Bull Market Rodeo – Money and Finance News from the Palm Beach Intelligence Group
If your devotion is to all, what is the value of your love? Are such displays of emotion not useless if any member of the horde on the other side of the hill holds the same space in your heart as those who have built their lives around you, who have celebrated and suffered by your side? Is it not pathological to care for strangers more than those next to you? Shockingly, such a standard has become politically correct in much of the Western World.
Be it African or Middle Eastern migrants smothering Western Europe or the demand in America for illegal aliens to be immune to American law, the message from the mainstream media is clear: foreigners are more deserving of Western society than those who value and preserve the ideals that made our countries successful in the first place.
Now, many will say that American foreign policy – especially the last eight years of failed nation building coups in Libya and Syria – have created the crisis in which the migrants are fleeing. And, while this opinion contains a partial truth, belief is such rhetoric would require ignorance of pre-2010 migration.
The red herring of Syria provides the pro-migration movement with a flashy distraction, forcing the world’s eyes away from the over 1 million migrants illegally flooding into the European Union every year. In fact, all the way back in 2010, Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi was holding the EU ransom for billions by threatening to “turn Europe black” by refusing to stop African migrants from crossing into Italy. In recent months, six years after Gadhafi’s death, Italy has agreed to pay $5 billion to build a greater resistance to the threat. If we do not address the actual reality of migration into Europe, as people who allow Syria to monopolize their discussion of these topics, how could any correct response be mounted?
While much of the media’s blame for migrants and illegal immigrants is directed towards the West’s foreign policy, the true cause is the welfare systems ingrained into our domestic policies. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the average household headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) costs taxpayers $6,234 in federal welfare benefits, which is 41 percent higher than the $4,431 received by the average native household. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography states that the average Mexican household (3.5 people) makes $10,116. To put simply, a full-time job in Mexico will earn about the same as not having a job in America. Is there any wonder why people want to join the hand-out party?
When I see pro-immigration activists flooding the streets, demanding more immigrants and more amnesty for those already here, I wonder why there is no care about veterans, our elderly. Why do they have no comment about inflation constantly increasing while wages continue to stagnate? Why is new infrastructure not being built? Why is the middle class trapped in a state of funding both poor and rich? The answer, quite simply, quite sadly, is because the news doesn’t tell you to be outraged about those things keeping food out of your family’s mouths. The news tells you to feel sorry for the brown people you are causing to suffer.
In the West, white people don’t have enough children to support the welfare state. With Americans and Western Europeans having fewer children than ever, there is simply not enough money to pay for the desires of those unable to pay their way: free health care, college, younger retirements, nanny service, etc. Unable to pay for these things, citizens fall into the politician’s trap, accepting that they can vote for their wants instead of work for them.
Those who desire big government will always want more immigration.According to Pew, the majority of Latinos have not voted for a Republican since the early 80s. Those who have come to America for free services will never vote away those services – or opt out of future services. For that reason, regardless of race or culture, Americans who value our Republic, not some dream of a mob rule democracy, must strongly, aggressively condemn Immigration of every potential dependent. We will slip deeper into the ever-failing socialist black hole with each new dreamer.
Reprinted with permission from http://punchingbagpost.com
by William H. Frey.*
“We believe our diversity, our differences, when joined together by a
common set of ideals, makes us stronger, makes us more creative, makes
us different,” Barack Obama pronounced at a citizenship ceremony last
Fourth of July. Until half a century ago most serious historians would
have called such an opinion ignorant or naïve. Ethnic diversity implies
cultural diversity—if it did not, ethnic diversity would soon disappear.
Cultural diversity means division, division means weakness, and weakness
means, eventually, unfreedom. Such, at least, is the traditional view,
and history appears to vindicate it. “Diversity” has been an attribute
of subject populations: medieval elites communicated in Latin, laborers
in various vernaculars. Diversity has been the form of belonging that
typifies empires, just as nationality has been the form that typifies
republics. The British Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Habsburg
Empire—these were diverse. England, Italy, and Austria, until recently,
were not. The motto /E pluribus unum/ is a sign that the founders saw
diversity as a challenge to be mastered, not a resource to be tapped.
Yet “diversity” today is a sacred term. It carries lots of power but
resists easy definition. It entered popular constitutional understanding
with the Supreme Court’s decision in /Regents of the University of
California v. Bakke /(1978). Justice Lewis Powell held that an
affirmative action program that reserved spots for minorities at the
U.C. Davis medical school violated the equal rights of white applicants,
but that “the goal of achieving a diverse student body is sufficiently
compelling to justify consideration of race in admissions decisions
under some circumstances.” Diversity thus became a euphemism, allowing
authorities to connive at public-policy goals that they could not openly
avow.
** * **
The Brookings Institution demographer William Frey would seem a good
candidate to lead readers to a clear, propaganda-free understanding of
what diversity is. The title of his new study on ethnicity and
population change is /Diversity Explosion/. While he never defines the
word explicitly, he means the decline—in both population and vitality—of
America’s European-descended population, and its replacement by more
recently arrived population groups from everywhere in the non-European
world/./ Frey sometimes describes this change as “the browning of
America.” More than half (53%) of the country’s 3,100 counties had
declining white populations by the first decade of the century. In the
current decade the white population has begun to decline in the nation
as a whole. Metropolitan New York and metropolitan Los Angeles have each
lost a million white people since 1990. Fewer than half the babies born
in 2011 were in the U.S. Census category of “non-Hispanic whites.” Three
years from now most Americans under 18 will be “minorities” of one kind
or another. In 1970, there were only two cities with more than a million
black residents: New York and Chicago. Now there are seven. Los Angeles
County and adjoining Riverside County have 6.1 million Hispanics.
In days when people spoke more freely about such matters, dramatic
change in the dominant population of the world’s dominant power would
have been occasion for speculation and worry. About whether, for
instance, as more of its citizens come from non-European backgrounds,
the United States will change its idea of its /cultural/ heritage. Or
whether, considering the occasional tawdriness of whites’ behavior
toward minorities in centuries past—displacing Indians, enslaving
Africans, deporting Chinese—there is cause to worry about race relations
once the shoe is on the other foot. Or whether European civilization,
which from the time of Columbus to the time of /Goodbye, Columbus/,
seemed to roll ever westward as if by a law of nature, is now beginning
to ebb.
** * **
Frey’s attitude toward these changes is much the same as President
Obama’s: demographically, America is bound for glory. “Rather than being
feared,” Frey writes, “America’s new diversity—poised to reinvigorate
the country at a time when other developed nations are facing advanced
aging and population loss—can be celebrated.” Any “resistance” to
diversity can be explained by Americans’ “fear of change, fear of losing
privileged status, or fear of unwanted groups in their communities.”
Now there are certainly good reasons to be glad of the size of our
recent immigration. The U.S. labor force will grow 5% between this
decade and 2030, and it would have shrunk considerably otherwise. Yet
Frey could do with a reminder that what he is celebrating in passages
like these is youth, not diversity, that natives ought to be as capable
of bearing the next generation of children as the foreign-born, that
their failure to do so may be an effect of something dire rather than
the cause of something to be “celebrated,” and that policymakers have
seldom been able to predict the outcomes of wholesale demographic change.
Clashes await. Frey sometimes has a sharp eye for them. Only 23% of
those born in the Baby Boom generation and before believe America’s new
diversity is a “change for the better”; 42% call it a change for the
worse. The interests of America’s aging, infertile white population and
its young, fecund immigrants will necessarily diverge, in ways that have
nothing to do with anyone’s good or ill will. Both groups are dependent
on government services, but in different ways. Sixteen percent of whites
are over 65, versus 7% of minorities. The former, broadly speaking, want
cheap drugs, lavish pensions, and a labor market in which young people
will push wheelchairs and fix meals for next to nothing; the latter want
new schools for their children, government-funded day care, and a
so-called living wage. This year, for the first time, white families are
supporting more dependent seniors than children. For them, the welfare
state is no longer in any sense an “investment,” the way its
social-democratic designers used to claim. It is, to use an
appropriately Baby Boom expression, a /drag/.
** * **
Such statistics lend themselves to reflections about decadence and to
questions about what it is we are /really/ importing. It is not so much
diversity, perhaps, and not so much labor, as traditional families. A
third of Hispanic households consist of families in which a married
couple lives with children, and a third of Hispanics are under 18. A
third of Asian-American households consist of these families, too, and
the country’s Asian population is now ten times what it was in 1970.
Among whites, by contrast, such families make up only a fifth of
households—except in those rare communities nationwide where the white
population is growing. There, white habits resemble those of immigrants,
with a third of families consisting of married couples and children.
Frey notes that over time Hispanics “tend to become ‘Americanized’ with
regard to family and household relationships.” But, for now, new
immigrant groups—or at least those individuals visible to the IRS—bear a
disproportionate burden. Pay-as-you-go welfare states, in which all
benefits are drawn directly from present earnings, are spectacularly
unfair to those who procreate. Everyone, in time, has a claim to the
benefits. But one group pays almost all the costs of producing,
nurturing, and educating the next generation’s workforce: parents. For
taxpayers, welfare states offer massive disincentives to having
children. Both the old (who have already paid for others’ benefits) and
the young (who will pay in the future) have legitimate but incompatible
claims on the welfare state. Trying to honor both is one reason the
country is now in such a fiscal predicament. Frey’s solution is to
“persuade seniors that the key needs among striving young
minorities—education, affordable housing, and steady employment—will
work to benefit the Social Security and medical care programs that
seniors will need in retirement.” Persuade all you like, but it’s not
true, or at least not soon enough. In a pay-as-you-go system, there’s a
lag of half a generation or a generation before education produces
benefits (which, of course, not all education does). Politicians might
reasonably ask seniors to consider posterity; but if anyone were capable
of doing that, we wouldn’t have got ourselves so deep in debt in the
first place. An economy built around mass immigration may lead to
underinvestment in the future. Indeed, this may constitute an
off-balance-sheet liability that makes the apparent economic benefits of
immigration illusory.
** * **
Frey’s book includes an innovation that renders his statistics either
clearer or less trustworthy, depending how you look at it: he treats the
U.S. Census category “Hispanic” as a race. That is a fateful change,
because Hispanics account for more than half of the country’s new
“diversity.”
Is this move defensible? “Hispanic,” as defined by the Census Bureau, as
well as by common sense, is not a race. It is rather a designation of
immigrant provenance that has been applied in ways ever more bizarre as
the years have passed. It classifies people by national language—/not/
the language of the immigrant—so that a youngster from the Dominican
Republic gets lumped together with an Indian from the Bolivian highlands
(even if that Indian does not speak Spanish), not with a Haitian who
grew up ten miles away (even if that Haitian does).
The problem is that government, however punctilious its definitions, has
/treated/ Hispanics as if they were a race. Ethnic lobbies, too, mix
foreigners and Americans, non-citizens and citizens, under the same
“Hispanic” category, in a way that renders meaningless many of the
statistics that rank their progress. The prospects of Ramón “El Pachuco”
Rodríguez of Maryvale, Arizona, who arrived from Sinaloa in his 30s a
couple years ago without a high school degree or even a green card, are
deemed somehow relevant to those of Lowell “Skippy” Rodriguez of
Greenwich, Connecticut, and Groton. The linguistic/national
nonce-adjective “Hispanic” gets passed on as if it were a genetic
inheritance so that Skippy (who may be “Hispanic” only because his
great-grandfather owned the largest newspaper in Buenos Aires) can
collect, on behalf of newly arrived El Pachuco, a “diversity” bonus that
will allow him to bump a more deserving applicant from a spot at Yale.
“It is safe to predict that racial classifications will be modified in
the future as multiracial marriages and populations proliferate,” Frey
writes. But this prediction is not safe at all. There now exists a
/market/ of racial classifications. Whether such classifications as
“black” and “Hispanic” get modified will depend on whether they continue
to produce jobs, promotions and college placements. In the case of
“Hispanic,” if a classification is something you can be incentivized to
belong to, then it doesn’t meet anyone’s commonsense definition of a
race. A faulty classification produces a faulty reading of society. To
argue that Hispanics should or should not be eligible for programs of
racial integration designed for blacks in the shadow of Jim Crow is to
put the cart before the horse. We have these categories in the first
place only to promote people’s insertion into race-based programs.
** * **
Frey is more interested in tracing the arrival, spread, and assimilation
of immigrants than in examining the centuries-old divide between whites
and blacks. Black population growth is steady but not spectacular—midway
between the exploding populations of new immigrants and the declining
one of whites. Still, his discussion of black population trends contains
some of the book’s most surprising data. For the first time since
slavery, immigration accounts for as much population growth among blacks
as it does in the country at large. Over the past 20 years millions have
arrived from West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Caribbean—a wave
so large that a tenth of American blacks are now immigrants.
Meanwhile, the trickle of native blacks to the American South, which
began in the 1970s, has in the last two decades become a torrent. It has
reversed the migration to Northern cities that went on uninterrupted for
most of the 20th century. The South is the only part of the country that
is gaining native-born blacks, but it is gaining a lot of them, and the
gains in Georgia have been particularly large. Atlanta recently passed
Chicago as the country’s second-largest black metropolis.
Blacks are moving to the South in part because they are being welcomed
there. The five most residentially segregated metropolitan areas in the
country are Milwaukee, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. The
ten /least/ segregated cities are all in the South or Southwest,
including Charleston, Raleigh, Greenville (South Carolina), Lakeland
(Florida), and Augusta (Georgia).
This may be because Southerners are nicer than Northerners, but Frey
argues persuasively that the federal government was more able to enforce
the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in new housing than in old, and most new
housing built after 1968 was in the Sunbelt. By measures not just of
segregation but also of income, poverty, and educational attainment,
blacks today do considerably better in states that were segregated until
the 1960s than in states that were not. The Supreme Court has been much
criticized for deciding, in /Shelby County v. Holder/ (2013), that the
parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that call for special scrutiny of
Southern institutions were unconstitutional. But if voting institutions
resemble the ones Frey describes, it would have been arbitrary to rule
otherwise.
Since the 1990s, when Frey noted that whites were fleeing areas of high
immigration, the separation between whites and all minorities has, he
says, “softened.” He speculates that immigration may have helped blacks
and whites get along because other minorities have provided a “buffer”
between them, although he offers no data to back up his assertion. A
sixth of newly married whites are married to someone of another race,
but it is not easy to figure what this means since the non-racial
category of Hispanics is, again, involved. Such intermarriage may be
rising because whites are growing more tolerant or because new “races”
have been introduced into American life that stand outside the historic
black-white clash. White-Asian marriages outnumber white-black
marriages, despite a vastly higher black population.
Yet white-black marriages have been rising since the 1960s, by about 50%
per decade, and now amount to roughly one eighth of the number of
black-black marriages. Frey finds a strange asymmetry in such racially
mixed marriages: three quarters are between black men and white women.
Frey does not give an explanation of where this imbalance comes from,
though in a footnote he hints that it might involve a trade of the man’s
economic status for the woman’s social status. Whatever the cause,
something other than straightforward assimilation is at work—some social
force that acts very differently on whites than on blacks.
** * **
In a 1973 episode of “All in the Family,” Archie Bunker spoke of a
co-worker everyone called Black Elmo, “so’s not to get him mixed up with
regular Elmo.” Sophisticates have long belittled the worldview that
white people are the only “regular” Americans. Yet we have built our
official racial policy around exactly this conception. Our politics, as
rejiggered by civil rights laws and affirmative action, assumes a
mainstream culture, and the ebbing of the white majority in the United
States is going to present genuine governing problems. Frey consistently
fails to see this. “Although whites are still considered the mainstream
in the United States,” he writes, “that perception should eventually shift.”
But how can it and why should it? Affirmative action has become such a
lucrative source of privilege that lobbying has made it impregnable,
even in a country that has shown, by twice electing a black president,
that it has no need of it. But our regime of affirmative action requires
a majority sensitive to pangs of conscience. When Frey offers policy
prescriptions, he focuses on closing this or that “gap” between
minorities and whites—as if the case for vigorous government action then
required no further elaboration. Activists and government make a similar
assumption. But once whites are a negligible part of the electorate,
whose incomes (or life expectancies, or college achievements) are
aggrieved minorities’ to be contrasted with? If blacks remain poor when
whites are merely another L.A. minority, what kind of remedies will be
suggested by the Mexican-American power structure and its Asian
supporters? If whites are poorer than, say, Asians, against whose
incomes will the poorest minorities’ be calibrated? Assuming whites
cannot be transformed from a repentant majority into a scapegoat
minority (on the model of European Jews historically, or the Chinese in
Southeast Asia more recently), then our ability to make “voluntary”
inter-ethnic transfers of money, jobs, and prestige may be nearing its end.
We have not prepared a regime to follow our half-century-long experiment
with affirmative action. The transition will be more complicated than we
assume. Should whites cease to be the majority, they will then become,
by definition, just another subgroup. They show signs of following the
interest-group logic that, since the 1960s and especially in the last
decade, has “racialized” the politics of all other subgroups. “[T]he
social, economic and demographic makeup of the white population is
becoming ever more distinct,” Frey writes, also noting their increasing
tendency to vote Republican. Whites, even the very youngest, favored the
underwhelming Mitt Romney in the last presidential election by between 7
and 23 points, depending on age cohort. This is not as extreme a
polarization as that of nonwhites, who in 2012 gave Obama margins of
victory between 58 and 64 points, but it is a significant change. It
will have repercussions for our politics. In Georgia last fall, Democrat
Michelle Nunn, an impressive candidate and the daughter of a
long-beloved U.S. senator, lost after getting only 23% of the white
vote. Weeks earlier, political analyst Nate Cohn had written in the /New
Republic/ that by 2016, due to the influx of blacks to Georgia, it
should be possible for a Democrat to win Georgia with that many white
votes. A racially polarized democracy is a terrible prospect. “Future
elections like this one,” Frey writes of 2012, “will not be
demographically sustainable.” One fears he means politically sustainable.
Like “multiculturalism,” the word “diversity” is both a sociological
description and an ideological program. Prop-aganda is baked into it
from the beginning. Frey is as independent-minded a demographer as there
is working today, and yet he cannot employ the term without getting
sucked into the /bien-pensant/ maelstrom:
Given the growing, more diverse racial populations that are central to
the nation’s future, it is imperative that the kinds of laws and
policies put in place to ensure equal access to employment, housing,
education and voting are enforced, monitored, and—where
necessary—augmented to accommodate new groups and needs, including the
integration of immigrants and their families. …[T]he demographic die is
cast…racial minorities will not just “fit in” but will hold sway….
A need to atone for slavery and segregation was once the justification
for the “laws and policies” Frey describes. Many and perhaps most
Americans have lost the thread of this historical narrative. These laws
and policies now seem to require no justification. So to whom,
ultimately, will the “new groups” address their “imperative” demands for
“equal access” when “sway” is held by people with no felt responsibility
to atone for America’s historic sins? Into what kind of society will
these new groups fit? Of what will these “augmented” monitoring programs
consist, and against whom will they be directed? “Diversity” is leading
us down an ominous and unfamiliar stretch of road.
Whites now will pay the freight to accommodate Hispanic
Flow of illegal immigration, all the while displacing seniors of both black and white LEGAL Americans. All this is done by bad politics. Bye Bye America
Whites do not produce babies like they did before WW1.
That is creating a vacuum in operating our economy and if the immigrants are not allowed in we will wither like Japan.
We waste too much money to support our military industrial complex.
That immigrants get more support than citizens from our welfare system is a big lie promoted by armchair academics who know nothing about real life of such immigrants. We need wiser and practical policies not preferring one race or other
Oh brother…
Dude….you’re severely lacking in socio-economic accumen …..comparing us to Japan? Other than becoming a tech giant…there is no comparison….for example…Japan…has inflation so bad…that a family making 250k would be like a 45k family lives here….do some research there Einstein
The mysterious Sean Gibbons gets his facts wrong. Inflation is not currently a problem. The Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates low because inflation is so low. More good information in the comments than in the article.
Inflation is not low nor is unemployment (95 million too young for SS and not working). Check the constant increase in food and energy price rises over the last 15 years. The interest rates are kept low by the Federal Reserve banking cartel because the “income taxes” are not even keeping up with the interest owed on the National debt(fraudulent by the way) of $20 trillion dollars. If the Fed rate was increased there would be a National default…or austerity that would result in a bloody revolution.
There is no escaping the financial burden of increased minority or disenfranchised masses into our once prosperous and triomphant country. She is on a slippery slope from where there is not one standing up for our shrinking majority (well perhaps only one who is not liked and even dispised for saying the thruth). If “political correctnes” remains in vigor, there is no hope for this nation. Down to the gutters sooner than later.
@Roger Hankey – Clearly, you do not do your own grocery shopping and haven’t eaten regularly at restaurants over the past 10 years. Inflation is VERY MUCH a REALITY, and it shows blatantly in the exhorbitantly rising prices and lowering weights of our FOOD. I remember 10 years ago you could get most full meals at your local IHOP or Denny’s for $5.99. Now those same menu items are $15.99! Wake up and smell the WAY overpriced coffee!
Whites do not produce babies like Illegal Invaders because they are responsible and want the best for each and every child of theirs- neither they send the bill to society like Illegals Hispanic and illegal Latinos do. Whites do not suck or parasite anyone. They study and work to exhaustion, while Illegal invaders from Mexico party, play victimhood, drink, have plenty of sex to bring their kind to the world & struggle to convince us all that they are misfortunate, loving to play victimhood like bastards, as part of their Chicano soap opera- pobrecitos.
They like easy life and they LOVE to have “babies”, so by playing victimhood they rob from our system to keep on partying and having babies. Not even the left of democraps like them, otherwise they would use their own money to feed or sustain this kind, not the Tax payer cash. Illegals is a SCAM against the honest men in America and honest men of any nation, and honestly if they are so precious why not even Mexico gives a shit to them. Also, Mexico gets for free over 27 Billion Dollars from the US, deviated and robbed from Americans by Illegals- what a good business- they invest nothing and get such a cash- JACKPOT!!!. And how much crime aside from Robbery and exploitation of this nation these Illegals have committed that the Press is in despair to shut down? How many legal immigrants who do not commit crimes at all, are put in the same “pot “with illegals, to justify the (low rate) crime? Misguided and Manipulated Statistics. So, if you can rob and do nothing other than making cash, not declaring to the IRS, getting plenty of benefits because of the “lack “of deviated income, and have your kids at other’s cost, why would ANY illegal (most of them Hispanic and Latinos) not do their best to keep the Parasite- low form of life- motto? Finally, ourselves we were burglarized to hell by this low form of life- they destroyed a substantial part of our lives. Myself, even after years, I cannot sleep at night, well imagine Kate Steinle family in San Francisco. “Pobrecitos” de DACA. Finally, they advocate they cannot get back to Mexico, given they were discharged in the US by their Illegal progenitors, yet if it were the opposite, the filthy true is that if their progenitors were Illegals in Mexico and deported to the US as Illegals American in Mexico, would the DACA members stay in Mexico – being discharged in Mexico- not their fault, or come back to the US.
Oh please…. Their argument that they grew up here so they cannot leave is SO LAME! And, China is Smart! Does China have Illegals from Mexico or from ANY place in its lands? Food for thought!
Leadership has betrayed us all long ago.
Dear White Americans, Why not consider moving to Australia? You are welcome if you want to take part in Australian life as a law abiding citizen. For those of you who have never visited Australia, it could be described as a combination of California and Texas. Lots of sunshine and most people live on the coast.
Patrick, I appreciate your kind offer, but I value the 1st and 2nd Amendments to our Constitution too much to give them up, not to mention some of the others. I would love to visit some time.
Most immigrants get more from welfare than they got for working in their own country. They think its 👍. We think they are poor but they think they are rich. Add to that the money they make under the table which they send back to their own country to live as kings. They take more than they give to this country. They are parasites.
We need a WALL!!!
First, what part of illegal do people not understand? Second, issue a guest worker visa and vet those coming in and those stsying, say, five years. Deport lawbreakers immediately. If we want them to work and they also are seeking work, that is a good paring. Stop giving them benefits and that will stop some of the illegal aliens. Also, when did they become immigrants instead of aliens. Do you think the parents of the “separated” children knew they were breaking our law before they arrived? If I commit a felony, I get arrested and tried for the offense.
We might want to declare martial law in “sanctuary” cities…….who made that legal anyway?