Bright, sunshine-filled late-afternoon Friday here in California’s Central Valley — coupled with some pleasant temperatures about as good as it gets around here for a winter’s day.
However, coming this holiday weekend is a forecast of a strong turnabout — seasonal shit of rain, thunderstorms and maybe snow for the nearby Sierra Nevada mountain range just east of where I’m tapping on my laptop keyboard. Consequences of weather.
In a related shape: ICE and the shitty-ass mass grabbing of immigrants. Beyond the physical horror, there’s a fiscal horror, too. And consequently huge.
Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205% of GDP—nearly twice its 2023 level, David Bier reports. Compared to the US-born population, immigrants of every education level reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio from 1994 to 2023. https://ow.ly/glnB50Y8lqS
Data via the Cato Institute earlier this month:
- Every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
- Immigrants generated nearly $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they induced in total government spending.
- Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.
- Immigrants cut US budget deficits by about a third from 1994 to 2023, and fiscal savings grew to $878 billion in 2023 (Figure 1).
- Noncitizens accounted for $6.3 trillion of the $14.5 trillion debt savings.
- College graduate immigrants accounted for $11.7 trillion in savings, while non–college graduates accounted for $2.8 trillion.
- The cohort of immigrants entering from 1990 to 1993, just before data collection began in 1994, was fiscally positive $1.7 trillion, and was still positive after 30 years in 2022–2023 (Table 1).
- Even including the second generation (see Box 1 for definitions), who are mostly still children who will become taxpayers soon, the fiscal effect of immigration was positive every year.
- Immigrants in all categories of educational attainment, including high school dropouts, lowered the ratio of deficit to gross domestic product (GDP) during the 30-year period.
- Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis
Great h/t to Robert Farley at LGM, who concluded:
Plenty of detail at the link, including robust data showing that low-skill undeclared immigrants are still a net positive from both economic and fiscal points of view. And I must have seen this like two dozen times in the past two weeks, which means that they (the Cato Institute) think it’s worth their while to invest heavily to push this hard on social media. And it’s a robust argument, not mealy-mouthed; pretty much all immigration is a net economic positive for the United States with benefits widely shared. They’re directly challenging Trump on his core issue, which tells us something about Trump’s coalition.
And like the agenda of T-Rump and his ugly-ass minions, the ICE terror has an unintended clusterfuck of the immediate future. This is a horror tale in so many outrageous ways.
In a historical sound effect:
Another path of destruction, or not, yet once again here we are …
(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Weeping Woman [La Femme qui pleure],’ found here)