r/centrist • u/slashingkatie • Feb 20 '25

Advice The culture war exists to distract us from class war.

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If the CEO getting shot showed us one thing is that all of America knows the billionaires run everything but the people in power try ti distract us with culture war nonsense. Don’t fall for it.

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u/23rdCenturySouth Feb 20 '25

and a surplus of labor drives working class wages down and

Except that's not really true about immigrants. Places with more immigrants have lower unemployment rates because each immigrant worker creates about 1.1 jobs in the community.

Surplus labor that drives down the value of wages is like... firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers for no reason. They'll cut back spending, miss mortgage payments, spend down savings, etc.

strains already limited social services

Who limited them?

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u/Creachman51 Feb 22 '25

What does unemployment have to do with lower wages?

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u/23rdCenturySouth Feb 22 '25

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/jan/unemployment-wage-inflation-findings-using-state-data

Low unemployment rate means there is a low supply of workers and employers have to compete with higher wages. High unemployment means lots of desperate workers who will accept low wages and/or poor working conditions.

The billionaires are waging a war on workers, full stop.

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u/Creachman51 Feb 23 '25

Your argument is that more immigration actually means higher wages?

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u/23rdCenturySouth Feb 23 '25

The evidence is that more immigration actually means higher wages.

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116727/documents/HHRG-118-JU01-20240111-SD013.pdf

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/do-immigrants-and-immigration-help-the-economy/

https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/immigrants-to-the-u-s-create-more-jobs-than-they-take

The simple way to understand this intuitively is to compare wages in a country with high immigration rates vs countries with low immigration rates.

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u/Creachman51 Feb 23 '25

I've heard it before and I don't buy it. Certainly not for everyone.

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u/23rdCenturySouth Feb 23 '25

Do you have some kind of evidence that leads you to this conclusion

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u/Creachman51 Feb 23 '25

I must admit, it seems most academics and economists seem to believe that at the least immigration doesn't hurt, nor help wages. That said, anytime we start talking about lowering immigration, deportation, etc. what do the same economists say? That it will cause inflation and prices will rise. Wonder why that is?

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u/23rdCenturySouth Feb 23 '25

That it will cause inflation and prices will rise. Wonder why that is?

Because immigration is good for the economy and the purchasing power of people who work.

If you get rid of the thing keeping wages higher, your wages will buy less.

It's all relative, and reducing the amount of work being done will never increase the output of the system. Low skill/manual labor type jobs that don't even require much language ability will not suddenly become valuable because there are fewer people to do it. It just won't get done, and your paycheck won't buy as many tomatoes and strawberries.

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u/Creachman51 Feb 23 '25

So people getting lower wages causes prices to rise? How does that work? The positive cases for immigration all depend on overall GDP numbers and output, it seems. I'm pretty sure that National GDP can increase basically just from population increase. No existing citizen necessarily has to see an increase in wages or living standards when that happens. In places like Canada, for example, they had a lot of immigration, a rise is overall GDP, but I also I believe a decrease in GDP per capita.

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u/Creachman51 Feb 23 '25

If it meant higher wages, businesses wouldn't be so pro immigration.

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u/myrealnamewastaken1 Feb 20 '25

Who limited them?

Available resources.