I love the way Jeb Bush thinks. He knows his views on illegal immigration are unpopular, so he thinks that if he talks conservatively enough about other topics, people will overlook his minor policy differences with mainstream America on illegal aliens and vote for him.
Don't laugh. After all, if he promised to drop marginal rates to zero, to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax, (which no other candidate has called for!) wouldn't that be worth the price of legalizing the existing legal aliens? If the answer is yes, then there is a tax rate at which you would vote for Jeb Bush!
So the question becomes, how big a tax cut do you need to vote for Jeb Bush? When I consider the question, I weigh the many downsides of illegal immigration and assign a point value. Right now the top marginal tax rate is 39% or with a extra 4% tax on investments about 43%., depending on the circumstances (and obviously not every one pays the top rate). Bush wants to reduce the top rate to 28%, (while raising it at the same time for people who are evil by virtue of the fact that they invest in hedge funds.)
So here's what it would take to get my vote:
1) Illegal aliens come here and murder people. They murder them while target shooting Sea Lions on the wharfs of San Francisco, they murder while committing rapes, and they murder while drunk driving. That's pretty severe, so I think I would need a 10% drop in the top marginal rate to compensate for the risk of that.
2) Illegals consume a lot of taxpayer money for schools and medical care. ...
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