Bipartisan meetings in the House of Representatives on a comprehensive immigration reform bill have failed, and the congressmen will meet for the last time today without reaching an agreement on a House bill, ABC News has learned.
The stumbling block is GOP insistence that newly legalized workers now working in the shadows have no access to government-sponsored health care during their 15-year pathway to citizenship, according to two sources with access to the secret house “Gang of 8″ meetings.
Democrats say that since these newly legalized immigrants would be paying taxes they should be eligible for benefits. . . .Yes, these former illegal aliens will be paying taxes, but the problem is that they will still be massive net beneficiaries of government subsidies even without the government health care. Lower income people get benefits that greatly exceed their taxes. Lower income individuals actually don't pay income taxes, they get money back from the government. The amount that they get back covers their Social Security taxes. But even if they paid Social Security taxes, the benefits that they get later in life greatly exceed their taxes. Social Security is set up to transfer money from higher to lower income individuals. You don't want a lot of people coming across the border just to get government subsidies.
Democrats know all this. The question is why Democrats have pushed this, and my guess is that they wanted the immigration bill to fail. Possibly they wanted it to fail in the House so that they could use it to push for Democrats taking over the House next year.
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