Originally published at Washington Examiner.

Washington is floating a plan that would force banks to collect and verify customers’ citizenship information, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying the order is “in process.”

The intention may sound good to some: Deal with illegal immigration and tighten enforcement. But good intentions don’t excuse bad policy design. This plan would make law-abiding Americans pay higher costs and surrender more sensitive data because the federal government won’t fix immigration enforcement where it belongs.

​Here’s the first principle: If immigration policy is failing, fix immigration policy. Don’t outsource the mess to private institutions and pretend the cost disappears because it shows up as “compliance” instead of a line item in the federal budget. 

​Families still pay. They just pay through higher bank fees, worse service, and more red tape when they’re trying to do normal life: Deposit a paycheck, pay bills, or open an account for a kid headed to college.

Banks already operate under strict federal identity verification mandates. The Customer Identification Program rule in 31 CFR 1020.220 requires banks to collect identifying information and use risk-based procedures to form a “reasonable belief” they know a customer’s true identity. That’s not some casual guideline — it’s enforceable law. This proposal is a separate and far broader mandate: citizenship classification at scale.

The feasibility problems alone should stop this idea. What documents count as proof of citizenship? A passport? A birth certificate? A naturalization certificate? What about name changes, mismatched records, replacement documents, or older documents that don’t match modern databases?

Policymakers pushing this plan rarely grapple with the operational truth: When standards are unclear, and penalties are high, banks respond by slowing onboarding, demanding more paperwork, and denying or closing accounts to reduce compliance exposure. That’s not because banks are mean — it’s because the incentives punish mistakes more than they reward customer service.

Then there’s the cost, and it’s not hypothetical. One estimate finds that verifying citizenship for new accounts could add 33.1 million to 73.3 million additional paperwork hours and $2.6 billion to $5.6 billion in administrative costs. Treat those numbers like a floor, not a ceiling, because they focus on new accounts.

If the mandate extends to existing customers, you’re no longer talking about onboarding. You’re talking about re-papering a big portion of the entire banking system.

Compliance costs do not stay at the bank. They get passed along. Higher monthly account fees. Fewer low-cost checking options. More minimum balance requirements. Fewer branches in low-margin areas.

Less flexibility for small businesses trying to set up accounts quickly so they can make payroll. Community banks and credit unions get hit hardest because they cannot spread fixed compliance costs across a massive national footprint. The result is a hidden tax on everyday Americans — paid not to improve banking, but to cover for federal dysfunction.

This plan would also intensify the debanking problem policymakers say they want to reduce. Even before any citizenship mandate, regulators and lawmakers have been grappling with how compliance pressure and subjective standards can lead to restricted access and account closures. 

That’s why federal regulators have moved to curb the use of reputation risk as an examination tool that can nudge banks toward denying services for non-financial reasons. Add a sweeping citizenship verification regime, and you increase uncertainty and raise the stakes for errors. The rational response is de-risking: fewer accounts, more freezes, more closures, and more blunt screening rules.

Now add the privacy bomb. Citizenship verification means collecting, storing, and potentially transmitting highly sensitive personal information on a massive scale. Bigger datasets become bigger targets. More collection points and more transfers mean greater breach risk, more insider misuse risk, and more mission creep risk.

Once a federal pipeline exists, it rarely stays limited to its original justification. That’s the historical pattern of compliance architectures: “just this one thing” becomes the foundation for the next “just this one thing.”

Conservatives have pushed back for years against compelled financial disclosure and creeping surveillance. The fight over beneficial ownership reporting is a recent example of how quickly “law enforcement” logic can morph into a broad data-collection regime that sweeps up normal Americans who are doing nothing wrong.

A citizenship mandate in banking would be bigger than that, touching vastly more people and vastly more accounts.

The burden also won’t fall evenly. Passport possession is nowhere near universal. Estimates suggest roughly 47% of Americans don’t have a valid passport, meaning millions could face immediate documentation friction if passports become the default proof document. Seniors, rural residents, and lower-income households are most likely to get caught in the gears, especially where documentation offices are far away and support services are limited.

That’s not targeted enforcement. That’s collateral damage baked into the design.

Supporters will argue this is about fighting financial crime. But serious financial crime detection is primarily about transaction behavior, suspicious patterns, and network analysis — things banks already monitor under existing compliance regimes.

Citizenship status is a crude proxy that risks both false positives (hassling the innocent) and false negatives (missing sophisticated criminals). Worse, if you make mainstream banking harder, you push more people into cash-based or informal channels where transparency is lower and monitoring is weaker. That makes it harder, not easier, to detect real wrongdoing.

There’s a better way that doesn’t punish the compliant: Enforce immigration laws directly through the agencies responsible.

Improve verification where it belongs: in employment eligibility, visa tracking, overstays, and targeted investigations of real criminal networks. Don’t impose a sweeping new mandate that effectively turns banks into immigration screeners and forces families to pay higher banking costs to cover for Washington’s failures.

A free society doesn’t treat ordinary citizens like compliance suspects because the government won’t fix its own broken systems. Turning banks into border agents is the wrong tool, the wrong target, and the wrong tradeoff. 
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If policymakers want a more lawful, more secure system, they should fix immigration policy without building a new financial surveillance layer that families end up funding.

Originally published on Substack. 

America should secure the border, reduce the welfare state, and open a market-based legal pathway for workers, builders, and strivers.

That is not some soft-hearted surrender to lawlessness. It is a hard-headed recognition of how a free and prosperous country actually works.

People who come here legally to work, build, raise families, worship freely, and contribute are not a threat to America. They are part of America.

Naturalized citizens are Americans. Lawful immigrants who come here under the rules help strengthen the economy, deepen communities, and keep the American project alive.

What is weak is blaming them for problems government created.

As I argued in my piece on immigration, inflation, and wages, our biggest problems do not come from immigrants. They came from bad policy: overspending, inflation, cronyism, broken healthcare incentives, bad schools, and too much power concentrated in Washington.

The same basic point runs through my essays on barriers to immigration and immigration and trade: when government blocks people from cooperating, trading, and working across borders under the rule of law, it blocks prosperity for everyone.

Law First

A constitutional republic is supposed to follow law, not online rage.

That means there is a real difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration. It means border security matters. It means due process matters. It means lawful immigrants and naturalized citizens should not be rhetorically swept into fantasies about who must be removed next. That is not serious. That is dangerous.

America needs enforcement, yes, but it also needs legal pathways that actually work. In my White House lessons piece, I made the broader point that failed government action often creates the very mess politicians later use to justify more heavy-handed action. Immigration is one more example of that pattern.

Prosperity Needs People

The economics here are much better than the rhetoric.

Immigrants do not “steal jobs.” They change the mix of jobs, increase specialization, expand production, and create demand for other goods and services.

That is exactly the point I made in Immigration and Trade Are Key to Thriving Economies: labor mobility works a lot like trade. It allows people to specialize where they are more productive and creates gains from exchange that make the pie bigger, not smaller.

Barriers to immigration, like barriers to trade, are barriers to human cooperation.

That is not just theory. The Congressional Budget Office found that the recent immigration surge would help expand the economy and collect more tax revenue over the coming decade, with the net effect of reducing cumulative deficits relative to what they otherwise would have been.

More people working and producing tends to be good for growth. That should not surprise anyone who believes in markets. America needs more legal immigrants, not fewer.

We are an aging country with a slowing native-born labor-force growth rate. We need workers, entrepreneurs, caregivers, engineers, tradesmen, nurses, founders, and risk-takers.

A confident country does not close itself off from human talent. It attracts more of it. That is one reason I highlighted in my review of the book Open Borders, Inc. that the economics of immigration are often badly misunderstood by people who see only competition and miss the dynamic gains from innovation, investment, and population growth.

Don’t Pair Immigration With a Bigger Welfare State

Now for the necessary qualifier.

None of this means America should pair wider legal immigration with a bigger entitlement state. That would be foolish.

In my piece on amnesty and Medicare for All and in my Tholos Foundation study on Medicare and immigration, I argued that adding more people into an already failing federal healthcare structure without reform would deepen fiscal stress, not solve it.

So the serious position is not “open borders and more welfare” not “send them bank”. It is border security, rule of law, “entitlement” reform, and more legal immigration through a system that works.

A Market-Based Visa System

That is where the smartest reform comes in.

Instead of relying on a visa system with arbitrary caps, long queues, political discretion, and random lotteries, America should move toward a market-based visa — the kind of approach associated with Gary Becker’s “pay at the gate” idea and later work on visa auctions.

The basic insight is simple: when visas are rationed by politics and bureaucracy, they are badly allocated. Fixed caps and queues make the system less responsive to labor demand, and lotteries assign visas randomly rather than based on where workers can create the most value.

The paper on visa auctions argues that queues and lotteries misallocate human capital and reduce potential output. A visa auction or market-priced visa system would be far better.

It would let employers, workers, and investors signal where labor is actually needed. It would reduce arbitrary discretion. It would generate revenue that could help strengthen border enforcement or offset public costs.

And it would move the system away from today’s mess of backlog, favoritism, and legal bottlenecks. That is the kind of immigration reform a classical liberal should want: not chaos, not closure, but law plus markets.

Three Takeaways for Policymakers

1. America needs more legal immigrants.
Legal immigration supports growth, production, and cooperation under the rule of law. Barriers to immigration are barriers to prosperity.

2. Fix the welfare state instead of blaming immigrants for government failure.
Immigration can help growth, but pairing it with unreformed entitlements is the wrong path. That is why entitlement reform must be part of the conversation.

3. Replace bureaucracy with a market-based visa system.
A Gary Becker-style visa market would be more rational, more transparent, and more pro-growth than caps, queues, and lotteries.

The Bottom Line

God loves everyone. We should, too.

That does not mean no borders. It does not mean no laws. It means building an immigration system that is lawful, humane, pro-growth, and worthy of a free country.

America does not get stronger by shrinking the circle of people allowed to contribute legally. It gets stronger by securing the border, enforcing the law, fixing the welfare state, and welcoming more legal immigrants who want to work, build, and become part of the American story.

​Economic policy affects more than just spreadsheets. When leaders fail to control spending, undermine markets, or delay hard decisions, families feel it through higher prices, fewer opportunities, and slower growth. 

With rising concerns about affordability, the consequences of poor economic policy aren’t abstract — they shape how people live, work, and plan for the future. Price controls, restrictive immigration policies, and higher taxes don’t solve these problems. They make them worse.

In the episode of This Week’s Economy, we examine what happens when policymakers ignore first principles. I break down why recurring shutdowns expose deeper budgeting failures, how states are approaching tax relief and economic freedom, what a new pick for Fed chair could mean for inflation and stability, and why labor shortages and immigration policy matter for long-term growth. Across each issue, the lesson is the same: prosperity follows discipline, sound incentives, and trust in markets — not political shortcuts.

Catch the full episode on YouTube, Apple Podcast, or Spotify, and visit my website at vanceginn.com for show notes and more information about my work at Ginn Economic Consulting.

Originally published on Substack. 

If the economy feels harder to navigate—even after tax cuts, deregulation, and promises of growth—there’s a reason. I’ve seen it before, up close, from inside the White House.
​
This isn’t hindsight punditry. I lived it. Not sure how or why it happened, but God.

I served at the Office of Management and Budget from June 2019 through May 2020, at the pleasure of President Donald Trump as a political appointee as associate director for economic policy (“chief economist”).

I worked on what became the president’s final budget, which included $4.6 trillion in proposed savings over a decade—documented in the OMB Budget Historical Tables and scored against Congressional Budget Office baselines.
And even that wasn’t enough.

I’m writing this now because the second Trump administration reflects a deeper shift—away from pro-growth reform and toward national conservatism using progressive tools. If this continues, it will make life harder for millions of Americans, regardless of intent.

My goal here isn’t to attack; it’s to share lessons learned, warn about concerns, and offer a better path forward.

​What I Supported—and What I Warned About

Inside the administration, I strongly supported policies that genuinely helped people prosper:

• Tax relief and marginal rate reductions, especially the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which improved incentives for work, saving, and investment
• Deregulation, particularly in energy, finance, and labor markets, with compliance-cost reductions
• Pro-growth reforms that trusted people and markets—not Washington—to allocate resources

But I consistently raised concerns—internally—about three areas:

• Trade protectionism, which I warned would raise relative prices and distort supply chains—later confirmed by research
• Immigration restrictions, which reduce labor supply and long-run growth, as documented later
• Overspending, which I argued would eventually overwhelm much of the benefits of tax cuts and deregulation, which it did

At OMB, many of us pushed hard for spending restraint. The uncomfortable truth is that spending discipline was not a top priority for the president or many agency heads. Not then. And judging by today’s policies, definitely not now.

Internally, the warning was clear—and it bears repeating today: excessive spending and trade protectionism would undo the gains from tax cuts and deregulation.

When COVID Hit, Government Power Took Over

When COVID escalated in early 2020, I was often working with our senior leadership team at OMB and other executive personnel to devise ways to get government out of the way, not expand it—through regulatory relief, waivers, and flexibility consistent with OMB emergency guidance.

I also sat—more than once—in the White House’s Situation Room with economic teams to discuss how people (the economy) would respond to different policy paths.

I was vehemently opposed to lockdowns.

I warned senior leadership and others intensely that the policies being pushed by Dr. Anthony Fauci and others would:

• Break market coordination (supported by analyses on mobility restrictions and economic activity)
• Destroy small businesses (shown in data)
• Centralize power (massive expansion in spending by Congress and Fed)
• Cause long-run damage far worse than acknowledged (education loss, lockdown-related deaths, etc.)

Ultimately, whether President Trump agreed or not, he went along with lockdowns. That decision became one of the largest government failures in modern history—economically, socially, and institutionally.

Lockdowns didn’t just pause the economy. They rewired the relationship between government and markets, normalizing trillions in new spending, debt monetization by the Federal Reserve, and executive control over daily life.
Nearly every affordability crisis we face today traces back to then.

Why I’m More Concerned Today

Back then, there were still people inside the administration pushing back—arguing for restraint, markets, and limits on government power.

Today, I’m not sure that’s true.
​
It increasingly looks like national conservatives (“natcons”) have captured the MAGA policy agenda and are comfortable with:

• Government picking winners and losers through subsidies and mandates
• Price controls and caps on interest rates for credit cards
• Protectionism as an erratic policy with high tariff rates

• Industrial policy and subsidies for purchase of a share of Intel, use of $200 billion to purchase mortgage backed securities, Trump accounts, Trump RX, and more
• Carveouts and exemptions instead of pro-growth tax policy

That’s not conservatism.

It’s not libertarianism.

And it’s not free-market capitalism.
​
Functionally, it’s progressivism with different branding—and it erodes the institutional framework that made American prosperity possible.

Spending is the Problem: Economic Chain Reaction Too Few People See

Here are the steps for how spending seems benign but it is a malignant cancer metastasizing throughout our lives and livelihoods:

1. Overspending leads to deficits.
2. Deficits add to debt.
3. Debt pushes interest rates higher.
4. Higher rates attract foreign capital, strengthening the dollar.
5. A stronger dollar widens trade deficits (not an issue but some hate it), which politicians then “fix” with tariffs.
6. Higher rates pressure the Fed to buy Treasury debt.
7. Debt monetization fuels inflation, distorting the orders of production while reducing real wages and increasing inequality and poverty.

​This isn’t ideology. It’s arithmetic. And it’s happening now.

What Should Be Done Instead

The hopeful part is that none of this is irreversible.
​
That’s why my work has focused on sustainable budgeting with groups like Americans for Tax Reform, the Club for Growth Foundation, and others. You can see that framework here:

• Let Americans Prosper Project: Ensuring Fiscal Sustainability for America’s Future
• Responsible State Budgets Across the U.S.

States that limit spending growth to population growth plus inflation often run surpluses, cut taxes sustainably, and avoid debt spirals.

Washington should finally learn from them.
​
A real pro-growth agenda would:

• Spend less—now, not later (yes, cutting government spend is pro-growth!)
• End trade protectionism (end tariffs and have the focus on what we can control regarding policies at home instead of trying to change policies abroad)
• Reject price controls (say no to credit card interest rate caps, no to MFN drug pricing, and more)
• Stop picking winners and losers (don’t take shares of private businesses, don’t give $1,000 of taxpayer money to parents with newborns, don’t remove specific things like tips, overtime SS income, interest on car loans from the tax code but instead lower and flatten the income tax rates)

• Unleash supply in housing, energy, healthcare, and capital markets (end Dodd-Frank , CFPB and Section 1033 rule, empower patients, and remove incentives in demand and supply side of housing and other markets)
• Let people in markets work!

A Final, Personal Note—and a Small Ask

I’m not writing this to relitigate the past—or to score political points.

I’m writing it because I’ve seen how quickly good intentions turn into bad outcomes when government power replaces market institutions. I’ve also seen how powerful growth can be when policymakers trust people, markets, and sound rules.

The Trump administration has governed for growth before. It can do so again. But only if it rejects progressive tools—no matter how they’re labeled—and recommits to the institutions that allow people to prosper.
​
As Milton Friedman reminded us, policies should be judged by results, not intentions.

Originally published at Washington Times.

​As Halloween approaches, it’s not just haunted houses and ghosts that should send chills down your spine. The real nightmare is America’s fiscal crisis — a terrifying collision of unsustainable spending and an exploding national debt.
​
At the heart of the fright are the country’s spiraling mandatory Medicare and Social Security programs, which account for about half the federal budget. As Medicare creeps toward insolvency by 2036, proposals for even more spending, such as “Medicare for All,” and amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants threaten to send the country faster over a fiscal cliff.

The Biden-Harris administration’s policies have led to a surge in illegal immigration, with an estimated 12.5 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. Proposals to grant them legal status may sound appealing. Still, they further strain social services such as Medicare.

Because Medicare is a pay-as-you-go system that relies on payroll taxes from current workers to fund retirees’ health care, adding millions of new recipients — many of whom are older — would only accelerate the program’s ensuing collapse. The estimated 90% of illegal immigrants here younger than 55 could be eligible with 10 years of work history before turning 65. The aggregate cost to taxpayers of recipients retiring later could be at least $1.8 trillion over time.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ Medicare for All plan, coupled with amnesty, could cost $2 trillion more over the next decade to cover newly legalized immigrants, as a new study states.

Combined with the full cost of Medicare for All for current Americans, the net cost could be $44 trillion, demanding unprecedented tax increases or massive cuts to essential services.

And while Ms. Harris argues that these programs promote fairness and access, the fiscal reality is terrifying. The government’s spending would spiral out of control, with no clear way to rein in the costs.

Former President Donald Trump has emphasized stricter immigration laws and border security. While Mr. Trump’s approach may help reduce the immediate costs of adding more people to programs such as Medicare, it does little to address the deeper issues of an aging population and soaring health care costs. Unless something is done to reform Medicare, the program will remain a ticking time bomb.

The fiscal implications of immigration are complex. On the one hand, younger, higher-skilled immigrants contribute to the economy by filling labor shortages and paying taxes, which help support programs such as Medicare. On the other hand, older and lower-skilled immigrants tend to impose a net drain on public resources.

Research shows that immigrants arriving in the U.S. after age 55 can impose a fiscal burden of up to $400,000 over their lifetime, while younger, educated immigrants contribute more than $1 million to the federal budget. Blanket amnesty would fail to account for these differences, much like a one-size-fits-all costume that doesn’t fit anyone quite right.

The real horror story, however, is Medicare itself. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was meant to curb rising health care costs, but it has only added to the chaos. With price controls on prescription drugs, Medicare premiums are rising faster than ever, up 21% in 2024 alone, and the number of available drug plans has dropped by nearly 100.

Rather than containing costs, the law’s price controls have stifled innovation and driven up prices, meaning older Americans have fewer and more expensive options. This could become a nightmare when access and quality of care are sacrificed.

So, what’s the way out of this fiscal haunted house?

First, the U.S. needs a sustainable budget with a strict federal spending cap tied to population growth and inflation. We can avoid the terrifying prospect of runaway deficits by cutting spending now and limiting how fast the government can spend after that. Expanding work requirements for government assistance programs such as Medicaid would help reduce dependency on taxpayer-funded benefits and encourage self-sufficiency.

A market-based reform system is crucial for immigration. A solution is a visa auction system where employers bid on visas for immigrants based on their skills and economic value.

By pricing visas based on demand, the U.S. could ensure that immigrants contribute meaningfully to the economy while filling labor gaps without burdening social services. Such a system would be a much-needed reform to correct decades of failed immigration policies and prevent the horrors of government failures.

If America wants to avoid fiscal disaster, policymakers must confront these issues head-on. Granting amnesty and expanding Medicare without reform is like opening the door to a haunted house — you may not know what horrors await, but you know they’re lurking. By balancing immigration with sustainable economic policies and reforming programs like Medicare, the U.S. can ensure a more prosperous, fiscally sound future.

The time to act is now before this fiscal nightmare becomes a reality.

​As election day approaches, critical issues like school choice, the federal deficit, Medicare, illegal immigration, inflation, and financial data privacy dominate discussions. From the growing debate on school choice to alarming projections about our national debt, these policies will impact the economic well-being of Americans. Here’s a brief look at where things stand and what’s at stake.
​
Watch the episode on YouTube below, listen to it on Apple Podcast or Spotify, visit my website www.vanceginn.com for more information, and get show notes at www.vanceginn.substack.com.

Originally published at Tholos Foundation.