So . . . . . . Eva Longoria is making her Mexico home permanent, to escape her “dystopian” home in the United States. She’s married to a very wealthy Mexican businessman and can afford such foolishness.
This woman has to be mentally challenged. I grew up on the Mexican border. There is no element of the Mexican government, including law enforcement, that isn’t thoroughly corrupt. Mexico is a handful of fabulously wealthy, 10% middle class and 90% incredibly poor. The government is useless, and the cartels rule half the country . . . if not the whole kit and caboodle, in one way or another!
Ex-Pats can live well in Mexico if they have a little money. That, plus its proximity to the U.S., is why it’s a popular retirement possibility for many. But you’d better not be dependent in any way on Mexico, and that includes dependent on the police, the fire departments, decent roads, transportation, reliable utilities, any kind of permitting or permission to do anything
I think the cartels have probably priced Mexico out of the old “mordida” economy. The days of a few bucks here or there are long gone, These days you need millions to build very high, electrified walls around your estate and to hire a large contingency of private security (who may well work for the cartels on the side). So, think twice before “escaping” the U.S. into Mexico.
Any place else in the world has its own drawbacks. Some countries are just difficult to move to . . . too much redtape. Others are really expensive. Still others are like Mexico, mismanaged and corrupt. While affordable airfare has made it even more palatable to live in faraway places, because it makes the occasional visit “home” possible, don’t kid yourselves. You aren’t moving to a utopian existence.
I’ve visited and even lived in far away places, and I loved every minute of it. I’m a natural-born traveler. But no matter where I visited, for whatever length of time, I had America to go home to. Whatever problems the U.S. had or whichever unwanted politics ruled temporarily, nothing about living in the U.S. was inferior to any place else in the world.
Eva can afford to make her statement. Staying in her mansion in Mexico until she gets offered a job in Los Angeles that let’s her pretend to be relevant. But the truth is that no one cares where rich people that live behind high walls are. No one! In fact, for the most part, those people who are so far removed from the way the rest of us live have an outsized influence on our politics. I’m happy to see them go!
So, what reality are we moving into with the election of Donald Trump? Well, let’s see. He was president for four years. Unlike either Obama or Biden, did his law enforcement agencies go after any journalist or political opponent? NO! Did he lower taxes on all Americans? YES! Did all minorities improve their financial positions? YES! Did he usher in justice reform that benefited minorities? YES! Did he begin to get the southern border closed? YES! Were our streets safer? YES! Did he rebuild the military? YES! Did our friends respect us and our enemies fear us? YES! Were we energy independent? YES! And did Trump do it all while he was hounded by Democrats and lawfare? YES!
Trump is a “promises made, promises kept” politician. He may well be the only one we’ve seen in a hundred years. This time around he’s promised much of what he promised, and accomplished, in 2016, and then watched as Biden tore it down. But he’s also promised something that we’ve been promised by every hack politician since the turn of the 20th century, to root out waste and corruption in every agency and department.
If Trump can accomplish that, he will go down as the most consequential president in American history. It surely won’t be easy. The U.S. government is a criminal enterprise in so many ways. At the bureaucrat level, we’ve seen no reform, ever. But I think that the D.O.G.E. attitude of this administration can get it done . . . starting with the roughly 50% of workers who work from home.
