There are a couple different shades of meaning to the word “exploit,” but when you say it angrily, you rarely mean it in a good way.

As the dictionary might say:

Use (a situation or person) in an unfair or selfish way.

The “e” word has been tossed around today in connection with calls for tighter restrictions on handguns; and to be honest, I wasn’t crazy about the timing… in light of the all-too recent events in Virginia. But “exploitation?” How is it unfair or selfish? Was a gun involved? Can an honest argument be made that the tragedy could have been avoided with tighter regulation of handgun sales? How many of the victims (or their family and friends) would make the same arguments? Was it exploitation (in the bad sense, as defined above) to use 9/11 as an argument for tighter airport security? Is it exploitation to point to outbreaks of salmonella as evidence of greater need to inspect the food supply?

As I said, the only objection I have is the timing. It’s always safer to debate issues when people are less emotional. Having said that, if debating gun control now is “exploitation,” then the same should be said of the 107th Congress… when they introduced the Patriot Act on October 2, 2001.

Taxes are on some folk’s minds… not many, given the events in Virginia, Washington, and the middle east… but they’re on some folks minds.

According to the Hoover Institution, the share of income taxes paid by the top 5% of wage earners in the U.S. has gone up from 35% in 1980, to 58% in 2004.

It sure makes me glad I’m not in the top 5%! There’s no telling what that kind of crushing inequality might drive me to do. Hell, I might go out and blow good money on real estate investments.

Ah, but wait. Maybe la creme de la creme don’t have it so bad. According to a looksie at IRS data, the percent of all income reported which was earned by the top 1% of wage earners doubled from 1980 to 2004. In 1980, the top 1% of income earners earned approximately 10% of all income earned in the U.S. In 2004 they earned approximately 20% of all income.

Although I haven’t matched my tax brackets perfectly (you can never find the perfect study on Google when you need to), the Hoover numbers sound pretty fair to me. Even under a flat tax (insert gnashing teeth here), if you double your share of the wealth you’re going to double your share of the tax burden.

Looks like you poor rich folk are just gonna have to suck it up and pay… that or increase your campaign contributions.

There’s a little flap in the Sunshine State over an email and illegal imigration.

What surprises me about this is not the email, or the fact that we have illegal immigration in this country, but what people perceive is the cost of illegal imigration to us – the legal residents. So I started a little research project. It turns out there is quite a little debate going over just how many illegals there are. The 2000 census estimated it at just under 9 million. Other researchers put the number closer to 20 million. For the purposes of this entry I decided to split the difference… so I’ll call it 15 million (give or take 500 thousand or so).

Now, playing to everyone’s worst fears… we’ll assume that they’re all receiving the maximum amount of SSI per month… or $623. Holly crap… that’s $112,140,000,000.00 PER YEAR. One hundred and twelve BILLION dollars! That’s some serious coin dude! Why… if we could cut off SSI to all 15 million illegal imigrants, our yearly federal budget deficit… would still be $130 billion (per year).

DAMNATION! You mean to tell me IF all illegals were savy enough to get a fake social security number, false documentation, and successfully apply for SSI (which is harder these days than finding a sperm whale in the Chicago River… for LEGAL residents), and IF we managed to round them all up at no additional cost to the tax payer (or we all volunteered the labor and supplies necessary to build and guard a wall on our borders – free of charge) we’d still have a yearly budget deficit? Well punch me in the face and call me a liberal!

Well what about all those primo jobs those illegals are taking away from Americans? Why just the other day I saw a guy speaking a slavic language in the kitchen at McDonals. You can’t tell me a legal resident would speak Russian of all things (everyone knows we’re barely smart enough to speak the Queen’s language… let alone another one to boot). What’re ya going to tell me next… that red-blooded americans are too lazy to work the kitchen at McDonals?

No, not lazy. Decadent may be a better word – but not perfect.

I challege you to walk into a court room (the easiest way to find poor people in this country), offer them a minimum wage job, and see how long they stay. If you think that’s tough, imagine trying to find someone to work under the table on a farm – for considerably less than minimum wage. I’ll wager there are segments of the economy that would collapse overnight if illegal residents disapeared en masse. What do you suppose THAT would cost the tax payers? Are you willing to pay $15 for a union shop orange? Maybe you’d like to pay $5 per pound for sugar? (The average price of sugar was around 40 cents in the U.S. in 2005.)

I’ve said nothing new here. I’m just sick of imigration serving as the villian for every populist on TV (I’m talking to you, Lou). That’s right, I don’t think much of populists. Why are liberals bad and populists good? Since when was it better to have NO convictions of your own, save for what the masses think at the moment? Illegal immigrants are an easy target. Because there are so few reliable statistics on illegal immigrants (when your research results range between 9 and twenty million – you’re safely outside the range of “reliable”) you can blame them for almost any societal ill with impunity.

So let’s call a spade a spade… picking on illegal immigrants is nothing short of a bully picking on the short kid… the privileged getting their licks in on the most vulnerable members of our society. Cast in that light, it doesn’t seem so noble, does it?