Because I knew our media would give me a short, objective, non-judgmental response this morning.
That is accurate. No pinocchios. It is true, if the Republicans deport 12 million people, that will make more housing units available for purchase or rental. That actually is a kind of housing proposal.
Q: What should we do about housing.
A: Don’t.
Well apart from the idea of deporting millions of people being morally fucked up Nazi shit, removing a few million people from the workforce would come with a few drawbacks, like nobody to fix your nice new cheaper flat, no food in the stores and no one to collect your garbage.
But then Trump and Vance and their fans are a bunch of racists, and racists don’t like to think.
Deporting people doesn’t solve a housing problem, it just shifts it to a different part of the world. And since the economy is global, that still affects us, just in different ways.
And as pointed out, it creates a labor shortage. Without immigration, the US population will not grow, and that leaves a smaller workforce with a greater share of retirees. The housing problem would probably get worse with fewer builders around.
There’s a housing problem because slumlords are buying up properties to rent out as Air B&Bs, because unfettered capitalism.
Alabama not too long ago, passed an anti-immigration law. It was a disaster.
If I remember correctly, mostly what happened is that undocumented immigrants just moved out of Alabama.
It’s not enforced any more either.
Most of the bill was unconstitutional and not enforceable.
By the time the courts ruled, Alabama wasn’t all that interested in enforcing it anyway.
@ #4: It’s not just AirB&Bs, there’s a huge amount of activity from Private Equity landlords buying up single family homes to rent out long-term too – both existing homes and new build-to-rent properties.
Doesn’t matter. The media has dubbed Vance the winner while “Coach” looked nebbish and accommodating.
Trump will win. Doesn’t matter if Harris wins the popular vote, his army of loyal election officials and the SCOTUS will give him the presidency. Then the Dems, who worship the system and the process, will hand power to a murderous fascist because that’s what the rule say and we must always obey the rules. “We can only hope that the people vote him out next election,” they’ll say.
When Trumps wins, there aren’t going to be any more elections.
@7
I would encourage people to please for FSM’s sake vote anyway, even if you think the Dems are doomed, because (just for starters) I’m one of the people who stands to get killed if Trump gets in again.
As someone in the midst of trying to sell a house, I’ve been getting all these requests to buy it, sight unseen, from mysterious people who don’t seem to care about the state of the house. I know what they want to do: they want to buy it and rent it out to their personal profit.
I’m not selling it to these wanna-be slumlords.
I’m going to fly off to Seattle in a week and a half to make arrangements with a realtor to try and sell if to a real human being who wants to live in it.
I was looking to buy a house for the last couple years. I’ve jumped on several of them right away, within hours of then coming in the market. Only to have them sell before I could see them. On 2 or 3 occasions, literally as I was driving to see them.
I suspect they were all bought by financial firms that just wanted to add $100,000 or so to the price and just list them again. The way the market was going they’d just sell six months later. I saw some places I was initially interested in had a history like that. Some mysteriously doubled in value from one month to the next.
@9 Some of the mysterious people might be planning to cover the floors with gray fake wood, spray the brick black and resell at a profit.
Walz was WAAAAY to gentlemanly when he should have been hammering Vance about Trump’s incessant stupid grifting, up to and including his latest grift — hawking fake-ass Swiss watches as a money-laundering scheme. Politely discussing “the issues” with con-men and bullshitters only gives them a platform to pretend they’re Serious People.
It is that at the least.
A lot of the people we deport are young people brought to the USA when they were little kids.
They don’t speak their former language very well or sometimes not at all.
They are also very Americanized to the point that they don’t know their former “native” culture at all.
Then they get dumped back to a country where they might speak broken Spanish or whatever if at all, don’t understand the culture, and don’t know anyone.
It doesn’t work. At best they end up being a problem for whatever country they get deported to.
I’ve heard of Korean-American kids, who don’t speak Korean getting sent back to Korea.
You could multiply this by a million to get an idea of what could happen.
Colbert’s post Veep (vs) Veep Debate interview with Chris Hayes here – J.D. Vance’s Most Audacious Debate Lie: “Donald Trump Saved Obamacare” (7 mins 7 secs) plus here – J.D. Vance “Is Not Ready To Be President Of The United States” – Chris Hayes (5 mins) as well as here – We’re In Treacherous Times On The International Scene – Chris Hayes (under 5 mins long) was intresting and made some rather good points I think esp regarding Vance’s blatant gaslighting. Just watched on late nght TV here in Oz.