By David Stockman

David Stockman’s Contra Corner

Indeed, three other western hemisphere countries on the list above suggest quite clearly that is it is not murder and dictators that migrants are fleeing so much as it is socialism and poverty. Fully 462,000 or 19% of the “encounters” in FY 2022 were with citizens from Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela. The political refugees from Castro’s jails left the island for Miami decades ago—so today’s escapees are simply victims of communist poverty, as is essentially the case for Haiti and Venezuela, as well.

Donald Trump’s major talent in the political arena is blowing things up, and for once that attribute has come in extremely handy. We are referring to his apparent death-blow to the so-called bipartisan immigration reform package and the $118 billion potpourri of funding that went with it.

To be sure, that doesn’t make up for the $8 trillion he added to the public debt during his four short years in the Oval Office and the $6.5 trillion pandemic relief bacchanalia that his Lockdowns and the White House Task Force fueled Covid-hysteria triggered between March 2020 and March 2021. And that’s to say nothing of the 40-year high inflation, massive Fed money-printing spree, egregious Wall Street financial bubbles and speculation and continuing stagflationary legacy that flowed from the Donald’s misbegotten war on the virus.

While the demise of this package is therefore surely in the nature of an uncontrolled partisan demolition rather than a purposeful policy initiative, it does have some redeeming collateral virtues. Just maybe Washington’s foolish proxy war against Russia in Ukraine will collapse for lack of funding, thereby encouraging saner heads in the Ukraine military to send Zelensky to his CIA safe house in central America and to negotiate a peaceful partition of a fake country created by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev that doesn’t want to be together anyway.

Likewise, Israel only needs to raise taxes by 2-3 percentage points of GDP to generate the $14 billion in aid that Uncle Sam flat-out doesn’t have. Even then, Israel’s defense budget would amount to a far lower burden on its $550 billion GDP than was the case for the first 50-years of its existence.

Besides, when the Israeli electorate is shown that the Netanyahu claque doesn’t have an ATM in the US Capitol Building, it might start electing governments willing to honestly pursue a modus vivendi with its Palestinian population and Arab neighbors.

As for the extra $10 billion for humanitarian aid, good riddance to that. It amounts to a 20% tip on top of the $50 billion already in the Federal budget for foreign aid and security assistance—none of which adds to the homeland security of America.

So putting the kibosh on the “foreign adventures” components of the package would save $85 billion and constitutes a halting first step toward fiscal sanity on the banks of the Potomac.

But the irony is that the even bigger waste in the package is the $20 billion to stop the so-called border invasion. Except the “invasion” is self-inflicted by an utterly broken US immigration control regime that literally invites millions of migrants to come to the US border and break the law in the guise of seeking “asylum” under international law and safeguards.

So fix the immigration system and you won’t even need the $30 billion in the current Federal budget for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and the Customs and Border Protection operations, to say nothing of the extra 50% or $15 billion provided to these agencies by the Senate deal.

See the rest here

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