A little Migrithmetic today…
A Maskachusetts resident with no W-2 or 1099 income gets $291 per month in SNAP/EBT (“food stamps”). Someone who walked across the border recently gets $1920/month in taxpayer-funded meals ($64/day). “How much is Massachusetts spending to shelter and feed migrants and homeless? I-Team obtains vendor contracts” (CBS):
Massachusetts has not been shy about how much money the shelter and migrant crisis is costing taxpayers. The I-Team looked into where some of the money is being spent, obtaining vendor contracts for services and hotels, including a no-bid contract for $10 million for a company providing meals.
WBZ first reported finding dozens of migrant families sleeping at Logan Airport, and the state is housing hundreds of others in overflow shelters like the one at Melnea Cass Recreation Complex.
But these locations do not include the thousands of homeless and migrants living in hotels and motels. So just how much money is the state paying for lodging?
Records obtained by the I-Team show the state has 17 contracts for housing totaling more than $116 million. Those contracts are only for fiscal year 2024 and end in June.
In some cases, the hotels are collecting money from the state for three meals a day, $16 for breakfast, $17 for lunch and $31 for dinner. That means $64 dollars a day per person.
Also covered by the Deplorables at the Daily Mail under the headline “Boston’s migrant shelter luxury: State pays $16 for breakfast, $17 for lunch and $31 for dinner as they live in hotels for free after entering the US illegally”. (A headline that will brighten any hotel owner’s day! You can choose 100 percent occupancy with migrants or raise your rates as former competitor hotels remove their inventory from hotels.com and similar.)
Meanwhile, state-sponsored media says that Texas has unwisely spent $1,450 per migrant to send them to Democrat-run cities and that it is “inhumane” to send a human to where he/she/ze/they can get weekly abortion care and gender affirming surgery. (If an all-Democrat state or city is a model society, second in virtue only to Hamas-run Gaza, why is helping someone to relocate there “inhumane”?)
It is tough to get an all-in number for what Massachusetts spends on migrants’ housing, health care, and food, but the estimated cost is $400 per day per migrant in New York City (source). In other words, after four days, taxpayers in NYC have spent more on each of their new neighbors than Texas spent to send them to NYC. (We are informed that migrants reduce crime and enrich host cities and countries economically and culturally, so NYC will ultimately come out ahead on its $146,000/year investment in each migrant.) Presumably the costs are similar in the Boston area.
A friend who likes to take full advantage of the McDonald’s app and refuses to spend more than about $5 per meal showed me a typical receipt:
In other words, a Migrant family of three could have enjoyed a delicious lunch for less than $1.50 per person had they been willing to walk through the miserable Boston weather to the nearest Scottish restaurant.
If an all-Democrat state or city is a model society, second in virtue only to Hamas-run Gaza, why is helping someone to relocate there “inhumane”? It’s not.
Unrelated for this thread, but one of the blog’s favorite topic: broken refrigerators! LG fridges are failing, but they snuck a clause on the box so owners can’t sue:
(still unrelated to this thread)
In a state like California, where warning labels are everywhere, it’s surprising there’s no explicit warning label given to Californian’s to warn them that corporations can screw you!
Anon: Thanks for that. Why is arbitration bad? Do we know that the arbitrators will be more pro-LG than a small claims court? The cost of a fridge makes it kind of an unfit subject for real litigation. If not for the clause maybe a law firm could organize a class action lawsuit, but the usual result of that would be $50 million in fees to the law firm and a $19 coupon to every harmed consumer good toward the purchase of a new LG fridge so that the cycle can start over.
Also… just made my first service call for the new Sub-Zero. It has a touch screen interface smack in the middle for changing the set temperature and an app that alerts you when the set temp is changed. Every few days the fridge will change its own set temp even though the door is closed and nobody has been touching the touch screen. I should probably check to make sure it isn’t being brushed by some items stored in the door.
I just double-checked and the touch screen is covered by the bottom of a door shelf when the fridge is closed so I don’t think that there any way for something that a consumer stores in the fridge to touch the screen. It’s some sort of ghost!
@Philip, you left out from your calculation the the amount of $$ we send to the country of those illegal migrants.
And a reminder to our readers, that we don’t spend US $$ fast enough “The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days” [1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html