Refugees Seek Asylum for a Higher Class of Poverty

You can barely go anywhere in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina without running into an illegal alien. There are times when you go into a store, a restaurant or a jobsite and all you hear is Spanish. Hadn’t I known better, I would assume I was transported into a third-world hellhole, or at least California. It is an amazing thing to behold.

We are told illegal aliens are looking for a better life. They need asylum from wartorn countries, or gangs, but basically what they’re searching for is a higher class of poverty.

We’ve already established that immigrants whether legal or illegal are prone to sponge off of the welfare system. American citizens are told to look beyond their leeching proclivities and welcome these refugees. I’m here to say that these Latin American countries are in a constant state of strife. For example, PBS published a timeline of Guatemala’s civil war. This has been going on since the Korean War. Actually, it’s probably been going on longer than that. Mind you, this was published in 2011:

Timeline of some key events:

1954 – The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency backed a coup commanded by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas against the democratically-elected president, Jacobo Arbenz. He was considered a communist threat, especially after legalizing the communist party and moving to nationalize the plantations of the United Fruit Company.

Following the coup, Castillo was declared president, and set about reversing land reforms that benefited poor farmers. He also removed voting rights for illiterate Guatemalans.

1960– Guatemala’s 36-year civil war began as left-wing guerilla groups started battling government military forces. The country was now under autocratic rule by Gen. Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, who assumed power in 1958 following the murder of Col. Castillo Armas.

The long conflict was marked by abductions and violence, including mutilations and public dumping of bodies.

1966 – Civilian rule was restored to Guatemala and Cesar Mendez was elected president, but the civil war only intensified with a major counterinsurgency campaign by the army.

1970 – Military-backed Carlos Arana was elected president, and he immediately placed the country under a state of siege, giving the military more control over civilians. For the next decade, a series of military-dominated governments escalated violence against guerilla groups and indigenous communities.

1981– The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report blaming the Guatemalan government for thousands of illegal executions and missing persons in the 1970s, and documenting accounts of the slaughter of members of Indian communities.

1982 – General Efrain Rios Montt seized power following a military coup. He annulled the 1965 constitution, dissolved Congress and suspended political parties.

Montt formed local civilian defense patrols alongside the military in the country and rural indigenous regions, through which he was able to reclaim most guerrilla territory.

This crackdown against the newly-united coalition, the Guatemalan Revolutionary National Unity, marks one of the most violent periods of the civil war during which a large number of indigenous civilians killed.

1985 – A new constitution was drafted and democratic elections for president resumed two years after Montt was ousted in another coup.

1993 – Then-President Jorge Serrano illegally dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and restricted civil rights, but was later forced to resign.

1994 – Under President Ramiro De Leon Carpio, the former human rights ombudsman, peace talks between the government and rebels of the Guatemalan Revolutionary National Unity began and agreements were signed on several issues including human rights.

1996 –A new president, Alvaro Arzu, was chosen in a runoff election. Under Arzu peace negotiations were finalized. Peace accords ending the 36-year internal conflict were signed in December of 1996.

Today Guatemala is led by President Álvaro Colom of the National Unity for Hope. Almost 15 years after the end of the civil war, violence and intimidation continue to be a major problem in political and civilian life. Organized crime groups operate with relative impunity, an issue that appears likely to factor prominently in the country’s next presidential election later this year.


All of these Latin American countries are basically the same. They all have a history of political strife, civil wars and poverty. Here is what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about Mexico in the 1830's:


The Constitution of the United States is akin to those fine creations of human endeavor which crown their inventors with renown and wealth but remain sterile in other hands.


Contemporary Mexico has illustrated this very thing.


The Mexicans, aiming for a federal system, took the federal constitution of their neighbors, the Anglo-Americans, as their model and copied it almost exactly. But although they transported the letter of the law, they failed to transfer at the same time the spirit which gave it life. As a result, they became tangled endlessly in the machinery of their double system of government. The sovereignty of states and Union entered into a collision course as they exceeded the sphere of influence assigned to them by the constitution. Even today Mexico veers constantly from anarchy to military despotism and back again.


We cannot absorb generations of Latin American refugees. There will come a time when we become just as dysfunctional as they. And what will the world do without the United States? Who will absorb American refugees looking for asylum from Latin American induced poverty, strife and civil war?


Source:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/latin_america-jan-june11-timeline_03-07

https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-and-Native-Households

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/map-illegal-immigration-costs-california-most-23b-all-states-89b

https://costonscomplaint.blogspot.com/2017/01/trumps-wall-is-monument-to-mexicos.html

California Leads Nation in Poverty

The census bureau has reported that California leads the nation in poverty. That’s right, you read that correctly. Libtards can’t use their whipping boy - Mississippi or some other flyover state - to point their fingers and jeer at. Their golden state has turned into a golden shithole and it’s all thanks to decades of progressive policies.


The major culprit for California’s “golden age” is their insufferable paternalism and the bureaucracies that enslave one-third of our nation’s able bodied citizens to a life of poverty. Here is an excerpt from City Journal:


Self-interest in the social-services community may be at work here. If California’s poverty rate should ever be substantially reduced by getting the typical welfare client back into the workforce, many bureaucrats could lose their jobs. As economist William A. Niskanen explained back in 1971, public agencies seek to maximize their budgets, through which they acquire increased power, status, comfort, and job security. In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its “customer” base—to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing. With 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, according to Governing, California has an enormous bureaucracy—a unionized, public-sector workforce that exercises tremendous power through voting and lobbying. Many work in social services.


Here is a video emphasizing just how dire the homeless situation is in California. It is shocking.






Source:

https://www.city-journal.org/html/california-poverty-capital-15659.html

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article97425342.html

Red Pope's Encyclical Parfait of Social Justice

Pope Francis is earning the moniker, the Red Pope.  The pontiff’s encyclical is a parfait of global warming hysteria, social justice, and anti-capitalist sentiments topped off with faux concerns for the poor.

Capitalism has been a boon for humanity.  The Industrial Revolution ushered in an age of prosperity.  This explosion of innovation is a direct result from profit and property rights.  The unskilled and the poor were provided opportunities other than subsistence farming, which was the predominate means of living prior to the 1800’s.  Here is an excerpt from Economics and Liberty:

Here we have the economic history of the world in one picture, as summarized for us by Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms:

The basic outline of world economic history is surprisingly simple. . . . Before 1800 income per person--the food, clothing, heat, light, and housing available per head--varied across societies and epochs. . . . the average person in the world in 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 BC.  Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world's population was poorer than their remote ancestors. . . . Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: thirty to thirty-five years. . . . average welfare, if anything, declined from the Stone Age to 1800.  The poor of 1800, those who lived by their unskilled labor alone, would have been better off if transferred to a hunter-gatherer band.  The Industrial Revolution, a mere two hundred years ago, changed forever the possibilities of material consumption.  Incomes per person began to undergo sustained growth in a favored group of countries.  The richest modern economies are now ten to twenty times wealthier than the 1800 average.  Moreover the biggest beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution has so far been the unskilled.  There have been benefits aplenty for the typically wealthy owners of land or capital, and for the educated. But industrialized economies saved their best gifts for the poorest.[Introduction, pp. 1-3]

In other words, for most of human history and in most places in the world, almost all people lived very near subsistence.  But, something happened around 1800 in some places, and the masses of people in those places began to break away from subsistence living and to prosper.

This is the Great Fact of history, as Deirdre McCloskey refers to it in Bourgeois Dignity.  This Great Fact seems to be something most people are unaware of, even among the people who are living in those places in the world where most people live far from subsistence.  It is a fact which seems to be missing from the curricula materials in our schools.  It even seems that this missing fact contributes to many people taking our own prospering for granted.  So, I suppose it should be no surprise that many people seem to believe ideas that are inconsistent with the explanation for why, in some parts of the world, the masses of people began to prosper and continue to prosper today.

    

 Pope Francis falls into that category.  He believes rich nations somehow owe a debt to the world’s poor simply because they are more prosperous.  Here is an excerpt from the Guardian:

Pope Francis has called on the world’s rich nations to begin paying their “grave social debt” to the poor and take concrete steps on climate change, saying failure to do so presents an undeniable risk to a “common home” that is beginning to resemble a “pile of filth”.

The pope’s 180-page encyclical on the environment, released on Thursday, is at its core a moral call for action on phasing out the use of fossil fuels.

But it is also a document infused with an activist anger and concern for the poor, casting blame on the indifference of the powerful in the face of certain evidence that humanity is at risk following 200 years of misuse of resources.

Up to now, he says, the world has accepted a “cheerful recklessness” in its approach to the issue, lacking the will to change habits for the good of the Earth.

“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods,” the papal statement says. “It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”

The true driver of poverty in the third-world is not indifference; its corrupt governments and a lack of access to electricity.  Businesses need assurances like the rule of law and dependable energy to prosper.  That isn’t going to happen when dictators disguised as social justice warriors are running your country.  Can anyone say Venezuela?

The Red Pope would be a better advocate for the poor by holding up the first-world as an example, instead of trying to tear it down. 

Source:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/18/popes-climate-change-encyclical-calls-on-rich-nations-to-pay-social-debt

http://economicsandliberty.blogspot.com/2012/07/economic-history-of-world.html

  

http://costonscomplaint.blogspot.com/2012/07/obamas-third-world-dream-for-united.html

Martin O'Malley: Baltimore's Failures are America's Failure

Liberals like Martin O’Malley never take responsibility for their policies, or their actions.  Their failures are America’s failure.  Nothing is their fault.

 I visited Baltimore in 2004 to watch the Preakness and I can tell you the majority of that city is a hell hole.  HBO featured The Wire around that time, and I can attest to the authenticity of that show.  I mistakenly drove down a major thoroughfare where I witnessed block after block of boarded up houses as far as the eye could see.  I was dumbstruck at that town’s dilapidated state.  But somehow, Martin O’Malley would have us believe its America’s fault for the failures of Baltimore.

The United States has spent over $22 trillion on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  How’s that working out?  Now we have rioters throwing rocks at police while taking pictures with their smart phones and tweeting others to burn down their city as well.

America is populated with people like Martin O’Malley who can’t come to turns with their failures.  Meanwhile, we have to watch a major city burn to the ground by sociopaths with EBT cards.

    

Source:

 http://dailysignal.com/2014/09/28/weve-spent-22-trillion-on-war-on-poverty-what-have-we-achieved/

The Eternal Sunshine of an Eclipsed Liberal Mind

A famous radio talk show host has frequently stated that it’s easy being a liberal.  You don’t have to defend your policies when it’s based on feelings.  Occasionally, one will come up with solutions, but as usual, their thought processes are flawed.  The Charlotte Observer frequently demonstrates this sunshine of the eclipsed mind. 

Last Friday, the Disturber featured a special by a volunteer at an agency that helps homeless families.  His article was filled with stories of the unfortunate, and of course we can all commiserate, but the solutions he proposed are contributing factors to poverty and a declining middle class.  Here is an excerpt:

What can be done?

Key factors of homelessness are lack of education, lack of skills training, lack of affordable healthcare, unmanageable family size, a limited network of friends/ family, too much debt and a low minimum wage. We need to continue and increase funding in our community college programs to enable homeless adults to get GEDs, develop skills and go to college. We need to identify and keep homeless kids in schools.

We need to increase the minimum wage; low-wage jobs perpetuate poverty. A living wage for one person in Charlotte is $9.67 an hour and the living wage for a mother with one child is $17.68 an hour. We need to connect people with better job opportunities. We need to continue forward with the Affordable Care Act, and the states who have not expanded Medicaid need to do so. And, we need to make birth control and education more accessible to manage family sizes.

We need to help people climb the ladders out of poverty. Don’t do for them what they can do for themselves, unless it is truly an emergency such as the family has been evicted. Once the emergency subsides, help them climb a ladder.

 

 

 

Alright, let’s address each one of his proposals.  Yes, education and experience is a factor in success.  You can obtain as many degrees as your heart desires, but it doesn’t guarantee a job, especially when federal and state governments are openly hostile to businesses.   The consequence is a bunker mentality. And the end result is a highly educated, unemployed person.

 

Raising the minimum wage to a “living wage” is another canard.  When businesses are forced to pay a higher wage, they in turn raise prices and/or let people go.  A minimum wage is an introductory wage for low-skilled workers learning a trade.  It shouldn’t be considered optimal pay.  Another consequence of raising the minimum wage is its inflationary aspect.  It is basically an indirect tax on goods and services that harms the poor.

 

 

The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, is also responsible for unemployment.  How many times have we read or heard of businesses cutting back on hours of employees, or halting expansion because of this abomination.  This law is anything but affordable.  Repealing this monstrosity would greatly improve the economy.  As a matter of fact, government regulations cost businesses about $2 trillion annually.  Is that not a regressive tax that hurts the poor?

Good intentions and government regulations don’t provide jobs, or a “living wage.”  Entrepreneurs don’t create businesses because Johnny is unemployed.  They do it because they see a need for their services or product.  Hiring is a byproduct of their success.

 

Yes, we all must do something about poverty.  But let’s keep things in perspective.  Feelings never provided a job, or prosperity for a family.  And neither will burdensome government regulations and failed policies.

 

Source: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/06/21/4121721/we-can-help-the-poor-and-the-homeless.html#storylink=cpy

 

http://tcf.org/blog/detail/graph-how-inflation-erodes-the-minimum-wage-and-why-its-time-to-raise-it

  
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/052913-658028-us-regulatory-state-is-getting-bigger-despite-talk-of-cuts.htm?p=full

Poverty Soars Under Democratic Power

The Census figures for 2009 are to be released this week. Demographers who track poverty trends state that the United States hasn’t seen numbers like this since the time of LBJ. The Associated Press reports:

Interviews with six demographers who closely track poverty trends found wide consensus that 2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent.


Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis.


Among the 18-64 working-age population, the demographers expect a rise beyond 12.4 percent, up from 11.7 percent. That would make it the highest since at least 1965, when another Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the war on poverty that expanded the federal government's role in social welfare programs from education to health care

Others believe that the poverty rate could reach as high as 15%:

A formula by Richard Bavier, a former analyst with the White House Office of Management and Budget who has had high rates of accuracy over the last decade, predicts poverty will reach 15 percent.


That would put the rate at the highest level since 1993. The all-time high was 22.4 percent in 1959, the first year the government began tracking poverty. It dropped to a low of 11.1 percent in 1973 after Johnson's war on poverty.

Of course the Democrats will try and blame Bush, even though they had control of Congress since 2007; not to mention their role in the corruption of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that propelled us down this awful road.

Source:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_poverty_in_america

N.C. Commission Investigates Poverty

I found this article on Civitas: http://www.nccivitas.org/media/publication-archive/perspective/policies-should-promote-wealth-creation

Policies Should Promote Wealth Creation

Brian Balfour January 12, 2010

This article originally appeared in the Jan. 10 2010 edition of the Durham Herald-Sun

What causes poverty?

That's what North Carolina's "Poverty Reduction and Economic Recovery Commission" -- which met again last week -- claims to be investigating. Specifically, the law that created the commission declares "an understanding of the causes and effects of poverty are critical in the reduction of poverty and economic recovery."

Seems logical enough: In order to reduce poverty we must first understand its causes. Sadly, however, the commission (comprised mostly of state legislators and agency heads) has got it completely backwards. There is in fact no cause of poverty. Indeed, poverty was the natural state of mankind for most of human history. As authors Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell Jr. wrote in their book "How the West Grew Rich," "If we take the long view of human history and judge the economic lives of our ancestors by modern standards, it is a story of almost unrelieved wretchedness. The typical human society has given only a small number of people a humane existence, while the great majority have lived in abysmal squalor."

As human societies evolved over time, several nations grew wealthy while many others failed to develop far beyond the original state of basic sustenance.

Poverty, in reality, is the absence of wealth creation.

The focus of the commission's attention, then, should not be what causes poverty, but what causes wealth and prosperity. After all, there is a reason Adam Smith titled his epic treatise "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" rather than "An Inquiry into the Causes of Poverty."

North Carolina's "Poverty Reduction Commission," however, seems completely disinterested in learning how wealth creation can relieve poverty. The commission's focus, rather, is centered on how to subsidize poverty through expanded government programs.

Indeed, the policy recommendations being discussed include a well-worn list of wealth redistribution programs such as increasing subsidies for low-income housing, increasing the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit and expansion of government health insurance programs. Such programs subsidize poverty to the extent they reward unproductive behavior, creating the perverse incentive for recipients to avoid accepting work lest they lose their government benefits.

Completely absent from the commission's discussion are policies to actually create economic growth, jobs and increase income. Curiously, not a single word of concern has yet been raised about the money that first must be removed from the private, productive economy to finance the new or expanded government programs.

In order to truly lift people out of poverty, the commission should be focused not on expanding the welfare state, but on encouraging productive activities that will generate opportunities for our state's poor.

After all, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the best social welfare program is a job. But how can the state best promote economic growth and opportunity? As the late, Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman put it, "the record of history is absolutely crystal clear; that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system."

If North Carolina's poverty reduction commission were truly interested in improving the lives of our state's poor, they would be seeking ways to unshackle the state's economy from high levels of taxation, regulation, government spending and wealth redistribution schemes. Rather than rewarding unproductive behavior by expanding the welfare state, North Carolina lawmakers should incentivize wealth creation and sustainable job growth

Disappointingly, North Carolina's promotion of a free enterprise system leaves a lot to be desired. The Pacific Research Institute's U.S. Economic Freedom Index (EFI) is the most comprehensive and current assessment of economic freedom of all 50 states. In the 2008 EFI rankings, North Carolina came in a dismal 36th (with 1 being the most free), down 12 slots from 2004. The drop was the second largest slide of any state during that time.

The EFI's rankings suggest that North Carolina's poverty problems have been exacerbated by public policies that don't square with promoting "the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system" credited for lifting so many across the world out of poverty.

The Poverty Reduction and Economic Recovery Commission will present its final report and recommendations when North Carolina's General Assembly session reconvenes in the spring. Here's hoping the commission will come to recognize that the best way to reduce poverty is not with more business-as-usual wealth redistribution schemes but through policies that strengthen economic freedom and encourage job-creating productive activities.