Stopping the Immigration Bill by scaring Senior Citizens?

You know how one of the other BLOGS always starts with: “One of our alert Readers ……”
Here is an “Alert Reader Thing”.

First let me dispense with a statement that what I have to tell you, I am telling you as myself, an individual and not as Horst Kraus, Secretary of GOP District Six.

I would not want to have my Chairman have an anxiety attack.

During the last district meeting one of our PC’s made a statement in conjunction with the then impending “Immigration Bill Speculation” to the effect that “Amnesty” of the illegal could cost Social Security 3.75 Trillion Dollars [$3.750,000,000,000.00] and mentioned a research paper published by the “Heritage Foundation”.

The day following the meeting one of our members, a retired teacher, called me and asked if I had taken notes and she questioned her own sense of hearing about that 3.75 trillion. I told her that this particular remark of the evening before was so hair brained and that I dare not repeat it or make it part of the minutes for fear someone might suggest to have me committed. We both suspected that the statement may have been based on a bigoted opinion and was created to rile the retired population against any compromise on immigration to keep the malaise alive for it is the only subject left for the extremist of our party to use to rally the sheeple.

Now I know a wee bit more.
Thanks to an alert reader, over my transom there arrived an E-Mail Message from the Center of Individual Freedom, courtesy of GOPUSA.

The main thrust of the message is: “Send me your Donation”.

It is signed by a cute fellow named Jeff Mazzella; he is the President of cfif.org.
The rhetoric of his communication is something to behold. A class study in “Hate Thy Hispanic Neighbors” and is reminiscent of stuff I read during my formative years in Central Europe long before Mr. Mazzella was [presumably] potty trained. I heard similar rhetoric from guys like Himmler, Eichmann and Goebbels and it was mostly directed against another ethnic group of people.

Mr. Mazzella headlines his beg letter with: “The 2.5 Trillion Senate Scamnesty Bill”

Interestingly he is using randomly and totally out of context the statistics from the Heritage Foundation namely a research paper developed by Robert Rector titled; “The Fiscal Cost of Low-Skill Immigrants to the U.S. Taxpayer”
Even though the mathematical calculations of this research are almost correct, the fallacy lies in its context. The author makes an erroneous comparison adding the combined expenditures of all the federal government and all the state governments of roughly in round numbers $3,750,000,000,000.00 [3.75 Trillion Dollars] and divides this number by 115,000,000 [One-hundred-and-fifteen Million] households as if every household, regardless if it is a one person household or a couple with 5 kids would equally benefit from the combined governments’ expenditures.

Directly quoted from the research report:

“The sum of 3.75 trillion is so large that it is difficult to comprehend. One way to grasp the size of government more readily is to calculate average expenditures per household. In 2004, there were 115 million households in the US. (This figure includes multi-person families and single persons living alone.) The average cost of government spending thus amounts to $32,707 per household across the U.S. population”

Here is where the Almost Correct comes in. If you repeat the calculation the cost per household actually come to only $32,608 prorated. But what is 99 bucks up or down when you let a Puzz like that mess with one's emotions?

Those combined Federal and State expenditures include everything from launching an Air Craft carrier to giving two-thousand dollar ATM cards to individuals living below sea level and have their homes flooded to countless mobile homes purchased by FEMA sinking slowly into the mud, supporting our troops on foreign soil, building bridges from nowhere to nowhere, subsidizing crops that no one needs, educating our young, funding the patent office, and paying a building inspector for harassing your favorite watering hole for not having a No-Smoking sign placed in compliant with some peculiar rule of compliance.
It should be quite obvious that the government paying for a trade attaché in China to protect the intellectual property of a US computer mogul is unlike more beneficial to the mogul then the benefit for a fellow who has his kid in all day kindergarten so that his wife can work to make ends meet.

But the statistics I eluded above treats everybody as if one size fit all. It does not even differentiate between a household of one or seven.

The statistic as it is presented will attempt to portray that a lower educated head of household can not produce the amount of taxes on his/her income to pay the governments for the services ($32,707) they presumably receive in spite of the fact they neither need nor want. Cleverly he weaves in the fact that Hispanic immigrants are almost exclusively Low Income Earners.

Later on he has a calculation that bestows an even more bizarre number of Social Security burdens we would have to carry if we paid S.S to every [currently illegal immigrant]

It is a monumental attempt to stir sentiments against the Immigration Reform Act of 2007 particularly with the older citizen and I must wonder why.

Could it be that the driving force behind those that preach smaller Government but promoting Government to stick its nose in all our private lives has finally run out of steam and issues after they bombed out on the marriage protection amendment, the hate crime law amendment and the curtailment of the right of women to have their birth control medicine filled in every drug store, and is hanging for dear live to vilify those who want to bring order to the chaos of our sad state of immigration law and administration to stall and keep status Quo, just in order to have a rally point and an avenue to divisiveness?

To be continued

Horst Kraus