The Great Recession ruined a lot of people. Unemployed people who used to have good jobs got dumped by their families and were written off as shiftless bums. They starved, their shoes wore out, their eye glasses cracked, they had dental emergencies and had nowhere to go for help, and if they had a car than it too needed emergency repairs. If they were lucky and had a semi-stable place to live than they were subjugated by their roommates or relatives who abused them because they were at the end of their tether. People are still seriously suffering in this recession and it's very strange that officials are saying that it's over. It's a form of gaslighting and they're doing it because of the upcoming election.
There is a legal phrase called "deceptive rhetoric" which is a fancy term for lying. Public relations specialists do it constantly. I know because I talk to them over the phone and then catch it when I cross check their data with others in outside organizations. Cross checking works. With that said, some rhetoric is transparently ridiculous and you can see it right away. For example, in spring 2010 the U.S. Census Bureau hired thousands of temporary workers to take the census. Obviously those jobs were temporary but President Obama said that the Department of Labor jobs report showed job growth. Clearly that wasn't true but in my opinion he made an honest mistake. Our president was still very much a college instructor and the American people both loved him and hated him for it. With that said, he hired the most qualified economists to help him with the presidency and so they must have known how to interpret the jobs report. Why didn't they mention where the jobs came from and that they were temporary?
There is plenty of deceptive rhetoric on the street. For example, staffing agencies are notorious for shamelessly lying to job seekers about the job market and so those in contact with them would have been very confused. Agencies need candidates to believe that they have job openings to fill so that they'll register with their agency. They need to keep a roster of candidates on hand in case a client calls with a job.
In 2010 the media began to broadcast that Silicon Valley was rapidly recovering from the recession, but I know a lot of people who work there and they've been sending me mixed signals about the local economy. Even now, in 2012. For example, one senior level IT professional has been laid off twice over the last few years. Two weeks ago I had pizza with an employer in San Jose who said that every time he posts a job opening online he receives between two hundred to three hundred resumes. I talked to an intellectual property attorney in Palo Alto who specializes in high-tech companies and he said that he has to work as a contract attorney because he couldn't find full time employment. I talked to a CPA in San Jose who didn't have any clients during the first week of February. One of his clients owns a famous cabinet shop in the South Bay and his income is now half of what it was five years ago. Of all of the people I've talked to, only one person said that Silicon Valley is doing well and he's a project manager in the high-tech sector. In other words, only a specific niche of the local economy is booming. My cousin, a real estate broker in Sunnyvale, told me earlier this month that real estate values in the area have been rebounding very rapidly this year, but in my opinion all of the cottage industries that follow real estate trends are still in the dumps.
The U.S. economy is suffering and is not nearly strong enough to give domestic jobs to foreigners. For example, imagine if our farms' crops were destroyed in a drought and we didn't have enough food to feed everyone. Would the U.S. Department of Agriculture inform those on Capitol Hill and the president? If so, than what would they do? They would mandate a food ration. That's what Washington did during World War II. What does that mean for foreigners? Unfortunately, it means that they'd have to go back home. It's not that we want them to leave; the real issue is that we don't have enough food, and in order to ensure that U.S. citizens have enough to eat we have to send everyone else back home.
Take that scenario and imagine that instead of food the shortage is jobs. We'd have to do the same thing.
Sometime during the Great Recession congress voted to ensure that educated foreigners could get jobs in the United States and settle down here. Their explanation was that our country needs to increase our number of educated workers in order to stay competitive globally. In effect, they're allowing enormous immigration waves of Filipino registered nurses to take nearly all of the R.N. jobs in our hospitals because our nation can't afford to send American kids to college to become nurses.
Ditto for East Indians in the high-tech sector. With that said, they're worse because they went to college in the U.S. and paid for it with American scholarships and fellowships, and U.S. federal and state financial aid. Their students are welcome here but the Republic of India should pay for it.
Developing countries such as India and Iran have small university systems that are not nearly large enough for their population. For example, Iran's university system is so small that they have only enough room for the top ten percent of their high schools' graduating class. Most of the remaining 90% of their kids go to college in the U.S. or England, and Iran does not provide tuition vouchers or any form of financial aid. They never pay one dime towards their kids' education. It's not just Iran and India; the U.S. has the same problem with Taiwan and China as well. I want to be really clear that my complaint has nothing to do with racism or politics and that American Universities encourage cultural diversity on campus. This is strictly a financial problem. Developing countries that can't afford the staggering costs of a huge university system should be allowed to send their kids to school here but they have to pay for it.
Their least expensive option would be to create their own online universities for lower division general ed classes such as sociology. That's not a quality education and so they'd have to stop doing it by the time that their students reach 60 units and then transfer them to a real university abroad and pay for it. In 2012 American private colleges in the 2nd and 3rd tier are charging about $30,000 to $35,000 per year, and those in the top tier are somewhere in the $40,000 to $50,000 range.
I want to address "breach of faith" for a moment. When American corporations, hospitals and universities import foreign workers and students on such a grand scale that it causes waves of immigration that push Americans out of the workforce than those organizations have become de facto foreign companies that practice de facto segregation against the American people. It pushes U.S. Citizens down into a native underclass. What could be a larger betrayal than that?
There is so much of it up and down the entire peninsula from Saratoga all the way up to Daly City that it's a breach of faith against the American people, and our own representatives on Capitol Hill voted for it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm almost certain that Nancy Pelosi voted for it. President Obama can veto congressional bills like that but I haven't heard anything and so I assume that he allowed it to pass.
Now I want to talk about our failing entitlement programs. This is similar to the food shortage scenario that I mentioned earlier. The United States is dead broke and our president just legalized certain illegal immigrants and they'll apply for our welfare programs. As I mentioned earlier, our president is a college instructor and the American people both love him and hate him for it at the same time.
I want to briefly mention welfare fraud. Most Americans don't know that legal immigrants who became U.S. Citizens and enrolled in Medi-Cal sometimes moved back to their native country, and then when they needed an expensive medical procedure such as heart surgery they returned to the U.S. for a month or two to get it for free. Additionally, there are those who have never worked in this country for even one day and when they became senior citizens they applied for Social Security Benefits. They collect $600 a month if they live at home with their kids or something, and when they move into a skilled nursing facility than their benefits increase in order to pay for it.
In conclusion, the United States is not open unclaimed territory where anyone can come here and do whatever they want. Imagine that it's private property that belongs to U.S. Citizens.
Each citizen personally pays for the public universities and entitlement programs here. To get an idea of how hard Americans in the Bay Area struggle to pay their taxes, imagine a hypothetical 30 year old single woman in San Francisco or Silicon Valley who works full time and makes $42,000 a year. Subtract 23% off the top for federal and state income taxes, which is $9,660. Now subtract $2,400 for her health insurance which she pays out of her own pocket. She rents a room for $800 a month, and so subtract $9,600. Her car payment is $400 and so subtract $4,800, and her car insurance is $75 a month and so subtract $900. Her cell phone/smart phone costs $80 a month and so subtract $960. Her utilities cost $80 a month and so subtract an additional $960. Now she's down to $12,720 for the entire year, which is supposed to cover all of her food, clothes, entertainment, gas, school, the gym, savings, contributions to her retirement account, and gifts that she buys for people on their birthdays and for Christmas. It's $244.62 per week. It's a living nightmare. Worse, there's no job security in the U.S. and so when she loses her job than she'll have to file for unemployment benefits which pays only about $1,440 per month after taxes for six months. It's hell. Now imagine living that way, going back and forth between having a job that pays $42,000 and collecting unemployment, for forty or fifty years. It's an inescapable black hole. Wouldn't her life become so much easier if she didn't have to pay $9,660 in taxes?
My point is that she's forced into paying it and if she doesn't than the IRS will add 20% interest and garnish her wages, and that's the hell that Americans tolerate in order to have entitlement programs and public universities. It's a major slap in the face to give it all away because when she needs it, it won't be there.
