Mentioned this in the Levin/Ryan interview post, but it deserves a more emphatic distinction...
Only a quarter? And how much you want to bet that number won't even hold up? Also, that's millions more poor...so let's get real about that 'major boost to the federal budget'...WashingtonTimes: The Senate immigration bill will be a major boost to the federal budget but does relatively little to clamp down on illegal immigration — cutting the future flow by only about 25 percent — according to the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the bill, released Tuesday afternoon.
Under the bill, which legalizes illegal immigrants and invites in foreign workers, immigration will total 10.4 million more people over the next decade and 16.2 million by 2033.
Related link: CBO: 75% of Illegal Immigration Would Continue Under Senate Immigration Bill
Take note of how amorphous the CBO's cost analysis of Obamacare has been year after year after year...those 'revised' numbers keep creeping up, proving just how fudged the figures given to the CBO were from the beginning. And now, here we are yet again.
I won't get into the nuts and bolts of it, but Daniel Horowitz delves deeper into our tax/benefit structure and our progressive tax system, and deduces that the CBO fails to factor in either. Needless to say, Horowitz leaves us with a quote from former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and it seems fitting to do the same:RedState: Somehow, when it comes to ascertaining the costs of wrongheaded policy, CBO wants us to engage in willing suspension of disbelief. The most costly entitlement will actually reduce the deficit, they claim. In Washington, up is down and down is up.
We are now seeing the same thing with the amnesty/immigration deform bill. You need not be an actuary to understand that 11 million poor illegals and tens of millions of other poor legal immigrants and guest workers, along with their American-born children, will wind up receiving a lot more in benefits than they pay in taxes. Yet, CBO will have you believe that this bill will actually reduce the deficit over 10 and 20 years by $197 billion and $700 billion respectively. In fact, the only main costs in this bill are the border security provisions.
Well, if you take their estimate to its logical conclusion, we should double the number of illegal immigrants, thereby doubling the level of deficit reduction. Also, countries like Mexico should be economic superpowers by now. It’s this sort of dyslexic bean counting that has led to $17 trillion in debt.
“I used to joke that the estimate was based on whatever my mood was in the shower that morning.”As long as we've got these geniuses in DC on the job, you can bank on that being about the extent of their accuracy.
