Kevin Drum rebuts Press Secretary Sanders:
[Sanders:] “It’s a known fact that there are over 4 million unemployed Americans in the same age group as those that are DACA recipients; that over 950,000 of those are African Americans in the same age group; over 870,000 unemployed Hispanics in the same age group,” Sanders said during Tuesday’s press briefing. “Those are large groups of people that are unemployed that could possibly have those jobs.”
What Sanders leaves out is that those 800,000 DACA recipients also buy lots of stuff, creating jobs for other people. In fact, the amount of stuff they buy is almost exactly equal to the wages of the jobs they take. In other words, if every DACA recipient got deported tomorrow, GDP would decrease by about the equivalent of 800,000 jobs. It would help nobody.
As interesting an observation as that is, there’s a sleight of the hand – transitioning from wages to jobs and implying the same jobs that are lost if the Dreamers are forcibly deported would come out of the pool held by Hispanics and African-Americans.
Still, it’s another page added to the coloring book of the Trump Administration, the one entitled, We Can’t See Beyond The End Of Our Nose.
