How NOT to make a case

Framer at Arizona 8th had a post yesterday which referenced a Washington Post article, which itself referenced the recent non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates as to the potential costs and benefits of the proposed immigration bill.

The article discusses the total costs of the bill, throws out a figure of $126 billion over ten years, and is generally accurate as far as it goes. My quibbles are it what it leaves out.

The article goes into great detail to spell out the figures of what new immigrants would cost - $15.4 billion for Medicare and Medicaid, $3.7 billion for food stamps and child nutrition programs, and so on. When all is said and done the grand total (derived from actually looking at the figures in the CBO report) comes to $53.6 billion. No question, that's a big figure.

What the Post article completely fails to mention, and the reader wouldn't know unless they took the time to actually review the full CBO report, is that $53.6 billion dollar all those dern immigrants is gonna cost us is more than offset by the $65.7 billion dollars in addition federal revenue said immigrants are expected to generate. Put another way, all those folks "doing nothing but taking money from the system that should go to real Americans" are, in fact, actually expected to put $12.1 billion more into the system than they take out. (I'll save you some time -- the relevant data can be found in table 3, pages 6-7, and table 5, page 27.)

If you're going to make a case based on someone's figures, it's best to take all their figures into account. There may be many good reasons to fight the bill (Framer has a more recent post on the subject here, and I know there are reasons liberals don't like the bill either), but implying potential new immigrants will cost us money when the data you use says exactly the opposite (which is what the Post article does) is not the best approach to take.