Can Businesses Bailout the Government? – Part 3

In Part 1, I discussed the problem of overspending and how government cannot get us out of the mess it has gotten us into.  Part 2 discussed some of the signs that we may be at the point of no return and some of the consequences.  Here I’d like to discuss some of the solutions.

Follow the US Constitution.  If it’s not there, you can’t do it, even if you think it will “promote the general welfare”.  That phrase is a platitude, not a mandate.  The mandates are clearly spelled out.

Eliminate all programs not constitutionally mandated.  If the rationale is “it’s for the general good” without some justification from a Constitution’s specific Article and Section, it has to go.  Here are a few examples.

Welfare is not the responsibility of the government.  It is the responsibility of the Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, socially-conscious atheists and the states in which the people reside.

Bring our troops home.  Not necessarily right this instant from Iraq or Afghanistan since there is unfinished work there.  Rather bring them back from Germany, the UK, Korea, Japan, Iceland, and the dozens of other places that they are deployed.  Our troops exist to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, not the friends of the government.  They’re not there as the pawns of the UN when it doesn’t like something.  If some country wants our expertise and training, let them pay for it fully.

Cut the pay and the days that Congress is in session.  There was never an intent for professional politicians when the Constitution was created.  Make them work in the real world so they understand real world problems.  Congress onlyunderstands what it is spoon-fed through its taxpayer-provided boondoggles and junkets.  Let them see first hand in their own businesses what they’ve done to the American people.

Eliminate Congressional pensions.  They’re the servants of the people, not the employees.  They should serve and then get back to their outside jobs.  Entrenchment in government only brings contempt toward the people they are called to serve.

Make Congress subject to every law they impose on the rest of us.  This means that their private pension plan will be folded into Social Security and they’ll get the same benefits the rest of us get.

Dismantle Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  This has to be done over time without pulling the rug out from under anyone but entitlements like this have got to stop.  I’ve not thought out how to do this completely yet, but when I do, I’ll write about it.  I’d like to hear your views.

Pass an Amendment to give the President line-item veto authority.  Congress passes the bills it sends to the President and the President getst the blame because he is forced to sign bad legislation to get one small good item.  Let him cut out programs that he feels are wrong.  Congress can always override his veto if they disagree.  Right now the President gets blamed for a lot of bad legislation that is really Congress’ fault.  Give him (or her) line item veto authority and then the blame will squarely fall on the Oval Office.

Promote the arts through public service broadcasts and strong copyrights, not failed giveaway programs.  The Constitution has limited authority here which does not include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts, or National Endowment for the Humianities, among other give-away programs.  Make these organizations not-for-profit or non-profit entities and let “we the people” support the ones we feel are worthy of our dollars.

Promote the sciences by having strong patent laws that are vigorously enforced.  Let Science and Society decide what to work on through corporate and private funding.  If Branson wants to build a rocket ship to go to the Moon, we should let him and let him reap the benefits.  Our space program should be limited to national security.  Granted that includes some research but I don’t think “the breeding habits of Belgian endive” ranks as a national security issue.

Article 1, Section 8 is not a sand box for faceless bureaucrats who mandate social programs in our schools.  Federal grants must be limited only to programs that directly support the Constitutional mandates for the Federal government.  “Oh, I’m sure there is a military benefit there someplace” is not sufficient.

Freedom of religion is not freedom from religion.  Let everyone (not) practice as he or she sees fit.  Nobody says you have to look at my Nativity scene or his Menorah.  What’s the matter?  Got a guilty conscience?  Allowing something is not promoting it.  After all, isn’t that the argument these same people use to justify giving out condoms in schools?

Strip the courts of their “legislation from the bench” rulings.  If it’s a good, constitutional idea, put it into law.  If not, nullify it through the judicial oversight powers granted in the Constitution.  The same goes for extra-constitutional Executive Orders from the White House.  If it’s your jurisdiction, then by gosh and by golly, step up and do your job!

I believe Congress does not nullify these judicial legislators and executive orders because (a) they like what they mandate but the elected representatives don’t have the honesty to go on record to put it into law, or (b) they’re so busy doing their own unconstitutional activities that they don’t have time to do their constitutionally-mandated responsibility of being the check and balance over the Presidency and the Judiciary.

Eliminate Labor Union welfare.  Congress is getting read for yet another labor union bailout.  All this does is attempt to buy the votes of the labor unions at the expense of the American people.  What did the Chrysler buyout gain the US citizens?  They’re still losing money and Fiat is struggling to get them profitable.

Eliminate “corporate welfare” by ending subsidies to farmers, manufacturers and businesses.  If they can’t stand on their own, they should fail.  This will immediately encourage competition that will make goods and services better and cheaper.  Small, family-owned farms can get tax breaks if necessary but let’s let food be cheaper for all of us.  Farmers know the benefit of crop rotation and letting soil rest.  If necessary, encourage that through a tax break but let them assume a lot of the responsibility themselves.  In no way should we ever pay a farmer (corporate or “little guy”) not to plant crops.  Remove quotas for tobacco, sugar and other crops as well.  If they want to grow it, let them compete like the rest of us have to.

Eliminate import quotas. Soft drinks use corn syrup because sugar is too expensive.  It’s too expensive because we have import quotas.  This same explanation holds for other foods and goods as well.  Quotas limit supply which drives up prices.

Ethanol from corn is a horrible idea.  It takes corn away from the food supply for both people and animals, thus driving up prices for food.  Ethanol or methanol from farm waste or other crops that rest the land is a much better idea.

Man-up on unfair trade.  Don’t waste years of hand wringing over countries undercutting their prices and currency.  If they violate a trade agreement, call them on it with sanctions immediately.  That’s one Constitutional mandate Congress seems to forget about until some country has destroyed some segment of the US economy.

Promote manufacturing here at home.  Cut taxes of companies that build or renovate manufacturing facilities.  Technology is wonderful.  Use it to automate factories and train workers to be the technicians that run the technology.  You’ll save the environment, too, by not having to ship raw goods overseas and finished goods back.

Unravel the health care mess Congress created. Congress created the health care “crisis” with its over-regulation in the 1960s and its foisting HMOs on the unsuspecting public in the 1970s.  Real health reform is when the individual, not an “insurance” company or HMO bureaucrat, along with the doctor decide what is needed.  Put in real medical tort reform to bring down costs and make people pay for “scheduled maintenance”, just like they have to do for their cars.  I don’t put in an insurance claim every time I change my oil.  Why should I do it for a runny nose?  Expand the use of tax-free medical Health Savings Accounts for normal visits and allow all people to set up one.  Save insurance for the truly catastrophic and expensive events.  That’s what you do for your house, right?  What’s your home insurance deductible?

Abortion is a medical and moral decision, not a political one.  It should be handled like every other medical procedure with states allowing and limiting how and when they can be performed, just like they limit who can perform an appendectomy or write a prescription.  On the moral side, let the debate be handled at the state level.  In addition, parents or legal guardians must be involved when minor children have this procedure.  The political cop-out here is that the courts can appoint some hack to approve the abortion for a young girl even when the parents are still “fit” to be parents.  Politics have made a complete mess of this (and other) situation.

I know that as we dismantle the unconstitutional programs that there will be a lot of bureaucrats and hard working people who will have to get real jobs in the real world.  Nevertheless, with all of the extra money people and companies will save through reduced taxes and reduced regulation, new opportunities will open up.  Many can become entrepreneurs and small business owners in their own right.  They can do it, that is, if they haven’t forgotten how to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. 

OK, maybe they can’t do it.  However, we should not eliminate Corporate Welfare only to replace it with Bureaucratic Welfare.  Oh, right, we already have Bureaucratic Welfare.  It’s called “Government Jobs”.

Can Businesses Bailout the Government? – Part 2

In Part 1 I discussed what I saw to be why the government cannot get itself out of the economic mess we are all in.  Here I would like to explore some of the warning signs that we are in a you-know-what-load of trouble.  I’ll examine solutions in Part 3.  The solutions are not new.How would your family get out of its debt problems short of declaring bankruptcy?    We talk about “the family of man”.  How will/should our national “family” solve this problem?

There is no way the government can tax its way out of this mess without destroying the very lives and liberties it is supposed to be securing.

The only way to overcome debt is first to stop overspending and then, second, to pay it off.  That having been said, no gutless politician has the you-know-whats to propose cutting spending to the point where we have real surpluses as measured by real revenues and not vaccuous projections.  Historically a surplus has been seen by the politicians simply as more money to spend.  This policy is not only inane but is a sure milestone on the road to national bankruptcy.

How will we as a nation know we are bankrupt?  You personally know when the bank won’t lend you money and your credit cards are suspended.  The Treasury will know it when countries like China stop buying our debt.

Just as you have to show the bank that you are a responsible borrower, government, too, must prove that it is responsible.  Other countries will continue to buy a country’s debt as long as they feel that it will honor its commitments to service that debt and not devalue the currency to wipe out that debt.  When those who buy government debt don’t buy it, regardless of the interest rate, governments have two choices.  They can either go into default or they can print more money.  The first leads to massive tax increases and the second leads to massive inflation.  The only question that remains is: Do you want the rock or the hard place?

The only real solution that won’t make matters worse in the long run is for our government to cut spending down to just the Constitutionally-mandated programs and create a climate where individuals and businesses can produce to grow the economy.  Growth alone won’t get us out of this financial mess.  We must also radically cut spending down to only the programs that the Constitution allows.

Government has stepped way out of bounds.  It’s time to call off-sides and bring it back in.

Stupid Products

I just saw a commercial on TV and had to comment on it. I’ve seen it before but you know how you’ll just blow something off until it gets too much. Well, this time it was too much.

The product is a “no touch hand soap dispenser”. I won’t mention the manufacturer. It’s filled with antibacterial soap that kills 99.9% of the germs on your hands and the ad says, “You’ll never have to touch a germy soap pump again.”

Why is this a stupid product, in my opinion? First of all, what’s wrong with touching a germy soap pump? You’re going to wash your hands anyway, aren’t you? “Oh! I can’t wash my hands. There are germs on the soap pump!” How poorly were you going to wash them?

I saw another show one time that said that just plain warm water washes about half the germs off your hands.

Granted, if you are in a health care setting with seriously ill patients, eliminating any source of germs may be good for them in their sickly state. However, the larger question to ask about our collective misophobia (fear of germs) is why do we need to persistently use antibacterial soap in the first place? If you have a healthy immune system, any of the billions of germs that touch our bodies each day will be obliterated by our white blood cells and antibodies.

If truth be told (and I always hope it is here), the Mayo Clinic writes about the inefficacy of antibacterial soap and even warns about its misuse.  They say:

Keep in mind that antibacterial soap is no more effective at killing germs than is regular soap. Using antibacterial soap may even lead to the development of bacteria that are resistant to the product’s antimicrobial agents — making it harder to kill these germs in the future.

Parents who have an obsession of keeping germs away from their children may actually be setting them up for more serious illness if their little immune systems get no work out against relatively benign germs.

It’s just corporate-sponsored paranoia.

The Populist Movements aren’t so Popular Any More – Part 2

In my last Populist blog, I wrote about President Obama’s health care plan and just touched on Global Warming.  Now I’d like to stomp on that topic.

Let me once again go on record as saying that the climate is changing.  The climate always changes.  As the universe goes through its cycles and as stars explode or simply burn their fuel, great changes happen as a result of small events.  It’s Newton’s Third Law.  It’s the Butterfly Effect.  Nevertheless, the climate changes.

That being said, I do not in any way condone wanton destruction of environment or its climate.  We need to act responsibly and use the resources we have, not abuse them.  However, the ends do not justify the means.  It is equally dastardly to lie about climate change as it is to abuse the climate in the first place.  That’s my take.

So why is the public’s opinion about Anthropogenic Climate Change (i.e. man-made global warming) cooling off?

Is it that the public is numb to the idea?  Are people just too selfish that the don’t care if their children or grandchildren have a nice earth?  Is it that people are tired of being blamed for all of the earth’s ills?  Is it that they are just too stupid to understand?

I believe the answer to each of these questions is a resounding, “NO!”  People are not stupid.  Other than government hand-outs and out of control national debt, they’re not selfish about leaving their children and grandchildren a nice place to live.

I believe the change is that people are realizing the truth and not just the truth that the special interests want them to believe.  They’re realizing the real economic impact and scientific realities, along with the seeing the nefarious extents that some will go to foist an idea on the public.

“Save the earth” technology is expensive and its benefits are unproven.  Compact fluorescent bulbs are expensive.  Do they really last 7 years? Ethanol from corn uses more energy than it saves and produces more CO2 than it supposedly reduces.

Leaked e-mails from supposed reputable so-called scientists have revealed just the tip of the growing iceberg of revealed deception and outright lies about our climate and what drives it, ”Climategate” being only one, albeit a large one, incident.

Even the UN produced flawed studies.  Here I use “flawed studies” as a synonym for “junk science”.  We have a conclusion, now let’s find only the data that supports this conclusion and ignore any data that moderates or contradicts our conclusion.  “An Inconvenient Truth” has been shown to be “A Convenient Lie”.  Maybe Al Gore and the UN’s IPCC should return their Nobel Prize.

It appears from the suppressed information that has been coming out that ”all reputable scientists” who signed on that man-made global warming is a fact may now be wrong.  The fear mongering that we are going to kill ourselves might just be a lot of hype.

We have the best scientists money can buy, don’t we?  It’s just not clear in all cases who’s buying the scientists.

The Populist Movements aren’t so Popular Any More

People can be fickle.  Popular opinion changes.

Global Warming is cooling off.

Universal Health Care isn’t universally desired.

What has happened?  Have the people become fickle?  Has apathy set in?

I truly believe that the American public is not as stupid as many politicians and ideologues want to believe.  As it has been attributed to President Abraham Lincoln, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”  Given time, truth will come out and people will have an opportunity to assess the facts.

We live in a day of sound bites.  The sound bites are chosen either to promote an agenda or to capture the audience’s attention and make the story more interesting than it really is.

We need to beware of quick actions by Congress whether it’s for the health care bill or anything else they want to pass.  All too often the details don’t come out until it’s too late.

The government doesn’t even have a clue about how much health care will cost. Even the CBO, Congress’ accountants, think health care spending for just the first 10 years will be at least $1.2 Trillion more than the Obama team estimates.  Are these people educated by the public school system and that’s why they can’t do arithmetic?  This is especially worrisome because the Obama plan has taxes and little spending in the first 5 years.  Expenses don’t kick in until six years out.  So, if all that money plus $1.2 trillion more is needed in years 6-10, how much more will we dig our grandchildren into debt in years 11-15?

If you need proof of bad arithmetic, take the government’s estimates for Social Security at any time in our history.  Take their estimates for Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, food stamps, or any other funding estimates for the War on Poverty for The Great Society.

The American people are increasingly suspicious and loathsome over back room deals to buy congressional votes at the expense of the rest of the country and they’re at it again. Why should Connecticut get a hospital and not the rest of us?  If you’re sick, will you fly to Connecticut for treatment?  Why should Florida senior citizens keep some medicare benefits the rest of us will lose?

Why do they have special money for Massachusetts?  I thought they had a model government-run health care program already.  Why do they need special money if their plan is so good?

The current bill is so bad that even the ruling party can’t get its own people to agree to vote for it.

I’ll ask the question again.  Can government really run health care? Look at the problems we have had (and still have) with the VA hospitals that are supposed to take care of the brave men and women who have sacrificed limbs and health to keep us free.  Look at the Swine Flu so-called “pandemic” that didn’t pan out.  Look at the government reports that say that women don’t need as many mammograms (but they’ll still pay for Viagra).

If the program isn’t good enough to stand on its own and you have to buy votes with special projects, the program simply isn’t good enough.  Kill it and start over, or maybe better yet, just kill it.