Tag Archives: spending

Contradiction in Terms

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The lede lays it out.

State financial aid continues to expand within higher education, allowing money to go to eligible illegal immigrant students.

That’s an obvious oxymoron, or it should be. Leave aside the plain fact that folks in the US illegally are not “migrants”—those are folks who entered (and remain) our nation legally. These folks are illegal aliens.

The contradiction is magnified by this bit:

Currently, around 21 states and the District of Columbia offer in-state tuition eligibility to certain illegal immigrant students, and 18 states and DC provide access to state financial aid programs, according to Higher Ed immigration.
For example, at a University of California school, the base in-state tuition is roughly $15,000 annually. For nonresidents, the base tuition is over $31,000, which means eligible illegal immigrants are essentially receiving $16,000 a year in aid.

That understates the case: these illegal aliens (not migrants or immigrants) are receiving $31,000 per year in aid, since they are, or should be, by dint of their illegal status not at all eligible for any of this taxpayer largesse.

Illegal aliens should be eligible for none of our welfare or other financial assistance beyond the payments they’re offered for leaving voluntarily, payments consisting both of a lump sum cash payment and he preservation of a one-time ability to come back, this time doing so legally and above board.

Don’t Mention Cutting Spending

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Don’t you dare. The newly proposed Australian budget contains some tax cuts here, some tax structural changes nearby, and some tax increases there.

The tax cuts and structural changes are small steps in the right direction. The tax increases, though, are rationalized in this way: Saul Eslake, ex-Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch in Australia is claiming, as paraphrased by the WSJ:

If the process of reform is to be extended from here, policy makers should consider increasing and/or broadening the country’s goods-and-services tax to repair the revenue side of the federal budget and help ease the significant tax burden faced by wage earners and companies[.]

“Repair the revenue side?” What’s to repair? It isn’t the government’s money; it belongs to the good citizens of Australia. Their government only takes the money away from them; any seeming shortfalls in collections are nothing less than more money in those citizens’ hands.

And this from Shane Oliver, AMP Ltd‘s Head of Investment Strategy and Chief Economist:

If you do one reform without looking at income tax, then you miss the bigger picture[.]

There are two things wrong with these criticisms. One is the utter lack of justification for the amount of money the government collects through its taxing regime, whether current or as proposed. That “need” is simply assumed as received wisdom. The other is the equally utter lack of consideration of government spending cuts. The supposed necessity of current (or increased) spending levels also is simply assumed as received wisdom, albeit the spending is occasionally weasel-wordedly justified by announced social need—but even that isn’t seriously justified, merely announced from on high.

If Australia—and others, including us—want serious, durable prosperity, it’s necessary to cut taxes and cut spending further. That’s not austerity, no matter how hysterically the Left generally proclaims it to be. Leaving more money in the hands of the citizens is not austerity being inflicted on them, it’s their prosperity being restored to them. And that’s the bigger picture that Oliver is missing.

Bah—Who Needs National Defense?

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section was unhappy with the spending proposal for and attendant priority given to defense spending. He didn’t seem to see any need for spending there.

I read with some alarm the enthusiastic commentary in your editorial regarding the proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget….
… Diverting expenditures to military weapons and away from social needs—housing, food and medical care—isn’t sensible nor is it possible, given current domestic needs.

What isn’t sensible is not funding our ability to defend ourselves in a world of many powerful enemy nations, at least one of which has sworn to surpass and dominate us.

Any free nation needs to be able to defend itself, or it won’t be free for long, and all the social needs—housing, food, and medical care—it gets, such as they might be, will be dictated by that nation’s conqueror. National defense must be that nation’s government’s first priority.

I decline to live under a People’s Republic of China tyranny. Or to see my nation simply destroyed by a nuclear armed Iran that has no other goal aside from visiting the same extermination on Israel.

On Trump’s Budget Proposal

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President Donald Trump (R) has submitted his budget proposal for the next year to Congress, and on its surface, it does little to address the current large budget deficit and its attendant borrowing on top of the current national debt. It does, though, seriously plus up defense spending, with its request for $1.5 trillion for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

There are a couple of ways to think about that. One is to deal with the threat to our economy, and so to our national security, of that burgeoning debt resulting from the continuing large deficit by raising taxes (as Progressive-Democratic Party politicians demand to do, especially on those Americans of whom they so vociferously disapprove) or by cutting spending (as budget hawks in the Republican Party demand to do).

Raising taxes, though, hurts all of us, not just those Evil Rich. Taking money away from the folks who make it and put it to gainful use reduces private economy investment and innovation—things us citizens do far better than even the most well-meaning government ever can—and that drop negatively impacts business competitiveness, expansion, and jobs, each of which hurts all Americans who are not part of the Evil Rich cohort.

Cutting government spending, on the other hand, always is a very good way to help our economy since it takes government competition for resources and more direct inputs to production out of the competition among businesses for those same factors, which puts downward pressure on prices that both businesses and consumers face. The cuts do, though, reallocate lots of jobs away from politicians’ districts and toward more efficient locations for the work, with efficiency defined by the businesses themselves rather than government politicians.

The other way to think about the budget with its deficit and attendant borrowing is articulated quite clearly by Trump:

We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.

Indeed. We can’t protect our economy and its health, much less reduce deficits and borrowings, if we can’t defend our nation and instead have our futures dictated to us by our enemies—as the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping has committed himself to doing.

The answer writes itself, as anyone to the right of the Progressive-Democratic Party can see: plus up our defense spending, cut Federal spending everywhere else, and either cut taxes further or at least leave them alone.

One More Step

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Thomas Savidge, of the American Institute for Economic Research, in his letter in Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, wrote about Washington State’s addiction to spending and its use of increasing taxes—even when they’re unconstitutional under the State’s own constitution—to feed the addiction. He offered a solution to the addiction from Washington’s own history:

Governor Gary Locke (D) in 2002 introduced the “Priorities of Government” strategy of ranking programs based on public value and essential government functions. This approach closed a $2.1 billion budget gap, just under $4 billion in current dollars, without raising taxes.

That, however, was an incomplete solution, for all that it “closed” that budget gap one time while pairing tax increases only with the lowest priority spending.

The complete solution, short of a State constitutional amendment to make more permanent the process, would have been to identify the revenue known to appear for the relevant fiscal year, then to run down the list of priorities, funding each one in turn until the expected revenues have been consumed, and then cut off further spending rather than raise taxes to cover the remainder.

But spending discipline is inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats, as it is today to too many Timid Republicans in DC.