March 31, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
2.5 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended since Biden took office. Almost all of them were released.
By Robert Romano
Since President Joe Biden was sworn into office in Jan. 2021, more than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended at the southern border, the greatest unchallenged influx of illegal immigrants in American history, according to data compiled by U.S. Customs & Border Patrol (CBP).
Of those, just 167,392 were either deemed inadmissible or expelled due to health concerns, according to the CBP.
Currently, just 20,146 illegal immigrants are currently detained in FY 2022 according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 136,725 have been released in FY 2022: 7,879 were bonded out, 85,747 were given orders of recognizance and 38,745 were paroled out. Besides that, ICE reports that Alternatives to Detention (ATD) currently number at 191,988.
That’s catch and release.
In addition, reports that in FY 2021, there were just 59,011 removals in its latest annual report, a 68 percent decrease from FY 2020, when 185,884 illegal immigrants were deported. And that was during the height of the Covid pandemic, and with far fewer apprehensions to work with.
So, working through the numbers: 2.5 million illegal immigrants were caught at the border, but only 167,392 were turned away and another 59,011 were deported.
Meaning, 2.27 million illegal immigrants just from Biden’s time in office remain in the country. They were all released.
Unfortunately, many of them are indentured slaves and victims of human trafficking who paid the Mexican drug cartels to get into the U.S. Once here, they are obliged to keep paying protection money. Many of them are sex slaves. How many?
In the year 2000, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated as many as 50,000 women and children are smuggled to the U.S. every year to serve as prostitutes and forced laborers in violation of the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of slavery and indentured servitude.
After more than 20 years, that would mean there are more than 1 million slaves in the U.S. and likely, given the numbers we are seeing presently at the border, there are many, many more than that.
And the Biden administration—and prior administrations although not the Trump administration, which prioritized securing the border—is letting it happen. In fact, by opening the border, Biden is accommodating this abhorrent crime against humanity.
According to a report by the Organization of American States on human trafficking, the conditions of these slaves are atrocious: “The victims, mostly women and children, are often deceived about the true nature of the work. They are exploited in slavery-like conditions. The traffickers grow rich, but the victims are held in debt bondage… Some are abducted and sold, some are deceived into consenting by the promise of a better life or a better job, and some feel that entrusting themselves to traffickers is the only economically viable option. Regardless of the route of entry, most women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation suffer extreme violations of their human rights, including the right to liberty, the right to dignity and security of person, the right not to be held in slavery or involuntary servitude, the right to be free from cruel and inhumane treatment, the right to be free from violence, and the right to health.”
The report continued: “Why can’t they just leave? Some trafficking victims are physically imprisoned by locks, bars or guards. Those with apparent freedom to leave are controlled by other means. Physical, sexual and psychological violence are employed against them effectively.”
Former President Trump dealt with this problem by threatening Mexico with massive tariffs if they would not deploy their military to secure their side of the border. The Migrant Protocols and the Remain in Mexico policy were adopted by both countries, and apprehensions dropped substantially.
Then, Biden arbitrarily ended the Remain in Mexico policy, an action which the Supreme Court then struck down. Not that it matters. While the U.S. and Mexico have nominally agreed to reinstate the program in December, without the threat of tariffs, the amount of apprehensions is higher than ever.
Who’s remaining in Mexico if 838,685 illegal immigrants have been apprehended this year?
The better question is, of the millions of illegal immigrants coming here, how many of them are now enslaved here in the U.S. by the cartels? Maybe somebody should ask President Biden at this next press conference.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/03/2-5-million-illegal-immigrants-have-been-apprehended-since-biden-took-office-almost-all-of-them-were-released/
FEC fines Clinton campaign and DNC over Russia collusion hoax
March 30, 2022, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in response to a Federal Election Commission ruling fining the Hillary Clinton campaign $8,000 and the Democratic National Committee $105,000 for concealing payments to Fusion GPS and other actors who perpetrated the Russia collusion hoax, falsely accusing former President Donald Trump of being a Russian agent, which resulted in a years-long top secret investigation and the appointment of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller who ultimately found “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”:
“The Federal Election Commission’s decision to fine the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee for illegally hiding the origin of the more than one million dollars spent by the two entities to fund the development and release of the Russian Collusion hoax against candidate and then-president Donald J. Trump.
“The Clinton campaign was fined $8,000 and the Democratic National Committee was fined $105,000 for failing to properly report the expenditures that resulted in hiring Fusion GPS and other actors who created the false accusations against Trump that bedeviled much of his first term.
“When measured against the damage done to our nation by the Clinton campaign and their minions at the DNC through this outright lie which they foisted upon the public, just as Al Capone eventually got convicted of tax fraud, America may have to be content with the fact that Hillary Clinton got an $8,000 fine for a paperwork violation.
“The one piece of positive news is that the Clinton’s can no longer claim that no one found them guilty of anything for fulminating the lie that cost American taxpayers millions of dollars to prove was false. The Russian collusion lie was a political dirty trick, which was used during the Trump presidency to undermine the legitimacy of his term in office. Ironic given that today, any mention of the current president’s unlikely election victory is deemed to be almost treasonous due its undermining of his authority.
“One can hope that special counsel John Durham will bring to justice more of the participants in the Clinton-DNC Russia fraud, but at the very least Hillary got a parking ticket from the FEC.”
To view online: https://getliberty.org/2022/03/fec-fines-clinton-campaign-and-dnc-over-russia-collusion-hoax/
ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured editorial from the Wall Street Journal, the board lays waste to President Joe Biden’s proposed wealth tax:
Wall Street Journal: Biden’s big new wealth tax
So much for President Biden’s pivot to the political middle. The fiscal 2023 budget he unveiled Monday re-proposes most of the bad ideas that haven’t passed Congress and adds a new one—a tax on wealth that he refused to endorse as a candidate in 2020. On the economy, he’s pivoting further left—presumably to fire up sullen progressives in November.
The White House is proposing a new “billionaire minimum income tax,” which the Federal Trade Commission would call false advertising if a private company tried that description. The tax isn’t limited to billionaires and it applies to more than income.
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It’s a new tax on Americans with $100 million or more in assets whose effective tax rate in any year is less than 20% of their income. But these taxpayers already pay a 23.8% tax rate on capital gains and 37% on ordinary income. The average tax rate for the top 1% of taxpayers in 2019 was 25.6%.
Here’s the Biden trick: The 20% minimum tax rate would apply both to ordinary income and the increase in the value of assets in a given year. This means taxing unrealized capital gains, which currently aren’t taxed until assets are sold and income is actually realized. In other words, this is a new tax on wealth—even if it’s structured differently than what Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed. The White House is redefining wealth as income.
Some details of the plan aren’t fleshed out, but the targets would appear to have nine years to pay the 20% tax on the growth in their assets from the first day they accumulated them. Going forward they’d have five years to pay the tax on their annual unrealized capital gains.
It’s not clear whether losses in future years would be allowed to offset annual gains. So a taxpayer might have to pay a tax, say, of $2 million on an unrealized gain in 2022 of $10 million. But if the asset declined by the same $10 million the next year, tough luck. The government would win whether financial and other assets rise or fall.
Taxpayers would have to report their assets to the IRS annually. Non-tradeable assets like a stake in a private company would be assessed at the last valuation event, increased annually at the five-year Treasury rate plus two percentage points or “other methods approved” by the Treasury Secretary.
The White House proposal would enormously complicate the tax code and create huge investment distortions. “Illiquid” taxpayers—defined as those whose tradeable assets make up less than 20% of their wealth—could defer payments until their sale and incur an interest charge. Investors would thus have an incentive to pile into illiquid assets such as real estate to avoid regularly liquidating stock to pay taxes. Rather than sell stock to invest in other ventures, investors might have to sell stock they’d prefer to hold in order to pay taxes on unrealized capital gains.
Progressives claim the tax will unlock capital by discouraging the wealthy from holding stock over time. But if liberals want to encourage capital to flow more freely, they should make the capital-gains rate zero. That’s what some countries do. And hasn’t the left spent years deploring investor “short-termism”?
Another disingenuous argument is that taxing only realized gains narrows the tax base and requires higher tax rates on income. But the Administration isn’t proposing to reduce tax rates. Its budget proposes raising the corporate rate to 28% from 21% and the individual top rate to 39.6%. The wealth tax is intended as an entirely new and additional revenue stream that would rake in close to $360 billion over 10 years.
The Administration says the tax would apply only to the top 0.1%—meaning hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and small business owners who accumulated wealth over decades through innovation and hard work. But these new taxes always start out applying to a few and then spread to millions.
The income tax in 1913 applied a 7% top rate on taxpayers making more than $500,000 ($14.5 million today). The Alternative Minimum Tax was created in 1969 as a flat 10% tax on the uber-rich but grew to cover tens of millions in the middle class.
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This all assumes the wealth tax would make it past the courts. The Constitution says Congress may only impose “direct taxes” if they are apportioned among the states according to their population. The Sixteenth Amendment lets Congress tax income, but unrealized capital gains aren’t income any more than unvested stock options are.
A tax increase of this magnitude is never desirable, but the timing now is especially bad. The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to counter inflation, and the bond-market yield curve is close to inverting, which can sometimes augur recession. Democrats already own inflation politically. If they now pass a giant tax increase, they will own all of the economic damage.
To view online: https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-big-new-wealth-tax-white-house-budget-fy-2023-11648504962?mod=opinion_lead_pos1&mod=article_inline