Tag Archives: Mass Deportations

What Did You Vote For?

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Did you vote for increased inflation and higher prices due to tariffs? Did you vote to pay higher taxes so that billionaires and multinational corporations could receive large tax cuts? Did you vote to increase the deficit and add trillions to the national debt? Did you vote to consolidate more power in the executive branch by taking power away from the courts and your elected representatives?

Did you vote to have unvetted 20-something-year-old geeks sort through all of your private information and cut thousands of federal jobs? Did you vote to make America more racist again by eliminating DEI programs and firing government and military leaders just because they are women or people of color? Did you vote to have inexperienced and unqualified people take control of government agencies?

Perhaps you voted to arrest and deport immigrants who are violent criminals, but did you vote for mass deportations of essential farm workers and those who work in meat processing plants? Did you want to see families torn apart? Did you vote to have your immigrant neighbors and community members arrested and deported without due process? Did you want to see innocent immigrants and US citizens imprisoned in El Salvador and beaten and tortured or thrown in concentration camps?

Did you vote for cruelty?

Did you vote to have masked men with military weapons kidnap working Americans without warrants? Did you vote to have armed military in our streets? Did you vote to have judges and congressional representatives arrested?

Did you vote to dispense with the rule of law?

Did you vote to deport Afghan interpreters who saved the lives of US troops? Did you vote for massive cuts to the Veterans Administration? Did you vote to see millions thrown off Medicaid, including elderly in senior care? Did you vote to make healthcare unaffordable for millions of your fellow Americans? Did you vote to close hundreds of rural hospitals? Did you vote to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control? Did you vote to cut medical research on cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases?

Did you vote to eliminate foreign aid programs that save millions of lives? Did you vote to alienate are most loyal allies, including Canada? Did you vote to make foreigners afraid to visit our country and to stop buying our products? Did you vote to end Voice of America? Did you vote to help Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?

Did you vote to ignore climate change while cutting funds for NOAA and the National Weather Service and eliminating FEMA? Did you vote to increase the use of fossil fuels and lease public lands to oil companies?

Did you vote to lower taxes on gun silencers? To watch our leaders engage in massive bribery schemes and corruption? Did you vote to pardon the criminals who violently beat police and planned to hang the Vice-President and many in Congress on January 6? Did you vote to have the president pardon felons in exchange for presidential bribes? To sell green cards for millions of dollars?

Did you vote for increased attacks on freedom of the press and freedom of speech? Did you vote to undermine the US Constitution?

Maybe you didn’t intend to vote for many of those things. But if you voted Republican in 2024, that’s what you got. Indeed, that’s who you are. Because your vote is a reflection of you.

Complex Problems: Part 3 – The National Debt

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According to the National Debt Clock, our national debt is currently $36 trillion and counting. That’s because the government is currently spending more than $1.6 trillion than it receives from federal taxes. This is despite the fact that the annual deficit is currently $1 trillion less than when President Biden took office.

Of course, there are many who will say that the way to reduce the debt is to simply cut spending. Others will say that we need to raise taxes to increase revenue. But it’s not that simple. To understand why, you need to look at how we got here.

Since the end of World War II, we have endured two banking crises and 13 recessions. Many of those events resulted in the necessity of corporate bailouts, tax cuts, and increased spending to induce economic recovery. During that time, we have also fought in four costly wars, not including the estimated $26 trillion in today’s dollars spent on defense during the Cold War. More recently, the failed response to the Covid Pandemic resulted in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the $1.2 trillion Inflation Recovery Act, which were necessary to stave off a second Great Depression and lower runaway inflation. Without those expenditures, we would have seen unemployment and inflation continue to skyrocket with many millions of Americans in soup lines and/or begging in the streets.

The point is, in a civilized society, there are certain events and economic conditions that require government to outspend its revenue.

Not the least of these are the climate-related disasters that annually cost billions of dollars to help victims and rebuild infrastructure. The National Centers for Environmental Information estimate that over the last five years those costs have totaled $764.9 billion! Do we turn our backs on the Americans ravaged by wildfires, droughts, hailstorms, tornados and hurricane victims to avoid budget deficits? Of course not.

And there are still more issues that have contributed to our debt, including self-inflicted problems such as trade wars, battles over the debt ceiling, and political shutdowns of the government which have cost many billions of dollars.

Taking all of this into consideration, you can see why, in modern times, our government has experienced a budget surplus only once. That was accomplished by the Clinton administration.

Now, you may say that I have overlooked one of the largest contributors to our annual deficits – the rising costs of “entitlements.” Certainly, it is true that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid payments comprise about 61 percent of the annual federal budget. But before you call for cutbacks to these programs, consider this: In reality, these programs should be entirely separate from the federal budget. That’s because the retired workers who benefit from them have paid for them over a lifetime of work through FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act).

That’s right, these programs are not “entitlements” at all. They are, in fact, insurance – nonprofit retirement insurance for which you pay premiums that are deducted from your paycheck.

Since the founding of the programs, the premiums collected have gone into a trust fund where the money is invested in federal securities. And because these programs are insurance, they should be treated like all other forms of insurance by following the principles of actuarial tables, which match premiums to expenditures. (When the costs of your casualty and accident auto insurance go up, so do your premiums.) Unfortunately, Congress has refused to consistently and equitably raise premiums, which has placed the programs in some degree of jeopardy.

That leads us to the politics of deficits and debt.

Since the Citizens United v FEC decision of 2010, political campaigns are funded in large part by billionaires, lobbying groups, and large corporations. Of course, these groups all expect a return on their investments. For example, despite the impact on our climate caused by the burning of fossil fuels, the fossil fuel industry received more than $1 trillion in subsidies in 2023. Many others have similarly cashed in. And all of these paybacks contribute to the deficit.

Further, politicians love to promise tax cuts even when they know those tax cuts will lead to larger deficits. Perhaps that’s why the highest federal income tax rate has been cut from 91 percent in 1950 to 40.8 percent today. Indeed, we have seen at least five major tax cuts since WWII. And since many of those same politicians like to campaign on a platform of fear – fear of immigrants, fear of other religions, fear of terrorism, and fear of other nations – they routinely vote to increase our defense budget.

The requested Pentagon budget for 2025 is nearly $850 billion dollars. That’s more than the next nine countries combined! And, if you separate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid from the annual budget as is justified, it represents roughly 34 percent of the remaining (discretionary) budget. Add another $103.2 billion for Homeland Security, plus $303.8 billion for Veterans Affairs, and you’ll see that we’re spending an incredible amount for defense and the consequences of war – an annual total of more than $1.2 trillion that is nearly equal to our deficit.

And that doesn’t even include the $21 trillion in previous spending that the Pentagon couldn’t account for in a recent audit.

So, where do you cut? How do you raise more revenue? If you’re serious about reducing the debt, you absolutely have to do both. But if you do too much of either, you risk damaging the economy which will further add to the debt.

The planned tax cuts, inflation-inducing tariffs, and mass deportations of undocumented workers certainly isn’t the answer.

Our Problems Are Too Big For Simple-Minded Solutions.

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Or simple-minded politicians.

The US and the world are facing a growing and complex set of interrelated problems. But few people have the time and patience to understand them. Many politicians know this all too well. So, instead of being honest with voters, they lie. They offer simplistic “solutions.” They create easy targets for voters to blame. Targets who have already been victimized, such as migrants and transexuals.

These people, they say, are the reason low to middle income voters are struggling. They tell voters that migrants are taking our jobs, filling our housing stock, and driving up prices when, in fact, the only jobs they are taking are those that no American citizens want. They also falsely claim that migrants are driving up crime rates.

The same politicians claim that transexuals are defying God and destroying our nation’s morals. They want you to believe that aspiring young male athletes are willing to permanently change their bodies, to undergo extensive hormonal therapies and to have their genitals removed, so that they can invade girls’ locker rooms and unfairly compete with the so-called weaker sex.

Seriously? How stupid do they think voters are? Never mind. We already know the answer to that question.

Now let’s take a look at the real problems we face: Climate change, human rights violations, mass shootings, religious conflicts and wars, poverty and food insecurity, wealth disparity and greed, corrupt and repressive governments, corporate consolidation of markets and resources, corporate treatment of workers as mere commodities, propagandist media, overcrowded urban areas, and hollowed-out rural areas.

There are no quick and simple answers for any of these problems. The issues are complex, and, in most cases, one drives the others.

For example, mass migration is the result of many factors. Very few people on the planet would leave their homeland, uproot their families, and, in many cases, walk thousands of miles through a gauntlet of hardships, violence, and obstacles just to take a poverty-level, back-breaking job elsewhere. That is, they wouldn’t unless the conditions in their homeland were much worse.

These migrants are leaving their homelands under threat of death – from wars, violent gangs, drug cartels, vicious dictators, greedy oligarchs, religious and political persecution, ethnic cleansing, and climate-caused droughts. They aren’t just looking for the promise of a better life. These men, women, and children are escaping almost certain death.

What happens when we deport them? In all likelihood, they will die. And their deaths should be forever burned into our collective conscious. Of course, many of those in prosperous countries will simply shrug their shoulders, offer thoughts and prayers, and claim their deaths are God’s will.

In fact, the anti-immigrant crowd is more likely to be concerned about the possible economic consequences of mass deportations. Deporting up to 12 million undocumented workers from the US could be catastrophic to our economy. After all, these are the workers who pick our fruit and vegetables, who process our meat, who cook our food, who clean our offices and hotel rooms, who repair our roofs, who do our landscaping, and nanny our children. Many have become friends and neighbors. And the plain fact is, we need these people.

But they should have entered the country the right way, you say. They should have stood in line to apply for immigration. The unfortunate truth is that it takes approximately three years to enter “the right way.” Most of those escaping their homelands would be dead by the time they received approval.

So, if walls, razor sharp concertina wire, and the threats of deportation are not the answer to migration, what is?

Clearly, a big part of the answer is to deal with the causes of migration. Of course, addressing climate change is a multi-generational task. So, there needs to be some interim way to humanely house and feed its victims. That only takes a willingness to help and money – likely less than we’re spending on walls. The other factors driving migration require governmental fixes – deposing dictators, ending persecution, and jailing gangs.

That all seems very daunting. But, in many cases, we – the world’s most prosperous nations and empires – created these problems and supported corrupt governments. We absolutely should be part of the solution.

Of course, that takes an honest, caring and sensible government at home. One run by politicians that are willing to level with voters, to understand the complexities and explain them to voters, to address the issues, to inspire, and to lead.

Unfortunately, such a government is nowhere to be seen on our horizon.