[1]My local paper, the Free Lance-Star, is unahppy about Corey Stewart’s Rule of Law [2] Resolution. Stewart, the current chairman of the Prince William Board of Supervisors, is reacting to the kerfuffle over Arizona’s SB1070, and trying to take his own PW policies on illegal aliens and adapt them to the state. He adds one twist that caught the FLS editors’ attention: a fee on monetary wire transactions.
The FLS did not approve [3]:
Just one big flaw of his plan would put a surcharge on the “remittances” that many foreign-born residents send to hard-up relatives abroad. Those who paid these fees and later filed a state income-tax return–with, of course, their Social Security number–would get a penny-for-penny credit for them on their taxes. But this seems an undue burden for those who work in Virginia legally–indeed, who might be naturalized (or even native-born) U.S. citizens. How could the state justly, in effect, impound money sent by one Virginian to Tío Miguel in Monterrey, but not by another to Aunt Fanny in Sioux City?
Such discrimination would violate the American credo, which holds that the fellow who just pledged allegiance to the United States at his citizenship ceremony is, in the law’s eyes, as good as the blue blood whose ancestors arrived at Plymouth Rock or Jamestown. A “two-tiered American” approach is also plain meanness.
Now, one can argue the merits of the fee; what one cannot do is misrepresent it – but that’s exactly what the editors of the FLS do here.
Perhaps if they had actually read the RoLR, the editors would have noticed the verbiage in Section 7 [4] (page 8 of 10):
Any licensee of a money transmission, transmitter or wire transmitter business and their delegates shall collect a fee of five Dollars ($5.00) for each transaction not in excess of five Hundred Dollars ($500.00), and in addition to such fee an amount equal to one percent (1%) of the amount of the transaction in excess of five hundred Dollars ($500.00).
Notice any “discrimination”? Any reference to foreign transmissions? Me neither. Sure, the expectation is that remittances from illegal aliens out of the country will be discouraged, but the fee itself is not triggered by destination alone.
Things like this are what have sent tens of millions of Americans fleeing from MSM, newspapers included.