elpasospeak

There are several legal challenges still in the court system relating to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as ObamaCare).

I do not understand why I have not read anything about the most basic of challenges that could be made.

The United States Constitution in Article One, Section 7  says “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills”.

The bill creates several new taxes and raises existing ones.  That is raising revenue.

The pages below are the first two pages of the Act as printed by the Government Printing Office:

firstpage

secondpage

As disgusting as it was, what you saw was a bill from the House of Representative (H.R. 3590) entitled “An Act to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes”.

The bill was passed by the House and sent to the Senate.  The Senate never passed it.  Instead the Senate wrote an “amendment”.  It was “Strike out all after the enacting clause and insert“.  That was followed by 2,407 pages of the health care bill.

The bill did not originate in the House of Representatives.  You might recall that the Senate wrote the bill in it’s entirety and sent it over to the House for passage.  They even recognize their Constitutional difficulty by trying to amend the old bill.  They knew they could not write their own, new bill.

If the writers of the Constitution wanted the Senate to be able to originate revenue actions, the sentence “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills” would not have been written.

The Senate originated the revenue raising bill.  This cannot be denied.

There was a reason that the power to raise revenue was given solely to the House of Representatives, but our congress has chosen to ignore the supreme law of the land.

Both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in this sham.  If they do not like that provision of the Constitution they should follow one of the procedures in Article Five that allow for it to be amended.  If we have no rules, what rules are we to follow?

What they have done is to violate their oaths as well as the law.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

There are several legal challenges still in the court system relating to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as ObamaCare).

I do not understand why I have not read anything about the most basic of challenges that could be made.

The United States Constitution in Article One, Section 7  says “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills”.

The bill creates several new taxes and raises existing ones.  That is raising revenue.

The pages below are the first two pages of the Act as printed by the Government Printing Office:

firstpage

secondpage

As disgusting as it was, what you saw was a bill from the House of Representative (H.R. 3590) entitled “An Act to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes”.

The bill was passed by the House and sent to the Senate.  The Senate never passed it.  Instead the Senate wrote an “amendment”.  It was “Strike out all after the enacting clause and insert“.  That was followed by 2,407 pages of the health care bill.

The bill did not originate in the House of Representatives.  You might recall that the Senate wrote the bill in it’s entirety and sent it over to the House for passage.  They even recognize their Constitutional difficulty by trying to amend the old bill.  They knew they could not write their own, new bill.

If the writers of the Constitution wanted the Senate to be able to originate revenue actions, the sentence “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills” would not have been written.

The Senate originated the revenue raising bill.  This cannot be denied.

There was a reason that the power to raise revenue was given solely to the House of Representatives, but our congress has chosen to ignore the supreme law of the land.

Both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in this sham.  If they do not like that provision of the Constitution they should follow one of the procedures in Article Five that allow for it to be amended.  If we have no rules, what rules are we to follow?

What they have done is to violate their oaths as well as the law.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Let’s talk about the Social Security Trust Fund.

By law those of us in the system must pay 6.2% of our paycheck up to $110,100.  Our employer must pay an additional 6.2%.  Congress reduced the employee portion to 4.2% as part of the financial “recovery” effort.  The 2% reduction is scheduled to be terminated on January 1, 2013 and we will be back to 6.2%.

The money gets deposited primarily into two accounts–one for retirement and the other for disability.  The law calls these “Trust” Funds.

Most of us think of a bank or financial institution when we think of a trust.  Indeed the people at Oxford Dictionaries define trust as ” an arrangement whereby a person (a trustee) holds property as its nominal owner for the good of one or more beneficiaries”.  The word “holds” says a lot — we do not expect our trustee to spend or sell our property and then pay us off when we want our value — we expect the trustee to hold our money.

Sadly, the use of the word trust here is a deception.  The law allows the United States  government to borrow money from the funds with the promise that they will pay it back when the funds need money.  Right now more money comes into the funds than gets spent on benefits.  The remaining money we deposit gets spent right away by the government.   At the end of 2011 the government had borrowed about $2.7 trillion dollars of our money with the promise (“the full faith and credit” of our government) to pay us back.

Sure, and the check is in the mail.  They have already spent the $2.7 trillion dollars.  There are only a few ways that the money can be recovered:

• Increase the number of payers and/or the amount that they pay.  This is a Ponzi scheme that requires younger people to pay for older ones.
• Decrease the benefits paid out.  Lower payments, introduce means testing (“you paid in but you don’t need it”), make you wait longer before you can start to draw benefits.
• Pay with general revenue funds.  Tax more or spend less.  Either way it is still a Ponzi scheme.

Then again maybe they will not pay us back.  I doubt that Congress would openly default on the loans.  More probably they will come up with some new program and just dissolve the program that you and I paid into.

They never intended to put our money in trust.

If you don’t agree with my analysis, read this from a former President’s state of the union speech:

“Some in our country think that Social Security is a trust fund – in other words, there’s a pile of money being accumulated. That’s just simply not true. The money – payroll taxes going into the Social Security are spent. They’re spent on benefits and they’re spent on government programs. There is no trust.”

You and I would go to jail for implementing such a scheme.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

As part of the discussion about how to handle the financial mess we are in, I hereby throw my two cents in.

First in deference to Cato and his recent post I use the word “federal” in this post to mean the government of the United States.  I recognize his point that it is not “federal” but for the moment that is what people call it.

Cut federal  spending across the board by 1% per year.  I would hope that Congress could eliminate ridiculous programs to do this, but the reality is that between special interest groups and the sacred cows that our legislators are feeding, this becomes a political free for all.  Cut federal spending across the board–every department–by 1% per year.

Does anybody know of an organization that cannot cut 1% from it’s spending?  We can do this without diminishing the programs that are being funded.  Some believe that waste accounts for 8% of all government spending.  Some say more, some say less.  We should all be able to  agree that there is waste and fraud in government spending.  Let’s cut from there.

What about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment and all of the social programs?  Let’s cut from the waste and fraud, not from the programs themselves.

Some in government would say “but cutting the waste is hard”.  Baloney!  Get to work.  Do your job.  “Mr. President, I don’t know how to cut waste in my department”.  “You’re fired”.

With population growth that gives us a 2% spending shift–if our current spending was on a flat line–which we all know it is not.  The spending shift this would cause is greater.

With this kind of discipline  plus a 2% shift per year we would  gain confidence.  More people would be hired, retirement funds would prosper.  Homes would be built, cars would be bought.  Taxable income would increase.  More money would come into the treasury.  The economy would grow.

We could get ourselves out of this mess over a relatively short period of time.

Don’t touch anything else right now.  Yes we need to get the employee’s portion of the Social Security “contribution” (popularly known as the payroll tax) back to where it used to be.  Not now.  Maybe we need to do something about deductions and capital gains.  Not now.  Don’t get in the way.  Let the economy grow.  It wants to.  Growth is the easy way out of this mess.

Try this for a couple of years.  If it does not work, try something else.  In the mean-time Congress should learn how to play gin rummy or something less destructive to our futures.

There are similar plans to this being considered.  Let your U.S. Representative and Senators know what you think.

We are in a mess.

We deserve better!