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Originally Posted by Mr. Kotter
I'm looking for the site, and the numbers...but I've gotta duck out for awhile.
Suffice it to say, we aren't just talking about income taxes here....and I'm talking about OVERALL costs for services given to illegals (as a group), compared to OVERALL revenues from all taxes paid by illegals. It's pretty clearly a net gain, according to the stuff I've seen.
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http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscal.html
I've just had a few minutes to glance through it, and here are some things I noticed:
1. The raw data does not identify which households were illegal and which weren't. The researchers used probabilities to estimate which households were illegal and which weren't. I'm no statistician, but I don't think this technique is totally off the wall. On the other hand, this report didn't appear in a peer-reviewed journal,* so there weren't other stats guys looking at it and approving of their methods.
2. The report attributes costs of citizen children to their illegal parents. This one's kind of a toss-up. Their costs are arguably the costs of illegal immigra
tion, even if they're not the costs of illegal immigran
ts. Still, seems kinda weird to identify costs that citizens are entitled to as "illegal immigrant costs."
3. The report reaches its ultimate result by attributing the "overhead" portion of the federal budget (defense, highway funds, etc.) equally to all households. This is pretty weak, as at best, we're dealing with marginal costs here, not average costs. All 10 million or whatever illegals could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't make our defense budget any smaller, and our highway expenditures wouldn't need to be lessened by 3%.
4. The report doesn't even try to determine secondary benefits of illegals on the federal budget. Higher profitability and therefore taxes on employers is the most obvious example.
5. Not so much a problem with the report, but some people use its figures to say "Illegals are a drain on the economy." No, supposing the report is accurate, they're a drain on the federal budget, not the economy. The relationship of the two is a little more complex than "budget deficit up, economy go down" that politicians (on either side of the aisle, when convenient) like to throw around.
It looks like the report basically takes the noncontroversial position that poor households are a net drain on the federal budget, and because we know X percent of poor households are illegal, we know that illegal households are a net drain on the federal budget.
*At least, I don't see any indication of that on the website.