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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Zero authority. But it’s a stress test. Can we get judges to go along? Juries? What can we get them to believe is a legal command? Can we get ICE into houses without warrants? Can we prosecute Mayors and Police officials for not providing data that is a request?

    They’re going to push as far as people let them push. This is why the Federalist Society has been trying to pack the courts with conservative judges for decades. Defense Attorneys are going to have to step up and stop plea dealing so much stuff. But that’s a lot harder to do than to say because they’re criminally under resourced and over worked. (Not metaphorically in some states) In a system where the default is a plea deal to get out of jail there’s going to be a lot of convictions for things that aren’t actually crimes. The entire reliance on plea deals was predicated on good faith prosecutions.













  • Your problem isn’t with the migrant. It’s with the government tolerating low wages and union breaking. It’s with corporations that take advantage of people. We can change that though because this is still our country.

    At the end of the day it’s not a story of two groups, it’s a story of what we’re willing to tolerate. Because there’s only 11 million undocumented immigrants in a country of about 200 million working adults. That fraction of the working age population isn’t depressing anything. Then, about promotion, migrants want to get promoted too. But the reality is a large minority will work in minimum wage their entire lives. That’s why we need regulations to make that better. And why it shouldn’t matter that immigrants are there too. The minimum standard of living shouldn’t be something people get threatened with.

    Calling me an ivory tower person is also just a way to dismiss facts.


  • That’s the point of the Department of Labor. Nobody wants to work for less pay and no benefits. Corporations can force migrants to work for less than minimum wage, no benefits, and live in overcrowded housing on site because if the migrants complain too much then the corporation just calls ICE.

    And at the end of the day if corporations are too powerful and keeping wages down then we can pass a higher minimum wage. But imagine if all those ICE agents were doing spot checks on employers for pay and safety issues. Where we put our resources matters and chasing metaphorical gophers has very quick diminishing returns.

    And that’s all without the macro economic point of view that points out having more consumers in your country means more economic activity which means more jobs.


  • That’s not going to work. You’re asking them to abandon their homes, family, friend networks, and be banned from ever returning.

    Conservatives characterize immigrants as poor people who haven’t been here long and are a burden on our systems. The truth is almost exactly the opposite. The vast majority of the 11 million people here illegally have been here for years, if not decades. They are productive, they pay taxes, and commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens.

    The answer is to stop worrying about “economic” migrants. Deport immigrants with DUIs and violent or financial felony convictions. Beef up the department of labor and go after companies paying people less than minimum wage. Then it’s not a matter of jobs or services or crime. The only thing left is xenophobia.





  • My main point is this is well beyond the supply/demand chart you get in Econ 101. That more applies to distributors and grocers than it does to farmers. In most places the farmers aren’t in control of the price. The distributors are. This is how you get things like Dairy Farmers disposing of literal tons of milk. It was more expensive to send it than they would have been paid for it. In other words the price dropped so low it wasn’t worth selling it.

    Of course that has knock on effects. That farm doesn’t magically get more money next year so their operations are constrained. Grain is worse than Dairy because it can be siloed for literal years. That means the glut will take years to resolve. Years with low or no income for grain farmers.

    Are you seeing the problem yet?


  • The distributors will lower prices. Farmers will get paid pennies for what would be dollars. Farmers don’t sell their product directly. They get screwed before the consumer gets screwed. In this kind of a cycle prices drop in the short term, but as farmers can’t afford to plant as much going forward, there’s a supply crunch next season. The government used to do a lot to manage this cycle and smooth it out, by literally buying product.

    No big deal in the long term though right? Well except we don’t have a competitive distributor or grocery market anymore. So when that crunch hits those prices are going up and they’re going to stay up. For reference check the recent greedflation that happened.

    Worse there is a real risk of a dust bowl effect. Farmers who are strapped for cash don’t want to spend money setting their fields up to fallow properly. So the summer hits and the crops that are planted get buried in all that dust. Making the supply crunch even worse.

    Then in a normal situation we’d still have the global supply chain to fall back on. But there’s a very good chance that food is going to have tariffs on it.

    Farming isn’t like making a widget in a factory.