Josh (24:21)
All right, hang tight with me guys. This is going to be data heavy and I know, I'm already cringing. This is coming from a right wing source, but it's important because it ties directly with what the administration is claiming about their immigration policies. And to me, immigration is the biggest evidence that we see that this regime, the Trump regime, is not aligning their rhetoric with actual numbers. The actual numbers and what is happening with immigration, it doesn't live on the same planet that the Trump administration. So I want to walk through some of these numbers and what they actually say calmly, clearly and carefully. And I want to use a source here that's going to make, I mean, it's going to make all of us uncomfortable, but it's especially going to make the people on the right uncomfortable because the numbers are coming from an unexpected source. It's a white paper put together by the right leaning, the libertarian Cato Institute. They're not exactly a socialist knitting circle here. And this week we saw, and this is part of a series that the Cato Institute has been doing over the last few weeks. The Cato Institute released a major white paper analyzing the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets. And they went all the way back from 1994 through 20, 23, 30 years. I mean, this is a really deep dive, a really deep dive into the economics of immigration in our country. It goes through multiple administrations, multiple economic cycles, booms, recessions, deportations, everything in between. And the conclusions directly contradict a large portion of what the people on the right are saying about immigration. So I want to start real quick, just to recap for those of you who don't know who Cato is and why this matters. Cato is a right leaning, libertarian, conservative think tank. They are huge champions of free market economics. They're skeptical of big government, of government spending. They don't like centralizing economic control. They're not at all progressive and they are certainly not aligned with democratic messaging. Anything on the left, they are not aligned with that. Their interest here is economic efficiency through free Markets, which means to me, if they're publishing this 30 year fiscal analysis saying immigration is not a budgetary disaster, which is how this comes to light, it deserves attention because this is someone from the other side contradicting the Trump administration. So let's talk about what these numbers and what they're saying. Let's start with the big numbers, right? Between 94 and 2023, immigrants generated $24.2 trillion in tax revenue. Compare that to the government spending on those same immigrants. The government spent $13.6 trillion. That means immigrants in this country, just by being here and participating in our economy, produced a surplus of $10.6 trillion. So, I mean, that's a huge number. Now let's keep digging into this because it gets more important as we go on, right? So this, this concept of this surplus, it means lower deficits, lower interest costs on government debt. And Cato goes through all of that. They go into the debt savings and you bring this debt total benefit. So not just the $10.5 billion, you're looking at the entire fiscal benefit, including the debt savings, it raises it to $14.5 trillion over those 30 years. That's half a trillion dollars a year over the last three decades. And look, it's important to note here too. This is the best part to me, and this is like what you can take away and argue with all your right wing friends on Facebook or wherever. The White Paper doesn't just include immigrants that are here with documented immigrants. It includes the undocumented population as well. And the other surprising part is if you look through this, this wasn't just one year or a fluke or, or any weird spikes. Cato tracks the numbers year by year across the same period, across this 94 to 2023 period. Again, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in government spending and government benefits in every single year of their study. Not most years, not on average, every year. Cato even goes into what happens if we had the Stephen Miller dream scenario where there are no immigrants. They modeled the counterfactual here. They modeled what happens if immigration goes away, if it's dramatically reduced or eliminated. And the numbers are stark. Without immigration over the last 30 years, the US government debt would exceed 200% of GDP, double the current level. And look, we know this. We know we're taking away workers. We know we're taking people away that are doing critical jobs in the United States. We're killing farms. And we know that a smaller workforce means less tax revenue. And we know that undocumented Immigrants, they are paying taxes and they're not getting benefits. And with all that lost tax revenue, you have higher per capita costs and a greater reliance on the United States to take on more debt. So, yeah, Stephen Miller's dream would crush our U.S. economy. And there's another figure that I found surprising in this whole thing. Over their lifetimes, immigrants individually paid Almost or approximately $130,000 more in taxes than the average U.S. born resident. $130,000 More in taxes than the average U. S. Born resident. And that includes your federal, your state, your local, all taxes across everything. And it reflects this, this long term participation that we've had of immigrants in our labor force. It goes through the consumption taxes, the payroll taxes, all of it. So yeah, we see the talking point, we see the right saying everything from houses to benefits to entitlements, all of it is that immigrants burden our governments. And they are, they're specifically saying, and immigrants aren't. But the right is saying that the burden is specifically on your state and local government. So let's look a little bit more at those numbers, the state and local level. In that 30 year period, 94 to 2023 immigrants paid $9.6 trillion in state and local taxes and state and local spending was 4.7 trillion, net surplus, 6.6 trillion. Over the whole, the whole thing, the whole, all numbers put together. So when people are arguing the immigrants are draining local budgets, the long term accounting doesn't support that, it doesn't support their claims. And we know that the right's going to run away from the data, they're going to run away from the numbers and they're going to maybe say, hey, look, we're going to put these, these numbers, if, if they come to light, they're going to put them in buckets, they're going to say, well, it's one thing, not the other. But again, Cato was detailed here and I hate to give them their credit, but when we are talking about someone who should be on Donald Trump's side directly contradicting his numbers, his talking points, I want to highlight that. And the Cato Institute goes through all of the categories and the costs are real, right? Education, all of that, we're still seeing the immigrant, the immigrants paying more tax contributions than the costs over time. Now I will show what the right is going to say that they are going to point to. In this whole study, Cato highlights the mismatch between where taxes are collected and where the services are provided. I already said that a lot of these costs are occurring at the state and local level, while the biggest tax revenue is going to the federal government. That's a federalism issue. That's, that's an issue between our federal government and our state governments. It's a budgeting issue. And so when you see the Trump administration hammering these blue states, he's not dealing with fact. He's cutting spending for childcare. He's cutting spending across the board, especially in blue states, claiming it's because of immigrant immigration. The fact is immigrants are subsidizing non immigrants. And again, I mentioned earlier that this white paper includes undocumented immigrants. And here is a statistic that is going to surprise people. Non citizen immigrants, including the undocumented ones, accounted for approximately 44%, 44% of the total fiscal benefit in this study. That works out to about $6.3 trillion in surplus. So noncitizens and undocumented immigrants gave this country $6.3 trillion of surplus over the last 30 years. That is directly contradicting what the Trump administration is out there saying and trying to sell us on why they're invading our cities and why they're snatching people off the streets and why they're tearing families apart. They're saying it's because they are a drain on our economy and on our government budgets. They aren't. They aren't, you know, immigrants aren't using welfare more than anybody else. According to Cato's analysis, non citizen immigrants consume about 53% less in welfare benefits than US born residents, 53% less. And that includes all the programs that the right wing are citing in their, in their political arguments about public assistance. And it's because the lower participation here is driven by eligibility restrictions. They, you know, non citizens, they don't have the same eligibility for benefits that citizens do. We see the employment patterns, the demographic differences, we see education. I talked about that a minute ago. It's usually the biggest cost associated with immigration. Cato accounts for that. When, when all of this money is included, including education, immigrant households are still ahead of the curve. And it's just showing us this long term benefit, the upfront costs followed by a long term benefit. And in all of that, we are coming out ahead. And it's consistent with any of your basic human capital economics. Now, I want to point out that Cato didn't put this out because of altruism. They're not putting this out because suddenly they've shifted their ideals on how this country works and how the economy works. They published it because immigration aligns with free Market economics, we hear all the time that immigrants do the jobs that citizens don't want to do. And when you have a larger labor force, it supports growth. Higher productivity expands the tax base, the tax base. And we hear Dr. Oz asking for more productivity. Kids to start working a year earlier, seniors to work a year later. Well, here's your answer. If you want more productivity, more workers reduce the costs of government services. And when you restrict immigration, it constrains labor, it raises prices. Hey, there, right there is your inflation. And so when you start cutting out all the people who do the jobs, prices go up and economic output is slowed. And if you compare this to the dominant political narrative on the right, the MAGA talking points, immigrants are, they're blamed for the budget deficits, the strained public services, fiscal irresponsibility, fraud in daycares. But the numbers are real. And the numbers show trillions of dollars in fiscal benefit. Lower long term debt, higher tax revenues, reduced costs per capita. And that gap is glaring. But the right and reality not meshing, it's not accidental. It tells us exactly what we already know here. It's just like anything else in Trump's policy. Trump's not a conservative. The Cato Institute being a conservative organization calling out Donald Trump is like the NRA calling out Donald Trump for not being a Second Amendment guy. Trump isn't a conservative. His approach to immigration is not conservative. It's not grounded in free market economics. The tariffs, they restrict trade and American taxpayers pay the tariffs. Mass deportations shrink our labor force enforcement surges are increasing the government spending. And again, this DHS bill, the funding bill, is skyrocketing spending. And now you see investors, there's uncertainty, so investments are all over the place. Markets don't like chaos. The economy doesn't like the Trump chaos. So the data that Cato is presenting, it makes it clear that immigration supports our economic stability. They are a vital part of our economy. And if you wanted to point to one thing that has driven costs up in this economy and made our markets unstable and, and made jobs just disappear across the country, it is this immigration crackdown and this Trump style war on immigration is undermining our economy. And again, this study runs all the way up through 2023. So the recent immigration surges, all the stuff that Trump's blaming on Biden, the economic shocks, the COVID all of that, even with all of that accounted for, immigration made the country more money than our country spent on immigrants. And so that makes it extremely difficult, extremely difficult for the administration to justify that immigration is a cause for any of our problems. After 30 years of data, it's straightforward. Immigrants and immigration, they reduced deficit. They, they lowered the debt pressure and they expanded the tax base, producing a surplus for our country. And again, conservative accounting assumptions, conservative based Cato here. I, I think you guys should read all of this yourself. It is absolutely stunning. And you guys all out there, you need to look at this. And again, this is a perfect talking point when, when your, your angry uncle comes at you on Facebook or when you're at the dinner table, are you in politics? Show them the Cato study. So I'm going to cover this next story in our next block, but again, I'm Josh from Ring of Fire. You can catch us on YouTube. The Ring of Fire.com I'm filling in for David. And if you like the job I'm doing or if you hate me, go to my newly launched social media pages, on Facebook, on Instagram, at the voice of the left, I'm Josh. We'll be right back with more content.
