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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33940 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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@2rafa? Your response?

DOGE sets its sights on Medicare and Medicaid:

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is quickly expanding its reach through the federal government. It recently accessed systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Musk and his team are now looking at key payment and contracting systems for Medicare and Medicaid - that was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. On X, Musk posted, he believes that, quote, "big money fraud is happening."

Mostly just talk and speculation at this point, but there are clear indications that medicare/medicaid have not escaped the notice of the DOGE.

In spite of the perceived celerity with which DOGE is eviscerating government programs, I'm still mostly in the "nothing ever happens" camp. "Cutting government spending" at this point is akin to rearranging deck chairs on the sinking Titanic that is Western civilization. The slow Brazilification of America is irreversible either way. Nonetheless, I am enjoying the apoplectic response that Musk's antics have occasioned.

EDIT: Oh, and social security was named as a potential target alongside medicare/medicaid as well.

It means becoming like a Latin American country in terms of racial demographics, standard of living, general texture of the social fabric, etc.

The actions of Trump on immigration and Doge on the budget will set the Brazilification project back by at least a decade, or indefinitely as long as the Republicans can keep winning elections.

Consider that immigration under Biden 2 would have been something like +15 million and under Trump it will probably be negative.

Similarly, there is hope on the budget. A return to 2019 spending would mean a $500 billion budget surplus. While that's not possible due to inflation, the era of mega deficits only started in 2020. We can and will go back to a more reasonable 3% deficit/GDP. When we do, interest rates will fall, reducing our borrowing costs and further reducing the deficit.

Consider that immigration under Biden 2 would have been something like +15 million and under Trump it will probably be negative.

It's unclear that Trump can even deport all of the people Biden let in.

I don't think the solution is to deport them all. The solution is what Germany used to do, which made immigration from their poor neighbors (e.g. Poland) roughly zero: make sure illegal aliens can't get a job, public education, welfare, or a place to live. They'll deport.

On the other hand, as long as life is better for illegal residents of the US than for legal citizens of Mexico, and I and my family live in Mexico or South of there, nothing is going to stop me from getting into the US. Wall? pshh. Under the wall, over the wall, through the wall, around the wall, bribe, fly, or swim, one way or another, I'm getting my family to higher ground.

There are declining numbers of illegal migrants from Mexico IIRC, because of more $4/hr(the breakeven wage for the same standard of living as the lower working class in USA, given lower Mexican prices) jobs in the north due to offshoring. Guatemala, Honduras(much, much poorer), Venezuela(lack of macroeconomic sanity causing… issues) and Haiti(sub Saharan Africa in the western hemisphere) are the big sources of migrants.

The problem here is that deportation is what Trump controls. He can't change state policies towards migrants or things like them having a "right" to schooling in the US. He can catch them at the border or send them back when he gets them but most anything else will be partly determined by lower governments.

To make sweeping changes would require Congress and, well, they've had years to do anything. If they could, Trump wouldn't exist.

Beyond that, nations like Germany don't have birthright citizenship. Plenty of people would eat shit indefinitely until their kids are born and have citizenship. That's just the incentive of all incentives (even if you stopped the sponsorship loophole). And there's no conceivable way Congress amends the Constitution any time soon. Let alone for that.

Oh, he can't. There's no question about that. The Biden Wave was unprecedented and terrible.

But I think net immigration will be negative for the next 4 years. If Biden had got a second term, that would have resulted in a second Biden Wave and put us firmly on the path towards a Third World future.

I think it’s possible net immigration can be ‘engineered’ to be negative by including stuff like returning students (if Trump doesn’t follow through with his / Elon’s plan of stapling green cards to diplomas) and border pushbacks, but

  1. There have been no announced plans to cut H1B numbers and Elon, H1Ber-in-chief appears even more powerful than most people expected, such that we’re more likely to see the number of those visas rise (mirroring the ongoing rise in O1 visas) along with those for dependants than we are to see them fall.

  2. Restricting family / chain migration, which is the other major source of legal immigration, would have to go through congress and there seems to be no big effort to do that at all, nobody even seems to be speaking about it.

  3. Refugee intake will likely go down, or the composition will change (there are not ‘that’ many white South Africans, but it would conceivably be possible to eg. hand out a full allocation of refugee visas to them and Ukrainians or whatever such that the composition would be altered), but that makes up a small percentage of legal migrants.

  4. Trump has criticized the Diversity Visa / lottery but hasn’t done anything about it yet. 2025 visas are being granted, 2026 applications are open and the program is going full steam ahead. Congress is doing nothing.

H1B, O1

H1B depresses wages -> political power for Blue voters, so that's working as intended; and the O1s you want no matter what anyway (it's a vital part of the brain drain pipeline, and I'd expect exit controls from countries that generate a lot of these before any limit from the US, perhaps as part of a response to economic sanctions).

Refugee intake will likely go down

Deleting the paragovernmental organizations that bring them across will help with this.

Criticized the diversity visa

It's been what, 3 weeks?

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