forgotten costs of illegal immigration

In texasgov-sulap.blogspot.com Sulap Brings up a huge topic that I never heard addressed at any point in the campaign season. What current steps are we taking to stop the huge flooding in the side of our Titanic? What is the entire cost of our inability to keep people out of our country? Estimates are scary. Criminal immigrants make up about 25% of our federal prisons at about 21K per year on taxpayers. That is about $500 billion federal funds per year and an additional $500 million for the nation's states incarcerations. That doesn't account for the welfare costs, labor market effects, wage effects, and drain on our education system. Why do people have such a hard time spending a couple of million on a wall. Sulap points out that the wall between India and Pakistan has dramatically reduced tensions between those countries. Implicit and explicit costs of Billions if not trillions of dollars is what is really killing our economy. I'll take the $25 billion to big 3 over a little wall any day. Drugs and crime are just a minor problem, look at the thousands of possible terrorists that are in our country right now waiting to really do some damage and that wall doesn't sound so bad does it. Some statistics were referenced from www.usillegalaliens.com.

More laws to protect us from each other.

Having now read a little history of Texas and more articles and blogs than I can count I am starting to see the Libertarian twist in the state. What got me thinking about this was some national attention recently and some local discussions about banning texting while driving. The lack of a motorcycle helmet law, state gun laws, and a general feeling I get from media coverage gives me a real “original 13” feeling toward Texas. Yes Texas has the two party thing happening, but there is definitely a defined defense for keeping personal freedoms within that game. There is some serious partisan attitude here in Austin that is stronger than anywhere I’ve ever lived and even with that there is still some room for personal freedoms.
Now don’t get me wrong I think texting while driving is crazy, I like everyone else has seen or been behind someone who is erratic and downright dangerous while texting. However is that any different than helping your kid in the backseat find his toy he just dropped, or putting on some makeup ( c’mon girls own up). We don’t have laws that restrict these things because they would be worthless. How many citations are there for kids not in their car seats? Yet we have all seen that as well. Another item is seatbelts, anyone ever been pulled over for that? So how are we going to police an item that is either unseen or can be unseen is seconds. Yes we could wait until the accident has happened, but unless we can get a time stamp for a text or have visual evidence it would be almost impossible to prove unless confessed (yeah right). I guess my idea is to find the story about an idiot texting while driving who goes Evel Knievel over the guardrail and send it to the “Darwin Award” website (http://www.darwinawards.com/) for submission. We can’t regulate stupid, and as much as lawyers need work in this terrible economy we don’t need to add any stress to law enforcement or the courts.