You see this in sports today. They say sports is a microcosm of society. In this century, doping scandals hit many sports, which included big penalties for a Lance Armstrong or Alex Rodriguez. Yet, it’s almost like you know guys are still doing it or doing something. Even Rodriguez is a national baseball analyst on FOX. One event in sports that I think caused some pause on strong punishments against wrongdoing was the Southern Methodist University Death Penalty for football. In ways, its impact lives on to this day for the school and even NCAA folks acknowledged the punishment went too far.
Another event whose legacy needs studied is the Clinton impeachment. There’s a lot of irony in the years since that event. One thing the Clintons did was successfully label opponents as hypocrites. An irony of this is the Clinton playbook was successfully used against them by Donald Trump. It is like clockwork whenever someone does something wrong today, the whataboutism comes trying to find a hypocritical connection toward critical authorities. It’s almost to the point that people are afraid of being harsh against wrongdoing because they might be labeled a hypocrite for something they did before.
It seems much easier to pass policy that promotes consumer interest than policy that promotes laborer interest. One hundred percent of the population are consumers (including the laborers), and only a small fraction of the population are laborers from any particular industry. If we crack down on illegal nannies, it imposes a cost on all of the parents who will use a nanny at some point in their childrens’ lives, and the only obvious beneficiaries are the legal nannies (who comprise a vanishingly small portion of the population).
Crackdown on illegal immigration in general and you reduce the demand for housing, Healthcare,education and help consumers instead of subsidizing strikers who desperately need to go to restaurants every night and Europe every year.
Topical for me, as after recent travels in Latin America, was thinking about development failures and middle-income traps.
A lot of countries stuck in middle-income traps seem to have something to do with what Aaron is describing here: you have large sections of the labor force in the “informal economy” in which the costs of proper compliance with the law exceed the benefits, even though the strategies required to remain illegible to the government end up being costly and inefficient in their own right. Yet professionalized formal businesses are hampered with too much bureaucratic corruption and red tape to outcompete the inefficient informal ones.
In middle-income economies the informal sector can easily account for over 50% of the labor force. At which point, to paraphrase Anton Chigurrh: if the law led you to this, of what use was the law?
Even the US is this way for hiring low-skilled labor to do household-level work. If we cared about functioning more like a first-world country in the market for household labor, we would probably reduce barriers and promote incentives to doing this sort of thing on the books. Households would need to be treated less like businesses in the eyes of the law.
This is good. We must not forget the moral corruption exists not only in the government, but inside institutions.
Boeing recently payed a $1+ Billlon fine for lying 🤥 to the Federal Aviation Administration over the 737 airframes, produced at Spirit Aeronautics in Kansas .
The culture has become one where it’s okay to fire or transfer someone cause they won’t lie on paper to a government agency.
There were other employees stand by while this is happening, other managers. They lack moral courage, or the ability to distinguish the quality of their product.
The employees and supervision had families, they chose to protect their income. By remaining silent.🤫
The old morale tale still applies:
See no evil🙈
Hear no evil🙉
Speak no evil🙊
This is the world where assertive men with chests (virtue) get fired, where the three 🐒 🙈 🐵 get promoted.
There are real moral corrupting consequences, for people on the ground. Danger to the soul.
I have not related the details of my own experience(s) but I can tell you most Christian’s are content to just obey orders. Which can mean lying on federal paperwork 📋. And of course ignore 🙈 the evil 😈 in front of them.
For myself those experiences often occurred amongst fellow veterans. Our code of conduct forbids this immoral behavior. Due to a Uniform Code of military Justice code that ultimately derived from Christian, Roman, and Greek values.
The pain for whistleblowers is severe. It reminds of me of Holocaust survivors who did not see the camp guards as the true evil. They saw the every day clerks who supported the system as the ultimate problem.
I encountered the Nanny Problem. If you hire a nanny, you are supposed to not only withhold state and federal income tax, but state and federal workmen's compensation, and social security, and medicare, and maybe some other things. I think some of those amounted to $2/month-- but a very large amount of effort. I forget what I did. I think I told her to pay her income tax as an independent contractor, and skipped the rest.
The issue of "wanting to get paid off the books" is not merely an issue of illegal immigration and tax avoidance. It is also about government benefits. The system is designed to trap a person. Work too much and you lose your benefits. That sounds fair, until you realize that work is usually not that reliable a source of income on the lower and even mid levels. The government check is reliable. So you have to choose between reliable money or unreliable money. You don't want to jeopardize the reliable money, so you work your irregular and unreliable job under the table. Being a nanny can certainly be this way. Some weeks are busy, some are not. The nanny can't hold another job, or maybe they can. (and take a look at the household employee part of the tax code, to see how complicated this can be) So why jeopardize reliable government benefits? As to the other points in this post, many of these "systems" seem unfixable. Retreat does seem like a viable option. Getting paid under the table is a kind of retreat from the system.
So, I was trying to figure out a bit of a napkin calculation. If you make 40,000 a year, that's $20 an hour, for under the table work. You'd pay in the neighborhood of $3500 in taxes, after all the deductions. So this is lost tax revenue. How many people would that be? A million? 10 million? If it is 1,000,000 then that's 3.5 billion in lost tax revenue. Sounds like a lot, however, the US government spent $7,000,000,000,000. 7 Trillion in 2025. While only taking in 5 Trillion. 3.5 Billion is a rounding error. Even 35 Billion, is still a drop in the 7 Trillion bucket. So no, not actually a big deal.
Ah the usual it is not so much argument. Fine, gut ss and Medicare as the young to old wealth transfer it is and gut the military. As for the illegals, the costs are amplified by remittances and cost to the school and health services that lefty justices said they are entitled to at the expense of americans and their state taxes. Go after any and all big and small who hire illegal labor.
So, let’s do that. Let’s go after the companies. Corporate tax rate is 21% of profit. So one company that makes a 10,000,000 profit off of illegal labour pays $2.1 Million in taxes. How many of those do you want to “go after”? What if as Aaron points out, nearly all of them do in certain sectors. Look, I agree, we should enforce the law. But, this I think, is why the law isn’t enforced.
Another element that factors in - when there's low institutional trust, and low buy-in to physical places, people don't seem to show up to compel improvement or good management. I was thinking about this last night, at our kids' school board meeting. We had a major issue come up this month that is very important to the future success of our school. I was the only parent who showed up to speak about it. At the PTO meeting last week, not even 20 parents came. It's very hard to hold professional staff accountable when community members (or in this case parents), don't do so. In my parents' day, they would have been there, and I feel strongly many in their generation would have, too. But there just seems so little willingness to hold institutions accountable, because it's very easy to exit or ignore them or people have just lost the habit. The sad result is, those institutions will just get worse - we all need accountability in some fashion.
They get worse by demographic replacement both by foreigners who dont care unless its already a highly rated school district or by the fact the community and by extension the country is top heavy with an older demographic that is more concerned with removing property taxes and building 55 and up communities.
Lol yeah I signed the petition to get removing property taxes on the ballot cause I'm homeschooling. Was talking to the guy collecting signatures he said yeah his kids are already out of school so why should he have to pay. When I asked if he was fighting to keep his parents from paying property tax when his kids were in school he gave me the most bewildered expression and I commented how amazing it is things are suddenly a problem when they affect boomers.
There is no generational solidarity in any capacity. Not in daily life or policy. Strip mine the nation and increase the competition of the next generation to make stock market and real estate go up. Make sure the federal budget maintains the young to old wealth transfer and dont rebuild or invest in the future. Gotta love the millenials and gen x who bought into it and now whine about childcare so they can get money for things and trips.
Completely agree, and this is where that all so critical faith should come in. Churches sing hymns about how they are content with a cabin down below cause we have a mansion up above and they are just a passerby in this world, cause their focus is on the next. Cool, sounds like you should be super willing to jump into a spiraling system and try to stop the tail spin. It won't be best for your material life, but that shouldn't bother you if you truly have placed your trust in eternity.
Re: Everybody knows we are better off with competitive elections, but people are moving to jurisdictions where others share their politics.
I am skeptical that political affiliation is any sort of conscious motive for where people move. It has never been so with me- and since becoming an adult I have changed address twelve times, including five interstate moves. I rather suspect that political concentration is a consequence of other reasons that influence people's choices: Housing cost, commute distance, school quality, child-friendliness, closeness to urban amenities (for some people); privacy and distance from neighbors (for other people)
Maybe your lifestyle is bs if it is dependent on borderline slave labor. I have no sympathy from striker professional freaks who depend on an underclass of helot workers to maintain their idiotic trips to Italy and pretend their nothing more than overcredentialed, mid iq tools.
If you have 5 kids, it's helpful to hire a nanny, even part-time. The nannies are glad for the job. If you have to fill out 20 forms, you may decide not to do it.
And raise your own children in an area surrounded by family and community instead of going to x major city because lifestyle or restaurants or sports all or opera or some other dumb reason.
All of the above. And we dont depend on illegal underpaid labor either or think spending ourselves into oblivion to be a regular striver freak who needs to live in one or three cities.
There are very few jobs that require one to actually live inside a city limits. Families generally live out in the metro area where housing is (somewhat) cheaper, schools are better and the environment more child -freindly.
Three city metros. I know the type who live Greenwich and Bergen and they do the same damn thing. Depend on their illegal and foreign labor at home and abroad to maintain their zip code
So called conservatives whether of the rural or urban variety conserve nothing. They import a helot labor class and ship off our manufacturing to foreign labor in other markets. The pitching and moaning about China or any other nation is farcical and pathetic given the rush to send our factories there and destroy communities in the process to enrich this morally deranged class that occupies nyc, la, chicago and dc. If there indian and mexican nannies are kicked out, all the better. They may have to care more about real communities than the fake financed ones they created by selling out their countrymen by using foreign labor at home and abroad.
You see this in sports today. They say sports is a microcosm of society. In this century, doping scandals hit many sports, which included big penalties for a Lance Armstrong or Alex Rodriguez. Yet, it’s almost like you know guys are still doing it or doing something. Even Rodriguez is a national baseball analyst on FOX. One event in sports that I think caused some pause on strong punishments against wrongdoing was the Southern Methodist University Death Penalty for football. In ways, its impact lives on to this day for the school and even NCAA folks acknowledged the punishment went too far.
Another event whose legacy needs studied is the Clinton impeachment. There’s a lot of irony in the years since that event. One thing the Clintons did was successfully label opponents as hypocrites. An irony of this is the Clinton playbook was successfully used against them by Donald Trump. It is like clockwork whenever someone does something wrong today, the whataboutism comes trying to find a hypocritical connection toward critical authorities. It’s almost to the point that people are afraid of being harsh against wrongdoing because they might be labeled a hypocrite for something they did before.
It seems much easier to pass policy that promotes consumer interest than policy that promotes laborer interest. One hundred percent of the population are consumers (including the laborers), and only a small fraction of the population are laborers from any particular industry. If we crack down on illegal nannies, it imposes a cost on all of the parents who will use a nanny at some point in their childrens’ lives, and the only obvious beneficiaries are the legal nannies (who comprise a vanishingly small portion of the population).
Crackdown on illegal immigration in general and you reduce the demand for housing, Healthcare,education and help consumers instead of subsidizing strikers who desperately need to go to restaurants every night and Europe every year.
Topical for me, as after recent travels in Latin America, was thinking about development failures and middle-income traps.
A lot of countries stuck in middle-income traps seem to have something to do with what Aaron is describing here: you have large sections of the labor force in the “informal economy” in which the costs of proper compliance with the law exceed the benefits, even though the strategies required to remain illegible to the government end up being costly and inefficient in their own right. Yet professionalized formal businesses are hampered with too much bureaucratic corruption and red tape to outcompete the inefficient informal ones.
In middle-income economies the informal sector can easily account for over 50% of the labor force. At which point, to paraphrase Anton Chigurrh: if the law led you to this, of what use was the law?
Even the US is this way for hiring low-skilled labor to do household-level work. If we cared about functioning more like a first-world country in the market for household labor, we would probably reduce barriers and promote incentives to doing this sort of thing on the books. Households would need to be treated less like businesses in the eyes of the law.
I think there can be a happy medium here. We probably are over-regulated, which is part of what drives people to informal solutions.
And grade inflation. If students expect As in classes, you get low reviews if you don't do that. Then you risk your job.
Great example!
This is good. We must not forget the moral corruption exists not only in the government, but inside institutions.
Boeing recently payed a $1+ Billlon fine for lying 🤥 to the Federal Aviation Administration over the 737 airframes, produced at Spirit Aeronautics in Kansas .
The culture has become one where it’s okay to fire or transfer someone cause they won’t lie on paper to a government agency.
There were other employees stand by while this is happening, other managers. They lack moral courage, or the ability to distinguish the quality of their product.
The employees and supervision had families, they chose to protect their income. By remaining silent.🤫
The old morale tale still applies:
See no evil🙈
Hear no evil🙉
Speak no evil🙊
This is the world where assertive men with chests (virtue) get fired, where the three 🐒 🙈 🐵 get promoted.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
All they have to do is pay a fine - not even a big one in many cases, relative to the size of these companies.
There are real moral corrupting consequences, for people on the ground. Danger to the soul.
I have not related the details of my own experience(s) but I can tell you most Christian’s are content to just obey orders. Which can mean lying on federal paperwork 📋. And of course ignore 🙈 the evil 😈 in front of them.
For myself those experiences often occurred amongst fellow veterans. Our code of conduct forbids this immoral behavior. Due to a Uniform Code of military Justice code that ultimately derived from Christian, Roman, and Greek values.
The pain for whistleblowers is severe. It reminds of me of Holocaust survivors who did not see the camp guards as the true evil. They saw the every day clerks who supported the system as the ultimate problem.
Men with chests
(virtue) get fired.
See no evil 🙈 , speak no evil 🙊, hear no evil 🐒.
I encountered the Nanny Problem. If you hire a nanny, you are supposed to not only withhold state and federal income tax, but state and federal workmen's compensation, and social security, and medicare, and maybe some other things. I think some of those amounted to $2/month-- but a very large amount of effort. I forget what I did. I think I told her to pay her income tax as an independent contractor, and skipped the rest.
It is clearly job-killing for the unskilled.
Not near as much as I would have thought honestly. May have to give it a go
The issue of "wanting to get paid off the books" is not merely an issue of illegal immigration and tax avoidance. It is also about government benefits. The system is designed to trap a person. Work too much and you lose your benefits. That sounds fair, until you realize that work is usually not that reliable a source of income on the lower and even mid levels. The government check is reliable. So you have to choose between reliable money or unreliable money. You don't want to jeopardize the reliable money, so you work your irregular and unreliable job under the table. Being a nanny can certainly be this way. Some weeks are busy, some are not. The nanny can't hold another job, or maybe they can. (and take a look at the household employee part of the tax code, to see how complicated this can be) So why jeopardize reliable government benefits? As to the other points in this post, many of these "systems" seem unfixable. Retreat does seem like a viable option. Getting paid under the table is a kind of retreat from the system.
Yeah, while ripping off the regular american worker and blowing the deficit.
I don't think a few dollars in undeclared income is really breaking the bank here. We could gut the entitlement system. Then what?
Compounded across the entire nation and illegal population plus the natives who do it, than yeah, it's a huge deal.
So, I was trying to figure out a bit of a napkin calculation. If you make 40,000 a year, that's $20 an hour, for under the table work. You'd pay in the neighborhood of $3500 in taxes, after all the deductions. So this is lost tax revenue. How many people would that be? A million? 10 million? If it is 1,000,000 then that's 3.5 billion in lost tax revenue. Sounds like a lot, however, the US government spent $7,000,000,000,000. 7 Trillion in 2025. While only taking in 5 Trillion. 3.5 Billion is a rounding error. Even 35 Billion, is still a drop in the 7 Trillion bucket. So no, not actually a big deal.
Ah the usual it is not so much argument. Fine, gut ss and Medicare as the young to old wealth transfer it is and gut the military. As for the illegals, the costs are amplified by remittances and cost to the school and health services that lefty justices said they are entitled to at the expense of americans and their state taxes. Go after any and all big and small who hire illegal labor.
So, let’s do that. Let’s go after the companies. Corporate tax rate is 21% of profit. So one company that makes a 10,000,000 profit off of illegal labour pays $2.1 Million in taxes. How many of those do you want to “go after”? What if as Aaron points out, nearly all of them do in certain sectors. Look, I agree, we should enforce the law. But, this I think, is why the law isn’t enforced.
Another element that factors in - when there's low institutional trust, and low buy-in to physical places, people don't seem to show up to compel improvement or good management. I was thinking about this last night, at our kids' school board meeting. We had a major issue come up this month that is very important to the future success of our school. I was the only parent who showed up to speak about it. At the PTO meeting last week, not even 20 parents came. It's very hard to hold professional staff accountable when community members (or in this case parents), don't do so. In my parents' day, they would have been there, and I feel strongly many in their generation would have, too. But there just seems so little willingness to hold institutions accountable, because it's very easy to exit or ignore them or people have just lost the habit. The sad result is, those institutions will just get worse - we all need accountability in some fashion.
They get worse by demographic replacement both by foreigners who dont care unless its already a highly rated school district or by the fact the community and by extension the country is top heavy with an older demographic that is more concerned with removing property taxes and building 55 and up communities.
Lol yeah I signed the petition to get removing property taxes on the ballot cause I'm homeschooling. Was talking to the guy collecting signatures he said yeah his kids are already out of school so why should he have to pay. When I asked if he was fighting to keep his parents from paying property tax when his kids were in school he gave me the most bewildered expression and I commented how amazing it is things are suddenly a problem when they affect boomers.
There is no generational solidarity in any capacity. Not in daily life or policy. Strip mine the nation and increase the competition of the next generation to make stock market and real estate go up. Make sure the federal budget maintains the young to old wealth transfer and dont rebuild or invest in the future. Gotta love the millenials and gen x who bought into it and now whine about childcare so they can get money for things and trips.
Completely agree, and this is where that all so critical faith should come in. Churches sing hymns about how they are content with a cabin down below cause we have a mansion up above and they are just a passerby in this world, cause their focus is on the next. Cool, sounds like you should be super willing to jump into a spiraling system and try to stop the tail spin. It won't be best for your material life, but that shouldn't bother you if you truly have placed your trust in eternity.
Re: Everybody knows we are better off with competitive elections, but people are moving to jurisdictions where others share their politics.
I am skeptical that political affiliation is any sort of conscious motive for where people move. It has never been so with me- and since becoming an adult I have changed address twelve times, including five interstate moves. I rather suspect that political concentration is a consequence of other reasons that influence people's choices: Housing cost, commute distance, school quality, child-friendliness, closeness to urban amenities (for some people); privacy and distance from neighbors (for other people)
I feel competitive primaries could yield better politicians too, doesn't have to be competitive in November
The fact that neocon scumbag graham has to pretend to care about south carolina this time around is small proof of that fact.
Maybe your lifestyle is bs if it is dependent on borderline slave labor. I have no sympathy from striker professional freaks who depend on an underclass of helot workers to maintain their idiotic trips to Italy and pretend their nothing more than overcredentialed, mid iq tools.
Aren't all of us dependent of that kind of labor working out in the fields? What would food cost without those neo-serfs?
Or automation with American ingenuity and know how with less imported cheap serfs who charge the american taxpayer for good measure.
If you have 5 kids, it's helpful to hire a nanny, even part-time. The nannies are glad for the job. If you have to fill out 20 forms, you may decide not to do it.
And raise your own children in an area surrounded by family and community instead of going to x major city because lifestyle or restaurants or sports all or opera or some other dumb reason.
Agreed that is the ideal, and people can move toward but they can't do it at the drop of a hat. Are you married, no name?
All of the above. And we dont depend on illegal underpaid labor either or think spending ourselves into oblivion to be a regular striver freak who needs to live in one or three cities.
There are very few jobs that require one to actually live inside a city limits. Families generally live out in the metro area where housing is (somewhat) cheaper, schools are better and the environment more child -freindly.
Three city metros. I know the type who live Greenwich and Bergen and they do the same damn thing. Depend on their illegal and foreign labor at home and abroad to maintain their zip code
Somewhat agree, which conservatives would tell companies to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as laborers.
So called conservatives whether of the rural or urban variety conserve nothing. They import a helot labor class and ship off our manufacturing to foreign labor in other markets. The pitching and moaning about China or any other nation is farcical and pathetic given the rush to send our factories there and destroy communities in the process to enrich this morally deranged class that occupies nyc, la, chicago and dc. If there indian and mexican nannies are kicked out, all the better. They may have to care more about real communities than the fake financed ones they created by selling out their countrymen by using foreign labor at home and abroad.