Conservative Forum — Week of August 30

Book Examines Stranglehold Of Local Government

Although many of us regularly cast an anxious eye on what's going on in Washington, a new book explains how our friendly local government officials are picking our pockets, stealing our property and suppressing our speech. And most of the time, we don't even know who they are.

"City Hall has become a David versus Goliath struggle and our liberty is often more at risk from City Hall than those bad boys in D.C.," said Clint Bolick in his new book, Leviathan, The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty (Hoover Institution, 2004).

In a State of the Union address, former president Bill Clinton famously proclaimed that "the era of big government is over." He was wrong, Bolick says; it just moved to the suburbs. The enormous growth of local government in recent decades bodes serious real-world consequences for every American.

In Leviathan, Bolick says the typical person lacks the resources, knowledge and skills to take on the monster that our local governments have become. The odds are further stacked by the ability of politicians to use their own citizens' tax dollars against them. Except for the rare situation in which local media take an interest, individuals usually stand no chance against the very officials that in our federalist system are supposed to protect our rights.

Drawing on his experience as an attorney with the Institute for Justice, Bolick presents several startling examples of local governments' infringements on freedom of speech, freedom of commerce and enterprise, private property rights, and even the simple right to be left alone. They include the following cases:

Garland Allen, who has been cutting hair in rural Tennessee for decades, was arrested in his barbershop for "impersonating a professional" and lacking a license, a felony punishable by up to six years in prison.

It would be a criminal offense for Virginia winery owner Juanita Swedenburg to ship to consumers in 25 states.

Texas foster parents Scott and Lou Ann Mullen, who are white and Native American respectively, were denied adoption of a black baby who they painstakingly nursed back to health from crack addiction and syphilis, (and his older brother) because the caseworkers said "it would be in the kids' best interest to place them in an African-American home."

Randy Bailey fought for several years to prevent the city of Mesa, Ariz., from using its power of eminent domain to take his brake shop and give it to a hardware store that wanted to expand.

"We must remember that the object of American constitutional government is the preservation of individual liberty and that government at every level is a constant threat to that liberty, even if it is close to home," Bolick said.

Leviathan is Bolick's seventh book. Bolick is a research fellow with the Hoover Institute.

The High Costs Of Illegal Immigration

A new study from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget, is one of the first to estimate the impact of illegal immigration on the federal budget.

Based on Census Bureau data, the study estimates that households headed by illegal aliens used $10 billion more in government services than they paid in taxes in 2002. (These figures are only for the federal government; costs at the state and local level are also likely to be significant.) The study also finds that if illegals were given amnesty, the fiscal deficit at the federal level would grow to nearly $29 billion.

Among the study's findings:

Illegal alien households on average are estimated to use $2,700 a year more in services than they pay in taxes, creating a total fiscal burden of nearly $10.4 billion on the federal budget in 2002.

Among the largest federal costs: Medicaid ($2.5 billion); treatment for the uninsured ($2.2 billion); food assistance programs ($1.9 billion); the federal prison and court systems ($1.6 billion); and federal aid to schools ($1.4 billion).

If illegal aliens were legalized and began to pay taxes and use services like legal immigrants with the same education levels, the estimated annual fiscal deficit at the federal level would increase from $2,700 per household to nearly $7,700, for a total federal deficit of $29 billion.

With nearly two-thirds of illegals lacking a high school diploma, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments-not their legal status or their unwillingness to work.

Amnesty increases costs because illegals would still be largely unskilled, and thus their tax payments would continue to be very modest, but once legalized they would be able to use many more government services.

The fact that legal immigrants with little schooling are a fiscal drain on federal coffers does not mean that legal immigrants overall are a drain. Many legal immigrants are highly skilled.

Because many of the costs are due to their U.S.-born children, who are awarded U.S. citizenship at birth, barring illegals themselves from federal programs will not significantly reduce costs.

Although illegals create a net drain on the federal government, the average illegal household pays more than $4,200 a year in federal taxes, for a total of nearly $16 billion.

However, they impose annual costs of more than $26.3 billion, or about $6,950 per illegal household.

About 43%, or $7 billion, of the federal taxes illegals pay go to Social Security and Medicare.

Employers do not see the costs associated with less-educated immigrant workers because the costs are spread out among all taxpayers.

Copies of this study are available here.