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Comment by davidf18 | Hacker News Reader

People are down voting, the but the assessment is a correct one: California citizens need to elect responsible politicians that spend money on people who live in the the US and CA legally instead of those illegally. If they elected responsible politicians that understood this, they would have their train funded.

Taxes should be only spent on people living in the US legally. Not certain why people have a problem with that.

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They're much more likely downvoting you for trying to hijack the thread with an unrelated political topic/flamefest and then complaining about getting downvoted.

But it is related. The fact is that the NYT article was complaining about the lack of federal funds, but the true fact is that if the citizens of California elected politicians who did not unwisely pay for people living here illegally, they would have the money for the electric rail. Since money if fungible, since California politicians decided that taxpayer money should go towards people living here illegally, then it means that federal funds are going towards people living here illegally. I think this argument is very sound. I'm really tired of people writing articles and other complaining without stating the full context.

If that electric rail is so very important to California, and I believe it is, then the citizens of California should elect officials that do not use valuable and scarce taxpayer funds to pay for services for people living here illegally. They should elect politicians that spend taxpayer money for the benefit of people living here legally which includes the electric train.

You can relate almost any topic to any topic with the insight 'money is fungible'. Using this to switch subjects to your favourite flamerant is bad, your comment was bad and you should feel bad.

They're downvoting because your argument is inflammatory, poorly informed and unpersuasive.

Please be specific. What is inflammatory? What is uninformed? It seems to be to just be ad hominem attacks.

It's largely irrelevant. A few million from college student fees is never allocated to the transportation portion of the budget. Also, the Department of Transportation (federal) has program for infrastructure. If you all don't want that money spent then ask the majority GOP to ax those programs. But as long as those programs exist then California and all other state governments have the right and duty to get as much return on those tax funded programs as possible.

> Not certain why people have a problem with that.

I'm even less certain you're willing to listen to anyone who tries to explain to you how faulty your logic is. Especially since you repeatedly try to distill down the complicated topics to bumperstickerisms.

Please explain why taxpayer funds should be funding people who live in this country illegally. To state that it is a bumperstickerism without providing an explanation for why this is so is an ad hominem attack.

The Federal government is also notoriously lax on prosecuting employers who use undocumented workers. Can you explain why:

a) the Fed withholding funds from California somehow "because" they have spent money supporting illegal aliens is somehow different from:

b) California wanting to withhold funding from the Fed because of their relative disinterest in prosecuting those who knowingly employ undocumented workers (thus exacerbating, if not indirectly causing situation A in the first place)?

I'll assume you are sincere, and write an answer. There are a few reasons I can think of.

1. They (people who live in this country illegally) and their families are often also taxpayers, so... why shouldn't they benefit?

2. It helps promote social stability and harmony.

3. It offers stable households for children growing up in their families.

4. It's the humane way to run a society. It makes our society more humane and less mean spirited, and thus better not just for them, but for the rest of us as well. Maybe this looks like a restatement of #2 but if you think about it, #2 follows from this one. Many of the points follow from each other. For example, the next one:

5. It arguably reduces the types of crimes that emerge when people are in desperate circumstances, which can include theft, burglary, violence, extortion, scamming, and others.

6. It increases public safety, for example if they can get driver licenses, then the existing system which gives everybody an incentive to learn and follow traffic rules will also apply to them, without the extra costs that would be incurred were we to deal with them as extraordinary cases using some other special system.

> Taxes should be only spent on people living in the US legally. Not certain why people have a problem with that.

So, you're saying we should get rid of ICE because it's tax money being spent on people who are not legal residents of the US?

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