Seems over-focussed on the economic impact. I have never seen a museum of concentration camp victims that highlighted how much they could have made number go up.
Hey, this is super fair. I debated whether to include these numbers, but I felt it was a powerful message that, in a time when no one can afford an emergency in the US, the average detainment would be a massive cost. I understand if you feel going further and having the big number and the tax number is a bit insensitive, but my thinking was this could be a convincing common ground for conservatives who only care about $$$.
Let me know if you think I could frame it better than I am, always open to feedback
I think the lost-revenue number is important and relevant, it underlines the hypocrisy of US fascism to be claiming on the one hand to balance the books while spending billions of dollars on performative cruelty. But I do think only presenting the numbers in isolation is insufficient, and comes off a little strange. Even a little blurb at the top (this is an unprecedented failure of the rule of law, ICE agents frequently arrest people illegally, this kind of thing) would be an improvement. It isn't actually clear at face value whether you think this project is morally wrong, or just expensive.
There are some quantitative questions it would be good to clarify, too. For instance, "convicted criminal" - does this cover people convicted of real crimes, or fake ones engineered by the administration? "pending criminal charges" - are these arrests illegal or likely illegal? should they be portrayed in a hostile light, or just neutrally, as if the courts are going to find these people guilty they just haven't got to it yet. Other useful segments that are relevant include the splitting up of families, the detention of children and the vulnerable, withholding of medication and religious materials. Unfortunately, the list goes on.
Definitely keep it. If someone is focused on the humanitarian aspect of this, they're the choir. No need to preach to them. See my above comment about including some credibly-neutral description of detention conditions, including the psychological aspect of there being zero process and total chaos.
My reply seems at face value to contradict this one, but I don't actually disagree, depending on what you mean by neutral. Certainly any comment should be based in facts, but I would be hard-pressed to describe what the admin is doing both truthfully and in a non-negative light.
Yea I was gonna say: frame it in some quantifiable terms of human suffering, except half the country enthusiastically cheers for human suffering, and would also turn it into a “suffering leaderboard.” We are living in dark times.
Not a museum, but you might be interested to know that a lot of historians argue that "the industrialists" in late 1920s and 1930s Germany went along with the holocaust because for a lot of them it just meant more business, and for some free labour.
In fact if you consider the question of what's the difference between "fascism" and "authoritarianism", the answer is that fascism is a subset of authoritarianism that focuses of business.
So yes, a lot of it is about money/business/economic impact. Always has been.
Yes, certainly. The economic effect of forced labour, and its impact on the motivations of people, is historically important. I only intended to question the highlighting. A statement like "people went along with the evils of the holocaust because they were motivated by money" is one thing; "a holocaust would be good for business" is another.
I think it's hard to capture in a few numbers - it's not exactly analogous, for instance in Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War, specifically her reports from Western European theater of WW2, she could never forget that part of the stated purpose by Nazi officals for those concentration camps and other captured peoples made to work for Nazi regime in other areas was to extract maximal economic value from them while working them to death and the German people as a whole felt essentially zero impact on their day to day life and benefited from the crops and material looted from captured territories or created by those captured by the Nazis, not to mention all the valuables looted from the people sent to concentration camps in forms of their business capital/jewelry/extracted gold teeth/other personal valuables. In one sense these current day agricultural/trade workers/labor system are subsidizing a lower price of some agricultural/trade products at least in the market we had. If we had a perfect market, the labor cost should go up in their absence to attract domestic workers in hand with end product cost though this has not happened in several prior crackdowns on undocumented immigrant labor in the USA. In addition to direct citizen monetary costs we might count a.) the spending on ICE b.) the discretionary funding by executive branch to farmers/ranchers to replace lost income as happened in aftermath of Trump's first term tariff regime.
