i_am2bz said:
moolie said:
colowyo0809 said:
true, but then that leads to other issues. if they have to pay a higher wage to entice those workers, then they will in turn have to raise their prices when they sell their crops. Higher prices for the crops means that it will be higher prices in the grocery store. It is a trickle effect with serious repercussions.
Some day people are going to have to pay the real cost of living. Might as well be sooner than later.
I agree, moolie. Cheap food should not be used as an excuse for allowing millions of people, who may have nefarious intentions, to flood the border.
It's not the alien
workers who have nefarious intentions, the majority of your illegals are just trying to make a living and take care of their families like everyone else. It's too bad that everyone gets painted with the same brush.
The average US citizen has actually created the US-Mexico cross-border worker problem by demanding cheap food and not being willing to work the jobs that immigrants are only too happy to do out of desperation to care for their families. If they couldn't get jobs in your country, they'd stop coming. However their labour is required to maintain the American status quo.
colowyo0809 said:
moolie said:
Some day people are going to have to pay the real cost of living. Might as well be sooner than later.
I agree actually. I was just pointing it out. In addition, if you raise the cost of food, your also raising other things. People who are barely affording to get by suddenly have to pay more for their food. Now it becomes an issue of "do I buy groceries or pay the heat? Do I feed my children or the gas bill? " and for people who are already making those decisions now it's "Do I go a second month in a row without food or go without making that house payment/rent/water/electricity/etc?". I wholeheartedly agree that we should be paying actual price for everything we buy, regardless of what it is. However, I also believe that prices on everything is overinflated and that we are paying way more than things are worth for
everything.
See, if you pay the workers a fair wage, the cost of living increases become moot. There is a tipping point to everything.
It's been mentioned in this thread that people are unwilling to work low-paying jobs. I'll submit that those people would still refuse to take labour-intensive jobs even if they paid as well as their cushy old office/tech jobs did.
People who are actually willing to work should get paid accordingly for that labour, after all--what's more important than feeding the nation?
Some prices of non-food items are definitely over-inflated--it doesn't cost that much to build a tv, it's just plastic and small electronic parts. However there is huge demand for this type of product, thus the cost. Plus the fact that all tech products are manufactured offshore (adding on shipping costs) by, again, cheap labour. But no one in America wants to build tvs for peanuts. Same thing with cars--they're not that expensive when you consider the parts and hours of labour it takes to make a car, however this industry is different in that the labour unions ensure that the workers get a decent wage, thus why automobiles are still manufactured in North America. It's not a perfect system, but I personally believe that if we paid people a fair wage for their work, the system would work better because the workers could afford the products.
There's no way to fix the whacked-out priorities of the people who'd rather spend on tvs and cars than on good food, or the people who are too lazy to put in a day's work, but the Darwin effect should eventually take care of that--adapt or die.
