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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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Yes. Some people believe the US is infinitely wealthy and we can afford to take in all of the downtrodden of the world fleeing poverty and oppression and the only reason you could be against this is because you're racist.

It does not compute that this could bankrupt the entitlements systems they are so fond of that are mostly paid out of high earner taxes. Or they believe money is magic and the classists are causing fake scarcity or whatever.

Or- what most educated people believe- that illegals mostly pay taxes but don't collect much benefits because they aren't eligible and like to retire to their home countries(which are cheaper). This leaves stuff out like the cost of their children's public school education but there are true things in it and the actual numbers don't seem to have ever been crunched in an unbiased way. There's also the take that illegals are necessary because somebody has to pick strawberries and kill chickens and Americans are too spoiled to.

A family of illegals with two kids in public school consumes $4000 a month in taxes from that alone and I don't think the taxes raised or economy activity generated by their strawberry picking even comes close to recouping that cost.

It's true the poor Appalachian white family that's been here for eight generations doesn't either, but we can't really argue over whether or not they should have been allowed in.

I mean, we then have to compute 'how many illegal children are in public schools'.

I'm totally willing to believe illegals are consuming more in taxes than they pay in. Just want to point out that the math hasn't been done.

Children that are themselves illegal is probably in the low million, children OF illegals in the high single or low teen millions.