Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Taxes
Join the Tax Day Shuffle: A Love Story
09 months ago
While we’re not afraid to say how much we love taxes, we’re definitely not fans of our current system of inequitable tax policies. Black and brown folks often pay the most and get the least from a government that’s long promised to do better. But today, residents in seven major cities aren’t just calling for a new system, they’re dancing for it. The Right to the City Alliance organized a series of Flashmob dances in San Francisco, Miami, Arlington, New York City, Providence, Boston, and Los Angeles.
The group is advocating for a proportional tax scale and loophole-less wealth and corporate taxes, revenues of which could be used to re-invest in communities and to create living wage jobs with benefits.
“Corporations and banks caused the crisis. Now it’s time they pay their fair share, and time for the Government to stop protecting the corporations and start protecting the people,” RTTC said in a press release.
The “Tax the Rich” shuffle will be performed in front of corporate targets, City Halls, and government offices. Check out the instructional video above, as well as last week’s reader forum on what you all are thankful to taxes for.
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To see other Love posts visit our Celebrate Love page.
Six Public Goods That Have Shaped My Life–Or, Why Taxes Are Cool
09 months ago
Yeah, it’s tax time. And with a high-stakes battle over the role and size of government building in Washington, the tax filing process is more freighted with political baggage than it’s been in a while.
We’ve spent a lot of time at Colorlines.com parsing budget priorities–and thinking about how much tax cuts for the rich cost government. For most folks, taxes are a far more personal business than all of that. Most ask just one question as they send in taxes: What’s it gonna cost me? But maybe everybody needs to also think about what we’re buying for ourselves when we file. Even those of us who are happy to contribute to the collective good could stand a reminder of why we fight for an equitable tax policy and for government’s role in creating a just society.
So today we’re following the lead of a Minnesota-based Web campaign called Thank Taxes. The campaign urges everyone to take a photo of themselves with a sign thanking taxes for a public good they love. You should do it. Here on Colorlines, we’ll just shout out our favorite public goods. Below is my own list; chime into the comments with yours.
What Have Taxes Ever Done For Me?
My grandfathers’ jobs
I wasn’t even born when taxes started to shape my life. During and following the second World War, federal money pumped into the economy to create jobs, get folks’ homes and support college education. Black people were barred from most of those opportunities, but both my mothers’ and fathers’ families were among the lucky exceptions. Both of my grandfathers landed civilian jobs on military bases, and those jobs propelled their families, and their children’s families, into the middle class that so many black Americans still haven’t reached.
My 3rd grade teacher
I won’t call her name, but she’s one of many educators who shaped my life. And not just because she taught me the three Rs. Rather, as a young black woman, she could see the strain I was feeling as a black kid in a largely white, suburban elementary school. I fought a lot, with both students and teachers. White school administrators said I had emotional problems and needed counseling; my teacher realized I was just learning how to deal with the racism that surrounded me. Today, I couldn’t recount the intangible lessons she taught me about being black in a white-run world; they certainly wouldn’t have appeared on any standardized test. But I know she became a source of safety and calm in an otherwise chaotic school day.
My mother’s pension
Speaking of public school teachers, my own mother taught elementary school for decades. Like too many seniors today–particularly those of color–she’s now retired in name alone, as she continues to try and make the monthly ends meat. It’s not easy, but one thing has helped tremendously: The pension she earned during all those years of helping raise other folks’ children into productive parts of society. If Republican governors around the country get their way, the next generation of career-dedicated teachers and public servants like my mother won’t have that security.
Clean drinking water
As an adult living in New York City, my quality of life depends upon uncounted public goods. Our unmatched tap water may be my favorite example–and it’s an ideal case study for why some things are best run as public goods rather than private ventures.
New York’s first public well was dug in 1667, about a block away from Colorlines.com’s office in lower Manhattan. But as population swelled, wells quickly became useless; there weren’t enough of them and waste easily polluted them. In 1799, the state tried a private scheme, giving the Manhattan Company exclusive rights to supply well water to the city. But the company’s real interest was in using the money it made to start Chase Manhattan bank. The water supply remained putrid; the bank thrived. So in 1837 the city put thousands of immigrants to work on the massive engineering feat of creating a public water supply from the Croton River in Westchester. Today, three massive reservoirs supply the city’s water, and allow me to walk up to my faucet and drink safely.
Public transit
I haven’t owned a car in 20 years. Enough said. Now, I’m no fan of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that runs New York State’s transit systems. And they need to stop raising fares that make it harder and harder for working people to live in the city. But that’s another post altogether. Management problems set to the side, me and five million other New Yorkers will use the subway today, and that’s a feat.
The Library of Congress
Some folks look in awe at our national parks, and they’re great. Me, I’m wowed by our national library. The Library’s primary goal is to serve Congress–it’s literally the place where lawmakers can look stuff up. It was founded in 1800, when the Capitol moved to D.C., and then revived in 1815, after the British burned the first one down. Congress bought Thomas Jefferson’s renowned personal collection of 6,487 books to get it going. Jefferson expected some controversy over his library’s sprawling contents, so he included a note that the conservatives who fetishize him today, while censoring the Smithsonian, may want to read:
I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.
Today the Library serves so much more than Congress; it serves you too. It houses an awesome 144 million items, ranging from back issues of Ebony Magazine to rare maps. An increasing number of them are digitized, or at least searchable on its website, which also contains many great histories. The Library sits across the street from the Capitol and next door to the Supreme Court–knowledge is power, one gathers while standing amid the three buildings. If you haven’t been to it, go this summer. Take a tour of the gorgeous Jefferson Building. Then go get a library card, sit down in the stunning main reading room, order up a beautiful text from your library, and dive in.
It’s money well spent.
Experts Highlight Economic Gains from Immigration
01 year ago
At a forum held yesterday by the Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institution, a panel of experts sought to “distinguish economic reality from myth” in the often fact-free and emotion-laden debate over how immigration affects the U.S. economy and U.S. workers. The forum, entitled “Crossing Borders: From Myth to Sound Immigration Policy”—as well as an accompanying report, Ten Economic Facts About Immigration—served to refute the shrill and empirically baseless claims of nativist groups that immigrants are stealing jobs from Americans while draining the public treasury.
In fact, the experts on the panel agreed that:
- “On average, immigrants raise the overall standard of living of American workers by boosting wages and lowering prices.” There are three reasons for this. First of all, “immigrants and U.S.-born workers generally do not compete for the same jobs; instead many immigrants complement the work of U.S. employees and increase their productivity.” Secondly, “businesses adjust to new immigrants by opening stores, restaurants, or production facilities to take advantage of the added supply of workers.” And, third, “immigrant workers enhance the purchasing power of Americans by lowering prices of ‘immigrant-intensive’ services like child care, gardening, and cleaning services.”
- “Taxes paid by immigrants and their children—both legal and unauthorized—exceed the costs of the services they use.” Although the children of immigrants are “costly” in terms of the educational and health services they utilize, this is true of all children. But children grow up to be working, taxpaying adults who pay back these expenses over the course of their lifetimes. Nevertheless, it is the federal government which ends up being the big winner in terms of collecting these tax revenues, while “education and health services for immigrant children are generally state liabilities.” The experts acknowledged that “states may be burdened with costs that will only be recouped over a number of years…”
- “Immigrants start new businesses and file patents at higher rates than U.S.-born citizens.” Immigrants “are 30 percent more likely to form new businesses than U.S.-born citizens,” and “among people with advanced degrees, immigrants are three times more likely to file patents than U.S.-born citizens.” These “investments in new businesses and in research may provide spillover benefits to U.S.-born workers by enhancing job creation.” In addition, many large and successful U.S. companies—such as Intel, Google, and Yahoo!—were founded or co-founded by immigrants.
The Brookings forum and report draw much-needed attention to the economic contributions which immigrants make as workers, taxpayers, and entrepreneurs. Moreover, as the speakers at the forum emphasized, the contributions of immigrants would be even greater were our immigration system not so unresponsive to the needs of the U.S. economy. As it stands now, the U.S. immigration system provides insufficient visas for both less-skilled and highly skilled immigrants. As a result, a significant share of the demand for less-skilled workers is filled by unauthorized immigrants, at the same time that many highly skilled foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities are forced to leave the country after receiving their educations. Needless to say, this is an illogical situation produced by a broken immigration system. The forum participants all agreed that revamping that broken system should be among the highest of priorities for the Obama administration and Congress.
Photo by borman818.
Undocumented Immigrants Giving Social Security, Baby Boomers a Big Boost
01 year ago
Washington Post columnist and Harvard University Migration and Integration Research director, Edward Schumacher-Matos, recently pointed out what the Social Security Administration (SSA) has known for years—undocumented immigrants contribute to Social Security in a big way. But what surprised Schumacher-Matos was just how much these immigrants contribute, and the fact that many states are trying to pass enforcement to drive these contributors out. With an upcoming wave of retiring Baby Boomers (who will receive Social Security benefits instead of paying into the system) and a Social Security system teetering on the edge of insolvency, immigrants (both documented and undocumented), their role as taxpayers, workers and consumers and the question of what to do about our immigration problems become ever more relevant.
In a recent Washington Post editorial, Schumacher-Matos laid out the facts:
- By 2007, the Social Security trust fund had received a net benefit of somewhere between $120 billion and $240 billion from unauthorized immigrants, representing 5.4% to 10.7% of the trust fund’s total assets ($2.24 trillion) that year.
- Unauthorized immigrants paid a net contribution of $12 billion in 2007 alone.
- The cumulative contribution is surely higher now.
- Roughly two-thirds of unauthorized immigrant workers, or 5.6 million people, were paying into the system in 2007.
- Few of these contributing unauthorized immigrants are likely to receive anything, ever.
The SSA’s chief actuary, Stephen C. Goss, went on to say that if it wasn’t for undocumented immigrants paying into the system—the majority of whom, mind you, will never collect the benefits—the SSA wouldn’t have been able to cover payouts in 2009:
If for example we had not had other-than-legal immigrants in the country over the past, then these numbers suggest that we would have entered persistent shortfall of tax revenue to cover [payouts] starting [in] 2009, or six years earlier than estimated under the 2010 Trustees Report.
As Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) start to retire, the ratio of seniors to working-age adults (25 to 64) will be thrown out of balance, causing massive Social Security underfunding. According to a report by Dowell Meyers of the University of Southern California, “over the next 20 years, the number of senior citizens relative to the number of working-age Americans will increase by 67 percent,” which means that more and more retirees “will transition from being net taxpayers to net recipients of pension benefits, and they will be supported by a smaller workforce that is struggling to meet its own needs.”
So as we pull out of the recession, employment rates return to normal and more and more Baby Boomers retire, who, exactly, is going to fill this gap? Enter immigration.
Clearly, having roughly 8 million undocumented workers in the U.S. workforce is not an ideal situation. While these undocumented workers do, in fact, shoulder some of the SSA’s solvency burdens, keeping them in our workforce is not only exploitative, it’s unfair. And it’s not a long-term solution. Yet neither is the recent “enforcement through attrition” strategy employed by immigration restrictionists to drive undocumented immigrants out.
Study after study indicates that immigration reform which includes an earned path to legalization—that is, allows these undocumented immigrants to become taxpaying U.S. citizens—would go a long way in filling the void. It is sad, but not surprising, that complex policy issues like Social Security reform and immigration reform have long been stymied by a political lack of will. It is also sad, but even more ironic that the same solution—comprehensive immigration reform—is critical to solving both problems.
Photo by americanconsumers.
New Report Highlights Economic Gains from Immigration and Immigration Reform
01 year ago
In a report released this week, the New Policy Institute (NPI) synthesizes much of the available research on the ways in which immigration ultimately raises wage levels for the vast majority of native-born workers and benefits the U.S. economy as a whole. The report, entitled The Impact of Immigration and Immigration Reform on the Wages of American Workers, also summarizes a number of studies which have demonstrated the economic gains which would likely flow to all U.S. workers were unauthorized immigrants given a pathway to legal status. The NPI report reinforces the conclusion of a February IPC fact sheet on immigration and the economy that “employment is not a zero-sum game in which workers compete for some set number of jobs. Policies which lift the wages of workers, regardless of where they were born, benefit the entire U.S. economy. Workers who earn higher wages also buy more goods and services from U.S. businesses, and pay more in taxes to federal and state governments, both of which create jobs.”
According to the NPI report, the available evidence suggests that “high levels of immigration have had no adverse effect on the average wages of native-born Americans. In fact, studies indicate that the recent waves of immigration have positive long-term effects on average wages as capital investment rises to take account of the larger numbers of workers.” The report notes that after the legalization program created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), “wages rose by 6 percent to 15 percent for previously-undocumented male immigrants and by 21 percent for previously-undocumented female immigrants. Those reforms also increased wages of previously legal immigrants. Research also suggests that those reforms led to modest wage gains by native-born Americans.” Moreover, as the IPC demonstrates in a November 2009 study, IRCA beneficiaries experienced significant gains over time as measured by a broad array of socio-economic indicators in addition to wages, including home ownership and education.
The NPI report also finds that, after “taking into account both spending and revenues, immigrants are not a net drain on most state, local and federal budgets. In any year, a handful of states with large numbers of recent immigrants with children incur significant net budget costs, largely from the educational and medical costs associated with the children. At the federal level, however, revenues from immigrants equal or exceed spending on immigrants.” In addition, according to the report, “on a longer-term basis, the lifetime earnings of immigrants, most of whom arrive in America at post school-age and without elderly parents eligible for Social Security and Medicare, are likely to exceed the lifetime government spending they claim.” These contributions are critical at a time when both Social Security and Medicare are facing a tide of red ink as the Baby Boomers retire, leaving the labor force and drawing upon their benefits.
Given the ability of unscrupulous employers to exploit unauthorized workers and drive down wages, particularly in less-skilled occupations, the NPI study also concludes that allowing unauthorized immigrants to earn legal status would raise wages for both formerly unauthorized workers and those relatively few native-born workers with whom they compete for jobs. As the IPC and Center for American Progress estimated in a January 2010 study by Dr. Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, the higher personal incomes of newly legalized workers would, over the first three years, increase consumer spending enough to support 750,000–900,000 jobs, and would generate $4.5-$5.4 billion in new tax revenue. Given the high unemployment rates and widespread budget deficits currently afflicting the United States, economic gains of this magnitude are not insignificant.
In short, the NPI report reinforces the findings of numerous researchers that immigration is a net benefit to the U.S. economy and to native-born workers, and that legalizing currently unauthorized immigrants would sustain new jobs and generate new tax revenue at a time when the nation desperately needs both.
Photo by rbbaird.
Immigration Reform Raises Revenue, While Enforcement-Only Strategies Throw Tax Dollars Away
01 year ago
Tax Day is a fitting time to consider the billions of dollars which the federal government wastes each year attempting to put a stop to unauthorized immigration through an “enforcement only” strategy—and the billions of new taxpayer dollars which would flow from comprehensive immigration reform that includes a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants already in the United States. As the IPC points out in a new fact sheet, “we spend huge sums of taxpayer money on immigration enforcement, yet unauthorized immigrants have not been deterred from coming to the United States when there are jobs available.” As a result, enforcement resources are needlessly wasted tracking down unauthorized job seekers and people trying to reunite with family members in the United States, rather than focused on finding individuals who are actually a threat to national security or public safety.
Since Fiscal Year (FY) 2004, the budgets of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—the border-enforcement and interior-enforcement components of Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—have increased dramatically. CBP’s budget grew from $6 billion in FY 2004 to $11.4 billion in FY 2010, while ICE’s budget increased from $3.7 billion to $5.7 billion over the same period. Moreover, since FY 2005, Congress has allocated $2.4 billion to build fences along the southwest border—and another $1.1 billion to build a high-tech network of cameras and sensors known as “SBInet.” However, there is no evidence that the fences actually deter unauthorized immigrants, and SBInet has been plagued by technical glitches, shoddy testing, and missed deadlines since its inception. On March 16, 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano froze SBInet funding, pending the outcome of a comprehensive review of the program.
Despite these ballooning enforcement expenditures, unauthorized immigration continues unabated. Research by Wayne Cornelius at the University of California, San Diego, has found that while unauthorized migrants from Mexico may be caught on their first attempt at crossing the border, they have an almost 100 percent chance of eventual success—particularly if they enlist the services of a coyote, or people smuggler. Moreover, as border enforcement is tightened between ports of entry along the southwest border, more migrants are being smuggled through ports of entry (sealed in a compartment within a vehicle, or as a passenger with false or borrowed documents). Research by Cornelius has also found that unauthorized migration from Mexico has diminished mainly because there are fewer jobs available in the United States.
In contrast to the expensive failure of the enforcement-only approach, comprehensive immigration reform would generate new tax revenue. Granting legal status to currently unauthorized immigrants, for instance, would boost their wages and increase their tax contributions even in the short run. A January 2010 study by Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, conducted for the IPC and Center for American Progress, estimates that during the first three years after legalization, the higher earning power of newly legalized workers “would generate $4.5 to $5.4 billion in additional net tax revenue.” In a related vein, a January 2010 study from the University of Southern California estimates that because unauthorized immigrants earn less than they would if they had legal status, the California state government lost out on $310 million in income taxes in 2009, while the federal government missed out on $1.4 billion.
The alternative to legalization—deportation—would be a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars. A March 2010 study by the Center for American Progress “calculates a price tag of $200 billion to enforce a federal dragnet that would snare the estimated 10.8 million undocumented immigrants in the United States over five years.” And this does not even begin to capture the social and economic destruction that would be wrought on communities and businesses nationwide by attempting to round up millions of men, women, and children.
Video by the Center for American Progress.