A Business Woman Says Taxing Immigrant Remittances Would Be NO PROBLEMA
Article publisher:
VDare
Article date:
1 July 2016
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
Donald Trump has proposed taxing remittances to pay for, among other things, a border wall. The Main Stream Media has reacted with hysteria. But it’s very doable, and I can tell you why.
From 1997 to 2003 I, along with my ex-husband, owned a small mom-and-pop type store selling goods imported from Mexico. Most of our clientele was from Mexico with a small portion coming from Central America, Cuba, and even South America. One of the services we offered: wire transfers or sending money to said countries in Latin America. During the six years that we did this, we probably did somewhere between 42 to 45,000 transfers, sending on average $1.25 million a year out of the country...
Because of this experience, I think that I can authoritatively speak to the comments made by those in the Open Borders crowd that claim taxing remittances would be impossible...
Baloney. Of course remittances can be taxed. And it wouldn’t be difficult...
This is reasonable because frequently the money sent out of the country is taken directly from cash wages earned here and never circulates in the local economy, nor has taxes paid on it. It never benefits American citizens.
At the same time, the remitter is benefiting from living in the US because he or she is able to live in a country that is relatively safe and that has good infrastructure and that provides health and educational opportunities for the immigrant and his family members—many of whom are here illegally.
On top of that, the remitter frequently receives a healthy tax refund because he often claims not only dependents living here but dependents living in the home country. This is certainly the case with Mexicans living in the US.
So the remitter is winning both going and coming. And the American citizen is losing both coming and going...
When Barack Obama and his Open-Borders shills in the MSM talk about the difficulty or impossibility of taxing remittances I wonder if they are embarrassingly ignorant, pitiably stupid, or willfully deceitful. We’re living in the 21st century. Haven’t they heard of databases, spreadsheets and adding machines? Don’t they know what the job responsibilities and skills of bookkeepers and accountants are? Databases can keep track of who sends what where and in what amounts. They can easily keep track of wire transfer amounts and the amounts levied upon them...