Are you familiar with the welfare cliff? Millions of people don't want to work because they would earn less working a minimum wage job than they can collect being on welfare.
The Official U.S. Senate Committee On The Budget
www.budget.senate.gov
Welfare is adjusted for cost of living increases, but the minimum wage is not. The last time the minimum wage increased was in 2009. It's been stagnant for 15 years and there is a lot of inflation which has happened since especially the last few years.
Where as you're saying "we need these illegal immigrants because our citizens won't work" you're only seeing the viewpoint of the big business owners who have thier heads in the clouds and can't see the true scope and scale of the problem.
The minimum wage needs to increase - substantially. There is no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of those unemployed hopeless people would be happy to work a job if they could earn more than what their welfare benefits provide them.
But that would mean like a $30 minimum wage, which sounds correct to me given all the inflation and cost of living increases - for years now that's what I think is about where it would need to be to provide an actual middle class standard of living to most people. That's where it would need to be for Millenials to live the same life that their boomer parents had.
But the rich would throw a temper tantrum. They would thrash and scream like babies. There's no way they would accept that. This is why they keep the border open and let in tens of millions of illegals. Why pay your fellow citizen a fair wage when you can exploit slave labor?
That's basically what illegal immigrants are. Or what outsourcing to China is. The year is 2024 and big business still is only able to operate by exploiting slaves.
Here is the rub:
Every time the minimum wage is adjusted, business raises the cost of doing business so that the percentages remain constant. If they double your wages, the prices for goods and services doubles.
The typical knee jerk reaction is to jump into socialism. It promises to balance that out. Socialism is a failure. Let's go a step further. When businesses don't pay, it is the taxpayers that pick up the slack. Once, several years ago, I researched and found out that the largest group of people whose children were drawing what is known as Peach Care in Georgia (state Medicaid for children) were the children of Walmart employees. So, Walmart wasn't paying their employees enough money; the taxpayers are required to pay via taxes so that the children of Walmart employees can afford health care. How do we get employers to pay up?
At the county level, the county should not grant a business license to a company that cannot afford to pay their employees a livable wage. And what is a livable wage? Figure the cost of housing. An employee should be able to afford minimal housing on 25 percent of their salary. So, if an area has rental apartments that can be had for $700 a month as a starting price, then the minimum wage it takes to live in that county is $2,800 a month. That works out to just under $17 an hour.
That means that county planners should be able to determine how many rental units it would take to guarantee that every business has the potential to hire workers that can afford to live there and that way no building permits are issued for more expensive rental units until enough rental units are built to accommodate lower cost housing. Now, let's solve the issue at the federal level AND give you relief from so - called
"illegal immigrants / aliens."
Taxes on businesses should be as high as humanly possible. We might even consider taxes to be 40 percent on a business. Then we allow for very generous tax breaks in the following areas:
Pay American employees 20 percent over poverty level wages to start - tax break
Hire an all American staff - tax break
Provide jobs for handicapped, elderly part time, and /or take someone off the welfare dole - tax break
Provide child care for employees - tax break
Bring jobs back to the U.S. - tax break
Finally, in order to make this system work at its optimum, the states should require every welfare recipient (along with those who claim any kind of unemployment, food assistance, etc.) to register with the state employment agencies. If after three months they cannot find work, they start going to classes and counseling with state employment specialists. The objective is to get those people back into the labor market. After six months of unemployment, they could do community service for their taxpayer paid benefits.
Should you ever want to discuss this in a REAL think tank atmosphere: resisters.freeforums.net