Leaving
California to the Homeless
Donald
Trump visited enemy territory this week.
He came out here to the deep blue state of California to
raise a few million bucks at private fundraisers in Silicon Valley and Beverly
Hills.
He also went down to the border with Mexico to inspect the
wall the federal government is building to stop illegal immigration and protect
what no longer deserves to be called the Golden State.
What the president couldn't see while he was out here were
all the wealthy and productive Californians who are leaving this state in
droves.
They are the people who are tired of being tortured by high
state taxes and bad laws like the ones that prevent low-income housing from
being built, or that make their electricity and gasoline so expensive.
They are the people who've watched the sidewalks of their
great cities being turned into permanent tent communities for the poor, the
homeless, the drugged and the mentally disturbed.
They are the tax base that has been footing the bill for the
social welfare benefits and government services that are bestowed so generously
on state citizens and illegal immigrants.
They have seen the grim future of their formerly great state and
said to themselves, "We're outta' here."
But millions of Californians like me can't leave. We have
kids and grandkids here.
We love the state and its people. We love the weather, the
beaches, the deserts and the mountains.
What we don't love is what the Democrat Party and its
policies have been doing for decades to harm California and its big cities.
The
Democrats running this state almost act like they hate it. All they seem to
want is more illegal immigrants, more crippling environmental laws and higher
prices for everything.
The shocking TV images of huge homeless communities living in
tents in Los Angeles and San Francisco are the most glaring sign of the
Democrats' failure.
Even Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom agree that it has been
state policies like strict building laws and environmental regulations that
have created tens of thousands of homeless people.
Only let's please not call them "homeless people."
It's a misnomer.
Most of the thousands of people you see on TV living in tents
and sleeping bags are homeless by choice.
They're mostly drug addicts. Or mentally ill. Or bums or
vagrants who've chosen to live on the street amid their own garbage, used drug
needles and human waste.
They're also mostly males.
There are lots of genuinely homeless people in California who
need assistance from government or private social agencies.
But they're usually women and children and they're usually
living in shelters where they can get the help they need.
Shelters
have rules you have to follow and homeless mothers and their kids will abide by
them. Men won't.
We keep hearing that we need to build more low-income housing
units for the homeless.
But the truth is, most of the men on the sidewalks of
downtown L.A. wouldn't stay in a shelter if it was located in the penthouse of
the Westin Bonaventure Hotel.
Half of the country's unsheltered homeless people live in
California. LA Mayor Eric Garcetti wants President Trump to solve the state's
homeless crisis.
But it's the responsibility of the Democrat-controlled state
government, the Democrat governor and the Democrat mayors - the ones who
created the crisis in the first place.
For California natives like me, it's a crying shame.
The most beautiful state in the U.S. has been wrecked by
Democrats and it's only going to get worse as more illegal immigrants arrive
from Mexico and Central America.
I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before the state runs
out of money and the productive people who provide it. -
DACA Illegals Sue to Ensure They Can Use Welfare and Still Get Green Cards
3:26
3:26
Two illegal aliens shielded from deportation by President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are suing the Trump administration to ensure they can collect federal welfare and still obtain green cards to permanently stay in the United States.
The open borders group CASA de Maryland and two DACA illegal aliens are suing the Trump administration over its soon-t0-be enforcement of the “public charge” rule, which would save American taxpayers billions by effectively ending welfare-dependent legal immigration to the U.S.
The regulation prevents legal immigrants from permanently resettling in the U.S. by obtaining green cards so long as they are found to have used or likely to use welfare programs like food stamps and subsidized health care.
The DACA illegal aliens, represented by Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP), want a preliminary injunction to stop the implementation of the public charge rule while the case goes through the courts, calling an end to welfare-dependent immigration “discriminatory” and suggesting the rule is racist against non-white immigrants.
“The new rule would allow immigration officials to deny [Lawful Permanent Resident] status to many immigrants in an arbitrary and discriminatory way,” Amy Marshak, senior counsel at ICAP, said in a statement. “This is by design. President Trump and his advisors have expressed animus toward non-white immigrants, and studies already have shown that the new rule will disproportionately affect immigrants of color.”
The lawsuit seeks to ensure that DACA illegal aliens, who have lobbied for DACA amnesty for years, would be able to obtain green cards if such an amnesty is granted despite them having used welfare that U.S. taxpayers have been forced to pay for.
“The new rule would expand the concept of a ‘public charge’ beyond recognition, making someone who receives little more than $1500 in food stamps or a few benefits at the same time for less than a year into a ‘public charge,’” ICAP counsel Jonathan Backer said. “That is not what anyone has ever understood the term to mean.”
Despite outrage from the open borders lobby, Democrats, and establishment media, Trump’s seeking to end welfare-dependent immigration is hugely popular with Hispanic Americans and U.S. voters overall.
The open borders group CASA de Maryland and two DACA illegal aliens are suing the Trump administration over its soon-t0-be enforcement of the “public charge” rule, which would save American taxpayers billions by effectively ending welfare-dependent legal immigration to the U.S.
The regulation prevents legal immigrants from permanently resettling in the U.S. by obtaining green cards so long as they are found to have used or likely to use welfare programs like food stamps and subsidized health care.
The DACA illegal aliens, represented by Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP), want a preliminary injunction to stop the implementation of the public charge rule while the case goes through the courts, calling an end to welfare-dependent immigration “discriminatory” and suggesting the rule is racist against non-white immigrants.
“The new rule would allow immigration officials to deny [Lawful Permanent Resident] status to many immigrants in an arbitrary and discriminatory way,” Amy Marshak, senior counsel at ICAP, said in a statement. “This is by design. President Trump and his advisors have expressed animus toward non-white immigrants, and studies already have shown that the new rule will disproportionately affect immigrants of color.”
The lawsuit seeks to ensure that DACA illegal aliens, who have lobbied for DACA amnesty for years, would be able to obtain green cards if such an amnesty is granted despite them having used welfare that U.S. taxpayers have been forced to pay for.
“The new rule would expand the concept of a ‘public charge’ beyond recognition, making someone who receives little more than $1500 in food stamps or a few benefits at the same time for less than a year into a ‘public charge,’” ICAP counsel Jonathan Backer said. “That is not what anyone has ever understood the term to mean.”
Despite outrage from the open borders lobby, Democrats, and establishment media, Trump’s seeking to end welfare-dependent immigration is hugely popular with Hispanic Americans and U.S. voters overall.
Poll: Majority of Hispanics Support Ending Welfare-Dependent Immigration
The latest Harvard/Harris Poll finds Hispanic Americans, by a majority of 56 percent, support denying permanent residency to immigrants who are known to have used welfare or are likely to use welfare. Likewise, a majority of 65 percent of Hispanic Americans said illegal aliens should not be allowed to draw from taxpayer-funded welfare programs, as well as 71 percent of black Americans.
A study by the Center for Immigration Studies notes that about 63 percent of noncitizen households in the U.S. use at least one form of taxpayer-funded welfare, while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare. This means that noncitizen households use nearly twice as much welfare as native-born American households.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that granting amnesty to roughly 3.5 million enrolled and eligible DACA illegal aliens would cost American citizens at least $26 billion as about one in five DACA illegal aliens would end up on food stamps, and at least one in seven would go on Medicaid.
The case is Aguiluz v. Trump, No. 8:19-cv-02715-CBD in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
The latest Harvard/Harris Poll finds Hispanic Americans, by a majority of 56 percent, support denying permanent residency to immigrants who are known to have used welfare or are likely to use welfare. Likewise, a majority of 65 percent of Hispanic Americans said illegal aliens should not be allowed to draw from taxpayer-funded welfare programs, as well as 71 percent of black Americans.
A study by the Center for Immigration Studies notes that about 63 percent of noncitizen households in the U.S. use at least one form of taxpayer-funded welfare, while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare. This means that noncitizen households use nearly twice as much welfare as native-born American households.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that granting amnesty to roughly 3.5 million enrolled and eligible DACA illegal aliens would cost American citizens at least $26 billion as about one in five DACA illegal aliens would end up on food stamps, and at least one in seven would go on Medicaid.
The case is Aguiluz v. Trump, No. 8:19-cv-02715-CBD in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
If You Want Less Income Inequality, then Enforce Immigration Law
As a man of the Left, I am frustrated with my political soul-mates who say that they are vehemently in favor of reducing income inequality, but show no interest (at best) in immigration law enforcement.
Let's look at the economic basics here: One obvious way to reduce income inequality is to increase tax collections on rich individuals and corporations; the Left understands this. Another way is to increase the power of labor unions; again the Left gets that point. Another way is to reduce the size of the labor force, or to keep it constant, as the number of jobs increases.
The Left used to understand that, but no more. I recall the late Howard Samuels, then-president of the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, telling me again and again that there is nothing better for the workingman than a tight labor market. He knew that illegal aliens were flooding the labor market and thus depressing wages.
The current posture of the AFL-CIO, and the Left generally, is that they want to raise wages and, simultaneously, are opposed to serious immigration law enforcement. They see illegal aliens as powerless individuals and potential members, but not as lawbreakers who are best friends (unwittingly, to be sure) to exploitative employers. There is a major inconsistency here.
Further, while I think raising taxes on the rich is a good idea, its impact on an individual worker is indirect, slow to happen, and too hard to measure. The removal of a single illegal alien and the replacement of that worker by a citizen worker, provides a tangible and immediate benefit for the citizen. She or he suddenly has a new job.
These thoughts occurred to me as I looked over another (to me commendable) tool of the Left, a class action suit, this time against a particularly unattractive group of employers: the operators of poultry slaughterhouses. That federal case was filed on August 30 and is a major one with oodles of public-interest lawyers suing a large number of employers. I wish it well. It carried with it (in a 77-page brief) this description of the workforce being exploited:
121. Many of the workers recruited and hired by Defendant Processors are migrant workers, refugees, asylum-seekers, immigrants employed under EB3 visas, prison laborers, and participants in court-ordered substance abuse programs. In a 2015 report, Oxfam America wrote, "The poultry industry has a complicated history of tapping marginalized populations for its workforce. ... Of the roughly 250,000 poultry workers in the US, most are minorities, immigrants, or refugees, and a significant percentage is female."122. For example, Norman Beecher, a former Human Resources manager for Defendant Case Farms LLC, actively recruited refugees from the Guatemalan civil war. Mr. Beecher explained to historian Leon Fink, "I didn't want [Mexicans]. Mexicans will go back home at Christmastime. You're going to lose them for six weeks. And in the poultry business you can't afford that. You just can't do it. But Guatemalans can't go back home. They're here as political refugees. If they go back home, they get shot ."
Two comments are in order:
- While it is perfectly true, as Beecher said, that some nationalities are more vulnerable than others, the civil war in Guatemala ended 23 years ago.
- The list of workers by immigration classes – "migrant workers, refugees, asylum-seekers, immigrants employed under EB3 visas" — is hopelessly incomplete.
"Migrant workers" is a useless, catch-all phrase without legal meaning. "Refugees and asylum-seekers" are useful, legally meaningful terms and "immigrants employed under EB3 visas" are about as rare as hen's teeth, as we will show shortly.
What is breathtaking in this little listing of exploited workers is the total absence of any mention of illegal aliens. This is probably the largest single grouping of poultry workers, as was shown dramatically, two weeks before this case was filed, by a raid of historic proportions on five large poultry firms, including two entities — Koch Foods and Peco Foods — that are on both the raided and the sued lists of malefactors.
This was the lede in an industry publication's story on that raid:
Immigration officials have raided multiple chicken plants in Mississippi, detaining 680 workers in what officials are calling the largest single-state sting in American history.As part of an ongoing criminal investigation, 650 agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed federal search warrants at seven processing facilities outside Jackson, Mississippi, seizing business records and rounding up hundreds of workers who the agency said were unlawfully working at the plants.
This raid took place 15 days before the class action filing, and involved two of the numerous companies sued by the lawyers. It was well publicized. My assumption is that the lawyers knew about the raid and, simply out of ideology, decided not to mention the illegal alien workforce in these plants.
The "EB3" Workers. I use quotation marks here because these liberal lawyers have made exactly the same minor error that President Trump has made in another immigration connection; he called H-1B workers, "H1B workers", suggesting, in both cases, a lack of knowledge about foreign worker programs. The correct term, EB-3, is for the third class of employment-based immigrants; if one has an EB-3 document, one has a green card, indicating permanent resident alien status.
The lawyers in this case may have encountered a few honest-to-God EB-3 workers in their fieldwork, or maybe they read the one article I have seen, after much research, on the subject. It is a commendable piece of reporting, but without any sense of scale. The December 18, 2017, article by Michael Grabell for ProPublica was headlined: "Who would pay $26,000 to Work in a Chicken Plant?". The text began: "Chicken plants have recruited thousands of foreign workers in recent years through a little-known program to fill jobs they say Americans won't do."
Apparently some crook in Korea collected the $26,000 from an emigrant, as he steered him into an EB-3 visa.
I am sure that ProPublica, a very useful source of news, found some EB-3 workers in some chicken plants, but there cannot be many of them, for two reasons: The first is that only about 1,500 workers in this class are admitted or adjusted each year. Some to many of the EB-3s are working elsewhere, one must assume. See the table below:
Admissions and Adjustments of EB-3
| |||
Fiscal Year | New Arrivals | Adjustees | Totals |
2008 | 129 | 1,783 | 1,912 |
2009 | 193 | 1,015 | 1,208 |
2010 | 1* | 2,042 | 2,043 |
2011 | 517 | 860 | 1,377 |
2012 | 662 | 1,109 | 1,771 |
2013 | 621 | 722 | 1,343 |
2014 | 322 | 759 | 1,081 |
2015 | 354 | 487 | 841 |
2016 | 758 | 757 | 1,515 |
2017 | 367 | 1,002 | 1,369 |
Totals | 3,924 | 10,536 | 14,460 |
* DHS, out of an obsession with privacy, records 1 and 2 as D;
we decided it was 1 in this case.
Source: Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 2008-2017,
Table 7, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. |
The other reason for the small number of EB-3 workers in the poultry houses is the fact that these workers — unlike either illegal aliens or workers in the H-2 classes — are not bound to their employer, no matter what the employer may have told them; they have green cards and have the legal right to leave these jobs if they so desire.
So here we have the liberal lawyers and the liberal media focusing on this tiny group of legal immigrants, when they should — in the chicken business and elsewhere — pay the most attention to America's illegal aliens.
Our story today, about this tiny group of legal immigrants, the EB-3s, is a reflection of the broader theme of what is truly depressing the lower levels of our labor markets: not a handful of people with obscure visas, but the millions of illegal workers.
For the full text of the filing against the poultry firms, see the class action complaint at case 1:19-cv-02521-ELH in the PACER electronic documents system; it was filed in the federal courts in Maryland.
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
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.
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:
NYT Admits Fewer
Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving Machines
Warren's core insight
was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor force had
actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages. BEN SHAPIRO
BLOG…. SO,
WHAT DOES LA RAZA WARREN THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN SHE HANDS 40 MILLION LOOTING
MEXCIANS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY???
How
the Quest For Power Corrupted Elizabeth Warren
Munro:
Cornell Study Shows Stagnant Wages Hurting Marriage in U.S.
Getty Images
Fewer women get married when fewer men earn a decent salary in an
unstable economy, says a study from Cornell University.
Job-Hopping Young
Workers Getting Huge Wage Gains, Says Business Center | Breitbart
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.
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
.
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."
Warren's core insight
was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor force had
actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages. BEN SHAPIRO
BLOG…. SO,
WHAT DOES LA RAZA WARREN THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN SHE HANDS 40 MILLION LOOTING
MEXCIANS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY???
How
the Quest For Power Corrupted Elizabeth Warren
I first
met Elizabeth Warren when she was a professor at Harvard Law School, in 2004.
She was fresh off the publication of her bestselling book, "The Two-Income
Trap." There's no doubt she was politically liberal -- our only
face-to-face meeting involved a recruitment visit at the W Hotel in Los
Angeles, where she immediately made some sort of disparaging remark about Rush
Limbaugh -- but at the time, Warren was making waves for her iconoclastic
views. She wasn't a doctrinaire leftist, spewing Big Government nostrums. She
was a creative thinker.
That
creative thinking is obvious in "The Two-Income Trap," which
discusses the rising number of bankruptcies among middle-class parents,
particularly women with children. The book posits that women entered the
workforce figuring that by doing so, they could have double household income.
But so many women entered the workforce that they actually inflated prices for
basic goods like housing, thus driving debt skyward and leading to bankruptcies
for two-income families. The book argued that families with one income might
actually be better off, since families with two incomes spent nearly the full
combined income and then fell behind if one spouse lost a job. Families with
one income, by contrast, spent to the limit for one income, and if a spouse was
fired, the unemployed spouse would then look for work to replace that single
income.
Warren's
core insight was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor
force had actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages.
But her policy recommendations were even more fascinating. She explicitly
argued against "more government regulation of the housing market,"
slamming "complex regulations," since they "might actually
worsen the situation by diminishing the incentive to build new houses or
improve older ones." Instead, she argued in favor of school choice, since
pressure on housing prices came largely from families seeking to escape badly
run government school districts: "A well-designed voucher program would
fit the bill neatly."
Her
heterodox policy proposals didn't stop there. She refused to "join the
chorus calling for taxpayer-funded day care" on its own, calling it a
"sacred cow." At the very least, she suggested that
"government-subsidized day care would add one more indirect pressure on
mothers to join the workforce." She instead sought a more comprehensive
educational solution that would include "tax credits for stay-at-home
parents."
She
ardently opposed additional taxpayer subsidization of college loans, too, or
more taxpayer spending on higher education directly. Instead, she called for a
tuition freeze from state schools. She recommended tax incentives for families
to save rather than spend. She opposed radical solutions wholesale: "We
haven't suggested a complete overhaul of the tax structure, and we haven't
demanded that businesses cease and desist from ever closing another plant or
firing another worker. Nor have we suggested that the United States should
build a quasi-socialist safety net to rival the European model."
So, what
happened to Warren?
Power.
The other
half of iconoclastic Warren was typical progressive, anti-financial industry
Warren. In "The Two-Income Trap," she proposes reinstating state
usury laws, cutting off access to payday lenders and heavily regulating the
banking industry -- all in the name of protecting Americans from themselves.
While her position castigating the credit industry for deliberate obfuscation
of clients was praiseworthy, her quest to "protect consumers" quickly
morphed into a quest to create the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau -- an
independent agency without any serious checks or balances. But despite her best
efforts, she never became head of the CFPB, failing to woo Republican senators.
The result: an emboldened Warren who saw her popularity as tied to her Big Government
agenda. No more reaching across the aisle; no more iconoclastic policies.
Instead, she would be Ralph Nader II, with a feminist narrative to boot.
And so,
she's gaining ground in the 2020 presidential race as a Bernie Sanders
knockoff. Ironically, her great failing could be her lack of moderation -- the
moderation she abandoned in her quest for progressive power. If Elizabeth
Warren circa 2003 were running, she'd be the odds-on favorite for president.
But Warren circa 2019 would hate Warren circa 2003.
Ben Shapiro, 35, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of
"The Ben Shapiro Show" and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is
the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller "The Right Side Of
History." He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.
Munro:
Cornell Study Shows Stagnant Wages Hurting Marriage in U.S.
6 Sep 2019334
4:14
Fewer women get married when fewer men earn a decent salary in an
unstable economy, says a study from Cornell University.
“Most
American women hope to marry but current shortages of marriageable men—men with
a stable job and a good income—make this increasingly difficult, especially in
the current gig economy of unstable low-paying service jobs,” said lead author Daniel
Lichter, a professor at Cornell University. He continued:
Marriage is
still based on love, but it also is fundamentally an economic
transaction. Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage
bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed
their male suitors.
The study
looked at wages and marriage rates from 2008 to 2017, and concluded that
“promoting good jobs may ultimately be the best marriage promotion policy,” says the study, which is
titled “Mismatches in the Marriage Market,” and was
published in the Journal of
Marriage and Family.
The study is
useful for the populist wing of the GOP, because it shows that rising wages for
men in President Donald Trump’s low-immigration economy is good for women’s
romantic aspirations and marriage rates. Other data shows that married people —
especially women — are far more likely to vote GOP than single people.
Correspondingly,
the bad news about wages and marriage is good news for the Democratic Party,
which will get extra votes from women if federal policies continue to suppress
wages for American men.
The study did
not try to show how marriage rates have been impacted by the various federal
policies which have flatlined men’s wages for 40
years.
For example,
the federal policy of flooding the labor market with immigrants has flatlined
wages nationwide for at least two decades. Also, President Barack Obama’s
failure to curb opioids — and his reluctance to favor American workers over
‘DACA’ illegals — helped to push millions of Americans out of the workforce and
many into their graves.
The Cornell
study validated conservatives’ view that women are different from men, and
prefer to marry men who earn a higher wage or salary. The press statement said:
The study’s authors
developed estimates of the sociodemographic characteristics of unmarried
women’s potential spouses who resemble the husbands of otherwise comparable
married women. These estimates were compared with the actual distribution of
unmarried men at the national, state, and local levels.
Women’s
potential husbands had an average income that was about 58% higher than the
actual unmarried men currently available to unmarried women. They also were 30%
more likely to be employed and 19% more likely to have a college degree.
Middle-class
women have the best chance of finding a man who earns more money, the study
says.
Low-income
women live among men with very little income, partly because they are in jail
or are suffering from drugs. And the many women who earn above $40,000 a year
face intense competition for the relatively fewer number of men who make more
than $65,000 a year.
This shortage
of prosperous men means that many high-income women must marry down, the study
said. “Women may instead ‘settle’ for a marital match that falls short of their aspirations in a spouse
... This will be expressed in new patterns of marital hypogamy or downward marital mobility,”
the study said.
The problem
is worse for women who seek husbands later in life, for example, after spending
years in university education:
For example, older women on average were much less likely a suitable marital match ... This is especially true among women who were highly educated
... A 10% increase in age among women with a college degree was associated with a 24.48 percentage point decrease in the likelihood of a suitable match. In contrast, age mattered much less among the least-educated women—those with a high school degree or less who had only a 4.47 percentage point decrease in finding a match. One implication was that delaying marriage, for whatever reason but perhaps especially if pursuing college degrees, had the effect of reducing women’s local-area access to demographically suited marital partners.
Future
studies will examine divorce rates among marriages where women recognize that
they earn more than their husbands.
Young Americans got a pay raise of 7.6 percent from late
2017 to late 2018 -- bigger than other groups -- b/c they are more likely to
switch jobs in Trump's low-immigration economy. http://bit.ly/2lWHQUD