On the heels of last night’s post in reaction to the Brokaw special on immigration, where I said that the $50 billion paid into the Social Security system by illegal aliens working legit jobs was still underfunding the S.S. system, I just assumed that the $50 billion was true, because I assumed the “study” Brokaw cited encompassed several fiscal years.
The study, as it turns out, was done and released by New York University, and its contention is that the $50bn figure is yearly.
Now I’m starting to have my doubts. Let’s get out the calculator.
If the illegal aliens pay $50 billion in the S.S. system ever year, this means their wages have $25 billion of employee income FICA tax taken from them, 7.65% tax rate for the earner. The other $25 billion comes from payroll taxes for those employees paid by the employers, at the same rate.
$25 billion in taxes paid divided by 0.0765 means that $326.8 billion in gross wages/salary has to be earned by illegal alien employees every year. Operating on a high assumption of an average $10 an hour (i.e. $20,800 a year) wage/salary scale for illegal alien workers, dividing $326.8bn by $20.8G/yr means that 15,700,000 illegal aliens would have to be working legit jobs every year. That number is higher than many of the “official” estimates of the total number of illegal aliens here (counting children and retirees), but lower than the 36 million estimate given by Newt Gingrich, which I believe is far more likely than the “official” estimates.
Take 15.7m and divide it by 36m. This means that 43.6% of all illegal aliens present would have to be working legit jobs.
If you think my $10/hr average for illegal alien pay-scale in legit jobs is too high, then that only increases mathematically the number of illegal alien workers needed to produce $326.8bn in gross income and thus $25bn in FICA income taxes.
In other words, that New York University study’s estimate is too high, and too generous toward illegal alien copiousness. Of course, that’s not counting it’s other problems, which I detailed last night, and anyone with a brain could discern that the NYU study is essentially corporate propaganda of the cheap labor lobby.
