At the time the Cayman Islands tax on remittances was implemented there was no minimum wage. One has since been implemented.
The tax applied to anyone (citizen, ex pat worker, illegal immigrant, ANYONE) sending money internationally by a remittance service (Western Union, Moneygram, and similar) but not to funds sent overseas by bank wire transfer or other means. This does mean that such a tax hits those who cannot afford to wire large sums of money on an irregular basis but instead send smaller remittances on a regular basis.
Such a tax may not be as highly targeted as some might like, but remittances form the US to Mexico are about US$20 billion US per year and rising. A 2% tax on that would be about $400 million per year. Over ten years that would be US$4 billion in tax just on the remittances to Mexico, on the low end of what some estimates are for building Trump’s wall. Make it instead a 1% tax on ALL such remittances to any foreign country and it would bring in more. And this is just one possible financing stream.
*Prior to becoming the FDIC chair in 2006, Sheila Bair ran a research project at for the Inter-American Development Bank at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to discover ways to help unbanked Latin American immigrants use the U.S. banking system. She found that the primary reason recent Latino immigrants don’t use banks to remit money is because they are illegal aliens.
*
In any case, if they all have bank accounts, why are they paying Western Union, etc $100’s of millions in wire fees to send cash?
Is Trump going to confiscate all ladders in Mexico? (If not, why not? :smack:)
Is there a time in the economic cycle when the Government can help the economy recover quicker by some random expenditure?
Would a pointless wall count for this?
How else would you do it? I have a bank account too (two, actually, with a regional bank and with a credit union), and if I needed to send money to Mexico, Western Union charges a fair bit less than either for the transfer.
The credit union, for example, charges $40 for an international wire transfer of any size. I can walk into a Western Union location, hand them $300 in cash, and my friend/relative can walk out of a pickup location in Guadalajara with the pesos in cash within an hour or so for $12.50 (and that’s not the cheapest option).
We already have them. I used to do that for the US Treasury, but the FBI and other agencies get in on the act. They arent very common in the USA.
I am actually a certified expert on Money Laundering. I think the wall is mostly stupid, but it certainly could be paid for by a small levy on remittances. I dont think it should, however.
How much money do the drug cartels currently launder back to Mexico and points south each year?
If Mr. Trump’s levy is very low, it won’t generate enough money to fund the wall in our lifetimes. If the levy is too high, though, it merely pushes customers out of the legal system and into the underground. (How exactly do you think the narco-billionaires of the Sinaloa Cartel got their money back from buyers in the states?)
Yeah, we do, but you are talking about VASTLY increasing the numbers of such investigators and prosecutors. Those extra people aren’t going to work for free. The best estimates I’ve seen suggest that $24 billion is sent to Mexico each year in 80-100 million separate transactions; do you think that the people currently on the federal payroll are going to be able to investigate even a reasonable fraction of that activity going underground?
Trump doesn’t know what “levy” means. He may try it, but that will be pissing into the ocean as far as it helps anything. But my point was that he never cared. He isn’t footing the bill. “And Mexico will pay for it!” was a rhetorical flourish, like “Carthago delenda est!”. His supporters ate it up, because it was a signal that Trump hated Mexicans as much as they did. They don’t care who pays for what either, they just want a job, and think being a dick to Mexicans will make that happen. Trying to seriously consider a Trump policy proposal is like interpreting dreams. An interesting diversion, perhaps, but it has nothing to do with reality.
Which law makes it illegal to call your buddy in another state and say “pay this dude $50, and I’ll owe you”? I’m interested in how that law reads, and how enforcement works.
