Musings from the basement...

Day three of some wall talkin’ (the one that won’t work). So, we need that big ol’ Trump wall because illegal immigrants are sucking the system dry and leaving Americans footing the bill, right? Not exactly. Or at least, it’s not the gigantic crisis demagogues like Donald Trump would have you believe. First, there is the charge that illegals don’t pay taxes. This is a myth. On the local and state levels they pay all the same rental, property, gas, and sales/consumption taxes we do. Further, according to the Social Security Administration, about 3.1 million working illegal immigrants (out of about 8 million working illegals total) pay into the Social Security system despite not being able to draw from it. Those taxes total $12 billion annually. (For…
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So we’re going to have a wall on the border of Mexico. Just accept that it’s going to happen, because unless Trump is somehow ejected from office, it will. That wall will be built. No, Mexico won’t pay for it, but we’ll have it all the same. The thing is, it’s not going to serve its intended purpose. Trump says the wall is meant to do two things: stem the tide of illegal immigration and stop the flow of illegal drugs into the country. The problem is, it will do little to address either issue. First, there is the matter of illegal immigration. We’ll get into why the boot-shaking fear of illegal immigrants he has been sowing (and his followers have been eating up like candy)…
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Let’s talk walls. Donald Trump continues to tell us that Mexico is going to pay for the Trump Wall on the border of Mexico. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has said fat chance and cancelled a meeting with Trump in January as a result. Leaders throughout Mexico have a pretty uniform stance to the idea: Screw Trump. Btu Trump says Mexico will pay, dammit, so the plan he floated is a 20 percent tariff on Mexican imports. In other words, American consumers will be paying for the wall, not Mexico. It astonishes me how many people can’t seem to grasp this, but like clockwork the faithful are all abuzz trying to defend the plan when it doesn’t take more than two seconds of thought to realize…
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