Sure. So let's take something that everyone agrees a welfare state ought to have -- Medicare for all. It seems obvious to me that we couldn't offer Medicare for all and extend that to unlimited immigrants. And the cruel other extreme of that is Medicare for all for citizens and allowing unlimited immigrants without a path to citizenship. That's obviously a very unjust and exploitative society. And everything in the middle of that is a too hot/too cold balancing act, where it's not clear that we could legislate a satisfactory equilibrium. One year in the US then getting citizenship is too close to the first untenable scenario, ten years in the US then citizenship is too close to the exploitative second scenario.

You're forgetting immigrants bring a bigger revenue for govt. via taxes if they're regulated.

Ah, you're worried about exploiting people. I see the problem

You are right that Stalin had much in common with Hitler despite being on opposite sides of a one-dimensional political spectrum. I don't quite agree that makes him right-wing. Mainly because I think the political spectrum isn't one-dimensional. Stalin/Lenin were far left on the economic policy axis and totalitarian on another axis.

This sentence is big problem because that's life. A lot of stupidity is based on people adhering to some axioms for no reason other than it's simple to do that and then pretending the axioms themselves aren't arbitrary.

A trillion dollar deficit isn't cool. You know what's cool? The quadrillion dollar deficit I hallucinate after huffing ether and blame liberals for.

Axioms like "open borders"?

But non-snarkily, the most compelling argument for Medicare for all is that most (all?) other wealthy countries have implemented a similar system, have better health outcomes and spend less on healthcare. That's a compelling argument! OK. But then apply that same logic to immigration. Do any comparable countries have open borders? Except within the EU, they don't -- and the EU only has open borders among member nations, all of which have similar welfare states and generally relatively similar per capita GDP levels.

Generally I think you're right, but I do think that fundamentally the left-right spectrum is about the distribution of power and whether it's narrow or broad. And I think some schools of thought, like right-libertarianism, fail to recognize that money and power are essentially the same thing in the real world. Economically the Nazis had organizations like IG Farben where a small group of people controlled production and they were closely tied to the government. In Soviet Russia you had large organizations where production was controlled by party members. The differences, like a "free market" and "economic mobility" are there, but are sometimes more theoretical than real as, especially in fascist countries, corporations tend to be even more monopolistic and closely tied to the state.

I wouldn't argue the same that Castro or Mao were right wing (though I think hierarchy is right-wing), but with Lenin/Stalin I think it's easier anyway to call them generally right-wing at least if you mean fascism/corporate-state-capitalism is right-wing.

I don't think it's right to say that free markets are incompatible with the left. This is a longer discussion, but people generally assume that government acts to redistribute wealth. It does to a small degree, but wealth is nothing more than some collection of legal rights. Wealth in our society is only valuable insofar as it is recognized and enforced by the state. You are not allowed to own the air. It's a right you cannot have. You are allowed to own land. The state grants and protects that right. It's a right you can have. If the government only recognized 100 acres max per person, the 101st acre would be like trying to own the air. In such a society, a leftist society, you could have free markets and far less hierarchy.

And I don't think state control of production is leftist. As Chomsky says, socialism is about worker control of production. That's in accord with the labor theory of value, which goes back to Ricardo and Adam Smith...and Karl Marx, but not Stalin. In Stalinism I'd say value just goes to the state and that's because the state owns everything. That's state capitalism.

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Cutting funding to the Special Olympics is just the perfect blend of heartless cruelty and utter pointlessness that has come to define the Rump administration

Exactly

It shows they are evil enough to be evil over $18M/year

Just like Don is grifter enough to grift for low amounts of money

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Mulvaney convinced Trump to back Obamacare repeal over objections from Pence, others

Mostly posting because it's amazing how little self-awareness they have about the GOP's health care platform, and what voters think of it:

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Good luck with that!


There are few things I can think of that would be worse for Trump's 2020 election chances than turning it into a referendum on healthcare. Like, he campaigned in 2016 on "we're gonna cover everyone", good lord PLEASE keep telling us that in 2020 as you...actually just took away millions of people's healthcare in the intervening 4 years.

Another thing about this is that its pretty well known budget details like this won't get approved through Congress. So this type of budget proposal is literally just a political statement to show how cruel they can be.

There are valid concerns about having a relatively open immigration policy combined with strong welfare programs, but these concerns are almost never brought up in good faith by the right. While you seem to be presenting it in good faith in this post, I don't think I could characterize your concerns over exploitation of immigrants as being brought up in good faith.

Currently we tacitly accept illegal immigrants, allow (mostly rich) people to pay them less than minimum wage without really going after them for breaking minimum wage laws, then require the undocumented immigrants to pay taxes (which about half do) while not allowing them to collect the vast majority of federal benefits, even if they pay taxes. Even legal immigrants have to pay into programs they cannot collect from.

So unless you advocate for wholesale changes to end that exploitation, the only valid question you can ask about immigrant exploitation is whether or not a reform proposal is better or worse than the current system.

With that in mind, accepting far more legal immigrants and granting unlimited temporary work visas (limited only by demand), while actually enforcing minimum wage laws, should greatly reduce the exploitation.

You could then move forward on improving welfare programs with very little concern over "open borders" and come up with a timeline for legal immigrants to get citizenship. In fact, you could even explore whether or not the enforcement of minimum wage and taxing of all those workers could allow you to establish more barebones welfare programs for the documented temporary workers and legal immigrants who are not yet citizens. I have no clue on the numbers, but it could certainly be investigated.

The main downside would be increased labor costs being passed on to consumers, but of course nobody can argue on that basis while also bringing up the evil of worker exploitation.

These tradeoffs, morally and in terms of policy, are why this is such a challenging issue.

2020 debate...

Trump: Now that we've gotten rid of Obummercare, I've got the best plan that's going to cover the most people the cheapest and the best. We're going to make healthcare great again!

Buttigieg (holds up a bill): Here's my bill, where's yours?

Trump: It's the biggest and the best and the cheapest and we're going to save the most money ever and cover everyone.

Buttigieg: Cool, where's the bill? Here's mine...

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Trump trying to make freddie mac and fannie mae private sector again, what could go wrong?



oh right, that

40% of the country: I want that plan that's the biggest and best and cheapest.

I wonder if he told the google guys to stop filling in "oompa loompa" when you type in "Donald Trump is an"

+1, keep up the good posts

Our current system, where the rich exploit the undocumented immigrants is immoral, yes. I agree that a generous but regulated guest worker program is a good possible solution to the status quo, but I don't think that it should be anyone who shows up at our border wanting to come in. We would want to control the numbers and check the backgrounds of those who come. But I do think that the more generous the welfare state is the more problematic the guest worker situation is; if there is no path to citizenship you're creating a permanent underclass with little to no chance for social mobility, if the path to citizenship is too quick you risk overwhelming the welfare state with a flood of low skill workers from the poorest countries who would quite rationally try to come to improve their lives.

To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee, regulated borders are like fleas arguing over who owns the dog. All we are saying is that we are in a good spot and because we were here first (not really) we are willing to imprison, deport, and if they resist, shoot anyone else who comes here that we don't want. America is not your house.

I'll accept someone from Guatemala coming in freely just as readily as I will someone from Ohio and believe me, California is pretty overrun with people from other states.

"And that other guy has 'butt' in his name lolol nice name you fruit"