What’s wrong with this sentence?
A report ordered up by President Trump in March, and produced by officials in July, concluded that refugees had delivered $63 billion more in federal, state and local tax revenue than they had cost in federal benefits through the decade ending in 2014.
I mean as analysis. That’s from a Washington Post editorial in support of the U. S. accepting more refugees.
The answer is that it’s comparing apples and oranges—federal, state, and local revenues vs. federal benefits only. If you really wanted to determine the net cost (or profit) from refugees, you’d compare federal, state, and local revenues with federal, state, and local spending as a result of refugees.
The state and local costs of refugees, immigrants, generally, actually, dwarf the federal costs. There are education expenses, health care expenses, roads and sewers, law enforcement, social services, and thousands of other expense line items large and small to include in the reckoning. I think we can agree that if you consider only the revenues and ignore most of the costs you’ll find a benefit every time. That’s generally not what is thought of as “cost-benefit analysis”.
I’d support changing the mix of immigrants into the United States to include more refugees, giving priority to the people who’d helped us in our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria and their families but I think we’d be better served as a society by reducing the total number of immigrants. Immigrants are presently 14% of the population—the highest in as long as we’ve kept records. I think we need a breather.
It’s a grave humanitarian error to decry the costs of educational and social services to refugees while countenancing those very same costs when incurred by citizens. As a single, childfree man, I am called upon to pay for health care, education and perinatal care for the breeders among us, who seldom bear their fair share. No one has consulted me as to whether I’d prefer that my tax expenditures for the breeding and care of yet another Amerikan brat over those of an alien. Why is it that we citizens must endure subsidizing of the breeders’ progeny and at the same time give them a voice in determining our priorities? And where is the “Taxpayer” in “PTA”?