Richard Cohen’s latest column is sillier than usual, which is really saying something. (Hat tip to Jason Kuznicki, who sums up Cohen’s argument as “Trump is SO bad that we must not impeach him.”)

In purple, paid-by-the-metaphor prose, Cohen calls our 45th president “a dust storm of lies and diversions with the bellows of a bully and the greasy ethics of a street-corner hustler,” someone whose “possible crimes line up like boxcars being assembled for a freight train.” And yet, “we would impeach Trump at our peril.” 

Why? Because the president’s hardcore supporters would view impeachment and removal as the reversal of a democratic election. Worse, some of them—possibly with Trump’s encouragement—might resort to violence. We could see “a lot of angry people causing a lot of mayhem” if Trump is impeached and removed for an offense falling “short of a triple ax murder,” Cohen warns. 

Put aside the notion—itself anti-democratic—that a violent minority should enjoy a sort of heckler’s veto on a legitimate constitutional process: Cohen’s vision of Weimar-era street brawls is almost certainly overblown. The political science blog hosted by Cohen’s own paper recently poured some cold water on the Trumpist-insurrection scenario here.

Still, Cohen’s trepidation about any impeachment effort—even against a president he believes wholly corrupt and dangerous—is all too common. What other constitutional provision is considered so near-blasphemous to merit its own sanitized euphemism? Treason’s a big deal, but you don’t hear people calling it the “’T’-word.”

Yet on the rare occasions that the “‘I’-word” becomes a live issue—once a generation at best—the commentariat adopts a funereal tone, insisting that such a dire remedy should only be approached in fear and trembling. We can be almost certain that something horrible will happen.

It’s not just workaday columnists, but leading constitutional scholars who hyperbolize about impeachment. Charles Black, in his classic 1973 primer Impeachment: A Handbook, writes of the “the dreadfulness of the step of removal… the deep wounding such a step must inflict on the country.” It should, Black wrote, be looked on as “high-risk major surgery.” Actually, it’s a “constitutional nuclear weapon,” legal scholar Ronald Dworkin argued during the Clinton affair, to be used only in the “gravest emergencies,” lest it “shatter the most fundamental principles of our constitutional structure.”

More recently, Lawfare’s Jane Chong wrote a valuable essay on impeachment’s scope, in which she warns that “when the president has proven himself unfit for the office,” shrinking from removal “is no less a partisan dereliction of duty than unduly clamoring for [it].” But, she insists, impeachment is “nothing to celebrate and no better than a crime against our collective vessel, an act of barratry, when pursued for the wrong reasons…. It also involves a measure of violence from which our constitutional democracy can only slowly and by no means inevitably recover.”

Is impeachment really as grave as all that?

To be sure, you can find some of the Framers waxing solemn and sober about it: in Federalist 65, Hamilton writes of “the awful discretion, which a court of impeachments must necessarily have, to doom [the accused] to honor or to infamy.” He also believed that discretion to be necessary, periodically, as “an essential check in the hands of [the legislative] body upon the encroachments of the executive.”

Other Framers weren’t quite so dramatic. At the Philadelphia Convention, Massachusetts’ Eldridge Gerry insisted: "A good magistrate will not fear [impeachments]. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them." North Carolina’s Hugh Williamson thought there was “more danger of too much lenity than of too much rigour towards the President.” He was more right than he knew.

Contemporary impeachment-phobia seems to rest on two related notions. The first is one Cohen gropes for: that there’s something democratically illegitimate—even coup-like—about removing a duly elected chief executive before his term is up. The second reflects a fear that removal is uniquely destabilizing. Neither idea is particularly persuasive.  

There’s no denying that impeachment is in tension with pure democracy. Like other features of our system—judicial review, for example—it’s counter-majoritarian. In fact, the Framers, with their healthy fear of demagogues, made it possible not only to eject, but disqualify them from any future “Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States,” permanently barring the election of figures popular enough to win, but too dangerous to be trusted with power.

But impeachment isn't a "coup”: It’s a lawful, “indispensable” method for “displacing an unfit magistrate” when necessary. And it doesn't "reverse an election." The 12th and 25th Amendments have all but ensured that any president who’s removed will be replaced by a member of his own party and usually his own ticket. In the as-yet unlikely event of Donald Trump's impeachment and removal, he’d be replaced by his hand-picked, lawfully elected running mate, Mike Pence. Some "coup."

Nor is there much evidence for the fear that impeachment attempts court “constitutional crisis” and threaten to upend or “shatter” our constitutional structure. In his testimony opposing the Clinton impeachment, Lawrence Tribe described the remedy as “truly the political equivalent of capital punishment,” “empowering the Congress essentially to decapitate the executive branch in a single stroke.” Cass Sunstein warned that, given the presidency’s growth in power and importance, “the great risk of the impeachment mechanism is that it is destabilizing in a way that threatens to punish the Nation as much as, or perhaps far more than, the President himself. Since the purpose of impeachment is not to punish officials but to protect the Nation, this is a cruel irony.”

Of the two, Sunstein has remained admirably consistent and cautious into the Trump years; Tribe is now ready to man the guillotine himself. But our all-too-rare experience with presidential impeachment suggests their fears were overblown. The post-Watergate “crisis of confidence” in our institutions was actually good for us: it led to new checks and scrutiny on executive abuse. Weakening the presidency only “punish[es] the Nation” if you’re convinced eight decades of executive branch metastasization hasn’t gone far enough. Besides, the attempt to oust Clinton didn’t weaken the presidency in any way you’d notice (more’s the pity). The principal effect it seems to have had on executive power was forging a consensus to let the independent counsel statute lapse. Nor was the episode particularly destabilizing; late-90s prosperity rolled on, and the markets barely noticed it was happening.

A better argument for not impeaching any misbehaving president too eagerly is that we may only get one bite at the apple. As the legal scholar Michael Gerhardt warns: “if not done properly the first time, you might not get a second chance.” The constitutional structure makes it that difficult: “The framers set the bar appropriately high,” Cohen writes, “a majority of the House, two-thirds of the Senate—so high, in fact, that it has never happened.” But is “never” (or once, if you count Nixon) in 230 years the correct rate of presidential removals? If not, you might be forgiven for wondering if they set the bar too high. In any case, when we conjure up specters of wounded democracy and constitutional collapse, we make it harder than it needs to be.

And there’s a cost to never, or almost never, invoking the remedy. Princeton’s Keith Whittington writes that “If Congress tolerates officers who commit high crimes and misdemeanors, it sends a signal to other officers that those crimes are not beyond the pale.” Tolerate bad behavior, you’ll get more of it. Right now, that seems at least as worthy a concern as the fear that we’ll resort to impeachment too frequently.

On September 25, 2017, Iraqi Kurds voted in favor of independence from Iraq in a historic referendum. Out of the 3.3 million Kurds and non-Kurds who voted, 92% voted in favor of independence, which is not surprising. The international community’s reaction is also not surprising: Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Russia, France,  and the United States were all against the referendum, cautioning the Kurdish leadership about the regional impact from various strategic angles. In its quest to secure more non-Arab allies, Israel is the only country that has backed the referendum. The international community’s lack of support is seen as hypocritical by the Kurds, and may very well be. The United States in particular is wary of the creation of new states and their regional impact that tends to increase instability rather than reduce it, like in the case of South Sudan. While discouraging a population from seeking self-determination is thorny—even illiberal—the Kurdish referendum has two important outcomes that should not, be ignored.

First, the referendum has sent a dangerous mixed signal to other populations seeking independence and territorial sovereignty. Currently there are no administrative channels in place that will facilitate Kurdistan’s secession from Iraq—and it certainly cannot be called Kexit in the same vain as Brexit, the nickname for the UK’s vote to exit the EU. For example, Iraq still controls the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s (KRI) air space and immediately following the referendum, instituted a flight ban from the region’s two international airports. KRI is not economically independent, and the referendum may have actually decreased its chances of becoming so. Even though Kurdistan has been producing 600,000 barrels of oil per day, an impressive feat for a landlocked region surrounded by hostile neighbors, low oil prices gravely impacted the development of its public sector that continues to remain weak and corrupt. Also, Kurds still hold Iraqi passports, and will most likely continue to be Iraqis officially for years to come, if not decades. So how exactly secession will happen is not clear. Therefore, it would be beneficial for other independence-seeking populations like Palestinians, Kashmiris, and Catalonians to pay close attention to how Kurdish independence unfolds, if at all. So then why was the referendum done now? There is speculation that the Kurdistan region’s president, Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, wanted his legacy to be putting Kurds on an internationally mandated path to independence. But Kurds are divided; while a majority of them want independence, many feel that is was not the right time, such as the “No for Now” campaign. In the presence of strong criticism from the international community, the referendum’s claim of providing a mandate for Kurdish independence is also questionable.

Second, the referendum has backed the United States in a corner. U.S. foreign policy has been driven by the idea that a unified Iraq is a better regional and counterterrorism partner than a divided one. In its quest to counter the Islamic State, the United States has often sided with Baghdad over Erbil. Yet, the Peshmerga, the KRI’s military force, has been one of the most effective fighting groups against ISIS, and played a crucial role during the battle of Mosul in 2016. But supporting Kurdish independence would have two negative consequences for the United States: 1) it would create a rift with Turkey, a key NATO ally at a time when the U.S.–Turkish relationship is already strained, and 2) U.S.–Iraq relations could weaken, which would be detrimental not only for Iraq’s stability but also for the region’s. Instead, this is a time for the U.S. to tread lightly and practice restraint. Whether or not the Trump administration will heed this advice will become apparent in the upcoming weeks. 

To the relief of many Democrats and the consternation of many Republicans, Congress will not be repealing ObamaCare this month. But that doesn’t mean Democrats are riding high or that ObamaCare is doing well. Premiums are still rising rapidly (Miami Herald: "Obamacare Premiums in Florida to Rise 45 Percent on Average Next Year"), insurers are still leaving the Exchanges (Healthcare Marketplace: "Nearly Half of the Country Left with One Carrier Option in 2018"), and ObamaCare coverage is still becoming a worse and worse deal for the sick (Wall Street Journal/yours truly: "How ObamaCare Punishes the Sick"). 

Now that repeal is no longer an immediate threat, the conversation has naturally turned to who’s to blame for ObamaCare’s failings. Democrats claim everything was going swimmingly until the Trump administration came along and began sabotaging the law. The funny thing about that line of attack is that’s if it were true, then Democrats’ real complaint would be that voters are sabotaging ObamaCare.

But it’s not true—and reporters should stop repeating this partisan line of attack as if it were. Here are five crucial points:

• The Trump administration is not causing the instability we are seeing in the Exchanges—ObamaCare is. Specifically, ObamaCare’s community rating price controls have both unleashed adverse selection (sick people enroll, healthy people don’t) and are making coverage worse for the sick (as insurers use plan design to deter the sickest from choosing their plans). There are only two ways to deal with that instability: eliminate community rating, or subsidize the heck out of insurers (either explicitly, or implicitly by encouraging healthy people to enroll).
• The Trump administration is not stoking the instability ObamaCare is creating in the Exchanges. Democrats claim that by not ending the uncertainty surrounding cost-sharing subsidies to insurers, and by not investing in enrollment activities as much as the Obama administration did, it is in fact the Trump administration that is creating or exacerbating that instability. That is false. As noted above, it is ObamaCare's community-rating price controls that are creating this instability, not the Trump administration's actions. The administration is not even adding to the instability. To do so, it would have to make ObamaCare’s community-rating price controls even more binding, which would exacerbate adverse selection. The worst you can say about those actions is that the Trump administration is failing to mitigate the instability ObamaCare creates, which brings us to our next point. 
• The Trump administration does not have a duty to reduce the instability ObamaCare creates, or to reduce the uncertainty ObamaCare creates, or to make ObamaCare "work." The Trump administration's only duty is to execute the law faithfully. So long as it does, it has the prerogative to pursue its political goals however it wants. I’m not aware of anyone accusing the Trump administration of not following the law in its handling of ObamaCare. 
• Reporters who say the Trump administration is causing or stoking instability in the Exchanges are simply regurgitating partisan talking points. Embedded in that claim is the normative, disputed, and ultimately false premise that the Trump administration somehow has an obligation not just to follow the law, but to make ObamaCare "work." That is a pretty radical notion, because it implies ObamaCare opponents don't have a right to use lawful means to press their views through the political process. 

If Democrats or the media want to get angry at someone for sabotaging ObamaCare, there are plenty of targets. They can start with the Democratic politicans who -- though they now clamor for bipartisanship now -- enacted ObamaCare in 2010 on a purely partisan basis, spent seven years refusing to compromise, and as a result sowed the seeds for the GOP's electoral gains. Then there's the Democratic president who -- and this was perhaps the sole exception to Democrats' general refusal to compromise -- himself sabotaged the law by agreeing to limit so-called "risk-corridor" subsidies to ObamaCare carriers. Then there was the time when ObamaCare was making voters so angry, that same Democratic president even violated the ACA by allowing people to keep non-ACA-compliant plans. That decision counts as an act of double-sabotage, because it continues to make Exchange premiums higher than they otherwise would be. 

In short, ObamaCare still doesn't work well; it isn't popular enough for Congress to paper over all its problems with more taxpayer dollars; Democrats did this to themselves; and they deserve nearly all, if not all, of the blame.

Now stop making me defend the Trump administration, people. Sheesh.

Donald Trump announced a mini-surge of U.S. forces into Afghanistan a month ago. This week the Long War Journal reported the Taliban now control or contest 45 percent of Afghanistan’s districts, up from 40 percent three months prior, which was an increase from 34 percent a year earlier, and you get the idea. The Taliban control more territory today than at any point since 2001, and they have the momentum.

Sixteen years after invading Afghanistan, toppling the Taliban, and routing Al Qaeda elements there, U.S. goals remain as far out of reach as ever.

However, rather than surge additional forces and fall victim to the “sunk cost” fallacy, the U.S. should withdraw military forces and re-align objectives to the threat and national interests. During his August speech, Donald Trump defended the surge by saying, “our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifices of lives.” His emotional appeal implied that grieving Gold Star families should be the nation’s impetus for continued involvement in the Afghan war (which would also lead to more families who would experience that ultimate loss).

Instead of defending a surge on the basis of efforts already spent, U.S. policy towards Afghanistan should rely on the 16 years of data available since initiation of the war on terror. All of that data strongly communicates two points: 1) the terror threat to Americans remains low and 2) a strategy that emphasizes military power will continue to fail.

The terror threat to Americans remains low as compared to virtually all other threats. Islamist-inspired terrorists have conducted less than one attack per year over the past three decades. In each of those 30 years, though, “regular” Americans murdered between 15,000 and 20,000 of their fellow Americans. Even the horrible attacks of 9/11 represented just a fraction of the Americans murdered that year.

Quite likely, the memory of 9/11 continues to inflate the terror threat, yet September 11^th was an outlier. The world never experienced a similar attack prior or since, and for good reason: significant terror attacks almost always take place in failed or war-torn states. America’s second worst attack occurred in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh killed 168 in Oklahoma City. And few Americans can probably even identify North America’s second worst attack. It took place in 1985 on an Air India flight from Toronto, Canada. Three hundred and twenty-nine died at the hands of Sikh extremists.

In 2001, our homeland security was much different than it is today. The 9/11 hijackers received their pilot training in plain sight. They entered the country legally, using their real names. One lived with his flight instructors, and two even argued their way back into the country by assuring border and customs agents that they were, in fact, students—pilot training students—authorized to be here.

If save havens are a concern, the most important one has been eliminated. Even though terrorists may seek to harm Americans, post-9/11 homeland security efforts have severely reduced their opportunity.

America’s overseas war on terror, though, has not made Americans more secure. Instead, the number of Islamist-inspired terror groups and terrorists has grown substantially. In 2001, the Department of State identified Al Qaeda and 12 other similar groups. Today, that list includes ISIS, Al Qaeda, and another 42 like-minded organizations.

The proliferation of terror groups, terrorists, and attacks appears to have only occurred in response to U.S. military action. As the chart below suggests, terror activity spiked after the U.S. initiated its war on terror in those seven countries, not before.

 

Source: Global Terrorism Database

And the research supports the point: militaries rarely defeat terror groups. Scholars such as Audrey Kurth Cronin, Seth Jones, and Martin Libicki have concluded that instead of military defeat, most terror groups end by entering the political process, being marginalized, or through active policing. Each of those three options represents a line of operation that the U.S. has little control over.

Despite 16 years of assistance, Afghanistan’s government remains more corrupt than 96 percent of all countries, and its security force of 382,000 cannot halt Taliban gains. As Trevor Thrall and I concluded in a recent policy analysis, it’s time for America to “step back.” Eventually the Afghan government will decide whether competency and transparency matter enough, and Afghans will determine whether the Taliban ends by entering the political process, becoming irrelevant, or at the hands of a capable police force. Until then, the U.S. cannot do it for them. 

--------

Please join us October 10^th as Cato hosts a policy forum on the future of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Stephen Biddle of George Washington University, Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings, and I will debate the merits of the primary options: surge, negotiate, and withdraw, and a young Army officer with two deployments to Afghanistan will open the forum with his “boots on the ground” perspective. Register here.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is devoted to reducing legal and illegal immigration. Its recent report, “The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers (2017)” by Matthew O’Brien, Spencer Raley, and Jack Martin, estimates that the net fiscal costs of illegal immigration to U.S. taxpayers is $116 billion. FAIR’s report reaches that conclusion by vastly overstating the costs of illegal immigration, undercounting the tax revenue they generate, inflating the number of illegal immigrants, counting millions of U.S. citizens as illegal immigrants, and by concocting a method of estimating the fiscal costs that is rejected by all economists who work on this subject. 

FAIR’s Errors

Merely using the correct numbers when it comes to the actual size of the illegal immigrant population, the correct tax rates, and the effect of immigrants on property values lowers the net fiscal cost by 87 percent to 97 percent, down to $15.6 billion or $3.3 billion, respectively.  Below is a list of FAIR’s errors and how the correct numbers affect the results:

1. FAIR assumes that there are 12.5 million illegal immigrants, over a million more than other organizations estimate (FAIR is inconsistent here as the number of illegal immigrants they report on page 34 is 12.6 million).  Pew estimates there are 11.3 million illegal immigrants, the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) estimates that there are 11 million illegal immigrants, and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) estimates there are 11.43 million illegal immigrants.  FAIR’s estimate of the number of illegal immigrants is more than a million more than that of their sister organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, that also shares their goal of reducing immigration.  Using the average number of illegal immigrants as estimated by Pew, CMS, and CIS instead of FAIR’s number lowers their report’s estimated cost by $11.6 billion.
2. FAIR counts the benefits consumed by the U.S. born American citizen children of illegal immigrants.  This means that FAIR also doesn’t count the taxes paid by these U.S. born citizens when they start working.  Counting the benefits consumed but ignoring the tax revenue they pay (or will do so in the future) is one way FAIR gets such a negative result for this report.  If FAIR counts the welfare consumed by the U.S. born children of illegal immigrants then it must also count the taxes that that cohort pays, but it does not.  In this way, the FAIR report biases its results to increase the value of benefits received and diminish the value of taxes paid. Workers with higher education earn more money and pay more in tax dollars.  Counting education entirely as a cost without any effort to actually measure the boosted tax revenue that should result from such a system counts only the fiscal costs.  FAIR argues that those U.S. citizen children should be counted as illegal immigrants for their fiscal cost analysis because they would not be here without their illegal immigrant parents.  It’s a mystery, then, why FAIR does not count the fiscal costs incurred and taxes paid by all of the descendants of illegal immigrants back to when the Federal government first created immigration restrictions in 1875.  Furthermore, does this mean that FAIR will seek to count the fiscal costs and tax revenue of the grandchildren of the illegal immigrants as well?  If they decide to do that then they should use a dynamic generational accounting model rather than their flawed static model.  Using the actual number of illegal immigrant children who are in school lowers FAIR’s estimated education costs borne on the state and local level by $31.7 billion.
3. FAIR blames the cost of immigration enforcement on illegal immigrants.  FAIR’s argument here comes down to “The U.S. needs to enforce our immigration laws better because the cost of enforcing immigration laws is so high.”  We suggest an easy remedy for this problem – cut immigration enforcement.  In all seriousness, this is silly.  If FAIR was serious about this argument, they would estimate how many illegal immigrants are deterred by immigration enforcement programs and compare that to their bogus budget figures to see the fiscal return on enforcement.  Excluding the costs of immigration enforcement, with the exception of the amount spent on incarceration, lowers FAIR’s estimate by $11.9 billion.
4. FAIR overcounts welfare benefits consumed by illegal immigrants by including benefits consumed by their U.S. citizen children.  They especially overstate Medicaid benefits by counting U.S. citizen children.  FAIR also relies on old data for the amount claimed by illegal immigrants in Child Tax Credits that overstates the 2015 number by $800 million.  Adjusting downward welfare benefits consumed by eligibility rules reduces FAIR’s estimate by $12.3 billion.
5. On healthcare issues besides Medicaid benefits, FAIR estimates that illegal immigrants consume an amount of healthcare proportional to their share of the population.  This is a vast overstatement in costs.  Overall, all immigrants consume 55 percent less in healthcare dollars per capita than natives.  According to the National Academy of Sciences report on the integration and assimilation of immigrants, illegal immigrants are “less likely than native-born or other immigrants to have a usual source of care, visit a medical professional in an outpatient setting, use mental health services, or receive dental care. (Derose et al., 2009; Pourat et al., 2014; Rodriguez et al., 2009). Per capita health care spending is lower for all immigrants, including illegal immigrants, than it was for the native-born (Derose et al., 2009; DuBard and Massing, 2007; Stimpson et al., 2010)."  Adjusting for lower immigrant per capita health care spending by 55 percent lowers FAIR’s estimate of the uncompensated hospital expenditures, Medicaid births, and Medicaid fraud costs on all levels of government by $13.9 billion.
6. FAIR also undercounts the tax revenue generated by illegal immigrants.  The first and most egregious undercount is that they ignore how increased housing demand raises the value of all real estate per county which also raises property tax revenue.  According to research by economist Jacob Vigdor, each immigrant raises the value of all homes in their county by 11.5 cents.  The average immigrant also lives in a county with 800,000 housing units.  The locations of illegal and legal immigrants are closely correlated so we can assume that the typical illegal immigrant also lives in a county with 800,000 housing units.  If the typical illegal immigrant increases the value of all housing unit prices by 11.5 cents, then illegal immigrants increase nationwide housing values by about $1 trillion.  Using the 1.15 percent average annual property tax rate, the increase in housing values created by illegal immigrants results in $12.2 billion in additional tax revenue.  Adjusting for the extra property taxes paid by property owners as a result of illegal immigration boosting housing values increases tax revenue by $11.2 billion over FAIR’s estimate.
7. FAIR also ignores the incidence of taxation when it comes to calculating their Social Security and Medicare contributions.  In law, employers and employees are supposed to evenly split Social Security and Medicare contributions but the reality is more complicated.  A recent literature survey on the incidence of taxation for social programs found that workers pay for 66 percent of all Social Security and Medicare taxes through lower salaries.  Thus, 66 percent of all contributions to those programs are actually paid by the workers.  FAIR also made a mistake.  They claimed that the worker and employer each pay a 2.9 percent tax rate for Medicare when, in reality, the worker and the employer each pay 1.45 percent.  Correcting for FAIR’s error, adjusting for the actual tax rate for Medicare, and including the incidence of taxation boosts illegal immigrant tax revenue by $6.2 billion.  If you include all of Social Security and Medicare taxes paid as a result of illegal immigrant employment, even if employers do pay the actual cost, then it would increase their tax contributions by $18.5 billion
8. FAIR probably undercounts sales tax revenue.  I write “probably” because one of the sentences on page 54 of their report does not make any sense grammatically or mathematically.  About 30 percent of personal income is spent on sales-taxable goods.  The average combined state and local sales tax rate was 6.44 percent in 2016 but adjusting for states where illegal immigrant live according to FAIR’s estimate, it is 7.6 percent.  FAIR claims that illegal immigrants keep $28,800 in pay after remittances.  Adjusting sales tax revenue for the tax rate and the amount of income spent on taxable goods increases illegal immigrant sales tax revenue by $1.6 billion over  FAIR’s estimate.

Merely using the correct numbers reduces FAIR’s estimated fiscal cost of illegal immigrants from $116 billion to $3.3 to $15.6 billion – and that is without touching their flawed static approach to counting how illegal immigrants impact the economy.  This does not mean that the negative fiscal impact of illegal immigration is $3.3 to $15.6 billion annually, it merely means that using the correct numbers massively reduces their cost estimate.  

FAIR’s Methodological Errors

FAIR’s biggest methodological error is that it does not consider the extra economic activity generated by illegal immigrants that would not occur otherwise.  The tax revenue collected through that extra activity cannot be adequately measured by looking at IRS forms but must include the taxes paid by U.S. citizens who also have higher incomes as a result.  Since the economy is not a fixed pie, removing millions of illegal immigrant workers, consumers, and business owners would leave a gaping economic hole that would reduce tax revenue.  The authors of the FAIR study concocted their own methodology that is uninfluenced by the vast empirical, theoretical, and peer-reviewed economics literature that estimates the fiscal cost of immigration. 

The authors in that literature find that there are three main ways to estimate the fiscal impact of immigration. The first method is by using macroeconomic models—variants of general equilibrium models—to predict the economic effects of immigration relative to a pre-immigration trend line, additional tax revenue, and additional government expenditure. The second is through generational accounting that pays particular attention to the government’s intertemporal budget constraints. The third is through a net transfer profile that starts with a static accounting model in a base year and then builds a lifecycle net transfer profile for individual immigrants. These are only quasi-rigid categories with the possibility of mixing and matching certain characteristics of each methodology, but each one has its own benefits, drawbacks, and several studies that employ each method, sometimes mixing them.  FAIR does not use any of these approaches in constructing their fiscal cost estimate.

The recent National Academy of Science (NAS) study on the fiscal and economic cost of immigrants accounts for the temporal nature of tax revenue and government benefits (people pay taxes at certain parts of their lives and consume more in benefits in others).  In order to properly account for the temporal nature of taxes and expenditures requires reducing the lifetime value of both and discounting it to the present value.  NAS table 8-14 does just that for federal, state, and local governments (displayed in Figure 1).  That Figure does not include public goods like national defense which is unaffected by illegal immigrants (the U.S. states does not require another aircraft carrier if there are 50 million more immigrants here). 

Based on the age of arrival and education, immigrants with less than a high school degree who entered before their 24^th birthday pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.  Illegal immigrants are potentially even better for public budgets in the short run because their consumption of government benefits is more curtailed than their tax payments (including the incidence of taxation) due to their legal status.  Illegal immigrants do not likely consume more in tax benefits than they pay in taxes but, if they do, the figure is small. 

Figure 1:  NPV Fiscal Impact on Federal, State, and Local Government, CBO Long-Term Budget Outlook, by Age at Entry and Eventual Education.  Source: NAS Table 8-14.

 

Conclusion

FAIR’s report argues for increased immigration restrictions as a way to address the federal budget deficit.  However, it relies on poor methodology and contains numerous errors that undermine its credibility.  Many years ago, I wrote a criticism of an earlier version of this report by FAIR.  It’s disheartening to see that this later version written by different authors is even more sloppy and makes more errors than the older version.  The immigration debate deserves higher quality research than this recent FAIR report.      

We hear a lot about book “banning,” especially when “we” maintain Cato’s Public Schooling Battle Map, but probably lots of other people hear it, too. Indeed, it just so happens that we are in Banned Books Week right now, an event that highlights challenges to books stocked by public libraries, including in public schools. But what is suddenly getting attention is not the Week, but a Cambridge, Massachusetts public school librarian rejecting a bunch of Dr. Seuss books that First Lady Melania Trump selected the district to win. Which raises two questions: Is it not just as much “banning” when public librarians choose not to stock books as when parents or citizens ask that those already stocked be removed? And isn’t it a threat to basic freedom to have librarians or anyone else decide for taxpayer-funded institutions—government institutions—what constitutes acceptable art or thought?

The first answer is of course it is just as much “banning” for public institutions to reject books in the first place as to remove them later on. The ultimate result is the same: not making a book available for the public to borrow. Of course, this is not really banning, which would be to prohibit people from reading a book at all—making it illegal to purchase or possess—not refusing to let people borrow it for free. But if people want to misapply the term, they should misapply it equally.

Which takes us to the root problem: Public institutions force all taxpayers to fund decisions by other people about what books are valuable, or age appropriate, or just plain morally upright. We are forcing them to fund someone else’s speech and opinions, even if they find that speech or those opinions offensive, or just wrong, and even if their views are rejected.

Look at the Cambridge situation. Librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro’s letter rejecting the haul of Seuss books was intensely political—itself a huge problem for someone speaking in an official capacity—but she also condemned the Seuss books themselves. “Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes,” she wrote. “Open one of his books (If I Ran a Zoo or And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example), and you’ll see the racist mockery in his art.”

Perhaps this is a unanimous opinion among people in the Cambridge school district—we know it wouldn’t be if expanded to Springfield, MA—and if so, okay. But if there is just one taxpaying dissenter who does not believe that Seuss’s work is racist, or who believes that his or her kids should grapple with racist works, or who just thinks Seuss is good literature worth reading, this person has essentially been rendered unequal under the law. He or she is forced to pay, someone else decides what is moral or appropriate.

Of course, barring the invention of infinite shelf space—actually, we call that the “Internet”—someone has to decide what is or is not stocked in libraries. At least for education, that is a reason that school choice is essential, especially through tax credit programs in which people choose whether, and for whom, to fund scholarships. With such programs no one is forced to fund or be subject to other people’s decisions about what is moral or age appropriate. It ends the government gatekeeper role, and lets no one impose a “ban” on anyone. It is exactly what justice and freedom demand.

The Republican tax framework released yesterday was generally excellent. However, it appears to include a sneaky and invisible tax hike. The framework “envisions the use of a more accurate measure of inflation for purposes of indexing the tax brackets and other tax parameters.”

The individual income tax is indexed for inflation, meaning that the dollar split points between the rate brackets and other parameters are set to rise a bit each year. Without those adjustments, Americans would lose ground to the government over time, as more of their income would be taxed at higher rates due to the general rise in prices.

Current indexing is based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI overstates inflation somewhat, so some analysts have suggested switching tax-code indexing to chained CPI, which produces a lower inflation measure.

If Republicans indexed the tax code to chained CPI, the government would receive an automatic tax increase relative to current law every year until the end of time. The Tax Foundation has a brief on the issue here.

Switching tax-code indexing to a lower measure of inflation is a bad idea for two reasons:

• It would generate a substantial tax increase over time, and it would be an invisible increase because there would be no tax-filing changes for people to notice.
• It would be an anti-growth tax increase because it would push people into higher brackets more quickly over time, subjecting them to higher marginal tax rates. The chained CPI proposal is essentially a proposal to slowly and steadily increase marginal tax rates.

Some economists may argue that the chained CPI proposal is a good idea because the tax code would more accurately reflect inflation, and it would. However, the tax code already contains a bias that pushes people into higher tax brackets over time, called “real bracket creep.” Real growth in the economy steadily moves taxpayers into higher rate brackets, since the tax code is indexed for inflation but not real growth.

Long-range projections from the Congressional Budget Office reflect substantial increases in taxes over time from real bracket creep. The agency notes:

… if current laws remained generally unchanged, real bracket creep would continue to gradually push up taxes relative to income over the next three decades. That phenomenon occurs because most income tax brackets, exemptions, and other tax thresholds are indexed only to inflation. If income grows faster than inflation, as generally occurs when the economy is growing, tax receipts grow faster than income.

So, I’ve got a better idea than indexing the tax code to a “more accurate measure of inflation,” as Republicans are suggesting: indexing the tax code to nominal GDP growth. That would adjust for the effects of both inflation and real economic growth on tax-code parameters, and it would prevent stealth tax-rate increases under our graduated income tax system.

More on tax reform here, here, here, here, here, and here.