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Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.
I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.
Fiscal discipline can only be enforced by the bond market, that is the reality. Since both Democrats and Republicans have borrowed and would borrow, the questions around deficit spending are only these:
How can we maximize spending to fiscally constrain a future opposition administration/congress?
How can we allocate the greatest possible funding to issues we care about?
This bill, while far from perfect, mostly accomplishes both. You can’t mass deport without large scale holding camp infrastructure. $50bn or whatever isn’t enough, but it’s a good start. Immigration is the only thing that matters until immigration is solved (AI matters too, but the state is powerless to stop that march of technological progress).
Mandatory e-verify would probably be a lot easier to enforce given that employers, unlike illegal immigrants, usually have names, addresses, assets, registrations, tax returns, etc that can be used to lean on them in legible ways. How many illegal immigrants are going to come here if they can't get a job and can't get benefits? How many will stay?
Vanning ten Guatemalans at a time at the home depot parking lot is not a serious strategy. Of course, Trump has already given carte blanche to continue hiring illegal immigrants to politically important industries, so it's just obvious that solving this is not a priority.
Mandatory e-verify doesn’t work because most settled illegals appear to have stolen social security numbers, as discussed above. It’s a fake solution.
That or they’re employed in one of a variety of non-w2 scenarios.
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