Obamacare Versus the U.S. Constitution

By Alan Caruba

In a nation where Congress has already determined how much water your toilet tank can hold and whether you can purchase a 100-watt incandescent light bulb, the assertion of federal power is now so great and so unbounded that a case concerning the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), brought by 26 states will decide whether, in fact, there are any rights or powers left to the states.

What many Americans do not know is that the United States of America is composed of separate and sovereign republics, each with its own constitution. What has occurred, however, has been the erosion of states’ rights and with that, the gradual distortion of the nation’s central instrument of governance, the Constitution, to mean anything Congress wants it to say.

At the very heart of the Obamacare case the Supreme Court will hear Monday through Wednesday, March 26 through March 28, is the question of whether the federal government can coerce the states under the threat of withholding funds—in this case for Medicaid.

Obamacare vastly expands Medicaid, but it should also be noted that Medicaid has been expanded over the years without evoking this kind of organized resistance. Over a million Americans descended on Washington, D.C. on March 20, 2010 to demand that it not be passed. They were dismissed by the White House that bribed and pressured members of Congress who, it turns out, never even read the law before voting on it.

Created in 1965, Medicaid was intended to ensure that low-income individuals and families secure medical care. Obamacare represents that largest expansion in its history. As the largest federal-state funding program, in 2010 it represented some $401.4 billion. Predictions of what Obamacare will cost are over the moon.

At present, some 60 million Medicaid beneficiaries include one in four children, severely disabled people, many nursing home residents, and low-income pregnant women. Children’s and trauma hospitals heavily rely on Medicaid funding. Under Obamacare, if ruled constitutional, more than 30 million more people are expected to gain health coverage through Medicaid.

The likelihood is that a federally administered health care system will destroy what is widely regarded as the best private sector health system in the world. It will put the government squarely between the physician and his patient, determining who receives treatment and the amount and cost of that treatment.

The issue of contention for many Constitutional scholars and others is Obamacare’s demand that everyone either purchase a health insurance program or pay a fine for not doing so. Congress asserts this under the Commerce Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3, that says it shall have the power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian Tribes.”

The early Supreme Court led by the fourth Chief Justice John Marshall (serving from 1801 to 1835) broadly interpreted these powers, extending federal jurisdiction over a number of aspects of intrastate and interstate commerce. In more recent times, under Justice William Rehnquist, (serving 1986 to 2005) the Court restricted interpretation of the Clause to allow states more control over business conducted within its borders.

The tensions between the states and the central government have always been part of the life of the nation and the Civil War was the ultimate test of whether states can secede from the Union if they feel their rights are being trampled upon. Under the many progressive social justice programs instituted since the 1930s, federal programs have acquired the power to coerce states to do its bidding simply by threatening to withhold billions in funding.

One need hardly be a constitutional scholar to understand that a federal government that can require you to purchase something you do not want or do not need can require you to do anything it wants. A government that powerful is a government to be feared.

The Tenth Amendment Center is rather sanguine about the Supreme Court’s likely decision. It notes that “In fact, from 1937-1995, the Supreme Court didn’t rule one single congressional act to be outside their constitution limits.” Thus, for sixty years, “they ruled absolutely nothing unconstitutional, and that included much of the new deal and all of the Great Society. Since that time, overruling Congress has been a rare occurrence at best.”

The Center is the leading advocate of the concept of “nullification” by which the states refuse to obey or enforce a federal law they deem a threat to the rights granted by the Constitution “For over 100 years,” says the Center, “federal power has been on one path and one path alone. It doesn’t matter which political party has been in charge. This case is the last exit ramp on the road to unlimited government.”

The Supreme Court is not famous for overturning its own decisions, precedents, and that is why many observers conclude they will rule in favor of Obamacare.

Add to that, the new Associate Justice, Elana Kagan, should have recused herself from hearing the case, having served as a Solicitor General in the Obama administration. The Court, however, defended her participation. As President Obama’s top advocate, Kagan headed the office responsible for formulating the administration’s defense of Obamacare—and oversaw the arguments both on appeal and in the lower courts because of its national importance. If that is not a conflict of interest, nothing is.

That leaves only one option left and that is a Congress elected in 2012 for the purpose of repealing Obamacare and a President other than Obama to sign it into law. The House has already passed legislation to repeal Obamacare.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate for President, is on record he would repeal Obamacare. Now he needs a Republican Senate and a Republican House in order to stop the federal government from becoming so powerful that a new revolution would have to be fought to overthrow it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

I'm Outta Here

By Alan Caruba

Those who follow politics more intently than I will no doubt be able to identify why, specifically, various incumbent Senators and Representatives have decided not to run for office in the 2012 elections, but as of this writing 43 incumbents have made it known they will not seek reelection.

Among the one hundred members of the Senate, five Democrats, three Republicans, and one Independent have made it known they will not seek office again thus far. In the House, thirty-four members have decided not to run; twenty are Democrats and fourteen are Republicans.

The Senate is composed of one hundred members, two from each State, while the House, based on population distribution, has 435 members, subject to districting that often favors one party over another. There are “safe” seats in districts that have a preponderance of one party’s registered voters.

The 112th Congress has 51 Democrats in the Senate, 47 Republicans and two independents that presumably vote with either party, but tend to favor one over the other. The slight majority of Senate Democrats cedes control to that party while, in the House, the Republicans control its agenda. The House has 240 Republicans, 192 Democrats, and three vacancies.

President Obama is running against a “do-nothing” Congress and it is worth remembering that, for the first two years of his term, Democrats controlled both chambers. More than 1,000 days have passed without a published budget. This is because Democrats do not want the public to know how much money is being spent or, to be more accurate, wasted.

The 2010 elections shifted power in the House to the Republican majority, largely due to the Tea Party movement that in time may be the next generation of Republican Party leadership. There used to be a Republican “establishment” but that is now largely a thing of the past.

Nor can it be said to have been a “do-nothing” Congress if one considers that it passed Obamacare, his signature piece of legislation. Its constitutionality will be decided when, in March, it comes before the Supreme Court in a case brought by 28 State attorneys general who deem it unconstitutional for its mandate that Americans must buy health insurance whether they want to or not. A federal government that can require you to buy anything is one with far too much power.

The Constitution exists to limit the power of the federal government.

In the Senate, Ben Nelson (D) of Nebraska whose vote was deemed critical to the passage of Obamacare has announced he will not seek reelection. Several other powerful members such as Jon Kyl of Arizona (R), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) of Texas, and Kent Conrad (D) of North Dakota will leave. The independent, Joe Lieberman, is not seek reelection in Connecticut, nor the fiery Jim Webb (D) of Virginia, Jeff Bingaman—generally regarded as non-partisan, though a Democrat—joins Herb Kohl (D) and Daniel Akaka (D) of Hawaii who has served in both Houses since 1975.

Many factors play in such decisions. Sometimes it is simply age, the recognition that it is time to retire. Other times it is the change in the political climate from liberal to conservative that would favor an opponent. An unpopular President whose defeat might take down many of his party’s members is a significant factor in the 2012 elections.

The role of the Tea Party in the 2010 elections is certainly on the minds of many Democrat incumbents in the House who will not run for reelection. One of the most powerful members of the House, Barney Frank (D-MA) has announced he will not run for reelection and his role in protecting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the years leading up to the 2008 financial collapse is no doubt a factor.

Ron Paul (R-TX), currently running for the GOP nomination, will not seek reelection and his candidacy is more of a last hurrah for his Libertarian views than a serious bid for the office of President. Keeping politics in the family, his son Rand (R) serves as a Senator from Kentucky.

Six Democrat House members from California are not seeking reelection. Given its size and population—California has 53 districts—there is not much to be made of those deciding not to run again.

Power in Congress is a numbers game of how many members are from the two main political parties, but it is also a question of longevity which lifts members into the chairmanship of powerful congressional committees when they remain there for many years.

I think the system would be vastly improved if there were term limits for members of Congress just as there is for the presidency.

Presently, Congress is held in such low esteem according to the polls, the President’s decision to run against it would appear to be a wise—very political--decision, but while his personal popularity remains intact, polls indicate a significant dissatisfaction with his performance in office.

It will be interesting to see how many Democrat incumbents conclude they cannot win with Obama at the top of the ticket and bail out—no pun intended. It is an indicator, but hardly the only one.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

How to Listen to Obama's State of the Union Speech

By Alan Caruba

The Tuesday morning post of the Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell” is worth sharing in part. You can read the whole post here.

“Tonight, Americans who tune in to the State of the Union will watch the work of a rhetorical master with a flair for illusion,” says Mike Brownfield. “President Barack Obama will take the to the floor of the Capitol in hopes of laying the groundwork for a political debate on his terms—one where he stands on emotional appeals, populism, and class warfare, not the shaky ground of his crumbling record.”

“And looking right back at him will be the U.S. Senate, which has for the past 1,000 days failed to pass a budget—a total shirking of their fundamental duty to be diligent stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars.”

That about sums up the situation in which voters on both side of the political spectrum, from liberal to conservative, find themselves and for both it is a portrait of failure of spectacular dimensions. Government, as we envision it, is not functioning.

Instead, Americans will have to listen to a great deal of nonsense about “fairness” and Obama’s view that government, as Brownfield warns, “should be the guarantor of equal outcomes and that ‘fairness’ of achievement should be decided by legions of bureaucrats in Washington.”

The Founding Fathers knew that life is not fair and that government can only provide the circumstances under which Americans are provided not happiness, but “the pursuit of happiness” based on a host of factors that include the good luck of being born to good parents, receiving a decent education, and being willing to work hard for a portion of success in life. Even without these factors, many Americans succeed while most just settle.

Joe Wilson, a Republican Representative of South Carolina’s Second District, gained fame at a previous State of the Union speech when in 2009 he shouted out “You lie!” at the president. He has said that “Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.”

That kind of straight talk is rare in politics. Commentators and political pundits are more free to express themselves than politicians and Charles Krauthammer has said that “Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.”

I doubt that Americans want to be equally poor, but that is the end result of Obama’s socialist policies.

Most certainly, a large element of the mainstream press has bought into Obama’s policies and the result is a growing distrust and disdain for it. Fox News’ Brit Hume has said that “Fairness is not an attitude. It’s a professional skill that must be developed and exercised.” It is reflected in Fox’s famed “fair and balanced” motto, though any journalist will tell you it is a very high standard to achieve.

We would do well to keep in mind Lincoln’s advice:

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”

At the heart of Obama’s State of the Union speech will be the direct opposite of the values expressed by Lincoln.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

How Not to Go Crazy in 2012

By Alan Caruba

Election years tend to create a level of frenzy concerning the selection of the nominees and the outcome. The media feed this in order to keep readers reading and viewers viewing. The history of American elections has always been one of vituperation between the parties, so there is nothing new about this. Indeed, since so much depends on it, the political free-for-all is a healthy exercise.

It can, however, make for a difficult environment in which to go about one’s life; the air filled with charge and counter-charge, polls going up and down, and a general sense that something is very wrong with the way the government functions.

On the bright side, a gridlocked Congress may bring a measure of relief to everyone. Writing about gridlock in January 2011, Marcus E. Ethridge, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, noted that “By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups.” In 2011, we saw what happens when advocates of “renewable energy”, wind and solar power, or electric cars, get priority over the needs of most Americans for reliable energy and transportation.

At the heart of the 2012 election will be the recognition that the economy is still not recovering, that government is seeking to extend and expand its control over our lives, and, even among former supporters of Barack Obama, that he has been a failure of historic proportions.

A Friday Rasmussen Reports said that “Voters right now give the edge to Republicans when asked which political party is likely to win the White House and control both the House of Representatives and the Senate in next November’s election”, adding that “a lot of voters are undecided.” Those voters may actually wait until entering the polls to cast their vote.

Another bad piece of news for President Obama is a new comparative analysis of current voter registration data in key electoral states of Nevada and North Carolina. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, there has been “a drastic drop from 2008 levels when a record-high proportion of young Americans turned out overwhelmingly to cast their votes to elect Barack Obama as President.” This is significant because more than two-thirds of young voters supported the Obama/Biden ticket in 2008.

The President had a low moment following the passage of Obamacare that transformed itself into the Tea Party movement and an even worse one in 2010 when it propelled a large number of Republicans into the House of Representatives, causing its control to change hands. He has had, in fact, only one truly high moment and that occurred when he announced the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. At the time, he typically took complete credit. In a speech at Fort Bragg to returning troops from Iraq, the word “victory” was never spoken.

Americans are not unmindful that the downgrade of the rating of the nation’s sovereign debt, the first in the nation’s history, was announced on Obama’s watch. The rate of "official" unemployment has receded to 8.6% but most Americans are well aware that it is far closer to 11% or more. America continues to experience that longest period of long-term unemployment since the 1930s.

For these and a myriad of other reasons, there is little reason to conclude that President Obama has any chance whatever of being reelected. The widespread contempt for Congress is also a hopeful sign for change. These are reasons to remain calm amidst the din of electioneering in the months ahead.

There is, however, all manner of troubles brewing in the world. Europe will have to find a solution to what will happen if its southern tier of nations elects to default on their sovereign debt. Cracks in the European Union are evident. If it falls apart, it will be very messy, but Europe existed before the EU and would if it disbands.

The Middle East is in the midst of a huge struggle between its fanatical Muslim faction and a population unhappy enough with former dictators to have forced out several in 2011 with the prospect that Syria’s Bashar Assad will fall in 2012.

Iran remains the wild card and its nuclear dreams will likely end with a well-timed and well-executed attack by Israel. Israel saved the world from a nuclear Iraq in 1981 and a nuclear Syria in 2007. An attack on Iranian nuclear and military facilities could trigger an internal movement to overthrow the mullahs.

There are other wild cards in the Middle East. The Palestinians show no indication of giving up their dream of destroying Israel. That will not happen. Without Iranian support, both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza will be set adrift. Muslim atrocities in nations such as Nigeria where Christian churches were bombed on Christmas Day will contribute to a growing movement against Islamic terrorism. It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.

Even the Russians show signs of tiring of their post-Soviet ruling class led by Vladimir Putin.

America faces a long period of restructuring the socialist programs that began in the 1930s and reached their peak in the 1960s. Should the GOP gain control of Congress and Obama is defeated, real change will occur.

Two other factors signal better times ahead. They are the failure of the global warming hoax and the disdain the “Occupy” movement engendered.

In 2012 Americans will take steps to end the scandals and deprecations of the Obama administration.

We shall ignore the anticipated shouts of racism.

We shall see the Supreme Court disembowel Obamacare or set in motion its repeal by a GOP controlled Congress.

We will select a President and a Congress to put things right.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The 2012 Check List for America's Survival

By Alan Caruba

Many people make resolutions to start the year, but I think a list of things that must be done to protect and preserve the Republic should be tallied.

1. President Obama must be defeated in 2012 and the obstructionist Democratic Party must lose power in the Senate to ensure both houses of Congress will be Republican and in a position to initiate real change.

2. The Environmental Protection Agency must be reined in with increased Congressional oversight and legislative limits on its rule-making capacity. Having fulfilled its 1970 mandate to clean the nation’s air and water, it should be scaled back to the maintenance of these functions.

3. Americans, despite the administration’s efforts to redefine and distract us, must keep clearly in mind the threat of Islam to the nation and the world. A Middle East in turmoil lays ahead for 2012.

4. To jump-start the economy, taxes and spending must be reduced across the board. A tax on consumption, rather than income would be a good start. Only 49% of Americans currently pay income taxes, the lowest in decades.

5. Obamacare must be repealed should the Supreme Court fail to rule that the Commerce Clause takes precedence over its requirement that Americans must purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so.

6. A serious restructuring of Social Security and Medicare must be undertaken. Older Americans who have paid into the system—it is involuntary—must be ensured their benefits will be paid, but younger citizens should have the freedom and responsibility to structure their own retirement and health plans.

7. Access to the nation’s vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil should be increased and encouraged. Oil companies should be encouraged to build more refineries via tax credits and removal of “environmental” obstacles.

8. Congress needs to identify and fund the repair to the nation’s aging infrastructure.

9. Utilities should be encouraged via tax credits and other incentives to expand the national “grid” for the distribution of electricity.

10. Term limits for Senators and Representatives should be added to the U.S. Constitution in the same fashion the presidency is limited. Salaries, pensions, and perks should be capped. A permanent political class is a danger to citizens.

11. The Federal government should be downsized with the elimination of the Departments of Education, Labor, and Energy, along with the Environmental Protection Agency. These powers should be returned to the individual States. (10th Amendment)

12. The nation’s military which has been significantly reduced in size and structure should be expanded with attention to the upgrade and increase of its naval fleet and aircraft.

13. Congress should reject and rescind all legislation based on “global warming” or “climate change” as the former has been demonstrated to be a hoax and the latter is meaningless insofar as the climate is beyond the control of humans.

14. The United States should significantly reduce its contribution to the United Nations and refuse to ratify any of its treaties.

15. Tort reform should be instituted to reduce the costs of health care.

16. The corporate tax rate should be significantly reduced from its present rate, one of the highest in the world, to increase expansion, new jobs, and competitiveness.

17. Public service unions should be illegal. The federal government does not permit such unionization and neither should states.

18. National Public Radio should no longer be funded. The “government entities” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated.

19. The federal government should be restricted or significantly limited from the acquisition of more of the nation’s landmass.

20. Strenuous efforts must be undertaken to reduce the national debt and deficit. A devalued dollar impoverishes everyone.

These are just a few changes which, if implemented, would go a long way to reducing the ills associated with a federal government grown too large, subject to crony capitalism, and corruption.

As John Adams said, "Let us disappoint the men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country."

© Alan Caruba, 2012

System Failure on a Global Scale

By Alan Caruba

We are living in times when the structures involving the global financial system, national security, and self-governance are under attack, decaying, or just self-destructing due to all the ills to which humanity is prone.

Wars in the twentieth century were always an example of either the failure of nations to resolve their differences or of the ancient human inclination to steal whatever they can from their neighbor. Wars organize this into armies for that purpose. The other cause for war is the necessity to rid the neighborhood of the crazy guy who’s hoarding weapons and building bombs.

What is occurring of late, however, goes beyond the usual casus belli to something far greater, a loss of faith in national and international banking systems, aggravated by the failure of nations to act in a prudent fashion to protect the wealth of their citizens and their national sovereignty.

The cause of this is socialism, the polite name for communism. Like Islam, it exists for world domination, the control of the population for the enrichment of those holding the reins of power. It is no accident that the U.S. Congress is filled with millionaires or those who soon will be.

Communism, the creation of a man who never held a job in his life, Karl Marx, and its theoretically gentler version, Socialism, has proved to be a failure wherever it was implemented. It is always introduced as the antechamber to utopia, a better life for everyone and it has always led to the slaughter of millions in the name of achieving it. It is just another form of slavery.

Socialism, as practiced throughout the United States and Europe, dependent as it is on the “redistribution of wealth” in the form of “entitlement” programs is now crashing down around the heads of various elected leaders.

As the former British Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, once famously said, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

When you pile on debt beyond the mind’s capacity to imagine and you empower “super committees” or hold desperate meetings as are occurring in Europe, public faith in national currencies begins to disappear and with it a rational world in which goods and services generate income.

We are now 66 years since the end of World War Two, the war that followed “the war to end all wars”, World War One. Peace—the absence of war—lasted a scant twenty-one years in Europe before the latter cataclysm began in 1939.

Times of turmoil are the perfect opportunity for tyrants of every description to emerge, organize the collective anger, and launch new wars. In the past 66 years of “peace” there has been a succession of wars, usually between Communist and Capitalist nations such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars or civil wars. The recent wars and revolutions in the Middle East have been about oil and who gets to pump it out of the ground.

Threatening the entire world is the rise of the Islamic Revolution. Islam is less a religion than a battle plan for global conquest that has the added fillip of enslaving its adherents in a faith system that demands total obedience on pain of death. Unbelievers in general face this threat. Israel in particular always has.

Capitalism isn’t a perfect system, subject to periodic cycles of recession and depression, but it does require a greater measure of individual freedom than any other in order to encourage the kind of innovation and risk-taking that creates vast wealth-producing economies.

The problem the West is facing has been brought on by the profligate and often corrupt waste of the people’s wealth. This has been the result of metastasizing laws whose ultimate purpose is to keep populations from demanding more freedom from rapacious taxing, borrowing, and spending. Even central banks are powerless against this. Ours, the Federal Reserve, has responded by printing dollars out of thin air.

On November 18th a proposed constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance the budget failed in the House. The U.S. is currently $15 trillion in debt. The worst fears of our Founding Fathers are coming true. Presiding over the nation is a Marxist ideologue and his henchmen.

When the Congress of the United States of America refuses to obey the limits of the Constitution, you have failure.

When that same Congress refuses to reform “entitlement” programs and reduce massive spending, you have failure.

When the Federal Reserve—a central bank that is not a part of the federal government— owns most of the nation’s debt, you have failure.

In my lifetime, the United States of America went from a largely Capitalist system and society to one of near total government control. It is Socialism supported by an insane system of taxation lacking even the appearance of fairness.

The United States has moved too far away from the purpose of the Constitution, established to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…”

We are that posterity,

In the decades since the last Great Depression a succession of Congresses has bankrupted the nation once again. It is happening as well in Europe because nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and France thought they too could defy common sense and fiscal prudence.

It is system failure on a global scale.

Americans and the citizens of Europe are the unwilling victims of too much government, too much regulation, too much corruption, too much taxation, and the general inclination of those in charge to acquire as much wealth for themselves while keeping the rest of the population complacent with “redistribution of wealth” schemes that always fail.

The Tea Party movement is calling for a restoration of America. We have precious little time to do that and it is the Democratic Party in league with unions who oppose that goal.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Mormon Thing

By Alan Caruba

Article VI, U.S. Constitution: “…No religious test shall ever been required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

First things first—I know very little about the Mormon faith system and, frankly, I don’t care. I may or may not have friends who are Mormon, but since I don’t ask and don’t select my friends on the basis of their religion, I don’t know if they are or not.

The simple fact is that virtually any religion you can name has aspects that seem odd to those not born into it, cause others to drop out of it, and provide rich material for those who mock of all religion. I personally feel more secure around people who have a religion—any religion—than around those who have none, but that’s just me.

So when the media, as usual, seized upon some obscure Texas pastor’s comments about the Mormon Church as a “cult” after he introduced the hapless Gov. Rick Perry at some event, the whole Mormon thing raised its ugly head again as various members of the chatteratti and various ink-stained wretches tried to raise the issue of Mitt Romney’s religion. It is also Jon Huntsman’s religion.

The question, generally stated, is whether Romney could be a good President as a Mormon? It is an idiotic question, the kind that was raised back in the 1960s when John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, ran for office. For my part, I would take Romney any day over the present occupant of the Oval Office who claims to have been a parishioner and close friend of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a racist and America-basher of the first order.

For deep dish conservatives concerned about Mormons serving in the White House, Stephen M. Studdert, a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, recalled that he “truly admired the Latter-day Saints. His administration included more members of the Church than any other American president ever.”

Among those close to Reagan during his eight years as the greatest president of the modern era was Richard Wirthlin, his chief strategist. Terrel Bell served as Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Angela Buchanan was Secretary of the Treasury, and Rex Lee was Solicitor General.

Reagan’s White House included Jon Huntsman, Jr., currently a former governor of Utah and a candidate for the GOP nomination. The national security advisor to Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, is now an elder statesman. Suffice to say there were many others. No one recalls that any those Mormons served with anything other than dedication and patriotism.

Still scared of Mormons? Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah was first elected to the Senate in 1992. John Doolittle formerly represented California’s 4th Congressional District. Jeff Flake represents Arizona’s 6th District. Mike Crapo is a Senator from Idaho. A former Senator from Utah, Jake Garn, has previously been an astronaut. Anyone caring enough to check will find many other Mormons who have honorably served in Congress.

One of the most respected members of the Senate is Orrin Hatch of Utah, a Republican. Indeed, all the Congress critters named to this point have been Republicans, but the Senate Majority Leader, Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat, is also a Mormon.

You can even go back to Eisenhower’s administration and find that Ezra Taft Bensen served as Ike’s Secretary of Agriculture for both terms.

History buffs will tell you that Leroy Eldridge Cleaver who, after a past that included thirteen years as a guest of the California penitentiary system for narcotics possession and assault, became the face in the 1960s of the Black Power movement. After renouncing the movement, Cleaver joined the Church of the Latter-day saints in the 1970s. And, yes, God does work in marvelous ways.

All of this is to say that, despite the misgivings of some Texas pastor and others, Mormons have an admirable record of serving their nation and doubtless, if elected, former Gov. Mitt Romney will do so as well.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Lawyers Rule

By Alan Caruba

If one looks back over the history of the members of Congress, the occupation that dominates is lawyers. It is reasonable to assume that those in charge of making laws would attract those who practice it to public office.

I got to thinking about this while considering the current 112th Congress, one that has imposed Obamacare on an unwilling majority of the population with former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, telling us that Congress had to pass this abomination in order to find out what was in it.

President Obama is a former lawyer with zero experience in the world of business and commerce. His current obsession is with “millionaires and billionaires.”

According to data from the Congressional Research Service, the dominant profession of Senators is law, followed by politics—also called “public service.” In the House, most members come from business, followed by public service, then law.

In the Senate, 49 had previous service in the House. In the House and Senate, 81 members were educators. There are two medical doctors in the Senate while the House has 15, plus two dentists, one veterinarian, one ophthalmologist, and one psychiatrist.

In the entire Congress, there is only one physicist, one chemist, six engineers, and one microbiologist.

Given the appalling financial condition of the nation, there are only seven accountants in the House and two in the Senate.

There are only five current members of Congress who served in the military Reserves, three in the House and two in the Senate. Four are current members in the National Guard; three in the House and one in the Senate. Four Representatives and one Senator are graduates of the U.S. Military Academy. Two Senators and one Representative are graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy.

In the 112th Congress, the Senate has a former comedian.

The 112th Congress has tossed aside its primary function to address the financial stability of the nation by authorizing a “super committee”, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats despite the fact that Republicans control the House where the authorization of all funding is a Constitutional mandate and the Democrats control the Senate by a bare majority of one vote.

There is extreme partisanship in both houses of Congress because the nation is sharply divided along liberal and conservative political preferences regarding its proper governance.

The 2010 elections moved the House in the direction of conservatism. For forty years Democrats controlled the Congress until the 1994 elections gave power to Republicans. It has seesawed back and forth since then, but both parties did little to address the issue of “entitlements”, Social Security and Medicare, or the looming housing mortgage crisis that imploded in 2008.

The 2008 election gave the nation its first president who, despite flowing rhetoric about bringing together the opposing factions in Congress, has not served from a center-left position, but has plunged totally into a far Left takeover of large portions of the nation’s economy from health to auto manufacturing to financial services.

For those who despair of the present and future, it is worth noting that the Founding Fathers created a Constitution that was designed to deliberately slow down the process of legislation with checks and balances that included presidential veto powers and a Supreme Court to determine issues of constitutionality.

The last time the nation was this divided, it fought a Civil War over the issues of slavery and states rights. This time, Americans are patiently waiting for the 2012 national elections to vote in a new president and rearrange the seating charts in Congress to favor conservative legislators. Who says so? All the polls.

The Tea Party movement was the direct result of the rejection of Obamacare which has been repealed in the House and is headed to the Supreme Court. The uncertainty surrounding it continues to have a profound and negative affect on the economy.

Like moths to a candle, the power vested in Congress has drawn lawyers as the group most interested in holding high office. That remains the case today and raises the question of how a group of men and women trained to lie on behalf of their clients can be trusted to make informed and intelligent decisions about the conduct of the nation’s affairs.

“It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”, said Winston Churchill. In a private moment, he is quoted as having said, “Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing — after they have exhausted all other remedies.”

We have been exhausted by the socialism of past Congresses and the remedies that President Obama has tried to impose on an unwilling nation. It is time to do the right thing.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Disarming America's Military

By Alan Caruba

In the preamble of the Constitution, the founding fathers made clear their priorities and among them was “provide for the common defense” to “secure the blessings of liberty.”

Ramping up an army and navy was an early priority of the nation’s first presidents because, then as now, the United States had real enemies.

The congressional “super committee” charged with finding cuts in the budget is testimony to the failure of Congress to attend to one of its primary duties and to the gridlock of partisanship. The notion of an automatic across-the-boards budget cut of $1.5 trillion is aimed at the growth in spending over the next decade, not a reduction in those programs that are responsible for an unsustainable debt.

A Rasmussen Reports survey released on September 28 revealed that “Americans think that tax hikes are more likely than spending cuts in any deficit reduction deal that comes out of Congress and are more convinced than ever that any new tax monies will be spent on new government programs.”

Nearly two-thirds of American adults, 62%, have no confidence in Congress’s ability to actually reduce spending for the purpose of reducing the federal deficit. The latest poll on this topic represented an increase of four points over the previous one in February.

In an article posted on Military.com, a September 26 report released by the House Armed Services Committee warned that $465 billion in cuts to the defense budget over ten years would “transform a Superpower into a Regional Power” and return the military to funding levels of “the post-Vietnam Carter era of the late 1970s.”

The report contemplated cuts that would “eliminate 60 ships, two carrier battle groups, and over 200,000 troops through 2021. The Army would lose ground combat vehicles. The Navy would suffer cuts in ship building and replacements for older ships. The Air Force would likely lose the next generation bombers and aerial refueling tanker aircraft. The Marine Corps would lose personnel carriers and indefinitely postpone replacements for new amphibious assault vehicles and ships.

Michael M. Dunn, president of the Air Force Association, in a memo to its members, referred to the cuts as draconian, noting that “It would gut many programs, throw tens of thousands of troops out of work, cause major force reductions, and necessitate closing bases. Our allies would begin to question our commitments in both conventional and extended deterrence realms.”

The budget and debt problems the nation faces are based in large part on our so-called “entitlement” programs that are hugely wasteful and in need of reform. There are entire federal departments such as Education that could be eliminated to the benefit of the nation, returning this function to the states instead.

Lost in the current debate is the fact that it is Congress that authorizes the funding of the many programs that waste millions on a weekly basis. An across the boards cut ignores priorities and, among them all, defense is the most essential.

Lost, too, is the realization that the U.S. has entered into an entirely new era of warfare. In a speech in June to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, William J. Lyon, Deputy Secretary of Defense, noted that “For centuries, the most economically developed nations wielded the most lethal military power”, but not anymore.

How has war changed? Think about this, “Our deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have now lasted longer than the U.S. participation in World War I and World War II combined,” said Lyon. “We must sustain long-term commitments for a range of plausible conflicts.” Moreover, today’s military must be ready for both high-end and low-end (insurgencies) threats." And the newest threat, cyberwarfare.

No one suggests that the Defense Department is a paragon or that it does not need to review issues such as its pension programs that begin at age 38 when retired personnel have twenty more years of productivity left. Even with aspects of the military that need revision, a United States of America with a military expected to fight with the weapons of the Vietnam era is an invitation to the nation’s enemies.

A look back over the era since the end of World War Two in 1945 demonstrates that the world has been a far safer place precisely because America has been a military superpower.

As China builds its military, non-state combatants challenge nations around the world, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons continues apace, this is no time to undermine a military that has answered the nation’s call to arms with courage and distinction.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Financial Advice of Experts, Then and Now

By Alan Caruba

“I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism…I have every confidence that there will be a revival of activity in the spring, and that during the coming year, the country will make steady progress.” That’s what William Mellon, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, had to say on December 31, 1929. The Great Depression would last until 1941 when the U.S. entered World War Two.

“Could we have a crash a la 1929? The flat answer is no.” So said Dr. Pierre A. Rinfret, a noted economist, writing in Time magazine on October 5, 1987 and, on October 19, 1987—instantly dubbed “Black Monday”—the Dow Jones average plunged 508 points.

Despite the pronouncements of Presidents and pundits, it was the December 30, 1929 edition of Variety, a newspaper for the entertainment industry, that got it right. The day after the crash its headline read, “Wall Street Lays an Egg.”

All through history, the opinions of “experts” have been subject to revision and derision. The Internet has simply multiplied our access to a multitude of opinions. It behooves us all to pick our experts very carefully. A good track record is always a good sign, along with a healthy measure of common sense.

As the economies of the U.S. and several European nations totter on default it is essential to draw on lessons from the past. The most obvious lesson is that the governments of the U.S. and the Europeans have been spending far more than they can tax or borrow.

All have spent decades since the 1980s wasting billions on “alternative” sources of energy in the name of global warming or climate change. All have stayed busy before and since the end of World War Two consolidating power in the U.S. federal government and more recently in the European Union.

Herbert Hoover on whose watch Wall Street crashed in 1929 generally gets the blame, but five years earlier in an address to the annual meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hoover said, “The test of our whole economic and social system is its capacity to cure its own abuses,” warning that, “If we are to be wholly dependent upon government to cure these abuses, we shall by this very method have created an enlarged and deadening abuse through the extension of bureaucracy and the clumsy and incapable handling of delicate economic forces.”

“The clumsy and incapable handling of delicate economic forces.” Spoken nearly 90 years ago!

What a perfect phrase to describe what the nation has been passing through as Congress during the last days of the Bush administration and the past two and a half years of the Obama administration has demonstrated.

The financial crisis of late 2008 was the result of government “entities”, Fannie Mae, created in 1938, and Freddie Mac, created in 1970, both intended to stimulate the housing market by securing the loans made by banks for the purpose of giving everyone, including those who could least afford it, the opportunity to own a house. By the time the crisis hit, they jointly owned more than 50% of all U.S. mortgages.

The failure of communism in the former Soviet Union (1922-1991) should be proof enough that government ownership of property and the means of production is one of the all-time bad ideas of the last century. A modified version exists in China with other versions existing from North Korea to Cuba. All depend on oppression and coercion.

The irony, of course, is that the Great Depression was extended by Hoover’s successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who believed that expanding the role of government was the best way to bring the Depression to an end. Instead, the Depression, experienced as well by European nations in the wake of World War One, gave rise to totalitarian governments and World War Two.

There is a reason that President Obama’s approval ratings, along with those of Congress, are at record lows. Most astonishing is the fact that, when Obama took office, the Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature, the Senate and the House. Even more astonishing, Obama pursued the same failed programs of FDR, most famously sponsoring a multi-billion dollar “stimulus” bill, along with taking over General Motors and Chrysler, ginning up a Cash-4-Clunkers program, and discovering belatedly that there were few “shovel ready” infrastructure projects.

By 2010, the voters returned political power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party, largely on the basis on newly minted “Tea Party” candidates. Obama’s Congress had rejected his proposed budget and the nation has been operating with “continuing resolutions” to fund its activities and a massive battle over raising the debt ceiling for the same purpose. A farcical congressional “super committee” has been told to cut a trillion and a half dollars out of government spending.

The economic advisers that Obama brought into the White House have all departed with the exception of the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner. The various government departments continue to spend millions authorized by the Congress every week or engage in dubious “loan guarantees” which give every indication of being a series of Solyndra scandals.

Despite the increasingly absurd assertions of the President, it’s not just corporations, large and small, making decisions about the current and near-term future of the economy. It is the vast body of Americans who are deciding what to purchase, whether to expand their business by hiring or not, whether to invest in stocks or gold, and thousands of individual decisions by which the real economy is shaped.

It is their decisions that determine how long the recession lasts, not the official pronouncements about when the last one “ended” or a new one begins. Economists of a conservative point of view know what must be done and should be listened to, but they are not advising this President, nor guiding the government’s decisions.

In the midst of this latest of many financial crisises at home and abroad, the campaign for the next presidential election has begun. Much depends on who John Q. Public elects to the office. Much depends on the long, hard slog to reduce the size and grasp of the federal government.

Will the wisdom of “the crowd” prevail over the present “experts” affecting the economy?

Stay tuned.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Why the US Credit Rating Was Downgraded

By Alan Caruba

To begin with, the debt ceiling was lifted in part to hold onto our historic AAA rating of U.S. securities, but that didn’t work. On August 5th, Standard & Poor’s, one of three major rating agencies, downgraded the U.S. to AA+, the first such downgrade in the history of the nation. The liberal media immediately attacked Standard & Poor’s, but odds are they will be joined soon enough by Moody’s and Fitch.

As the air is filled with charges and countercharges as to who is to blame for the downgrade, and blaming George W. Bush has become a joke (yes, he does share some of the blame), the numbers tell the story. As the Washington Times recently noted, “In 2008, the federal budget deficit was around 3 percent of gross domestic product. In 2011, it’s around 11 percent.”

“Total federal debt was $10.7 trillion at the end of 2008 and is currently $14.6 trillion. Debt as a percentage of GDP was a painful 69 percent at the end of the Bush years, but Mr. Obama is pushing it over 100 percent, another disgraceful historic milestone.”

In the week leading up to the last-minute agreement to lift the debt ceiling the Tea Party movement’s members were being called “terrorists”, a notion so idiotic that it defies belief. As the debt ceiling debate wound down, that was all one heard from Democrat politicians and their mainstream media toadies. It is a measure of their desperation.

Neither the President, nor the leadership of the Democratic Party apparently got the message of the 2010 elections that took away the control of the House and gave it to Republicans and new Tea Party caucus members. The initial Democrat response was to call them “extremists” for wanting to get spending under control, but mostly to repeal Obamacare.

The House, in fact, did vote to repeal Obamacare. The Tea Party movement began with its opposition to that legislative monstrosity. On March 9, 2010, Americans filled the streets of Washington, DC, right up to the stairs of the U.S. Capitol Building. David Axelrod, then a White House consigliore to President Obama, dismissed them saying, “They are wrong.”

They were not wrong then and, in many respects, they are not wrong now. They are, however, impatient. That is historically American because we have always been a people in a hurry. The Tea Party movement rose out of widespread opposition to Obamacare.

At some point the nation has to begin the long hard process of reversing a decades-long spending binge by both the government and individual Americans, many of whom turned their homes into ATMs or purchased homes they could not afford.

The housing bubble burst in September 2008 at the end of President Bush’s second term. It’s worth remembering that, when Bush came into office President Clinton had bequeathed him a budget surplus.

Bush expanded Medicare with a prescription benefit. When 9/11 occurred on his watch, it drained a trillion dollars out of the economy. He responded with a war in Afghanistan and then added a war in Iraq for good measure. They seemed like a good idea at the time, less so now. The Bush tax cuts reduced government revenues and were very popular, but bills must be paid. Massive borrowing ensued.

When the financial crisis hit, President Bush was at the tail end of a long period of U.S. history dating back to the 1930s Great Depression that made it inevitable. Social Security and Medicare/Medicare have become unsustainable. In effect, the housing bubble was just the trigger that revealed a far larger problem. The New Deal of the 1930s, Medicare in the 1960s, and LBJ’s “War on Poverty” were all part of the problem Americans must address today.

It is historic fact that Republicans have presided over a debtor nation for a long time, dating back to the days of Richard M. Nixon. Indeed, a decade ago, it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who had a surplus when he left office. Previously, Ronald Reagan had run deficits for his eight years and had increased the budget by 69%. He was followed by Bush41 and Bush43 who also ran deficits. I am not assigning “blame”; just stating facts, because facts are important.

An excellent new book, “Lost Decades” by Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden has just been published and anyone who truly wants to understand how Democrats and Republicans alike have dug the nation into a deep financial hole should read it.

As the authors note, “Events of the weeks during and after the passage of TARP revealed a chilling fact that the American financial system was effectively bankrupt.”

TARP, an emergency legislative response to the 2008 financial crisis, was designed initially to purchase the “toxic assets” that had been sold throughout the financial system, mostly banks, hedge funds and insurance companies—all rated AAA by Moody’s, Fitch, and Standard & Poor’s…yes, that Standard & Poor’s!

Also revealed has been the fact that the American economy is central to the stability of foreign economies as well. Many other nations had also been engaged in spending too much and were caught up in the housing bubble, ours and their own. England was one. Ireland, Spain, Italy, Greece, and others tottered as billions in alleged value, bundled from countless mortgages and sold as securities, disappeared.

At the urging of two government sponsored entitles (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, subprime loans were encouraged. They were then “bundled” them and sold as securities. When the housing bubble burst, no one knew who owned what. The assets were often no longer specifically connected to the owners of homes who discovered that their mortgages now exceeded the value of their homes.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own nearly half of all the mortgage loans issued by banks and mortgage firms nationwide. The government was on the hook for billions and stepped in to seize both GSEs. They need to be wound down and eliminated, returning to a time when banks and mortgage firms can rationally make prudent loans. The federal government should not have been in the housing mortgage business and now we know why.

When investment banks like Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the huge insurance company, AIG, faced a similar fate, the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, stepped in to stabilize the U.S. financial system with loans constituting billions of public funds.

In sum, they had no choice. They had facilitated the problem, but a nation without a functioning banking system is nothing but some borders on a map.

It’s worth pausing to recall that President Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury was Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs. He was succeeded by Lawrence Summers, a Rubin protégé and later an Obama economic advisor. Bush’s later Secretary of the Treasury, as noted, was Hank Paulson and his chief of staff was Joshua Bolton, another Goldman alumnus. It’s a very small cliché of men deciding first how Wall Street will benefit and then how, as the expression goes, “to kick the can down the road.”

As noted in the "Lost Decades", “The government depended on access to domestic and international finance to underwrite its own borrowing as deficits grew; the private sector’s vibrancy similarly depended on a continued flow of funds from and through the world’s financial institutions.”

So long as the bubble existed, the politicians found no reason to rein in government spending and to compound the mess its vaunted regulatory apparatus had failed its responsibilities as well. These bubbles and recessions are not exclusively American. Previously, Japan lost a decade as well and other nations, several in South America, experienced even worst financial debacles.

So the debt ceiling vote just put off the problem while the politicians hope and pray that the economy will revive. They are unlikely to do what is necessary to cut the size of the federal government, its spending, and remove the weight of suffocating job-killing regulation. Whole government agencies need to be eliminated.

The Tea Party movement, made up of middle class, sensible, God-fearing and Constitution-loving Americans is all that stands between us and the politicians. The Tea Party needs to be focused. It needs to be patient. We know the current bunch of politicians must be replaced.

As for the theatrics of the debt ceiling debate and vote, we elected these politicians and their predecessors. The deficits they gave us are collectively our deficits, our debts.

In 2012, hopefully we can begin to say goodbye Barack Obama, goodbye Harry Reid, goodbye Nancy Pelosi, goodbye Barney Frank, goodbye Dick Durbin. And thank you, Tea Party Americans.

© Alan Caruba, 2011.

A Balanced Budget Amendment is No Panacea

By Alan Caruba

As this is being written, early Sunday evening, the House has passed Speaker Boehner’s legislation, rejected on arrival in the Senate, and the Senate has rejected Majority Leader Harry Reid’s!

While the details of how much spending is to be cut are being negotiated, the sticking point is the insistence by some on a “balanced budget” amendment to the Constitution and that is likely the cause of this pathetic spectacle.

J. R. Kearl is a professor of economics in Provo, Utah. He has good academic credentials and, more importantly, he possesses a fair amount of common sense. In a July 19 opinion that appeared in the Deseret News, Prof. Kearl warned that “the balanced budget amendment now being touted by proponents is silent on distinctions between operating and capital expenditures, silent on distinctions between on-budget and off-budget expenditures, and silent on mandated expenditures.”

Those of us who lack degrees in economics may not be familiar with these terms, but they are crucial to how states—even those with balanced budget requirements—conduct the business of governance.

“Many states and local government have balanced budget laws, but they apply only to ‘operating expenditures’ and not ‘capital expenditures’ used to fund, for example, infrastructure and buildings,” wrote Prof. Kearl. “A balanced budget amendment that does not make this distinction rules out this option at the federal level.”

To write such an amendment would require language nearly as long as whole sections of the Constitution. It is impractical and unwise, particularly in the event of a war. It is not needed.

What the U.S. needs is a realistic budget that constrains the way its seemingly endless departments and agencies throw public funds at politically-driven pet projects, the “earmarks” we have heard so much about, and the conduct of functions that would work better if privatized.

As the Constitution defines this, it is “to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States…” Towards this end, the Constitution empowers the Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with Indian tribes” among a number of enumerated duties of the federal government; read Article I, Section 8.

The United States does not need a balanced budget amendment. It needs to stop borrowing and spending money in stupid, wasteful ways. An amendment would only encourage a future Congress to create all manner of agencies and means to get around it and you can be very sure it would.

“In short,” says Prof. Kearl, “it is at best poorly written and incomplete, and at worst naïve and ill conceived.”

If a balanced budget amendment is the issue that is keeping the two houses of Congress from coming to an agreement to raise the debt ceiling, it is a very bad idea that ignores the nation’s obligation to pay its bills.

Cutting spending is the real issue facing a Congress so divided in ideology that even getting an agreement on that will be a major achievement. It is unrealistic to suddenly decide the nation should not borrow what it needs to meet its obligations. All nations borrow all the time.

There would have been no America if the Continental Congress had not borrowed from France to conduct the Revolution.

And this is hardly the first financial crisis in the history of the United States. We have been through a lot of them and, to our credit, have striven mightily to regulate our banks and other financial institutions that have too often failed us.

The present crisis reflects the way that, from 2000 on, we have been poorly served by those regulatory agencies and even by the ratings organizations, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, who sanctioned all manner of hocus-pocus financial instruments.

We are in this mess because both the federal government and individual Americans went on a borrowing and spending binge over the past ten years or so believing that the value of housing in America would always increase.

As they say in New Orleans, laissez le bon temps roulez, let the good times roll. Well, the good times are over until we get our house in order. To do that, the federal government will need to borrow enough to pay its bills.

After that, we need to elect legislators like Paul Ryan and others who will take a chain saw to the present federal government to reduce its size and its role in the economic life of the nation.

Too many feckless decisions have been made for too long by people who frequently came from or benefited from the very source of the problems we have. There are many entities to blame, but let’s get beyond the blame game long enough to pay our bills.

Capitalism is messy and risky, but it is still the best economic system ever devised. Diluting it with a lot of “social justice” programs as the U.S. has been doing since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has brought us to this point.

The least we can expect from Congress is to act swiftly and pragmatically at this point. Those calling each other schoolyard names should not be invited back to govern.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Scary American Stats

By Alan Caruba

Rasmussen Reports maintains a daily presidential tracking poll and, as of Sunday, July 10, President Obama’s Approval Index rating was minus-19. If he wasn’t such a narcissist this might bother him, but one gets the impression he is so convinced of his ability to lie his way out of any situation, that he will continue his present trajectory.

The kabuki dance regarding the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling limit provides a useful insight to the workings of Washington, D.C., and the principles—or lack of them—that drive the Republican and Democratic parties.

Democrats want to raise taxes. Republicans want to cut spending. The latter course of action is the only one that will pull the nation back from the brink of default and insolvency. The U.S. now owes so much interest on what it borrows that economists say it will take a decade just to pay it, let alone address the principal.

Here are some scary stats about America and its citizens that say something about how a great nation has slid into bad habits, bad behavior, and bad judgment :

We have the highest rate of illegal drug use in the world.

We have more reported rapes, murders, and total crimes in the world.

We have the largest prison population of the entire world.

Between December 2000 and 2010, the U.S. ran the largest trade deficit in the world every year, $6.1 trillion dollars. The U.S. has had a negative trade balance every year since 1976.

The U.S. has accumulated the biggest national debt the world has ever seen and it is getting worse, expanding at a rate of $40,000 per second.

On Sunday, the tracking poll showed that 21% of voters “Strongly Approve” of the way Obama is running the nation. That’s just short of one-in-four voters and is a fairly constant number reflecting those voters who are (a) too stupid to realize just how much trouble the nation is in, (b) too devoted to Obama to see any flaws, and (c) too committed to the Democratic Party to step back and ask why we are in the midst of a depression.

Why those who analyze and comment on public issues will not call it a depression escapes my understanding. We have unemployment rates that are comparable to those of the 1930s, home foreclosures from coast to coast, and, most importantly, a consumer confidence rate that is in the basement.

All the Democrat talk of “shared sacrifice” is just nonsense, given the fact that the top earners—the millionaires and billionaires—pay the largest amount of the taxes (the top 10% pay 68%) while somewhere close to 40% or more pay no taxes. Rewriting the U.S. tax code would bring everyone closer to actually sharing the burden of providing Washington the revenues politicians routinely waste.

The “social justice” programs of the 1930s and 60s, Social Security and Medicare, need to be fixed or, better still, phased out. It must, of course, be done with regard to a huge population of seniors who paid into these programs, neither of which even comes close to being “voluntary.”

They are about as voluntary as Obamacare’s demand that you buy health insurance even if you don’t want to. Meanwhile, it will continue to wreak havoc on what is arguably the best health system in the world. This might account for why 26 states have joined in a court case against it and why the House has already voted to repeal it. It is the Democrat controlled Senate that is the obstacle.

It also accounts for why 40% of the voters Strongly Disapprove of Obama’s performance in office at this time. The majority of voters are not stupid. Rasmussen reports that “55% of voters nationwide believe that cuts in government spending are good for the economy.” In addition, “54% also believe that raising taxes will hurt the economy.”

What these statistics reveal is that there is a shift in the direction of common sense and an understanding of fundamental economics. It also explains why voters in the 2010 election returned political power in the House to Republicans. What remains to be seen is how many of those newly-minted GOP representatives keep their pledge not to raise taxes.

It is troubling, though, that “Overall, 46% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president’s performance” while “53% at least somewhat disapprove. “Somewhat”? What does it take to get people to look at Obama and see the worst President of the modern era?

Historians will look back at this period and rightly conclude that the nation was politically very sharply divided between liberals and conservatives. Look to the Obama administration to play heavily on the fears of those who believe that their Social Security checks will be cut or not arrive at all. They will suggest all manner of other cuts and changes as well that slow the welfare train. It is classic Chicago-style and Democrat politics that depends on buying votes.

The worst of this is that it is precisely the “redistribution of wealth” that has gotten us to this point along with a housing bubble created by government entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Together they distorted the housing market by providing the mechanism for low-cost loans to people who did not qualify to receive them. Unbelievably, they are still in business.

The stats tell us that it is the slim majority of voters that will determine the future and tucked in among them are the independents upon whom everything depends.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A Whiff of Secession and Nullification

By Alan Caruba

In May Rasmussen Reports took a survey of a thousand adults asking if they believed that States have the right to secede. “One-in-five Americans believe individual States have the right to break away from the country, although a majority doesn’t believe it will actually happen.”

That a Tea Party movement sprang to life in the midst of the protests against Obamacare and then was instrumental in transferring political power in the House of Representatives in the 2010 election cannot be dismissed. People—lots of them—are increasingly wary of the central government, particularly one that has burdened them with more debt in the last three years than in the entire prior history of the nation.

In October, Pelican Publishing Company will publish “Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century” in which a number of scholars edited by Donald Livingston, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, examine the implications of secession, possibly by regional groupings of States, from the present federal government.

Prof. Livingston is a political philosopher and scholar, the author of two books on the British philosopher David Hume and may well be one of a handful of people who have given serious thought to the question of whether the present Union has either outlived its usefulness or, worse, become a sinkhole of power aggregating to itself total control over the States.

The Tenth Amendment clearly states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

That is true, but I doubt there is a single Governor of any of the fifty States who cannot enumerate the ways the federal government has wrested power from them while imposing costs. When Arizona finds itself the object of a federal legal suit to prevent it from trying to control its border with Mexico, you know there’s a problem.

In an article, “Decentralization for Freedom”, by Prof. Livingston, he raises some issues that are increasingly troubling to a growing number of Americans. He addresses the measures States can take “to protect their citizens from usurpations by the central government.” Among these are the passing of resolutions. “A continuous flood of resolutions from the States about the constitutionality of this or that issue (and widely publicized) would serve to educate the public.”

Thereafter, Prof. Livingston recommends a resort to the Tenth Amendment by State legislators and governors in order to recover usurped authority. We are beginning to see another measure, the refusal to accept federal funding as regards its centralized control of education.

Resistance to Obamacare is based on the question whether the federal government can require individual citizens to purchase something they do not want. The House has passed a measure to repeal it, but it is stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Reverse the situation and you have a federal government telling Americans what they cannot buy, as in the case of the 100 watt incandescent light bulb in use since the days of Thomas Edison.

“Genuine federalism in America can be recovered only by political action in the name of the State’s own authority and not by Supreme Court legalism,” says Prof. Livingston.

“To all of this it is often said that State interposition, nullification, and succession were eliminated as policy options by the Civil War. Brute force, however, cannot settle moral and constitutional question.” While Lincoln did “save the Union”, he did so at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and the destruction of the South.

Clearly the central government has grown so large, so unwieldy, so wasteful, and so unresponsive to the problems and costs it has imposed that people are beginning to wonder why 435 Representatives in the House and 100 in the Senate should control the lives, the economy, and the education of more than 300 million people in fifty sovereign States.

The President virtually makes law with “executive orders” and the nine members of the Supreme Court exercises final authority of the constitutionality of laws. Congress is so divided by raw partisanship it is barely functioning.

“The only remedy,” says Prof. Livingston “is territorial division of the Union through secession into a number of different and independent political units.”

“The current central government of the United States hates inequality, but it also fears the people,” says Prof. Livingston, noting that “There is no law an American State can pass that cannot be overturned by the arrogant social engineers of the Supreme Court who in the last fifty years have played with the inherited moral traditions and federative policy of the American people like a quack with a hapless patient.”

“Constitutionally, this means that the States must reassert their sovereignty under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and recall those powers they have allowed to slip out of their hands to the central government.”

This is not a call for anarchy. It is the realization that the modern presidency has aggregated to itself powers it does not have or, in the case of Libya, is ignoring the War Powers Act that limits its ability to engage the nation in conflicts Congress does not ultimately authorize.

It is the realization that every United Nations treaty the United States signs deprives it of its sovereign rights.

It is a call for consideration that regional groups of States with common interests might provide better government within such groups, leaving to the central government the responsibility to protect the nation via a common military, conduct foreign affairs, and return to the gold standard that would protect the value of a common currency.

When one-in-five Americans give credence to the right of secession, it is clear that the problems being experienced in all fifty States, the massive regulation of all activities within those States, the imposition of a centralized “core” curriculum to be taught in all schools, is arousing a rediscovered sense of liberty among Americans.

What steps must be taken to retain that liberty and even to restructure the Union are as yet undetermined, but they are increasingly entering the public debate.

There is no debate that something is terribly wrong when a president is elected whose eligibility and legitimacy is in serious question while the courts do nothing to address this critical constitutional issue and the Congress does nothing while sending bills for his signature.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Fog of Numbers

By Alan Caruba

There are several reasons why Rep. Paul Ryan and his fellow Republicans in Congress want to cut four trillion dollars from the 2012 budget. Here are just four of them:

• The 1994-1996 Social Security Advisory Council

• The 1995 Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform.

• The 1999 National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare

• The December 2010 bipartisan Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Most of us have heard of “the fog of war” in which the participants have difficulty finding the enemy, get disconnected from their own lines, suffer “friendly fire” deaths because of the confusion of the battlefield, and must contend with the awful fear that war embodies.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the fog of numbers as Americans struggle to understand just how seriously our entire national economy is threatened. Like some weird kabuki theatre, we watch politicians engage in insane disputes over cutting a few billion from the torrent of spending and borrowing that has got us to this point.

In late March, the Cato Institute published Policy Analysis No. 673, authored by Michael Tanner. The title was “Bankrupt: Entitlements and the Federal Budget.” I grant you this does not have the enticement of an article about Charlie Sheen or Kim Kardashian, but it does have the mordant power of reading one’s own obituary in advance.

Tanner begins by noting that the U.S. government “is about to exceed its statutory debt limit of $14.3 trillion” noting that “if one considers the unfunded liabilities of programs such as Medicare and Social Security, the true national debt could run as high as $119.5 trillion.

To put this in perspective, the entire annual gross domestic product, GDP, of the United States is about $14 trillion, so the debt limit means that the government needs every single dollar earned from the sale of all products and services just to meet its current debt limit. Some limit! And Congress will have to increase it in order to avoid having the U.S. default on the trillions it has borrowed.

Starting with the Roosevelt era during the Great Depression Congress looked for “a safety net” that would protect seniors who had worked their entire life. The answer was Social Security, but at the time, most people died well before the payback began at age 65. The government got to keep all the money they were required to pay in. What no one anticipated was that people in 2010 would have a life expectancy of 78 years of age and many lived well into their 80s and 90s.

This was followed by Medicare, an expansion of the Social Security program to provide health insurance coverage to people 65 and over or for those meeting other special criteria. It was signed into law on July 30, 1965 by Lyndon B. Johnson, famed for the failed “War on Poverty” and the failed Vietnam War which he escalated while in office.

Now add to those programs the fact that the Bush43 and Obama presidencies “have been the two most profligate political eras of modern times. Federal government spending has nearly doubled over the last ten years. As a result, we now face budget deficits that are unprecedented in the post-World War II era.”

A deficit is the difference between the revenue the government takes in and what it pays out. “In Fiscal Year 2011, the federal government will spend $1.65 trillion more than it takes in…this represents the second largest budget deficit in the last 65 years.”

You will hear that the cost of the wars we have been fighting since 9/11 is to blame, but those coasts are in actuality “only a small fraction of the deficits.” What you probably have heard is that government workers are actually making more money than those employed in the private sector.

Here, too, the numbers are scary. Those employed producing goods of all kinds peaked in 2000 at 24.6 million. By 2007 the numbers for government works and private sector workers were about equal at 22.2 million. By March 2010 the private sector workers had decreased to 18.6 million, but the government employees had increased. We are reaching a point where too few people are making things and they are being taxed to pay for government workers who push paper.

These are numbers worth keeping in mind as we begin the early stages of the 2012 election campaigns and we watch the present Congress address an unsustainable situation created by previous congresses going back to the 1930s.

The Republican caucus will announce its budget and it will seek to trim trillions over the next decade. That’s all to the good, but it may not be enough if government continues to grow and continues to spend.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Party's Over

By Alan Caruba

We all see the world through the prism of where we live. Most of us live in the cities and suburbs. From the early 1940s when my parents moved to the picture postcard town of Maplewood, N.J. that is where I grew up and have spent most of my life.

Maplewood is a quick half hour train trip into downtown Manhattan and is a bedroom community for many executives that work there. It is famous for its many tree lined streets, manicured lawns, and homes, many of which were built starting around the 1920s after the Erie Lackawanna made it a regular stop. Its school system was renowned. It’s still a beautiful town and its village shopping area was the setting for scenes in the film “One True Thing.”

When the property taxes on my home there continued to rise, myself and many other senior citizens who had lived in the township elected to move. My older brother had already set up house in Florida, God’s waiting room, but I elected to move one town over into a swanky new apartment complex, allowing me to make the short drive into the “village” of town every day to purchase sundries and get what, for me, passes for exercise.

What struck me today was the way the small office building in which my CPA’s firm is headquartered is bereft of any other firms. It used to house a photographer’s business and one that sold insurance. I left off my 2010 tax records. Across the street a take-out food store had closed its doors. The town’s pet store had departed not long ago.

As I walked toward my car I realized that yet another gift shop had bit the dust. Other shops, too. One of the town’s busiest real estate firms had a window filled with pictures and descriptions of homes for sale. My former home where I had lived for more than sixty years had changed owners twice in seven years.

The short drive back to my apartment complex included passing homes with for-sale signs, too numerous to ignore.

When the phone rings these days it’s usually one of a small circle of longtime friends. One of them runs a longtime, successful enterprise that matches people of differing expertise with reporters needing some quick information and insight, a quote on some subject. Talk radio and TV producers use it to find guests.

Over the twenty-seven years I have known my friend he went from running the business from his apartment to a large office with a full staff. He now runs it from his apartment and it is a virtual business. His directory of experts is print-on-demand for those who request a copy and many of the computer and web services he uses are provided from Bangalore, India.

Like a fish in water, it occurred to me that I haven’t met face to face with any of my clients in years. We communicate mostly via email or occasionally on the phone. I am trying to remember when I last put on a suit and tie. I can’t.

When I turn on the television news or listen to it on the radio, what I really hear is that everyone is waiting for the megalith we call the federal government to come up with a budget and to fund its function for another two weeks!

When a nation cannot operate in a predictable, rational way, it forces people to put a lot of ordinary decisions on hold.

That’s why a great swath of businesses is just waiting for someone to buy something. The ones that provide goods that are essential, food, toilet paper, things to keep the house clean, medications, are okay, but anything that is non-essential is moving far more slowly. Even the catalog operations that depend on moving all manner of household items are slashing their prices. The $10 “rehab exercise ball” is now $6.00. The $14 “ratchet pruner” is now $8.00.

I used to go to a nearby mall to purchase things. Now I go on the Internet and they are delivered in two or three days at most. The most extraordinary business in America is the delivery business, whether it’s Fedex or UPS.

As the price of gasoline goes up, reflecting the turmoil throughout the Middle East as it recedes further into its dark ages people are going to travel less. Visiting grandma will be by iphone. The huge business of trade conferences will be hard hit. In turn, hotels, airlines, and tourism will feel the affect.

Nobody has any idea how America will pay off the huge debt it has acquired—the bulk of it in just the last two years—and still Congress critters argue over cutting pitifully small pieces of it.

We have huge government departments and agencies that should simply be shuttered, along with their matrix of duplicated and overlapping programs that suck up millions, if not billions, annually. It won’t happen.

There is a lull in the life of the nation. Shops are closing. Homes are going unsold or foreclosed or both. Everything looks “normal”, but it isn’t. The party’s over.

© Alan Caruba, 2011