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Monday, June 04, 2007

Free Mustangs

Posted by: Jonathan Garthwaite at 11:33 AM

A new website has popped up from our friends at the Heritage Foundation, NoFreeMustang.com. The website gets its name from an analysis of the fiscal costs of illegal immigrant amnesty.

"The average illegal immigrant family receives an average of $30,000 in governmental benefits! Yet they pay only about $9,000 in taxes per year. That creates a $21,000 shortfall that the American taxpayer has to make up. That’s like buying each of these illegal immigrant families a brand new Mustang convertible—each and every year!” —Robert Rector, Ph.D., The Heritage Foundation

Definitely an interesting way to illustrate the point.

UPDATE: Not to be confused with the Mustang Heritage Foundation.

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dskerman writes:	Monday, June, 04, 2007 1:50 PM
Not accusing anyone
I'm not accusing the heritage foundation of anything. Here's their mission statement "Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institute - a think tank - whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense." Formulate and promote conservative public policies seems pretty easy to follow to me. Which is why I made the statment that when you have a research group with specific goals in mind as to what they desire their research to show it results in poor research. As for the claims that NPR is liberally biased, every recent study which has been performed has shown that NPR has some of the most balanced news coverage in the country. As for the claim that economists never agree on anything, the fact that there are dissenting views does not mean that the vast majority of economists does not hold certain things to be in general true.
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LazyKingDave writes:	Monday, June, 04, 2007 12:47 PM
dskerman
Did you really just cite an NPR piece in the same comment criticizing the Heritage foundation for bias? BTW: "Economists generally believe that when averaged over the whole economy the effect is a small net positive." Where is the general agreement of economists on ANYTHING? I'm sure that Borjas (who seems to be the sole source for the story) believes that economists generally agree with him, but it would be a new phenomenon in my experience, since I see a fair amount of disagreement on some things that seem fairly cut and dried (e.g. socialism is an abject failure as economic policy).
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dskerman writes:	Monday, June, 04, 2007 12:10 PM
Misleading
That may be true when looking only at the tax impact of the immigrants, but when the full economic impact of the workers is accurately tallied the overall economic impact of the workers is actually positive. Economists generally believe that when averaged over the whole economy the effect is a small net positive. According to Harvard's George Borjas the average American's wealth is increased by less than 1 percent because of the illegal workers. Here's a piece NPR did on the issue. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5312900 It's time people stopped listening to the Heritage foundation. The idea of a reaserch group with specific political goals seems compleatly backwards to me. Whenever you have a study with pre-determined desired results the studies tend to be worthless.
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