Several previous postings (here, here, and here) have discussed the importance of the rule of law issue in the illegal immigration debate.
Jennifer Roback Morse has written a very compelling piece, Immigration Reform, French-Style, which provides increased clarity to the public debate about illegal immigration and it follows below in its entirety:
Let’s get real basic with the immigration debate. No, I don’t mean a rerun of the debates on the economic impact or the numbers of immigrants or the difference between legal and illegal. No let’s get even more basic. Why are they here and what do they want?
The vast majority of immigrants from all over the world come here for economic opportunity. Why do they do that? Because we’re rich and they aren’t. To be more precise, we have a functioning economy that generates wealth and they don’t. Why does our economy work and theirs doesn’t? We have the rule of law and they don’t. Believe it or not, that one simple gift of our British heritage continues to pay large dividends to us and to the rest of the English-speaking world.
The rule of law means that one set of rules applies to everyone. There isn’t one set of rules for the people in power and another for the average Joe. It means that property rights are relatively secure. Whether you’re rich or poor, whether your family is in the government or in the gutter, you can buy, sell and own property and be pretty sure it will still be yours the next day. The rule of law and secure property rights creates an environment in which people can make investments, take financial risks and create wealth. We take it for granted that our savings will be in the bank where we left them. Most Americans don’t worry about leaving their homes or businesses unguarded.
How can you create corruption without really trying? Have laws that are not uniformly enforced. The principle of the rule of law says that the same laws apply to everyone, and that everyone knows roughly what the laws are and what penalties for non-compliance are. In many Third World countries, there are so many regulations that it is not possible to do business legally. Large portions of the economy operate underground, illegally, or as it is sometimes called, “informally.”
In a corrupt system, people who have connections can do better than the average Joe. If your brother-in-law is the police chief, you get your building permits and your business gets protection. If you are some poor schmuck trying to make a living, you might not. That uncertainty and that unfairness conspire to sap the energy people could be using to build better products, and in the process, hire more workers. Everything about this stifles capital formation and business development.
What does this have to do with the immigration debate? We have a set of immigration laws that are not being enforced. We also, obviously, are not enforcing our labor laws. The employers who hire illegal workers are almost certainly not in compliance with every aspect of our labor laws governing hours, wages, benefits and working conditions.
Both the immigration and labor laws lie in wait to be enforced when convenient. That’s a recipe for undermining the rule of law, the key thing that makes us richer than the rest of the world. This is true, regardless of the exact content of the laws. Any laws you don’t intend to enforce or that you intend to enforce selectively, invite corruption.
But as we look at how the immigration debate is unfolding, there are even more reasons to be concerned about the rule of law. The mass demonstrations of the past weeks reveal a much more sinister development: the arrival of French-style street politics in America.
Look at the control the French public employee unions have over public policy. More than a million people came out in the street to oppose a law that is an entirely reasonable attempt to deal with youth unemployment, which has been over 20 percent for a decade. The French public employee unions organize the students to fill the streets, scare the government and control the “debate.” It is policy-making through intimidation. France is a banana republic with bad weather. If the Left has its way, it will be coming to a street near you.
Left-wing groups are actively working the immigration debate. Leftist unions and organizations worked behind the scenes of the high school demonstrations of the past weeks. Think about it: a network of e-mails went out over the week-end of March 24-25. The next week, high school kids from all across the country “spontaneously” ditched school, aided and abetted by left-wing groups, including, in Los Angeles’ case, their own school officials.
The DC Clergy prayer service to support illegal immigrants was sponsored almost entirely by left-wing activist groups, cloaked in a thin veil of Christianity. The Center for Community Change, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, La Raza and other groups sponsored the prayer rally. These groups are far more about anti-American politics than they are about the Christian gospel.
My real fear about immigration is the continual importation of people who will be clients of the welfare state and the political apparatus that supports it. My parish has a lot of Mexicans. I love them. They could save the Catholic Church in America. It is a privilege to worship with them. On the other hand, I can’t stand the thought of Mexicans becoming lifelong clients of the radical left, with their identity politics, their self-righteous anti-Americanism, and their entitlement mentality. Whatever you believe about the balance between controlling the future flow of migrants and humanity to those already here, the introduction of French-style street politics is an ominous development.
If we import third world politics, we will destroy our first world economy. And everyone, native-born and immigrant alike, will be worse off for that.
(H/T to Democracy Project)
[Open full post]Does the rule of law matter anymore? Or do we now apply it selectively based on interest group policy preferences? Is the latter consistent with longstanding American principles? Is it consistent with a sense of fair play?
Aside from the national security issue, the primary philosophical and policy issue at the center of of the illegal immigration debate is whether America will honor the rule of law in our day-to-day life. The specific issue of granting in-state tuition to illegal immigrants here in Rhode Island is a subsidiary question, directly related to the broader rule of law issue. This broader issue is also one many people do not want to debate, especially those whose difficulties with the issue begin with an Orwellian inability to use the two words “illegal” and “immigrant” in the same sentence. The illegal immigration debate will never be properly resolved as long as the rule of law issue is avoided.
The unspoken, but crucial, impact of selectively applying the laws of our country means that any sense of fair play that would otherwise exist is gone. It is replaced by a world where outcomes are driven by the raw use of power, by who has the ability to vote favors-of-the-day for the desired interest groups. It is no less true that those favors will only last as long as political power remains unchanged, which then has the consequence of intensifying political combat. Politics morphs from being driven by eternal guiding principles such as those in the Declaration of Independence to trench warfare of a political nature, a change which only serves to polarize further our society.
Why did Martin Luther King, Jr.’s moral crusade for black civil rights in the 1960’s have such a powerful impact? To have any meaning, the rule of law requires laws be applied equally to all Americans. King forcefully reminded us how the principles of the American Founding took our society to an unprecedented level of freedom and equality. Nonetheless, he noted the job was not finished because black American citizens were not being treated with the equality that was their natural right as Americans. King knew what all students of history know – that it was a self-evident, albeit not then practiced, truth that such rights of black citizens preceded even the existence of our government because all of us are endowed by our Creator with those inalienable rights. This is the proper interpretation of how King’s moral crusade relates to the illegal immigration debate, a topic which was discussed under Core Issue #2 in the posting, Identifying Four Core Issues Underlying the Immigration Debate.
The debate about illegal immigration has also highlighted how our government – under both political parties – has consistently chosen not to enforce existing laws or to pass laws in conflict with existing laws, thereby further undermining the rule of law. That begs the question of what is the proper role of government, a question addressed by Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, in the second chapter of his classic work, Capitalism & Freedom:
…a good society requires acceptance by the players both of the rules and of the umpire to interpret and enforce them, so a good society requires that its members agree on the general conditions that will govern relations among them, on some means of arbitrating different interpretations of these conditions, and on some device for enforcing compliance with the generally accepted rules…In both games and society also, no set of rules can prevail unless most participants most of the time conform to them without external sanctions; unless that is, there is a broad underlying social consensus. But we cannot rely on custom or on this consensus alone to interpret and to enforce the rules; we need an umpire. These then are the basic roles of government in a free society: to provide a means whereby we can modify the rules, to mediate differences among us on the meaning of the rules, and to enforce compliance with the rules on the part of those few who would otherwise not play the game…
As an alternative to the clarity and logic of Friedman’s argument, you can always turn to the sloppy and Orwellian use of words at RIFuture. Be sure to read the comments section.
It is in this broader context of the illegal immigration debate that a legislative proposal to grant in-state tuition rights to illegal immigrants has arisen.
Today’s ProJo carries a news article on the latest developments on this proposed law:
If states have a responsibility to provide all students, even illegal immigrants, with a solid education, does that responsibility also include a college education?
That was the question in a State House hearing yesterday, as lawmakers and advocates debated extending in-state college tuition rates to all Rhode Island high-school graduates, regardless of immigration status. Currently, noncitizen students must provide a permanent resident card to qualify for in-state tuition.
“Limiting access to education has never proved to be a good thing for any country or state,” said state Rep. Grace Diaz, D-Providence, who sponsored the in-state tuition bill…
The two-hour hearing included some emotionally charged moments…At one point, state Rep. Arthur J. Corvese, D-North Providence, locked into a heated exchange about racism with Wilfred Ordonez, a community organizer for Progreso Latino.
“Racism is real, and it has existed throughout the entire history of our country,” Ordonez told the committee.
“There can be a legitimate dialogue and discourse without any racist motivation,” Corvese responded. “You cannot run to the racist card every time someone disagrees with your opinion.”
Major questions remain about the bill’s financial impact. The difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition is $7,312 a year at Rhode Island College and $12,642 a year at the University of Rhode Island…
URI President Robert L. Carothers testified that the bill would not cause problems with classroom capacity at the university. However, he asked the committee to consider removing a sentence that would prohibit public institutions of higher education from sharing information on students’ immigration status with “any governmental or nongovernmental agency.” Carothers said the university is required to report such information to the federal government, and faces penalties if it doesn’t…
Rhode Island will, no doubt, be watching a federal court case challenging a similar law in Kansas and a lawsuit in California challenging that state’s policy of allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition. The plaintiffs in the California case, three dozen University of California students, claim the policy discriminates against out-of-state students who are U.S. citizens…
An earlier posting clarified the relevant issues:
If you want a local example of how our General Assembly is also blurring the distinction between legal and illegal immigration, read how this bill grants illegal immigrants the right to pay in-state tuition costs at our state colleges – and then says the schools cannot share their information on the illegal status about such people with any government agencies. Wink, wink. Why pass a new law if we are going to knowingly not enforce existing laws? Now take a step back and think about the implications of this proposed bill: An American citizen born and raised in Massachusets will pay more to attend URI than an illegal immigrant. In other words, we are economically penalizing a law-abiding citizen and economically rewarding a law-breaking non-citizen. And that is just one small example of how illegal immigration and current amnesty proposals undermine the rule of law – and the sense of fair play – in America. All of us should send that message to the bill’s authors: Assembly members Grace Diaz, Joseph Almeida, Thomas Slater, and Anastasia Williams.
Unfortunately, the granting of in-state tuition rights to illegal immigrants is not limited to Rhode Island. As Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, writes:They’re doing so in clear defiance of congressional intent to make such preferential treatment unlawful. Title 8 Section 1623 of the U.S. Code (part of the Illegal Immigration Reform Act of 1996) provides in pertinent part:
Limitations on eligibility for preferential treatment of aliens not lawfully present on the basis of residence for higher education benefits
a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a State (or political subdivision) for any postsecondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such benefit without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident.So the problem is actually worse than expected here in Rhode Island. The introduction of this bill by these four legislators not only violates all sense of fair play, it violates Federal law. What kind of example are they setting for the residents of our state? For our children? It is an outrage that only encourages further disrespect for the rule of law.
The debate about the rule of law can be explained as a gut sense among Americans that we believe in fair play, in a level playing field. Many of us who are citizens and have spent our lifetime living by the rules of our country are offended that lawbreaking illegal immigrants are being granted additional unearned favors by legislators who don’t even have the courage to enforce existing laws.
The overriding issue here is not about education. It is about whether we will be a country that lives by the rule of law, by a sense of fair play that provides the basis for all Americans to live together peacefully.
Senator Jack Reed was one of just 16 Senators to vote against building 370 miles of new fencing along the U.S-Mexico border.
Whatever their positions on guest worker and amnesty programs, is a vote for open borders really a vote that most Rhode Islanders support?
Last week, the Senate voted to continue a filibuster against the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act of 2005. Here’s what the bill would do if passed.
Like all significant legislation relating to health insurance in America, this act relates to one of the most incomprehensible laws on the books — the Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). ERISA effectively divides health insurance into 3 regulatory classes…
- Employee sponsored plans, purchased through an insurance company,
- “Self-insured” plans, where a large company or labor union directly administers a health insurance plan, and
- Everything else.
A key provision of ERISA prohibits states from regulating ERISA-qualified plans (list items 1 and 2) any more strictly than the Federal government does. ERISA bars states from imposing any conditions on “self-insured” plans at all. However, ERISA also expressly reserves to the states certain powers to regulate insurance companies. Thus, although states cannot mandate the breadth of coverage provided by an employer, they are allowed to mandate the minimum coverage that must be provided by the insurance companies operating within their borders.
The final result is that big corporations and labor unions — entities with enough people to support a go-it-alone self-insurance program — can do whatever they want. Everyone else is strictly regulated by the government, via direct regulation of the insurance business.
What the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act would do is add a new class of plans to the ERISA regime. Trade associations and other commercially-oriented non-profits would be allowed to pool their employees for the purposes of purchasing “Small Business Health Plans” (SBHPs). SBHPs would be granted an exemption from state mandates similar to the exemption that self-insured plans already have (though the current version of the bill prohibits organizations qualified to offer SBHPs from self-insuring; I suspect this measure was added to the bill to placate the insurance industry, who would lose a great deal of business if trade associations were allowed to self-insure).
Since many trade associations have a national scope, this bill would give small businesses the opportunity to “cross state lines” to find a mixture of health insurance costs and coverage suiting their employees when available state-regulated insurance is too expensive. The law would not create a new category of “special rights” for SBHPs — it would simply give SBHPs the special rights that big-entity self-insured plans already enjoy.
The Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization Act is a baby step in the right direction. But it’s only baby step, because much of the healthcare “crisis” in America, and especially the crisis of healthcare “portability”, is an artificial one, created by the unintended consequences of government regulation and ERISA in particular. [Open full post]
I wish I could offer some little bit of insightful commentary on the President’s speech. Unfortunately, I dozed off shortly after his use of the “the vast majority of” construction. On the bright side, the nap left me revivified for the season finale of Prison Break. The frustration: that I had to wait an extra twenty minutes for the show and the writers still ended the season with a cliffhanger.
Maybe next season the President will have something worthwhile to say.
ADDENDUM:
Now that I’ve gotten a (somewhat) full night’s sleep, perhaps two examples of the mentality that’s causing my ennui are in order. From the speech:
Many use forged documents to get jobs, and that makes it difficult for employers to verify that the workers they hire are legal.
This statement — picked up later in the speech, as well — seems to me to deliberately skirt the central point. The President says that we must “hold employers to account for the workers they hire,” but the advanced ID card that he then proposes speaks not at all to the penalties to those who hire them for the very reason that they are outside of the system and, therefore, cheap. What does it mean to “hold them to account”? Where is the stiffening of punishments and the funding for additional manpower to seek them out?
Illegal immigration puts pressure on public schools and hospitals, it strains state and local budgets, and brings crime to our communities.
This idea disappears as soon as it’s voiced — as if thrown out there for small-government types to nibble on. What the President did not include is a suggestion that government services should not, in most instances, be available for illegal immigrants. They aren’t “putting pressure” on our public systems via some force of nature; they’re doing so because we let them.
In short, as perhaps best represented in his policy-free exhortation to assimilate, the President has suggested no force for motivation to enter into the system.
Back in 2000, Thomas Sowell wrote an editorial, Useful Idiots (H/T Power Line), in which he stated:
Lenin is supposed to have referred to blind defenders and apologists for the Soviet Union in the Western democracies as “useful idiots.” Yet even Lenin might have been surprised at how far these useful idiots would carry their partisanship in later years — including our own times.
Stalin’s man-made famine in the Soviet Union during the 1930s killed more millions of people than Hitler killed in the Holocaust — and Mao’s man-made famine in China killed more millions than died in the USSR. Yet we not only hear little or nothing about either of these staggering catastrophes in the Communist world today, very little was said about them in the Western democracies while they were going on. Indeed, many useful idiots denied that there were famines in the Soviet Union or in Communist China.
The most famous of these was the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for telling people what they wanted to hear, rather than what was actually happening. Duranty assured his readers that “there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.” Moreover, he blamed reports to the contrary on “rumor factories” with anti-Soviet bias.
It was decades later before the first serious scholarly study of that famine was written, by Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, always identified in politically correct circles as “right-wing.” Yet when the Soviets’ own statistics on the deaths during the famine were finally released, under Mikhail Gorbachev, they showed that the actual deaths exceeded even the millions estimated by Dr. Conquest.
Official statistics on the famine deaths in China under Mao have never been released, but knowledgeable estimates run upwards of 20 million people. Yet, even here, there were the same bland denials by sympathizers and fellow travellers in the West as during the earlier Soviet famine…
Today, even after the evidence of massive man-made famines in the Communist world, after Solzhenitsyn’s revelations about the gulags and after the horrors of the killing fields of Cambodia, the useful idiots continue to deny or downplay staggering human tragedies under Communist dictatorships. Or else they engage in moral equivalence, as Newsweek editor and TV pundit Eleanor Clift did during the Elian Gonzalez controversy, when she said: “To be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami and I’m not going to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously.”
Apparently totalitarian dictatorship is just a lifestyle, like wearing sandals and beads and using herbal medicine. It apparently has not occurred to Eleanor Clift to ask why poor people in Miami do not put themselves and their children on flimsy boats, in a desperate effort to reach Cuba.
Elian Gonzalez and his mother were only the latest of millions of people to flee Communist dictatorships at the risk of their lives…
Yet none of this has really registered on a very large segment of the intelligentsia in the West. Nor are Western capitalists immune to the same blindness. The owner of the Baltimore Orioles announced that he would not hire baseball players who defect from Cuba, because this would be an “insult” to Castro. TV magnate Ted Turner has sponsored a TV mini-series on the Cold War that has often taken the moral equivalence line.
Turner’s instructions to the historian who put this series together was that he wanted no “triumphalism,” meaning apparently no depiction of the triumph of democracy over Communism. Various scholars who have specialized in the study of Communist countries have criticized the distortions in this mini-series in a recently published book titled CNN’s Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy, edited by Arnold Beichman.
Meanwhile, that moral-equivalence mini-series is being spread through American schools from coast to coast, as if to turn our children into the useful idiots of the future.
The issues of education, multiculturalism, and relativism have been highlighted in an earlier posting, Becoming Americans.
[Open full post]Senator John McCain (R-AZ) prides himself on his “straight talk.” However, recent times have shown that his appreciation for his own free speech does not frequently apply to others’ right to free speech.
First, he led the effort to curtail free speech via the euphemism called campaign finance reform.
Second, George Will recently captured some McCain comments which showed a genuine lack of respect for free speech:
Presidents swear to “protect and defend the Constitution.” The Constitution says: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” On April 28, on Don Imus’ radio program, discussing the charge that the McCain-Feingold law abridges freedom of speech by regulating the quantity, content and timing of political speech, John McCain did not really reject the charge:
“I work in Washington and I know that money corrupts. And I and a lot of other people were trying to stop that corruption. Obviously, from what we’ve been seeing lately, we didn’t complete the job. But I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government.”
Question: Were McCain to take the Presidential oath, what would he mean?
In his words to Imus, note the obvious disparagement he communicates by putting verbal quotation marks around “First Amendment rights.” Those nuisances.
Then ponder his implicit promise to “complete the job” of cleansing Washington of corruption, as McCain understands that. Unfortunately, although McCain is loquacious about corruption, he is too busy deploring it to define it. Mister Straight Talk is rarely reticent about anything, but is remarkably so about specifics…
Anyway, he vows to “complete the job” of extirpating corruption, regardless of the cost to freedom of speech. Regardless, that is, of how much more the government must supervise political advocacy.
President McCain would, it is reasonable to assume, favor increasingly stringent limits on what can be contributed to, or spent by, campaigns. Furthermore, McCain seems to regard unregulated political speech as an inherent invitation to corruption. And he seems to believe that anything done in the name of “leveling the playing field” for political competition is immune from First Amendment challenges.
The logic of his doctrine would cause him to put the power of the Presidency behind efforts to clamp government controls on Internet advocacy…It is extending to regulation in the name of “fairness.” Bob Bauer, a Democratic lawyer, says this about the metastasizing government regulation of campaigns:“More and more, it is meant to regulate any money with the potential of influencing elections; and so any unregulated but influential money, in whichever way its influence is felt or achieved, is unfair.” This explains the hand-wringing horror with which the reform community approached the Internet’s fast-growing use and limitless potential.
This is why the banner of “campaign reform” is no longer waved only by insurgents from outside the political establishment. Washington’s most powerful people carry the banner: Led by Speaker Dennis Hastert, and with the President’s approval, the Republican-controlled House recently voted to cripple the ability of citizens’ groups called 527s (named after the provision of the tax code under which they are organized) to conduct independent advocacy that Washington’s ruling class considers “unfair.”…
Proof that incumbent politicians are highly susceptible to corruption is the fact that the government they control is shot through with it. Yet that government should be regarded as a disinterested arbiter, untainted by politics and therefore qualified to regulate the content, quantity and timing of speech in campaigns that determine who controls the government. In the language of McCain’s Imus appearance, the government is very much not “clean,” but is so clean it can be trusted to regulate speech about itself…
McCain told Imus that he would, if necessary, sacrifice “quote First Amendment rights” to achieve “clean” government. If on Jan. 20, 2009, he were to swear to defend the Constitution, would he be thinking that the oath refers only to “the quote Constitution”? And what would that mean?
Third, McCain’s words were dripping with condescension when he slammed the free speech exercised by bloggers in his recent speech at Liberty University:
When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.
Unfortunately, none of this surprises people anymore because it is now clear that the only right to free speech Senator McCain believes in is his own. And that means he fails the “presidential timber” test.
[Open full post]Today’s Washington Times had an article entitled Kirkpatrick hit liberals for blaming America first, in which she was quoted as saying:
“I worked very hard on that Dallas speech, and I believe the charges I made were defensible and that I could document them,” Mrs. Kirkpatrick, 79, says as she sorts through old manuscripts in the living room of her Bethesda home. “At that time, there really were very widespread attacks on Ronald Reagan and the Reagan administration. I thought they were unreasonably harsh, and that’s what I was referring to.”
While foreign policy led her away from her former party, Mrs. Kirkpatrick also had domestic policy differences with Democrats.
“Democrat welfare policy not only was not working but was damaging to the people who were the supposed beneficiaries,” she says. “I believe in self-reliance.”
Her own current foreign policy views seem not quite to match either party’s talking points.
“I don’t think we have an obligation to engage in a new imperialism,” says Mrs. Kirkpatrick, who adds that she is “skeptical of nation-building. It is extremely difficult for one nation to seriously remake another nation.”
She calls President Bush’s foreign policy “a little too interventionist for my taste, frankly — but not across the board. I am very much in favor of his actions in Afghanistan and have not opposed them in Iraq.”…
If you want to read her 1984 speech, it can be found in the posting, Revisiting Jean Kirkpatrick’s “Blame America First Democrats” Speech.
[Open full post]As had been predicted, Senator Chafee voted against the reaffirmation of President Bush’s tax cuts. Meanwhile, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee has discovered that lower taxes are actually more “Progressive”:
Debate over changes in the tax code often focuses on who benefits most from such changes. Most of this debate hinges on tax distribution tables that measure the impact of tax law changes on the tax liabilities of various income groups. However, many newspaper articles and think tank reports fail to consider the current progressivity of the existing tax code when discussing the benefits of tax cuts for various income groups.
For example, it is important to note that up to 40 percent of federal income tax filers cannot receive further tax relief because these taxpayers do not in effect pay federal income taxes. Millions of families, many in the bottom fifth, have either zero tax liability or receive a net transfer from the government due to the refundable portion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and/or the Child Tax Credit (CTC).
In addition, millions of people do not earn enough to file a tax return. Hence, these nonfilers, plus many of those that file tax returns in the bottom fifth, do not actually pay federal income taxes and, due to the refundable portion of the EITC and/or the CTC, many do not in effect pay payroll taxes.
Here [PDF] is the brief, 2-page report. Included is this nice chart that lays it all out (via TaxProf):
The top one percent of tax filers paid 34.27 percent of federal personal income taxes in 2003, while the top ten percent accounted for 65.84 percent of these taxes. To be counted in the top one percent, taxpayers needed an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) of $295,495 or more. The 2003 AGI cut-off amount for the top ten percent was $94,891, while the cut-off amount for the top/bottom fifty percent was $29,019. Again, it is important to note that many returns in the bottom half report zero or negative federal income tax liability.
These IRS data illustrate the steeply progressive nature of the federal income tax. Further, data on the number of non-filers, tax shares and the number of taxpayers effectively paying zero federal income taxes must be considered before any valid distributional evaluation of various income tax proposals or legislation can be made.
Couple this with the established fact that tax revenues have increased since President Bush’s tax cuts were implemented (as they have in the past) and I’d say that current tax policy is a Progressives dream!
[Open full post]Follow along to understand the problem with the Marxist philosophy(*) espoused by Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Stephen Fortunato in Wednesday’s Projo.
1. Start in a place where Marxists and non-Marxists can find common ground. People get compensated differently for the work they do and there’s not always a strong correlation between some quantity like “importance to society” (or even “importance to your company”) and income received.
2. So how are incomes allocated? At present, they are determined by a market system, which Judge Fortunato believes to be inherently amoral…
In sum, globalization, whether called imperialism or capitalism, is neither benign nor moral for the majority of the earth’s 6 billion people. It has always been thus, and there is nothing inherent in capitalism — whose only guiding principles are increasing profits and cutting costs — that results in just wages and benefits for all…
The exorbitant salaries and lavish lifestyles of corporate profiteers is not a result of irresistible natural forces but, rather, of their domination of economic and political power. An executive makes $12 million a year not because some free-market force dictates this, or because of his inherent worth to the community, but because of decisions by executive-pay consultants and cross-pollinated boards of directors, who sup at the same trough.
3. Since capitalism is neither “benign nor moral”, Judge Fortunato wants to do away with it. In Judge Fortunato’s opinion, to reject that “fundamental changes in the current economic order” are necessary is to accept a “dire and fatalistic view”.
4. Wanting to do away with a system because it is neither benign nor moral implies there is a system more benign and moral that can replace it. The Judge doesn’t tell us in his op-ed what the new system is, but he does drop a few clues…
4a. The new system will be based on the “laws of right”…
The 19th Century philosopher of art and social reformer John Ruskin put it well: “It [is] the privilege of the fishes as it is of rats and wolves to live by the laws of demand and supply; but the distinction of humanity, to live by those of right.”
4b. The new system must be powerful enough to mandate income levels for everybody…
Equally unjust and irrational economic arrangements lead to the payment of exorbitant amounts of money to celebrities and sports figures, but no one could legitimately argue that the absence of Britney Spears or Paris Hilton — or even Johnny Damon — from society’s stage would be as calamitous as the departure of local nurses or garbage collectors.
5. But who will determine what the “laws of right” are? And who will determine how much income each person rationally and justly deserves?
Trying to answer these questions leads straight to the heart of the internal contradiction that ultimately unravels any socialist argument.
Having decried the “domination of economic and political power” by a few, Judge Fortunato implies that the remedy is more consolidation of economic and political power in a single set of hands; what is needed is a government powerful enough to manage all economic activity in a country so as to guarantee that everything is “fair” according to the “laws of right”.
But on what basis does the Judge assume that the people that rise to the top of his unspecified ideal system will be any more benign and moral than the people at the top of the current system? He doesn’t answer that question, ignoring the fact that the oligarchs in his centrally-planned dystopia will have much more power to pursue selfish interests at the expense of everyone else than do the elites in a free-market system.
Ultimately, Winston Churchill said it best…
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
The same sentiment can be applied to capitalism and economic systems.
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