Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

It's all terrific.  And entirely unrelated to the small point I was attempting to make.

And Musk only owns about 13% of Tesla stock, so it's not as if it's all his by any stretch.

no shit sherlock- it's a publicly traded company. he also happens to be the single largest shareholder of said publicly traded company, is a co-founder of the company and personally put up 93% of the initial investment to get the company off the ground, controls the board of the company, is the CEO of the company and heavily involved in every aspect of the company from design, engineering, manufacturing, to marketing.

stop being this purposely dense. it's unbecoming of you.

I can't imagine arguing that Elon Musk's wealth hasn't also generated significant wealth for other people, including for the U.S. Treasury.

But it is irrelevant to making a decision about his immigration status when he was "an illegal" as a college dropout. 

He probably isn't any liability except maybe politically.  I get a statement from SS each year that shows what I pay in FICA.  That is what I'm speaking about.  I would note if he cashes in options, which he may well do, he'd get a FICA ding on that (as well as income tax etc.).

I pay zero in FICA these days because I don't have a salary.  I'm now a "taker", one might opine I pay a negative tax, since I get a "check" every month.

FICA tax is a very specific thing, clearly.  

The point about Musk is important: the response is, well, he's a productive member of society--but that's a backward looking argument; he wasn't a bazillionaire when he was an undocumented immigrant. Also, he's obviously an outlier because of his massive wealth, but I think there would be pretty broad agreement on immigration if the standard were that: productive member of society. 

Yes, he IS an outlier but I didn't bring him up, you did.  

He also isn't merely a "productive member of society", he is arguably the single most productive member of our current economy.  He might not be #1 but clearly he is in the top 1%.  We as a society are obviously not losing out financially by virtue of having permitted Musk to live here.  

I started with SSI and Medicare because those are the obvious ones.  Both systems are hemorrhaging money and demographic trends point to VAST deficits in both.  From that we can assume that the average contributor isn't paying enough to cover their costs.  We know this because if the average contributor was covering their costs then the systems would be solvent and we know that they aren't.  

The average contributor is a born American who contributes from their first day on the job flipping burgers during HS to their last day on the job passing out shopping carts in retirement and makes an average wage.  If that isn't enough (and we know that it isn't, see above) then anything less than that makes the problem worse.  

Consequently, I wouldn't go for "productive member of society" for two reasons:

• It is so vague that obviously our definitions could vary wildly, and
• Even most relatively conservative definitions would still include a whole lot of people earning at or near the average who are STILL making the SSI and Medicare problems worse rather than better.  

My cutoff would be age and income based because younger workers will pay into SSI and Medicare for a lot longer before they start collecting than older workers.  My solution would be targeted to cover this problem.  I don't have sufficient data to put exact numbers to it but it would be something like this:

• In your 20s:  Must have income at least 120% of mean.  
• In your 30s:  Must have income at least 150% of mean.  
• In your 40s:  Must have income at least 200% of mean.  
• In your 50s:  Must have income at least 400% of mean.  
• In your 60s:  Must have income at least 1,000% of mean.  

The dramatic increase aren't for dramatic effect.  I laid it out that way due to the time-value of money.  If you start contributing late you have a lot of ground to make up and the later you start the more impossible this becomes.  Honestly, 10x mean income for people in their 60s probably isn't enough but I'm assuming that people earning at that level are valuable enough to their employers that it really doesn't matter because they are contributing in other ways and paying a LOT of other taxes.  


You might think that SSI would be limited such that people who don't contribute for very long don't get benefits and while that would be logical, it isn't true.  You only need 40 quarters (10 years) of contributions to collect SSI.  Thus, a 55 year old new immigrant is a fiscal catastrophe for the US unless they make just massive amounts of money.  Even that it is an issue for SSI because taxes for that are capped.  

Vis-a-vis non-brown immigrants:
I don't positively know this, but my guess is that most Scandinavian, Canadian, and Asian immigrants would pass the framework outlined above.  I'm thinking here of my dad's South Asian Cardiologist.  I saw those bills.  I'm pretty sure he was in the 1,000% of mean range so even if he didn't come here until he was 60, I'm good with that.  I've also known a couple of VERY highly compensated European immigrants who came here because pay in their fields was better here and they rather obviously made enough to pass the framework outlined above.  

This isn't about race, it is about the status of their home countries.  Poor Europeans don't really have any incentive to come here because their home countries have social welfare systems generally more generous than ours.  No illiterate Norwegian thinks "I'm going to go to Minneapolis because they have better welfare there."  However, there are literally billions of illiterate people in the world who live in countries that do NOT have social welfare systems more generous than ours.  The undeniable reality is that the vast majority of such countries are populated by people that you referred to as "brown".  

But I know that many of you don't believe the studies that I've seen; for whatever reasons you think those studies can't be trusted/must be wrong.

I wanted to address this individually because it is a point you have made before and I think it is incredibly important and explains a lot of what I see as the slow-motion collapse of our institutions.  

First, I'll admit to it.  I flat don't trust the "experts" or the major media (including Fox) on this.  (Fox was pro-immigration right along with Boehner, Cantor, and the rest of the Republican "establishment" up until the revolt of rank-and-file Republicans resulted in Cantor's primary loss in 2014 and Trump's primary win in 2016.)  

I fully realize that the fact that I (and my entire side) simply don't trust the "experts" and media makes getting out of this mess more-or-less impossible but I honestly don't know how to fix it. You have been lying to me for generations.  I don't mean you and me personally but your side and my side. 

Global Climate Change is probably at least a concern but your side has exaggerated and outright lied so much that my side is literally never going to believe what you have to say now.  According to Al Gore circa 2000 @847badgerfan , @Mdot21 , @Honestbuckeye , and the rest of our Floridian posters would be underwater by now.  Gore was either wrong, exaggerating, or outright lying and from my perspective we are WAY past the point of trying to figure that out.  I don't care.  The effect is that his dire warnings were flat out wrong and now you (your side, not personal) are the proverbial "boy who cried wolf" and we (my side, not personal) are simply NEVER going to believe you.  

As I said earlier, I realize that this is a HUMONGOUS problem because now, if the new Global Climate Change warnings are actually real, not exaggerated, and accurate well a humongous segment of society is simply unwilling to hear the logic behind it.  As far as I am concerned, not my fault.  The boy who cried wolf eventually had his sheep eaten by a wolf because nobody came to help him when a wolf REALLY was attacking his flock.  

This, obviously, is different because we aren't just talking about the boy's sheep.  Climate Change impacts us all.  

Now back to immigration.  I ran through the methodology of the lies underlying the "immigrants commit less crime" studies in a previous post but, in brief:  What they did was to only assign crimes to immigrants if a known immigrant was convicted of the crime.  There are two massive problems with the numerator in this equation:

• Unsolved crimes or crimes for which there was no conviction are literally ALL assumed to have been committed by a non-immigrant.  Obviously at least some of these were committed by immigrants.  
• Most large cities are "sanctuary" cities that REFUSE to share immigration data with the Federal Government and thus literally NONE of the crime in those cities counts as "immigrant crime" in the study.  Large cities are where most of the crime occurs and they are also where most of the immigrants live and the people who conducted the "study" literally evaded reporting ANY of the crime committed by immigrants in the Cities where most of them live and where most of the crime occurs as immigrant crime.  

That is just the numerator.  Additionally, their figure of non-immigrant crime was simply "the rest" so not only was a substantial portion of immigrant crime (probably a majority) falsely not reported as "immigrant crime" it was also falsely reported as "non-immigrant" crime at the same time.  

I don't have time to chase down all the errors, omissions, mistakes, and outright lies in all studies but I've looked at enough to KNOW that I'm being lied to so I'm literally NEVER going to trust what the leftist academic/media/political universe puts out on this (or frankly any other) issue.  

Again, I realize that this is a humongous problem because I'm literally unconvinceable as is basically my entire side.  My response is not a solution but it is simply that it isn't my fault and you can't expect to piss on me and tell me it is raining for literally decades and then have me believe literally anything that you (your side not personally) say.  

The above is also why January 6, 2021 happened.  I've said before that those rioters were idiots but I'll also tell you that the reason they didn't believe the media when the media said "There is no basis to Trumps claims" is that these people are on my side.  They've been lied to for so long that a big chunk of them just assume that EVERYTHING is a lie.  That is an intractable problem and if we're assigning blame all I can say is it wasn't my side that lied for generations.  Now we've reached the point where that has come home to roost and as far as I can tell, there isn't a solution.  

On climate change claims, the media in part and Al Gore in specific hyped this up like it was a Hollywood movie.  The actual SCIENTISTS were never projecting that sort of hyperbole, in general.  I've commented before about how the changes predicted in sea levels are not that draconian, they would be a concern for sure, but it's not like anyone real is saying they'd be 20 feet higher.

The same is true for global temperature.  I fault the media (duh) and the scaremongers.  I'd say every media report I've ever seen about some scientific area I know perhaps something about is way over hyped.  It's akin to see Ohio State beating Michigan by 33-24 and the headline is "Buckeyes destroy Michigan".  

And yes, this does lead to discounting "experts", understandably, when often the media just got it flat wrong what experts were saying.  Experts are boring.  Boring doesn't generate clicks.

So Iran is well down the path of enriching uranium- and not far from producing their nuclear capability.
Iran has said- and continues to openly state their goal of wiping out Israel.    No secret there.

I've been told this for decades - no secret