By Chris Powell
Many sad stories were told a few weeks ago at a hearing of the General Assembly’s Human Services Committee on legislation to provide free state government medical insurance to illegal immigrants under 26 years old. There was testimony about young people and children going without normal treatment for painful illnesses and broken bones and thus risking lifelong suffering or even death.
No one would [ITALICS] want [END ITALICS] to deny treatment to anyone in such distress. But with more than a hundred thousand illegal immigrants in Connecticut, with most of those who are working doing so in low-wage jobs without medical insurance, the cost to state government of the proposed free insurance would quickly rise to tens of millions of dollars per year. Such a program would lead to a program for free insurance for [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] illegal immigrants at much more cost.
This might greatly increase illegal immigration to the state.
Illegal immigration has worsened Connecticut’s desperate shortage of housing, but ironically many of those who complain about the housing shortage advocate facilitating illegal immigration into the state’s self-proclaimed “sanctuary cities.”
Meanwhile some immigrants in Connecticut, legal and illegal alike, are clamoring for an education measure misleadingly called the “parents’ bill of rights” though it would provide only foreign language services to parents who don’t speak English and aren’t bothering to learn it.
Maybe the current wave of illegal immigration being allowed by the Biden administration is only cosmic reparations for this country’s abuse of the privilege of issuing the world’s reserve currency, which long has enabled the United States to run huge trade deficits, paying for imports not with equivalent production but with colored paper and electrons and, of course, munitions, the latter doing little to improve standards of living outside this country.
But cosmic reparations or not, the economics of it all is not widely understood, and with the president defending Ukraine’s borders better than those of his own country, Connecticut residents at least should try to be more hard-headed than their ever-posturing state legislators. They should recognize a few things:
— The free medical insurance legislation is mainly about facilitating illegal immigration.
— Its cost in the long run will be enormous.
— Governor Lamont’s budget proposal does not provide for it.
— Providing for it will mean reducing government services to legal residents, raising taxes, or more cheating with the state pension funds.
— Most of all, state residents should recognize that if the country’s [ITALICS] legal [END ITALICS] immigration policy, close to the most liberal in the world, is still not good enough and is to be disregarded in favor of open borders, Connecticut can have half the populations of Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala in just a few months — just for starters.
This surge in illegal immigration arises less because this is the land of the free as much as it is the land of seemingly free [ITALICS] stuff. [END ITALICS]
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WAR TAX IS INFLATION: Visiting Ukraine the other day, President Biden promised tens of billions of dollars more in military assistance. There was no debate in Congress about appropriating the money. It must already have been lying around somewhere. While Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal insists that there are no “blank checks” for Ukraine, there [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] an unlimited number of [ITALICS] huge [END ITALICS] checks, all being dispatched with the senator’s approval if not actually with his vote.
Nor has there been any serious articulation of U.S. war aims. Do the president and Congress mean to commit this country to Ukraine’s recovery of every inch of territory occupied by Russia, including the Crimean peninsula, which, like all of Ukraine itself, for centuries was part of Russia and was annexed again by Russia nine years ago?
Infinite money for Ukraine and U.S. domestic goodies now is regularly being distributed without any reference to how it is to be financed. It’s not done with taxes. No, the money is being obtained from debt that is quickly monetized.
That is, it is being financed by inflation, a tax Congress doesn’t have to vote on but still has to be paid by the unwitting public.
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 