I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Governor Jerry Brown wants to close up to 70 state parks. But the savings would be trivial. Meanwhile, fruit and vegetable growers in California complain about a shortage of pickers. Can we turn this into a win-win?
1 Comment.
This is NOT a problem in enlightened states, like my home state of Texas.
My home town is an agricultural center and has a population of about 15,000. Under the Clinton law, any man named as the father of a child–usually a man whose wife divorced him–must pay at least $700 to support his children under Texas guidelines.
Most minority men have a take-home pay of less than $700, so, under the Clinton Law, 3,000 divorced men are jailed in the Workhouse Texas put up in my hometown.
This does NOT mean that the state of Texas feeds them while they sit in a cell: the jail is a very austere facility, and they are sentenced to hard labor.
Every day, they are bussed to a job, usually farm work, and 90% of their take-home pay goes to the woman who said they fathered her child, while 10% goes to the state of Texas (DNA tests are inadmissible, and, in any case, the men jailed in Texas are those who can’t afford to pay for one).
The farmers who once used illegal immigrants now have a perfectly legal workforce that is more reliable than the illegal immigrants. The single mothers get 90% of whatever the men earn. And Texas gets 10% of what they earn, which more than pays for the cost of the austere Bradford Workhouse.
So no shortage of agricultural workers in my hometown.
States that limit support to some amount less than the putative father earns, and who are therefore short of slave labor, have only themselves to blame.
Texas has largely eliminated illegal immigration and unemployment of minorities by taking full advantage of the Clinton law.
Slavery was a great idea. And the Clinton law that abolished AFDC in favor of enslaving the men single mothers name as the fathers of their children is going a long way to restoring that peculiar institution.