Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another.
Drop by and tell us about your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper. Newcomers may notice that many who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
************************
THIS IS AN OPEN THREADNothing is Off the Table
But play nice.
************************
#Defender Music MondayHow could it get any better than this… I ran through all of the Marvel Netflix series a few weekends ago. I’d previously watched Jessica Jones and liked it almost as much as I’d enjoyed Fringe a few years ago. But as a whole, right up to and including the recently released The Defenders season 1, this series of inter-connected shows are terrific. Gritty and real with a soupçon of Marvel technology and mutant “powers” on the side.
It just happens to be set to one of the sole tunes from Nirvana that I ever liked…
x xYouTube VideoAnother dark, noir video, but the music is vibrant and full of depth and color… a lyric version of the song that, above all, set the tone for the Women’s March in january: I Can’t Keep Quiet
x xYouTube VideoBut the mythos of the Marvel Defenders and “I can’t keep quiet” is a solid foundation for the activism alive and well and growing in our nation right now, as I write these words…
This weekend #TinyhandsMagoo informed the world through the Presidential Press Secretary second creepiest person in D.C. that he would likely be ending DACA (deferred action for childhood arrivals) with a 6 month effective date. There has been much talk this weekend about defending DACA.
Lots of conservatives continue to attempt to claim that undocumented immigrants in the United States costs taxpayers money. The numbers are always different, but the idea — immigrants in the US cost Americans jobs — is always the same. I’ve seen it this weekend online and in video from various news and news-adjacent programs alike.
Here, Ali Velshi (his bio on Twitter: I actually AM a Kenyan-born Muslim. Raised in Canada) of @MSNBC shows that those ideas are just more made-up bullshit from the Messaging Division of the GOP Corporation...
x#DACA stats pic.twitter.com/HKhpqaUYnC
— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) September 4, 2017Immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, help our economy expand and grow. They are a BENEFIT to the system. They are makers, not takers, in the parlance of the Trump zombies.
Why “especially” undocumented immigrants? They pay into our FICA tax system in every hour they work above the table, and that number is staggeringly high …
www.TheAtlantic.com online
The Truth About Undocumented Immigrants and TaxesEvery year, the Social Security Administration collects billions of dollars in taxes that it doesn’t know who paid. Whenever employers send in W-2 forms that have Social Security numbers that don’t match with anyone on record, the agency routes the paperwork to what’s called the Earnings Suspense File, where it sits until people can prove the wages were theirs, allowing them to one day collect retirement benefits.
The Earnings Suspense File now contains Social Security tax forms that date back to 1937 and are linked to the taxes that were paid on nearly $1.3 trillion in wages. Some of the W-2s in it belong to people who got married and never reported changing their name. Others are people who filled out their tax forms incorrectly. As of 2014, efforts to track these taxpayers down allowed the Social Security Administration to match 171 million tax forms to their rightful owners.
But there are still about 340 million unclaimed tax forms recorded in the file, compared to 270 million nearly a decade ago. A good portion of those forms were filed by employers on behalf of some of the most unlikely funders of Social Security: undocumented immigrants. In fact, illegal immigration is considered largely responsible for the mushrooming of the file, with undocumented workers paying billions in taxes for retirement benefits they will likely never receive.
and THIS is what the Social Security Administration has to say about it:
HOW THE PARTICIPATION OF UNAUTHORIZED WORKERS AFFECTS SOCIAL SECURITY'S FINANCIAL POSITION
For the annual Trustees Reports, the President’s Budget,and other documents, OCACT projects the numbers of unauthorized immigrants residing in the United States,their earnings, and the implications of these earnings on Social Security financing. Our projections assume that unauthorized residents work at about the same rate as the rest of the population by age and sex, but earnings are less likely to be reported as taxable and even less likely to be credited for future benefit entitlement. Thus,our projections suggest that the presence of unauthorized workers in the United States has, on average, a positive effect on the financial status of the Social Security program. For the year 2010, we estimate that the excess of tax revenue paid to the Trust Funds over benefits paid from these funds based on earnings of unauthorized workers is about $12 billion
That means that in 2010 ALONE, undocumented immigrants paid in about $12 billion dollars into just the Social Security system. That doesn’t count their contributions, financially, to Medicare, Medicaid or the Disability systems which FICA taxes also fund. Or state income or sales taxes, among the bazillion other taxes and fees we all pay nowadays.
Immigrants are GOOD for America, whether they are documented or not.
But America is good for immigrants when they are documented. Which is what DACA was designed to help do. To help these young people brought to our nation as children stay here where they’ve grown up, and avoid deportation, until Congress finds a way to make their Status here in the United States legal and permanent.
If you believe this is true, please help the efforts to make a difference and Defend these young people. After all, this is what I believe is true about them:
xIf the #DACA youth were living in a foreign nation, wouldn't they be EXACTLY the type of immigrant we want & need most? #DefendDACA
— Angela Marx (@AngieinWAState) September 1, 2017If #TinyhandsMagoo does announce an end to DACA on Tuesday, as most are anticipating, please do your part.
Call Congress (202) 224-3121Demand they enact a DACA bill and send it to Trump to sign into Law.
What I did this weekendSee the above and add in spreading the word about the Freeway Blogger’s #LaborDayWeekend event. Oh, yeah, and that migraine which woke me up out of a dead sleep way too early Saturday morning. Considering that most of Houston, on Saturday morning, looked a lot like this, I think perhaps I can live with the occasional migraine, right?
xBuy Pandas Cookbook and I will donate 110% of the Sept profits to my elementary school. #Houston#Harvey#pandashttps://t.co/v6J7FvXqn4
— Ted Petrou (@TedPetrou) September 1, 2017 How was your weekend?