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Here is the Heritage Take on the top issues today. Please reply to this email to arrange an interview.
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- Conservatives have warned for years that Biden’s open borders and mass releases would bring increased crime and cost American lives.
- Biden’s immigration-driven crime wave is now arriving in America’s suburbs and small towns with devastating results. The past two weeks made the consequences of unchecked open borders clear: crime, chaos and death in the American heartland.
- The murder of nursing student Laken Riley in Athens, Georgia, by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela with outstanding charges was one of the first stories to raise the alarm in late February. But it’s far from the only one.
- Biden should immediately end his lawless abuse of immigration parole.
- Second, all law enforcement in the United States, from federal to state, local, and tribal, should be required to report the immigration status of people they arrest.
- Third, Mayorkas should rescind his enforcement priorities memo and allow ICE to get on with their job of arresting and deporting alien criminals without burdensome administrative obstacles.
- Finally, Biden should enforce laws already on the books by detaining illegal border crossers or having them remain south of the border until their immigration cases are concluded.
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- While the White House lectures on the strength of the economy, Americans are drowning in credit-card debt, which hit a record high $1.13 trillion by the end of last year.
- Excessive government spending over the last four years has created nothing short of a cost-of-living crisis, which has left families mired in debt.
- Many Americans racked up credit-card debt when they had interest rates at or near 0%. With the expiration of those introductory offers and the rapid rise in interest rates over the last few years, financing costs on credit cards have shattered previous records.
- The combination of record-high credit-card balances and interest rates means Americans are now paying $240 billion annually just in interest, before they pay a single dime on their outstanding balances. That’s an additional cost on top of the existing stratospheric increases in their cost of living.
- This will continue if Washington maintains its prodigality. Every time the federal budget increases, the family budget decreases.
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- Rather than find a way out of the deepest budget hole in human history, too many of the nation’s leaders remain focused on shoveling even faster.
- A perfect example is the possible extension of the Affordable Connectivity Program. Its stated purpose is providing subsidies for broadband internet service to households earning up to 200% of the poverty level. But it has been used to pad corporate profits and state government budgets.
- The broadband welfare program began as part of the pandemic-era spending spree that cost trillions of dollars, driving the wave of inflation that is still hammering family budgets. Since the program has no dedicated funding source, extending it would mean either new taxes (likely on internet plans) or more inflationary deficit spending.
- The Biden administration wants to expand eligibility standards to the point where over one-third of households would qualify, driving costs into the tens of billions of dollars per year – resulting, naturally, in higher inflation and bigger deficits.
- Rather than making Americans more dependent on the federal government by creating a new entitlement for internet service, legislators should take the opposite approach: shrinking the number of wasteful and politically corrupt programs, lowering deficits and disposing of the Biden administration’s ruinous agenda.
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