I've covered this before.

The pool of illegal labor increases every day by at least a few thousand. Every month a whole city of labor appears in America and displaces a percentage of the workforce and destabilizes the entire income structure.

Bill the gardener, in 1988, is earning four hundred a week, and can own his own small house, make a car payment and purchase tools & supplies.

In 1998, his "turf" was encroached upon by three landscaping "firms" that went door to door to his customers and undercut his price. Bill was now down to $300 a week. He bought a used car instead of new, barely made his bills on time and went into credit card debt, hoping things would turn around.

Now in 2008, Bill the gardener is gone. He already filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and his former customers are served by competing dozens of groups of illegals with a truck and tools, who are here illegally, have no telephone, pay no taxes and will do the same work Bill used to do for $150 a week - or less.

Bill wasn't qualified to do much, but he feels lucky he got a job delivering mail after taking the postal service exam. There were no jobs in gardening available anywhere. Food services, markets and other entry level jobs were seemingly only hiring illegals, and Bill was never even called in to interview or was told because of his age that he was "overqualified" for the jobs he applied for. even the low level management positions were going to people earning minimum wage and who spoke Spanish as a native tongue.

Bill is multiplied by 100,000 Americans every month. He is forced into a new career or government service because the entry level sector just doesn't want to pay even a penny over minimum wage or hire anyone over 30 years old. All these "Bills" are straddled with debt, their credit rating is shot and they live paycheck to paycheck. Many have lost their homes or are barely clinging on to them. They have no health insurance - or their health insurance has such high co-pays that most doctor visits are cheaper if they pay privately.

The US workforce is being FLOODED....DECIMATED by cheap labor that gets Bill's work because they can work for less than the minimum wage. My local McDonald's are staffed entirely by illegals fresh over the border and who can barely speak English. The franchise owner denounced the business laws punishing illegal hiring as harmful to local business. He helps the illegals get bogus papers and sets them up. Then he pays them god only knows what per hour.

It's not the CEO with his 50,000,000 dollar salary that is the major problem. The greedy CEO just loots corporate equity - he doesn't TAKE jobs or lower the average wage of his employees - that can only be done if he can hire illegals, or outsource corporate jobs overseas.

Taxing the fatcat CEO and getting a few more million from his bloated salary into the tax coffers will not bring the jobs he sent to India, or that are being performed by illegal aliens back. The tax hike will not raise wages for the remaining employees and will, in fact, likely cause MORE folks to lose their jobs and MAGNIFY outsourcing and illegal hires. He will boost his income to compensate and slash accordingly.

What's not working, Rob, is the free market. It's been short-circuited by illegal labor that can work for less. Eventually, the ENTIRE WORKFORCE will be composed primarily of illegals, if the corporations can get away with it. Sales clerks, drivers, labor of all kinds, low and mid-level management - the whole shebang. It's happening all over. It started in the southwest and is moving north and east as the southwest is already drowning in illegal labor.

The only folks finding steady work - are folks who work UNDER the minimum wage!

So Bill the gardener and Sue the Salesclerk are now already toast.

Even the doctors are now here from places like India and Peru - with poor foreign medical credentials that are permitted to practice in lenient accreditation states.

Check twice before assuming your doctor was educated in the US. The third world has muscled in on doctors turf as well and the local ER will have a distinctly multicultural (pronounced cheaper labor) essence. Dentists from New Delhi, Orthodontists from Lima and General Practicioners from Brasilia are the new doctors taking over the hood.

Yes, the US has shafted itself by not enforcing the borders or punishing those who hire illegals. Our entire workforce is earning less, has less buying power and has almost no career opportunities available to him/her to pursue that have not already been contaminated by cheap labor!

That, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with the economy. The housing issue was driven by illegal influx and has turned former "dream" states like California into residential nightmare communities - completely overrun and with super few decent jobs to be had for someone just getting out of college.

It's exponential now. The numbers and reproductive rates of the illegals has kicked in - destroying the SCHOOLS and reducing the quality of public education for all.

"Taxing the rich?"
"Spreading the wealth?"

Those are non-solutions. Those will do absolutely zip for the 150 million Bill the Gardeners now struggling with their careers and income.

The answers are
A) strict enforcement and purging of the illegals in the US
(Good luck on that)
or
B) ALL Americans can set their own WAGES again.

Only if B is enacted, will the legal workforce find steady employment again. Only then will QUALITY again be chosen as a factor during hiring in lieu of simply selecting people based on who will work for the "dirt cheapest" sub-minimum labor wages.

That returns the FREE LABOR MARKET to the US. Right now our constitutionally designed FREE MARKET only exists for ILLEGALS and OUTSOURCED LABOR! So they are getting somewhere around 100 MILLION jobs that used to feed OUR economy.

That's whose benefitting from "Trickle Down" right now Rob - Mexico and India are practically being carried by US trickle down!

Americans can't let that stand for much longer. The pillars of America are cracking from the bottom up. We have only a few years left before it will really be too late for America.