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| JOHNSON |
When
Taxes Start Sneaking Across the Border...
by Mac Johnson [writer,
physician] 6/14/06 |
Illegal immigration
is an unsolvable problem. America should surrender now to the
irresistible will of the leaderless gaggle of semi-literate
busboys and landscapers who stumble northward with the unbeatable
plan of “that way!” in their diabolical minds.
Who can stop these master criminals? Not the poor little U.S.
government!
With its
limited resources and power, how can it do something as complex
as watch to see if a confused mob of aspiring roofers walks
across a line in the desert? Or enforce laws against hiring
illegal aliens? Or most intimidating of all, how can it find
illegal aliens already within America?
After all,
they are so well hidden, standing there on the corner of McGrath
and Broadway in Somerville, Mass., every morning from sunrise
to lunch, waiting to be picked up by anonymous labor johns.
Really, how does one capture people so cautious that they jump
into the back of any truck that pulls up? I mean, this isn’t
something easy like going to the moon or establishing Democracy
in all the world.
Contributor
Mac
Johnson
Mac
Johnson is a freelance writer and biologist in Cambridge,
Mass. Mr. Johnson holds a Doctorate in Molecular and
Cellular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine. He
is a frequent opinion contributor to Human
Events Online. His website can be found at macjohnson.com [go
to Johnson index]
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I’ve
often heard that you have to have a will to succeed, if you
want to win. But in the case of the open borders lobby
that has held sway over our immigration and borders policies
for the last 30 years, all they need to win is a will to fail.
It is now
national policy to fail to guard borders, to fail to prosecute
those who bear forged documents, to fail to arrest
illegal aliens even when found. It is our government’s
policy to fail to notice the illegal labor pools operating openly
in every major city in America. It is doctrine to fail to deport
illegal aliens even when they are arrested for other crimes,
and to fail to investigate corporations openly claiming they
cannot function without illegal labor. It is protocol to fail
to notice when “temporary” visa holders never leave,
and to fail to pursue court decisions against cities that actively
provide sanctuary for immigration criminals.
Never has
a fringe political movement succeeded so well by failure, as
the open borders wing of our bipartisan ruling class has by
its willful sabotage of our nation’s immigrations and customs
enforcement apparatus. Now the feigned incompetence and willful
neglect that have been used to achieve a de facto opening of
borders is being used as a major argument in favor of passing
the Bush/McCain/Kennedy/Reid amnesty for illegal aliens—a
formal opening of the borders.
Everyday we hear the whine of the willing failures in Washington,
D.C: It’s just so hard…Can’t we just give up
and start over? ... We tried to guard the borders but they’re
soooooo big. … There are so many people to keep track of
and it’s just not reasonable to try. … It’s
crazy to deport people back to where they actually are supposed
to be … so we win, ha, ha, give us open borders like we
wanted all along.
By contrast,
if you want to see what our federal government is capable of
when it stands to benefit from law enforcement,
just look at our tax system. The modern tax code is a Byzantine
obscenity. It’s too large to be understood by any one person.
Armies of lawyers, accountants, and computer programmers are
needed just to figure what each individual owes.
Every paycheck
in America is tracked. Every corporation monitored. Every home
sale and stock trade and bank account in a country
of 300 million people is watched for potential taxation. Employers
are used as the primary collection and enforcement apparatus
in the system, which understands well that a corporation that
fears huge fines for small errors will obey the law carefully.
Saving a few bucks just isn’t worth it, if you get the
IRS on your back.
For many people, the Internal Revenue Service is the most feared
law enforcement agency in the country. At the state, county,
and city level, nearly every house, trailer, boat, car, truck,
RV, and motorcycle in the nation is tracked year to year, assessed,
taxed and monitored with rigorous enforcement by every clerk
and traffic cop possible. Likewise, nearly every gas station,
shopping mall, fruit stand, restaurant and bar in America is
expected to collect sales tax on every stick of gum or pair of
panties it ever sold.
This the
government can do. But it can’t find the illegal
aliens on the street corner or shut down the makers of fake green
cards or prosecute the same businesses it expects to obey a million
different tax laws when they knowingly hire a subcontractor to
provide them with laundered illegal labor.
Clearly, if you want a law enforced by our government, you should
make it a tax law.
Which brings
me to one of the more interesting possibilities in the popular
rebellion against the anti-nationalists in the
Democratic and Republican leaderships (those who seek to totally
open our borders and thus eliminate our nation as anything other
than a free-enterprise zone for the world’s excess poor
and their would-be employers): What if advocates of secure borders
and controlled immigration sought to entangle immigration and
border enforcement with tax enforcement?
This could
be done by throwing our weight behind the “Fair
Tax” tax reform movement that is already gaining steam
throughout America. Allow me to explain.
For those
of you that don’t know, the Fair
Tax movement
seeks to replace the maze of current personal income, capital
gains, corporate, gasoline, and payroll taxes that the federal
government has thrown up over time with a single, fair consumption
tax. Every person in America would take home their entire paycheck,
and pay only this one tax, which could thus be easily monitored
by voters. Likewise, every business would be subject to it and
freed from having to hire a flock of lawyers to figure out their
tax burden each year. The IRS would be abolished.
The Fair
Tax is a consumption tax—a sales tax—it
would be automatically calculated and collected every time you
or any other person or business bought any item at the retail
level. No more W-2s or 1040s or schedules B, or IRS audits or
multiplying the greater of either line 32 or 34a by the amount
from the appropriate box on the table on page 92. When you buy,
you pay.
The tax has an enormous number of economic advantages that have
been extensively analyzed by many economists and would spur growth,
discourage corporations from moving offshore, and reward savings.
These are too numerous and lengthy to detail here, but I encourage
you to learn more by reading the Fair
Tax Book.
The Fair
Tax would neither raise nor lower your taxes, it would simply
change the way they are collected—and that is how
it might have an unintended effect on border security. When taxes
are collected on retail sales, instead of income, the easiest
way to avoid paying them is to try to buy your goods across a
border, in a jurisdiction without the sales tax. This pattern
is very familiar within America.
Just across the border from states with high gasoline taxes
are clusters of gas stations. Just out of the reach of states
with onerous liquor taxes are clusters of liquor stores. The
southern portion of sales tax-free New Hampshire is one great
cluster of malls and stores catering to shoppers from high-tax
Massachusetts. States are prohibited from interfering with such
activity under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.
They really are powerless to enforce their borders (and properly
so).
But imagine
if Northern Mexico and Southern Canada became giant outlet
malls catering to frugal shoppers from a Fair Tax America.
How seriously do you think the federal government would become
about inspecting every car and closing every isolated crossing
point? If it were taxes sneaking across our borders, instead
of illegal aliens, the government would have the Marines mining
the fronteir with Quebec. Somebody sneaking in to take a job
away from an American doesn’t bother Washington at all.
But can you imagine the outrage and panic if that same person
were sneaking in to try to sell Americans tax-free iPods?
The impossible-to-patrol border would suddenly become very,
very patrolled. Or the government could choose to just forego
all those taxes and get smaller and smaller. Which do you think
would happen?
Now, the
Fair Tax is worth implementing for other reasons, and would
also discourage illegal immigration by fully taxing the
underground economy for the first time (unlike an income tax,
which is easily avoided by those who work off-the-books). But
wouldn’t it be nice to have a byproduct of our tax system
be secure, well ordered borders, adequately staffed and patrolled?
This year the Fair Tax bill (HR 25) has an impressive 57
co-sponsors in Congress and it gains support every year. The added support
of millions of Americans opposed to open borders could push the
bill into the realm of real possibility.
Most of life is the result of unintended consequences, and every
once in a while they can actually work for you.
¡Viva
El Fair Tax, Amigos! CRO
First appeared at Human Events Online
copyright
2006 Mac Johnson
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