CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – I’ve shared earlier that I owe tax this year. It’s my own fault. As my kids grow older, they no longer qualify for tax credits. I didn’t have enough withheld from my paycheck to make up the difference.
Last weekend, I filed and wrote a check to the United States Treasury.
I don’t object to paying taxes. I object to my taxes being wasted.
The day before I got right with the Internal Revenue Service, came this little nugget from the Biden Administration. Dreamers – who were brought to the United States as children by their illegal immigrant parents – will now be eligible for health insurance under Obamacare. It was such a given in the current political climate that it was done by executive order.
I remember how contentious each piece of Obamacare was. The give-and-take among Democrats was intense. (They controlled both houses of Congress then.) The sweeping healthcare package was approved by 1 vote in the U.S. Senate using the reconciliation process. No one ever imagined then that a future president could unilaterally offer those benefits to another 600,000 people, no congressional action necessary, who aren’t even citizens of the United States.
I actually have a great deal of sympathy for Dreamers. The four year old child who was taken across the border by their parents is innocent, and they shouldn’t be punished. The solution is quite simple. Dreamers who are leading productive lives in the United States, and don’t have criminal records, should be offered a path to citizenship. But it should not be chain-citizenship, where a new citizen also gets to bring relatives to the United States legally. It’s the parents of Dreamers who are law-breakers, and they should not benefit from it. After all, coming into the country illegally already got free health insurance for their kids. And the check that I just wrote to the IRS is helping to pay for it.
Chris Conley
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