do not rise to be considered as even talking points in the current conversations about how the society is to be improved by a change of administration in 2020. The focus is almost entirely on our compassion for the illegals overwhelming the border, the vast number of whom are economic migrants, not refugees.
Oakland and Berkeley representative Barbara Lee (D) has been in Congress since 1988. She is an economic progressive, and she is strongly against deportation. But can you be against deportation while advocating for social services for your own poor who are living under highways?
Resources are finite. Solving the problems of one’s own poor -- who have grown in number since 1988 when almost no one lived under the maze -- should take precedence over the impossible task of rescuing the poor of Mexico and Central America, if not the world.
The truth is that the illegals are the latest trend in virtue signaling. My CEO acquaintance can sit with her friends in upscale San Francisco restaurants and talk about her compassion for the homeless and her political work for DACA while ignoring the plight of the people she practically steps over daily on Market Street.
Kamala Harris will demand more diapers and wipes for the children at the border while ignoring America’s own homeless under California’s freeways. Barbara Lee will tout her progressive credentials at the next election, but whatever her progressive ideology has done for Oakland and Berkeley’s impoverished, it seems neither to have touched the growing street population nor to have abated it.
Politics is not about finding solutions. It is about gesturing toward policies that will provide what the mass public thinks are solutions while mobilizing their votes.
If you want to see a meaningful change in both immigration and homeless policies, start inviting millions of middle-class professionals into America and give them quick licenses as doctors, lawyers, and accountants to compete with middle-class virtue signalers. Don’t invite poor people who will end up competing with America’s homeless for a warm grate on a pitiless Chicago winter night.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and a distinguished fellow with the Haym Salomon Center.
Paying for illegals' 'free' health care by fining Californians who can't afford Obamacare
The leftists running California's one-party state have done it again. They've rolled out a $312 billion budget that includes $98 million for free health care for illegal immigrants under the age of 26. That's a dinner triangle to all able-bodied foreign nationals working off the books that the free ride is about to arrive.
The expansion will take effect Jan. 1, 2020 and cost $98 million in the upcoming fiscal year. It will make California the first state to allow undocumented adults to sign up for state-funded health coverage.
The budget includes a fine on people who don’t buy health insurance known as an individual mandate. The fines were initially implemented as part of the federal Affordable Care Act law known as Obamacare, but Republicans acted in 2017 to roll them back. Newsom and legislative leaders say re-imposing the penalty at the state level will shore up the state’s health insurance marketplace and keep premiums from rising dramatically.
As if that $98 million is really going to cover it as migrants from Central America and beyond surge into the U.S. in record numbers, and five million from Latin America alone planning to enter the U.S. with or without papers.
California, remember, was quite convinced $39 billion would cover the cost of its famed bullet train up and down the state in 2008. The price tag now, with just a tiny portion of it out in the Central Valley to be built? $98 billion.
Given the incompetence of those numbers, you can bet the surplus that the money is about to be taken from is ... not going to remain a surplus.
All this, while the burned-out city of Paradise remains un-rebuilt due to all the state's environmental concerns. Priorities, see...
But it's not just that which makes the measure so objectionable.
The free health care - and Medi-Cal is very, very, free, with no deductibles for anything - is going to be paid for out of a new program of fines for California citizens who don't qualify for free health care, yet can't afford Obamacare - quite possibly due to the high cost they are paying for keeping a roof over their heads, for one.
The Associated Press reports that the few Republican legislators remaining have tried to make exactly that point in their objections:
Republicans on the legislative committee negotiating the budget voted against the proposal, arguing it was not fair to give health benefits to people who are in the country illegally while taxing people who are here legally for not purchasing health insurance.
A subsidy program is going into place, supposedly to "help" them, but you can bet it won't cover the average Californian who can't afford Obamacare. As for the illegals, well, when you work off the books, you can pretty well claim anything as your income, so rest assured that all those who want the free health care, no matter what they earn, are going to be able to get it.
So what we are about to see now is the fining of Californians trapped in the high cost of living brought on by leftist policies, in order to bankroll the state's abundant illegal immigrant population, which now stands at a quarter of the nation's count.
And the little claim at the bottom of that last cited paragraph from the Sacramento Bee suggests even more trouble on the horizon for Californians who can just barely pay those gargantuan Obamacare premiums: "keep premiums from rising dramatically."
What's the takeaway on that? That bankrolling illegals is going to make premiums rise on Californians who are stuck in the individual market, but rest assured, the hikes won't be dramatic.
Sound like a recipe for flight from the state? You would be insane if you didn't think so, and the state already is bleeding people. Fifty-three percent of the state's citizens, according to one poll, want to leave, and more than one report shows that the state lost more people than it gained, even with the border surge bringing new supplicants in. Voters know their votes don't count in a state where ballot-harvesting by illegal immigrants is routinely done now, so any discontent is virtually impossible to telegraph at the ballot box, and the leftist mafia running the state insists that this is what Californians want. Color me skeptical on all fronts.
The one thing worth watching for in this is not the cost overruns, though that should be an interesting topic. It's whether Californians will finally switch their voting patterns in sufficient numbers to finally get this crew out. The odds are against them with ballot-harvesting, yet still, still, one expects something to eventually blow. Maybe this will be what does it.
BLOG: THE MEXICAN TAX-FREE ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION YEARLY. THIS SAME COUNTY HANDS ILLEGAL ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS MORE THAN $1 BILLION IN WELFARE!
Eligibility would be determined by the same rules of Medicaid, based on annual income. As many young illegals are working off the books, for cash, they will have no official reported income regardless of how much they actually earn, insuring their eligibility for Medi-Cal.
California Says: ‘Go West, Young Illegals, Go West’
Doctors and hospitals are in the gunsights of many Democrats who want Medicare-for-all as a draconian price control scheme by government over all medical care in the US. Hospitals are told they charge too much and doctors are vilified for earning too much.
What a relief that a sugar daddy has appeared, a rich boyfriend, a benefactor with a fat wallet, ready to bestow his financial largess on financially strapped healthcare providers.
This sugar daddy is named Gavin, tall and handsome with good hair. I speak of California Governor Gavin Newsom, who finalized a deal with the California legislature, “to provide full health benefits to low-income illegal immigrants under the age of 26.”
California is the first state to provide such benefits to illegal or undocumented immigrants, depending on which term you prefer. Specifically, this group of adults, age 19 to 25 will have access to the state’s Medi-Cal program, California’s version of Medicaid.
California anticipates providing coverage to 100,000 people. I’m not sure how they arrived at this number since I’ve always heard that illegal immigrants “live in the shadows,” meaning we really don’t know how many there are. And when word gets out to the rest of the country, expect that 100,000 number to grow exponentially just as it would if California announced it was giving away cars to this same group of people.
BLOG: THE MEXICAN TAX-FREE ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION YEARLY. THIS SAME COUNTY HANDS ILLEGAL ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS MORE THAN $1 BILLION IN WELFARE!
Eligibility would be determined by the same rules of Medicaid, based on annual income. As many young illegals are working off the books, for cash, they will have no official reported income regardless of how much they actually earn, insuring their eligibility for Medi-Cal.
This scheme is to be funded by taxing those who do not have health insurance. Who might that be? Not the young illegals who how have free insurance. How about the small businessman who earns too much to qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford an Obamacare policy with massive premiums, copayments, and deductibles? Or the struggling wannabe actors and actresses in the same financial boat as the small businessman? Or the 60-year-old retiree, not yet eligible for Medicare but unable to afford private insurance given the higher premiums at her age?
How nice of California taxpayers, those American born or here legally, having their earnings confiscated to pay the medical bills of those not here legally. Who pays the medical bills of those Americans who can’t afford their medical care?
Interestingly undocumented elderly are not covered under this new plan. Sugar Daddy Newsom opposed this, preferring the young over the elderly, likely due to the much higher medical costs for those over age 65 compared to those under age 25.
This may have to do with voting preferences. It is unknown how many illegals vote, but younger voters tend to vote Democrat compared to older voters who lean Republican. Is this healthcare scheme a form of voter outreach?
Why are doctors and hospitals across America so grateful for their new sugar daddy?
Americans subsidize health care for illegal immigrants to the tune of $18.5 billion a year according to Forbes. Imagine being able to now offload some of this care to California?
Hospitals are required by law to render emergency care to everyone, regardless of a person’s ability to pay. A pregnant woman illegally enters the US, and when she goes into labor, the hospital is required to deliver the baby, caring for both baby and mother, at an average cost of $32,000.
What if the baby is born premature and needs a few weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, or is born with a heart or bowel defect, requiring additional surgery? The costs quickly escalate into 6-figure sums.
Labor and delivery is certainly common in the 19-25 age group. So are injuries that may require non-emergency treatment, such as a retinal detachment or a ligament tear in the knee. For the doctor, these patients are considered self-pay. Despite promises to pay all of their medical bills, some patients, once reasonably stable after surgery are gone with the wind, with no way to contact them, and no payment made for rendered services.
What if doctors and hospitals, when discussing costs of medical treatment, can now give the patient a map? A few hundred years ago, newspaper editor and author Horace Greeley advised the 19 to 25-year-olds of the day to “Go west young man”. The same phrase may become popular again, particularly in states adjacent to or close to California.
When faced with patients with non-emergent medical problems, direct these patients to the nearest east-west interstate, I-40, I-70, or I-80, and drive toward the setting sun until seeing the “Welcome to California” sign. Go west and allow generous California taxpayers to pick up the tab.
Hospitals won’t be stuck with bad debt and physicians won’t be stiffed after offering their time and expertise without compensation.
Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said this about an open-border immigration policy. "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state." Which is exactly what California offers, providing free healthcare to living in the state against the law.
While at the same time, California has an out of control homelessness problem, many of those homeless being American veterans. They are living legally in their own country yet living on the streets, in squalor, with rats and other vermin bringing back historic diseases like typhus and typhoid fever. Where is their sugar daddy governor? Busy pandering to those here illegally.
Down on their luck Americans are told to pound sand while illegals are lavished with drivers licenses, welfare benefits, and now healthcare. California cannot care for its own residents, but is opening its doors to the world, promising goodies that will do nothing but attract more of the world, regardless of laws.
When does it end? I’ve suggested that the Trump administration send refugees and illegals to sanctuary cities, so those cities have the opportunity to live with the consequences of their virtue signaling. Now doctors and hospitals can do the same. If California wants to be an open borders welfare state, it’s the least the rest of the country can do to help out by sending young undocumented immigrants to the land of milk and honey.
Instead of “the doctor will see you now”, expect to hear, “go west young man.”
Behind Trump’s clash with the Fed: Looming economic crisis and class conflict
18 April 2019
The repeated calls by President Donald Trump for the US Federal Reserve to loosen its monetary policy and provide a further boost to the stock market expose the economic and political reality behind the mask of official ideology.
In his latest remarks, contained in a tweet last Sunday, Trump said the Dow Jones Industrial Average would be 5,000 or even 10,000 points above its present near-record level if the Fed had not tightened interest rates last year. He demanded that the central bank resume the program of “quantitative easing,” under which it poured trillions into the financial markets in the wake of the 2008 finance crash.
For more than three decades the stock market has served as the primary financial mechanism through which the American ruling class has carried out an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the working population to the rich. Under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, the Dow has risen 17-fold since 1985 on the basis of a relentless assault on workers’ jobs and wages and cuts in education, health care and other social services.
Under Obama, the Dow rose more than 250 percent. Under Trump, it has risen a further 32 percent.
The official refrain has been the lie that “there is no money” for schools, health care, housing or pensions, while unlimited sums have been squandered to pay for more yachts, private islands and Manhattan penthouses for the modern-day aristocrats, along with new and more deadly conventional and nuclear weapons to prepare a new military Armageddon.
Wealth and income inequality have reached record levels, consolidating the rule of the financial oligarchy over every aspect of American social and political life.
Trump is simply declaring openly what the Fed has been doing throughout this period, behind the official pretence of “neutrality” and “independence”—and demanding that it do more of it.
If there are objections to Trump’s comments from the New York Times and other key sections of the political and media establishment, on the grounds that they infringe on the Fed’s “independence,” it is not because of any disagreement with the fundamental direction of his policies. They are concerned that Trump is seeking to transform the US central bank from the instrument of the ruling class as a whole into that of his own faction. But Trump’s factional opponents within the ruling elite base themselves on the same forms of financial parasitism as those sections for whom the real estate swindler-turned president speaks.
The legal mandate of the Fed is to adjust monetary policy so as to ensure stable prices and maximum employment, irrespective of the ups and downs of the stock market. But the Fed has been directly tailoring its policies to prop up the financial markets since the stock market plunge of October 1987, when Wall Street fell more than 22 percent in a single day and the then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan announced that the financial spigots were open.
This led to what became known as the Greenspan put: That when the markets began to falter, the Fed would be ready to step in to boost them with the provision of cheap money. Greenspan did make one attempt to curb what he termed “irrational exuberance” in 1996, but such was the adverse reaction from the financial elites that it was never again attempted.
From then on, the official mantra was that it was impossible to tell if a financial bubble was in formation and the markets had to be given their head, with the Fed intervening to support them when their speculative activities gave rise to a crisis.
This program was intensified after the financial crash of 2008, when the government doled out hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks and the Fed initiated its policy of quantitative easing, providing trillions of dollars of ultra-cheap money to ensure that the speculative binge continued and expanded.
At the same time, it was insisted that corporate taxes had to be continually reduced. This has now resulted in a situation where, as a recent analysis revealed, 60 US corporations, appropriating billions of dollars in profits, paid no tax in 2018, with some receiving a tax refund.
Trump’s latest intervention is accompanied by the claim that the US economy is powering ahead and could grow even faster if only the Fed stopped holding it back. But rather than indicating strength, Trump’s ultimatums express a deepening crisis and fear that the financial house of cards will collapse unless still more money is pumped into the system.
Claims of the underlying strength of the US economy are belied by basic facts. The present interest rate of between 2.25 percent and 2.5 percent is one of the lowest in economic history, but the Trump administration wants it cut by at least 0.5 percent.
The stock market, bloated by financial speculation, is like a drug addict who demands more as his underlying health continues to deteriorate. When the US financial markets neared bear market territory earlier this year and Wall Street demanded that the Fed halt its policy of incremental rate increases, the Fed snapped into line and Chairman Jerome Powell announced it would abandon its efforts to “normalize” interest rates, leading to the latest rally, which has pushed the Dow to within a few points of its record high.
At the end of 2017, Trump claimed that the trillions of dollars handed out in corporate tax cuts would cause the economy to roar ahead with expanded investment and the provision of well-paying jobs. This lie has been exposed as the vast bulk of the money the tax cuts provided has gone for share buybacks and other parasitic means of pumping more money into the coffers of the rich.
Now the global economy, upon which the US economy is dependent notwithstanding Trump’s claims of the success of his “America First” program, is experiencing a significant slowdown after a brief upturn in 2017.
In its latest economic outlook, the
International Monetary Fund cut its forecast
for global growth, warning that 70 percent of
the world economy was undergoing
deceleration, a phenomenon concentrated in
the advanced economies, including the US.
Those warnings have been underscored by the announcement on Wednesday by the German government that it was halving its forecast for economic growth in 2019 to just 0.5 percent.
The Trump administration is frightened by the prospect of a recession, or even a significant slowdown in the economy, fueling the growing wave of strikes and protests and transforming it into a social explosion, not only in the so-called rust belt areas that voted for his presidency, but across the country.
These fears extend beyond the White House. In a recent essay, the head of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, the multibillionaire Ray Dalio, warned that when there is a “very big gap” in the economic conditions of people, a downturn can lead to conflict and “revolutions of one sort or another.”
With interest rates already at historic lows, Dalio said he was “worried what the next economic downturn will be like, especially as central banks have limited ability to reverse it.”
It is above all the fear within the ruling elite of growing socialist sentiment in the working class that underlies both Trump’s self-proclaimed war against socialism and the bipartisan attack by the ruling elite on democratic rights.
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