Paul Krugman makes excellent points with a Led Zeppelin kicker.

“It’s useful to recognize that the federal government is, in a widely used expression, basically an insurance company with an army. Specifically, the federal government largely collects taxes from working-age adults to pay either for defense or for social programs that spend most of their money on the elderly — that is, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Immigration expands the base of taxpayers, which means more people to share the burden of paying taxes to pay for defense. This includes undocumented immigrants, because their employers collect payroll taxes out of their wages, with the added fiscal payoff that they will never collect benefits. And because immigrants are relatively young and healthy, they increase the amount going into government coffers while having a delayed impact on outlays. The Social Security Administration does substack.com/redirect/c… of factors affecting its projections, and consistently finds that higher immigration improves the system’s financial health, while lower immigration worsens it.

I could go on and on, but the point should be clear. Trump, Miller and company are succeeding in their anti-immigrant crusade, despite many failures of implementation, because they are managing to scare away millions of people who wanted to live and work in the United States, contributing to our society. And this “success” will leave us poorer and weaker.“