The Trump Presidency - how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hair

Our country has assistance programs for the poor, but they are not a large portion of our state and federal budgets. Your and my tax dollars mostly go to the military and medicare. It is also very difficult and expensive to legally immigrate if you're not a refugee. It's hard to look at your position as being anything other than xenophobic.

https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-spending-3305763

https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-immigrate-to-the-US-from-Mexico-legally
I, and a ton of people I know, legally immigrated to the US. Hell there are at least two other legal immigrants on the board here...

My position is dictated by basic logic, if you want your country to thrive you want to bring in people who will help you do just that. It’s same reason for stuff like H1B work visa, that allows companies to hire the best and the brightest from other countries and bring em here.
 
Show me the data. I've provided a reference to empirical evidence based on current research that states that refugees are worth the initial investment. The arguments against it so far are conjecture, assumption, or "you don't know that it's not ____"

Support your position.

That is exactly my point, you only know the averages but not the data that goes into it. For all you know it's only refugees from North Korea that are carrying the rest.

Also I'm not in any way anti immigration, for pretty obvious reasons, I'm just trying to make a couple of points:
1 - just because refugees overall do well doesn't mean that all or even majority are doing well.
2 - trying to prevent possible drain on public resources by not letting in non-refugee low income immigrants makes logical sense.

Even if there were some that were a "drain" on public resources, as a population refugees are a net gain - putting it in business terms, the current scheme makes money. The plan to change it is shortsighted, it only looks at the resources a person comes with today and does not account for their contributions tomorrow - which more than offset the initial cost of getting them started.
 
Worthy of mention here is the fact that without immigration the US has a negative population replacement rate.
 
Show me the data. I've provided a reference to empirical evidence based on current research that states that refugees are worth the initial investment.
Your data isn’t very good. It doesn’t provide nearly enough resolution to show that all or even majority of refugees are a net positive. In fact it shows nothing but absolute values (not even an average), which can easily be skewed by a minority. Like say Google co-founder Sergei Brin came over with his parents as a refugee (he mentioned that in an interview at some point), he is worth $50bn, that would massively skew your data.

However for like the 5th time, we aren’t talking about refugees, the rule GR mentioned doesn’t apply to refugees, I made no arguments against taking in refugees. So I really don’t understand why you are belaboring the point.

Worthy of mention here is the fact that without immigration the US has a negative population replacement rate.
Considering that we are probably a generation or two away from automation driven unemployment I don’t see that as a negative. And also again I said nothing against immigration in general
 
The study is not about identifying which immigrants or refugees make the most, it's about the population as a whole.

If the reference doesn't meet your expectations, feel free to present contrary evidence that is stronger. So far you haven't presented anything.
 
The study is not about identifying which immigrants or refugees make the most, it's about the population as a whole.

If the reference doesn't meet your expectations, feel free to present contrary evidence that is stronger. So far you haven't presented anything.
Again your assertion and the study you are using to back it up simply don’t match up. To state that “it’s worth the investment into refugees” would require that at minimum the majority of refugees are a net positive, which this study simply doesn’t demonstrate.
To try and clarify this for you even more, I am not questioning the validity of the study, I am questioning the validity of your conclusion from that study.

Also again, what is the relevance of refugees to this conversation in the first place?
From the link
npr said:
It doesn't apply to non-citizen children of U.S. citizens. Refugees and asylum-seekers are also exempt.
 
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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2nd-whistleblower-forward-speaking-ig-attorney/story?id=66092396

2nd whistleblower comes forward after speaking with IG: Attorney

Zaid tells ABC News' Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos that the second person -- also described as an intelligence official -- has first-hand knowledge of some of the allegations outlined in the original complaint and has been interviewed by the head of the intelligence community's internal watchdog office, Michael Atkinson.

The existence of a second whistleblower -- particularly one who can speak directly about events involving the president related to conversations involving Ukraine -- could undercut Trump's repeated insistence that the original complaint, released on Sept. 26, was "totally inaccurate."

That original seven-page complaint alleged that Trump pushed a foreign power to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden, and Biden's son, Hunter, and that unnamed senior White House officials then tried to "lock down" all records of the phone call.




"This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call," the first whistleblower stated, in a complaint filed Aug. 12.


Zaid says both officials have full protection of the law intended to protect whistleblowers from being fired in retaliation. While this second official has spoken with the IG -- the internal watchdog office created to handle complaints -- this person has not communicated yet with the congressional committees conducting the investigation.


The New York Times on Friday cited anonymous sources in reporting that a second intelligence official was weighing whether to file his own formal complaint and testify to Congress. Zaid says he does not know if the second whistleblower he represents is the person identified in the Times report.


Zaid’s co-counsel, Andrew Bakaj, confirmed in a tweet Sunday that the firm is representing "multiple whistleblowers." Zaid later confirmed in a tweet that two are being represented by their legal team.


According to the first whistleblower, more than a half a dozen U.S. officials have information relevant to the investigation -- suggesting the probe could widen even further.

A transcript released by the White House of Trump's July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy showed Trump asking a "favor" of the foreign leader and pushing him to launch an investigation into the Biden family. Hunter Biden was on the board of a Ukraine energy company while his father Vice President Biden led policy on Ukraine during the Obama administration, leading some to question whether there was a conflict of interest or impropriety.

"There's a lot of talk about Biden's son," Trump told Zelenskiy at one point, offering the assistance of his attorney general. He later adds "a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great."

The White House cautioned that the transcript was not verbatim.

Text messages later obtained by Congress showed top U.S. diplomats dangling the possibility of a summit of the two leaders in Washington on the condition that Ukraine agrees to announce an investigation. The Ukraine government never did. The text messages were provided in congressional testimony last week by one of the diplomats, Kurt Volker, who has since resigned.

It is illegal for anyone to receive something of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election, according to the Federal Election Commission. While it is not immediately clear whether Trump or other U.S. officials broke the law in its handling of Ukraine, that might not matter. The Constitution allows for Congress to decide what constitutes an impeachable offense.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing, calling the phone call "perfect."

"Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this accuser, the so-called "Whistleblower," represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way," Trump tweeted Sept. 29.

The White House had no comment.
 
Good to see your TDS is still running strong.

This nothingburger, as you call it, has already got Trump and Pence subpoenas. That means there is the potential for both of them to get impeached, and vault Pelosi into the White House. I highly doubt that would happen, but it should make the republicans quake in their boots. Hell, that should make Hillary look good to you.

As far as whoo seems to be losing their mind, I think Trump is about to pop.

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/05/7672...ent-talk-intensifies-so-does-trump-s-rhetoric

'Treason,' 'Spy,' 'Coup': As Impeachment Talk Intensifies, So Does Trump's Rhetoric
 
How to alienate allies, feed anti-USA sentiments, allow extremists to get their head out of the mud, make a favour to the authoritatian leader of a powerful country, lose whatever influence the US had in Syria (what was the point of that long support to the anti-Assad forces again?), make a disgusting moral move (yeah, we get that the "no one is left behind" thing only applies to american citizens and american soldiers in particular, but this is betrayal in its clearest form) and leave anyone with a grain of salt in his head with the curiosity of understanding why this move has been chosen.

And this is, I think, the most important question: why?

The US are withdrawing troops from the Turkish-Kurdish border in Syria
 
It's amusing watching Democrats lose their minds because this story, the 100th nothingburger, is so much more serious than the previous 99 times they called for impeachment, that it will finally be the scandal to get Trump out of office.
I would love to live inside your head for a week, just to try to understand what the world looks like. It would be a very interesting paper. I'm thinking, "The Comforting Lies We Tell Ourselves: An Examination of a Trumpette's Cognitive Distortion."
 
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I think you'd like it. The economy is booming, unemployment is very low, taxes got cut, we're not starting wars all over the world - it's a good world to live in, you should try it.
If I tell you to check your privilege you will call me an SJW, but still - these are the words of a very privileged person that one could also translate as "as long as I am winning, fuck women's rights, fuck minorities, fuck refugees, fuck our allies, fuck the rest of the world".
 
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