The Celente solution to the government shutdown. Wall or no wall

[RVonse]

The Wall or No Wall ballet would be simple Yes or No vote

A)Yes, I want a wall that will cost $XX to build
B) No, I do not want a border wall and I am willing to pay $XX more in taxes for the social needs of each immigrant entering this country.

And in the future, to accelerate the voting process and put the decisions of the important issues in the hands of the people, such as voting for wars, defense budgets, tax deals, and other critical issues, Mr. Celente identified Blockchain Voting as a 21 century replacement of the archaic systems that proved their ineffectiveness in the 2018 mid term elections.

Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eftTBMi3jK8

This blockchain voting idea sounds like a great way to go. How could it be any worse than what we have now? No more government shutdowns. If it worked well enough, perhaps most of the congress could be layed off so they could work in the private sector. It would be true democracy.

 

[Keith&Co.]

This blockchain voting idea sounds like a great way to go. How could it be any worse than what we have now? And no more government shutdowns.

Well, the false dichotomy springs to mind.

Building a wall will have little to no impact on how many immigrants enter this country, so it will have little to no impact on my costs for the social needs of each immigrant entering this country.

So a YES vote is a vote for BOTH the cost of the wall AND the cost of immigrants. That is not made clear in the example.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Illegal immigration across the US border is in a relative lull, a mere fraction of what it was less than two decades ago.

The social costs of illegal immigration, even negating the whole economic benefits provided when they work for less than minimum wage, is a tiny portion of the cost of running the government.

Regarding block chain voting... one could just pass a law that authorizes previous spending levels in 3 month increments until a budget is passed. That would seem to be a much easier change to enact.

 

[Politesse]

I'll take the "social needs" option please, Alex. Even if that were in any way a plausible scenario*, it wouldn't bother me. Taking care of our societal needs is what the government is or should be for. This idea that communal funds should only serve the wealthy and enfranchised is alien to me, and I certainly have no personal stake in it. By hard-stop free market logic, why would I ever support a proposition that doesn't personally benefit me?

*It isn't, of course.

 

[RVonse]

Building a wall will have little to no impact on how many immigrants enter this country,.

It obviously will have an impact. If walls did not work, you would not see them anywhere.

The real issue is with a congress that is totally controlled by large corporate interests, no one except for Trump and middle class really wants to keep immigrants out.

 

[RVonse]

Regarding block chain voting... one could just pass a law that authorizes previous spending levels in 3 month increments until a budget is passed. That would seem to be a much easier change to enact.

Your idea is good and would certainly be an improvement to what there is now.

But the block chain takes it a step forward so that other issues can be more efficiently addressed in democratic fashion.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Building a wall will have little to no impact on how many immigrants enter this country,.

It obviously will have an impact. If walls did not work, you would not see them anywhere.

The real issue is with a congress that is totally controlled by large corporate interests, no one except for Trump and middle class really wants to keep immigrants out.

Our nation was built on the backs of immigrants.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

This blockchain voting idea sounds like a great way to go. How could it be any worse than what we have now? And no more government shutdowns.

Well, the false dichotomy springs to mind.

Building a wall will have little to no impact on how many immigrants enter this country, so it will have little to no impact on my costs for the social needs of each immigrant entering this country.

So a YES vote is a vote for BOTH the cost of the wall AND the cost of immigrants. That is not made clear in the example.

This. While the push to lower the level of illegal immigration into your country is a legitimate position for someone to have, building a wall isn't a legitimate step towards that goal. You may as well have the position that the solution to America's immigration issues is to burn huge piles of cash at the border because hispanics are afraid of smoke - it would be about as effective.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Regarding block chain voting... one could just pass a law that authorizes previous spending levels in 3 month increments until a budget is passed. That would seem to be a much easier change to enact.

Your idea is good and would certainly be an improvement to what there is now.

But the block chain takes it a step forward so that other issues can be more efficiently addressed in democratic fashion.

The election of Donald Trump shows the weakness of pure democracy. The people are not informed enough to make reasonable judgments on all sorts of policies.

 

[RVonse]

Please take notice that in the poll $XX means that is a number which might be small or large. But it would have to be assumed to be an accurate reflection of the true costs whatever they calculated to be.

 

[Politesse]

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-...i3yDimS_odBk8QPpu_01R_AcoY9-e2d_cduuBmxmYbcyw

Recent immigrants are NOT who we ever choose to blow our budget for as a nation.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Building a wall will have little to no impact on how many immigrants enter this country,.

It obviously will have an impact. If walls did not work, you would not see them anywhere.

I did not say 'no' impact, did I?

The wall will have no affect on those immigrants coming through the legal ports of entry, such as airports, harbors, highway gates.
If that's the greater number of immigrants, then the wall will have less of an impact on the overall immigrant situation.
If the overall affect on the numbers is minimal, then the impact on the costs is minimal.

And that's not reflected in the simple binary vote.


We also see walls around prisons. If they're supereffective, we would not see illicit drugs in the prisons, would we?

 

[Keith&Co.]

Please take notice that in the poll $XX means that is a number which might be small or large. But it would have to be assumed to be an accurate reflection of the true costs whatever they calculated to be.

Of course, the fight over those numbers would limit the effectiveness of the votes, wouldn't it?
I mean, you could maybe come up with a breakdown for Trump's wall. But nothing contracted ever comes in on the first estimate, so people will argue over that number.
And the cost per immigrant is far more ephemeral, so no matter WHAT numbers you put there, someone's going to complain that it's not the true costs.

I've seen 3 estimates for how much the government lost just on this last shutdown and they differ by billion$. So, even if we all agree that cutting this down to specific dollar estimates is right, who gets to set those estimates?

 

[RVonse]

Regarding block chain voting... one could just pass a law that authorizes previous spending levels in 3 month increments until a budget is passed. That would seem to be a much easier change to enact.

Your idea is good and would certainly be an improvement to what there is now.

But the block chain takes it a step forward so that other issues can be more efficiently addressed in democratic fashion.

The election of Donald Trump shows the weakness of pure democracy. The people are not informed enough to make reasonable judgments on all sorts of policies.

If you mean people are too dumb to vote I do not agree with you. If you mean people are too ignorant I do agree with you that the media is doing a very poor job today. It became monopolized under the Clinton regime and should go back to smaller competitive organizations like before. Basically just undo everything that Clinton did. But that discussion goes beyond the scope of this thread.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The election of Donald Trump shows the weakness of pure democracy. The people are not informed enough to make reasonable judgments on all sorts of policies.

If you mean people are too dumb to vote I do not agree with you.

Well, that would also be evidence that I'm correct. I'm a reasonably well informed person. But there are all sorts of policies I am terribly unqualified to be setting with a vote.

If you mean people are too ignorant I do agree with you that the media is doing a very poor job today. It became monopolized under the Clinton regime and should go back to smaller competitive organizations like before. Basically just undo everything that Clinton did. But that discussion goes beyond the scope of this thread.

The lack of intelligence isn't the media's fault. Human beings can't all be very smart. And they certainly can't be highly educated in broad areas of concerns for setting policy.

 

[ronburgundy]

Building a wall will have little to no impact on how many immigrants enter this country,.

It obviously will have an impact. If walls did not work, you would not see them anywhere.

Like everything else in existence, walls work for some things and not for others. So, like your OP, this is a false dichotomy where you insist that either walls will work to keep out immigrants or they walls never serve any function. Walls work for creating climate controlled environments and to demarcate boundaries that won't be crossed without permission, if and only if those on the other side are not so suffering and desperate that they are willing to chance the consequences of violating the rule that the wall represents. IOW, they work for conditions that do not include situations like the central and south American immigrants seeking to enter the US.
.
As Keith pointed out your OP is a false dichotomy, not merely b/c it presumes the wall would be effective, but even if it did slightly reduce illegal immigration, there is no taxpayer cost to illegal immigrants. The evidence shows that they pay more in taxes than the government services they receive. Thus, an "effective wall" would not only cost $70 billion to build and $1 billion every year to maintain, but would reduce government revenue via taxes on immigrants that would have to be made up by citizen tax payers.
It is also a false dichotomy, b/c another reasonable option would be to force Trump's billionaire buddies to pay for any costs either way. Therefore, there is no logical ink between opposing a wall and being willing to personally pay additional taxes.

The real issue is with a congress that is totally controlled by large corporate interests, no one except for Trump and middle class really wants to keep immigrants out.

Trump is a corporate interest controlling the White House. He has made $ from illegal immigrants his whole life and his inheritance was partly created by abuse of illegal immigrants. Trump does not actually want to keep them out. What he wants is for his mindless idiot base to give him another term for assuaging their racist fears with a wall that will make him and his buds billions in contracts and be a monument to his insecure ego, while not actually stopping illegal immigration and thus allowing him and his corporate buds to continue to profit from abusing immigrants with inhumane wages and slum lord rental practices.

 

[laughing dog]

If the wall in the poll also keeps Trump out of the US, I vote yes.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

If the wall in the poll also keeps Trump out of the US, I vote yes.

Agreed. No way in heck could he either climb over or under it.

 

[ronburgundy]

The election of Donald Trump shows the weakness of pure democracy. The people are not informed enough to make reasonable judgments on all sorts of policies.

If you mean people are too dumb to vote I do not agree with you.

Then you disagree with 50 years of cognitive science showing that even when given accurate information, most people are incapable of sound reasoning and highly subject to emotional ideological biases that undermine how they use that information.

If you mean people are too ignorant I do agree with you that the media is doing a very poor job today. It became monopolized under the Clinton regime and should go back to smaller competitive organizations like before. Basically just undo everything that Clinton did. But that discussion goes beyond the scope of this thread.

So, in your fictional universe, prior to 1992, the media was not an ever increasing consolidation of monopolizing power with shared corporate agenda?
The vast majority of news outlets in the US were under under control of a handful of corporations well before Clinton, and they were/are the same corporations who dominate most major industries from fossil fuels to war (which I realize are highly overlapping, but most corporate interests overlap with War). And Reagan was the king of corporate consolidation, which skyrocketed under his near total dismantling of regulation, the FTC, and Antitrust enforcement. What occurred under Clinton was an inevitable result of that momentum and the anti-regulation courts and precedents that Reagan created.

Oh, and our dad's generation was just as if not more ignorant and irrational. They were the idiots who supported a government that paved the way for a monolithic press devoid of accountability for outright lies and misinformation. They didn't bother to attend to relevant facts even when they were available. So the problems with today's press are more of a byproduct and enhancer of the problem of public irrationality than a cause of it.

 

[RVonse]

Well, that would also be evidence that I'm correct. I'm a reasonably well informed person. But there are all sorts of policies I am terribly unqualified to be setting with a vote.

Then if you didnt feel qualified to vote, you would not have to vote. Nor would all complicated issues go before the public for a vote; only important issues.

Personally Id rather accept some public ignorance voting versus today's expert advice anyway. Considering it comes from highly biased lobbying firms paid by big money. Because I think I know whats best for me better than what I trust coming from them.