Hillary Said What??

I had a momentary curiosity on Wednesday and decided to listen to the speech that Hillary Clinton gave in Raleigh, NC, as she continues a run for the presidency that may likely have a diversion off to prison, at least if we are all lucky.

It is hard as heck to listen to a Hillary speech.  On one side, you have to listen to That Voice, which makes each hair stand up on the back of your neck before it then combusts into little puffs of smoke.  Oh, my Lord, I pity anyone who has to listen to that involuntarily.  It makes you understand why Bill traveled so much.

More to the point, though, is what she said.  I watched the speech with my best girl, who detests Hillary as much or more than I do.  We more wanted to hear if she said anything in response to Donald Trump's earlier devastation of her record of corrupt dealings, while Secretary of State and before.

She chose, by the way, or her handlers chose, not to address them -- it's pretty hard to respond when you've been caught enriching yourself at the expense of the American people and our safety -- except for one predictable point. 

Trump had pointed out how many millions had been sent to the Clinton Foundation by foreign interests with issues before Hillary's State Department.  Hillary made mention only of how he was taking issue with a "charitable foundation that helps poor people get AIDS medicines", leaving out the fact that it also paid the Clintons pretty healthy amounts that had come from those foreign donations.

Much of the promises she made in the speech were stolen from Bernie Sanders (free public college tuition, forgiveness of college debts, etc.) in a thinly veiled attempt to suck up to his voters.  In no case did she explain in the speech how all that would be paid for, not the infrastructure "investment", nor the paid family leave, nor the higher minimum wage.  She said she had answered that elsewhere, but the only reference was to making the wealthy "pay their fair share."

I waited for her to tell us what that "fair share" actually was, but apparently she is not yet ready to tell us.  So we won't know if that's 40%, or 90%, or somewhere in between.  As I've written, I don't think we're ever going to get that answer.  As the link suggests, don't hold your breath waiting for it.

Once in a while -- and this is the point of this piece -- we had to stop the TV, ask ourselves "what the Hades did she just say?", then rewind and listen again.  And in one case, that meant three rewindings to figure it out.

That one case was where she was talking about wages and fairness, and tried to link in "immigration reform."  Now, I think anyone who says "immigration reform" owes their listeners, at the very least, a description of what that phrase means.  A more open border?  A more secure border?  "Reform" can mean almost anything.  And Hillary usually means eight different things at once, none of them good.

In this case, she was trying to link higher wages for Americans to the fact that there are illegal immigrants being paid sub-minimum wage rates.  It took three tries, but eventually enough rewinding let us hear that she was saying that she was going to legalize the illegal aliens in the country, which would force their employers (in her view) to pay them higher wages (i.e., they would be less illegal, and so would be covered by the minimum-wage law).

The odd thing was that she was using that point to say that her approach would stop illegals from competing with low-wage actual Americans (presumably mostly black and Hispanic).  That is, of course, why it was so hard to figure out what she was saying.  The problem is that the USA is full of illegal aliens who are competing with low-wage Americans for a limited number of low-wage jobs, and her solution is to pay the illegals higher so they will no longer compete. 

I kid you not.  Listen for yourself and try to figure out what she meant.

Now, Donald Trump had mentioned this very problem earlier in his speech.  He specifically pointed out that his approach to reforming immigration, which he clearly said was to limit immigration overall and stop illegals from getting in, would cut the number of illegals competing with Americans for the limited low-wage job pool.

I didn't have to rewind that part in Trump's speech, because it was obvious.  If you have people who should not be here, taking jobs from our citizens and thereby depressing wages (too-high labor supply), you fix the problem by making it impossible, or at least very unattractive, to hire illegals -- and you try to deport the illegals.  If America comes first, you protect the Americans.

Hillary's approach was mind-numbing.  You don't get rid of the illegals, nope -- you make them Americans.  So help me God, Hillary Clinton actually tried to say that making them legal would address the problem of illegals competing with Americans for that job pool.  Do you understand why we had to rewind so often? 

But this was her approach -- make the illegals legal, which will force business to pay them at least the minimum wage, and they will no longer be a competitor with actual Americans for those jobs (because it will no longer be more attractive to hire illegals, get it?).  Never mind that now you have 11 million more people in the market for those jobs.

I do not know how you get through college, law school, law practice, be a professional wife to a governor and then to a president, serve in the Senate and then become Secretary of State, and still have no earthly idea of the law of supply and demand!  If there are ten million low-wage jobs out there that Americans, or illegal aliens, could do, then every worker added to the economy starting with Mr. 10,000,001 becomes surplus.  That surplus drives down wages as it drives up unemployment, because ten million jobs can only be done by ten million people -- or fewer.

Right now, there are X number of citizens who are in (or are looking for) low-wage jobs.  There are Y number of illegal aliens also looking for (or are in) low-wage jobs.  And there are Z number of those jobs.  We know X + Y is a lot greater than Z.  So Hillary snaps her fingers and makes the illegals part of the work force.  But X and Y are still the same and, more importantly, there are still only Z number of jobs.  And X + Y is still way bigger than Z.

Except now, to the extent there was illegal sub-minimum paying going on, the cost of those Z jobs in terms of wages just went up.  And that means that the number of those jobs is going to shrink as much as it can, because costs went up with no benefit to the employer.  So they'll look for better, more diligent people so three workers can do the work that four cheaper ones were.

Hillary somehow thinks that the poor American (an X) who was trying to get one of those jobs is now better off after she snapped her fingers.  But he is not better off.  All those Y people are now X people, and he has no advantage over them for having been, you know, legal.  The only ones better off are the illegals with a good work ethic who will have a big-old leg up on those Americans who should have been put first.

The crowd in Raleigh, NC, of course, cheered.  They thought this was wonderful stuff, assuming, of course, that they understood a word of what she was saying.  Which, of course, was essentially impossible to have been the case.

You see, they didn't have a rewind button.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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