SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Fred Reed's mathematical analysis of Trump's Wall proves that Trump is insincere, proves that Trump is mathematically incompetent, and earns Fred Reed an honorary nerd card:
https://fredoneverything.org/the-wall-the-sound-and-the-fury-and-not-much-else/
More math!
~childo
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Trump's Wall Is Mathematically Unlikely
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 91 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
"The subspace _W inherits the other 8 properties of _V. And there aren't
even any property taxes."
-- J. MacKay, Mathematics 134b
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @07:49AM (13 children)
From https://amac.us/illegal-immigration-cost-1/ [amac.us] we have this:
"In 2010, the average unlawful immigrant household received around $24,721 in government benefits and services while paying some $10,334 in taxes."
From https://fairus.org/issue/publications-resources/fiscal-burden-illegal-immigration-united-states-taxpayers [fairus.org] we have this:
Cost is $135 billion, taxes paid are $19 billion, net loss is $116 billion.
To me that looks like roughly $1000 per legit household. Imagine knocking $1000 off your taxes.
Let's consider something else though, which a liberal ought to care about: the effect on poor Americans. Wouldn't you like a living wage? Illegal aliens drive wages down, putting many Americans out of work. Wages rise when immigration laws get enforced. The effect is particularly strong for black people ("people of color" today?) because they are often the first to be laid off and the last to be hired. Illegal aliens hurt black people.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @08:24AM (6 children)
So, uh... punish employers who hire illegal immigrants. That solves pretty much all of the problems, and has no unethical downsides.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @10:05AM (5 children)
Yeah but they are too-big-to-fail. You know, it's always the little guys fault.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 07 2018, @10:47AM (4 children)
The goal of the punishment should not be to make them fail. The goal should be to make illegal employment more expensive than legal employment.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @05:37PM
It's a fundamental part of running a business to weigh RISK and COSTs over a planned period of time. Breaking the law for MANY corporations is NO different for them to consider than the 1000s of other decisions that must be made. It's so easy to treat legality like any other business factor; same with morality... That is how corporations and how we structure them promotes people who might not be evil individually to do far more immoral and/or illegal things by proxy.
Corporate punishments NEED TO BE FAR MORE SEVERE than individual punishments. A corporation not wishing to collapse will evaluate a severe COST and it's risk accordingly. If they know they won't have a high COST, they'll not even care about the RISK - it can be treated like a TAX... except it's a tax you ONLY pay on the rare occasion you get "assessed" (caught) and you can often negotiate it down lower, unlike a tax.
We NEVER have a shortage of people for management; they are supposed to be paid more for having more responsibility--- but they do not have actual responsibility; culturally, there was a weak implied social contract. We MUST stop viewing them as high priests who magically produce jobs and at least treat them on par with lawyers... if not lower. If they go to jail, that responsibility would justify their salary. The implied social contract that they protect our jobs, our company, our economy-- no longer exists and it wasn't great to begin with. They lack of ANY constraints is why it progressed downhill and continues to do so... especially as they find it easier to remove themselves from the culture in which they are symbiotic parasites. (they are... think about it... they are in it for greed and we want to benefit from that... but the symbiotic relationship is getting way too imbalanced. welcome to the 2nd gilded age.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 07 2018, @06:11PM (2 children)
When you make illegal employment more expensive than legal employment (to the employers) then you hurt business - drive up the cost of goods, diminish our competitiveness in world markets, slow the flow of export (and domestic) dollars into the hands of the big business owners - and then they can't trickle it down...
If they really wanted to stop illegal employment, they'd start by putting real enforcement and penalties on businesses that do it - but that's not the kind of thing that real politicians do.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @11:40PM (1 child)
Sure. And when you use fines to to make illegal driving more expensive then legal driving then you hurt motorists, and when you use some FDA regulation to make illegal pesticides more expensive then legal pesticides then you hurt farmers, and when you require that surgeons go through some pesky training before operating on someone then you hurt those poor doctors.
But not as much as you hurt the public in general if you don't have or enforce those rules. Why should it be any different for employment?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 08 2018, @12:34AM
Didn't you get the memo? Government has been bought and paid for by business; it now exists to protect business interests first and foremost - all other benefits to the electorate trickle down from a thriving, maximally profitable business sector.
Illegal driving kills people, and frightens many more - dead and frightened consumers are bad for business.
Illegal pesticides kill people too, same principle: dead consumers spend no more.
"Training" doctors is a whole other kettle of fish - now we're talking about throttling supply so that demand spikes to maximize payouts. Medical is a unique field in that people will pay virtually anything to avoid dying, so you want to make sure that doctors are just expensive enough to bankrupt the median family assets when someone dies so as to maximize that flow of capital out of the hands of the families and into the active economy via the luxury cars, real estate, travel and other things that the physicians and hospital investors will purchase with dying people's money.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by tonyPick on Sunday January 07 2018, @10:39AM (3 children)
Except that there are many problems with the way FAIR constructs it's estimates amongst other things:
and
and
and
But to return to your point....
You think spending tens of billions of dollars on something which will mainly increase the purchase of 31 foot sections of Rope in Mexico will somehow help poor Americans?
(Score: 4, Informative) by tonyPick on Sunday January 07 2018, @10:46AM (2 children)
Bah :missing link for source reporting in the above [politifact.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @10:56AM (1 child)
Politifact is about as biased as can be. It's one of those dishonest "fact checker" sites that the democrats cooked up as a tactic for spreading disinformation.
The moment you take politifact seriously, you are discredited.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @01:59PM
Translation: "Everything politifact says is true, it just contradicts my worldview and all the cult propaganda I have been fed. It hurts my feelings!"
(Score: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 07 2018, @11:23AM
Hate the numbers? No. Accurate and honest numbers are to be respected no matter what good or bad news they bring. That's a stance the Right has entirely too much trouble understanding and accepting.
Clearly AMAC is highly partisan. They are anti-abortion (spinning that position as "pro-life" of course) but pro-gun and against Obamacare. A typical contradiction. I wouldn't trust their numbers. A common trick I've seen conservatives pull is to claim the poor don't pay much in taxes, using only the _income_ tax and not counting all the sales taxes and other taxes everyone pays. In recent decades, the political Right has demonstrated over and over that they are insincere, lying, cheating idiots who really seem to think facts do not matter. They have no credibility.
I couldn't tell with a quick look whether FAIR is another propaganda organ.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 07 2018, @05:48PM
No, your numbers above indicate cost is around $45 billion ($24k cost per). The $116 billion would need to including the similar level of benefits, which are going to be more than just taxes paid.