Illegal Immigrants

Oversaturated work markets are bad in all regards.
Wages get reduced... So does work stability, promotions, mentoring, work hours, work based benefits.. hell, the lack of qualified personnel in a country can be directly linked to companies no longer educating their staff for said positions and just expecting everyone to have them before being hired..

Companies have no particular motivation to develop staff or provide positive working conditions or guaranteed employment when someone can always be theoretically available to fulfil the role at any point.

Of course that leads to bigger issues with housing affordability , but that's another issue... That mass immigration effects negatively aswell...

At least we agree on raising minimum wage, then.

Ours just went up to $14.75/hr on monday in BC

Nice! Hopefully, wages will go up in quite a few places now that we had our reminder of how fragile the economy is without its supposedly-low-level work force. Not that America is particularly known for getting the message, but.

I have a hard time with the fact you guys are still at a $7/hr min. wage. After. Twenty. Years. I made that wage in 1988/89 ski season

I made more than that on my first entry level job in the UK. And it wouldn't be so bad if the cost of living were scaled back accordingly but of course it's f**king not.

There is a difference between market wage being suppressed by oversupply and regulating the wage by law.

So what? Oversupply is something that can ALWAYS be arranged. Hey, here's one way: relocate your entire business to Shanghai; boom! Massive workforce that'll take just about any job for figurative peanuts. I mean, at what point do we have to just say "look, as much as we love to get in on this, if you want to hire someone in this town, you do it properly, and we'll be watching to make sure you do."

Tax laws drove a lot of production overseas. Production methods requiring less killed workforce.

Multifaceted problem.

Bull go***mn shit. Even if our tax rate were zero, they'd still set up in China and Mexico. They're not after the tax savings - they're after the exploitability of the workforce.

How about this?

If a country doesn’t have a functioning EPA as restrictive as ours, there’s a 20% tariff.
Country has no equivalent FDA, 10% tariff
Etc, etc.

See, now you've got a tariff war and that just hits our exports. Doesn't work.

What exports? Everything that used to be made in America is now being made in Mexico and China and other Third World countries

Pre-COVID, US exports were about $220 billion monthly, fluctuating quite shakily depending on how often Trump mentions China in his tweets.

Helps having a level playing field

....mmmm, mutual tarriffs are more like splitting the playing field into several small ones. It shrinks the size of the game for everyone. So we maybe we'll open a small factory to produce our own ipods, but having a factory in every country producing more expensive ipods just shrinks the size of the market overall so it becomes a rich people commodity instead of a ubiquitous household item.

Then Clinton is to blame because he signed NAFTA and he gave China most favored nation trade status

That's a very different, very long conversation but long story short, Clinton's only partly to blame on that front.

Maybe on NAFTA...many players over several administrations.
Still, Clinton gave China most favored nation trade status

True. Very complex issues too hard to discuss here

Didn't you just get deleted already? Get a job.