Our Next President?

[dcarrigg]

Re: My immigration policy

Maybe stop H2 completely and use H1 only for physicians, lawyers and CEO's?

Honestly I'd say none of the above. I know kids who have been on wait lists for nursing programs or med school for years. There are 100,000 qualified MBAs for every CEO slot. JDs are unemployed all over the place. We have plenty of talent. There's no shortage of pretty girls who'd like to marry a rich guy that I've seen. We don't need more H1Bs.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: My immigration policy

Honestly I'd say none of the above. I know kids who have been on wait lists for nursing programs or med school for years. There are 100,000 qualified MBAs for every CEO slot. JDs are unemployed all over the place. We have plenty of talent. There's no shortage of pretty girls who'd like to marry a rich guy that I've seen. We don't need more H1Bs.

I think Polish_Silver was being facetious. Imagine hiring an H-1B visa from India with a degree from IIT and IIM who's willing to work for 1/10 the wage of a typical CEO. To use the spiel from management when it comes to bringing in totally unqualified, unintelligent technologists on H-1B visas, "We can't find anyone with the qualifications for these CEO jobs. We should bring in Indian CEOs! They've graduated from world class institutions and the best thing is, THEY ALL SPEAK ENGLISH!"

[Polish_Silver]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

I think Polish_Silver was being facetious.

only 50%

Maybe I was wrong about JD, but Physicians and CEO's are the most massively overpaid groups I can think of.
If DC is correct, that there are many qualified people, than why are CEO salary so high?
Obviously, supply and demand has nothing to do with physician and CEO salaries.

The systems operate more like cartels.

[dcarrigg]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

only 50%

Maybe I was wrong about JD, but Physicians and CEO's are the most massively overpaid groups I can think of.
If DC is correct, that there are many qualified people, than why are CEO salary so high?
Obviously, supply and demand has nothing to do with physician and CEO salaries.

The systems operate more like cartels.

Absolutely. Especially the combination Chairman of the Board / CEO positions. The same guy as Chairman hires himself as CEO and sets his own compensation package. There's no separation of powers. There's no national or international search for talent. It's not about who's best for the job. It's about power.

You want a great case-in-point? Mylan, the makers of EpiPen who got some bad press about jacking up the price by 500%. Who enabled that? Senator Joe Manchin. Who became CEO of Mylan? Heather Bresch, Joe Manchin's daughter. Did she have an MBA? No. But she lied about having one on her resumé. So why did Mylan select her, of all people, to be their CEO. Was it because she was the best qualified? Was it because she was the most honest? Or was it because her dad pushed through a bill to have all schools buy EpiPens at inflated prices?

Of course, I think markets are always about power. Even if you make it to the last table at a Hold 'Em tournament, if you're low on chips compared to the big fish, it's easy to get pushed all in. Even small business is full of this stuff. I learned that as a kid flipping pizzas. Owner was trying to open a new location. Competing pizza shop was owned by a guy who had several restaurants in the town. Several of his restaurants was rented from the same landlord who owned the new location, since that landlord was the local land baron and owned lots of commercial real estate in that town. Competing owner told landlord he'd shut everything down and walk if landlord rented to my boss. Landlord tore up the lease and rented it to the competitor who just kept it empty to avoid competition until he finally put something in there maybe a year later. My boss ended up finding a different spot to rent tucked back in a less visible location. It eventually went bust. This is how the real world works, not like a supply and demand graph the ivory tower egg heads teach kids in econ 101. It's not fair. It's cutthroat. And it's super easy for bigger players to leverage power to muscle out competition.

With doctors, the bottle neck isn't even the med schools, which also have very long waiting lists, but have been expanding enrollment somewhat. In the last 20 years they have opened a couple dozen MD granting institutions and about a dozen DO granting ones. The tightest part of the bottleneck is residencies. Residencies have been frozen at a constant level since 1996 thanks to "The Balanced Budget Act." But this is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and probably costs more money than it saves. I've not gone through the process myself, but from what I've heard it's bananas. Why?

Of course, The Market® will never fund residencies at any reasonable level. BUT, big corporate pharma and med companies will fund specialists' residencies that do things they like, with heavy strings attached. They have no incentive to fund what people actually need, only what's profitable for them. So Neutrogena will make more dermatologists happen to sell more Neutrogena stuff. Actual health outcomes are irrelevant. So this is how the supply of doctors happens--this is how the decisions about how many we'll have practicing in which areas of medicine happen. The number of slots government funds is capped. Corporate funds augment it and fund a number, dictating how many and in which given specialty. Then the National Resident Matching Program reviews things over matching weeks and tells students whether they match at all, and what they matched with. Of course, they had to "market up" the process with nonsense. So the decisions are made by the Roth-Peranson algorithm, which operates on the principle of the stable marriage problem and makes snap decisions in less than a minute. The system is designed such that there are always more applicants than slots, so many MDs and DOs are "not marriage material." What happens to all those MDs? They end up in hundreds of grand of debt doing paperwork or lab tests or some other thing someone with much less education could do and try again the next year. So now we have a pool of deeply indebted domestic MDs not allowed to practice doing menial labor deeply in debt. But we also don't have enough MDs practicing in certain areas that don't get corporate love for residency slots. So what's the solution? Import doctors who have gone through foreign residency programs and send them through a whole different tortured process. And if this sounds like the stupidest thing you've ever heard, then I think you're following along with me.

There's no shortage of people who want to do these jobs. MDs entering medical billing data all day on the sidelines because an algorithm didn't like them probably aren't living their best lives. Of course, the entire generation born after 1980 that has been essentially priced out of the housing market in good chunks of the country probably isn't either. And the solution to both issues is easy. Build thousands more small, unpretentious, two and three bedroom homes. Fund thousands more residencies. But The Market® will never do it. Because it's about power. And doing it would squeeze those with a bigger pile of chips, both wages of practicing physicians now, and home equity of people who bought in before the early 2000s when housing prices went through the roof. So we only build luxury housing, and we only add corporate-sponsored specialist residencies. 84% of all new construction lists in the top 20% of local housing markets now for the last decade and change. And most of that luxury housing gets scooped up by people and investors from abroad too. And when the eggheads say, "luxury houses trickle down," I'd invite them to come to New England, where lots of us live in housing that's very old, and the middle class housing from the 1700s and 1800s is still middle class today, and the luxury housing from the gilded age is still owned by the wealthy and powerful. It doesn't trickle down. It never will.

And I think the root of the problem is really the Good/Evil, God/Devil, Market/Government dichotomy people have in their heads. We've got to break out of it. We've got to get ourselves to a point where we realize that there's a stupid and a smart way to do things, not a good and an evil way. There's tremendous potential in America being wasted every day. If we could just break the stranglehold of power a little bit, we could unleash it. Millions of smart, educated, qualified people are doing pointless, menial jobs. Millions of couples that could be improving property and raising families are living in basements and one-room apartments letting the days tick by paying student loans, getting too old to have children or pay down a 30 year mortgage. We're better educated and trained than we've ever been. But we're locking a huge swath of people out of opportunity because it benefits a few people tremendously. It's the mis-match between skills and opportunity and capital and projects that need doing that are really the core of the slow growth and falling life expectancy and general malaise.

And the problem with the total hands-off free-market approach is that VC billionaires and big developers will never find a way to do small-town local construction projects in a way that sends all the profits to back to the valley. So capital they've accumulated will never be allocated to those ends, and therefore nor will the tax revenue. Just like there's no good way for big corporate players to make money off small private practice GPs, so they won't fund those residencies, and CVS will push for NPs and PAs or something like them to staff Minute Clinics instead. When you take democratic government totally out of the picture in a highly oligopolized world where capital is the most concentrated in the fewest hands it has been in history, power to make decisions how to allocate capital goes to the oligarchs de facto. And they have no incentive to do anything altruistic.

Of course, the government over everything approach doesn't necessarily work either. But I cannot think of an institution other than Government (inclusive of the military) that has the power to challenge the powerful and realign skills and opportunity; capital and work that needs doing. Problem, of course, is right in the Manchin example I used above. How much incentive to legislators really have to do these things when their funding all comes from the people benefiting from keeping the misalignment of capital and useful projects and skills and opportunity going? People are going to have to bootstrap candidates who will actually stand up to the oligarchy and wrest capital and opportunity free from those directing it toward their own ends. The problems America has are not terribly hard to fix. The healthcare issue can be solved by copying almost any other system from any other 1st world country instead of the one we have. The housing issue can be solved by building a lot more ~1,000sqft plain jain not-luxury homes. The infrastructure issues can be vastly improved by simply building them, swapping out lead pipes, building gas lines, The opportunity issue can be solved by funding more residencies and programs and licensures and all that and getting rid of the rube goldberg machine of private sector administrative jobs that gets bigger and bigger all the time and just crushes the souls of people who work them and bogs every sector down. And I'm even open to the idea that some of the regs and restrictions can be pared back in a way that's not dangerous.

I mean, imagine an America where instead of having a single algorithm decide whether and which residencies MDs get, we have an algorithm free millions of people from the drudgery of working in medical and insurance billing and administration. It's possible without proprietary pricing agreements and trade secrets between insurance companies and hospitals. It really is. Almost any other activity would be more useful. As a nation, we're expending a tremendous amount of effort on pointless activities just because we can't snap out of the good/evil paradigm, and it forces us to punt the authority to make decisions to a few private sector people with the power to make them, who always act in their own interests and have no incentive to care about the common weal.

I mean, the state where I was born was named after the common weal. It is a commonwealth. If the citizens of a republic hamstring themselves and actively punt decisions, who will act in their interests? Who will care about the commonwealth? Probably nobody. And if we're locked in a good/evil paradigm in which we've convinced ourselves that punting decisions is good and making them ourselves is evil, then I don't see how we have any hope. We'll keep getting bananas processes if we insist on having a banana republic where a handful of oligarchs run roughshod over the rule of law and make short-sighted decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the commonwealth. So someone's going to have to reassert control, at least long enough to shake the ground and better, if not perfectly, align opportunity and skill and capital and useful work. We need less capital for apps and more for sewers. How many millions of kids are going to grow up with cognitive impairments from lead poisoning and lower IQs, and how much will that cost in lost opportunity? We know how to fix it, we have the technology, we simply don't allocate effort and capital to solving the problem. And we're never going to ever get it without really shaking things up. I doubt it will come just from one strong personality either, although someone will become a figurehead for it. It's going to come from people demanding it. People generally don't give power away. Usually you have to take it from them. And they tend to kick and scream in the process.

[Chris Coles]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

Absolutely. Especially the combination Chairman of the Board / CEO positions. The same guy as Chairman hires himself as CEO and sets his own compensation package. There's no separation of powers. There's no national or international search for talent. It's not about who's best for the job. It's about power.

You want a great case-in-point? Mylan, the makers of EpiPen who got some bad press about jacking up the price by 500%. Who enabled that? Senator Joe Manchin. Who became CEO of Mylan? Heather Bresch, Joe Manchin's daughter. Did she have an MBA? No. But she lied about having one on her resumé. So why did Mylan select her, of all people, to be their CEO. Was it because she was the best qualified? Was it because she was the most honest? Or was it because her dad pushed through a bill to have all schools buy EpiPens at inflated prices?

Of course, I think markets are always about power. Even if you make it to the last table at a Hold 'Em tournament, if you're low on chips compared to the big fish, it's easy to get pushed all in. Even small business is full of this stuff. I learned that as a kid flipping pizzas. Owner was trying to open a new location. Competing pizza shop was owned by a guy who had several restaurants in the town. Several of his restaurants was rented from the same landlord who owned the new location, since that landlord was the local land baron and owned lots of commercial real estate in that town. Competing owner told landlord he'd shut everything down and walk if landlord rented to my boss. Landlord tore up the lease and rented it to the competitor who just kept it empty to avoid competition until he finally put something in there maybe a year later. My boss ended up finding a different spot to rent tucked back in a less visible location. It eventually went bust. This is how the real world works, not like a supply and demand graph the ivory tower egg heads teach kids in econ 101. It's not fair. It's cutthroat. And it's super easy for bigger players to leverage power to muscle out competition.

With doctors, the bottle neck isn't even the med schools, which also have very long waiting lists, but have been expanding enrollment somewhat. In the last 20 years they have opened a couple dozen MD granting institutions and about a dozen DO granting ones. The tightest part of the bottleneck is residencies. Residencies have been frozen at a constant level since 1996 thanks to "The Balanced Budget Act." But this is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and probably costs more money than it saves. I've not gone through the process myself, but from what I've heard it's bananas. Why?

Of course, The Market® will never fund residencies at any reasonable level. BUT, big corporate pharma and med companies will fund specialists' residencies that do things they like, with heavy strings attached. They have no incentive to fund what people actually need, only what's profitable for them. So Neutrogena will make more dermatologists happen to sell more Neutrogena stuff. Actual health outcomes are irrelevant. So this is how the supply of doctors happens--this is how the decisions about how many we'll have practicing in which areas of medicine happen. The number of slots government funds is capped. Corporate funds augment it and fund a number, dictating how many and in which given specialty. Then the National Resident Matching Program reviews things over matching weeks and tells students whether they match at all, and what they matched with. Of course, they had to "market up" the process with nonsense. So the decisions are made by the Roth-Peranson algorithm, which operates on the principle of the stable marriage problem and makes snap decisions in less than a minute. The system is designed such that there are always more applicants than slots, so many MDs and DOs are "not marriage material." What happens to all those MDs? They end up in hundreds of grand of debt doing paperwork or lab tests or some other thing someone with much less education could do and try again the next year. So now we have a pool of deeply indebted domestic MDs not allowed to practice doing menial labor deeply in debt. But we also don't have enough MDs practicing in certain areas that don't get corporate love for residency slots. So what's the solution? Import doctors who have gone through foreign residency programs and send them through a whole different tortured process. And if this sounds like the stupidest thing you've ever heard, then I think you're following along with me.

There's no shortage of people who want to do these jobs. MDs entering medical billing data all day on the sidelines because an algorithm didn't like them probably aren't living their best lives. Of course, the entire generation born after 1980 that has been essentially priced out of the housing market in good chunks of the country probably isn't either. And the solution to both issues is easy. Build thousands more small, unpretentious, two and three bedroom homes. Fund thousands more residencies. But The Market® will never do it. Because it's about power. And doing it would squeeze those with a bigger pile of chips, both wages of practicing physicians now, and home equity of people who bought in before the early 2000s when housing prices went through the roof. So we only build luxury housing, and we only add corporate-sponsored specialist residencies. 84% of all new construction lists in the top 20% of local housing markets now for the last decade and change. And most of that luxury housing gets scooped up by people and investors from abroad too. And when the eggheads say, "luxury houses trickle down," I'd invite them to come to New England, where lots of us live in housing that's very old, and the middle class housing from the 1700s and 1800s is still middle class today, and the luxury housing from the gilded age is still owned by the wealthy and powerful. It doesn't trickle down. It never will.

And I think the root of the problem is really the Good/Evil, God/Devil, Market/Government dichotomy people have in their heads. We've got to break out of it. We've got to get ourselves to a point where we realize that there's a stupid and a smart way to do things, not a good and an evil way. There's tremendous potential in America being wasted every day. If we could just break the stranglehold of power a little bit, we could unleash it. Millions of smart, educated, qualified people are doing pointless, menial jobs. Millions of couples that could be improving property and raising families are living in basements and one-room apartments letting the days tick by paying student loans, getting too old to have children or pay down a 30 year mortgage. We're better educated and trained than we've ever been. But we're locking a huge swath of people out of opportunity because it benefits a few people tremendously. It's the mis-match between skills and opportunity and capital and projects that need doing that are really the core of the slow growth and falling life expectancy and general malaise.

And the problem with the total hands-off free-market approach is that VC billionaires and big developers will never find a way to do small-town local construction projects in a way that sends all the profits to back to the valley. So capital they've accumulated will never be allocated to those ends, and therefore nor will the tax revenue. Just like there's no good way for big corporate players to make money off small private practice GPs, so they won't fund those residencies, and CVS will push for NPs and PAs or something like them to staff Minute Clinics instead. When you take democratic government totally out of the picture in a highly oligopolized world where capital is the most concentrated in the fewest hands it has been in history, power to make decisions how to allocate capital goes to the oligarchs de facto. And they have no incentive to do anything altruistic.

Of course, the government over everything approach doesn't necessarily work either. But I cannot think of an institution other than Government (inclusive of the military) that has the power to challenge the powerful and realign skills and opportunity; capital and work that needs doing. Problem, of course, is right in the Manchin example I used above. How much incentive to legislators really have to do these things when their funding all comes from the people benefiting from keeping the misalignment of capital and useful projects and skills and opportunity going? People are going to have to bootstrap candidates who will actually stand up to the oligarchy and wrest capital and opportunity free from those directing it toward their own ends. The problems America has are not terribly hard to fix. The healthcare issue can be solved by copying almost any other system from any other 1st world country instead of the one we have. The housing issue can be solved by building a lot more ~1,000sqft plain jain not-luxury homes. The infrastructure issues can be vastly improved by simply building them, swapping out lead pipes, building gas lines, The opportunity issue can be solved by funding more residencies and programs and licensures and all that and getting rid of the rube goldberg machine of private sector administrative jobs that gets bigger and bigger all the time and just crushes the souls of people who work them and bogs every sector down. And I'm even open to the idea that some of the regs and restrictions can be pared back in a way that's not dangerous.

I mean, imagine an America where instead of having a single algorithm decide whether and which residencies MDs get, we have an algorithm free millions of people from the drudgery of working in medical and insurance billing and administration. It's possible without proprietary pricing agreements and trade secrets between insurance companies and hospitals. It really is. Almost any other activity would be more useful. As a nation, we're expending a tremendous amount of effort on pointless activities just because we can't snap out of the good/evil paradigm, and it forces us to punt the authority to make decisions to a few private sector people with the power to make them, who always act in their own interests and have no incentive to care about the common weal.

I mean, the state where I was born was named after the common weal. It is a commonwealth. If the citizens of a republic hamstring themselves and actively punt decisions, who will act in their interests? Who will care about the commonwealth? Probably nobody. And if we're locked in a good/evil paradigm in which we've convinced ourselves that punting decisions is good and making them ourselves is evil, then I don't see how we have any hope. We'll keep getting bananas processes if we insist on having a banana republic where a handful of oligarchs run roughshod over the rule of law and make short-sighted decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the commonwealth. So someone's going to have to reassert control, at least long enough to shake the ground and better, if not perfectly, align opportunity and skill and capital and useful work. We need less capital for apps and more for sewers. How many millions of kids are going to grow up with cognitive impairments from lead poisoning and lower IQs, and how much will that cost in lost opportunity? We know how to fix it, we have the technology, we simply don't allocate effort and capital to solving the problem. And we're never going to ever get it without really shaking things up. I doubt it will come just from one strong personality either, although someone will become a figurehead for it. It's going to come from people demanding it. People generally don't give power away. Usually you have to take it from them. And they tend to kick and scream in the process.

There are small signs of change, with perhaps the best, recently, has been the publication of this paper https://www.westonaprice.org/oiling-...a-in-new-york/ which sets out in great detail, (printed out some 30 pages of text), so a very long read. This will sound outrageous; if you want to live, you absolutely have to read it; all of it.

That leaves the obvious question; who among the candidates for your next President understands the challenges Oiling of America demands? And if there is even just one; where is their recognition of the need for change?

[dcarrigg]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

Of course I think markets are always about power

Saw this earlier, good example of nobody breaking the law, investors just seeking return, and folks getting hurt in the process. For anyone who grew up being told stories of absentee landlords in the great famine, this should be familiar stuff. For anyone else, if you ever wondered where my aversion to getting locked into "regular monthly payments" for something you can't quite own and control outright, there you go. Sensitivity to market power and aversion to getting into positions where it can be wielded like a weapon against you is a deep, cultural thing.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

Last week I went to a meet-and-great for investing in apartment buildings.
Most folks were house flippers looking to move up into the big leagues, I was looking for passive lending opportunities.

The presenter made a similar argument about raising rents. It's one key to making the numbers work for the apartment project flipper, raising rents 20% to 30%.
He talked about how people are stuck in their apartments to a large degree. Although in theory they can move, most folks want to live within a couple miles of where they live now, and moving is expensive.
If the flipper buys the cheapest project in an area, he can raise rents up to the units nearby and people are just stuck, they will somehow find another $100 a month.

[dcarrigg]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

Yeah. Homelessness is usually the last option. Most people will default on their car loans and credit cards and student loans and go hungry before they get thrown out on the street. So it's great for investors. The landlord's pretty high up on the payment priority ladder. Of course, some people can and do stop paying. And laws vary by state about how long they can get away with that. But I generally expect chattel defaults to precede evictions and mortgage defaults.

I think that this is going to be a bigger story as one integral part of the next recession. The last recession forced subprime homeowners into the rental markets. The next recession is going to push renters onto the streets. The monthly cash flow of the bottom 50% is super precarious. And they're disproportionally young. And there's a lot of them. For some it may even be a blast. But they're going to be super pissed off and radicalized by what's happened. I don't think it's a coincidence that the big rental squeeze is on at the same time socialism is on the rise amongst the exact population demographics in the exact localities most affected by it. As the squeeze gets tighter, what other reaction should anyone expect? Basic Newtonian physics.

And America's unique system of profit-based healthcare works exactly this same way. They know they beat even the landlord and the bank on the priority chain. So they charge whatever they damn well please. They liquidate people in exchange for their lives. It's just naked and vulgar raw power.

[dcarrigg]

Re: med costs

Maybe of interest and relevant to the thread, this just popped up on my RSS feed.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: med costs

Nobody supports "open borders" .
It's a talking point catch phrase that implies some candidate wants any person in the world to be able stroll in and stay forever, no questions asked, even a million people at a time.
I'm not aware that anyone has proposed or endorses such a thing; it exists only as an insult.

[dcarrigg]

Re: med costs

I think you're right. More than that, perception is everything and reality doesn't matter. I'd be shocked if 10% of rando Americans polled would say that the Trump Admin legally lets in more foreign guest workers than Obama's. But it does. There's a lot of rhetoric and kabuki theater going on. Actions tell a different story.

[DSpencer]

Re: med costs

Nobody supports "open borders" .
It's a talking point catch phrase that implies some candidate wants any person in the world to be able stroll in and stay forever, no questions asked, even a million people at a time.
I'm not aware that anyone has proposed or endorses such a thing; it exists only as an insult.

Very true. Bernie even backs it up a little bit by pointing to some problems with the idea. The problem is that most of what he supports has the tendency to move towards open borders. It's kind of like saying that you don't support anarchy; you just want to release all the prisoners from jail and then defund the police.

[dcarrigg]

Re: med costs

Very true. Bernie even backs it up a little bit by pointing to some problems with the idea. The problem is that most of what he supports has the tendency to move towards open borders. It's kind of like saying that you don't support anarchy; you just want to release all the prisoners from jail and then defund the police.

I'm less certain about this. We'll see what comes. But I think Bernie and most of his fans are primarily interested in increasing wages, aka the price of domestic labor, and I think they'd happily end guest worker programs and curtail immigration if it led to those ends. The more "centrist" Democrats generally support a more open borders policy, but they also generally support whatever is in the best interest of the Davos crowd anyways. Horseshoe theory is generally stupid. But I think you'll find immigration may be one issue where folks on the left and the right agree more than they disagree on actions, if not rhetoric, and folks in the center are really the opposition on actions, if not rhetoric. The problem is keeping the rhetoric distinct from the actions long enough for people to pick up on it.

You ever met a union member who liked illegal labor? Don't think I have. SEIU may be the exception to the rule. I'll tell you one thing, I agree with almost everything Tucker Carlson said here. Bananas. Who thought we'd see the day?

[DSpencer]

Re: med costs

I'm less certain about this. We'll see what comes. But I think Bernie and most of his fans are primarily interested in increasing wages, aka the price of domestic labor, and I think they'd happily end guest worker programs and curtail immigration if it led to those ends. The more "centrist" Democrats generally support a more open borders policy, but they also generally support whatever is in the best interest of the Davos crowd anyways. Horseshoe theory is generally stupid. But I think you'll find immigration may be one issue where folks on the left and the right agree more than they disagree on actions, if not rhetoric, and folks in the center are really the opposition on actions, if not rhetoric. The problem is keeping the rhetoric distinct from the actions long enough for people to pick up on it.

You ever met a union member who liked illegal labor? Don't think I have. SEIU may be the exception to the rule. I'll tell you one thing, I agree with almost everything Tucker Carlson said here. Bananas. Who thought we'd see the day?

Maybe it's just that Bernie tries to stay quiet with the rhetoric for fear of offending groups that might support him. The problem is that nearly everyone claims to want the same thing: secure the border, deport violent illegal immigrants, and humanely deal with the peaceful and hardworking immigrants who want to stay here, especially children. Is there any candidate that wouldn't say they support "comprehensive immigration reform"?

Maybe it's just a question of priorities. Or maybe some people say it but don't really mean it. All I can say is that, personally, if Bernie gets elected, I won't be expecting a clampdown on illegal immigration.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: med costs

Maybe it's just that Bernie tries to stay quiet with the rhetoric for fear of offending groups that might support him. The problem is that nearly everyone claims to want the same thing: secure the border, deport violent illegal immigrants, and humanely deal with the peaceful and hardworking immigrants who want to stay here, especially children. Is there any candidate that wouldn't say they support "comprehensive immigration reform"?

Maybe it's just a question of priorities. Or maybe some people say it but don't really mean it. All I can say is that, personally, if Bernie gets elected, I won't be expecting a clampdown on illegal immigration.

This is a campaign game we play now. Conservatives have convinced millions of Americans that Democratic candidates want a slew of ridiculous things, so the Democrats will be asked about them, and need to disavow them, no matter how absurd. I try to listen to right wing radio a bit every day, and the ridiculous accusations come a dozen every hour by every radio talk host.