When I was still working 50+ hours a week, and my wife’s employer(a title company) was making a ton of money because the real estate market was healthy, we were definitely “middle class”.
We owned our own home, had 2 cars(a truck and minivan), and were able to take a vacation usually once a year.
Fast forward to now, and I’m not even sure if we are still in the middle class. My income has been cut by almost 60%, and the real estate market has been in the toilet since the lockdown in 2020. Some weeks, my wife is lucky to get in 40 hours a week. From 2021 to 2022, my wife took a $6000.00 paycut because there was no overtime and no bonus’s. We were barely making it that year and had to ask our kids for help.
Luckily, they’re both in a position to help us, and were definitely willing to do so.
The gap between the have’s and the have not’s is getting bigger here in the US.
The gap is getting bigger in every country except where there are positive remedial taxes. Globally however those little islands of sanity make no difference to the ever growing swollen intestines of the uber class and their grubby pursuit of money and power.
The explanations for passing the harsh laws just get worse and worse. Desantis proudly waved the bill around for the cameras after he signed it, now they’re scrambling to keep the undocumented from leaving the state. They’re trying to get the word out that the law saying employers must verify employee’s legal status only applies to new hires. They’re just saying that they’ve got all the low paid workers they can use right now and don’t want any more. The no hospital visits without deportation and all other parts still stand though, and they seemed to have failed to account for the seasonal workers hired each year or high turnover. I doubt they plan to much enforce the must verify legal status law, since they don’t enforce the laws they already have, but they can’t say that in public and the word hasn’t trickled down to workers yet. Gee, all they were trying to do was assure the xenophobe vote, and now their industries, particular farming, is going to suffer. Crossing the border is dangerous and desperate people trying to cross cook alive every year in semi trailers or die in other ways. Those are just the ones we hear about. Then a state openly fanning the flames against them is surprised if they exercise one of their few options by going elsewhere. Desantis, Florida’s governor who’s trying to get the GOP nomination to run for president, is presiding over all this. He is currently being investigated for possible kidnapping charges because this clown likes to ship people trying to obtain legal entry to the U.S to other states under false pretenses because the people who voted for him like these shows. Such fun pranks in no way affect the number of immigrants going to Florida but is cheered on by the supremely ignorant.
This is upsetting?
enalties will be applied to employers who knowingly have immigrants without documentation working for them, with the severity dependent on how many undocumented immigrants were employed.
Employers may also be placed on probation for one year.
The bill is intended to curb illegal immigration, but critics argue that this will take a toll on Florida’s economy – especially the construction, agriculture, and hospitality sectors.
Additionally, Florida hospitals that accept Medicaid will be required to document whether a patient is a United States citizen, and whether of not the patient is an undocumented immigrant.
However, neither citizenship nor legal status will affect their medical care, and undocumented patients will not be reported to immigration authorities.
What is SB 1718?
SB 1718 is an immigration law that goes into effect on July 1 in Florida.
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Requires companies with more than 25 employees to use the E-verify program to determine their immigration status when hiring workers and establishes fines for violators. They are all supposed to have green cards anyway. Why is this an issue?*
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Requires hospitals that accept public Medicaid and emergency departments to collect data on patients’ immigration status. This is the truth of every country I have lived in and the one I live in as well. I must present my Alien Card. The hospital will treat me anyway, but I will be reported to immigration… This is what countries do. Medical treatment is not free? Someone has to pay for it.
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Makes transporting people to the state of Florida without immigration status a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Completely agree. Trouble is, these people rarely cross the borders. They take the immigrants right up to the border and then run away with their money. They make them wild promises of jobs, of help to find family members, and follow through on nothing. It’s as bad as a slave trade. Go to America and get riich.
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Prohibits funding of city and county programs to provide ID cards to migrants without legal immigration status. Absolutely no issue with this A job offer is required and the U.S. employer must file an Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker , Form I-140, on behalf of the applicant. Applicants may apply for … The only thing that needs to happen is that it needs to be easier for employers to hire labor directly from Mexico. This is a very reasonable goal.
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Eliminates tuition fee waivers for undocumented immigrant students. "Absolute agreement. This country is not responsible for educating children who were brought into the country illegally by their parents. This is child smuggling and the child and the parent should be deported. That is the way countries operate.
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Repeals the law that allows lawyers who are still regulating their immigration status to practice law.
(Absolute agreement. I don’t see how this is any kind of issue at all.) -
Requires law enforcement agencies to collect DNA samples from people who do not have a legal immigration status and are detained under a federal detainer request. (HuH? We do not do this to our own citizens. Not that I am aware of. This, to me seems really weird. 'No." This is creepy.
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Allocates $12 million for the transfer of immigrants to other states of the country. Absolutely Not. This shifts the financial burden to another state. That’s bullshit. If you are going to put the laws in place, you bear the burden of seeing them through. Loading immigrants into a bus and shipping them to another state should NEVER be an option. If you are going to ship them anyplace you must return them to their country of origin.
Based on the last two points and only these two points, I would never be able to vote YES on such a bill. The bill is bullshit and does not solve a problem. It just pushes a problem off on another state.
Well, we agree on that. The thing is it’s all BS since they have no intention of enforcing it and have frantically been getting that word out there so as not to lose their work force. I’m not anti-immigration law, I’m anti-using bigotry to get votes and anti-wasting time and money to do it while blocking any real solutions. Basically I’m anti-stupid 
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The corrupt will use any methods deemed useful in the pursuit of power and money, and the clinging thereto once acquired.
DeSantis is corrupt to the core, though in a manner that isn’t unique to him in the current Republican Party by any stretch of the imagination. He’s also not unique in another respect, descibed succinctly in Airey Neave’s account of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, when the subject of Julius Streicher was being discussed (an individual you’ll need a strong stomach to look up, by the way). Neave wrote of Streicher thus:
DeSantis is cast from the same sordid mould. It’s instructive to note that Streicher’s downfall didn’t arise from his monstrous racism, his ludicrous pursuit of pseudoscience, or his outright sexual criminality (accounts of the Nuremberg Trials may cover all of these in more detail than most would wish, I hasten to add). What led to Streicher being reduced to a fringe figure on the lunatic wing of the Nazi Party, was his being steeped in legendary levels of financial corruption, to a point where even the Nazi authorities of the time were forced to move against him.
It’s interesting to note that there’s a very strong correlation between being a fulminating right wing ideologue, and being corrupt to the core. Some notable exceptions do exist, but usually said exceptions were too busy satisfying bloodlust to be intricately engaged in industrial scale grifting. The utterly revolting Ante Pavelic in WWII Croatia, for example, was too busy being trying to become the apotheosis of a real life slasher horror movie villain, along with a number of his entourage. But even a brief look at the likes of Pinochet in Chile, or Videla in Argentina, quickly reveals that grifting is never far below the surface with most of these people.
I gather DeSantis is already on the radar with respect to dodgy financial dealings, and that’s probably where he’ll come seriously unstuck - trying to sneak illicit transactions past the SEC or IRS. Sadly, I suspect he won’t be prosecuted for the legion of preventable harm he’s unleased upon the vulnerable and the marginalised, though in any properly constituted jurisdiction, he should be facing even stiffer penalties for this, than for any financial malfeasance uncovered in future.
Here he is comparing himself to Jesus disciples. Another common practice of corrupt politicians, at least in the U.S., is a claim to be a devout christian. I find him even creepier than Trump in that respect because I think he believes it. Trump uses the religious right, this guy is one of them.
Pretty similar to the UK and Brexit at least inasmuch as we’re short of all those workers that did those jobs no one else wants to do.
UK Atheist
In a perfect world everyone who speaks the words “they are taking our jobs” would have to do those jobs, Most of them spewing this line wouldn’t last an hour, let alone a day.
Indeed. I was in IT before I retired and I always said that if I lost that job I’d do whatever I had to, to support my family including being a bin man (waste disposal) but I really wouldn’t have liked to and luckily didn’t have to.
Now, I am a man of leisure which is [expletive deleted] great … now if only I could find a way to reverse engineer that so I could enjoy it when I was young 
UK Atheist