Posted on 06/27/2011 9:05:43 AM PDT by bjorn14
In fact, Social Security Administration actuaries point out that undocumented workers have just the opposite impact on the programís finances. They pump millions of dollars annually into Social Security trust funds without ever collecting a nickel in Social Security benefits.
(Please bear in mind that the actuaries are not saying illegal immigration is a good thing for the country. But they are saying it has a positive impact on the financial status of Social Security.)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25727901/ns/us_news-life/t/illegal-immigrants-spurn-needed-benefits/
I have never had to show ID at the hospital. Are you going to make the hospitals responsible for enforcing immigration laws?
We need to punish those who hire illegals. Put them in prison, not just some fines which in the end will be cheaper than paying Americans a living wage. Have the local police sit in the parking lots of Home Depot and Lowes and arrest the Mexicans who congregate looking for work and get paid under the table. Arrest those who are looking to hire them as well. Make sure no children are allowed in schools without an American birth certificate as well as providing their parents’ birth certificates. If they are not all born in America, the child doesn’t get into school. And the child doesn’t get to be president!
You and I both know no politicians are gonna advocate this and that it won’t happen. How many years has this been going on? What has changed?
What you are missing is once they are legalized(registered) they are entitled to those benefits and they are already broke. Previous Republican amnesty bills would have loaded millions of illegals onto SS and medicare after they are 65.
YES you should have to show an ID to get in a hospital or face an investigation to find out who you are. You are aware that someone gets stucking paying those hospital bills of illegals, right??? If it's free someone pays. I know it seems compassionate to ignore that fact, ala Bush 'compassionate conservatism' made believe no one pays for anything the government gave away.
You are fun to debate :) It's been a while.
Thanks. I just try to see more than one point of view. Personally, if it were up to me, there would be no immigrants allowed in at least til the economy is better. Especially the H1B visas!
This issue should not be only addressed to Palin(who may not even run in 2012.) . Last year SJB proposed that all Republican candidates have to fully answer those questions BoR posed to her about those '12 million illegals' already here. That was a great idea.
The reason why we are sensitive to this issue is related to your comment above and the GWB history. Yes, amnesty is toxic now because of high unemployment. But lets go back to 2007 when the RINO party was gung ho about ramming through a amnesty bill with Pelosi’s cooperation. The argument pushed on us was he had this huge booming economy that required lots of low skilled workers to fuel it, specifically illegals were needed for home construction. The liberal Baltimore Sun did an editorial I posted here making the argument that the US has a shortage of low paid unskilled workers.
Well it turns out that the Bush economy boom that required all these illegals was a huge credit equity bubble (sort of a ponzi) that had to end in a market crash sooner or later. If we had passed an amnesty bill based on the imaginary endless growing economy we would have an even worse disaster now. Note that the areas hit WORST by the market crash were areas of high illegal immigration : NV, AZ, FL.
I look on any proposals for anmesty with deep suspicion and think that candidates need to be asked about it. Unfortunately I dont trust FNC to do it.
Tennessean4Bush wrote: “In the spirit of John Wayne Gacy, I presume?”
I don't know enough about Bachmann yet to have strong opinions. What I know I generally like, but I have the same concerns about her that I do about many of the good conservative candidates, including Sarah Palin — they say the right things, their track record shows they've been hurt for taking strongly conservative stands so they obviously believe what they say, and that's a huge advantage over Mitt Romney, but there's a lack of experience showing they can effectively implement their conservative ideals.
However, while the John Wayne Gacy situation is minor by itself, it showed a major problem, and it shows more than just a lack of ability to handle the media.
True, there is an issue of “handling the media.” If she were a candidate for the county commission or a city council, I'd jump all over her for something like that. You just don't talk that way when you're running for president, **ESPECIALLY** when you are trying to claim Waterloo, Iowa, as your hometown!!!! Surely she knows that.
Now why is this important?
First, with this one dumb statement, the biggest thing she did was draw the attention of Iowans to the fact that she didn't do enough research about her claimed hometown to get her facts right. Yes, it is absolutely true that rural voters appreciate having a connection to a candidate, but rural states also don't like people perceived as “carpetbaggers” who claim local ties that don't exist. Waterloo is a fairly sizable community by Iowa standards, but this took the focus off Bachmann’s message and that should not have been allowed to happen.
Second, I might be able to forgive a stupid comment like this coming from a candidate for county commission or the state legislature. Unless they're businessmen who have mobilized their employees to work on their campaigns, local and state-level candidates in a rural state like Iowa don't have staffs to check facts. But in this case, one of three things happened: either Bachmann made an incredibly stupid unplanned ad lib (any idea why Obama uses teleprompters?) or a staff member failed to effectively fact-check her speech before she got on the podium or Bachmann failed to double-check the work of her staff. All of those answers would be really bad answers for a mistake in a small speech to a Rotary club somewhere that got videotaped by media, but in a CAMPAIGN ANNOUNCEMENT SPEECH????? This is so bad that I would not have believed it if I had not seen it with my own eyes. I hope a staff member gets fired or severely disciplined if they're responsible (but done out of public view, because the “buck stops here” with the candidate) or Bachmann sits down with her staff and says, “I screwed up big time, this is my fault, and I need your help to fact-check my stuff so this never, ever happens again.”
Third, I haven't been paying much attention until now to the arguments that Palin has been tried and tested by the media, dragged through the fire, and there's nothing else to dig up about her — but after this gaffe by Bachmann, I think there may actually be something to that argument. People now expect Sarah Palin to make occasional misspeaks. Her supporters don't care. Her opponents don't get any more traction my making those attacks; everybody knows that Palin is not a Rhodes Scholar, but neither was George W. Bush. To some extent, the electorate has been inoculated against gaffes made by Palin by listening to the attacks on her since 2008.
That brings up the fourth point: Palin was trained as a television sportscaster, but for most of her adult life her vocation has been being a mother, the wife of an oilworker and fisherman, and a community activist whose activism led her into politics. The expectations are lower than they will be for a lawyer, who has at least four years of college and three years of law school teaching her how to think on her feet and defend her positions in public.
If Bachmann, with her legal training and political experience, does stuff like this in her announcement speech, for crying out loud, what else are reporters and her Republican opponents going to dig up that she has said on C-Span or entered into the Congressional Record?
In my community, I have to deal with two community message boards, one of which has a small group of people who jump all over me when I make the tiniest mistake in an article — and that's legitimate. Reporting is what I do for a living, and I should be held to a higher standard. Likewise, a lawyer can and should be held to a higher standard, and so far Bachmann is not showing herself able to meet that standard very well.
Mistakes happen. We'll see how she does in a few weeks or months and whether this was a really unfortunate gaffe or part of a pattern of problems.
You can't really mean what this literally says.
Identification and insurance verification normally happens in most hospitals after treatment, not before treatment. Maybe what you mean to say is that the normal procedure should change for routine treatment, but what about emergencies? After all, it's the true emergencies (not just somebody walking into the ER with a broken finger or runny nose) that account for some of the worst high-cost bills, second only to long-term chronic care of the elderly.
It's not uncommon that people who arrive via an ambulance or a helicopter to an emergency room don't have identification documents with them. Most do, but a fair number don't. Surely you aren't suggesting that a person airlifted 90 miles from the scene of a three-vehicle crash with critical injuries should be stuck in the waiting room while the nursing staff call the highway patrol or local police to have them hunt around the crash scene for the missing identification documents, and then verify citizenship status? (BTW, lots of people in the United States legally on various types of temporary status such as students aren't citizens.)
Most hospitals fall into one of three categories: nonprofit charitable organizations, many of which are Roman Catholic or have other religious motivations to care for those who are unable to pay; government-run hospitals, which in most cases actually get very little of their money from direct tax support; and private for-profit hospitals.
I don't have a problem with a private organization deciding who they want to treat, and if that includes illegal aliens who can't pay, so be it. The consequence of government regulations controlling who businessmen can sell to are far worse than a private hospital making its own decisions on who they'll accept as a nonpaying patient. Same for a nonprofit organization — if a Roman Catholic or Baptist hospital sees part of its key mission being providing medical care for those who can't afford it, I don't want government regulating their religious mission by mandating proof of citizenship first.
The real issue is whether illegal aliens should be allowed to get medical care at government-run hospitals. That's a legitimate public policy question, and I'm open to arguments for or against it, though as with anything else, we need to show a clear and pressing need for a change before making a change of that magnitude. However, I think we may find that there are unintended consequences of refusing to provide medical treatment for illegal aliens in government-run hospitals. I think a hospital run by city, county, state or federal authorities has that right, and the supervising government agency has the right to direct them to do that, but I'm not sure it's a good idea.
In Maryland they add a specific tax on our hospital bill that goes into a fund for the hospitals treating un-insured. Because Maryland is a illegal friendly state, offering a huge ID loophole for illegals in getting a drivers license you know illegals are a huge beneficiary of this treatment. This tax is intended so that hospitals in areas of high illegal concentration (and uninsured) like Baltimore do not get stuck anymore than those with low #s of illegals.
The federal government should offer to re-imburse hospitals that verify the ID of the patients, or notify them if they cant.
The Bill to Defund the Libya war, defunded nothing! it authorized and funded limited support for said campaign.
Bachmann has opposed our intervention in Libya from the first time the media pushed it. Try again.
Again, show me where Bachmann said she voted against limited funding for the war because that would authorize it.
Ouch - looks like I left a mark.
Since you want it again here it is:
“Bachmann, speaking before the U.N. vote on Thursday, did not specify whether she was against air strikes against pro-Gadhafi military targets or whether she supported a multinational intervention.”
Okay, I think I now see your point.
There's an important difference between a private company choosing to write off a loss or a charitable organization viewing service to those who can't pay as part of its charitable mission, on the one hand, and a state levying a special tax on those who can pay for health care to pay for those who can't pay.
Yes, I know that the cost from those who can't pay their medical bill gets passed on to everybody else who uses that hospital, but that's a decision by the owners or trustees of the hospital that would be taken into account by patients in a truly capitalist health care system. I realize that's not the way things work now due to the realities of insurance, but the solution is to move toward more capitalism in health care, not less.
You did get my point on that?
The government should offer to reimburse all hospitals for the free care they mandate on all emergency rooms, and can require the hospitals to identify who the patients to get it. The hospitals in sanctuary cities can turn down the money and not report the illegals if they want, but their patients may not be happy about being forced paying for it just to protect the illegals. And in fact all hospitals take medicare and medicaid I bet, so add that to the conditions.
I always tell libertarians, ‘freedom in a welfare state is bankruptcy’. Cut off your welfare first then you can be free.
” I look on any proposals for anmesty with deep suspicion and think that candidates need to be asked about it. Unfortunately I dont trust FNC to do it. “
Fox, as a network, is for amnesty, and so are Palin, Barnes, Krauthammer, O’Reilly and others at FNC
I agree with you on FNC and those others (Hume too.) As far as Palin goes , I was told she is for getting them to voluntarily register for deportation, under the threat that they be deported if they dont register for..., Oh wait I see a problem with this reasoning... :)
I must confess that, being a native New Yawkuh,
folksiness is not a core competence, and beg indulgence.
No big deal but she'd better cut that stuff out any day now.
” agree with you on FNC and those others (Hume too.) As far as Palin goes , I was told she is for getting them to voluntarily register for deportation, under the threat that they be deported if they dont register for..., Oh wait I see a problem with this reasoning... :) “
LMAO!!
Indeed. And I don't want to pick on Palin and leave everyone else alone. Pawlenty (who may become stronger later) needs to answer tough questions about immigration. As for Romney, he has flipped on this issue more times than Cirque du Soleil.
Amnesty is a huge threat to this nation, but the media treats it as a fringe issue. They would be happy if we "pass the bill to find out what's in it," but even an amnesty bill which does not explicitly mention a "path to citizenship" bears the hidden promise to import, sooner of later, 10s of millions of leftist voters.
BTW ilovesarah2012. SJB means our friend stephenjohnbanker.
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