When WAS America great?

Every post I read by you has one message. "America sucks, and it always has sucked"

 

I remember LA from the early 1950s and there was still a lot of open space all over the Basin. LA County was still produced more fruits and vegetables than any other county in America. By the late 1960s, my wife and I couldn't get out of LA fast enough. It took me an hour to get to work from Long Beach to Hawthorne.

 

I moved here as a kid in 1961 and it was wonderful. I can only imagine what it was like in the 40s and 50s. I think the further you go back in time, the better it was since our real problem is not politics but too many people.

 

Wealth can also be skills and training.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/openbook/12028/xhtml/images/p200147b8g48001.jpg

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2023-07/doe-critical-material-assessment_07312023.pdf

We buy things from other countries because they're lower cost producers.

Comparative advantage. Look it up.

We need reliable sources of raw materials, not just domestic supplies.

 

Much of which are now debt based in the US.

Yes. A bunch of resources you claimed we are short of domestically but aren’t.

Why would I need to look anything up? I’m the one educating you on why we buy these raw materials from others. You claimed it’s scarcity of the resource domestically. I explained its slave labor and regulations, not scarcity that drives us away from domestic utilization of resources we have in abundance. You are wrong. Might as well admit it and move on.

Many on your list we source from China. We keep no strategic reserve. We dismantled our mining and processing facilities. Is that smart? You would infer it is by repeatedly posting that chart as some evidence for your claim we are short of raw materials.

Just like here at home, you prefer exploitation of the workers abroad as well. Sad.

 

Then you should be able to show one. Go ahead...

 

I’ll keep my eye out for them in the future. When you post one, I will let you know. I am not going to waste my time looking for the many times you have trashed this country from your Australian perch. I spent most of my time today writing an article on political items for publication in a hobby magazine. I won’t waste the time looking for your many anti-American posts.

I am amazed at how many of you United States hating Australians there are. I don’t trash your country’s policies. You should have some respect for my country.

 

Are you okay? You were going on like protecting the border is complicated and the government should focus most of its attention on that. Send troops to the border and immediately turn them back. Not rocket science.

My post countered your claim the government should focus on the border. It has a lot to do.

I've said repeatedly we should not accept refugee claims from either Mexico or Canada. None. Zero. Zilch. I've also said we should have a national ID modeled on the Nexus Pass that employers can use to check on the status of a potential employee, even for day labor. Employers who violate the law get nasty fines, with egregious violators getting jail time.

If you search my posts over the past few years for "Nexus" you'll run across my taking the positions I did here. No asylum from Mexico or Canada, the latter nation not accepting asylum from this country. a national ID. We use it

 

Caught, weren't you...? Like so many of your kind that make bold claims, the truth finds you out...

 

All I did was post facts.

I simply pointed out to another poster all the laws we need to stop this nonsense exist. They just aren’t being enforced. Then I pointed out it is a constitutional duty for the executive branch to ensure secure borders. That’s it.

I’m fine with ID and enforcement of violations of legal work requirements. Actually I’m fine with refugee claims. It’s asylum claims that are the problem today. You can’t grant asylum from Mexico or Canada. Asylum seekers are already in the U.S., illegally for the most part. Enforce the existing laws against illegal border crossings and asylum claims plummet. That was the point of my post you originally responded to. I quoted the laws against illegal entry.

 

They knew a general welfare clause meant almost any government action could be justified.

Then there is the "general welfare."

The Preamble includes:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."​

In practice, it's been used many times to justify all sorts of common good spending starting with the Louisiana Purchase.

Every era in this country had government spending on the general welfare.

 

Sorry, I meant "asylum."

 

Did you just make all that up? And why?

 

Congress spends the money.
Without money there's not much any president can do.

The Senate passed a bipartisan bill with Biden support and the House killed it because trump said to.

The president is limited by what congress allows.
You know that's why trump never built his wall? Congress never authorized funding.

 

Hey, lynchings in the south was generally legal though, wink wink.

 

Except the one you responded to a few posts back.
He/She never said anything about America sucking. So where'd you get that idea from?

 

Those were the days, My Friend. Those were the days!
​

 

If existing funding was used to enforce the law instead of reward lawbreakers there wouldn’t be a problem.

I’ve already educated you on how funding has increased four fold in the last 25 years. That money is being spent to reward lawbreaking instead of enforcing existing laws that would cut illegal border crossings.

We don’t have a funding problem. We have a problem not enforcing laws that control illegal border crossing. Those illegal crossings that are REWARDED instead of penalized under our existing laws are why border crossings keep increasing.

You folks have been seriously misled. You’ve been denied facts about funding, existing law, what laws are enforced, numbers of crossings, what asylum is, the percentage of asylum claims that are fraudulent, the percentage of asylum claims that don’t show for hearings and disappear undocumented into the country, etc., etc.

Throwing money at doubling down on bad policy that created the problem is not the solution.

 

What funding exists today? And how much does it cover? A president has an option to divert congress money, like trump did, but those are limited options and amounts.

So what if it increased 4 fold? Apparently it's not enough. So your education is quite meaningless without where the new funding is directed and how it can be used.

I have asked you before what isn't being enforced, I don't recall your answer.

This border problem is several decades in the making and has been going on for several decades, going back to at least the 1980s.
Don't feed us your BS about bad policies.
Congress makes the policies. Yet you just want to blame 1 president.

 

I’ve posted the law and the text of the law to you and others multiple times in this thread.

it’s USC 8. I’m not providing pull quotes again.

I’ve also numerous times said the problem has multiplied under all administrations over the last decades. Don’t make things up please. I even explained in this thread how Reagan made the problem worse. I did point out specifics of how Biden is making things worse. Sorry you are butthurt because I’ve posted facts that conflicted with your opinions. But calling my posts BS and misrepresenting them is way out of line.

It’s a fact your opinions I’ve corrected in this thread were incorrect based on evidence. That’s not my fault. Making stuff up about what I’ve posted won’t change that. May make you feel better, but it makes your arguments and those you align with politically look weak.

 

Well you hate the U.S. and capitalism also. You keep posting the stuff, but went you are called on it, you say no, no no! I support freedom and the capitalist system. That's what the progressive Democrats do to keep people off balance until they achieve their objectives.

 

We'll see if Biden comes up with an effective means of combatting this...



Old Joe has not explained why we should accept asylum claims from people in Mexico. Humanitarian reasons? A legal requirement? Or why we should accept people who can get to our southern border over people in other parts of the world who can't.

We should have a national ID we issue to our citizens, permanent residents, and to citizens of nations we require to enter on a visa, and the make it the legal responsibility of employers to use a cellphone to check on the right to work of every employee they hire, even day labor. Let that ID replace many other federal, state and local IDs issued to individuals. We should refuse asylum applications made from people trying to enter from Mexico or Canada.

I don't think the stalled Senate bill is a good enough answer, but that Republicans are wrong holding up aid to the Ukraine and Israel.

Immigration is a big deal and could be enough to cost Biden the election. Is the border the hill Democrats want to die on? Do they think Trump is dangerous or not?

 

That was NOT the intent.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed41.asp

If the constitution percieved that General Welfare could apply to anything, then there are no limitations which was clearly not the intent of the document.

Promoting the General Welfare can still be limited to the confines of the limitations of powers enumerated and afforded the federal government, no?

i.e. The Common Defense, which is an explicitly enumerated responsibility empowered the federal government does in fact provide for the General Welfare.

Foreign trade, treaties, and many other responsibilities are also enumerated powers of the fed, like the Louisana Purchase.

This however does not justify or give authority to the federal government the authority to pay off little Billies liberal arts degree using other people's tax revenue, as an example.

 

Much better. Much of the LA Basin hadn't infilled yet. I went to Long Beach State in the mid-60s and lots of the frat types lived in rented houses in Seal Beach. My wife and I rented a nice apartment--still there, looks the same today as it did when we last went by for a look at our first place together in the 70s. It was starting to get out of hand for us and we left in 1968.

Yes, way too many people.

The change from the early 1950s when I was barely old enough to remember to the late 1960s when my wife and I left from where we lived in Long Beach was really quite amazing. From then until now is mind-boggling.

 

Intention, no, as the Founders were anxious about heavy-handed government, but they never found a way to effectively limit the "general welfare" clause. Madison Struggled in Federalist Paper #41.

I haven't seen anyone thread the needle.

Good luck on your quest to sort this out. 235+ years later and no one has cracked the code.