“Trump reshaped virtually every part of the U.S. immigration system through executive action, policy guidance and regulatory change.
In total, he made more than 400 changes to immigration policy in the last four years, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank. The Immigration Policy Tracking Project, run by former Obama Homeland Security official, Lucas Guttentag, puts that number closer to 1,000.
Biden has made fighting the coronavirus, which is still infecting tens of thousands and killing 2,000 Americans each day, his top priority. After he helps bring the pandemic under control, he plans to tackle several issues, including the economy, infrastructure, gun restrictions and immigration.
In addition to Trump’s changes, the circumstances surrounding immigration on the ground have changed, making it impossible for Biden to try to just return to pre-2016 policies.”
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” On his first day in office, Biden released a massive immigration package and signed several immigration-related executive orders to halt construction of the border wall, end a ban from some majority-Muslim nations and restart a program to protect so-called Dreamers.”
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“But Biden has yet to address a series of issues: He punted on whether high-skilled workers should be given preference if they are being hired at companies paying more money instead of through a random lottery. He hasn’t fulfilled a campaign promise to tackle the massive backlog at immigration courts that doubled under Trump. (Even with the backlog, many of those cases were denied.)
And last month, he called for a review of the so-called public charge rule that makes it harder for immigrants who rely on public benefits, such as Medicaid, to obtain permanent residency in the country.”
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“Biden will be forced to make decisions on some issues, including the closure of the southern border and granting visas to more than 100,000 foreign workers. But it’s not clear when — or if — he will act at all on others, including fighting court cases and changing the refugee caps.”
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“One of the most pressing issues Biden faces: to allow temporary migrants, such as students, easier access to visas, even though many consulates and embassies are closed. Only 43 of 233 processing centers for guests are processing routine cases, according to the State Department.”
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“Before Trump came into office, nearly 500,000 new foreign students came into the United States in a year, pumping billions of dollars into small and large schools across the country. That number slowly declined under the former president and plummeted last year.
Julie Stufft, acting deputy assistant secretary for visa services, acknowledged the problems in securing visas last week. She said her office is working to solve the problem, though those who plan to reside in the U.S. permanently take precedent. Some immigrants from select countries, including China and much of Europe, are still banned from traveling to the U.S. due to the pandemic.
Gregory Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the Biden administration deserves credit for pursuing many of the reforms he had pledged to do during the campaign. But, Chen said, “The jury is still out on whether they are going to be successful in implementing those policies.””
“Over the course of the last decade, Illinois lost more than a quarter-million people, dropping to a total population of about 12.5 million. The state lost 79,000 residents this year, an increase over previous years. The Wall Street Journal predicts that as a result of this loss, the state will lose at least one congressional seat during the next reapportionment.
Illinois isn’t alone. California, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Minnesota, and Michigan may also lose congressional representation due to population migrations over the past decade. New York and Alabama are on the bubble of each losing a representative. But none, not even California, has seen Illinois’ population loss.
Reason has been making note of this trend for years, while also observing (particularly in Chicago) that state and local government have poorly managed their public employee pension obligations, creating massive government debts that consume budgets and lead to service cuts. Government leaders have responded not with better fiscal management (the state’s powerful unions blocked pension reforms), but with more taxes and fees, even as residents leave. As C.J. Ciaramella has reported, Chicago’s corrupt policing system of fines, asset forfeitures, and vehicle impounds serves to extract whatever money the city can get from its poorest citizens to pay for itself.”
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” Major reasons Illinoisans are choosing to leave the state are for better housing and employment opportunities, both of which have been hindered by poor public policy in Illinois. Nearly half of Illinoisans have thought about moving away, and they said taxes were their No. 1 reason.”
“Suppose you’re a single parent raising two kids, ages 3 and 5. You were furloughed in the spring, when the big-box store you worked at downsized. You started getting hours again in the summer, enduring substantial risk by going to work with customers who didn’t always wear masks. Child care was a mess, and you had to scrape together help from family and friends.
It was a rough year — but you stayed afloat. In total, you ended up working about 1,000 hours last year at $14 an hour, or $14,000 total — plus there were the two stimulus checks the government sent out in April and December.
Less heralded but no less important to helping you pay the bills were a couple of tax credits the government offers: You got $1,725 through the complicated child tax credit (CTC) and another $5,600 from the earned income tax credit (EITC). That came out to $7,325 — a badly needed infusion. But as is the case every year, it was also a pain — you basically have to go to a tax preparer every tax season to help you with the paperwork to claim the credits.
This week, your member of Congress, in an unprecedented act of constituent outreach, asks you to hop on a Zoom. She’s working on legislation meant to make life easier for single parents like you, including a stimulus check. But it’s the two options to reform the tax credits that she wants to ask you about.
The first option: The government will increase your CTC a ton, so you get a whopping $7,200 a year ($3,600 per child), not just $1,725. Instead of a lump sum at tax time, the government will send you the money every month or so. Under this scenario, you’d still get the $5,600 from the EITC. The downside? You’d still have to go through all that tax prep every spring.
The second option: The government will junk the CTC — and will just send you $700 per month in the mail. That’s $350 per kid under 6, every month, regardless of whether you owe taxes. Perhaps just as appealing, there’s no tax-season paperwork to prepare. That’s $8,400 per year total, even more than the CTC in option one. The downside in this scenario: Under this plan, the EITC shrinks — and your EITC goes down to $2,000.
To recap: Both give you more money than you get now. Option one gives you more money than option two. But option two makes your life much easier logistically. You get big regular monthly payments whose amount doesn’t vary. And you would no longer be in a desperate rush every spring to get your tax return in for your big refund.
Option one above is what Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration want to do to tackle child poverty. Option two is Republican Sen. Mitt Romney’s plan to enact a new, simplified child allowance.”
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“If you make $14,000 a year, there are a bunch of state and federal programs out there to help you. And by “a bunch,” I mean a bunch.
Depending on the state you’re in, you may qualify for Medicaid. It’s not so simple, though — you’re eligible in every state that did the Obamacare expansion, but a bunch of states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi) set the eligibility cutoff much lower. In Texas, single parents have to make less than $277 a month to qualify, so in this scenario, you’d be way too “rich.” (And getting your kids covered through Medicaid or S-CHIP is a whole other can of worms.)
Need housing? You can apply for a housing choice voucher under the Section 8 program, but it’s underfunded so you will have to navigate years or decades of waitlists.
Need help with child care and early education? There’s Head Start and Early Head Start. In addition, there’s the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant — but you probably won’t get it; only about 15 percent of income-eligible families do, and depending on your state, you might have to be enrolled in a formal welfare-to-work program.
Speaking of which, you might get some money from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). But, again, most don’t, and for those who do it’s strictly time-limited and requires tedious “work reports” to prove you’re not too “lazy” to deserve it.
In the winter, if you need help with heat, there’s the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) — but only 20 percent of eligible families get it.
You’ll probably be able to get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, or food stamps, to help with groceries. If you have an infant, you can probably get aid from the nutrition program for women, infants, and children. There are probably some other programs I’m forgetting.
Conservatives and libertarians sometimes see this laundry list and think, “Look at how much we do for poor people!” I see it and think, “Look at how ridiculously complicated the system we make poor people navigate is.””
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“Romney’s child allowance plan is generous. The Democrats’ plan is even more so. But Romney’s plan has one edge: It simplifies things for the people it’s supposed to benefit.”
Global Climate Agreements: Successes and Failures Lindsay Maizland. 1 25 2021. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/paris-global-climate-change-agreements The Climate Change Performance Index 2021 Jan Burck et al. 2021. New Climate Institute. The Climate Change Performance IndexResults 2016 Jan Burck et al. 2016. GermanWatch.
“At least $63 billion—an amount larger than the current annual budgets of 42 states—of the boosted unemployment payments distributed as part of the federal government’s pandemic response has been distributed improperly, according to an estimate from the Department of Labor Office of the Inspector General. The office attributes a “significant portion” of those improper payments to fraud, and preliminary audits indicate that the actual amount of improper payments may be higher.”
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“The inspector general reports “a forty-fold increase” in the number of fraud-related matters, which have “exploded” since the CARES Act passed.”
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“payments to people who can’t work because of the pandemic (or due to the government’s response to it) is a defensible proposal. But even defensible proposals have costs to consider. Extending the federally boosted unemployment payments through August will cost taxpayers an estimated $246 billion—and that likely means that another $24 billion, or more, will be lost to fraud.”
“In 1984, they introduced MediSave, a health savings account that was part of the country’s mandatory savings scheme, called the Central Provident Fund (CPF). Adding the MediSave bucket to the fund (which also has a bucket for housing and a bucket for retirement) forced all Singaporeans to pay something for medical care. This was followed in 1990 by the introduction of a catastrophic insurance policy called MediShield Life that is mandatory for all Singaporeans and permanent residents. Finally, in 1993, Singapore introduced MediFund, a government-managed endowment for Singaporeans who cannot cover their medical bills using the above two funding methods, cash, or family assistance. Interest from the endowment is given to certain health care institutions to underwrite the bills of patients who can’t pay. (The family help aspect is important, as MediSave funds can be used to pay the health bills of an immediate family member.) Although the country also has a supplemental private insurance market, Singaporeans under 55 must contribute 20 percent of their salaries, and their employers another 17 percent, to the CPF.
A network of public hospitals are meant to encourage what Lee Kuan Yew called a “self-administered means test.” Patients can choose any kind of hospital “ward” they like, but the subsidies slide based on consumer income and ward grade. A public hospital’s cheapest ward might sleep four patients to a room and lack air conditioning, while its most expensive wards sleep one person to a room and are cooled. While the vast majority of Singapore’s hospital beds are in public facilities, there are also private hospitals. (The situation for primary care and clinics, where care is cheaper, is the opposite: Most practices are private.)
Singapore has found that making people pay a nominal amount for every type of medical service discourages unnecessary consumption and that the spectrum of service upgrades—from shorter wait times to one-person rooms—allows prices to work as a mechanism for allocating resources. The system is greatly aided by a requirement from the Ministry of Health (MOH) that all public hospitals report to the government what they charge. The MOH then posts facility-specific averages on an easily searchable website where consumers can sort hospitals and wards by how much they charge for specific procedures. Private hospitals aren’t required to submit this information to the MOH, but many do so voluntarily. The differences are stark: The median cost of repairing a one-sided lower abdominal hernia at Singapore’s cheapest public hospital ward in 2018–2019 was $966. The median cost for the same procedure at Singapore’s most expensive private hospital was $15,729.”
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“Singapore doesn’t control just the pharmaceutical choices of its residents; it also controls most of their media choices. Consider that Singapore’s buskers—the independent street performers one sees in public transportation systems and parks around the U.S.—not only need a permit (as is the case in Boston and several other American cities) but “are required to attend an audition to ensure consistency in the quality of busking activities,” according to guidelines published by Singapore’s Media Development Authority (MDA). Video games and movies “deemed to undermine public order” or that are “likely to be prejudicial to national interest” are prohibited. Press freedoms are nonexistent.”
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“Even people who abhor the draconian policies in Singapore begrudgingly admit that it is a well-put-together place. The science fiction writer William Gibson visited the island for a 1993 Wired article in which he described the airport, streets, and buildings as perfectly maintained and the flora as immaculate. He could find no “wrong side of the tracks” or dilapidated infrastructure. The whole country was safe and polite and advanced. “Only the clouds were feathered with chaos,” Gibson wrote.
Following the publication of the piece, which described the country as “Disneyland with the death penalty,” Singapore banned the distribution of Wired.”
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“Singapore is complex, but its core tension comes from the pairing of highly effective public and private institutions that take into account how people respond to incentives while engaging in shocking incursions on personal liberty and bodily autonomy. Imagine for a moment that it were possible for America to import what’s “good” about Singapore—the effective institutions, the economic growth, the tranquility. Could it be done without accidentally importing what’s bad?”
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“Singapore is one of the few countries in the world where the public sector outbids the private sector for talent, thanks to the fact that “cabinet level pay may exceed U.S. $800,000, with bonuses attached that can double that sum for excellent performance.” The country’s culture of public service is also bolstered by “complex and overlapping incentives whereby top public sector workers are…respected highly and develop the personal networks for subsequent advancement in either the public or private sectors.””
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“Bryan Caplan has argued that Singapore is unique in a way that does not bode well for policy adoption in either direction. In a 2009 paper, he summed up the “Singapore paradox” thusly: The island nation “persistently adopts policies that the democratic process would overturn almost anywhere else on earth, but the same party keeps winning election after election by a landslide. Why doesn’t a rival party promise to abolish the PAP’s unpopular policies and soar to power? How, in short, is Singapore’s political-economic equilibrium possible?”
Caplan probed several explanations in his paper, which he presented in Singapore. He ruled out the idea that the country is not actually a democracy, since it has free and fair (though not competitive) elections. Instead, he found strong survey evidence that Singaporeans were both “unusually concerned about economic performance” and deferential to the party that has delivered consistent economic growth for decades. The 2002 World Values Survey, where Caplan derived his data, reported that 58.8 percent of Singaporeans say “a high level of economic growth” should be their nation’s top priority, compared to 48.6 percent of Americans. In terms of political culture, the differences were much starker: 3.2 percent of Singaporeans reported being “very interested” in politics, and 32.8 percent were “somewhat interested” in politics. In America, the World Values Survey reported those numbers at 18.3 percent and 47.2 percent respectively.
Based on both the last eight months of social upheaval and on the United States’ decadeslong preference for swapping Democrats and Republicans in and out of federal power, Americans are almost certainly less deferential than are Singaporeans. And therein lies the rub: Being 10 percent less democratic requires American voters to trust elites and government far more than they do and, frankly, far more than they should.”
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“Yana Chernyak, the assistant director of strategic initiatives at the American Enterprise Institute (and Cowen’s stepdaughter), wrote a guest post for Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog in 2014 in which she posited that people “run in circles discussing whether Singapore is replicable based on its public and economic policies” and generally miss that “what actually makes Singapore so unique and probably impossible (or at least very difficult) to replicate” is its culture—specifically, Peranakan culture, which is passed down by the descendants of pan-Asian merchants and which holds a “positive view of commercial activity as the machine of wealth creation and basis of improving one’s life.””
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“Singapore has combined classical liberal policies such as free trade, an open port, and low taxes with an authoritarian single-party government that centrally plans large swaths of the island’s economy and infrastructure, plays the role of censor in practically every media sector, canes petty criminals, and executes drug offenders. Because of, or despite, this seemingly incongruous combination, Singapore for most of the 21st century has reported higher annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth than the U.S., as well as lower infant mortality, greater trust in government, a comparable GDP per capita, and a longer life expectancy. The island city-state, as its proudest inhabitants love to mention, is also cleaner than the U.S. and has much less crime.”
“A growing chorus of lawmakers and experts argue Congress could further improve jobless benefits by adding something called “automatic stabilizers” into the equation. That would mean that benefits would be tied to certain economic conditions — say, the unemployment rate — and would phase out as the economy gets better. They would be triggered on and off according to what’s actually happening in the economy for businesses and for workers.
“A ton of resources are wasted during a really crucial time … just having to go through this ad hoc stimulus and relief and recovery, and it just doesn’t have to be like that,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Labor Department. “We can automate things to make it so Congress could step in if they ever needed to do more relief, but it would mean that the basic structure of relief and recovery would be there already.””
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“The government already has in place automatic stabilizers, including unemployment itself, which is intended to stabilize the economy — not only do they replace income for people who lose jobs, but they’re also meant to help prop up the economy in moments of downturn and keep consumer spending going. When an unemployed worker can’t pay their rent, it’s bad for both the tenant and the landlord.
Because the unemployment system has become so whittled down over the years, benefits are less effective at supporting the economy than they used to be — food stamps tend to be more impactful — but it varies by state. “Unemployment insurance is a much better stabilizer in Massachusetts and New Jersey than it is in Texas and Virginia,” said Wayne Vroman, a labor economist at the Urban Institute.
But with federal interventions during the pandemic, that has changed somewhat, at least temporarily. Expanded unemployment benefits appear to have been quite useful in helping people spend what they need, which in turn helps businesses dependent on those customers. Research shows they actually helped many people with savings, and they likely made the recession less severe. They also reduced some inequalities in how Black and white workers access benefits and the amount of benefits they receive. This makes the argument that they should continue as long as the crisis continues make sense.”
“A genuinely free market family agenda could start with reforming tax laws to ease the burden on two-income families with children. As Edward McCaffery documented in his 1997 book Taxing Women, the U.S. tax code is biased against secondary earners, who are usually women. The secondary earner’s first dollar is taxed at the same high rate as the primary earner’s last dollar, because we don’t allow true individual filing for married couples.”
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“One of the book’s best chapters explores the benefits of marriage and decries falling marital rates among the poor. But it does not explore how tax and welfare policies that distort market signals help explain the rejection of marriage. For example, a couple who each earn $20,000 and are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit can get substantially more by remaining unmarried and filing two separate tax returns than by marrying and filing one. And because many welfare benefits are reduced as household income rises, there is a disincentive to live with the other biological parent of one’s children. A simpler relief system, along the lines of a negative income tax or a universal basic income, could avoid many of those dysfunctions by providing benefits directly to individuals regardless of marital status or other demographics. But even that sort of reform, hardly a radical libertarian move, doesn’t get discussed here.”
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“Nor do we hear as much as we should about the potential drawbacks to the policies Eichner prefers. She frequently invokes Finland as a country that does more to mandate paid parental leave, subsidize day care, and limit weekly hours of paid work. She does not ask what the costs to Finnish society might be from such policies. For example, the Finnish unemployment rate over the last decade (before COVID-19) was roughly twice the U.S. average, falling only briefly below 6 percent and topping out at almost 12 percent in 2015. The female unemployment rate for 2009–19 averaged about 8 percent, compared to about 6 percent in the United States. In 2014, Reuters found that fewer women are in high management positions in the private sector in the Nordic countries than in the United States. There are two likely explanations for this. First, despite public policy geared toward equality, Nordic women still are disproportionately represented in occupations such as health care and education that are largely in the public sector. Second, parental leave laws still encourage more time off for mothers, and that time off can set women back when pursuing management tracks. The Financial Times recently reported a similar result looking specifically at Norway.
Perhaps these costs are worth the benefits, but to make that case you have to discuss the cost side of the equation. The Free-Market Family does not grapple with the evidence that virtually every federal social program in U.S. history has ended up costing far more than projected when it passed. Whatever Eichner imagines the costs of her preferred pro-family policies to be, we can reliably multiply that several times over to get the likely costs over time.
She does finally say something about costs in the final chapter. But even there we get only a few paragraphs of hand waving and the assurance that these programs will pay for themselves with greater productivity and female employment. And if they don’t, well, we can just reallocate what we spend on the military and make the tax code more progressive. There is no discussion of the potential tradeoffs caused by higher marginal tax rates. (She points out that the U.S. economy grew when statutory rates were higher in the past, but this ignores the difference between statutory rates and the effective rates paid after avoidance and deductions. According to the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent of earners in the 1950s paid an effective tax rate of about 42 percent, which is not that much different from the 36 percent effective rate today.)
Despite these omissions and flaws, The Free-Market Family does document some significant problems facing American families. As Eichner shows, the more we learn about the neuroscience of child development, the more we know about the material conditions under which children thrive. It is important to think through how best to ensure that parents can create those conditions, especially at a time when the prevailing policy assumptions tend to favor big-government interventions like the ones Eichner proposes.”