Greece is the wordFollow

Opening it wider to ANY visa category that could be revenue generating, 227,527 Canadians in the U.S. labour force.

A very, very, far cry from half of Canadians.

F'ucking idiot.

Well!?

Locked,

Same here...

So I guess we're at an impasse.




Moebius,



Because people who work in the US always have a visa right?

You f*cking idiot. Just because some canadians don't have a visa doesn't mean they don't work in the US. That's like saying there are 1 million mexican working visas in the US so that must be all the mexicans working in the US.

You're associating with liberals way to much. Their penchant for not being able to understand simple concepts is starting to rub off on you.

So, using Locke's numbers, you think over 9,000,000 Canadians are illegally working in the US? Really? You're that fucking stupid?
Wouldn't 9,000,000 Candians working in the US be a bit more than some?

That's only because we're illegally working in the US, stealing your jobs and money...

Jophed,



I don't know about Australia, they have nice beaches and great surf, but I wouldn't set foot in Canada if my life depended on it.

This thread has made me happier.

While Varus' aim is off, the larger point is valid. As you point out, it's about labor costs and inefficiency. The idea of government being required to guaranteed you a job (or provide stuff for you if you don't get one) is a central point of labor movements, and those movements have gained massive hold in many European countries. I seem to recall riots and protests in France some years back, not over low pay, or unsafe working conditions, or lack of representation. Nope! They were rioting because the government was merely considering implementation of a requirement that you work for some period of time at a job before you can't ever be fired from it.


When I speak about the danger of a majority in a socialist country simply voting for their benefits without regard to longer term economic health, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about. The specifics can vary, but once you get a large enough percentage of a democratic population hooked on the idea that government's job is to provide them a livelihood you're pretty much stuck on a track that will make your economy less and less efficient and more and more bizarre. Most people in the US find it completely ridiculous that someone would expect that their job was immune to termination *ever*, so we scratch our heads over the idea that people would riot over only having that guaranteed after they've worked for a year (or whatever the time was). It's just so far out there into sillyland that most of us just can't understand how someone could think that makes sense.


Entitlement takes many forms, pretty much all of them bad.

He's praising China for keeping their infrastructure up-to-date. You know, making sure roads and mass transit don't crumble and fail; keeping commercial ports modern so the business traffic will flow.

But you don't think the government should be responsible for the country's upkeep.

Except that it's not the type of taxes that matter nearly so much as what is driving the need to tax in the first place. That's what determines the amount of taxes that have to be raised to fill whatever needs are present. Whether one uses pure VAT, or end point sales taxes, or import taxes, or capital gains taxes, or income taxes is only half the issue, and it's the lesser half in this particular context. Those tell us something about how the tax burden is spread, but don't tell us anything about how much that burden is in the first place.

The degree to which the government takes on the role of provider for the people is what determines the overall efficiency of the system. Taxes flow from that, not the other way around. Taxes end out being the big negative that hurts the economy, but they are an effect of yet another cause. You can't just talk about taxes alone without also addressing the social angles which cause people to push for and support those taxes in the first place.

I don't support slave labor. I do think it's a good idea to put the people to work getting our country back up to first-world standards.

It's kind of a semantic issue at that point IMO. What qualifies as "hurting" the economy? It's a cumulative thing. The higher the total taxes across the whole economy, the more sluggish said economy will be. It's similar to saying that alcohol doesn't hurt the liver. Sure. In small doses, it's not sufficient to cause sufficient impairment and damage to prevent the liver from doing its job. But every amount does cause some "harm". It's just a matter of when that harm is sufficient to cause noticeable reduction in function.


It's equally incorrect to say that since X amount of taxes hasn't made a country fail that 2x is just fine as well. This is why government should be limited to doing just the minimum absolutely necessary things. The danger comes in when the people are convinced that more and more things are "necessary". That's when taxes run out of control. And borrowing money to provide those things without raising taxes (which is the game Obama is trying to play right now), only forestalls the day when those taxes must inevitably rise.


When you compare government revenues and public debt as a percentage of GDP between the US and most European nations, it's like night and day. The European countries pay a high price for all those social services. It's not uncommon to see 50%+ GDP consumption, and 50%+ public debt figures. Remember that people in the US screamed and yelled during the Bush administration when we were running 18% revenues and 35% debt ("people" being liberals btw). I'll also point out that right now, both of those numbers are noticeably higher, yet those same people are conspicuously silent.


Doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons just makes what you're doing doubly wrong.