>>Interesting, but it doesn't correlate with the fact that we can't get people to drive school busses or drive long haul tractors.

Sure you can. Increase the pay by $10K. Still no takers? Repeat. Eventually you'll have all the bus drivers you need. Meanwhile implement incentivized training so before long there's a glut of HT licensees and the market corrects itself. Then spend some $ figuring out why this happened and why it won't happen again. A penny of prevention is worth a pound of cure, etc. Maybe paying $5K more as soon as the issue stirred would have headed it off.

Instead, employers wring their hands that they can't get drivers on minimum wage except by employing illegals or other desperates willing to work for pennies. Upright employers are forced to follow suit or be priced out of the market. Tolerating this perpetuates the problem.

The people paying Juan and Maria under the table for gardening and house cleaning are just as bad. Victor once reprimanded another poster for her "I'm OK, Jack" mentality and it's the same mentality for those who support illegals for personal benefit. You can expect to see figure after figure in coming weeks about the costs of illegals to US taxpayers with some experts saying the cost is well into the 4 figures per annum per citizen family. Voting patterns may change when voters realize they pay more to support illegals than they could afford on Christmas and birthdays for their own family.

>>Here's a thought:
>>Maybe for a lot of people - working just doesn't work.

Yep. And once there's a generation where unemployment is normalized, especially if dad is absent it's harder and harder to promote the habit and kudos of working. If people want to label others racist, how about those who willfully sold fellow citizens' jobs for a short-term profit for themselves and now pose as saints against walls and border control to hold unskilled wages down. This is a double-whammy against those whose jobs were sold for mammon and now compete against desperate newcomers for every menial scrap of work. Not content with that, big IT lobbies for hundreds of thousands of H2B IT workers to compete with US graduates and hold down wages there too. I used to refer to "exploiting class" as a sarcastic jest, but it's just as Marx described it in 2019.

>>I told the owner- an owner from heaven- who didn't know anything about it and he'll pay for her meds.
>>This happens daily and it's outrageous, John.
>>Hardworking people aren't earning enough to survive while others are buying $20million condo's in NYC.

You're telling me that the US has a broken medical funding model? So let me tell you the next tsunami of trouble about to hit: while it's fashionable to sling off at physicians pillaging the system, increasing numbers of US physicians abandon private practice that was the norm when I qualified, to take up salaried roles. The international experience is that costs *rise* when physicians are on the clock and not in charge of the practice. The solution is to introduce other sorts of practitioner, which all evidence confirms increases costs even more. So the US with costs already double those of similar nations can expect costs to rise and rise, and you can't blackmail facilities on price the way you can private practitioners. We will see if I am right.

BTW, returning to the topic of your thread: I did go back to source, looking at Tuesday's CBO Q1 Monthly Budget Review. Despite the graphs in your NYT opinion piece, federal receipts are actually up slightly, by about $2B. The cause of the $92B deficit appears to be that spending rose by $93B.

It appears that a predictable $9B reduction in corporate tax is largely paid for by $8B of tarriffs that the NYT author left out, plus another $9B from the healthcare taxes on high earners.

So Trump's changes so far are revenue-neutral and what would have been a healthy increase in revenue unfortunately was consumed elsewhere, most notably Federal Reserve remittances dropping after the Fed increased short term interest rates.

Looking forward to seeing arcane NYT graphs to the contrary. ;-)