Spreading the Non-existent Wealth

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 17 August 2012.]

The Obama administration is notorious for its initiatives – legal and extra-legal – to enlarge and lock in a dependent constituency that will reliably deliver it votes during elections.  The latest vote buying initiatives involve expansion of major welfare programs.  And I bet you thought that we were actually rolling back welfare and controlling the spending of dollars we don’t have.

Let’s first look at the refundable child tax credit.  This program provides cash payments to low-income parents who pay no income tax.  Evidence is piling up that this cash refund program is massively abused by the country’s illegal aliens.  Before looking at some details, we see that even the ‘refund’ part of this redistribution program is cynically labeled – there is no refund possible if there was nothing paid in initially.

The way you get this cash as an illegal is to first obtain an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number from the IRS.  ITINs are easy to get and are required for anyone paying taxes who does not qualify for a Social Security Number.  The IRS makes it clear that “ITINs are for federal tax reporting only, and are not intended to serve any other purpose.”  So you file a tax return and at the same time apply for an ITIN.  On the tax return you show minimum income, and claim as many dependent children as you think you can get away with.

The Heritage Foundation reports that, for example, “a family earning $16,000 a year with two children would receive more than $7,000 in combined cash payments.”  Since such a filing entails no payment of taxes, this is like free cash for a little paperwork and no worries about immigration police.

Heritage tax expert Curtis Dubay writes that “the extensive and rapidly growing problem is that illegal immigrants who reside in the U.S. are able to acquire ITINs from the IRS and then use those identifiers to file tax returns on which they claim the child tax credit and its refundable payment. A study from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reports that the number of ITIN filers claiming refundable payments nearly doubled between 2005 and 2008 from 796,000 to 1,526,276.”

This program benefits mostly Latinos and is a great way to nail down the loyalty of Hispanic Americans.  “Conservative estimates show the federal government will spend $7.6 billion over 10 years on child tax credit payments to illegal immigrants.” - thereby garnering Hispanic votes that are cheap at twice the price.

Moving on to President Obama’s recent removal of workfare from the celebrated 1996 welfare reform act.  This reform, passed by a Republican Congress and reluctantly signed by President Clinton, has been a burr under the blanket for progressives – and also an opportunity for Team Obama.  The heart of the reform was the ‘workfare’ requirement for a bona fide job, or spending recognizable effort to find a job, or attending a job training program.

Nationally recognized expert on welfare and poverty, Robert Rector, reports (here) that Obama’s recent directive completely overturned the work requirement.   He writes, “Unable to eliminate ‘workfare’ legislatively, the Left now acts contrary to the law and employs a bureaucratic maneuver to gut the work requirements. The Obama administration claims authority to grant waivers that allow states to skirt these requirements.”

This is the most recent case of this President’s history of sidestepping or subverting the laws of the land.  The progressives celebrate his ‘chutzpah’ because they know that it will return millions into reliable, permanent, and grateful wards of the state.  And you can be sure that, come election time, they will know what party has always labored long to remove work requirements from qualifying for the dole.

And those are just a couple examples of how we spread the wealth in America.  Did I mention that 40 cents of every dollar of this wealth is borrowed, just like they’re doing in Europe?

My name is Rebane, and I expand on this and related themes in my Union columns and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary with related links is posted.  These views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Comments

[Paul Emery]

So George if I may summarize the first part of your post, illegals
who get tax goodies by gaming the tax code inspire voters who are citizens of similar heritage to vote Democratic out of gratitude.

[billy T]

I thought that the Welfare Reform Act had an iron clad clause in the language. Congress specifically wrote in that the work requirement could not be altered, changed or abridged. Heard the White House lawyers favorite phase is :Contracts were made to be broken." Think Obama is on shaky ground on this one, but, then again, the incumbent lad is fighting for reelection and needs to shore up his base.

[Russ Steele]

[email protected]:17PM

The illegals do not have to get their Democrat friends to vote for them, they can do it for themselves. The Voter Integrity Project found thousands of illegals on the voting rolls in Southern California. This article appears in The Cutting Edge, extracted here to just cover the segment on California.

The evidence is indisputable that aliens, both legal and illegal, are registering and voting in federal, state, and local elections. Following a mayor's race in Compton, California, for example, aliens testi­fied under oath in court that they voted in the elec­tion. In that case, a candidate who was elected to the city council was permanently disqualified from holding public office in California for soliciting non-citizens to register and vote. The fact that non-citizens registered and voted in the election would never have been discovered except for the fact that it was a very close election and the in­cumbent mayor, who lost by less than 300 votes, contested it.

Similarly, a 1996 congressional race in California may have been stolen by non-citizen voting. Republican incumbent Bob Dornan was defending himself against a spirited challenger, Democrat Lor­etta Sanchez. Sanchez won the election by just 979 votes, and Dornan contested the election in the U.S. House of Representatives. His challenge was dismissed after an investigation by the House Com­mittee on Oversight and Government Reform turned up only 624 invalid votes by non-citizens who were present in the U.S. Immigration and Nat­uralization Service (INS) database because they had applied for citizenship, as well as another 124 improper absentee ballots. The investigation, however, could not detect illegal aliens, who were not in the INS records.

The Oversight Committee pointed out the ele­phant in the room: "If there is a significant num­ber of ‘documented aliens,' aliens in INS records, on the Orange County voter registration rolls, how many illegal or undocumented aliens may be regis­tered to vote in Orange County?" There is a strong possibility that, with only about 200 votes determining the winner, enough undetected aliens registered and voted to change the outcome of the election. This is particularly true since the California Secretary of State complained that the INS refused his request to check the entire Orange County voter registration file, and no complete check of all of the individuals who voted in the congressional race was ever made.

[Todd Juvinall]

I watched a little CSPAN before I went to dinner in NC tonight. A Time mag writer was the guest and he made me almost spew. He is Grunwald or something like that.

Anyway, he wrote a book about how the stimuli really was the greatest thing ever and he had the shovel ready crapola ready to prove it. I was shocked that a person could be that stupid but maybe Time Magazine does that to people. He was a fast talker and it was clear he would probably be an Obama concubine if he could.

[Michael Anderson]

Todd wrote: "He was a fast talker and it was clear he would probably be an Obama concubine if he could."

Beautiful. This statement is a dog whistle, mixed with some misogyny, wrapped in a slur, signifying nothing. Deep respect.

[George Rebane]

PaulE 717pm - spot on Paul. The legal Hispanic community could stop the illegals abusing the child tax credit in a heartbeat by simply reporting them. Instead they remain silent, and look favorably on politicians that promise to make them feel good about their decision to circumvent their civic duty. Aztlan (q.v.) is not a terrible alternative for the Hispanic-American, especially if every day he sees the progressive tide sweeping toward such a future for the southwest.

[TomKenworth]

George, let me know the next time you turn in to the IRS a commercial truck towing a boat to the lake.

[TomKenworth]

Yup, even the richest Americans have got empty pockets, except when it is really, really important.

http://fansided.com/2012/08/17/texas-high-school-builds-60m-stadium-fires-84-teachers/

[George Rebane]

TomK 1052pm - point well made. People don't report infractions of laws they don't believe in. Whether it be anyone overlooking a small business owner using his business vehicle for weekend recreation (legal if you report the fraction of its private use), or a legal Hispanic overlooking his illegal fellow Hispanic sacking the federal dole programs that he sees as a commons.

In the latter case, there is a sizeable Latino population in the US that considers formally illegal entry into this country to be totally acceptable. In fact, the US is seen by them as a tyrannical state when it seeks to enforce border security or reciprocate any of the dozens of laws that the Mexican government enforces against aliens.

[TomKenworth]

Mexicans would not have come across the border, if employers didn't employ them.

This goes well back even before Boswell got started:

" October 2003
A rich, colorful history of California centering on the untold story of America 's biggest farmer, J. G. Boswell, who controls more than $1 billion worth of water rights and real estate in the heart of the state. J. G. Boswell is the biggest farmer in America. Over the past fifty years he has built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields. " Now eighty years old, with an almost pathological bent toward privacy, Boswell has spent the past few years confiding one of the great stories of the American West to Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman. The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s,drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world. Indeed, the sophistication of Boswell 's agricultural operation -from lab to field to gin - is unrivaled anywhere. Much more than a business story, this is a sweeping social history that details the saga of cotton growers who were chased from the South by the boll weevil and brought their black farmhands to California. It is a gripping read with cameos by a cast of famous characters, from Cecil B. DeMille to Cesar Chavez."

~The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire [Hardcover]
Mark Arax (Author), Rick Wartzman (Author)~

How come the Tea Party doesn't go job site to job site and attempt to prove that some of the workers are here illegally? Same reason 6th generation, with ancestors born here before 1848, Mexicans do not turn in their more recent arrivals. The real owners, if you will, were the California Indians, who got here 10,000 years before present, not the Johnny Come Lately who arrived to stay in 1769 and 1849. Spain dropped anchor 200 years prior, but left immediately. Only when the Russians started working their way down the Pacific Coast did Spain attempt to occupy California.

[Russ Steele]

The Real California?

Victor Davis Hansen
Aug 16, 2012

“One-third of the nation's welfare recipients now reside in California”

Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line. Consider the disconnects: California's combined income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest, but the state's deficit is still about $16 billion. It's estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet California wants to raise taxes even higher; its business climate already ranks near the bottom of most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid on average in the nation, but its public school students consistently test near the bottom of the nation in both math and science. The state's public employees enjoy some of the nation's most generous pensions and benefits, but California's retirement systems are underfunded by about $300 billion. The state's gas taxes -- at over 49 cents per gallon -- are among the highest in the nation, but its once unmatched freeways, like 101 and 99, for long stretches have degenerated into potholed, clogged nightmares unchanged since the early 1960s. The state wishes to borrow billions of dollars to develop high-speed rail, beginning with a little-traveled link between Fresno and Corcoran -- a corridor already served by money-losing Amtrak. Apparently, coastal residents like the idea of European high-speed rail -- as long as noisy and dirty construction does not begin in their backyards. As gasoline prices soar, California chooses not to develop millions of barrels of untapped oil and even more natural gas off its shores and beneath its interior. Home to bankrupt green companies like Solyndra, California has mandated that a third of all the energy provided by state utilities soon must come from renewable energy sources -- largely wind and solar, which presently provide about 11 percent of its electricity and almost none of its transportation fuel. How to explain the seemingly inexplicable? There is no California, which is a misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, each equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster. A postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley, where the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life is becoming premodern. On the coast, blue-chip universities like Cal Tech, Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA in pastoral landscapes train the world's doctors, lawyers, engineers and businesspeople. In the hot interior of blue-collar Sacramento, Turlock, Fresno and Bakersfield, well over half the incoming freshman in the California State University system must take remedial math and science classes. In postmodern Palo Alto or Santa Monica, a small cottage costs more than $1 million. Two hours away, in premodern and now-bankrupt Stockton, a bungalow the same size goes for less than $100,000. In the interior, unemployment in many areas peaks at over 15 percent. The theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the shrinking middle class flee the interior for the coast or nearby no-income-tax states. To fathom the state's nearly unbelievable statistics -- as the state population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million during that period; one-third of the nation's welfare recipients now reside in California -- visit the state's hinterlands. But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about the state's trivia -- as their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects to save the 3-inch delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents. But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the gas for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil and pasta. On the coast, it's politically incorrect to talk of illegal immigration. In the interior, residents see first-hand the bankrupting effects on schools, courts and health care when millions arrive illegally without English-language fluency or a high school diploma -- and send back billions of dollars in remittances to Mexico and other Latin American countries.
The drive from Fresno to Palo Alto takes three hours, but you might as well be rocketing from Earth to the moon.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

[TomKenworth]

His solution I suppose: Police state ID's and checkpoints. Immediate deportation. Dig up plans from old Berlin Wall, and design improvements, more machine gun towers, maybe?. Mandated TREX decks, and so on. Tax wine, ooops, that affects farmers, your good guys.

[Gregory]

If that apocryphal commercial vehicle pulling the boat to the lake was part of an outing to entertain employees or customers, it would probably be a proper business use as far as the IRS is concerned.

"How come the Tea Party doesn't go job site to job site and attempt to prove that some of the workers are here illegally?" Because investigating and enforcing state and federal law isn't a job for a self appointed mob, just as rooting out commercial tax fraud isn't the job of self appointed busybodies? An even simpler answer is that most TP'ers are more sane than the sock puppet asking the questions.

[Gregory]

"Its teachers are among the highest paid on average in the nation, but its public school students consistently test near the bottom of the nation in both math and science. The state's public employees enjoy some of the nation's most generous pensions and benefits, but California's retirement systems are underfunded by about $300 billion."

Hanson has that right, and the solution should be to show underperforming teachers the door, find more ways (like Teach America) to ease the way for smart college grads into the classroom, and to convert the public pension system from defined benefit to defined contribution like what the rest of us live with.

[George Rebane]

re TomK's 944pm - to the uncommitted reader, here is Exhibit A of the nonsensical babble that comes out of a progressive mind when it's backed into a corner by a blizzard of reality. They immediately reach for the Alinsky Alternative and turn it 180 for the cranially crippled.

Guard towers, machine guns, checkpoints, and Berlin Walls (whose historical function he does not understand) have been built and manned by collectivist regimes of the kind that come about after a fundamental transformation of a nation.

[TomKenworth]

Hate to disappoint you George, but I witnessed those walls at age 11, visited Hitler's Death Bunker, in East Berlin, and know damn well that like Germany itself, Berlin was divided into 4 occupied parts, post WWII.

Supposedly you want all illegal aliens out of the country, and no more coming it. How do you intend to accomplish that, if that is indeed what you want?

[George Rebane]

TomK 1059am - You addressed nothing in my 1053am save confirming that a source of your ignorance about the Berlin Wall may have started when on your trip during which no one explained to you that the wall was built by a communist regime to keep their citizens from escaping to the capitalist west.

Take consolation in that you are not alone. I have found few progressives who understand that important distinction. To them every mention of America's border security connects some of their hip level synapses, and they start babbling about our building a Berlin Wall. Only Mexico can build a Berlin Wall on our border, capice?

Securing our borders requires nothing more than enforcing existing illegal entry laws with the help of a secure fence abetted by existing sensor technologies. In country we would issue federal IDs to all legal residents stating their status and its duration. These would detract not one iota from anyone's liberties or privacy concerns, given what is already known about us in multiple databases, and what is collected about us daily through our purchases, web surfing, and cell phone usage.

Also removed would be transfer payments to illegals. With this in place, employers could very easily vet the legal status of prospective hires. None of this portends a police state, but it does promote a secure, law abiding nation that again enforces and honors the franchise of citizenship. And none of this impacts immigration to the US.

[Russ Steele]

[email protected]:44

One of the first steps would be to mandate all business in California use E-Verify and the State stop giving welfare payments to persons in the country illegally. Use E-Verify as test for eligibility. As for voter registration, must have a photo ID to register and one to vote. Just as Arizona discovered, if you start applying the laws of the land those in the state illegally start remove themselves.

[TomKenworth]

And so when all the employers in all the states are getting bounties for identifying illegals, do you think the illegals will all go across the border? Or is it possible, that then, as now, the employers will stay on the hush to be able to employ cheap employees, or employees for jobs that "no American will take?" You know, I think that requiring each owner of a megafarm to spend one full workday in the fields, doing a normal days output as he requires from his employees, and having to repeat if he failed to meet output, would greatly improve working conditions, and Americans would begin to take the "jobs" that no American will take now.

[TomKenworth]

" when on your trip during which no one explained to you that the wall was built by a communist regime to keep their citizens from escaping to the capitalist west."

God God George, that's an obvious given!

To begin with, there was no wall when I was there, but there were checkpoints, and soldiers patrolling the borders, and I believe minefields. When those didn't work, they built the wall.

You don't think I don't remember all the news stories about people tunneling, people being shot to death, for attempting to flee East Berlin? Life magazine had many such stories, here's just one of them, and I haven't even Googled this yet. I know they are there.

"Berlin wall" Life Magazine" escape "East berlin" 341,000 results, samples:

http://life.time.com/history/birth-of-the-berlin-wall/#1

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-tunnel-digger-escapee-recalls-sweet-revenge-against-east-german-regime-a-779231.html

http://www.readersdigest.ca/magazine/true-stories/escape-east-germany

http://www.vintag.es/2012/05/berlin-wall-pictures-in-1961.html

[TomKenworth]

"if you start applying the laws of the land those in the state illegally start remove themselves. "

and if every state does it, and there are no jobs in Mexico, just what do you think will happen?

[TomKenworth]

You know what could happen? The Chinese could start buying up Canadian oil sands and hire all displaced Mexicans to operate them, after training, for pittance wages.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

What find at every instance - the new housing rules was an example also - as soon as anything might be subjected to a pullback of any kind.

It immediately leaps all the way to anarchy - nothing in the middle and its the progressives that sneak it in there bean by bean to be begin with.

Now can can do away with this drivel as he's starting to loose it with 4 posts and 6 links in a row - thinks we'll really read them I think