WEEKLY EDITORIAL RECAP

TUESDAY

ILLEGAL TO BE ILLEGAL

For decades, Arizona's border with Mexico has been all but open. Arizona faced such steep costs providing taxpayer-funded education, health care and welfare to illegal immigrants that voters have passed several ballot questions denying them public services, resident tuition and bail, among other things, to little avail.

Illegal immigrant advocates continue to take the position that states can't do anything to free themselves of these expenses -- that immigration is a federal issue. They do so knowing full well that Washington has no interest in enforcing existing immigration law.

With double-digit unemployment and Mexico's warring drug cartels brazenly taking their violent turf battles onto Arizona soil (Phoenix is now known as the ransom capital of America) law-abiding taxpayers have had enough. They want local police to have the tools to clamp down on the illegals who flout our laws and create an oversupply of cheap labor, driving down opportunities for low-skilled citizens -- many of them minorities.

How convenient for the defenders of illegals to demand that one set of laws be ignored entirely, yet claim that taking steps to enforce the law is illegal. How revealing that in screaming that police will engage in racial profiling, the champions of illegals are more than happy to profile and stereotype anyone who disagrees with them.

WEDNESDAY

DEFICIT PANEL

There is no putting politics aside when it comes to federal spending -- ever. That's precisely why Washington has run up the national debt to nearly $13 trillion, with the country's credit card balance expected to approach $25 trillion by 2020. To say nothing of the $56.4 trillion in promised entitlement benefits there's no money for.

The members of his bipartisan commission could recommend raising the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages to 75, means-testing benefits, shuttering one-third of the federal bureaucracy, cutting military spending in half, creating a 10 percent national sales tax and slashing the salary of every federal employee by 15 percent and Washington would still have trillions of dollars in debt and unfunded liabilities.

The federal government's deficit spending is that bad.

And the most politically palatable way to deal with such an imminent threat to the economy is job-crushing tax hikes?

It's the spending, stupid.