President Donald Trump is right: There is a crisis at the southern border. Just not the one he rants about.
There is no pressing national security threat — no invasion of murderers, drug cartels or terrorists. No matter how often Trump delivers such warnings, they bear little resemblance to the truth.
But as record numbers of Central American families flee violence and poverty in their homelands, they are overwhelming U.S. border systems, fueling a humanitarian crisis of overcrowding, disease and chaos. The Border Patrol is averaging 1,200 daily arrests, with many migrants arriving exhausted and sick. Last week, a teenage boy from Guatemala died in government custody, the third death of a minor since December. As resources are strained and the system buckles, the misery grows.
Something needs to be done. Soon. Unfortunately, political gamesmanship once again threatens to hold up desperately needed resources.
On Wednesday, the White House sent Congress a request for $4.5 billion in emergency funding to help manage the surge. In a letter to lawmakers, the acting director of the White House’s budget office, Russell Vought, sought to convey the scope of the challenge. “In February, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered more than 76,000 illegal border crossers and inadmissible aliens, and in March that number exceeded 100,000 — the highest monthly level in more than a decade,” Vought wrote. He described what he said were “alarming numbers” of women and children jammed into Border Patrol stations never intended as long-term shelters.
Funding for vital services is not expected to last through the fiscal year, Vought said. Most urgently, the program that deals with unaccompanied minors is expected to run dry next month, requiring resources to be diverted from other programs and leading to a further deterioration in conditions.
While the request is light on specifics, it does draw some important outlines. Nearly three-quarters of the funds, $3.3 billion, would be earmarked for humanitarian needs, with much of it flowing to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency responsible for unaccompanied minors. None of the money would go toward Trump’s border wall.
Several hundred million dollars would, however, go toward shoring up border security operations, including increasing the number of detention beds overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. This, for Democrats, is a nonstarter.
The debate over the permissible size of the detainee population has grown white hot. Democrats contend that the president brought this housing crisis on himself with his push to scoop up as many noncitizens as possible, rather than prioritizing those considered dangerous, as previous administrations did. Instead of asking for more money, Democrats assert, ICE should redirect existing resources to the border.
Detention beds were a sticking point in this winter’s budget negotiations as well, ultimately resulting in a convoluted compromise no one seemed to understand. Since then, the issue has festered as the administration has adopted policies that will further swell the detainee population, such as last month’s order for immigration judges to keep more migrants locked up while their asylum claims are processed, rather than allow them to post bail.
The Democratic chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, Nita Lowey of New York, said the administration was seeking billions of dollars to “double down on cruel and ill-conceived policies” and bail out ICE for locking up more migrant families than it could humanely accommodate. But until better policies are in place, Democrats need to find a way to provide money for adequate shelter.
Democrats have other, lower-level concerns as well, such as ensuring that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is not used as an enforcement agency or that the contractors and facilities used to care for children meet certain standards. As a condition of handing over additional billions, they are likely to push for at least modest increases in oversight. They should aim to keep such tinkering as narrow and targeted as possible. If the White House is serious about needing the money, it should be prepared to agree to a few conditions — and convey the need for flexibility to Senate Republicans.
As for the clash over detention beds: Knowing how toxic the matter is, the White House would have been wise to leave it out of a request it needs to advance quickly, postponing that battle for a another day. Both sides need to dial back the fighting words, resist the temptation to finger-point and find a creative way through this minefield.
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A Very Modern Waste of Tax Dollars
When Californians place an online order with Best Buy, they pay the company and they pay a state sales tax. What the receipt doesn’t say is that Best Buy gets some of the sales tax, too.
California distributes a portion of sales tax revenue to local governments, based on the location of sales. In 2015, Best Buy agreed to keep a distribution warehouse in the small city of Dinuba, and to credit its online sales to that location. In exchange, Dinuba agreed to give Best Buy 45 percent of its share of the resulting sales tax revenue.
Companies including Apple, Macy’s and QVC have struck similar deals with other California municipalities, according to a recent investigation by Bloomberg Tax. A consultant to the League of California Cities estimates that corporations are now receiving more than $1 billion a year in such payouts — more than 20 percent of the total local share of sales tax revenue.
The tax deals are a facet of a much larger problem: the incredibly wasteful competition among state and local governments to lure and keep corporations. Everyone (well, everyone except corporations) would be better off if states prevented local governments from offering such incentives, and if the federal government deterred states from doing so, for example by taxing state and local incentives. So long as such incentives are legal, the result is an endless game of beggar-thy-neighbors-and-thyself.
In the case of California sales taxes, the internet supersized an old problem. Governments across the country have long offered sales tax kickbacks, for example to lure an auto dealership from a neighboring town. Before the internet, however, the benefit was limited to sales at that location. In the age of e-commerce, one warehouse may serve the whole state.
Most states allocate sales tax revenue based on the location of the buyer. California is among a handful of states that uses the location of the seller. That effectively lets online retailers pick a city to get the tax revenue — and to sell the rights to the highest bidder.
Apple, for example, assigns the taxes from its California sales to its headquarters city, Cupertino, in exchange for a 35 percent kickback. Macy’s gets a 50 percent kickback from Sacramento County. Ulta, which sells beauty products, gets up to 75 percent back from Fresno.
A bill proposed by state Sen. Steven Glazer, and backed by the League of California Cities, would prohibit new deals of this kind, though it would allow existing deals to be renewed — and would still allow kickbacks to brick-and-mortar retailers.
The league’s logic is that assigning online sales to a single location allows cities to steal from one another. Beyond that, it says, local governments still should have the same right as state governments and the federal government to determine the use of tax dollars. A 2013 California law requires local governments to publish the details of any tax incentive over $100,000, along with an analysis of costs and benefits, and to hold a hearing. If voters don’t like what they see, the argument goes, they are free to vote the bums out.
(California also could adopt the more common system for allocating sales tax revenue, but cities with warehouses argue that they bear the costs, and deserve the money.)
The bill is surely a step in the right direction, but its proponents should heed the logic of their own proposal. The purpose of all sales tax kickbacks is to compete with other cities.
And the competition does not just shift tax dollars from place to place — it decreases the total pool of sales tax dollars by giving some of the money to corporations.
Companies, and cities, cannot be expected to exercise restraint under the current rules. The real answer is for California, and every other state, to prohibit local sales tax kickbacks.
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De Blasio May Want to Be President. What Do His Donors Want?
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s flirtation with a White House run has generated virtually no interest among voters. One national poll in March found he was the only Democratic candidate with a net negative approval rating, though fewer than half those polled had any opinion of him at all.
But his potential candidacy has caught the attention of people who do business with the city. They’ve been donating to the mayor’s presidential political action committee, the federal Fairness PAC, his latest vehicle for raising money from powerful interests.
De Blasio’s lowly showing in the polls didn’t, for example, dissuade John F. Fish, chief executive of Suffolk Construction, a Boston-based company, from hosting a fundraiser last month for the mayor’s PAC. Fish’s company is clearly hoping to expand its business in New York — Suffolk recently hired Shola Olatoye, who led the city’s public housing authority until last year — and may see an opportunity to win favor with a current mayor and future presidential candidate.
What’s disconcerting, however, is why de Blasio would welcome such donations, given the risk of even the appearance of impropriety, not to mention the fact that his fundraising has raised ethical and legal questions since he first ran for mayor in 2013.
A donor to his first mayoral campaign pleaded guilty to bribing him to get favorable lease terms for a Queens restaurant. Federal prosecutors indicated that they didn’t charge the mayor because the Supreme Court had recently narrowed the scope of what could be considered corruption.
A donor to one of the nonprofits the mayor has used to advance his liberal agenda and raise his profile pleaded guilty to charges involving bribery after receiving special access to de Blasio and city officials.
The city’s Department of Investigation found that the mayor violated conflict of interest rules by soliciting donations for his Campaign for One New York from people seeking favors from the city, as the news site The City recently revealed. (The rules would not apply to the presidential PAC.)
That’s not to mention the Manhattan district attorney’s announcement in 2017 that the mayor’s fundraising for the Democratic campaign to win the state Senate in 2014 violated the “intent and spirit” of campaign finance laws by directing contributions meant for political committees toward specific candidates.
Fundraising can taint City Hall by giving the appearance of pay-to-play, even if none is involved.
In 2015, the city lifted a deed restriction that allowed a Lower East Side nursing home that once served AIDS patients to be converted to condos. Among those who had pushed for the deed change was lobbyist James Capalino, who steered $40,000 to de Blasio’s 2017 re-election campaign and $10,000 to the Campaign for One New York. Capalino has said that the client he worked for who sought the deed change fired him in 2014 after he was unsuccessful, and that he wasn’t involved in the issue afterward. City Comptroller Scott Stringer investigated the land deal and blamed it on mismanagement by city officials.
De Blasio, who is barred by term limits from seeking re-election, is using his federal Fairness PAC to pay for his travel to states like Iowa and Nevada, which will be important if he runs for president. De Blasio has said the group will not accept contributions from anyone in a database of those doing business with New York City, a stricter standard than the federal rules the group must follow.
But that database, called “Doing Business,” doesn’t include every individual or group with business before the city. Frank Carone, for example, a lawyer representing two owners of 21 buildings the city bought to provide affordable housing, is a longtime de Blasio supporter who has been helping raise money for Fairness PAC. He donated $5,000 to the PAC in September, as the deal was under negotiation.
A campaign spokesman for de Blasio says Carone wasn’t listed as a lobbyist in the “Doing Business” database when he made the $5,000 donation. Last month, the de Blasio administration agreed to pay the landlords $173 million for the 21 buildings — a price a third higher than the $115 million they were appraised for by an independent firm on the city’s behalf.
A de Blasio spokeswoman, Freddi Goldstein, disputed the idea that donors receive special favors at City Hall. “All official decisions are made based on merit,” Goldstein said.
But the ease with which the mayor continues to accept donations from people seeking business before the city is disquieting, even if the fundraising breaks no laws.
The field of candidates seeking the Democratic nomination is already large. If de Blasio chooses to run, he will have to find a way to assure voters that he has their interests — not those of his big donors — at heart.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.