posted on June 19, 2003 06:36:34 AM new
The discussion on the death-row kidney transplant was veering off into an unrelated area, and there were a lot of intelligent comments being made that deserved (I thought) their own thread. So here it is! I picked out some of the non-strictly-transplant related comments:
davebraun said: The irony is that the state provides medical care for inmates but the citizenry is hung out to dry. Universal health care including a comprehensive prescription benefit is needed for every American now. If one person does not have coverage that is too many. I know what it feels like to wait for an organ. I'm a post liver transplant patient.
tomyou said: Good point about the poor guy with no insurance. He would have a better chance at getting a transplant if he were to commit a crime and get put in state care. Those that take advantage of the state systems are the ones that destroy it for those who really need it. I am all for needed state assistance but far to many people see that as a full time job.
I said: I don't think poverty should be a factor, either, but it is. When it appeared that my state was going to end its Medically Needy program in May, several people were dropped from transplant lists b/c their doctors assumed they would no longer have any chance of affording the anti-rejection drug regimen. (It's my post so I get to fix my spelling error )
Cheryl said: I am denied medical attention because I have no insurance and cannot afford it. ... Healthcare should be available to everyone regardless of social status. It still sucks that a convicted murderer gets healthcare that is not available to poor Americans (those that don't qualify for Medicare or Medicaid). What of those families who have to raise money so that their children can have a transplant operation? I have to wonder what they think about this situation.
davebraun said: ....Health-care should be available to all who wish access regardless of economic status. Denying access to prisoners is barbaric. Denying access to every or any American is equally barbaric.
neonmania said: Because quite simply - that is the reality. Would I like for it to be different? You bet your ass I would, I am one of the millions of uninsured americans that must (today in fact) weigh financial resources against medical need. Rather than being able to go to a doctor to have an infection drained and treated I had to turn to a little internet research, a trip accross the border for meds and the assistance of my neighbor the unsquimish body piecer to lance and a little hope that this does the trick. It pisses me the hell of that had I left my ID at home and done a little strategic j-walking I could have had it done professionally on the states dime, gotten two free meals and be home in the morning with a $35 fine to pay. I do my battles on that front on election day but in the meantime I accept the reality of the current situation and try to find the best solutions within the actual perameters as opposed to the optimal ones.
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We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.
------------The Talmud
[ edited by msincognito on Jun 19, 2003 06:37 AM ]
posted on June 19, 2003 06:50:40 AM new
Now, here's the question. Various universal national health-care plans have been proposed, with price tags ranging from $70 billion to $200 billion a year and up.
How do we pay for it? There are several proposals.
The White House's tax plan, stripped of its devious sunset provisions, will cost more than $1 trillion over the next ten years. Repealing those tax cuts could provide the money for national health and still cut the deficit.
Or the government could take a hard look at privatization of government services, and direct handouts to corporations, items which go hand in hand. In 1998, Time Magazine estimated that corporate welfare (subsidies, tax breaks, etc.) sucked $125 billion from the federal budget each year. The most recent analysis shows that that figure has tripled. The Time figure does not cover money paid to corporations who are hired to take over an essential government function, also known as "privatization."
These are a few ideas on how to pay for a national health plan. I wondered if anyone had any others - or who on these boards opposes the idea of national health care.
------------------- We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.
------------The Talmud
posted on June 19, 2003 09:04:43 AM new
I don't oppose it. Insuring my family on my school's dependent coverage will cost ONE THIRD of my paycheck next school year, and it's crappy, mismanaged coverage. Thank god they are healthy, it's bad enough having to pay for it, USING it is another nightmare. I'm right now waiting on a quote from a private carrier to see if they can beat my district's plan, but I'm not very optimistic.
___________________________________
What luck for the leaders that men do not think. - Adolph Hitler
posted on June 19, 2003 09:18:38 AM newBelow tells why we won't be able to count on much of anything from the govt.
Fate Worse than Debt: Can the U.S. Deficit Rise to $45.47 Trillion?
The U.S. government’s future obligations outweigh its projected revenues so heavily that it would need a permanent income tax increase of 66% or the immediate elimination of all federal discretionary spending to put it on track for balancing its finances.
Such is the startling conclusion of a report by Wharton insurance and risk management professor Kent Smetters and Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank economist Jagadeesh Gokhale. The two argue that the government’s accounting system is backward looking and so has failed to properly account for future outlays such as Social Security and Medicare.
Their report, “Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: New Budget Measures for New Priorities,” estimates that the “fiscal imbalance” – existing debt plus future projected deficits – is an enormous $45.47 trillion, expressed in 2003 dollars. That dwarfs the $3.8 trillion debt that the government officially reports. If steps are not taken immediately to correct the imbalance, it will rise to $53.96 trillion by 2008, the report says.
“Because the current structure of Social Security and Medicare involves long-term payment obligations, backward looking or short-term measures such as debt and deficits need to be complemented by long-term forward-looking ones that explicitly measure future payment obligations relative to the resources available to meet them under current laws,” the authors say, adding that adopting backward-looking measures “understates significantly the financial shortfall that the federal government faces under today’s fiscal policies.”
Of this year’s total imbalance, $37.59 trillion, or almost 80%, comes from projected outlays on Medicare, reflecting the rising cost of caring for an ageing population, while Social Security accounts for $7.2 trillion – about a fifth of the Medicare number. Other government spending shows a relatively insignificant imbalance of $676 billion. The Bush administration’s tax cuts, now totaling $350 billion, are even less important in the overall calculation, Smetters said, although he declined to put a number on the tax cuts’ fiscal impact.
The fiscal gap could be even bigger because the Medicare estimate is based on “very conservative health-care growth assumptions,” Smetters noted in a May 28 Financial Times interview.
At the heart of the case is the concept of “present value,” which converts future receipts and outlays into current dollars by adjusting for inflation and discounting the value of future dollars by the amount the government pays for long-term borrowing. It uses the recent average of 30-year Treasury bond yields. Any attempt to correct the fiscal imbalance that did not use present-value numbers would miss more than 90% of future obligations, Smetters said.
Smetters and Gokhale have calculated the present value of the fiscal imbalance into perpetuity by discounting future dollars by the long-term rate each year. Dollars in the more distant future, therefore, are discounted more heavily than dollars paid or received in just a year or two. The authors then aggregate across the values of each year’s fiscal imbalance to arrive at their total fiscal imbalance. Attempting to measure the government’s level of imbalance by looking at only the government’s current official measure of public debt, but without measuring future obligations and revenue, would miss more than 90% of the true fiscal imbalance, Smetters said.
The present-value operation implies that the government should come up with the $45.47 trillion if it wishes to correct the fiscal imbalance immediately. Since that is clearly just a theoretical possibility, it will have to make future cuts or revenue increases of more than this amount so that the money, when discounted, equals the fiscal imbalance in today’s dollars.
To emphasize the burden on future obligations, the new accounting method also breaks down the fiscal imbalance by generations of those who receive Social Security, Medicare and other federal government services. The figures for Social Security show that living and past generations are projected to receive $8.9 trillion more in benefits than they have paid and will pay in taxes. Future generations, by contrast, are expected to pay $1.7 trillion more in taxes than they will receive in benefits, and so help to close the gap somewhat.
Medicare’s Rising Costs
When it comes to Medicare, the imbalance on account of future generations, at almost $22 trillion, outweighs that for past and current generations, which shows a gap of $15.7 trillion. The higher number for future generations reflects the rising cost of medical expenses per capita. Eliminating the imbalance on Medicare would require tax increases or service reductions to the tune of $37.59 trillion.
The report acknowledges that the government uses 75-year estimates of Social Security and Medicare shortfalls but says even these result in a significant understatement of the fiscal shortfall and therefore lead to policies that continue to focus on backward-looking measures. The five- and 10-year budget tables by the Office of Management and Budget and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office are not stated in present-value form, the report notes.
Smetters and Gokhale also look at the 75-year horizon, a period approximately equal to a human lifespan, and conclude that the fiscal imbalance has a 2003 value of $17.1 trillion over that period.
Their 75-year projection is more persuasive than the perpetual accounting, according to Richard Kogan, senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning Washington think-tank, because of the long-term assumptions about Medicare spending.
Kogan questions the heavy reliance on Medicare outlays on the grounds that future advances in medical technology are unknowable and could significantly affect the estimates of Medicare spending. “We really have no idea what Medicare and Medicaid costs are going to look like in 30 to 40 years, let alone 75 or further out. Things could be much worse or they could be much better.”
A $17 trillion fiscal gap would represent 3.3% of gross domestic product for the next 75 years, according to figures from the Social Security Administration. And if the government sought to eliminate the imbalance, it could do so with an across-the-board tax increase of 20%, a significant but not implausible number, Kogan argued.
As for the huge in-perpetuity numbers that have drawn so much attention, they may not be too surprising simply because of the mathematics involved, Kogan said. “Present-value infinity calculations often produce eye-popping numbers.”
Political Interference?
Smetters presented his case last March to the House Judiciary Committee in a hearing on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. To illustrate the magnitude of the problem, he said the imbalance could be corrected by an increase of 16.3 percentage points – more than doubling – in the employee’s payroll tax on uncapped earnings used to pay for Medicare and Social Security. Such a measure would start in 2004 and be permanent. Waiting until 2008 to enact such a measure would mean an increase of 17.4 percentage points to achieve the same result, he said.
Alternatively, the government could consider shutting down half of its activities outside of Medicare and Social Security. Such a dramatic gesture would involve cutting departments such as homeland security, agriculture, commerce, education, and roads but even this would fail to completely fix the problem, leaving a fiscal imbalance of $3.2 trillion. “Shutting down half of the rest of the government forever is not enough to put the U.S. fiscal policy on a sustainable course,” Smetters told the committee.
Such measures were not put forward as policy advice because they would probably do severe economic damage, Smetters said in his testimony, but were presented as illustrations of the magnitude of the problem.
The report was initially written as an internal discussion paper for former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, when Smetters was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at Treasury and Gokhale was a consultant there.
In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Smetters denied a report in the Financial Times on May 29 that the Bush administration chose to keep the report out of its 2004 Budget because it was trying to promote its tax-cut plan which critics say will expand the federal deficit.
“It was simply internal thinking,” Smetters said. “It was to try to help O’Neill think about it from an economic perspective. The whole conspiracy theory really had no legs.” He said the Administration had an incentive to incorporate his report into the Budget because it showed that the impact of the tax cuts on future obligations was insignificant compared with Social Security and Medicare, but it chose not to do so. There are “people in the Administration who are very excited about fixing the accounting,” he added, but declined to be more specific.
Democratic presidential contender Senator Joseph Lieberman, however, claims the Treasury “suppressed” the report at a time when the administration’s tax cuts are expected to reduce government revenues by as much as $1 trillion over 10 years.
In a letter to Treasury Secretary John Snow on June 4, Lieberman accused the administration of “stripping out” the report’s findings from the 2004 Budget at the last minute, “suggesting that this administration is trying to hide the true nature of our financial obligations from the American people in order to advance its agenda of cutting taxes indiscriminately.” He called for an explanation. As of June 12, Lieberman’s office had received no response from Treasury, said Lieberman counsel Chuck Ludlam.
Spokespeople from Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was quoted by the Financial Times on May 30 as saying the administration agreed with the report’s conclusions and was concerned about the “crushing burden” of long-term deficits on taxpayers.
Hard Choices
Robert Inman, professor of finance and economics at Wharton, echoed Lieberman’s claims, saying the apparent exclusion of the Smetters report from the Budget was inspired by the tax-cutting agenda. “The Financial Times got it right,” Inman said. “It’s political. They have this whopping big tax cut and they know darn well that it’s going to lead to future tax hikes.”
The Smetters-Gokhale report shows that tax cuts are not affordable given the increasing burden of Social Security and Medicare spending in light of the ageing population, Inman said. “My instincts are that there are some very hard choices that have to be made in the federal sector.” He applauded the report, calling it “absolutely essential information for effective budgeting.”
The failure of government to properly address long-term obligations reflects a refusal by the electorate to look beyond the short term, and a naivete about taxation and federal spending, noted Olivia Mitchell, professor of insurance and risk management at Wharton. “Many people think there’s a bank account where their contributions have been piling up and which they can draw on when the time comes. They don’t realize that the money is collected from those who are working and then goes straight to the retirees.”
Mitchell, who in 2001 served on the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, a bipartisan panel to examine the government’s future pension obligations, called the Smetters-Gokhale report a “great service” that will allow policymakers to look beyond the 75-year horizon that has been the traditional limit of budget planning.
In his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Smetters drew a parallel between the government’s accounting methods and those of some corporations whose practices have recently undermined confidence in financial reporting.
“We have seen in the past year how dubious private-sector accounting hides large cash-flow shortfalls for a period of time, only to be revealed later at a great loss to pensioners and other shareholders,” he said. “The federal government now needs to lead by example by getting its own books into shape as well.”
posted on June 19, 2003 10:23:17 AM new
The Smetters/Gokhale report is already facing some serious questions about its credibility from both the right and the left. Conservatives are unhappy because it seriously undermines the President's case for tax cuts, but liberals are far more upset because they say it uses several false criteria to shift the blame for the budget crisis away from irresponsible recent spending by the Bush administration and toward Medicare and Social Security, which they mistakenly refer to as "social programs." It's telling that the report will be released by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
I suspect there's a grain of truth to the argument. Both Medicare and Social Security are facing a "bubble" as Baby Boomers retire. But from the portions that have been covered in the reporting, I have some questions about the report's logic.
1) The report allegedly attributes 80 percent of the "fiscal imbalance" on Medicare. That's kinda strange, because Medicare is less than 15 percent of the federal budget. The only way I can see them getting near 80 percent is to assume that the cost of providing all other government services remains flat - unadjusted for inflation or anything else - for at least 20 or 30 years.
2) The report also allegedly claims that Medicare is responsible for a $36 trillion imbalance this year alone. (Yes, I understand that it's not out of this year's budget, but a measure of the debt that's currently owed based on projections of future obligations.) But still, that's curious as well, since the federal government only spent $254 billion on Medicare this year. Medicare is predicted to keep growing, but even at $600-700 billion a year it would take 40 years or more to reach total spending of $36 trillion, which doesn't take into account the fact that Medicare is partially funded by Medicare taxes. (Here's a projection of spending on all programs for 2003 from the Congressional Budget Office.)
3) They say they aren't calculating the tax cuts' impact ... but it seems to me from the spending totals that they've already subtracted those losses from the bottom line. In other words, they're not treating the cuts like spending - which they are - but as if the revenue they would have produced never existed.
I really want to take a look at this report.
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We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.
------------The Talmud
[ edited by msincognito on Jun 19, 2003 10:24 AM ]
posted on June 19, 2003 04:46:03 PM newThe report allegedly attributes 80 percent of the "fiscal imbalance" on Medicare. That's kinda strange, because Medicare is less than 15 percent of the federal budget.
15 percent of the current yesr federal budget. I believe what the article refers to are the accrued liabilities for medicare. While I currently do not use the system, I am a finanacial liability for the system.
posted on June 19, 2003 05:26:39 PM new
Yes, but that assumes that the general operating budget of government itself - the bureaucrats, the office buildings, the copiers, the staplers, the staples to go in the staples - do NOT represent an ongoing liability. When you start collecting Medicare, those bureaucrats will still be in those office buildings making copies and stapling them. The Department of Agriculture, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Elections Commission, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta - these expenses will not magically vanish at a point when it's convenient to Mssrs. Smetters and Gokhale. I would love to read the report to see if - and how - they handle that.
I also noticed something else: They're assuming the current rate of medical inflation stays constant. (Medical costs are currently rising at a rate that's a little more than twice the increase in the overall Consumer Price Index.) I sure hope they're wrong about that.'
I'm hoping that the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (whose numbers I trust) posts a more detailed analysis of this report as well. Richard Kogan got a little nibble at it, but it didn't sound like he'd had a chance to go over it thoroughly.
Now I really want to read the original report. This probably makes me a sick puppy.
------------------- We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.
------------The Talmud
posted on June 20, 2003 07:37:44 AM new Corporate Welfare keeps jobs here in the US, that is a definate.
And did you get that crapola from your fellow uneducated neo-cons?
Corporate welfare is used to aid them in relocating overseas and Mexico.
Corporate welfare is used to finance the farming out of labor to overseas factories. Can you say Nike?
Corporate welfare is used to recruit foreign workers who will work for far less in highly technical fields than Americans. Can you say Indian College Students?
The only jobs it keeps here are the low-paying unskilled jobs such as fast-food service. MacDonalds for one, receives millions each years to "train" workers in a six-month program at lower than minimum wage pay. After the six-month program, the workers are "supposed" to be hired at full minimum wage, but instead are fired and a whole new set of "trainees" are hired. But the fired employees at least leave with a skill, being able to recognize pictures of MacDonald's food on a keypad. Big demand for that. They can't even get a job in other fast-food places because they feed at the same gov't pig trough.
So 12-pole you obviously have no clue what corporate welfare does, do you?
posted on June 20, 2003 08:51:13 PM new
REAMOND you are correct that our standard of living will change as will our leaders. As we become less privileged as a class the wealth of the elite becomes far greater.
I do want that street bum to have access to the same medical care I enjoy as well as every other person in this country. There is no need for anyone to suffer needlessly in this country.
posted on June 21, 2003 08:37:21 AM newI do want that street bum to have access to the same medical care I enjoy as well as every other person in this country.
The way things are going, you and the street bum will have the same medical care, but it will be at the bum's standard.
posted on June 21, 2003 11:14:31 AM new
There has been a lot of talk about 'universal health care', i.e. everyone (rich or poor) should have access to medical care. But I think we have different definitions of 'medical care'.
A lot of our problems are caused by the *advances* in medical care. Not the advances themselves, but the cost of them.
I'll use a personal example - my mother has CLL (a form of chronic leukemia). Twenty years ago, she would have died. (Her mother died of it.) As of now, my mother has lived with it for eleven years.
In those eleven years, she's had multiple cycles of chemotherapy, several short hospital stays, spent two months in the hospital last year (one month in intensive care) and just got out of the hospital again last week (she was there for six days). I can't even imagine how much this has all cost.
All I am pointing out is that most of us will spend far more on health care than our parents did. Is our health care better?? Yes. Do we live longer? Yes. But at what cost??
posted on June 22, 2003 02:48:15 PM new
Okay 12-pole....
I'm clueless? Well then, let us see your glowing examples of how Corporate Welfare kept jobs. Why don't you start with the airline industry? How about Nike shoes? I know, the Big Three automakers? How about the Accounting industry...A million jobs are about to be tranferred to India!
posted on June 23, 2003 06:30:25 AM new
One example right in my Area... wafer manufacutrers just got HUGE tax breaks and incentives not to move and also to build another plant...
That saved over 1000 jobs....
...and will provide more once the new plant is in operation.
Boeing wants tax breaks to build their new plane here in Washington, or they take it elsewhere and that state will be the one supporting them... but the jobs will be there...
Many many examples...
Look at your own job if you work outside of eBay...
AIN'T LIFE GRAND...
posted on June 23, 2003 06:47:40 AM newAs far as health care, I don't want that street bum to have the same benefits as I do... pure and simple
Many of those so called "bums" are victims of the mental health system in this country. Many of them were thrown out of facilities due to budget cuts and closings. With nowhere to go, no one to monitor their medications and with no one to assist them in living independantly they are the lost. Let's hope your mental condition doesn't deteriorate any further because you, too, could find yourself a "street bum" if the sham is allowed to continue.
Cheryl
My religion is simple, my religion is kindness.
--Dalai Llama
posted on June 23, 2003 10:31:48 AM newCheryl Truer words were never spoken. The sad thing is that many mental illnesses are 100 percent treatable now - very inexpensively. But left untreated, they can cause much worse problems.
------------------- We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.
------------The Talmud
posted on June 23, 2003 10:45:22 AM new
12
I think that 'job creation' by big companies is often a myth.
A company like a big wafer manufacturer, for example, that 'creates' 1000 jobs, often does so by driving say...2000 people out of work in smaller bakeries.
I personally find it absurd when I see 2 Australian States competing with each other, with promises of tax breaks to large companies in an effort to get the company in their own state.
Don’t they se it just means less money coming into the national coffers, less for education, health, etc.
posted on June 23, 2003 12:53:10 PM new
You eat these wafers Austbounty... you would die... they are silicon wafers for making chips....
There is not much competition among the companies, they all benefit from the tax breaks and incentives.
Cheryl, that maybe true, but only because you cannot force someone to commit themselves to get help and unless they become a pest, they will continue to be over looked.
However there are many that choose that life style because they can make more panhandling than at a job.
AIN'T LIFE GRAND...
[ edited by Twelvepole on Jun 23, 2003 12:55 PM ]
posted on June 23, 2003 03:45:08 PM new
uhhh 12-pole.....
I want you to think very carefully without straining yourself to much....
That 1000 jobs the tax breaks "saved" were 1000 jobs they were going to have anyways. They just found a way to make saps like you pay for them. No jobs were created, they existed. They were just going to exist where they could extort the most money from the public....
posted on June 23, 2003 06:48:54 PM new
Saved jobs for whom mlecher? certainly not for the people of this county, they would of closed the plants and moved somewhere else.
I personally don't care if you and your trailer park friends have work... I care about my friends...
...and by building an additionaly plant, more people will be employed...
posted on June 24, 2003 09:18:14 AM new
Think again 12-pole.....
They were going to build that plant anyways. They just got saps like you to pay for it....
Did the tax breaks prevent the company from closing completely or did it just keep it from looking for an area even stupider?
[ edited by mlecher on Jun 24, 2003 09:18 AM ]
posted on June 24, 2003 09:43:41 AM new
The same reasons stated below why SS will not work are the same reasons health care can not be placed under the government.
"The only way to maintain a pay-as-you-go system is to combine growth in productivity with a growing population. (The more productivity grows, the fewer new workers you need to support the elderly—and the converse.) But that combination does not exist, either in Europe or America, where productivity growth has stalled and birth rates have bottomed out. This is not the place to investigate why native-born Europeans and Americans have stopped having children; the fact is that they have, and as a result our pension plans grow more top-heavy by the year. The average woman in EU countries has 1.5 children in her lifetime—not enough to replace the current population; meanwhile, women across the Islamic world average four to five—enough to double the populations of many already crowded, impoverished nations.
The Western birth decline makes our own social insurance system untenable, as Peterson noted in Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?: “In 1960 there were 5.1 taxpaying workers to support each Social Security beneficiary. Today there are 3.3. By 2040 there will be no more than 2.0—and perhaps as few as 1.6.”
In Europe, the addiction to lavish social insurance has already set in motion a vast reverse colonization of the continent by peoples from the developing world. As readers of Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West know, European politicians will soon be faced with a stark choice: cut benefits to ever more demanding senior citizens—the same spoiled Boomer generation that did not replace itself—or open the floodgates of Europe to young and fertile workers from outside. Most likely they will come from the teeming Middle East, where population grows steadily and political instability drives disgruntled millions from their homes.
This process will be made unstoppable if the European Union swallows the suicide pill that is Turkey—leaving that country’s porous, ungovernable border with Iran, Iraq, and Syria the last barrier keeping millions of refugees and economic migrants out of Berlin, London, and Paris.
In America, with our birthrate a little above the replacement minimum of 2.1, mass immigration is already the only reason our population is increasing. While an influx from Christian Latin America is not nearly so troubling as the march of Islam into the heart of Europe, it does raise serious issues for national unity—particularly as so many of the immigrants to the U.S. come from a single neighboring country, Mexico, with a potent nationalism and irridentist claims upon large sections of our territory.
I have long said, half in jest, that the future of Europe is “a brown hand pulling a white plug out of the wall.” At the very least, policy makers ought to wonder about the future of a pension system that relies upon heavily taxing poor recent immigrants and their children to support more prosperous elderly people of another race—particularly of a resented, displaced majority. A professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Rodolfo Acuna, has applied this logic to America. He said of the Latino community, “There’s a growing feeling ‘Why should we pay for all these senior citizens’ if the majority of them are white and all they were willing to pay for was prisons?” Professor Acuna has a point. How exactly do we justify over-taxing struggling families with children to keep gassing up the Winnebagos of over-rewarded elders? That bumper sticker “We’re spending our children’s inheritance” ought instead to end with “birthright.”"
posted on June 24, 2003 10:30:52 AM new
While an influx from Christian Latin America is not nearly so troubling as the march of Islam into the heart of Europe, it does raise serious issues for national unity—particularly as so many of the immigrants to the U.S. come from a single neighboring country, Mexico, with a potent nationalism and irridentist claims upon large sections of our territory.
And so The big joke reamond,
while pushing for a white or Jewish, American immigration policy; if your grandson is more dark than you, would you love him less????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Or do you perhaps think Jewish immigration needs to be 'deterred' to?
)
