WHY WE NEED  A CONSERVATIVE  FOR PRESIDENT

 

Article II of the Constitution says in part “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.” With this broad definition of qualification for office in mind the framers of the Constitution limited the duties and authority of the federal government.

One bit of housekeeping before I go on, full disclosure requires that the reader know that both my wife and I voted for Herman Cain during the last republican Primary and that we donated to his campaign fund. I believe that the reader can deduce from context that I am a conservative.

To make the case so provocatively stated in the title it will be necessary to draw some comparisons to our present administration. If the law of the land is faithfully adhered to I do not believe that any adult male or female could or should be barred from holding the office. The qualifier of adhering to the law does present a problem though. There is a process of checks and balances in our government to assure the people the opportunity for a government by the people. If as is the case today, the laws are only followed as a matter of discretion in the executive branch of government, the Legislative and Judicial branches should provide a check to executive power. Failing that, we always have the vigorous free press and the two year election cycle of the House to protect us from government overreach. But what if as today there is something about the individual in office that, counter to the Constitution, causes the Legislative branch not to act. What if the press predominantly finds its own reason to remain silent when laws are broken by the President. Could an unscrupulous commander in chief then cloak himself in secrecy as a “matter of national security” and exercise authority unilaterally, almost as a monarch.

In America today any scribe who dares to question a policy of the president is drowned out in a chorus of voices on all sides yelling “racist”. The President, through no fault or skill of his own, has dark enough skin to be considered black. It is amazing that this fact allowed him to defeat the darling of the political left in the 2008 democratic primary. The politics of Obama and Hillary Clinton are so similar that the voters could have swung either way. His race though, caused even Hillary to hold back from pressing home her usual brand of bare knuckle political attacks on the vulnerable newcomer. In a time of national crisis on unemployment, healthcare, foreign policy and debt that would usually fill the news, the press still remain almost silent. With 90% of Americans polled indicating that they feel the country is headed in the wrong direction the Legislature still does not act to block the imperial actions of the President. The president has twin shields protecting him from criticism as his administration moves from scandal to scandal while he exercises unilateral power through executive orders and executive privilege. The Presidents job approval has sunk to 39% and still no one raises the call for impeachment lest they be branded a racist. Being Liberal and black at the same time has made the President almost invincible.

I do not fault the President for being liberal in his politics or because he is half black. I do believe that his policies have failed and that he has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. The real fault lies with half of the country for letting him have a legal pass because he is liberal and the other half of the country for not having the courage to criticize his actions because he is black. The press has failed America by not holding this man accountable as they would if he were a conservative.

My fear is that we may next elect a liberal woman who would also have twin shields to use as she pushes forward a progressive agenda.

I say that we need a conservative, black or white, in the office for a while so that the Press and   Legislative Branch of government can remember what their job truly is.

       Q: SHOULD I MOVE TO A BLUE STATE OR RED. A: YES

 

It depends on you and what you are seeking. The fifty states offer fifty different options for citizens to choose the type of climate, entertainment, job opportunity, political bias, taxation and crime rate they desire. The original 13 states were very different and the founding fathers correctly, in my opinion, decided to let state governments retain control of all aspects of government except those few things essential to the National Interest. These they laid down in the Constitution and reserved to the Federal Government. The wisdom of their actions can be seen every day in the intra-continental mass migration taking place. People are moving in large numbers from blue states to red ones. The shift has been so dramatic that the last census required 12 Congressional seats to change states. Five traditionally blue states lost seats while only Washington State gained one. Red states gained many of the seats that shifted with Texas receiving the most new seats numbered at four. Between 2009 and 2010 for example, 880,000 people left Illinois while during the same time period Texas gained 782,000. People move for a whole host of reasons to be sure and even though the net migration patterns indicate more people are moving from blue to red states it is true that many people also move counter to this trend. So like I said in the title of this post, the correct direction to move in is the one that best suits you. I know that this conclusion may seem trivial but I think that it is far more important than it appears at first. We as a nation enjoy a diversity of landscapes and politics and the ability to move at will between them.

Every time the Federal Government takes unto itself one of the authorities reserved to the individual states it substitutes instead a one size fits all law. It doing so it tramples on freedoms cherished by roughly half of the population. Our freedom to move around and find the best state for ourselves is diminished every time the Federal Government makes a law that applies in all States. A few years ago we migrated from one blue state to another. We moved to the State of Washington because it has no income tax, it’s beautiful and I love the sailing. I am a conservative so I when I see that red states averaging 1.8% less unemployment and are experiencing about five times the income growth rate of the blue states I believe that it shows red states are better. My liberal friends are quick to point out that the highest average incomes are in the blue states and that the migration of high income earners toward red states slants the income growth rate figures unfairly. People are voting in this pole with their feet and the results favor business friendly, low tax areas and less intrusive government.

I remember Germany before the wall came down, the wall that was erected for the sole purpose of preventing the German people from doing the very thing we take for granted. They wanted to move toward freedom and away from socialism. Instead of enticing their population to stay in East Germany the Soviet controlled government used the military and wall to force them to stay. I worked in communist China before their citizens had any right to even change jobs, much less move for political reasons. When I would return home from business trips over-seas it never failed to make an impression on me with regard to how much freedom we have.

I don’t think it is as important whether you are liberal or conservative as it is that we have a choice. If you want to live where the Mayor unilaterally decides how big a soft drink you can buy, move to New York. If you want to carry a concealed weapon or smoke pot Colorado may be for you. I submit that the worst thing that we as a nation can do is lose that freedom to choose. We need to respect the values of our fellow citizens and not surrender to the temptation of trying to force everyone to live as we ourselves see fit.

The latest over reach, if we don’t count the NSA spying on us, is the Federal government’s takeover of  healthcare. This program was opposed by the majority of Americans when it was passed and has since managed to become even more unpopular. One size fits all government seldom does. The 2014 midterm elections should, in my view, be a referendum on States rights more than anything else.

                         THE GREATEST FRAUD OF ALL TIME

 

I just finished an intrigue novel, set in 1910, filled with shady international characters and high stakes gambling on a vast scale, the plot is just believable enough to keep you turning pages. In it six people representing one quarter of the world’s wealth meet in total secrecy where, even though they know each other, they use only first names, two of which are aliases. The plot centers on the creation of an illegal cartel which is so vast and diabolical that if the public were to ever to learn of it, the member’s lives and fortunes would be forfeited. One member is a highly influential member of Congress while two others represent the largest European banks. The rest of the conspirators are the power brokers of the New York financial world.  Any cartel is just a group of competitors that come together and agree to restrict competition and fix prices. The very nature of a cartel disrupts a free market and does not allow supply and demand to set the selling price of goods and services. I highly recommend the book and the author even came up with the perfect sinister sounding title; “The Creature from Jekyll Island”. By 2010 the book was in its fifth edition and twenty eighth printing.

Like most of my reading the book isn’t really a novel at all. It is a history book and it recounts the events surrounding the creation of the noble sounding “Federal Reserve”. I say noble sounding because it is neither a federal institution nor are there any reserve funds. Until the plot could be legalized by an act of Congress in 1913 the existence of the cartel and the meeting at Jekyll Island where it was formed had to be kept secret from the American public. In fact the choice of the name was critical to plan for selling this monster to the Congress. In the guise of pretending to stabilize the value of our currency while protecting the public from bank failures this Trojan Horse secretly, as in without congressional oversight, handed over control of the country’s financial system to a handful of bankers. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is appointed to a six year term and must be confirmed by the Senate. Once confirmed, and he is the only member so vetted, he must report to Congress once a year. He is not required to tell Congress how, what or why the Federal Reserve is doing what it is doing. So here is how the fraud works. The Federal Reserve Banks (that aren’t really banks) create money out of thin air and have the treasury print it. The currency is just a note that promises to pay the holder the face amount which is why our money says on it that it is a Federal Reserve note. Originally the money was backed by an equivalent value of gold but that was to restricting to the cartel so now they just say that it is backed by the full faith and credit of the government, in other words, by nothing at all. The principle mechanism that the Federal Government uses to push the fake money into the economy is through the sale of Treasury Notes. These are promises to pay the buyer back with interest at some set time in the future. What the government really does is pay off the notes that come due by selling more. The value of the new notes must be greater as the interest on the first notes must be paid. Well the problem is obvious the debt will continue to grow and never gets paid back. It is like paying off one credit card with another.

The Federal Government had to be in on the fraud in order to make it legal so it is fair to ask what it gets out of the deal. Remember that the cartel told the county that the point to all this was to stabilize the currency, well they don’t. The fact is they have inflated (devalued) the currency so much that today it takes a dollar to buy what you could get for seven cents in 1913. The government is paying the buyers of the Treasury Notes back with money that is worth less than the money they spent to buy them. This little sleight of hand by Uncle Sam covers the cost of the interest. The terrible cost of the scheme is born by the public whose savings continue to lose value from inflation.

The bankers who were in on the plot from the beginning wanted to be able to loan vast amounts of money to big companies and foreign governments. The more money they loan the more interest that they earn. The problem is that private banks that loan money need to be able to pay their depositors back and cover checks written on accounts and such. If the money is loaned out and not immediately available people might get nervous and all want their money out of the bank at once. Worse yet the bank might make some bad loans and never get the money back. The Federal Reserve became the perfect answer. They operate in secret without oversight so they can just tell the government it needs to protect the public by covering the banks losses. The banks are portrayed as “too big to fail” so the Fed steps in with a bailout and just like magic the taxpayer picks up the tab. Let’s take the case of the Penn Central railway. In 1970 it became at the time the nation’s biggest ever bankruptcy. Most of the country’s biggest banks had loaned Penn Central money and received seats on the board of directors as a condition for granting the loans. The banks also held large blocks of the railroads stock. Once it became obvious that the company was in trouble the board of directors, including bank representatives, borrowed large amounts of cash and paid lavish dividends. The shareholders including themselves profited and the stock price shot up allowing the banks to sell hundreds of thousands of shares before the public was made aware of the company’s financial trouble. Fed chairman Arthur Burns called upon the members to lend Penn Central an additional $125 million dollars but was unable to get the banks to budge until Congress guaranteed the loans. For some reason Congress mandated a retroactive pay raise of 13-1/2 % for all of the railways union workers as part of the deal. When the money failed to save the railroad the government nationalized the Penn Central and turned it into AMTRAK and CONRAIL. CONRAIL was sold off to private investors and operates at a profit, AMTRAK is 85% owned by the U.S. Government and has cost taxpayer by 2009 $23 billion dollars. To sum it up the banks made bad loans and put their own directors on the railroads board of directors. They realized that the company was in trouble so they inflated the value of the stock and sold it after cashing their dividend checks. The the Fed got the government to guarantee more loans which were repaid with interest by the taxpayers and then the original loans got paid back by the taxpayer with interest so that the government could nationalize the railroad and run it at a $23 billion dollar and counting loss. This same scenario has played out over and over from the New York City bankruptcy to Chrysler, General Motors and the Continental Illinois bank. In total by 1986 the Fed and Treasury Department had given Continental Illinois $9.4 billion dollars. Paul Volcker who was Fed chairman at the time told the Senate banking committee that “The operation is the most basic function of the Federal Reserve. It is why it was founded.” Bankers made the money while the tax payers picked up the check.

Remember when Congress passed the $700 billion dollar TARP bailout in 2008. A passage in the book I spoke of above says that the research firm CREDIT SIGHTS looked at all of the deals made by the Federal Reserve and the FDIC and concluded that the real cost to the tax payer was $5 trillion or $16,500 in lost money for every American citizen.

The Federal Reserve is not now and never has been about stabilizing the value of our currency and protecting the public from bank failures. The currency has been devalued constantly since 1913 and the public has paid in full for all of the failures created by bad lending while the bankers walk away free to do it all over again.

I do not have the space here to cover the book in more detail but I recommend that every tax payer get and read a copy.

 In 2010 the President signed into law an act referred to as dodd-frank. The law purports eliminate the disastrous bail-outs known as “too big to fail” and stabilize the financial system. The preposterous nature of this new monster becomes clear once you learn that it is administered by the Federal Reserve and also is exempt from congressional oversight. The Fed through this law is now legally able to access every citizens private financial data to use as they see fit!

                         THE CITIZEN IN ME ASKS WHY II

 

Unemployment is a subject thrown around by politicians and the press almost as if the “rate of unemployment” was the score of a sporting event. If you are unemployed it is 100%, no one ever feels 6.7% unemployed. It seems everyone who steps up to a microphone or pens an editorial uses the latest government statistic to bolster his partisan argument. The citizen in me asks why they do this when any thoughtful examination of the process that generates the statistic shows that the number is meaningless. The actual unemployment rate is the number of unemployed people in the work force divided by the total number of people in the workforce. Why you could ask, do I then assert that the governments number is meaningless. The great big and intentional deception comes from the way politicians choose to define who is in the workforce. The current administration is touting the drop in unemployment to 6.7% during their tenure. The problem is that more people are out of work now than when they took over five years ago. If I wanted the unemployment rate to look good as possible for political reasons I would calculate the number of unemployed people as only those actually drawing unemployment compensation at the moment. This would be the smallest number I could defend using. The obvious benefit is that it lets me ignore anyone whose benefits have run out or given up looking for work so I don’t need to admit that they are unemployed. If I eliminate anyone who has a part time job even if they want full time work I can lower the number even more. I would naturally count a highly skilled worker who has been forced into a minimum wage job as employed and scoff at the very mention of the term “underemployed”. Students would be eliminated from consideration as unemployed but I would lump them into the total number of people in the workforce to help drive the “rate” down. Then I would add the military personnel into the workforce number because they are 100% employed and that would help drive the number down. I could shift great numbers of unemployed people onto Social Security disability and ignore them. See how easy it is, and by the way all of the shady tactics I just listed are part of the government’s calculation. There are 23 million unemployed people in this country today. The only way that the unemployment rate could be 6.7% is if there are 343 Million people in the workforce. More than the number of people in the entire country! The real unemployment rate is closer to 18% and that is why we don’t have an honest debate about unemployment and I maintain that the 6.7% number is meaningless.

40,000 new regulations went into effect on 1/1/2014 regulating the ability of people and businesses to participate in the free market. Many of the new regulations come to us from the EPA and are crafted to, among other things, put the fossil fuel industry out of business. The administration is pushing congress to add 13 million illegal aliens into the workforce competing for our jobs. The same administration is pushing to double the minimum wage. The country is in the middle of an unemployment crisis and every proposal coming out of the White House has been shown though history to hurt business and employment. The citizen in me asks why does the government do this?

The “affordable care act” includes substantial penalties for any business of 50 or more employees that does not provide approved health insurance for its employees. Legislating huge added costs on any business is harmful but doing so in a struggling economy is going to make some businesses fail. Businesses that can cut employment to fall below the line will tend to do so while other companies will tend not to hire for the same reason. These are job killing provisions. The government identifies companies that sell goods and services on the international market as beneficial for the trade deficit. Ironically these same companies are penalized more than those in the domestic market because foreign companies are not burdened by the added costs imposed by “Obamacare”. The effect of the new healthcare law from every aspect is harmful to employment except in its requirement for new IRS enforcement personnel.

It is hard to see how our elected officials can improve the employment problem when they clearly don’t understand what drives job creation. The engine of the U.S. economy is small business and its job creation. The first step we should take for a real economic recovery is the repeal of Obamacare followed immediately by elimination of the minimum wage. The free market determines the correct wage rate for every job though competition. The federal tax rate for corporate income should be zero just as it is in the countries whose businesses undercut American companies in the market place. All income is subject to personal tax as it is. Double taxing through corporate tax reduces the capital available for growth.

 The disincentive to employment of endlessly paying people not to work with government compensation checks must stop. The old adage that says if you want more of something, subsidize it. We are subsidizing unemployment and we are living with an ever increasing population of the unemployed.

Welfare benefits in 33 states now pay more than a full time job at minimum the wage. Thirteen states pay welfare benefits that exceed the newly proposed $15/ hour minimum wage. The benefits are claimed, by the government, to be means-tested but in effect are an open ended entitlement.

If the government could be convinced to get out of the way our capitalistic free market would grow the economy and solve the unemployment problem. Sadly, every good progressive and socialist believes in the free market as long as it is properly regulated. Therein lies the problem with socialists, they all want to control the market so that they can force the country into the social engineering flavor of the month. This year that flavor is low cost healthcare for all, that also just happens to be killing jobs and eliminating health care coverage for ten times as many people as it covers. The new law was sold to the press as necessary to provide coverage for 30 million uninsured Americans. The problem is that about 80% of those people were uninsured by choice and are not signing up for the new coverage. The 20% that wanted coverage and couldn’t afford it is 6 million people. If the government really wanted to provide health insurance for these people they could have bought it on the open market for about a billion dollars a month. This is less than the cost of the new IRS agents and the administrative staff required for the new law. Just think, they could have left the health insurance alone that 80% of Americans liked and solved the problem. The cost of the failed web site alone would have paid for the first month. Without even touching on the questionable constitutionality of the ACA it is easy to show that it is bad for jobs and the country. The citizen in me asks why we elect these progressive tyrants. They will not stop unless we fire them or they destroy the greatest country on earth.

                REGULATION TIME BOMB, CAN YOU SAY CRA

 

People who know me well are aware that I expound at length sometimes about the destructive effects of over regulation on the economy. The pervasive intrusion of the world’s manufacturers into the U. S. market place multiplies the damage done to American businesses by our tax and regulatory burden. The products of our businesses must be competitive in the free market or the businesses will fail! To illustrate my point consider the 5.4 Billion hours each year that Americans spend complying with the tax code. The cost of this time, even at the minimum wage, is $39.15 Billion dollars a year not counting the cost of the taxes themselves. The federal bureaucracy pumped out 80,000 pages of new regulations in 2013 alone. Laws are passed by the legislative branch of government and submitted to the President for signing into law. Once signed the laws are turned over to one of the departments of the federal government’s leviathan bureaucracy to write the enacting regulations. The cost of complying with and proving compliance with these regulations is a cost that our international competitors don’t have. Allow me to illustrate my point using one law from the 1970s.

In 1977 President Carter signed into law an innocuous piece of legislation called the “Community Reinvestment Act” (CRA). The purpose of the legislation was to encourage banks to lend in their local communities and thereby stimulate local economies. Administrations change and with them the emphasis that is placed on enforcement of existing laws. Regulators started holding banks accountable for CRA compliant lending quotas in the mid 1990s under the Clinton administration. The move put pressure on lenders in low income areas to increase loans with relaxed lending standards so that they could meet the quotas. Interest rates were high enough at that time to discourage a wave of refinance even with the lower standards. Regulators again on Clinton’s watch threatened to make mortgage companies, who weren’t governed by the law, comply with the CRA. The threat got mortgage companies to behave as if they were regulated by the law extending its effect. Regulators pushed by the G.W. Bush administration next favored low to no down payments loans when evaluating a banks compliance with the CRA. During the Bush administration banks were informed that all lending standards that exceeded CRA standards risked being seen as evidence of unfair lending. In regulator speak that is big time arm twisting to make banks lower all of their lending standards. Bankers couldn’t object to the arm twisting publicly without appearing to resist an important piece of civil rights legislation. Automated underwriting of loans was thrown about, in the most pejorative way, during congressional hearings as evidence of bad practice or even predatory lending. John Carney in his excellent article in Business Insider, 6-27-09, put it this way. “Those not employing automated underwriting would be putting their CRA rating at risk. Automated underwriting was seen as a way of eliminating bias in lending.” Banks felt safe making the loans as home prices kept rising improving collateralization at the same time Fannie and Freddie offered to buy $2 trillion worth of “affordable mortgages” from primary lenders. CRA loans did not have higher default rates than other loans increasing the banks sense of security. Banks that did not meet CRA volume guidelines could still qualify by buying Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) based on CRAs. The pernicious evolution of regulations aimed at social engineering in the home ownership market across multiple administrations combined to build a bubble that burst in the autumn of 2008.

Over and over again with the predictability of the sun setting, politicians and bureaucrats place artificial constraints on a free market and end up causing the market to collapse. A trillion dollar TARP bail out for banks and a worldwide recession costing countless jobs and business failures came about courtesy of unelected bureaucratic regulators who never suffered repercussions. Today banking regulators are once again encouraging sub-prime home mortgages while the FED is pumping Billions of dollars a day into the economy building the next securities bubble on Wall Street. Meanwhile Congress fails to pass a single constitutionally mandated budget for five straight years and continues deficit spending at record levels. The new healthcare law is in the process of crippling 1/6 of the economy while, for some strange reason throwing 13 million illegal aliens into the legal workforce with a path to citizenship is the priority for Congress. The President with executive orders and EPA regulations is in the process of doing to the coal industry what over-regulation did to Americas steel mills.

Coming full circle I struggle to understand the madness of our own government taxing and regulating manufacturers until they can’t compete in the marketplace with foreign goods, all the while pontificating about jobs being their number one priority. I have personally run a manufacturing business for thirty one years and lived with endlessly increasing regulation and its compliance paperwork. It is time to vote for Congressmen with business experience so that they understand the necessity of reducing government interference in our free market.

 

                   GLOBAL WARMING ,IS CO2 THE VILLAIN

 

In 1975 a PhD. in atmospheric science and climate specialist for NASA gave a guest lecture at the university where I was an undergraduate. His discussion on the subject, one analogy in particular has stayed with me all these years. He painted a mental image for us of a 10,000 seat football stadium where the seats represented the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. He said before you get too concerned about CO2, realize that only three of those seats would be CO2 by volume. If instead we consider the greenhouse gases by their effective contribution and not volume then he said the CO2 would only occupy one seat. Virtually all of the seats in that stadium would represent water vapor.

The scientific and pseudo scientific community publish articles citing empirical data from one study or another to add gravity to the argument they are making. A careful reading of the way that the data is presented in each paper is usually instructive. Take for instance the papers that state 99.4% of the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere is CO2. This statement is true if you ignore the contribution of water vapor. No less authority than the U.S. Department of Energy published a chart in October of 2000 showing that 99.438% of the greenhouse gas is CO2. Of the 368,400 parts per billion (PPB) CO2 in the atmosphere they could only credit 11.880 PPB to be manmade additions. The rest of the CO2 existed before mankind started burning fossil fuels or got there through natural activity such as volcanic eruptions. 3.2% of the total atmospheric CO2 is all they could blame on mankind through our entire history but more importantly the chart states that the figures do not include water vapor. You see this exception over and over in the literature because it helps to color the narrative showing CO2 as a bad actor. If you include water vapor in the study CO2 only contributes 3.62% to the greenhouse effect. So 3.2% (mans contribution) of 3.62% of the total greenhouse effect can fairly be blamed on mankind burning fossil fuels. One tenth of one percent (0.001) is the fault of man. Another piece of empirical data used over and over states quite accurately that throughout history the periods of highest average climate temperatures are also the times when the CO2 levels were the highest. The question of cause or effect is pertinent here. Is the climate average temperature high because of the elevated CO2 level or is the CO2 level elevated because of the high temperatures? Look up a graph for yourself that plots the earth’s temperature over time including a plot of CO2 levels. I can save you some time, the temperature rise pre-dates the increase in CO2 levels consistently by about 1000 years. It does seem that increased temperature causes the elevated CO2 levels and not the opposite, at the very least we can deduce that the CO2 could not have caused any temperature rise which proceeded it by many years.

 In April of 2012 forty nine former scientists, engineers and astronauts from NASA sent a joint letter to the current NASA administrator. The letter objected to NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies extreme advocacy of the theory that CO2 is causing global warming. The scientists included these points.

1)      “The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”

2)      “We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated.”

3)      “We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and web sites on this subject.”

So if the CO2 isn’t a major contributor to the heating up the planet what is? Sampling of the ice cores shows that the earth has undergone cycles of warming every 100,000 years. A study of the earth’s orbital dynamics (spending more time closer to the sun) explains the variation including the 100,000 year frequency of ice ages. The time line of 100,000 year cycles shows that we are due for a warming trend. Random variations tend to coincide with volcanic eruptions that put ash in the atmosphere or the level of solar activity.

It seems imprudent to take drastic measures aimed at reducing CO2 emissions when their impact is virtually negligible on the environment. Remember that if mankind had never burned any fossil fuel the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would only be lower by 0.1%. The financial impact on industry and the economy on the other hand is anything but negligible. It is left to us to investigate what motivates the “climate change” alarmists who slant the scientific data in their effort to foment a crisis. Could it be that the lure of nearly unlimited research grants and speaking fees are having a corrupting influence on some who are so inclined?

                        THE ENGINEER IN ME ASKS WHY III?

In 1974 the Congress of the United States decided to force automobile manufacturers to increase the corporate average fuel economy (café) of the vehicles they sell. Automobile engineers from all parts of the industry voiced their concerns about the negative consequences of such regulations. Lobbyists argued that it was a matter of national security and that we had to reduce our dependence on foreign oil as well as benefit the environment by burning less gasoline. The only real avenue available for engineers to increase mileage was decreasing the weight of the vehicles. The unintended consequence of making vehicles lighter was an increase in fatalities/accident. The other correct prediction by the auto companies was that people would not and in fact did not reduce their consumption of oil. People drove more miles and U.S. fuel consumption remained constant. The automakers safety engineers predicted the increase in miles driven and as miles / accident tends to be a constant a proportional increase in accidents occurred. Fatalities attributed to the café standards jumped by 3900 deaths in 1975.  A government sponsored study evaluating the effectiveness of café standards at reducing fuel consumption concluded that the program failed to produce any reduction in fuel consumption. The program failed so the bureaucratic regulatory machine doubled down on the failed program and increased the average mileage requirement again. In fact the café mileage requirement increased every year but one until 1990. The results continued to show the program failing to reduce fuel consumption while increasing fatalities, so the engineer in me asks why didn’t the regulators learn that it did not work and, in fact, caused the loss of tens of thousands of lives. Some sanity in the application of café standards prevailed for the next thirteen years as no changes were imposed through 2003.

It is unfortunate that legislators and regulatory bureaucrats are often so sure of their ideology that the facts are ignored. I have discussed this issue with liberal nontechnical friends and they all state and believe unequivocally, that higher mileage cars reduce our oil consumption and help the environment. No amount of empirical evidence has any effect on their convictions. The United States leads the world in engineering and technology but if real world facts disagree with the progressive agenda of the politicians and leftwing media we throw good money after bad and more lives are lost. The engineer in me asks why the current administration uses junk science and refuses to learn from the past as they implement new café standards requiring 54.5 average miles per gallon by 2025? Keep in mind, as well that even most motorcycles are too heavy to meet this standard. The latest auto industry study on fatal accidents finds that you are five times as likely to die if your average small car collides with a 3500 lb SUV and nine times as likely to die if the SUV weighs 5000 lb. The current administration estimates that higher mileage cars sold under the new standard will be driven the same number of miles as their lower mileage trade-ins. Every study to date shows that the miles driven grows with higher mileage vehicles offsetting any fuel savings. Based on their faulty logic the administration predicts a reduction of 1.8 billion barrels of oil usage equaling 900 million metric tons less green house gas.  The idiocy of the decision is mind boggling but sadly about what we have come to expect from ideology driven politicians with no business experience and no technical training to draw on while making decisions. The real tragedy is that the same politicians will pontificate about the great new mileage they have forced the greedy automakers into and will never be held accountable for the associated loss of life.

The engineer in me asks why our politicians are so blind? Could it be that the hundreds of millions of dollars in fines collected annually from auto makers for failing to comply with café standards is the goal? In 2010 the average fine for every car sale was $122 amounting to a windfall profit for the government. Is it possible that the mileage target is intended to be impossible to attain?

I have spoken of a similar regulatory ignorance in an earlier essay about diesel engine emissions. Regulations currently in effect require emissions from diesel engines that no manufacturer can meet. The EPA was forced to postpone the implementation of the new standards or stop the sale of all diesel powered equipment. Trying to change the physical world by writing regulations is stupid but also beyond the comprehension of the majority of our lawmakers. You might just as well make a regulation outlawing heart attacks and claim to have saved lives or mandate that all women’s fashions be sold exclusively in size two to combat obesity.

            THE ENGINEER IN ME ASKS “WHY?”

Do you remember the teamsters’ union commercials saying “if you got it a truck brought it”? This is a true statement. It is also true that the trucks, trains, ships, and planes that brought it to you burned diesel fuel.

I submit that the one thing mankind has created which most improved the human condition is the diesel engine. Think for a moment about how many thousands of people a single farmer can feed using a tractor compared to working with a team of horses. Once man learned to make steam engines to do our work we quickly moved on to internal combustion engines. Fossil fuels burned in power plants make most of the electricity we all depend on. Today armed with regulations, taxes and lawsuits environmental zealots both inside and outside of the government are waging war on every industry in America. Claiming the moral high ground of a “cleaner environment” they seek to eliminate manufacturing and transportation. The engineer in me asks why?

Do you remember when the villain was acid rain? Some very smart chemists and engineers figured out how to scrub the sulfur out of fuels and emissions eliminating the majority of the sulfuric acid. Lead in the fuel was toxic so we developed unleaded fuels to solve the problem. Now we are hammered in the news media that carbon dioxide is the villain “greenhouse gas”. If you bother to look it up you will learn that only one tenth of one percent of the “greenhouse” effect is caused by CO2. The fact is that the vast majority of the greenhouse gas in our atmosphere is water vapor. Given that the negative effects of CO2 in the atmosphere are so insignificant why does it get all the play in the media? The engineer in me asks why.

I believe that it is precisely because there is no way to burn fossil fuel without making CO2 that it is such a perfect weapon for environmental zealots in their war on industry. Demonize CO2 and the fossil fuels that produce it and you have a tool to take control. Regulations put in place by the EPA exist today that mandate emissions standards that no engine manufacturer can meet. The agency has to keep extending the deadline for compliance or no diesel powered machines could be built. The newest engines fail to meet the emissions criteria and cost twice as much but this does not stop the crusade. In our society it is somehow viewed as noble to be against things even without offering an alternative. Oh but what of wind and solar power you ask. In the real world alternatives must stand up to a practicality test. That farm tractor is just not practical without its internal combustion engine.

We regulated our steel mills out of existence. Our leather is tanned in other countries. Goods of all kinds are made off shore and imported at the expense of American jobs. We were the industrial pioneers who taught the world how to make almost everything we use. Now owls are used to stop logging and fish cause us to remove dams. The next thing you know the anti-everything perpetual opposition crowd will be telling us that fracking technology is bad. Oh wait, they already are trying to stop fracking.

The engineer in me asks why we allow a small hand full of people with no practical solutions to destroy our way of life. These same people who would not accept being denied the products produced by the very technologies they condemn. Why do we accept a media that demonize the profit made by oil companies while ignoring that the government makes many times as much profit from oil related taxes? If we let the anti-everything crowd win then who will get to decide which people make up the 7/8 of the world’s population that must freeze to death or starve. Technology has elevated us from the horse and buggy to the space age. I have designed and installed industrial plants all over the world and seen the improvement in living conditions technology produces first hand. Only here at home have I experienced this animosity. The engineer in me asks “why”?

                   THE TAXPAYER IN ME ASKS WHY

The U. S. Government printing office says that for the price of $967 they will print and ship title 26 to you post paid. The average citizen knows title 26 as the 16,845 pages of the internal revenue code. The federal government also estimates that American citizens spend 5.4 billion hours each year trying to comply with title 26 and its 721 unique forms. The federal government mandates a minimum wage of $7.25/hour must be paid to the people who work for a business. 5.4 billion hours of work each year at the minimum wage rate says that the government is using at least $39.15 billion dollars worth of our time without compensation. The average federal income tax paid by a U.S. taxpayer is less than 10%. The taxpayer in me asks why we have an income tax rate above 39%.

My arithmetic shows that if every person earning income in the United States paid an 11% flat tax the government could pay all of its bills, pay the interest on the national debt and have money left over to reduce the debt. The opponents of the flat tax wail about the unfairness of a flat tax without all of the carefully constructed tax rules and progressive tax rates crafted to redistribute wealth. If a flat tax is applied with no deductions or exemptions the title 26 tax code would fit on the top half of one page. We would not need to calculate our tax return or worry about keeping records and receipts. There would be no opportunity for billionaires to exempt income and end up paying no taxes.  Person “A”, that earned ten times as much income as person ”B”, would pay ten times as much in taxes. The taxpayer in me asks why we put up with spending 5.4 billion hours a year complying with a tax code that isn’t fair to the citizens in any way. I have spent my entire working life finding solutions to problems so that my customers can save money making their products while making a profit. It appears to me that the only reasonable course to take is to simplify the tax code and save the time and money. The taxpayer in me asks why we don’t do this.

History shows that we as a country have never followed such an obvious course so maybe the people making the decisions are not trying to solve this problem for the American people. Is it possible that the people in Washington D.C. who sell their influence and the rest of the people in Washington D.C. that are buying that influence don’t want to solve the problem? Senators and Representatives often talk about simplifying the tax code but it never happens. The very complexity of the tax code creates an enormous opportunity for special interest lobbyists in Washington. Given the large campaign war chests amassed by incumbents from special interest lobbyists and the companies they represent I think that we can correctly surmise why the tax code exists as it does. I submit that if we look at what our elected officials do instead of listening to what they say we may find the answer. Most tax payers do not even know that when the sixteenth amendment to the constitution was passed to allow the collection of federal income tax it was capped at 7%. That is correct, the Constitution was amended to allow tax collection, the original Constitution forbade the collection of such a tax by the federal government. How is it possible that we have the current mess of a tax system given the original wording of the law? The tax payer in me asks who is profiting from this terrible system. Maybe we should consider whether electing trial lawyers and career politicians to congress to solve the country’s problems is the wrong approach. Should we substitute professionals at problem solving for our current crop of ineffective legislators and executives? We might try people like doctors, military commanders, engineers and fire fighters. All of these professions have one thing in common, they must solve problems or they lose their jobs. Doctors that can’t help their patients soon don’t have any. Fire fighters that can’t put a fire out soon need to learn how to do another job etc. It also might be a good idea to eliminate campaign contributions from business and labor unions. If campaigns were funded solely by individuals and then capped to a small enough amount so that no one could buy influence we might again have government by “we the people”. Unfortunately relying on career politicians to reform the tax code or campaign financing is like asking the fox to guard the hen house. The taxpayer in me asks why we put up with all of the corruption in D.C.

WE CAN HAVE A DEBATE ABOUT ALL THINGS IF FIRST WE HAVE JOBS

 

A PLAN TO SAVE AMERICAN INDUSTRY AND JOBS

The earliest written history of mankind, even the most primitive cave paintings, became possible only once we learned how to create for ourselves one essential tool. A tool without which there would be no music, no mathematics or science, no books or theater, this one thing made all of what we call civilization possible.

People as individuals and later in groups spent their entire waking existence supplying their need for food, clothing and shelter. Hunting and gathering slowly gave way to a stationary existence of cultivating the soil and domesticating animals in a relentless pursuit of just one thing. We as a species became industrious enough to supply our needs and have some time left over to ponder the world around us.

For the next 5000 years we learned how to increase the amount of free time we had compared to the time spent supplying our basic needs. Some of the techniques that mankind devised, we revile today as barbaric. The great advances in mathematics, construction, art, music and theater in the cultures of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Chinese were possible in large part because they used slave labor to supply their needs. The industrial revolution was a short 80 year time span beginning in 1760 that changed everything for mankind. We went from cultivating the soil using trained beasts and traveling around on wind driven ships to doing our work with steam and internal combustion engines. We learned to enslave machines to do our work instead of other humans. Slavery did not go away because mankind suddenly grew a conscience, machines made slavery obsolete and it was discarded. Women no longer used a spinning wheel and loom to make textiles. Canning, refrigeration and chemical preservatives allowed us to store our food. Medical advancements began to extend our lives. We even found ever more efficient ways to kill each other in war.

Wars have always spurred intense periods of innovation. Something happens when the collective will of a society is focused on a single goal that has never been matched in a time of peace and plenty. Once the goal is in sight, voices of opposition from within a society are paid no heed.

The industrial revolution and the industries it spawned along with our ever greater life spans have freed up our time as never before. Some people use their free time industrially to build and create. Some people use their free time to do drugs, play video games and fill out applications for government assistance. Others spent their time and energies in perpetual opposition. These people seek to control others by claiming some moral high ground as justification while blocking others from earning or keeping the fruits of their labor.

Some in our society view the Constitution as nothing but an outdated charter of negative values that blocks the government from fulfilling its great promise. These same people work for generations to erode the protections in the Constitution so that they can regulate society to their own design. The eighty thousand pages of regulations promulgated last year are just the latest infringements by these people on the constitutionally guaranteed civil rights of Americans.

WHAT IS THE KEY TO UNLOCKING THE INDUSTRY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AGAIN

Just as if we were fighting a war, the American people need to take no heed to the voices of perpetual opposition. Without silencing those voices we need to put every regulation, rule and law that they have forced on America to a simple test. Does it promote or hinder the industry of America’s citizens?              I submit that there is nothing about January first 2014 that requires 80,000 more pages of regulation than we needed on January first of 2013.

If a tax on American industry reduces its ability to compete against foreign industry the tax must be eliminated. If a law or its regulations force or even just induce American jobs to go overseas we must find a way to preserve the intent of the regulation without the unintended destruction of our jobs.

We taught the world how to make steel with a blast furnace and then virtually regulated the steel industry out of America. We still use steel but it is largely bought from foreign countries. It is hard to buy a John Deere tractor made in this country. Regulations and labor laws make it almost impossible for large scale manufacturing in this country and insanely we have done this to ourselves. Law suits, regulations and taxes hurt our ability to compete while less expensive products from foreign manufacturing flood our free market. Other countries place import duties on our goods while we shackle ourselves with ever more regulations creating a giant wall between us and prosperity. It is time for the industrious American spirit to rise up and stop the cancer of bureaucracy from destroying the nation. The culture of opposition must be replaced by our traditional American “can do” attitude.

The conservative message needs to be that we will have the debate with liberals about abortion, global warming, income inequality, and every other one of their cherished causes but first let us get America back to work! The country does not need a government program to create jobs, industry will take care of that if we can just get the self imposed obstacles out of the way. Insurmountable regulation is the plague of our time.

WHEN DOES THE SOCIAL SAFETY NET BECOME A HAMMOCK?

 

When the war on poverty began in 1965 President Johnson laid out the goal of the program to be the “elimination of the cycle of dependence” and its perpetuation of a permanent poverty class of Americans. The slogan of the program was “a hand up not a handout”. The 77 welfare programs have morphed from such noble beginnings to the leviathan it is today consuming over a trillion dollars annually and doing so at an accelerating pace.

Mean-tested welfare is the fastest growing component of the federal budget. Note that means-tested excludes Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is second fastest growing part of the means-tested welfare. The idea of means-testing a person prior to granting benefits is meant to prohibit fraudulent claims and to withdraw benefits once a person is again able to take care of themselves. This notion of means-testing is why most states administer their food stamp (SNAP) programs in the same departments that administer the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. For purposes of our discussion I would like to call particular attention to the word temporary in the acronym. These programs are intended to help individuals and families temporarily and then sunset the benefits once they get back on their feet. The problem with the whole concept is that virtually no ongoing means-testing occurs and that Welfare benefits including (SNAP) now exceed minimum wages for a full time job in 33 states. 13 states already pay benefits in excess of the proposed new minimum wage of $15/hour. The pre-tax welfare “salary” in some states exceeds $60,000/year. In 2000 the Clinton administration changed the eligibility rules to include “broad based categorical eligibility”. To understand the shift you must first understand that most people can qualify in one way or another under categorical eligibility rules for non-cash aid. The new broad based categorical eligibility allowed states to grant cash benefits like food stamps to anyone that qualified for non-cash benefits. This almost complete lack of real mean-testing initially and no follow-up means-testing combine to grow the program and eliminates any sun-setting of benefits.

Cash and non-cash benefits from the 77 welfare programs are now so lucrative that they provide a significant disincentive to working for a living. The program’s goal that SNAP is to be a program of temporary aid is defeated by the failure of the regulatory agencies to run it as a work activated program. Non-elderly, able-bodied adults that receive benefits should be required to work, be looking for work or be learning work skills. According to a 2010 study by the Heritage Foundation 18.8 million households or roughly 1/5 of U.S. households received food stamp benefits. 10.5 million households that received benefits contained at least one non-elderly able-bodied adult. In 5.5 million of these households with non-elderly able-bodied adults the adults performed zero work.

The average length of time that a person receives temporary benefits is now almost nine years. The number, bad as it is, does not indicate the real depth of the problem. Children who grow up and apply for their own benefits stop appearing as a long term receiver of benefits and look to the system as a new entrant. Sadly living off of welfare benefits has become a generational way of life for many people. The fear of many of the programs proponents is that any attempt at reforms like sun-setting of benefits or work activation will only hurt the real needy families and miss the fraudulent beneficiaries.

There are about 4 million native born children of illegal aliens living in the U.S. These children are eligible and when their parents apply for aid under the SNAP program the benefits are granted without any repercussions to the illegal alien parents. Unless the proof is required by administrators that the parents are living in this country legally the EBT cards should be denied. The program has built in a huge incentive for expectant mothers to illegally enter the country to obtain welfare benefits.

Reforms passed in such a way that the country still provides a safety net for the needy must be enacted to unburden the economy from the downward drag of the hammock dwellers living off of the largess of the U.S. taxpayer.

                                  ETHANOL IN GASOLINE?

 

In the process of becoming a mechanical engineer I was required to take a course called “fuels and lubricants”. I know that you are probably thinking that a course with a title like that must have been fun and exciting, right. For the record it was neither but I did learn things that have been useful to me for thirty five years in my career. I can read a report by the EPA, American Petroleum Institute or the ethanol producers association and understand when actual science is being used to explain an issue and when it is being used to cloud the issue.

THE MILEAGE/FUEL EFFICIENCY DEBATE

The idea of biofuels is not new, Rudolf Diesel invented his engine in 1894 in part to allow farmers to burn biodiesel that they could make themselves. Fords first cars were alcohol fueled before turning to the cheap and available gasoline. The principle argument that was made in favor of adding ethanol to gasoline before the Congress mandated it in 2007 was that it would reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Chemical giant Archer Daniel Midland lobbied in favor of the mandate and congressional members from corn growing states pushed for passage of the mandate. Here however science gets in the way of their argument. Ethanol only produces 2/3 of the energy per gallon that regular gasoline does. Cars operated on 10% ethanol blended fuel get 13% fewer miles per gallon. The darned arithmetic just doesn’t work out. You cannot come out ahead by saving 10% when it costs you 13% more fuel to go the same distance. Compounding the problem for the folks preaching the energy savings is that it takes a lot of energy to make a gallon of ethanol. The energy available in the average gallon of ethanol is 76,330 BTU while the total energy required to produce it is 81,090 BTU. Again the darned math just doesn’t work out in favor of putting ethanol in our fuel.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEBATE

The argument in favor of including ethanol in automobile fuel from the environmental perspective is that ethanol produces 20% less carbon monoxide and 2% less carbon dioxide for each gallon burned than for the same volume of  gasoline. The nitrous oxide produced by burning ethanol is higher than it is for gasoline so environmentalists tend not to use it in their arguments. The statistics above showing reductions in the CO and CO2 emissions makes it sound like there is a real advantage to adding the ethanol to our fuel. The darned science gets in the way again though. If you read the top of this paragraph again note that the figures are given as amounts of pollutant/gallon. Once you take into account the extra fuel that you must burn to drive the same distance it turns out that you actually make more pollutants per mile traveled.

WHAT ABOUT OVERALL ECONOMY

The old adage about being able to learn all you need to know about something by following the money is useful in this discussion. Ethanol costs about 57 cents more per gallon than the average gasoline at the pump. The petroleum companies that refine oil for gasoline and blend the fuel we pump into our tanks have petitioned Congress to remove the Ethanol mandate stating the same arguments I have repeated above. EPA regulations enforcing the congressional mandate required fuel blenders to mix 13.8 billion gallons of ethanol with their gasoline in 2013 based on a 2005 study that predicted that this volume would yield about a 10% mix. The slow economy coupled with higher mileage vehicles have reduced the fuel consumed so much that the blenders are unable to use 13.8 billion gallons of ethanol when using a 10% mix. Newly proposed EPA regulations to requiring 15% ethanol blends have prompted auto makers to state that burning such blends will void engine warrantees. The solution for the blenders comes in the form of credits that they can buy to avoid blending fuels with the higher ethanol content. We are finally getting to the real driving force behind the regulations. Credits that cost 7 cents per gallon in January 2013 before the proposal of new blends cost over a dollar a gallon by early March once the text of the new regulations was known. Blenders are forced to add the higher cost less efficient and dirtier ethanol to our fuel and pass along the cost to consumers. It now appears likely that the cost of purchasing the credits will need to be passed along also as another hidden tax. The cost of corn for animal feed has skyrocketed, making retail food costs soar.

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS

From the engineering prospective it makes no sense to blend ethanol into our fuel. It is less efficient and because it absorbs water out of the air it cannot be stored long before it goes bad. The only reason to continue this failed program is because ethanol producers make big campaign contributions and Congressmen from corn growing states garner votes with it. The government has no incentive to stop it because it gets a windfall of money out of the credits purchased. The only thing eternal is a failed government program so it appears that this farce is going to be expanded. Is there any wonder why we have seen the price of fuel more than double in the last five years.

Before sending comments to me about how much better the efficiency numbers are once you increase the compression ratio of the engine. I know this and that the higher octane of the ethanol allows for this increase in compression ratio. The problem with this argument is that the existing engines in our cars are not built to produce the higher ratios.

 

                             THE PATRIOT IN ME ASKS WHY?

 

I think that a person should examine one’s own strongly held beliefs now and then and ask yourself why you feel so strongly that they are correct.

I was in that frame of mind last week when watching the news I heard myself described as a radical, extreme right wing conservative. The commentator used the label conservative in the most pejorative way. In his view people that self identify with the TEA PARTY pose as big or bigger threat to our country than al-Queda. I found the patriot in me asking why anyone could hold this view. Imagine my surprise when I learned that my belief in the 2^nd amendment right to keep and bear arms branded me as one who condones gun violence. Apparently my belief that all human life is sacred also shows that I hold a deep seated hatred of women. His narrative moved on to equate my conservatism with being a racist, homophobic and virtually cult-like in my irrational devotion to the constitution. Asking rhetorically he said “Just think how great America could be if we weren’t anchored down by a moldy 18^th century document that limits the government from doing most of the good things that need to be done.” My first thought upon hearing his question was that this person with a microphone in front of the camera had no idea what was in the constitution. You see I know that the constitution is silent on the question of whether a woman has the right to abort a pregnancy, not one word. What the constitution does say in a very general way is that the federal government does not have the right to tell her she can’t do it or most other things as they are reserved to be the rights of individual citizens or to the states. His final condemnation of me as a conservative came as the proclamation that my resistance to granting amnesty to illegal aliens is because I hate poor people and most of all colored poor people.

Way back in high school I learned that one effective debating technique when defending a weak position is to assign reprehensible motives to the other person and then attack him for holding those beliefs. I know that I am not a racist and I do not care what gay people do in private but he tarred me with both brushes as well as hating women and the poor to further his argument. Taxed Enough Already is the common thread that unites the TEA PARTY. I have never met a self identified TEA PARTY member or conservative that holds the beliefs he says we all hold.

In one of the commentator’s rants he stated that because the constitution says that blacks are only 3/5 human we clingers are obviously racist. I would like to respond to this charge of all his misguided judgments in particular. First, the constitution counts all free people except Indians as a whole person for the sole purpose of determining how many representatives would serve in the House of Representatives. Second, slavery was a divisive issue at the time the constitution was ratified and the framers believed that outlawing the practice would prevent the states where slaveholding was common from voting to ratify. Third, all other persons, not free or Indian, were assigned as 3/5 of a whole person so that the slaveholding states would not enjoy a dominance of numbers in the legislature. It was in fact built into the constitution as a way of eliminating slavery and at the same time guaranteeing that once freed all free people count as a whole person. I would suggest that anyone who doubts my assertions read the constitution for themselves and follow up with a reading of the federalist papers to gain an understanding of the framers motives.

The constitution is a charter of negative rights that seeks to limit the power of the federal government. It grants very specific and limited power to the federal government and through the tenth amendment in the bill of rights reserves to “we the people” control of our own lives through our local government.

The patriot in me asks why it is so hard for progressives to just leave the citizens of this country alone to live our lives as we choose. Stop telling me that I can’t drink a big sugary soda or that I can’t petition my government to quit infringing on my constitutional rights. I am a conservative and I believe that all people including Indians are equal. I believe in the rule of law and that the government that governs best governs least.

 

 

                         THE CITIZEN IN ME ASKS WHAT HAPPENED?

 

The tenth amendment in the bill of rights states “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.” The constitution divides the power to govern between the State and Federal government with these words. The citizen in me asks what happened?

Progressive politicians since Woodrow Wilson have been working nonstop to erode the effect of the tenth amendment. The constitution as ratified including the bill of rights had protection for individuals from overreach by their government in the form of the judiciary system. In addition to this the people were granted the sole right to elect representatives to the federal house of representatives for a term of two years. The framers of the constitution sought to protect the rights of the individual states within the articles but also by giving control of the senate to the state legislatures. Senators were not originally elected to the U.S. senate by a vote of the people. The two senators from each state served at the pleasure of the state legislatures and were tasked with representing them. The constitution limited the power of the federal government in another way by limiting it’s ability to collect money from citizens by taxation. The first imposition of an income tax by the legislature during the Wilson administration was struck down by the supreme court as unconstitutional. Proponents of an all powerful central government refused to be limited by this and worked successfully to pass the sixteenth amendment allowing for the collection of a federal income tax of up to 7%. Noting that income tax rates have varied ever since to levels as high as 90% the citizen in me asks what happened to our constitutional protections?

The framers had lived under the tyranny of the British monarchy and feared centralized power which is why the U.S. Constitution is primarily written to limit federal government power. Critics of this structure point to the countries founding document as outdated and in need of modernization. The commerce clause and the wording about providing for the common good have been so extended in meaning over the years that the original limitations on the power of the federal government are all but lost. For example; The department of education, the department of environmental protection, the department of the interior and the department of energy are unconstitutional at the federal level and all such authority is reserved to the states. Generation after generation of citizens have gone about their lives confident in their inalienable rights without realizing the slow and constant erosion of those rights by the progressive movement. People so self important and confident in their own ability to see the proper course for our lives that they draw more and more power to themselves. The progressive movement spearheaded by Woodrow Wilson created the federal reserve. Its charter states that it’s primary function is to provide a currency and maintain a stable value of that currency. The federal reserve is not a federal agency, it is made up of private banks without congressional oversight. I submit that the federal reserve is an utter failure at maintaining the value of our currency as a dollar today has been deflated in value to such an extent that it will only purchase 6% of what it would when the fed was formed. Printing money and pushing it into the economy devalues all of the money in circulation just as the policy of economic easing is doing today. The citizen in me asks how can this happen?

My opinion on this is simple to explain. We allow our politicians to spend more money than the internal revenue service collects and we further allow them to spend this borrowed money extravagantly in their home districts. This practice all but insures their reelection and also insures that the country spirals into debt. Self centered politicians won’t quit using the treasury to buy votes so the only way to maintain the graft is by devaluing the currency so that tax payers constantly pay larger and larger sums to pay off the debt. The appetite of politician’s for ever increasing budgets has exceeded even this vast resource and plunged the country into enormous debt.

In light of the disastrous federal takeover of the healthcare system the citizen in me asks how can this happen when we are supposed to be protected by our constitution? Is it possible that the poison pill built into our constitution by the framers in the form of an article 5 convention is needed to force the centralized government progressives in congress to live by the constitution they swore in their oath to uphold?