With the Trump administration planning to deport millions of hardworking immigrants, the nation faces the question: “Who will fill the jobs that immigrants used to do, jobs that American citizens don’t want?”
The Florida Republicans have the answer: Put school children to work for long hours and short pay.
Florida may loosen child labor regulations By Romy Ellenbogen and Ana Ceballos, Tampa Bay Times
TALLAHASSEE — Teenagers as young as 14 could soon be allowed to work overnight shifts as part of an effort in the Republican-led Legislature to roll back major aspects of the state’s child labor laws.
The proposal — passed 5-4 by the Florida Senate Commerce and Tourism Committee Tuesday — comes as Gov. Ron DeSantis says a younger workforce could be part of the solution to replacing “dirt cheap” labor from migrants in the country illegally.
The labor is “dirt cheap.” American adult citizens don’t want those “dirt cheap” crap jobs, but wait. The Republicans have found a replacement: Our children.
“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be able to do this stuff,” Governor Ron DeSantis said last week during a panel discussion with President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan.
Yes, Ron, those “millions of 14-year-old college students” would be the perfect solution for doing “this stuff.” We’re not sure what “this stuff” is, and we are sure DeSantis has no idea. Here’s a clue.
“This stuff” is the job that pays “dirt cheap” wages only undocumented aliens take because no one else will hire them — you know, the stoop labor in 100-degree heat, with no healthcare insurance, no school lunch, and few bathroom breaks.
Those would be great jobs for our 14-year-old children. Right?
The governor said the state has taken several steps to crack down on the hiring of workers living in the country illegally, including enacting a state law that requires large companies to screen workers through E-Verify, a federal database that confirms an employee’s citizenship status.
And why, Ron, do you want to “crack down” on those workers? You acknowledge that they aren’t taking jobs away from documented workers. That’s why there is a labor shortage. And statistics show that they are less likely to commit crimes than citizens.
So, other than pure bigotry, what’s your excuse for your mean-spirited cruelty? Got it. Pure bigotry it is.
“Yes, we had people that left because of those rules, but you’ve also been able to hire other people. And what’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? I mean, that’s how it used to be when I was growing up,” DeSantis said.
Yes, Ron, when you were growing up, kids did all sorts of lousy jobs rather than go to school. That is why today, even states that come in 42nd among 50, have child labor laws.
Will someone please explain to DeSantis why we have child labor laws in the first place?
Low wage, child labor: The perfect Republican solution to the labor shortage the Republicans created.
In Tallahassee state lawmakers may remove all limitations on how late and how much 16- and 17-year-olds can work and end those teenage workers’ guarantee of a meal break.
And isn’t it nice that those kids never will join a union, much less form one?
This year’s bill is sponsored by Sen. Jay Collins, R-Tampa.
He did not return multiple calls for comment about the bill and why he thought it was necessary.
Pols love all the media exposure they can get, so when they refuse to return calls, you can be sure they are hiding something — like making children into low-paid slaves.
As it stands now in Florida, teenagers aged 16 and 17 can’t work before 6:30 a.m. or after 11 p.m. on a school day and can’t work during school hours unless they are in a career education program.
They also are limited to up to 30 hours a week of work when school is in session, unless their parent or a school superintendent waives that restriction.
The risk is that young workers will have fewer protections and will have a harder time saying no to employers, said Nina Mast, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute.
“The teens who will be most harmed by this bill are low-income young people or those without documented status who are compelled by their situation to work,” Mast said.
Companies across the United States, regardless of existing labor laws, have employed migrant children in dangerous jobs, reports have shown.
Forget school. Teach them “skills.”
In January, meatpackers Perdue Farms and JBS agreed to pay a combined $8 million after the Department of Labor found the companies relied on the labor of migrant children in their slaughterhouses.
Mast said bills like the one Florida is considering are “essentially trying to legalize violations that employers are already committing.”
In typical Republican fashion, business is considered far more important than the lives of children.
The pseudo-exception is what the GOP considers “woke” and porn. With anti-“woke” laws, the children are protected from learning history, and with anti-porn laws, the children are protected from seeing what is widely available on the web.
The book-banning is right-wing showmanship, as are the deportations. Those, along with anti-abortion laws, comprise the right-wing “reward-the-rich, punish-the-rest” system of governing.
The number of child labor violations in Florida tripled from 95 in 2019 to 281 three years later, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics cited by the Florida Policy Institute.
In 2023, violations dropped to 209 but were still high compared to previous years.
Should we expect that under Trump, Musk, and DeSantis, those statistics will be hidden and never gathered again?
Florida’s child labor law provides additional protections beyond what the federal Fair Labor Standards Act imposed in 1938. But Collins’ bill would move Florida closer to the baseline federal standard.
Under this year’s proposal, 14- and 15-year-olds would be able to work longer hours if they have graduated high school or have a GED, if they have an exemption from the school superintendent or if they are home-schooled or virtually schooled.
Does this satisfy any moral human being: 14- and 15-year olds, who should be in school, instead will work longer hours for “dirt cheap” low pay? Is that what a 1st world nation strives for? Is that how we “make America great, again”?
Without proper schooling, he’s doomed to a low-wage future.
Alexis Tsoukalas, a labor expert with the left-leaning Florida Policy Institute, said the bill’s proposals are “being shortsighted versus thinking long term.”
Tsoukalas said research shows that when adolescents work more than 20 hours a week, they’re at a greater risk of dropping out of high school or having a poorer performance in school.
Does that come as a surprise to anyone? Is it acceptable?
“In the short term, yeah they might make some extra money, but in the long term it hurts them more in the labor market because they don’t have the education,” Tsoukalas said.
Tsoukalas said even if a teenager isn’t working in a hazardous job, working longer hours puts them more at risk of accident or injury.
Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-West Park, said that while he supports students working part-time jobs, he believes the bill being proposed this year “exploits students and potentially affects their well-being in school.”
Far be it from a conservative to exploit students, and Trump University demonstrated.
Beyond that, Jones worries that Republicans are looking to young workers to address potential shortfalls in the workforce as Trump promises to deport millions of immigrants who are in the country illegally.
America’s future labor force after the adult immigrants are gone.
“Let’s not look to our students to fix the problem that President Donald Trump and the Republicans have caused,” Jones said.
“Lowering the working age is not the key to filling the gap in our workforce — the key is fixing our broken immigration system, and that does not include Florida or the United States using inhumane tactics for political gain.”
Collins’ bill closely mirrors the proposal that failed to pass the Legislature last year after facing public backlash from critics who worried that letting teenagers work longer hours during the school year would impact their health and education.
Last year’s bill was sponsored by Rep. Linda Chaney, R-St. Pete Beach.
Last year, Chaney’s bill was filed after the conservative advocacy group Foundation for Government Accountability passed the draft to her office.
The group has pushed for rollbacks of child labor laws in other states, as well.
Records show that Chaney’s office asked the foundation for talking points on the bill. The group responded by saying the changes would help teenagers learn skills and the value of the dollar.
There you have it. Keep ’em poor to teach them the value of a dollar because poor people understand the value of a dollar. And teach them skills like picking lettuce, mopping floors, and asking, “Will you have fries with that?”
“Make America Great Again”?? More like, “Make America Dark Ages Again By Making the Rich Richer and the Poor Poorer.”
Here are three current articles that demonstrate the economic ignorance of the American public. We’ll begin with an article that reflects American’s beliefs about immigration:
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted from January 16 to 21, 2024, 78% of Americans believe that the large number of migrants seeking entry into the United States at the U.S.-Mexico border is either a crisis (45%) or a major problem (32%).
Republicans are more likely to describe it as a “crisis” (70%) than Democrats (22%), who mostly view it as a “major problem” (44%) or a “minor problem” (26%).
Concerns raised by respondents include economic burdens associated with the migrant influx and issues related to how migrants are cared for and the overall immigration system.
Additionally, in a nationwide poll conducted in late March, 83% of respondents expressed support for a complete cessation of immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Furthermore, a Rasmussen Reports survey found that even among Hispanics, 55.8% supported closing the border.
A majority of Americans believe immigrants are an economic burden on America. Compare that with these facts:
Immigrants boost job growth The labor shortage has employers pinning hopes on arrivals, By Paul Wiseman, Gisela Salomon, and Christopher Rugaber Associated Press.
The millions of jobs that new immigrant arrivals have been filling in the United States appear to solve a riddle that has confounded economists for at least a year: How has the economy managed to prosper, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs, month after month, at a time when the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates to fight inflation — usually a recipe for a recession?
The answer appears to be immigrants. The influx of foreign-born adults vastly raised the supply of available workers after a U.S. labor shortage had left many companies unable to fill jobs.
More workers filling more jobs and spending more money has helped drive economic growth and create still more job openings.
Immigrants have
Helped solve a severe labor shortage
Reducedinflation
Driveneconomic growth
Prevented a recession
Created morejob availabilities.
“There’s been something of a mystery — how are we continuing to get such extraordinary strong job growth with inflation still continuing to come down?” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “The immigration numbers being higher than what we had thought — that really does pretty much solve that puzzle.”
While helping fuel economic growth, immigrants also lie at the heart of an incendiary election-year debate over the control of the nation’s southern border.
In his bid to return to the White House, Donald Trump has vowed to finish building a border wall and to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
This is the image being planted in your mind.
Millions of Americans think that is a great idea.
Whether he or President Joe Biden wins the election could determine whether the influx of immigrants, and their crucial role in propelling the economy, will endure.
The immigration boom was a surprise.
In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that net immigration—arrivals minus departures—would equal about 1 million in 2023.
The actual number, the CBO said in a January update, was 3.3 million.
That’s 3.3 million workers and consumers helping to build our nation.
Thousands of employers desperately needed the new arrivals. The number of native-born Americans in their prime working years — ages 25 to 54 — was dropping because so many of them had aged out of that category and were nearing or entering retirement.
Their numbers had shrunk by 770,000 since February 2020, just before COVID-19 slammed the economy.
Filling the gap has been a wave of immigrants. Over the past four years, the number of prime-age workers who either have a job or are looking for one has surged by 2.8 million.
And nearly all those newcomers — 2.7 million, or 96% of them — were born outside the United States.
As older people leave the work force, young immigrants enter, the ideal situation for our economy, given our reduced birth rate.
Where else will we find new, young workers to fill the voids left by older retiring for dying workers, if not from immigrants? But Trump wants to force “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Immigrants are people like you, just trying to make a better life.
It makes no sense.
A study by Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson of the Brookings Institution found that new immigrants raised the economy’s supply of workers and allowed the United States to generate jobs without overheating and accelerating inflation.
Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden’s immigration policy over the surge in migrants at the southern border.
Only 27% of the 3.3 million foreigners who entered the United States last year did so as “lawful permanent residents” or on temporary visas, according to Edelberg and Watson’s analysis.
Many economists suggest that immigrants benefit the U.S. economy.They take low-paying but essential jobs that most U.S.-born Americans won’t, like caring for the sick and the elderly.
And they can make the country more innovative because they are more likely to start businesses and obtain patents.
Ernie Tedeschi, a visiting fellow at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center and a former Biden economic adviser, calculates that the burst of immigration has accounted for about a fifth of the economy’s growth over the past four years.
Think of the Hitleresque realities. To fulfill his “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” promise, Trump would need to:
Hire, pay, and occupy the time of tens of thousands of police and/or National Guard
Have them search house to house, millions of dwellings, from attic to basement
Kick down doors if necessary
Drag from their homes screaming men, women and children
Put them on trains (cattle cars?) and ship them to the border
Disregard the fact that many immigrants will have spent years in America building lives and contributing to our nation
Split families, some of which will have had children born here and by law, are citizens.
Turn millions of Americans into Gestapo-like spies, encouraged to rat out their neighbors, which will rip apart American society, changing our nation in ways we would regret, forever.
And why do this to America? Because one man, Donald Trump, has appealed to the ignorant, bigoted and haters in his base, convincing them that immigrants are not people, and that logic and compassion are not American virtues.
America needs to spend on better systems for vetting and assimilating immigrants, not on spending for higher walls and forced deportations.
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Immigration is not the only “problem” about which we have been lied by the politicians and some of the media. Consider inflation:
Elevated inflation will likely hinder rate cuts this year, Powell says WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Tuesday cautioned that persistently elevated inflation will likely delay any Fed interest rate cutsuntil later this year, opening the door to a period of higher-for-longer rates.
“Recent data have clearly not given us greater confidence” that inflation is coming fully under control and “instead indicate that it’s likely to take longer than expected to achieve that confidence,” Powell said during a panel discussion at the Wilson Center.
“If higher inflation does persist, we can maintain the current level of (interest rates) for as long as needed.”
The Fed chair’s comments suggested that without further evidence that inflation is falling, the central bank may carry out fewer than the three quarter-point reductions its officials had forecast during their most recent meeting in March.
For years, interest rates (blue) were near zero and inflation (red) remained low. Then, came the COVID-related shortages, and inflation zoomed.
We’ve discussed this previously, here and here and elsewhere, so I’ll just summarize for you:
Inflation is a general increase in prices.
Higher interest rates increase the prices of everything, because interest costs are added to nearly everything you buy.
Therefore, the Fed wants to fight inflation by raising the prices of everything!
In short, the Fed is applying leeches to fight anemia.
Prices go up when things are in short supply. Supply problems arise not because interest rates are too low but because of other economic factors.
America’s most recent inflation was caused by COVID-relatedshortages of oil, food, steel, paper, computer chips, lumber, shipping, labor and other goods and services.
The cure for inflation is not to raise prices further by raising interest rates, but instead increase government spending to acquire and distribute the scarce goods and services — exactly the opposite of the “cut-spending, raise-interest-rate” proclivity of the Fed.
In the past several weeks, government data has shown that inflation remains stubbornly above the Fed’s 2% target and that the economy is still growing robustly.
Year-over-year inflation rose to 3.5% in March, from 3.2% in February.
And a closely watched gauge of “core” prices, which exclude volatile food and energy, rose sharply for a third consecutive month.
The irony is that good economic news is bad news for the Fed, which raises interest prices in response to increased prices.
In summary, inflation is caused by shortages of critical goods and services, not by low interest rates or federal spending.
Despite the Fed’s “best” (actually worst) efforts, inflation has fallen because the federal government has subsidized industry to create more of the scarce products.
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Vanderbilt University. Some students will pay $100,000 tuition. Athletes won’t.
The third article demonstrating the ignorance-forcing, false statements by the politicians and the media has to do with student loans.
The original American colonies, recognizing the vital need for education, set up schooling, initially teaching the reading of the bible.
Boston Latin became the first American public high school in 1820, and in 1827, the state of Massachusetts opened all public schools free to all students.
And we have hardly progressed from there.
Today’s more literate world competition demands more than a high school education, with college and beyond being ever more needed for economic and scientific growth.
America should be doing everything in its power to provide free education to young minds. Yet we remain stuck in the 1800’s, with state and local taxpayers funding K-12, plus some lower-level community colleges.
Rich kids go to the best schools; poor kids go to work. The implicit assumption is that poor kids aren’t smart enough to warrant the best education. That thinking creates a terrible waste of brainpower.
The federal government should take the education burden off taxpayers by funding all levels of education, including university and beyond. Being Monetarily Sovereign, the government does not spend taxpayer dollars. Its spending costs taxpayers nothing.
Yet, rather than providing free education, Americaputs its best students into debt bylending, rather than giving, them education dollars. Senseless.
And when someone tries to help students come out of debt, they meet objections based on ignorance.
Student loan plan: President Joe Biden’s latest plan for student loan cancellation is moving forward as a proposed regulation, offering him a fresh chance to deliver on a campaign promise and energize young voters ahead of the November election.
The Education Department on Tuesday filed paperwork for a new regulation that would deliver the cancellation that Biden announced last week.
It still has to go through a 30-day public comment period and another review before it can be finalized.
It’s a more targeted proposal than the one the U.S. Supreme Court struck down last year. The new plan uses a different legal basis and seeks to cancel or reduce loans for more than 25 million Americans.
Conservative opponents, who see it as an unfair burden for taxpayers who didn’t attend college, have threatened to challenge it in court.
In this regard, we meet ignorance in its various disguises:
1. The false belief that taxpayers fund federal spending.While taxpayers do fund state and local government spending (those governments are monetarily non-sovereign) taxpayers do not fund Monetarily Sovereign federal spending.
The federal government creates new dollars, ad hoc, to pay for all its spending. Even if the federal government collected $0 taxes, it could continue spending forever.
Ben Bernanke: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”
The purposes of federal taxes are not to provide spending money to the government, but:
A. To control the economy by taxing what the government wishes to discourage and by giving tax breaks to what the government wishes to reward
B. To assure demand for the U.S. dollar, by requiring taxes be paid with dollars.
Taxpayers would not pay for federal funding of education just as taxpayers don’t fund tax breaks for mortgage interest, long-term capital gains, or any other tax benefits to the rich.
2. The false belief the federal government can’t afford more deficit spending. The federal government has the infinite ability to create its own sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar. It never can run short of dollars and can pay any bill of any size, without taxing or borrowing.
Those who complain about the size of the federal “debt” (that really isn’t federal or debt), demonstrate ignorance about federal financing.
3. The “If-I-didn’t-get-it,-he-shouldn’t-get-it” envy. This idea precludes any new government benefits, because benefits have to begin somewhere, and there always will be people who didn’t receive a benefit before it began.
4. The rich, who run America, don’t want the income/wealth/power Gap to narrow. Without the Gap, no one would be rich, and when the Gap, widens, the rich grow richer.
Giving free education to the average American would narrow the Gap and make the rich less rich. So, they spread the misinformation that while it’s OK for state/local government taxpayers to fund K-12, it’s not OK for the federal government to fund K-16+, with no help from taxpayers.
It makes no sense, but that is what you’re being taught.
Why do we treat grades K-12 differently from grades 13+?
Grades K-12 are free to students who don’t opt for private schools, paid for by taxpayers, and are mandatory to certain ages.
Grades 13+ are costly to students or funded by taxpayers and are optional. Entrance is based on merit (as judged by the school) and on affordability.
Why the cutoff at grade 13? Why don’t we treat all education levels the same? And if education is important for America’s international competitiveness, wellbeing and economic strength, why doesn’t the federal government fund it?
Why does America force our students into debt poverty, when America needs them?
IN SUMMARY
Ignorance is expensive.
Ignorance about immigrationcosts America valuable workers and their beneficial output, while converting the search for the American dream to a nightmare of immoral selfishness and cruelty.
Ignorance about inflation dooms us to ideas that perpetuate inflation while costing us the products whose scarcity causes the inflation.
Ignorance about federal Monetary Sovereignty and schooling costs America the brainpower benefits millions of middle-to-lower income young people could provide.
Only two things keep people in chains: The ignorance of the oppressed and the treachery of their leaders.
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 