Tag Archives: Vote Buying

News

What are Hillary Clinton’s views on amnesty and illegal immigration?

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Here’s a story from the Weekly Standard.

It says:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is now saying she supports driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. “Hillary supports state policies to provide driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants,” a spokesperson told the Huffington Post.

The issue gave Clinton fits last time she ran for president. She was for it before being against it.

[…]But now Clinton has completely flipped again, taking up the position now most in line with the Democratic base. It would appear the front-running Democratic candidate is doing her best to adopt the positions of her chief rival, Martin O’Malley, whose long supported this liberal policy.

So she supports Obama’s executive order amnesty. How many driver’s licenses are we talking about?

The Washington Times has the number.

Excerpt:

The administration has granted about 541,000 Social Security numbers to illegal immigrants under President Obama’s original 2012 deportation amnesty for Dreamers, officials told Congress in a letter made public Wednesday.

That means almost all of the illegal immigrants approved for the amnesty are being granted work permits and Social Security numbers, opening the door to government benefits ranging from tax credits to driver’s licenses.

[…]Social Security numbers are considered one of the gatekeepers for being able to live and work in the U.S., and some experts have said granting them to illegal immigrants makes it easier for them to access rights reserved only for citizens, such as voting.

But the Obama administration has ruled that the illegal immigrants it has approved for its temporary deportation amnesty, known as “deferred action,” are here legally for as long as the program exists, and so they are entitled to work permits and Social Security numbers.

The IRS has acknowledged that getting a Social Security number entitles illegal immigrants to go back and claim refunds under the Earned Income Tax Credit for time they worked illegally — even if they didn’t file returns or pay taxes for those years.

Republican critics of the president’s immigration policy say he’s helping illegal immigrants at the expense of American workers, whose taxes pay for Social Security and other government benefits.

“This grant transfers jobs, wealth and benefits from marginalized U.S. workers directly to illegal workers,” said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Sessions. “One of the most dramatic costs of amnesty — whether legislative or imposed through executive diktat — is the opening of our federal Trust Funds to large numbers of lower-income illegal immigrants.”

Mr. Obama’s latest amnesty, announced in November 2014, has been halted by a federal court, so no Social Security numbers have been granted under that policy.

But the first amnesty, announced in June 2012 and covering young adult illegal immigrants known as Dreamers, remains in effect, and had approved nearly 639,000 persons as of the end of 2014.

I think this quotation hits on the problem that conservatives have with illegal immigration – whether the illegal immigrants will pay more in taxes than they use in social services. It is good to be generous to others, but I would rather use my own money to help people who will respect my values and let me into their decision-making, instead of having the government swoop in and hand out money in exchange for votes – my money. My plans require the money I earn. When that money is taken by government for someone else who doesn’t know me at all, that makes it harder for me to carry out my plan and help the people who know me.

To give someone financial aid is to present your values to them in a positive light. Who is respected when government takes my money and hands it out? I don’t get to pass my values to the people I am helping. Government gets to pass their values to the people they are using my money to help. I have the ability to speak into the decision-making of people who ask me for my help – I get to advise them. But government has nothing to say to people when they hand out money, except maybe to encourage them to make more bad decisions so they can get more of other people’s money. That’s not a hand up, that’s a hand-out.

News

109,631,000 Americans collect welfare, more than full-time year-round workers

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From CNS News.

Excerpt:

109,631,000 Americans lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded “means-tested programs” — also known as welfare — as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau has not yet reported how many were on welfare in 2013 or the first two quarters of 2014.

But the 109,631,000 living in households taking federal welfare benefits as of the end of 2012, according to the Census Bureau, equaled 35.4 percent of all 309,467,000 people living in the United States at that time.

[…]What did taxpayers give to the 109,631,000 — the 35.4 percent of the nation — getting welfare benefits at the end of 2012?

82,679,000 of the welfare-takers lived in households where people were on Medicaid, said the Census Bureau. 51,471,000 were in households on food stamps. 22,526,000 were in the Women, Infants and Children program. 20,355,000 were in household on Supplemental Security Income. 13,267,000 lived in public housing or got housing subsidies. 5,442,000 got Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. 4,517,000 received other forms of federal cash assistance.

[…]In 2012, according to the Census Bureau, there were 103,087,000 full-time year-round workers in the United States (including 16,606,000 full-time year-round government workers). Thus, the welfare-takers outnumbered full-time year-round workers by 6,544,000.

Democrats tell us that we need to raise taxes on those who work in order to spread the wealth around. But I submit that there is too much redistribution of wealth going on already, and we need to stop it. We are not sending the right message to people about the importance of working and earning with this much taxing and welfare spending.

 

News

UK social policies undermine work and family while rewarding hedonism and sloth

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Dina tweeted this article by Jill Kirby from the UK Daily Mail, which helps to show how government can punish good behavior, and reward destructive behavior – simply by transferring wealth.

Look:

Over recent decades, the British state has been engaged in a huge social experiment in which traditional family structures and moral values have been deliberately undermined by official policy.

In the name of progress, hard work and self-reliance have been punished through excessive taxation, while irresponsibility and idleness have been rewarded through unconditional welfare payments.

The destructive consequences of this approach are now becoming ever more apparent.

Britain now has a huge underclass of benefit-dependent, dysfunctional families who know far more about crime, drugs and alcohol than the world of work. Figures published yesterday revealed there are half a million problem households who, in total, cost taxpayers more than £30 billion a year through the colossal burden they impose on the welfare state, police forces and social services.

The scale of this social disaster is much worse than previously estimated. A Government study in 2011 reported there were around 120,000 troubled families — four times fewer than was revealed this week.

The cost is not just financial. With their self-centredness and disdain for the bonds that glue together civilised society, many of these families also bring misery to their neighbourhoods.

[…]When social reformer Sir William Beveridge first proposed the creation of the modern social security system in 1942, he explicitly stated that benefits should to be based on contributions through taxes and national insurance, otherwise they would simply discourage people from working and taking responsibility for their families.

But his contributory principle has long since disappeared, and we now have a ‘something for nothing’ system where those who give the least to society receive the most. Indeed, according to one official calculation, every ‘problem household’ costs the taxpayer at least £75,000 — which is more than three times average earnings.

So we have the grotesque situation where people who try to do the right thing — who go to work and bring their children up in a stable family — are punished twice over: first through the punitive income tax rates which contribute to paying for the welfare state, and second, through subsidising again the dysfunctional families that are produced by unconditional social security.

If the Government was serious about dealing with the problem, it would have the courage to introduce proper welfare sanctions to end the incentives to fecklessness. It would also provide real support through the tax system for the institution of marriage.

Sadly, the Coalition has done nothing to reverse the bias of the fiscal system against married couples, whereby married families are ruthlessly penalised by withdrawal of tax allowances and benefits, whereas support is lavished on lone parents.

And the cycle continues, because children of “lone parents” are going to be far less likely, on average, to be able to be net contributors in the society – to pay in more than they take out. It sounds so nice to redistribute wealth from people who have something to people who don’t, until you have too few people doing the right things, and too many people doing the wrong things. What happens then? I think that the responsible, hard working people will either leave the UK or curtail their productive activities. What else do you do when the government punishes you for your success and rewards other people for failure?