A guy seeing your frustration with a coin that seems to often come up "tails!" offers to get rid of the tails of your coin.
"How," you ask.
"Trust me," he says.
Frustrated and angry, you do.
How does he get rid of the tails portion of your coin? He just takes the coin.
The good news? No more tails.
The bad news? No more coin.
Donald Trump has convinced his supporters that immigrants are a threat to their livelihood and even their lives. (More than once he's trotted out grieved parents whose child has been killed by an illegal immigrant with a gun or a car.) If we build a wall ... If we deport them ... If only it weren't for immigrants, the economy would be so much better.
Well, there is your tail. We don't like losing jobs to the immigrants and Donald promises to get them out.
How? Well, he glosses over the little details of how you'd manage to find and deport 11 million people. (A task that is complicated by so many things - including the fact that families are rarely one thing; how do you deport a 45 year old whose two teenagers are not only citizens in the US but in school here? His answer? Trust me.)
But his plan to remove the tails portion of the coin of course involves taking away the heads portion of the coin.
Every person here in the country is part of our domestic market. They rent or buy houses. They buy food, clothes, cars, and thousands of little and big things that get sold or rented every day. If we were successful at deporting 11 million people, we would lose all that demand for goods and services. Even assuming that their incomes are only half that of the average American, they represent incomes of about a quarter of a trillion - $275 billion - a year. That's a chunk of income lost, enough to throw the country into a recession.
I could make all sorts of mind-numbing calculations based on reasonable assumptions about how much illegal aliens contribute to the economy but bottom line, if they aren't living here, they aren't shopping here. The good news is that they wouldn't be here to take your job in nailing up sheet rock in the construction industry; the bad is that they wouldn't be here to demand housing and with them gone, it's conceivable that the homes abandoned would be available for folks to buy or rent, meaning that no one would need to build houses for awhile and you still wouldn't have a job nailing up sheet rock in the construction industry. It's tough to imagine that demand for housing would be strong in the aftermath of 11 million lost residents.
Donald Trump is promising to take away the tails you hate getting on your coin. How will he do that? He'll take away your coin.
R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
As I was reading your blog entry, when I got to the part where you mention the potential of all the homes and apartments being available for purchase or rent should illegal immigrants be ousted, I couldn't help but think there might be 1 silver lining positive to this: we might be able to solve the problem of homelessness. Of course those owning the properties wouldn't necessarily see it as a healthy solution, especially to their revenue stream, but it's still a potential.
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