Is Illegal Immigration Moral?

by Victor Davis Hanson

We know illegal immigration is no longer really unlawful, but is it moral?

Usually Americans debate the fiscal costs of illegal immigration. Supporters of open borders rightly remind us that illegal immigrants pay sales taxes. Often their payroll-tax contributions are not later tapped by Social Security payouts.

Opponents counter that illegal immigrants are more likely to end up on state assistance, are less likely to report cash income, and cost the state more through the duplicate issuing of services and documents in both English and Spanish. Such to-and-fro talking points are endless.

So is the debate over beneficiaries of illegal immigration. Are profit-minded employers villains who want cheap labor in lieu of hiring more expensive Americans? Or is the culprit a cynical Mexican government that counts on billions of dollars in remittances from its expatriate poor that it otherwise ignored?

Or is the engine that drives illegal immigration the American middle class? Why should millions of suburbanites assume that, like 18th-century French aristocrats, they should have imported labor to clean their homes, manicure their lawns and watch over their kids?

Or is the catalyst the self-interested professional Latino lobby in politics and academia that sees a steady stream of impoverished Latin American nationals as a permanent victimized constituency, empowering and showcasing elite self-appointed spokesmen such as themselves?

Or is the real advocate the Democratic Party that wishes to remake the electoral map of the American Southwest by ensuring larger future pools of natural supporters? Again, the debate over who benefits and why is never-ending.

But what is often left out of the equation is the moral dimension of illegal immigration....

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States Raise Payroll Taxes to Repay Loans

by Sara Murray

State governments are borrowing heavily from the federal government to keep paying unemployment-insurance benefits and, even with the weak job market, most states are raising payroll taxes to pay off the loans.

Thirty one states, their unemployment-insurance funds empty, have borrowed nearly $41 billion from the federal government. California alone has borrowed nearly $8.8 billion as of mid-November, according to the Labor Department.

As states try to replenish the funds and begin to repay the loans, employers are facing increases in both state and federal payroll taxes, a potential barrier to new hiring.

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Patients Should Pay Their Own Bills

by IBD Editorials

Big Spenders: Increases in health care costs rival the rising of the sun for inevitably. Should we blame greedy doctors and drugmakers? No, blame should be placed on the system the government has promoted.

The tax code encourages employers to buy health care insurance plans with pretax dollars. Because these plans are exempt from federal income and payroll taxes, employers salaries. Nearly 60% of American adults are covered by an employer-based plan.

For most, these plans work well. But the arrangement that so many have become accustomed to has driven health care spending ever higher. The cost of medicine increased 98% between 1992 and 2008, a period when the consumer price index rose 53%. Health care spending now makes up 17% of the economy, a far bigger slice than it did before the 1965 creation of Medicare and Medicaid, when it never went beyond 6%.

Why has this happened? Devon Herrick from the National Center for Policy Analysis has the simple answer: We have become big spenders on health care because our motivation to be thrifty has been legislated away.

"A primary reason why health care costs are soaring is that most of the time when people enter the medical marketplace, they are spending someone else's money."

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Some Companies Shift Health Costs to Better-Paid

by Reed Abelson

With health care costs climbing even higher during this enrollment season, more employers are adopting a tiered system to pass on the bulk of those costs to their employees by assigning bigger contributions to workers in top salary brackets and offering some relief to workers who make less money.

For years, employees have seen what they pay toward health care go up as companies ask them to contribute more to premiums and deductibles. But now, as people enroll in health plans for the coming year, the sticker shock is more jolting than ever because so many companies are passing on to their workers most, if not all, of the higher costs.

A worker’s share of a family policy is approaching $4,000 a year on average, and is most certainly going to keep rising through the next few years. For lower-salaried workers, those costs have only compounded their struggle in a brutal economy.

More and more companies in the last year or so have begun signaling their recognition of the added burden shouldered by workers in low- and middle-income jobs by varying the premiums they pay based on salary. Consultants say the trend is likely to continue, as employers devise various ways of spreading increased health care costs among their staff and balancing that side of the ledger against fewer raises and other compensation.

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Joan Baez injured falling out of her treehouse

by Bruce Newman

1960s songbird Joan Baez had a treehouse built -- without walls -- 20 feet high in an oak tree behind her Woodside home because she wanted to sleep with birds.

The folksinging legend, who once performed the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" before a half-million people at Woodstock, fell from that treehouse Wednesday as she climbed down from the platform.

Paramedics drove the singer to Stanford Hospital, where she was treated and released after it was determined she had suffered only minor injuries.

"I sleep in a tree all summer long," Baez told an English blogger in 2008. "I climb up on a ladder, with ropes and things. The birds are right there in the morning. Sometimes they're flying so close to my head I can feel the wind.

"Those things are heaven to me."

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