From Neil Munro at the Daily Caller:
President Barack Obama’s amnesty for four million illegal immigrants will cost Americans about $2 trillion, or roughly $40 billion a year for the next five decades.
The cost of Obama’s generosity is equivalent to 30 cents extra for every gallon of gas bought by Americans.
Or a $10 monthly fee added to every cellphone.
Or a $22,000 tax on every American graduate’s four-year college degree.
The $2 trillion cost is driven by the federal government’s support for all poor people, says Robert Rector, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Rector explained that, on average, the illegal immigrants benefiting from the amnesty have a 10th grade education.
That low education ensures they can’t earn enough money, or pay enough taxes, to pay for the many benefits they’ll get if they progress from temporary residents to legal residents and then to citizens, Rector said.
These various benefits add up to roughly $50,000 a year for each household, but those households can and do pay only about $13,000 a year in federal taxes, leaving a gap of roughly $40,000 between payments and benefits, Rector said.
That gap is effectively filled by payments from intact, college-education households which normally pay $30,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits. “It takes all of the net taxes paid by one college-educated family [household] to pay for one of these immigrant households,” he said.
Read more: Daily Caller