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Spending on Healthcare & Defense

Do federal, state, and local governments spend more combined money on healthcare or national defense (including veterans’ benefits)?

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In 2025, federal, state, and local governments spent $2.8 trillion on healthcare, or 2.2 times spending on national defense and veterans’ benefits. Since 1959, government spending on healthcare has risen from 4% to 26% of all government outlays. The costs of this amount to $20,544 for every household in the nation.

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Immigration Amnesty

U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico (D–TX) claims that “we have to build a pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants “who have been here for years” because “they deserve a shot at joining our communities as full citizens.”

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IN FACT, such amnesties reward law-breaking, undercut immigration standards, incentivize more illegal immigration, and give political power to Democrats. Here are the specifics:

U.S. immigration laws provide 40 pathways for immigrants to become legal permanent residents and full citizens.
However, the laws contain numerical limits and quality standards to ensure that immigrants assimilate and benefit the U.S. by being law-abiding, self-sufficient, and productive members of society who don’t harbor totalitarian views.
People who immigrate to the U.S. by illegally crossing the border or overstaying their visas violate those laws and subvert the reasons for them.
The bulk of illegal aliens also commit identity fraud and/or tax evasion, which are federal felonies punishable by up to five years in prison.
Illegal immigrants commit imprisonable crimes at several times the rate of the general U.S. population, and claims to the contrary are rooted in studies that suffer from 10 fatal flaws.
In 1986, Congress and President Reagan agreed to an amnesty for 2.7 million illegal aliens as a “one-time resolution of a longstanding problem” in return for stricter immigration laws, but the population of illegals multiplied in its wake.
As Congress was negotiating the amnesty of 1986, Southwest border patrol apprehensions rose to a record high that has been exceeded in only 5 years since then, 4 of which under President Biden.
The Clinton administration then misused the 1986 law to award citizenship to immigrants by processing applications that were “rife with fraud,” failing to conduct “complete criminal history background” checks, flouting the “English-language requirement” of the statute, and giving “superficially trained, inexperienced” INS employees only 5 minutes to vet the applicants during their citizenship interviews.
In 2012, President Obama unilaterally enacted a “guideline” to not deport illegal immigrants if they were under the age of 16 when they arrived in the U.S. and met other limited criteria.
Obama’s fiat, called “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” or DACA, also granted these “DREAMERS” authorization to legally work in the U.S. and made them eligible for government programs like Social Security and Medicare.
In the wake of DACA, the number of unaccompanied children from Central America crossing the border grew by roughly 10 times, overwhelming the ability of U.S. officials to care for the children and creating an “urgent humanitarian situation.”
Media outlets blamed the DACA-associated surge on violence and poverty in the children’s homelands, but murder rates in these nations were lower before DACA, and the migrants themselves stated that they were coming because they heard that they would be let it.
At least 79,398 people were approved for DACA despite having a prior arrest, including 7,926 arrests for theft or larceny, 4,210 for driving under the influence, 3,308 for assault, 869 for fraud or money laundering, 587 for hit-and-run, 173 for kidnapping or trafficking, 62 for rape, and 5 for manslaughter or homicide.
Obama also tried to unilaterally place another 4–5 million illegal immigrants above the law by shielding them from deportation, giving them work authorizations, forcing states to issue them drivers licenses, and making them eligible for an array of government programs like Social Security and Medicare, but his decree was stuck down by a federal court.
Shortly after becoming president, Joe Biden sent amnesty legislation to Congress that would have allowed “nearly 11 million” illegal immigrants to become citizens while giving them the right to vote and full access to welfare.
With that, Biden enacted numerous open border policies, which in combination with the pending amnesty, fueled the worst border crisis ever recorded in U.S. history.
Nearly three-quarters of all illegal immigrants come from Latin America.
About 42% of all Latin American immigrants aged 25–64 don’t have a high school diploma or GED, as compared to 5% of people born in the United States.
Poverty rates of Latin American immigrants are roughly twice that of people born in the USA, despite a federal law that is supposed to prohibit foreigners from entering the U.S. if they are “likely at any time to become” a burden on taxpayers.
A nationally representative bilingual poll of 784 immigrant Latinos conducted by Pew Research in 2011 found that 81% said they would prefer “a bigger government providing more services,” and 12% said they would prefer “a smaller government with fewer services.” In contrast, 41% of the general U.S. population said they would prefer a bigger government, and 48% said they wanted a smaller one.
A nationally representative bilingual poll of 800 Hispanic adults conducted by McLaughlin & Associates in 2013 found that 59% were born outside the U.S., 53% considered themselves to be Democrats, and 12% considered themselves to be Republicans.
In a 2009 speech, Eliseo Medina, former executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, encouraged the “progressive community” to put “12 million” illegal aliens “on the path to citizenship and eventually voting” in order to create a “governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.”

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