Rob Not

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@memeticsisyphus No, most people in the Springfield realized they were beneficial (because they were), it was a pretty small set of people complaining (about things which were mostly about the city never planning for their public push for workers to succeed).

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 I have to sign off, it's way too late to keep doing this.

I hope you enjoyed your 4th

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 And the whole thing is that you're just not actually being fucked over.

That's just the modern flavor of agitation directed at nativists in order to maintain party loyalty.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 And most of the rest of the globe isn't really doing as well as us in a whole lot of ways, and even other somewhat comparable wealthy nations have serious problems on their horizons that we don't.

And they also are slowly coming around to using more immigramt labor.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 Oh, it's not just decades, using this kind of labor was pretty much built into the baseline function of the US economy from the start.

How exactly would the markets normalize in the way you think they will - same production, higher wages, not higher inflation?

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 We could and probably should be doing some amount of that. There are a lot of likely benefits to UBI.

But that's not really creating the same result, since that isn't also simultaneously increasing supply (and doing so by a larger degree than demand)

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 No, a lot of those would just stop. There's a significant chunk of both industries that are only profitable in the first place because of below market labor costs.

This has happened in places where super tight enforcement has been attempted.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 No, it's a pretty mundane result, actually.

The expense is still tiny compared to the value created, even if the government balance sheet is where the hot potato lands.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 Removing them would mostly mean a lot of jobs just wouldn't exist at all, as opposed to workers getting better wages. And then also a higher inflation rate.

Making these *legal* work programs with protections, tracking, and travel limitations would probably be the best result.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 Our economy is very very strange on a macro level and just going off of basic models doesn't work well as a result.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 As a result there all this money just kind of flowing around forever in abstract ledgers instead of doing anything.

So this getting siphoned off into the actual consumer economy via new low end labor doesn't create the effect it would be expected to.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 The issue is the flow of value creation, not the lack of it.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 No they're not, they're very much in the positive overall, it's just not the public budget that's collecting most of the immediate value.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 You're also including authorized work programs in there, which is kind of weird.

The cost of their medical care isn't all that big of a deal, either.

The future economic contributions of their children as citizens makes up any difference in their welfare spending.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 And the impact of their addition to the supply of food and housing outstrips the impact of their demand on those things.

Them ending up on welfare is mostly a function of how low wage works in general - businesses extract the value they create and leave the public with the bill.

[Rob Not @TheNot]

@LilBastardGob @WestsideLAGuy @MT_6226 Scale is always what matters. The existence of something tells you nothing at all about its importance

And the negative effect is mostly countered by reducing inflation (particularly for things which take up a larger proportion of low wage budgets) and growing the economy faster