If you're reading this and live in California, you should strongly consider the 3rd parties on the ballot. Obama's got the state locked up by 15-20 points, so there's no risk in third party voting. Obama will win, Romney will lose. This will happen however you vote.

So take a look at the 3rd parties, and if one of them more closely matches your views, support them. Don't waste your vote on parties you don't believe in.

Parties also can implode and die (Whigs, Federalists, ...)

What services? Please be specific.

Before you cite services like roads, fire protection, etc, please go look at what your taxes are actually spent on: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2010_US_total

From another vantage point, as a health economist recently said: vis a vis access to health care, you're better off as a homeless person in the United States in 2012 than President Dwight Eisenhower was during his term of office. Meanwhile, the rural poor of Asia are probably still nowhere nearly as well off as Ike was. They still die of polio.

I don't favor prioritizing the millions of people in the US who already suffer the problem of not being allowed to live and work here - illegal immigrants have already demonstrated a willingness to break our laws.

The government's institution of property rights, which are protected by the police, army, courts, etc, makes everything around us possible. Without that basic order, there is no wealth creation. In the state of nature, a skinny nerd like Mark Zuckerberg is not king. In the state of nature, the kings are the people in the gangs: young, strong, capable of using and organizing force. I don't believe in a god that says "thou shalt not steal" or "thou shalt not kill." I have to depend on a utilitarian justification for the existence of property rights: that they allow the existence of the kind of complex society necessary to create wealth.

The imposition of this wealth-creating order is not free, and the cost is not just what we spend enforcing order. The cost is enormous: taking away the only natural ability common to all people: taking what you need. When we create property rights that allow a landowner to own vastly more land than he could personally defend, we take away the ability of people to hunt and fish and subsist on that land as they would in nature.

I believe that programs like welfare, food stamps, etc, are the moral obligation concomitant with the imposition of this highly artificial order. The order exists because it results in the greatest good for the greatest number, but in the process it creates a class of losers. I believe we have an obligation to take care of, as we can, the losers created by our order. I consider such expenditures to be a cost of creating that order that ultimately makes my income possible.

You don't have to agree with me. I think it's immoral to impose an order that prevents people from fending for themselves outside that order, and then to not provide for them. You may disagree with that.

Beyond that, even if you disagree with that premise, line item thinking is still nonsensical. For example, take the spending on Medicare and social security. You can disagree with whether national insurance is the most economically efficient way to take care of the elderly, but the cost wouldn't disappear if we got rid of those systems. Instead, the elderly would move back in with their kids, as they have done through human history. The cost to you is not the cost of the program, but the cost of the program minus the cost of taking care of your parents yourself. This is generally true for every line item--you have to engage in an alternatives analysis instead of chalking up the whole dollar value as not benefitting you.

Moreover, in many situations the cost to provide a service would be much higher without the government. For example, consider the 15% of all spending that goes to education. Our modern society would not be possible without this education, and employers benefit from it tremendously (what is the incremental benefit to an employer of someone who can't read versus someone with a public education?) People act like education is something that benefits individuals, but at the end of the day, an individual only benefits from his own education. An employer benefits from the education of each of his employees. And due to the public good nature of education, it's unlikely employers could provide it more cheaply than the government.

In general, I find the approach of "look how much we spend on X" to be intellectually lazy. Nearly every $1 you spend on taxes benefits you in some way. The debate is not about whether it does, but how much it does relative to that $1 and whether there are alternatives that cost less than $1.

Go back to the original point:

  "Another major issue is the fact that millions of people from the poorest places on earth (I'm not talking about wealthy nations like Mexico here) could be lifted from poverty. The vast majority (i.e., >95%) of India lives in what would be considered dire poverty in the US. Upper class individuals in the poshest suburbs of Mumbai suffer living conditions comparable to the poorest housing projects in the US. All we need to do to lift them from poverty is allow them to enter the US and provide us cheap medical services, clean our houses and the like."

Moreover, the "cheap medical" bit isn't correct. It's not labor shortages that are causing all the runaway costs in healthcare, and to pretend that bringing over physicians will somehow improve our situation (without explicitly saying how) is just wishful thinking.

There is still more issue with "Oh, well, they can do menial jobs and suchlike, and clean our houses." We already have folks for that--normal immigrants and illegals, no less--and additionally it creates yet more lower class issues. The problems we have with the economic gap here persist and are worsened by this sort of thinking, regardless of any absolute scale of poverty.

And then, the signals bit.

If you want to talk about signals, observe the point--however odious it may be--that a reliable signal we have from the poor is that they both are unskilled enough not to be desirable additions to our economy and irresponsible enough to continue breeding and voting. I can support this signal however you'd like with a straight face.

Signals, sir, are whatever you interpret them to be, regardless of origin or intent.

Compare that with another signal from illegals here--that they care enough about quality of life, for themselves and their children, that they'll willingly do whatever it takes to become part of the economy and community (note that I did not say citizenry, as they do not use official channels to becomes citizens).

~

All this annoyance aside, I'd much rather see an attempt to upgrade their countries and societies in place than flood our own lower classes with more immigrants, especially if we can't even come to terms with existing problems like our resident illegal alien population.

The fact that the two of you have made such observations about the illegal immigrants tells me that we've a ways to go before we should even consider helping out people abroad.

Could you justify this claim? Or is this simply an axiom of yours?

(As an aside, why again is it undesirable to simply help them get running water and schools in their own countries?)

It's not. It's just not as cost effective. Building running water in India is not under our control, nor is it free. Allowing people to live and work in the US has a negative cost - we benefit from their labor, and they benefit from our consistent water supply.

I think those benefits outweigh any liberal angst created by increased inequality (within US borders) and decreased global inequality.