by Johnny Dwyer
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by Rusty Weiss And Jeff Dunetz
by Melissa Quinn
{ economics21.org } ~ Last year I published a study with the Mercatus Center projecting that enacting Medicare for All (M4A) would add at least $32.6 trillion to federal budget costs over the first 10 years... After the study was published, some advocates misattributed a finding to it, specifically that M4A would lower national healthcare costs by $2 trillion over that same time period. This misattribution has since been repeated in various press reports. Multiple fact-checking sites have pointed out that the study contains no such finding, as did a follow-up piece I published with e21 last year. However, because the mistake continues to appear occasionally, this article provides additional detail about how and why it is wrong. First, some brief background on the study itself. The study estimated the federal budget costs of M4A, as this is an important number that would guide Congress’s procedural points of order if such legislation were considered. The study did not focus on aggregate changes to national health spending under M4A, in part because such estimates do not affect Congress’s legislative procedures. Whenever Congress considers legislation with budgetary significance, such as a new federal program or a tax cut, its procedures are affected by what the bill would do to federal spending, revenues, and deficits, but not private-sector spending. For example, no Congress would consider a large tax cut as having zero budgetary effect, based on the irrelevant rationale that the reduction in federal revenues would be offset by an equal gain in taxpayers’ after-tax income. Accordingly, my study’s estimates, like any performed by the Congressional Budget Office, focused on M4A’s effects on the federal budget rather than on other areas of the U.S. economy. This is a primary reason why neither the $2 trillion figure nor any other such estimate appears in the study. However, a critical additional reason why the attribution of $2 trillion in savings is wrong is that it is inconsistent with the study’s conclusions. Some have attempted to convert the study’s lower-bound federal cost estimate of $32.6 trillion into an estimate of savings in national health spending, arriving at the $2 trillion number. It is incorrect to do so, as the following analogy may help to explain. Imagine that members of a family have separate cell-phone data plans that add up to $57 a month. Now imagine the following conversation...
Fellow Americans, you’ve seen it all before. The broken promises to “do something” about illegal immigration that amounted to nothing, even when each political party had complete control of Congress and the White House. The bankrupt arguments, like the contemptible idea America should tolerate wholly avoidable crimes, including rape and murder, because illegals commit them at “lesser rates” than native-born Americans. The judicial activism, as in preventing the Trump administration from transferring Pentagon funds to border-wall construction, or forbidding it from withholding grants from sanctuary cities that openly defy immigration law. And the wreckage of lives perpetrated by drug cartels, to the point where the number of lives lost to drug overdoses exceeds the number of those killed in car crashes.
Thus, Americans are enduring a wholesale invasion of our nation. One so egregious the number of apprehended illegals could top one million just in FY2019, a total that is surpassed only by the 10 most populous cities in the nation.
And you’ve witnessed every bit of it abetted by open-border, nation-state-despising, “abolish ICE!” leftists, many of whom believe that any attempt to preserve our customs, culture, language, and exceptionalism is tantamount to white nationalism.
When President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, the Democrat/Media Complex assured the nation he was “manufacturing a crisis,” that he was “abusing” the Constitution, and that Congress was the only entity that could address the issues that would effectively eliminate the problem. Yet the legislative branch has failed to address issues such as birthright citizenship, E-Verify, visa-overstays, the Flores Settlement that requires government to release children detained by ICE within 20 days, and the idea that an asylum claim automatically gets one entry into America, even though international standards require asylum-seekers to claim it in the first safe country they enter.
Lawmakers’ calculated impotence is no accident. “For decades politicians made statements about how our immigration laws must be enforced and our borders secured against the illegal and uninspected entry of aliens, while making certain never to implement the measures to actually achieve those commonsense and achievable goals,” columnist Michael Cutler explains.
They have an equally recalcitrant ally. “Mexico … refuses to sign a ‘safe third country’ agreement with the United States — this despite Mexico having incredibly generous asylum laws that are even broader than our own,” writes columnist Rachel Bovard, who further asserts that Mexico is the key to solving the crisis.
Mexican President President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has other ideas. “‘America First’ is a fallacy because until the end of times, even beyond national borders, justice and universal fraternity will prevail,” he asserts.
Thus, the game continues. Trump’s proposal for a merit-based immigration system that would raise skill-based immigration from 12% to 57% of the total, and decrease family-based and lottery-based immigration by 50%? A deflection.
His promise to impose a 5% tariff on all Mexican imports beginning June 10, and rising to 25%, if Mexico does not take action to “reduce or eliminate the number of illegal aliens” crossing the border? “This is a misuse of presidential tariff authority and counter to congressional intent,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) insists. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) agrees. “Senator Cornyn supports the president’s commitment to securing our border, but he opposes this across-the-board tariff which will disproportionately hurt Texas,” a Cornyn spokesperson said.
Disproportionately hurt Texas? Compared to what? “‘We’ve never seen anything like this’: As Trump threatens to close border, migrants overwhelm Texas cities,” stated a USA Today headline — in March.
April? “On Wednesday, CBP reported ‘off the charts’ figures for the number of migrants apprehended at the border in April,” Fox News reports. “109,144 people were encountered trying to illegally enter the U.S., up from 103,719 in March and a 160 percent increase over the previous year.”
May? An NBC News headline says it all: “Record number of undocumented immigrants flooded the southern border in May.”
Mexico’s response to the proposed tariff? “Mexico’s top diplomats issued a veiled threat to the U.S. government suggesting that without their efforts, 250,000 more Central American migrants could proceed north,” Breitbart News reveals.
Central American migrants? “Border officials in Texas say a group of 116 Africans was arrested Thursday after wading through the Rio Grande to enter the United States,” Fox News reports. “The migrants were from Angola, Cameroon and other African nations and include families with children and young people who were not with relatives.”
In other words, how to game America’s immigration system is becoming common knowledge worldwide.
Enough. America currently maintains 28,500 active-duty troops on a South Korean border they have defended since 1953. And as columnist George Neumayr reminds us, the same Congress that refuses to address the problem at America’s border gives “billions of dollars to governments across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.” Moreover, that funding “combined with the astronomical costs of U.S. military protection, allow those countries to seal off their borders” (italics added).
It’s time to seal our border the same way. And it’s time to ignore the voices that insist it will violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, prohibiting the use of U.S. military forces to perform civilian law-enforcement tasks without congressional authorization. Mexico has demonstrated for years it is willing to behave as a hostile power. Cartel-driven human and drug trafficking need to be treated like the terrorist operations they are. And caravans are being organized for the sole purpose of breaching our border.
Repelling an organized invasion abetted by heavily armed cartel members is not civilian law enforcement. Moreover, nothing but a complete border shutdown enforced by troops will force Congress to act and Mexico to behave.
Ruling-class mandarins who speak of the dire economic consequences of such a move? As always, globalist-minded elites with armed security, who erect walls around their houses and their neighborhoods, and who send their children to private schools and access first-class medical care — all of which is wholly unaffected by massive illegal immigration — couldn’t care less about “racist deplorables” forced to endure the orchestrated descent into Third World-ism.
A descent that will entrench those same elitists in permanent positions of power.
As stated above, the number of apprehended illegals this year is likely to exceed the population of Austin, Texas. Combined with those who aren’t caught? How about San Diego, California? Combined with the current level of legal immigration that engenders 1.1 million new green cards every year? Are Americans really supposed to abide the admission of a population close to the size of Chicago — every year — or endure accusations of bigotry for refusing to do so?
A promise to fix illegal immigration put you in the White House, Mr. President. You said a “nation without borders is no nation at all.” It’s time to act like a commander-in-chief and defend our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Put troops on the border and shut it down. Everything else is politics — and has been for decades. ~The Patriot Post
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