Well this issue is already lumped in with immigration. There was an article back about a week and a half ago about how an amendment to the current immigration bill was going to have a higher cap on H-1B visas of like 195k. So maybe it will get striped or killed, I don't know but one of my senators is one of the ones who has been pushing the higher cap for a while now.

People like AC don't want to save now for the future. Why live with less now so you have more later when it just prevents them from having fun. These are also the same people who would have bought as much house as they could have gotten a loan for just before the crash.

They are republicans they don't believe in evolution.
Now that I have that barb out of the way it is basically applicable to all side but I find it somewhat interesting that in this case we have 2 republicans in support of American jobs and higher pay of American workers while one of the main supporters of expanding the H-1B program is a Democrat from Minnesota.

What you describe is the difference between a statesman and a politician. Sadly we have far too few statesmen.

Burn heretic!

So in general just like every other issue.

To quote the late George Carlin:

If I remember correctly the cuts that were proposed weren't what normal people consider cuts, but were decreases in the rate of increase which in Washington D.C. translates to someone took a chainsaw it. Then I could be remembering it incorrectly but that was a while ago.

The problem is that structurally Social Security and Medicare have problems. Depending on what side of the aisle you are on it is either they have been too generous with benefits or haven't been funded like they needed to be. Either way it is going to be a political mess when the trust fund runs out, but even before that things are going to get painful for the government.

In years when Social Security was running surpluses that extra money went to purchase the bonds for the trust fund so that money went into the general fund to pay for other stuff. Since the trust fund is really just government bonds that will get redeemed from the general fund you are going to see either increased taxation, decreased spending on other programs, or more likely higher deficit spending. When that is gone then the hard decision comes as Social security will only be able to pay out ~75% of the benefits it had been paying out. The government doesn't have a choice in this because the constitution states, in not so few words, that the debts will be paid. At this point the US federal government will either have to directly fund the difference out of the general fund (basically it will be the same amount that was spend on the previous month paying off the last batch of redeemed bonds), or tell the peasants to piss off and accept that they can't pay benefits in full.

...and the other half would be in jail.

While I am not sure about what class you fall into the one time I was audited was my 3rd year in college. The only two deductions I claimed were the standard one and the tuition tax credit and only had one job and was still able to use for 1040EZ. Still I ended up having to take the entire day off from work and school to go up to their office in the Twin Cities (I forget if it is in Minneapolis or St. Paul) to be audited. It isn't like this was a difficult set of taxes like what I have now as it probably took longer to go down to the Mankato post office to get it stamped and mailed than it did to fill out but the audit took a couple of hours. It isn't like they don't already have their own copies of the same documents plus the ones I mailed to them. The whole time I ended up feeling like they were looking to find something I missed or entered wrong which is pretty hard to do when the only pieces of paper are the 1040EZ, a single W-2, and my tuition statement. The auditor would ask questions about each entry, hem and haw, get up to go check things. In general it was a giant waste of everyone's time. I could understand auditing taxes like the ones I have filled out now since it it a byzantine mess with kids, wife who is a teacher, child care, investments (foreign and domestic), some foreign income taxes, retirement savings, property tax, a mortgage, at least 2 W-2s, some 1099 MISC, and what ever else, that ends up with a stack of paper about an inch thick I need to keep for my records that takes 4 hours to fill out even though I am pretty sure I know what I am doing.

After doing my current set of taxes I would welcome a simpler tax code with fewer deductions and rules. What is wrong with a few good brackets (like 5, one for each household quintile), some wildly popular deductions that are used to encourage things society wants (home ownership, education, dependent care), and treating all income the same from an income tax perspective. I'm sure a simplified tax code for businesses could be created as well that still has the encouragements that the current one purports to have while not being so byzantine that investing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in accountants can result in millions or billions of dollars in tax savings.

6 more years of Putin without a shirt.

Hey I am thankful for the Illinois Nazis. Without them there wouldn't have been the important US Supreme Court free speech ruling that made it clear that even offensive speech is protected speech.

Schools in the US have all sorts of special privileges probably because they are treated as having legal custody of the children under their supervision, or that is my understanding of it.

This makes me wonder if those crap minimum wage jobs still offer a perk like the one I worked at had. If you were going to college and maintained at least a 2.0 GPA they had a "scholarship" program that would provide you an extra $1/hr. This was with a regional gas station chain years ago and the thinking was that while this is a shit job it would be better to have a competent person working it for a few years who will work hard, show up, but eventually move on than a warm body who may or may not show up but won't quit and will have to be fired. The best part of that job was picking up the overnight shifts as there was usually about 6 customers in 8 hours and apart from mopping and cleaning the drink bar you had a lot of time to study, got the $1/hr scholarship money, and a $0.75 shift differential for the overnight.

They often do. I remember years ago reading about a shortage of tool and die makers and that journeyman (basically just out of tech school) were getting jobs for like $150k a year.

The biggest problem I have seen is that high schools teachers and councilors push the 4 year degree as the only way to get ahead and that no one should get a 2 year degree or learn a trade if they want to succeed. While they are correct in that a high school diploma basically ensures that you will live in poverty working minimum wage jobs hoping to get promoted to overnight manager they miss the point that you need to have skills. Skilled labor is what is needed and it does pay well. One of my buddies used his army benefits to go to the tech/community college near me and learn how to be an electrician. He now earns enough that he can support his family on just his income but is saving up for a down payment on a house. I have another fried who went and learned carpentry and makes a good enough living he can live like a college student working about 6 months of the year with hiking and camping in the summer and skiing in the winter. Hell I even use the tech/community college near me to learn new skills every couple of years since they do offer courses in the practical instead of the theoretical.

Better yet just up the output on one of these things. It isn't like they aren't already on a heavy vehicle with a large engine capable of outputting several hundred KW. Since it would be used against drones you don't have to worry about the rules of war and what you can use against people. On second thought the very existence of one capable of taking out a drone would mean it would get used against people.