(June 23, 2018 at 6:57 pm)Tizheruk Wrote: Sigh
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/no-...527d6780b0
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myths_and_..._pay_taxes
https://www.statista.com/chart/6129/how-...rants-pay/
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/how-do...explainer/
See here's the thing, I don't mind fact checking and looking into the sources. Reason being is that we live in a time now where people and organizations will use statistics in a purposefully obfuscating manner to hide what they don't want seen, and promote what they're looking to sell. Huffpost of course has their agenda, the other sources were definitely more fair though. So I will do a quick breakdown of each article, and give my synopsis at the bottom.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/no-...527d6780b0
CLAIM: Illegal immigrants DO NOT receive Children's Health Insurance, Disability, SNAP, health insurance via ACA, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Welfare. They DO receive Emergency Medicaid, Schooling, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (for low income pregnant women and children up to the age of five that are at nutritional risk).
This is true although they did leave out a little something. Undocumented immigrants are also allowed to take advantage of the child tax credit, in fact in 2010 non citizens received $4.2 billion from this tax credit. This is actually supported from your own fourth source. Now to be fair, they did change that law the same year so that only filers with children with valid social security numbers could obtain these credits. So I did a quick search to see how much those benefits have decreased, turns out in 2013 non citizens filed for $6 billion worth of child tax credits. Source.
CLAIM: According to a 2010 report, undocumented immigrants pay $90 billion in taxes and only receive $5 billion in benefits. Also in 2010 undocumented immigrants paid $10.6 billion in state and local taxes.
I included the source of their claim because because in all honesty I can find nowhere in their source that claims undocumented immigrants pay $90 billion in taxes. In fact from what I've been able to pull together, they pay $23.6 billion in federal tax, $13 billion in Social Security, and $12 billion in state and local taxes. I wasn't able to find any hard data on what they pay into Medicaid, but considering the tax rate is about a quarter of the rate for SSA, lets say they pay $3 billion into it. That's a grand total of $51.6 billion. And we already know that they receive at least $6 billion from Child Tax Credits, so it's safe to say they received more than $5 billion in benefits. In fact, again from your own source it's estimated that undocumented immigrants actually receive $11.64 billion in benefits.
CLAIM: 50-75% of undocumented immigrants pay taxes.
False. As I included in my last post, we know there are at least 11 million undocumented immigrants, of which only 4.4 million filed tax returns. That is less than 50%.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Myths_and_..._pay_taxes
CLAIM: Illegal immigrants pay taxes
Again, a false truth. Yes illegal immigrants pay taxes, a large portion (one could even argue a majority) do not. It's the equivalent of saying "I pay my bills," when I only pay half of them. Yes I pay my bills, just not all of them. The stats that they use are the same that have already been discussed, so I won't go any further.
https://www.statista.com/chart/6129/how-...rants-pay/
This one doesn't go into too much detail, just tallies up what illegal immigrants pay in state & local taxes, which has already been discussed in previous . Other than that it just confirms how much in benefits they receive. And it also mentions a half truth that Donald Trump used when talking about the Child Tax Credit, which I already brought up in the response to the HuffPo article.
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/how-do...explainer/
Got no problem with this one, I actually used this for a few of my sources.
Total taxes paid into the US by illegal immigrants is roughly $51.6 billion across 11 million people. US citizens paid $1.48 trillion in federal income tax, $846.2 billion in state taxes, 791.3 billion in social security, and roughly $197.8 billion, for a grand total of $3.3 trillion across 315 million people. Now lets not forget that taxes and population of undocumented immigrants is part of that, so if we subtract it out we are really talking $3.26 trillion across 304 million people.
So where does this data get us? If we divide the taxes paid by the amount of people, we get a rough dollar amount paid on average per capita. For illegal immigrants, they are paying $4690.91 per capita. For US citizens, they are paying $10,723.68 per capita. So US citizens are effectively paying more than double in taxes. Wait a second, that doesn't seem right. Because it's not! We didn't take into account that only 40% of immigrants filed federal tax returns, and those taxes include federal income tax, SSA, and Medicare which is roughly 75% of the total taxes paid. That brings the average taxes paid for illegal immigrants down to $3,283.64 per capita.
Now lets bring it back to an effective tax rate between groups. In my post about state & local taxes my sources indicated that illegal immigrants average roughly $30,100 per household with an average household size of 2.29 people. US citizens averaged a much higher with an average household earning $73,298 with an average household size of 2.54. When we use these numbers in conjunction with taxes paid per capita, we have an average total tax rate of 24.65% per illegal immigrant household and 37.16% for US citizen households.
In conclusion, do some illegal immigrants pay taxes? Yes. Does an overwhelming majority? No. So much so in fact, that between both populations, American citizens have a 50% higher rate of tax then illegal immigrants do and pay and additional 12.5% on income.
As an aside, this was way too much effort to put into a post. Looking back, I'm questioning my life.
