Conservatives? Want tougher enforcement of immigration laws? You're going to have to grow the federal bureaucracy

To listen to Republicans in the presidential primary debates, you'd think Barack Obama had thrown open the borders to the United States to every Tom, Dick, and Juan who wants to stream over the southern border. That's not true, of course: Obama's deported nearly as many illegal immigrants in less than three years than George W. Bush did in eight. 

But there are still illegal immigrants in the United States, so clearly he's doing something wrong. Right?

Maybe you can ship all 11 million illegal immigrants out of the country. But here's the thing, conservatives: You're going to need a much bigger federal bureaucracy to get the job done. According to a Washington Post profile this morning, the U.S. only has the budget to deport 400,000 illegal immigrants a year.  At that rate, it'll only take 27.5 years to ship everybody else—assuming, of course, you can keep everybody else out.

If you want tougher enforcement that includes deportation of any immigrant found to be here illegally, you're going to have to raise the budget for border enforcement considerably. You're going to have to hire a lot of new immigration agents. That's going to expand the federal workforce—something conservatives seem to hate—and spend a lot of money, something conservatives undoubtedly hate. If bigger government is an evil in its own right, then the only solution here is more evil.

Or we could reform our system to offer more guest-worker visas and generally allow more legal immigration. But that would make too much sense.

Millionaires can afford a tax hike: Some correspondence

Nothing makes middle-class conservatives angrier than suggesting millionaires should be paying more in taxes. One admires such folks for sticking so rigorously to a principle that won't benefit them in the least, but still one wonders—why?

Anyway, I've heard from you in blog comments and at Facebook. I also received a couple of letters on the topic overnight. The first, from John Senuta in Wickliffe, Ohio:

Hey Joel here is another way to look at it .The poor that don't want to
work and live off you they look at you as RICH and they want alot more of your
money to spend.They want your TAX rate to go to 75% so they could live
better,you can afford it RIGHT???? 

And by the way a portion of your phone bill pays for a cell phone for them
to use FREE.Do you have a cell phone????How much are yoiu paying???Let dig a
little deeper into your pocket and help them out....

There's a presumption here that "the poor" are a bunch of lazy panhandlers trying to get their hands into your pocket. But of course, there are four job-seekers for every job opening in America today. And the money raised from a millionaire's tax, in this case, would go towards programs like tax breaks for businesses to hire employees.  So that people can work private-sector jobs. It's shifting the tax burden ... to people who can afford it.

H Kennedy, meanwhile, tells me that my thinking is "narrow and faulty based on a short coming socialist point of view." An excerpt:

Of course, you give no thought to the fact within our present tax structure the top 1% of wage earners already pay 39% of taxes collected. And, I might add, the top 50% of earners pay 97% of the taxes. 97%, that means the entire remaining 50% pay only 3% of all taxes. Yet, avail themselves of all the benefits provided by the greater taxes collected from the others. Perhaps it is your concept is those top 50% should pay 100%. That way all the others shouldn't pay anything. 

As well, many of those 3% not paying any revenue into the system will get 'refunds' under the Earned Income Tax Credit' or Child care Credits. Refunds, I might add, from the taxes paid by those evil rich. 

Additionally, have you given no thought that the 'millionaires' are already paying more taxes? They are paying more in their communities in Real Estate Taxes due to the more and expensive 'upper class' homes. Also, more taxes in licensing fees, sales taxes, and personal property taxes for the cars, boats, etc. they own. So, these greater tax payments support the local fire, police, schools, and support services. And too, pay more to keep the streets, bridges, sidewalks, infrastructure, etc. in their towns and cities.

So, Pay More???? 47% of the population isn't paying anything. Yet, they use those fire, police, EMT, personal. They travel those street, roads and bridges. Those "not so fortunate" share in all these with any cost sharing all due to the payment of the 'evil rich'.

Some mistakes that Kennedy makes:

• I don't think I've said the rich are evil.

• It's incorrect that 47 percent of the population "isn't paying anything." Now: A good portion of the population doesn't pay income taxes, it's true. But they do pay other taxes—FICA, for example, to the feds, plus all manner of local sales taxes and other fees—that go to support the very services Kennedy says only the rich are paying to support.

• As Ezra Klein notes in the link on the previous bullet point, Citizens for Tax Justice (PDF) has added up all the federal and state and local taxes paid by each income group. And this is what they've found:

The Top 1 percent earns 22.2 percent of all income in the United States—and pays 23 percent of all taxes: federal, state, and local combined. Despite what Kennedy says, the rich are not unduly burdened.

And it suggests we can do what I've been saying all week: Raise taxes on the millionaires. They can afford it.

Let's get rid of our government, start over with a parliament: Revisited

A few months ago in the Scripps Howard column I made the 300-word case that America's Constitutional system is broken, and should be replaced by the parliamentary system in place in nearly all other advanced democracies. In The American Prospect today, Harold Meyerson makes the case at more length,   but offers more modest proposals instead:

The two reforms with the most support—ending the filibuster and abolishing the Electoral College—would do nothing to curtail the fragmentation of power within the federal government, but both would limit minorities’ ability to reduce the sway of majorities. Another reform that would create a more representative government would be to change the timing of elections and the terms of congressional office. Presidential contests draw far more votes than midterm congressional ones: From 1984 through 2008, turnout in presidential elections has ranged from 53 percent of eligible adults to 62 percent, while turnout in midterm elections from 1986 through 2010 has ranged from 39 percent to 42 percent. If House members were given four-year terms coterminous with the president’s, they would be answerable to the same larger electorate. This, of course, would also be true of senators. These wouldn’t be parliamentary elections—the candidates for president, senator, and representative would still be elected separately—but at least our elected officials would all derive their power from the identical and most broadly representative electorate. 

Although the federal government can’t go parliamentary, why can’t the states? Maintaining two legislative bodies at the state level has been pointless for the past 50 years, ever since the Supreme Court’s one-person, one-vote decisions; those rulings required state Senate districts, once apportioned by geographical unit (such as counties), to be apportioned by population, just as lower-house districts are. Talk about duplication and waste in government! Nebraska has long had a unicameral legislature. There’s no good reason why 49 other states shouldn’t follow suit. Nor is there a reason why at least a few more compact and homogenous states—Vermont? Oregon? Utah?—can’t go one step further to a parliamentary system. Two and a quarter centuries after the Philadelphia convention, America should be ready for some small-scale experiments in majority rule.

It's worth noting that the Constitution came together because the national government under the Articles of Confederation was so gridlocked that it couldn't pay the bills—America's Revolutionary War debts weren't being paid, with the result that the United States was seen as weak and feckless. Based on the Founders' own precedent, we're once again at a point in history (for the third time this year!) where it's time to consider altering our political system so that it can perform basic duties in a fashion accountable to the electorate. We're not going to adopt a parliamentary system anytime soon, but maybe we should.

Ross Douthat's confounding argument against banning the death penalty

Ross Douthat's column in today's New York Times—when did he get moved to Sundays?—attempts, I think, a form of moral sophistication but instead falls prey to silliness. His argument (I think) is that banning the death penalty would be really bad—because life in prison is really bad, maybe even worse than being executed, and in any case might cause prison reformers to take their eye off the ball.

But there’s a danger here for advocates of criminal justice reform. After all, in a world without the death penalty, Davis probably wouldn’t have been retried or exonerated. His appeals would still have been denied, he would have spent the rest of his life in prison, and far fewer people would have known or cared about his fate.

Well, maybe. But ... he'd still be alive.


Ah, Ross argues, but life in prison would be a fate worse than death.

This point was made well last week by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing for The American Scene. In any penal system, he pointed out, but especially in our own — which can be brutal, overcrowded, rife with rape and other forms of violence — a lifelong prison sentence can prove more cruel and unusual than a speedy execution. And a society that supposedly values liberty as much or more than life itself hasn’t necessarily become more civilized if it preserves its convicts’ lives while consistently violating their rights and dignity. It’s just become better at self-deception about what’s really going on.

We can't ask Troy Davis if he'd rather be dead or alive and in prison, but I suspect he'd prefer the former. I imagine his family would prefer him living, as well. And we wouldn't be wondering right now if the State of Georgia and the Supreme Court of the United States were essentially indifferent to questions of innocence when it comes to the rights of death row prisoners.

But Ross is correct, from what I can tell: Prison is hell. Is it worse than death? At the risk of being glib, an awful lot of prisoners aren't committing suicide, so I'll presume that the vast majority of them think that living is preferable.

Let's put aside Ross's obtuseness regarding the execution of potentially innocent life—I don't think he brooks many excuses when it comes to abortion—the real fundamental problem here is his assumption that we can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Hey: We can work to ban the death penalty because it's an unreliable yet irrevocable form of justice and work to reform prisons and our sentencing culture at the same time. There's no reason we can't do both! And indeed, justice may demand that we do so. Ross Douthat's position is that we have to choose which injustice to correct. We should try to have it all.

Christina Ricci misses the overt misogyny of the 1960s

Pardon me for scoffing as Christina Ricci promotes her new show, "Pan Am":

It’s interesting. We’re portraying women who are navigating a blatantly misogynistic world, time, and society. And we live in a society that is a thinly veiled misogynistic society. And we are women trying to navigate that. It’s interesting, because in some ways, while it’s nice that everyone pretends the world today is not misogynistic, in other ways, at least before, when it was blatantly misogynistic, it was a little bit more honest. Things were called what they were called, and the rules were set, and people knew what things they had to meet, and what things they had to check off the checklist. And once they abided by certain things, they could then kind of go and run free and avoid things that needed to be avoided. It was, in some ways, less confusing, and in some ways, less dangerous. I struggle with which is better.

I know which is better. Now is better.

Ricci is correct, perhaps, that the old ways were "more honest." But hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue—and in the 21st century, misogyny and sexism are looked down upon. Even officially sanctioned, in some settings. That's progress, even if it's not as much as we'd like to see.

Beyond that: the rules, expectations, and checklists that women were expected—and, frankly, allowed—to fulfill during the 1960s setting of Ricci's new show were much more limited. Being a stewardess (or a teacher, or a homemaker) was about as far as most women could hope their talents to take them. Being an executive at a company? Election to congress or the Senate? Serving in a president's cabinet? It was unthinkable.

It's true that women oftentimes face obstacles in those heady settings that men simply don't. (Remember all the hubub about Hillary Clinton getting choked up during the New Hampshire primary in 2008?) But during the era Ricci pines for—and never experienced—women didn't even have the opportunities to rise that far.

There's still work to be done. I won't deny that. But Ricci expresses a kind of ignorance when she acts like the 21st century is no better than the 1960s. It really, really is.

Rich Lowry's piffle about Elizabeth Warren

At NRO, Rich Lowry hints that Elizabeth Warren—she of the "factory owner" quote that's gone viral among my liberal friends—is a bit of a socialist.

Her remarks and the celebration of them capture the Left’s romance with collective action over individual initiative. Most people don’t look at a successful manufacturer and say, “Yeah, but he’d be nothing without a surface-transportation network.” Although all of us (not just the rich) travel roads and bridges, few of us open factories.

 Lowry's wrong. Warren's remarks celebrate collective action and individual initiative working hand-in-hand. (And it's a necessary counterpoint to the ascendant Ayn Randian ideology that celebrates the individual without acknowledgement of the collective action that made it possible for the individual to succeed—indeed, disdains that collective completely.) Here's part of what Warren said:

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Lowry scoffs:

Focusing on infrastructure as the crucial support of entrepreneurial activity is like crediting the guy who built young Bill Gates’s garage with the start of Microsoft. Yes, Gates needed a roof over his head, and garages are useful. But it was Gates who had the ambition to do more in his garage than store his car and lawn-care products. Incalculably more important than his physical surroundings were his imagination and business sense. 

Could Gates have done it in Mogadishu or Peshawar? Certainly not. But the goods cited by Warren as the foundation of a workable business environment are extremely minimal.

I guess I don't get this. Lowry has to admit that the infrastructure and public safety made possible by government are essential to entrepreneurial activity—thus the Mogadishu comparison—but at the same time he dismisses it as "minimal."

I think that's extremely easy to say if you're not in Mogadishu. Gates can't get his work done without that garage, but it doesn't matter? Very weird. I assume Rich Lowry likes to build houses without foundations.

Millionaires can afford a tax increase

Ben and I talk a little bit about the "Buffett Rule" in this week's Scripps Howard column. I got my populist on:

Should the federal government raise taxes on millionaires? Why not? They're millionaires! They can afford it! Don't let all the crocodile tears over "class warfare" persuade you otherwise. 

It's time, in fact, for millionaires to start giving back to their country. While Americans in all income categories saw their tax rates slide slightly from 1979-2007, the top 1 percent of households saw a big drop: From 37 percent to 29.5 percent. The richest 400 households in America got an even better deal, says the Economic Policy Institute: Their average tax rate dropped from 26.4 percent to 16.6 percent -- a tax rate nearly 4 percent lower than the average American's. 

The millionaires can afford it. 

And the rich are getting richer. EPI also notes that from 1983-2009, the top 5 percent of households accumulated 82 percent of the nation's wealth gains -- half of that went to the top 1 percent -- while the bottom 60 percent lost ground during that time. In fact, the Census Bureau reported last week that the poverty rate is the highest measured in 52 years; the median household income declined in 2010 by 2.3 percent from the previous year. 

The millionaires can afford it. 

Republicans protest that levying such taxes will penalize "job creators" and discourage them from doing the hard work of capitalism. 

But take a look at the high, sustained unemployment rate. Right now there are four job seekers for every job opening in America. The rich aren't actually creating jobs right now; they're sitting on their money. Put that money into President Obama's jobs program! 

America's wealthy are getting wealthier. The rest of us are not. It's not "penalizing success" to ask millionaires to pay just a little more. But those higher taxes might give many Americans a shot to survive. 

The millionaires can afford it.

In fairness, I'm not certain Obama's jobs program will deliver the kind of employment jump-start we need. But at least it's something.