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If the wealthiest top 1% of households in America have at least $14mil, and the class as a whole possesses 55 trillion in wealth, then there is necessarily a lot of wealth wasted on things that are not required for the happiness of these 1% of households. And so we can improve a comical amount of lives in America by simply halting immigration. If this wealth were originally compelled to be redistributed annually (because no surplus of workers), we are talking about 1-3 trillion to be distributed. That’s giving the bottom 100 million working Americans (the bottom 60%) between 10k and 30k annually. We are also talking about lower housing costs and lower stress-related healthcare costs. We are also talking about a more efficient economy as the workers are actually able to pick up and move for greater wages (simply not realistic for many working Americans right now, and they can’t bargain if they can’t afford to quit for a couple months). We are also talking about less educational waste as people see that they can live comfortably without a college degree. Then we will see gains in civic participation, with all of its myriad benefits. &tc
It’s a big deal for me that this wealth is wasted because, at the end of the day, we are trading the blood and lives of the poor so that the flooring in a wealthy person’s bathroom is more colorful. We are looking at the mangled corpse of a child in a drunk driving accident, knowing of course that alcoholism and life stress are linked (and in any case treatment costs money), and we are saying “this is just the price we pay so that an investment banker gets a yacht”. This is not a rational trade for the statistically-informed looking at the predictable cofactors of misery. I think this is just allowing the poor to die so that the rich are more comfortable.
So immediately you've moved off the consumption point. The vast majority of this wealth is is frozen assets that don't do anything to consumption.
??? This just seems like free association. Where are you getting these numbers? Where is the redistribution coming from because of preventing immigration? Almost all of higher labor costs are passed on to the consumers which you can basically model as a flat tax, famously a regressive type of tax.
What are you talking about man? You don't need to take months off to find a job. Most people interview for new jobs while working their current jobs.
Ultimately this whole world view you're espousing is a mess. I guess the cleanest way to attack it is just that your conflation between wealth and consumption is founded on misunderstandings and the mechanism you're expecting to connect immigration enforcement to lead to improving people's lives are very transparently you deciding you don't like immigration and working backwards. Almost none of the wealth of the rich is in the consumption of bathroom tiles. It's tied up in little bits of paper, they are for the most part deferring their right to bid up consumption for the average person. They're not buying thousands of pounds of beef and burning it on pyres so that the hard working American has to go without, they're not buying up entire hospitals and cackling as they sit empty or square miles of in demand real estate that they leave empty. They are having negligible impacts on the consumption of your downtrodden American. Further immigrants that come and do the work that your average American consumes are on net increasing the average American purchasing power. They're on the supply side of the equation. Building houses, working agriculture, all the stuff that reduces the cost of living for the average American.
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