Been reading all sorts of commentary on the DREAM Act and other proposals to legalize all or some of the vast population of illegal aliens.
The arguments are:
A. These are hard working, salt of the earth people who struggled to get here to make a better life.
Which is opposed by:
B. Illegal aliens have broken the law, and must be forced to get in line behind the people in the legitimate immigration process.
While I am sympathetic to some illegal immigrants, particularly ones I know personally, I have to come down in favor of enforcement of immigration laws.
Without even mentioning the fact that a huge portion of the crimes I see prosecuted in Dallas County, Texas are crimes committed by illegal aliens, or mentioning the destruction of my school system, I will tell you how I came to see the personal impact of illegal immigration.
I have a 1966 Mustang convertible. It is my first car, which I have owned and worked on since 1986.
A few years ago I took it for a drive. An illegal alien in a junk car ran a red light and destroyed my Mustang.
Naturally, he had no insurance, license and the car was unregistered. A few minutes later his brother pulls up in a truck with no tags. The brother proceeds to tell me how sorry his brother is, but he is poor, and he and his family only came here to eke out a living.
Poor, poor them he told me, sad eyes and all, and then he told me how much they like it here in America. While I called the cops, they quickly grabbed a few items from his wrecked car and peeled out of the area post-haste.
You see, the problem is that when you give an inch, a mile or more is taken. Since they have no consequence for sneaking in, the message is that there is no consequence for anything at all.
Why have insurance? Just drive a disposable car and be prepared to dump it after you damage another persons car, or kill them, whatever.
We have turned our country into a Disneyland for scofflaws, where speaking out against criminal acts is called racism, and we have to learn to accept two-tiered legal system: one for legal residents and a low-impact one for illegal aliens.
This is nonsense. It has taken me 5 years to get my car back in shape, spending my own money to pay for an illegal alien to get “better life”. How is this different than if he had burgled my home to make his “better life”? What if he had killed my family in that wreck?
What costs am I expected to bear for their good times?
Their better life should not be at my expense. I am losing patience.
So, here we have one of many similar proposals being thrown around in order to save money for State government. This nugget of brilliance involves eliminating 12th grade, which would place 16 and 17 year olds into the work force or early college.
Sounds great for the 5% who are mature enough to handle it, but in reality it will just set more kids up for failure. The only goal here is to save money, again at the exepense of the future. Reducing lower education beyond its current sewer level can only lead to Hell.
Tell you what, the day we graduate 95% who can read and write, we can start talking about cutting years off the process.
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We have always had hucksters and scammers. They have been a part of history since it was first carved into clay tablets. They were a notable minority in every society. It appears that we have flipped the script on that ratio, now it seems the majority of people have cashed in their character for some chips at the easy-money Casino.
I have been meeting far too many selfish people lately. Not personally, mind you, rather they are things that have happened to clients or consultations I have had lately with people I did not choose to represent.
Most of this kind of whom I am complaining seem nice on the surface, but only when you delve deeper to you encounter the cold hard center of their being.
People with great incomes and savings seeking to take advantage of the situation and entering loan modifications (then wanting to sue because their precious credit rating takes a 100 point hit).
People with significant wealth seeking to hide assets and income so as to be eligible for greater public benefits (and becoming irritated with me when I point out that the social services they seek to defraud are meant to help those in need.)
Large land owners seeking to torment smaller neighbors into giving up their holdings at a deep discount (by interfering with access, disrupting water flow and making noise at all hours with equipment.)
Forging documents, cheating siblings out of wills and trusts, strategic mortgage defaults, taking advantage of elderly relatives, widespread mortgage and Real Estate fraud and the so many other disappointing and disturbing means of weaseling undeserved or unneeded resources by people who simply don’t need what they are stealing.
As the economy gets tougher, the veneer is peeling back on these people, and they are reverting to their hard-wired programming of Me. It is almost as if they never grew past early childhood internally, but took on all the outward signs of adulthood (or even old age!)
It would be easy to say that this is normal, accept it as reality and just take who ever comes through the door as a potential client, represent them and “get mine”, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I am sick of these people and I am sick of the harm they have caused all of us, and I hate the fact that they are liquidating my children’s future knowingly and intentionally.
The greed that has infected so many is the root of all of our problems. From the Welfare Queen to the millionaire spending Social Security on golf dues, from the fraudulent mortgage applications and mortgage-equity withdrawals and the subsequent default, modification and strategic walk-away scams performed by church-going “honest” people.
Individually, these people have done well for themselves. For their children and grandchildren, not so much.
They don’t care. So long as they “got theirs”. The car, the house, the handbag and the belief that they deserve so much more is what drives them.
I believe that this situation is coming to a climax. We will all “get ours” eventually.
Collectively, we will get what we are asking for, that is for sure.
How is this for efficient use of your tax dollars?
http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/30/news/economy/Stimulus_jobs_created/index.htm?postversion=2009103007
Let’s do the math:
$150,000,000,000 One hundred and fifty billion dollars spent.
/ 650,000 Jobs “created or saved”
————————–
= $230,769.23 Tax dollars per job “created or saved”
This is being touted as a success? The U.S. median income is about $50,000.00. At least four families could have been handed one years earnings for the cost of one “created or saved” job and had enough left over to pay income taxes.
The fact that our government touts this as a victory is stark evidence of just how bad our education levels have fallen and just how delusional our media has become.
Are we sure we can afford a health care system run by these people?
Here we go again.
http://www.businessinsider.com/20-year-old-buys-home-with-183000-fha-loan-and-just-35-down-2009-10
Since the end of 2007, private mortgage resources have dried up. Private money stopped funding mortgages. In late 2008, as Fannie and Freddie collapsed (and should have been wound down), We The People started funding the mortgage market. Our children and grandchildren have guaranteed these loans, through government price support loan policies, in order to keep housing unaffordable and out of reach for the very children and grandchildren that are subsidizing this wealth transfer.
Just like every one of us knows that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, yet we still allow the ongoing theft from the future generations because of our own selfish interests. We all know that Real Estate prices are unsustainable, but we are not willing to see our fantasy equity vanish as prices discover their natural place.
We have become too greedy and too selfish to make the hard sacrifices necessary to wash out the problems we have created.
We used to be a nation of people concerned for the future of our kids. Now it appears that it is every man for himself.
Bush or Obama? That seems to be the question. As usual, the real culprit is not being confronted.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a_A5nqmw9Dq8
Sadly, the it is us. Decades of excess consumption, financed by fantasy equity has driven us off the cliff.
New car every three years, clothes, clubs, vacations, medications and a charge card. Irresponsibility will turn out to be much more expensive than anyone expected.
You may have seen those ads for debt settlement companies. Most are written off as a scam. A local one has retained me as part of an effort to move clients too deep in debt into a more sensible bankruptcy option. I have found some startling things about the debt settlement business, and debt in general.
I expected to find hard-sold customers, pissed off and looking to blame someone. Instead I have found that these are people who are mostly trying to continue their life in denial of the financial facts of life. The first thing I have discovered is that debt settlement companies can reduce peoples debt in astonishing amounts (50K or more wiped out sometimes in a few phone calls).
The second thing I have learned is that the people who seek debt settlement services have some common issues in communication within their household. It seems that Bankruptcy will force them to admit the true state of their credit to their wives, husbands and families. It seems that so many simply want to ignore reality and just keep kicking the can down the road until, somehow, their finances improve. Sadly, these people are 40, 50, and even 60 years old. Short of a lottery ticket, their opportunities to massively increase their income are non-existent.
What has stunned me the most about this experience is that the people I am talking to, who should be old enough to understand and make the necessary changes, are the ones least likely to accept the facts. I am finding that the younger debtor has a much more intuitive understanding of their debt, their options and they are not as hung up on image and stigma of Bankruptcy. The older one, the ones who can least afford to keep up appearances are the ones who hold on until the catastrophic end.
This article contains information that is extremely misleading:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090927/D9AVHRDG0.html
Social Security is projecting a deficit for at least two years. This means that more money is going out than is coming in. The article helpfully points out that this happened before in the 1980’s.
What is not mentioned is that in the 1980’s there was actually a surplus held by the Social Security Administration, and deficits were funded by reserves at that time (or at least the level of debt was something more manageable.)
The article points out that this spending will add to the Federal deficit. That is because the surplus fund for Social Security was depleted years ago and those funds were replaced by IOU’s issued by Congress.
There is no money in Social Security, only IOU’s, and now expenses exceed income.
How will we ever pay for the 2.5 Trillion dollars already owed to Social Security from past borrowing, while we are adding to the debt at the rate of at least 10 billion dollars per year and rising?
In an economy where an 18-25 year old faces 30 – 50% unemployment, with substandard public education, competing with nations that take their future seriously, I simply don’t see that this Ponzi scheme can survive.
The only thing we can be sure of is that this will end badly.
The attached Memorandum opinion is a judicial wrench thrown into the spinning gears of the corporate/government spin machine.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19115290/Rakoff-Order-to-SEC-and-BofA
Your Securities and Exchange Commission tried to enter into a settlement whereby Bank of America admitted that it lied to its shareholders (charmingly BoA states that shareholders should have relied instead on media rumor instead of BoA statements). In exchange, BoA was going to scalp the shareholders an additional 30 million to pay off the S.E.C.
For those of you who disdain all lawyers and blame the legal system for all the woes of the world, be aware that there are some out here working at ideals. This is how revolutions start, with a few people making principled decisions that are not in their own best interest. God help this Judge and his cause, because so many powerful people want this to fall down the memory hole.
Good luck, brave Judge.
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