A Constitutional Amendment to Limit Spending
In the first 20 years that our Constitution was in existence, it was amended 12 times. In the 203 years since, it has been amended just 15 times. So the Constitution was amended nearly as often in its first two decades as in its past two centuries. Is this because we’ve now gotten everything right, or because we’ve simply stopped striving to get everything right?
No government, of course, can reach perfection, and seeking utopia on earth is a good way to bring about something closer to the opposite. But that doesn’t mean that the Constitutional Convention delegates weren’t trying to make the Constitution as perfect as they could. Striving to improve our governmental forms, even while recognizing that human society and humanity are not perfectible, is a virtue.
In that spirit, the Constitution’s amendment provision, Article V, was one of the seven original articles penned at Independence Hall. And in his farewell address, which fellow Convention delegates James Madison and Alexander Hamilton played an active role in writing, President George Washington reminded us of the role that we would be called to play. Washington declared to his “fellow-citizens” that “the free Constitution … is the work of your hands”; “may [it] be sacredly maintained.” He didn’t think our Constitution would maintain itself.
Moreover, Washington said:
If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates.
Indeed, our Founders provided twelve such corrections during Washington’s lifetime or within the first five years after his death.
In the present day, it is all well and good to hope that our congressional representatives will change their ways; that after continually increasing their spending since the passage of another amendment — the Sixteenth (1913), the income tax amendment, passed at the height of the Progressive era — they will soon stop spending like drunken sailors. But why leave it up to the limits of their wisdom or the strengths of their spines? The great powers of government are those of the purse and the sword, and ours needs to be reminded that the purse is not bottomless.
With the American people now realizing the dangers of unlimited spending to a perhaps unprecedented degree, the time is ripe — to use Madison’s formulation in Federalist 51 — to recognize “the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” In this spirit, there’s been much talk of a balanced-budget amendment. But such an approach would more likely lead to higher taxes than to limited government. Similarly, limiting taxes would invite higher deficits. We need to stop treating the symptom of increasing debt and go after the disease of spending.
By limiting government’s spending, we will limit government’s appetite to tax — as taxing is government’s means, not its ends. By limiting government’s spending, we will limit government’s ability to rack up deficits — as deficits are the product overspending. By limiting government’s spending, we will limit government’s ability to regulate, as regulation follows in spending’s wake — witness ObamaCare.
So, to regain control over our government and its reach, we must limit its spending. And to limit its spending over the long haul, we need a Limited Government Amendment.
I discuss the Limited Government Amendment in more detail in a longer piece over at National Affairs. But here it is, in a nutshell:
The amendment would limit the annual increase in federal spending to 2 percent (above inflation). It would grant an exception allowing for unlimited defense spending during a time of congressionally declared war. And it would allow three-quarters of the states (acting upon the request of two-thirds of Congress) to issue a 1-year exception for any reason whatsoever. In these ways, the amendment would constrain Congress, while leaving us with the flexibility to deal with what Hamilton called the full “extent and variety of national exigencies,” which no nation can foresee but which every nation must be prepared to address.
Would such an amendment really make that much of a difference? It would make a colossal difference.
Sounds great, if you can backdate it to 1909. Otherwise, it just cements-in the extra-Constitutional Progressive agenda enacted to date.
2% above inflation is too much – government will still eventually grow without bound. Another provision requiring the the 5 and 10 year averages to be at or below the inflation rate is needed, as is a limit of the federal share of the government to 10% of the non-government portion of the GDP.
Exactly. The proposed amendment is both too timid and too prolix. No matter what, passing a Constitutional amendment is hard. So if we’re going to propose one, let’s be bold and to the point.
How about something like this instead: “Congress shall make no law inhibiting free trade or the right of contract. Each year, the total spending by the United States Government shall be reduced by 2% or more from the prior year until the amount reaches 10% or less of gross domestic product.”
Just read this entire comment thread, which is pretty good, but this first comment is still the most germane; such an amendment would only constitutionalize gigantic central government (and not to mention obliterate any coherent definition of GDP as politicians redefine it until they get the loot they’re after).
I believe the best way to rein in the Federal government would be to take from Congress the power to write taxes by specifying the means of a simple tax constitutionally and only leaving Congress the power to control it’s rate. Congress would likewise be required to pay off in full any borrowed funds in the following budget cycle before any other funds are appropriated.
cthulhu- agreed. let’s first dismantle the apparatus of the bloated bureaucracy, then cement it in.
I like it, but there are just a couple of things wrong with the idea.
1. It would be easier to get the French to agree on anything than get Liberals to agree on anything involving a lick of sense.
2. As long as we permit Congress to use earmarks, “deem-and-pass”, and allow Congress to vote on unwritten and unread bills and other legislative magic tricks, nothing, and I mean NOTHING, will change.
3. As long as the major media insist on reporting fairy tales, you’ll never get it any traction.
4. Until there is a total national voter re-registration, no vote on any constitutional issue can be relied upon.
Other than that, it’s a fine idea.
The only way I see out of the problem with the media is to start buying it. Eventually we will get a controlling interest and we can bring some integrity back into it.
There are far more that a couple of things wrong with this idea. The worst is that it is legalistic while the problem is moral. Why not just say No when Congress proposes these spending bills that are supposedly for our aid.
When Congress ignores our desires as it did on health care we need a new Congress, not a new amendment.
The government does have expenses but that is no the source of our problem. The problem is the funds the government takes for our supposed welfare. The supposition about inflation is also wrong. Inflation is a government disease not a commerce malady. It is caused by government welfare and represents our counterfeit dollars we inject into our business. It tends to raise price but does not raise value. There is still a need of a profit to stay in business and we have added valueless overhead which is inflation.
If we just don’t take that handout we will starve the bureaucrat.
Which one of you, my reader, does not balance his own budget and what happens when you don’t. What going business has not had to keep his budget balanced? No Amendment needed, just one two letter word, NO! when our government proposes spending for a responsibility that does not fall under our Constitution.
What is not a government responsibility is our responsibility and, with this amendment, we would shirk our own responsibility to be responsible. That is the problem with legalism. If more of us understood what the New Testament teaches we would understand why this is not a government responsibility but a personal one. Therefore this amendment will be a burden rather than a help.
Mr. Anderson,
Your “idea” sounds great on its face but then you must ask yourself: what and how will you cut Medicare and Social Security? Without cutting funds to those two programs your idea of “limiting government” is just a worthless talking point. Case in point, if every single employee of the federal government were fired and every single federal program were eliminated except for Medicare and Social Security; the net savings would be less than 15% by 2040
Limited government sounds great but then you run into to problem of telling your party (I’m assuming you’re a Republican) that you’re going to cut Medicare or Social Security. Good luck with that.
The solution is Devolution: devolve the entitlement programs (among other things) back to the States. Let each State decide how generous it wants to be with its own population because it will be up to the citizens of that State to pay the freight for those benefits.
With 50 States grappling with this, eventually a balance will be found and a workable plan will emerge.
Yup, sounds great as far as it goes. However, we still have to deal with Congress’s wild card, the Commerce Clause, as well as a government that thinks nothing of purchasing entire corporations out of the public sphere, while gleefully kicking the bondholders to the curb.
Perhaps an amendment that removes most, if not all, of the abuses of the Commerce Clause and prohibits the government from owning any portion of a corporation is in order, too.
Our Constitution gives us no rights, whatever. Those rights come from our Creator and our Constitution is an agreement on how we can keep those rights. The restriction is on the sphere of government responsibility rather than the government extending privileges to us that it has no power to give.
Those privileges come at the expense of another. We have developed traffic rules for entering the super highway with a sigh that says yield. You definitely have a right to drive on the highway but you must honor the primary right of way to approaching traffic. We need to treat our own rights and liberties in the same manner. We are not yielding our rights when we are yielding the right of way.
Today, we are abusing free speech by shielding profanity and immoral speech. This has greatly increased after WW II. Civility and courtesy are not a work of the law and the first amendment does not address that phase, yet when we restrict foul language and indecent behavior it is called censorship.
We cannot control our Constitution if we are not willing to control ourselves. There are those who demand their “rights” rather than to correct their wrongs. We do not have to fight for our rights but we do have to suppress our wrongs else they turn on us to our destruction. That cannot be done by law but must be done by choice.
Legalism, perhaps more than materialism,is a major stumbling block. When it is legal we shuck our responsibility. What ever you can get by with is legal, hence all the high handedness in our current government. If we are going to let the government get by with its
high handedness then it must be legal. To stop it, just say, NO, to what it is trying to sell.
maybe. but your proposed amendment has four sections, this is way too wordy, won’t fly.
a simpler way to handle this would be to reinstitute full dollar convertibility to gold, and prohibit any government borrowing, or guaranteeing any debt, except in time of a congressionally declared war.
sweet and short.
Perhaps another way to get our fiscal house in order and acheive limited government would be a revision of our tax code.
Sonething along the lines of a flat tax as follows:
1.1 – Graduated tax would be retained for individuals gross earning up to 35K.
1.2 – All gross earnings above 35K would be taxed at a flat rate.
1.3 – There should be no exemptions, deductions or other considerations that would have the effect of lowering the taxable amount.
1.4 – Individual tax rate of 10% on all gross income above 35K. To change this should require a 60% affirmative vote of the 50 states making up the union of The United States of America.
2.1 – Businesses and Corporations should be taxed on the flat tax basis.
2.2 – Business and Corporations should cease to receive government subsidies and corporate welfare. Too big to fail would no longer be an operative word.
2.3 – Deductions for businesses and corporations should be limited to legitimate business expense as defined by current cost accounting principles.
2.4 – Business and Corporate tax rate should be 10% after legitimate business expenses are deducted.
Fairly simple, would actully increase total tax revenues, and if coupled with a balanced budget amendment we would be well on our way to regaining fiscal sanity.
In addition the regulatory behemoth needs to be brought into control as well as the military industrial complex President Dwight D.Eisenhower warned us of in his 1961 farewell speech to the nation.
I TOTALLY agree with this proposition. In fact, I think we need a Constitutional amendment which limits the Fed to ONLY assess a flat rate income tax (on the basis you propose). All other federal taxes should be eliminated and prevented. Then, I believe, we need a balanced budget amendment as well. This would force the federal government to balance the budge with the money they receive and would limit the money they receive. The revenue would increase because it grow the economy, eliminate (virtually) tax evasion, encourage foreign investment/business growth, eliminate pork barrel spending, force the government to prioritize its spending, give us all an incentive to be more successful and grow wealth and eliminate the corruption associated with special interest influence in government. We NEED to get on this track because career politicians have been violating our Constitution and their oaths to it for so long, we can no longer trust ANY of them to follow the spirit in which our country was founded.
Your first premise is wrong so your whole argument is wrong. If we are going to charge one group with more responsibility than another group, which is what this graduated tax does. we have a double standard which may be legal but it is not right. In this respect we should make no difference between the rich and the poor. The rich can do nothing with their wealth that will not benefit the poor without using some form of dishonesty. Riches give more opportunity to exercise dishonesty but it does not give any more power to be dishonest than what all of us already posses.
The temptation to covet the riches of the rich is a test of our own honesty.
I agree that our taxes are excessive and have overloaded our commerce, making it more difficult to prosper under the conditions as we find them. Why do we need government welfare in the first place? It is misplaced charity. A government has no responsibility to be charitable. That is not its purpose.
~ 1Ti 1:8 But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully;
9 Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,
10 For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine;~
This sound doctrine is for my guidance, not the running of our government. As we shift that responsibility on to our government we get tyranny.
Why not add a “Balanced Budget Amendment?” Many states have them and they seem to help. Oviously, you would have to make exceptions for when the country is at war, since individual states don’t have to worry about funding a war.
But your proposition should include two other points: 1) Not to allow Congress to add in non-defense related items into a defense bill, especially during times of war. For example, Harry Reid just recently tried to stick in a provision on immigration in the recent defense bill, something that had NOTHING to do with defense. Congress does this all the time, sticking in entitlements or pork projects in a massive defense bill. This must stop if we’re going to get a handle on spending. 2) I noticed you always mentioned “Declared Wars.” Both the first and second Gulf Wars and the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the war in Vietnam, were NOT declared wars. What do we do about those conflicts? Does this bill force the President and Congress to actually declare war whenever we actually drop a bomb? That could get tricky for limited conflicts of very small duration, such as the invasion of Panama during the first Bush administration.
Would you like an 80% tax rate?
This is a means to the same end without causing taxes to skyrocket.
A balanced budget amendment is legalism and cannot work. That is because management is not a legal problem. Had we paid better attention to the instruction in our Constitution we would not have this problem now. We have had the solution all along and ignored it. Passing more law will not correct that problem but it will add other problems with more unintended consequences. One drop of water does not make a flood but every flood starts with one drop of water.
When we come together in unity to properly manage our government these problem will all disappear. As long as we use our government to finance our poor the problems will continue. When we use our own resources to help the poor we will have plenty.
As Israel went into the promised land they were instructed to leave something in the field so the poor could gather for themselves. For that time an place it worked. Today is different but I am sure there are corners in our fields that can serve the same purpose but our “special interest” have been busy putting those areas off limits and these interests are not greedy industrialists but greedy politician and labor bosses.
And how would the US have financed its war against the Nazis without deficits?
Conservative mouths left agape. Good one!
They have simple unworkable solutions to complex problems. This is how they appeal to the low information voter. The reality is that both parties spend like drunken sailors. The difference being what bar they go to. This amendment to limit spending is a pipe dream and a waste of time.
“conservatives mouth left agape”
are you serious?? you think that was some sort of gotcha? that somehow riverstyx spotted a huge hole in the logic of this proposal? well no, sorry,not to be. instead it just exposed you two idiots as morons w/ a reading comprehension problem.
No mouths agape here dude. Financing a war is a separate issue that we can deal with at such time as it becomes necessary. We are talking about the rest of government activity – including entitlements that keep people in poverty and discourage the productivity we need to have a high standard of living long term.
Dig into any arena of government spending and you see that a) it just grows and grows, b) it is rife with inefficiency and fraud and c) it usually ends up harming what it intends to “help”.
If you want to live in a government dominated society, fine. What we are struggling for here is a way to make it impossible for you to drag us along into that hell and making us pay for it to boot.
OTOH, we have seen again and again that Re-, er, Progressives have complex, unworkable solutions to even simple problems …
… they appeal to the low-information voter by portraying themselves as “experts” who can solve the problems FOR them, and encourage voters to check their brains at the door and subordinate their resources and decision-making authority to their Progressive overlords, er, leaders …
… by encouraging the false beliefs that (1) the voters are too stupid to figure things out for themselves, and (2) a few Regressive Best and Brightest in DC are ALWAYS a better source of solutions than 300 million engaged/empowered problem-solvers with the authority and resources to solve their piece of the problem, themselves.
To encourage this Biggest Lie of All, complex “solutions” are a feature, not a bug … for they reinforce the lie that Regressives are oh-so-smarter-and-therefore-wiser than the rest of us, because the problems are too complex for the ordinary man to understand … when in fact, a lot of the complexity is the result of over-analysis and navel-gazing that adds no value to the final legislative product, but added to it because, after all, that is what “smart” people do.
That was a declared war. However, limiting government really ought to begin and end with limiting its legitimate powers and activities. Simply decreeing a spending limit, however formulated, will cause the political Establishment to finesse it. If we want to curb spending, the way to do it is to enforce the Constitution’s limits on Congress.
I note that Praetorian, one of the emptiest barrels ever to clatter and clang at Pajamas Media, has put in an appearance with his usual menu of derision and unfounded assertions. Once again, he has nothing of substance to say. But in these days of vast uncertainty, at least we know we can still count on a statist ideologue to oppose any and all limits on government.
Great point.
A way must be found to start stripping the Federal Government of its unconstitutional overreach and return those functions back to the States.
One way to do this might be a gradual transfer of responsibilities and, more importantly, revenues to the States. So, for example, on Medicare, the Department of Health and Human Services would lose their authority for enforcing Medicare rules vis a vis the States. It would be up to each State to decide what level of benefits to provide. The funding for Medicare would go directly to each State based on its Medicare-eligible population and it would be up to each State to decide how to use that money. No strings attached. That means that each Medicare recipient would gripe to their State government, not the Feds. With each passing year, DHHS would be given less funding and shrunken in size until it either was closed entirely or existed as a small, advisory, research agency with little or no actual power of its own and a very small staff. The power, jobs and money would go to the States.
All the leftists who want European-style welfare, could move to New York or California and pay the 75% tax rate there to support it. Free market types could move to other, low-tax States that stress individual responsibility and the support of family, charities and community.
Major problem is that reforms are never gradual and what we face at this time is no exception. There is no gradual system available. We need to go back to the foundation which precedes our constitution and take up the sound doctrine that did produce our Constitution. This is not done by law but by choice.
The article specifically allows for that. I’d like to address several problems I see with it though. I think they should do an amendment that limits bills to one specific purpose. All bills must cite the clause of the constitution allowing it.
A additional amendment would specify that the income tax shall be the same rate for everyone. Each person regardless of age, marital status would be allowed one exemption of the dollar amount of the poverty level. No refund of moneys that would not paid in would be allowed and all business taxes would be abolished. The customer ultimately pays they anyway so businesses could lower their prices, domestic products would become more competitive on the world market and our whole economy would go into turbo overdrive.
As long as we’re bringing up amendments, I’d like to see one that limits the commerce clause – the source of so much of the spending and control from washington. And while you’re at it, toss in an amendment to limit the “general well being” clause too.
You have the general idea of what it will take. I don’t think we need more law to do this but we do need to exercise our own personal responsibility to see that it is done. The details have a habit of falling into place when the intent is right.
I have just finished viewing (the second time) “The History of the Conservative Movement” by Dr. Gary North. He says that we need to backdate to 1904. We definitely need to do MAJOR housecleaning in Congress, to include BOTH parties. In the cleaning process, we need to keep in mind that Islam is incompatible with our constitution and it’s followers should not be considered in any manner in our elective process.
The thieves will just redefine what the inflation rate, just as Greenspan et al did the CPI a few years back.
No, the simple solution is to limit the federal government to the Enumerated Powers, or pass Amendments to validate programs by granting more Enumerated Powers.
That is, if we the People WANT a Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid establishment, it should be enshrined in the Constitution. Transfer payments, like welfare, do NOT pass muster by my reading because paying individuals does not qualify as “general welfare” or direct apportionment.
This will not work as Inflation is easily manipulated by the Federal Reserve, which is owned by European banking Families. They make their money from 300+ Billion in Interest the US Taxpayer has been gives them each year, all they need to do is increase inflation rate to allow for increased budget.
If you wish to restrict budgets and strengthen the Dollar, the only option is to back the US dollar with hard asset such as Gold and Silver, Like it was until 1971.
China, Russia, and a few other nations are moving to back their currencies with hard assets. If the US continues to flounder with its currency situation trade settlements will move Away from US dollar. When enough countries do this ( at this time about a dozen countries have moved away from US dollar settlement), the US Dollar will collapse.
Constitutional amendments will not help if the basic underlying foundation of the US economy is not strengthened.
Allowing the printing of money by other than the government is the single most destructive action taken by our government. The fed should be nationalized and it’s status as a company should be deleted. All money should be backed by something real not the good faith of the government. Good luck on good faith from this administration.
This is a nice idea, and I subscribe to your point of view: government spending needs to be constrained. But I am not convinced a Constitutional Amendment will do the job. Both you and I know the moment something like this is passed, there will be tremendous pressure to figure out ways around the limit.
Secondly, when you say raising taxes cannot be relied upon to limit government spending, I am not sure I agree. In fact, politicians have been prevented from raising our taxes to such an extent, we are now faced with an enormous deficit. So I am thinking we could limit deficits and/or limit the printing of money as perhaps a better way to control government spending.
ex animo
davidfarrar
Some good thinking and good questions. It is hard to find the right answer until the right Question is asked. You can’t spend money when there are no takers. I was in the GI Farm School program ib the late forties and the PMA,AAA or whatever it was called at that time along with the USDA and county agent had cost sharing funds available that had not yet been spent with the end of the fiscal year eminent. They were desecrate to get those funds spent and were lobbying hard to get us to sign up for any practice they could accept to clear the till. I did not see the necessity of doing that and suggested we just slide the money into the new fiscal year. Yikes!! Wrong thing to say. You see,the powers that be had been lobbying hard for a 15% increase for much needed funding and then to have surplus??? Just too embarrassing. I quite the program on the spot and never looked back but from that day forward I began to climb. Pretty steep hill for a bit but I made it. We do not need these programs any more than we need to get drunk on vodka at your expense. Without them we would be prospering.
Actually, while I tend to be seen as a ne’er-do-well librul in these parts (if right wingers used expressions like “ne’er-do-well”), there is some merit to at least think about having an equivalent of a Proposition 2 1/2. The thing, though, is that such a law would have to be very carefully and intelligently crafted given the lessons of Proposition 1/2:
1) Fire and especially police departments, which usually have the most political clout outside of the town leaders, tend to get very short fingered, stubborn and selfish during budget crunches, often resulting with the town very disproportionally slashing the budgets of departments with less clout, like schools, libraries and social services. The national equivalent will be with the military and intel agencies. It’s been long known that you could cut the military budget in half and still have the same military, but you can count on the DoD and its Congressional toadies to go all police union on the idea.
2) Budget cutting in general, when left to the entrenched bureaucracy, is *never* done intelligently. Often the best run and most effective departments are staffed with eager beaver, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, do-gooders (who tend to be young progressives, sorry), but are usually without much political clout, which make them dispensable by bureaucratic logic. Which in turn means there has to be mechanism in place to ID and protect effective departments and personnel.
3) Social services, which right wingers and conservatives are always pointing their pitchforks and shotguns at, is a vast theater of effective, ineffective, vital, not so vital, well run, poorly run operations, and with many overlapping federal/state/municipal departments and agencies. You would need a serious, massive GAO or equivalent audit to even begin to figure out how & where to cut money without doing damage. Of course right wingers, not being very logical or insightful, will assume that national health care will go right away, but no: our health care system has been deteriorating in terms of cost vs benefit for decades now, and federal intervention was not only needed but long overdue. Judging from the comments by conservative/right wing leaders and their followers, they really don’t have a clue about what an expensive mess our health care system had become and what to do about it other that to chuck out unsubstantiated talking points like “tort reform.”
4) In short, while there in theory can be something akin to a national Proposition 2 1/2 to control budget spending, the current crop of Republican leaders and congressional candidates with extremely few exceptions, simply don’t at all have the intellectual chops to do it right. Which means they would have to actually *work* with Democrats and their smarty-pants staffers to get something like that done, instead of just name calling and throwing rocks. Unfortunately the GOP mission statement of late seems to be: “No cooperation, no ideas, no research, no fairness, elections first, friends second, country last, and screw them all.”
My goodness, I hope you’re not implying that you think ObamaCare was “well thought-out”! Of course, Obama & the Dems did absolutely NO reaching across the aisle, and I doubt that any one of them had any idea what the entire bill included (we had to pass it to find out what’s in it; even then, we need mindless bureaucrats’ interpretations and regulations to complete the deal).
Do you think if they had actually sought out Republican suggestions and incorporated them (not including tort reform, of course, since that’s only an “unsubstantiated” talking point–notwithstanding John Edwards’ vast wealth attained by convincing a jury that a baby’s autism was caused by the doctor’s not delivering the baby by caesarian, a theory later completely disproved), the bill would have been perfect? Or is it only Republicans, who may soon control Congress, who should reach across the aisle in a spirit of cooperation?
It was the Democrat wizards (Barney, Chris, and many others) who insisted that banks loan to deadbeats so that ALL might “own” homes. Should they have cooperated with the Republicans who begged them to restrain Fannie and Freddie? Do you think there’s some way to get Democrats to think ahead? To listen to regulators’ warnings? To stop demonizing anyone who tries to inhibit their spending or massively regulating? I thought not.
Polly wrote: My goodness, I hope you’re not implying that you think ObamaCare was “well thought-out”! Of course, Obama & the Dems did absolutely NO reaching across the aisle, and I doubt that any one of them had any idea what the entire bill included (we had to pass it to find out what’s in it; even then, we need mindless bureaucrats’ interpretations and regulations to complete the deal).
Wrong and wrong. It was indeed well-thought out despite ejit comments like “death panels” tossed out by the clueless and the politically malicious. And attempts were indeed made to get Republican input despite their loudmouth opposition to any serious attempt at reform, which is consistent with their past actions.
And when the Republicans finally came out with their own “alternative plan,” unsurprisingly it was a stupid joke apparently cobbled together from comments appearing on right wing websites.
It was the Democrat wizards (Barney, Chris, and many others) who insisted that banks loan to deadbeats so that ALL might “own” homes.
Really? You think? I guess not. It’s because of willfully misinformed people like you why bad people keep getting elected, and why government, from the town level to the federal, is so inefficient, and why so much friggin time is wasted on politics instead of getting things done.
A minor correction. Edwards’ fortune was made by convincing juries that cerebral palsy was caused by the absence of timely Caesarian section. The fact that here are now four times as many Caesarians as there were in 1970 but no change in the rate of babies born with cerebral palsy is merely small evidence that medical malpractice lawsuits, however frivolous, can cause expensive (and dangerous) changes in delivery of health care.
I’m certain that you still consider tort reform an “unsubstantiated talking point,” but even if it were to reduce costs by 0.01%, wouldn’t it be worth it? Especially if women were saved from the more dangerous form of baby delivery, Caesarian section?
‘Actually, while I tend to be seen as a ne’er-do-well librul in these parts…’
Actually, you are seen as the poster boy for the ne’er-do-think progressive in these parts.
‘It’s been long known that you could cut the military budget in half and still have the same military…’
Really? It has? Long ‘known’ by who?
But of course that would have been long known by BC the military genius that that is the case have you seen all the decorations on his old dress uniforms from the many campaigns he participated in and planned even better than General George Patton!
The flaw in your analysis is that you assume that the Federal government needs to be the problem-solver in even individual-specific areas (yes, like health care). Demanding that people work across the aisle on these problems misses the point … they shouldn’t work on them at all.
Not because “they’re not in the Constitution” (we could amend that) … because rights-respecting, equal-protection-under-the-law governance does not give a relative few Best and Brightest the power to accurately determine and efficiently produce what is require — over 300 million individualized solutions for each problem — let alone do so without infringing upon our liberty in ways that make the PATRIOT Act look libertarian by comparison.
It AIN’T THEIR JOB … it’s OUR job, as individuals or private-sector groups … to solve those problems.
However, it is easier to package top-down delusions of omniscience into campaign commercials … especially when you get the people to believe they are too stupid to solve these problems themselves.
Why an amendment when you have all you need now in the Founder’s Constitution, as opposed to the one imposed by constitutional putsch of the 1930′s. If the the General Welfare Clause (Article I Section 8) were brought back, the trillions of dollars in rent-seeking and rent-extraction activity would come to a screeching halt. An additional amendment would seem to me a tacit acknowledgment of that the New Deal was correct in its “interpretation.”
Why build in the 2%? That’s simply continuing a reduced version of zero-based budgeting. Government today is far too large and intrusive.
How about we limit spending to the total projected revenues less 10%. Apply any surplus each year to the debt. Keep the exceptions you mention but force it to be balanced.
After all, they passed a spending bill that includes a measley $800K to teach a group of Africans to wash their genitals after sex. Really?
The Republicans come up with their plan and completely ignore earmarks. Really?
The days of the giant ATM in DC are O-V-E-R. Entitlements must be fixed!!!! And yes, that means CUTS. Does anyone really believe that we can find some way out by continuing to spend more than we take in?
Obamacare? Who exactly changed the meme from “Repeal” to “Repeal and Replace”? The establishment Republicans, that’s who. If there are problems with insurance like pre-existing conditions or inability to cross state lines or lawsuit reform then pass that as SEPARATE legislation. Just like the immigration situation requires that we FIRST close the borders and address reform AFTER that, repeal Obamacare and THEN pass corrective legislation.
All I’m seeing so far is an attempt by the establishment to rename the same old policies.
CC
CapedConservative I am assuming you are a good manager of your resources but why? Is it the law or just discipline and common sense? Actually how you manage is of little concern but what causes you to manage is of great concern
There is a old saying that poor folk had poor ways. There are two interpretations to this statements.
The first,being the one that generated the statement,says that your ways are poor due to lack of capital to do better.
My interpretation is that you are poor likely because you are a poor manager. There can be a lack of discipline that allows you to take your resources and make them work for you instead of consuming them on your own desires. The supermarket shelves are filled with offerings to consume on our own pleasure but when we are tight on cash those things can stay on the shelf. I don’t need a law to tell me to pass them up. The Socialist says I have a right to indulge and I don’t argue the point but it is not prudent to do so. Once you begin to prosper you can more freely indulge.
We have let our government sell the poor on the thought that they have a right to indulge when they should conserve. You can live without smoking, drinking and many other expenses. When you spend that money on getting ahead you usually do.
Several years ago our church had a mission in Mexico among the poverty stricken. We teach against smoking and drinking. Day wages ran 20 pesos and cervesa (beer)and a pack of cigarettes took about 12. When the wage earner got converted he had half his wages available for getting ahead and did. Therefore the rumor circulated that we paid our converts. This is the principle involved. When the poor manage they are less poor.
The direct consequences of poor management vs good management of your personal money is a good thing to teach people…. helps them understand their individual responsibility.
Where on your scale do you place the decision of the government to confiscate your money and use it to educate people in a foreign country to wash their genitals after sex?
CC
“Would such an amendment really make that much of a difference? It would make a colossal difference.” The Constitution as it presently reads is being ignored by the Executive, Judicial and sometimes the Legislative branches. Unless that changes, no new amendment will make any kind of difference.
In the 1970′s/80′s the lazy lib mindset that frequently argued, “You can’t legislate morality.” I’m afraid they were right in a far broader sense: the general morality required to acknowledge the Constitution and use common sense is only a flimsy influence in the ruling class today. So amend away. Just don’t expect it to make any (much less a “colossal”) difference.
Emma, exactly!
Everyone is wringing their hands over exactly how to word the amendment to fix the problem.
Except the problem is that we live in a lawless environment, where the constitution is “interpreted” to mean whatever is the “interpretation” approved by the mob!
There is an ultimate moment in “The Man Who Would Be King”, where Peachy Carnehan [Michael Caine] tells Daniel Dravot [Sean Connery] “Danny, the jig is up”.
Barring an Epiphany for the American electorate, where a solid majority suddenly gets religion and decides that the law is really the law as written, “Danny, the jig is up”.
Says nothing about reducing the size of government so we would still be stuck with a bloated government and a government that has far too many useless departments. If you are really serious about both curtailing spending and reducing our deficits and debt then we need to shrink government. We need to devolve much of government back the states. And we need to just end many of these programs and departments.
This is a curious clause: “Spending that is not defense spending shall not be characterized as such…” Meaning that spending on entitlements would be classified and adjusted according to what???
Much of this government entitlement should devolve back to the people, not be intercepted by the state. The vast majority of this problem is not a political responsibility. There is no good reason for every outcome to be the same.
~ 1Co 12:14 For the body is not one member, but many.
15 If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?
16 And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?
17 If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling~
Our body normally works together very smoothly but the eye does not hear the song nor the ear see the bird. Together we enjoy both. If we were all rich who would wash the dishes? If we were all poor who would have a dish to wash? The Corinthians must have had a problem with this and Paul was correcting that problem. We have need of the rich just as we have need of our eyes for the eyes see where we need to go. But with out the feet we couldn’t get there so we need the poor, or the less rich to move. We cannot make the eye equal to the ear because the function is completely different. I have to direct my body to pound this keyboard but there are many things that does not require my conscious direction. If I had to micromanage all those functions I would fail and the body would perish. The government can do no better.
It is a wonderful start, but there are several other measures that must be enacted along with this cap and I am not completely sure that we should allow them 2% over inflation. We need a balanced budget and national debt retirement because without either of these this is just a continued ticket to wasteful spending. It would be nice to set the level of acceptable federal spending, but we all know that if you give Congress a pot of money they will squander it and ask for more for things they should have spent if on in the first place, plus without retiring the national debt we will have to pay a large portion of all future spending to service that debt. This is a very complex issue that needs to be address in a comprehensive federal spending amendment.
If we want to make America strong again it means putting Americans back to work and that means making this country a great place to do business for big and small. We must lower taxes on businesses big and small because they create the jobs, not the government. We have long lived with the idea that we must punitively tax the producers to pay for the poor, but there would be far less poor if there were jobs. Today, we have 5% higher unemployment, which means that there are more poor that the government is having to support. So, make it worthwhile to do business and put those people back to work. The current reason is that the government doesn’t want to because it likes being big and powerful. I likes messing with people’s lives and a livelihoods. It is no mystery that when you lower taxes and minimize government interference that you have job growth (check the history, both Democrat and Republican), so why hasn’t if been done in this recession?
It is a matter of choice and we get to make that choice on Nov. 2nd.
It’s a great fantasy.
Any suggestions on what to do with Congress when they do not pass any budget, such as this year?
Tar and feathers.
Shut down the Federal government (except for the military; Social Security and Medicare, being insurance and not welfare, should either stay operational or be exposed as welfare programs) … and use it as an object lesson for the We the People, to show how LITTLE all that spending affects their day-to-day lives.
Don’t you mean how MUCH that spending affects our lives? It is sucking all our jobs right out of our economy because it does not leave working capital that creates those jobs. We work in our own perceived best interest and when we are mindful of the welfare of others as, in the golden rule, we protect ourselves against fraud. Serendipity is the blessings we accrue from doing the right thing which sometimes seems like a personal loss to us. When we get altruistic we also are vulnerable to hypocrisy.
I meant how LITTLE … as in, how LITTLE of a positive effect upon their lives they receive for all that spending.
I.E. if it disappeared tomorrow, the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t miss the programs bought with that money … so hopefully once they experienced that reality, they would be more responsive to the idea of whittling this government down to Constitutional size from its present Levithian status … and less responsive to the Re-, er, Progressive fear-mongering that keeps the status quo for these programs intact.
Good point ritchie. These programs do nothing for our welfare. However they are a source of inflation which robs us further which was my thought. We’re probably seeing the same thing from different angles. Thanks.
I love this discussion and I have a website with suggestions. I am concerned about my grandkids liberty. Please read http://www.rrauh2orr.org with some suggentions.
Thanks
Sam
IF the federal government were held to the limited powers (including limited powers of taxation) already extant in the existing Constitution, there would be no need for a Constitutional amendment.
But, no, we’re saddled with a plethora of government types/legislators who only respond with stuff like “you’re kidding, you’re kidding”* when queried as to where in the Constitution the federal government has such powers as it has been assuming, literally over decades now.
*Queen Bee Nancy P’s response when asked where in the Constitution the federal gov’t could require a citizen to purchase a service or product, like health insurance…
Amending the Constitution is a lengthy, drawn out process. By the time an amendment limiting spending might actually pass with 3/4 of states ratifying, hell, we’ll be 30 trillion in debt.
Also such an amendment would be subject to endless challenges and vapid legalistic wrangling over exceptions.
Government in DC seems almost unalterably broken. It seems like it has become so “abusive” of the ends for which it was created, that it cannot be effectively “altered” and the only recourse is to abolish it.
Let me get this right… Do you think that even Ammendments to the Constitution will be ignored by those in Washington?
If so, what’s the alternative… a “like-minded dictator” in control of everything?
Just asking, because I personally feel that many very good solutions to the problems that face us will not be implemented until we have a “strong leader” who “demands” the constitution’s provisions be honored.
How about 537 strong, principled leaders.
Elected, and continually refreshed with new, principled ones, by a responsible group called We the People.
In a lot of ways, we’re getting the government our lazy, un-engaged, easily-bought-off-with-glitz attitudes deserve.
When we routinely ignore the Constitution why would we be constrained by an amendment?
Fire, pure and simple. Everyone can think of things they wish the Constitution said, hell, if they wear a black robe they can even make up what it says. But, if we open a Constitutional Congress who’s to say what we might loose? There are plenty in this country who would gladly delete the 2nd amendment and substitute some lame “right to healthcare” bs.
The solution is much simpler. Either the elected representatives start dismantling the beurocracy or we fire them and find some that will. I’m not talking about limiting spending, I’m talking about limiting government, entire departments and wide swaths of laws need to be abolished outright.
Tie spending to “inflation?” How many times has the government changed how “inflation” is defined and measured in the last hundred years?
It should specify precisely what percentage of the GDP regardless of population size the government is allowed to spend and should include a requirement for a rainy day fund. It should also set a floor for defense spending in percentage of GDP.
No automatically allowed increases based on inflation and other BS, otherwise our banking system will be rigged to create inflation higher than it is riged to create now. Our fed has target inflation rates, and it is not the maximum it that matters, it also has a minimum inflation rate it wants accomplished. The government is limited in scope by total gross domestic product period with a floor on spending for military.
Please do not waste your time fooling yourself. The Constitution is not respected. Most especially by politicians. Watch what they do, not what they say. Congress eagerly suspended their rights to control of MONEY by instituting the FED RES in 1913. Many of the OWNERS were (are) Eurofolk.
Please – are your trying to waste our time? Solution is ugly. I do not want to get into trouble, so – leave it to your imagination.
Author has the basics down- something must be done to stem the tide of tax-and-spend: just that his ideas to deal with it are wrong.
We do need a Constitutional Amendment-one that simply says ALL Federal spending-per year- is limited to 10% of the previous years’ GDP.
As part of this basic, gigantic reform, we need to change Federal employment and the tremendous expense of pensioning the lot, that is, all non-military Federal employment limited to eight years-for life, and no pensions funded by the citizens.
Senators- two terms, Congressman-four terms. No parachutes, pensions or re-employment by any government organization. Ever.
Balancing the budget-required, and done by cutting the wages of all current government employees equally to accomplish this.
2% above inflation will simply lead to destruction.
Make it no higher than 15% of the GDP, but allow declared war exemption on defense spending. Require defense spending at 4%+ of GDP during times of peace.
Add in provision that taxes cannot be raised without 2/3 of BOTH houses of congress.
Outstanding! And a Big Yes.
Is it possible to have a national referendum requiring an amendment vote via a signature drive. It would be a mandate from the people, who after all this money and prosperity belongs to.
I like this idea; Take it to the People. The States could implement this and force it on the drunks in Congress.
The States need to start somewhere to regain the power they have been robbed of by Congress and the White House.
Many of these ideas are great, as is the basic idea of an ammendment to reign in and maintain only a level of government spending that is economically beneficial to a strong, vibrant, growing economy.
What America really needs to do is to agressively and simultaneously address both spending and inflation…. especially inflation!
Inflation robs each of us individually. It must be defined regularly and emphatically to educate all citizens, not just the elite… Everyone must know inflation is the loss of purchasing power in the dollars we earn. Everyone must be encouraged to understand how this poorly understood economic reality affects them personally.
By including a “measure of inflation” in any ammendment, we will maintain an economy that “anticipates” continued loss of purchasing power and reduction of personal wealth… i.e. perpetual inflation. That’s not good planning by our “political leaders.”
There is no “reasonable level of inflation,” simply because it must be properly viewed by “looking back 30-40 years… not just one or two political administrations.
Anytime inflation increases (even at 1-2%) it is “compounded” along with every loss of purchasing power of previous years. Inflation is a “negative and continual drag” on a nation’s economic progress and the indiviual’s attempt to accumulate weath for self and family.
Only “personal wealth” can be directed towards others by those to whom it rightfully belongs…. This should never be mandated by “government — at the ‘point of a gun’ or threat of imprisonment or confiscation.”
We must stop both spending and inflation in their tracks. We must affect a net reverse in spending if we are to begin to reduce inflationary pressure.
Our goal should be to eliminate inflation if we are ever to be able to acquire goods and services and effectively build the net worth of our citizens. To reduce the ever-increasing cost of food, gass, shelter, medical care, etc., we must strengthen our dollar… read “increase the purchasing power of our monetary unit of economic exchange.”
I’ve seen one proposed ammendment I like…. it mandates that those drafting a legislative bill must specifically designate a corresponding reduction of existing spending programs as an integral part of every future, proposed spending bill creating any “tax- or debt-financed” “program” or “initiative.”
(This is the only kind of “mandates” that should be imposed in America… only those that limit federal, state, and local power and intrusion into citizens’ financial affairs.)
Two points:
(1) “…and the method of measuring inflation shall not be altered substantially from long-established norms…” — this is a serious weakness in the proposed language, as clearly this verbiage will permit a lot of monkeying over time. A clear, quantifiable method defining how inflation is to be measured, AND defining what is inflation, must be included.
(2) Social Security spending can be easily reined in simply by raising the retirement age by 6 months every year up to the point where the retirement age is 2 years beneath the average life expectancy, such average to be determined based upon male life expectancy. Such a method would mean that a man might expect to collect Social Security for 2 years, women for a few years more than that. At which point Social Security would be totally solid. Medicare, on the other hand, can be fixed completely simply by providing hospice type care only upon reaching that same age. In other words, once you hit that age, the only type of medical care you get is opiates and help changing your diaper.
Uhm, what? The Constitution was amended 12 times in 20 years? Lets correct that to, it was amended 10 times in the first year. Really?
Come on, the chance the Constitution is amended EVER is incredibly slim– it takes colossal social changes, like a Civil War, or a World War, or race riots, to amend it. The Tea Party, as much as I love it, has not yet achieved clear, unquestionable moral superiority.
Anderson, like the Republicans and too many of the Tea Party, misses the point of what a “Limited Government Amendment” should mean: Limiting Government, period.
There is only one proper function of any government: protecting individual rights. Not providing health care”, regulating drugs, “promoting agriculture”, “workplace safety”, guiding the economy, “saving the planet”, “feeding the world”, schooling and indoctrinating the masses, etc, ad nauseum ad infinitum. One proper function: protecting the rights of the individual to his life, his liberty, his property (without which life is impossible) and his pursuit of happiness. Period. Police. Courts. Military.
(See http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_man_rights, and
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_the_nature_of_government)
So, to promote a so-called “limited government amendment” with a content focused on little more than limiting “the annual increase in federal spending to 2 percent (above inflation)” is a bit of a perversion of the concept “limited government”, and a poor joke. It might slow down the statists a little, but it ain’t gonna stop no one. What it really does is undermine the very concept of “limited government” in people’s minds. That’s a bandwagon the Left can climb on to.
Worse, in today’s day and age, when irrationality and ignorance is rampant across the political spectrum, proposing Constitutional Amendments is extremely dangerous. There’s too much that can slip into an amendment, like it did in the Health Care Act of 2010. The passage of even one amendment will beget others, and soon we’ll be far worse off than when we started. We are best off, for now, limiting ourselves to voting the crooks and thieves and commissars out of office, and passing regular laws to send them to prison.
And much easier than passing an amendment — start repealing laws, cutting budgets and disbanding entire functions of unnecessary government. For a start:
# $78.7 billion (−1.7%) – Department of Health and Human Services
# $72.5 billion (+2.8%) – Department of Transportation
# $51.7 billion (+40.9%) – Department of State and Other International Programs
# $47.5 billion (+18.5%) – Department of Housing and Urban Development
# $46.7 billion (+12.8%) – Department of Education
# $42.7 billion (+1.2%) – Department of Homeland Security
# $26.3 billion (−0.4%) – Department of Energy
# $26.0 billion (+8.8%) – Department of Agriculture
# $18.7 billion (+5.1%) – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
# $13.8 billion (+48.4%) – Department of Commerce
# $13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of Labor
# $13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of the Treasury
# $12.0 billion (+6.2%) – Department of the Interior
# $10.5 billion (+34.6%) – Environmental Protection Agency
# $9.7 billion (+10.2%) – Social Security Administration
# $7.0 billion (+1.4%) – National Science Foundation
# $5.1 billion (−3.8%) – Corps of Engineers
# $5.0 billion (+100%) – National Infrastructure Bank
# $1.1 billion (+22.2%) – Corporation for National and Community Service
# $0.7 billion (0.0%) – Small Business Administration
# $0.6 billion (−14.3%) – General Services Administration
Amen to this. And the fact that Social Security and Medicare dominate the budget doesn’t mean we should just not address all of these other wasteful and ineffective departments. We should compartmentalize SS and Medicare and lay in a plan that keeps promises to those without sufficient time to prepare for retirement while moving those coming along behind to private systems or to a public plan that requires full contributions that the government cannot touch for any other purpose.
If you put up a “No Tresspassing” sign and find a bunch of vandals wandering around your property, putting up a half-dozen more signs won’t solve your problem.
An ammendment won’t work either, so please don’t waste your time and energy on distractions. Washington State passed something similar, Initiative 601, in the mid-90′s. It limited the growth of government spending to inflation + population growth. It passed (in a liberal state at that).
Problem is, we kept electing the same tax-and-spend politicians to office.
At first, they probed cautiously for loopholes, exploiting them liberally (pardon the pun). When none of them lost their jobs for circumventing the law, they just stopped paying attention to it altogether. Today spending in WA is nearly as out of control as in CA. Our elected officials ignore the law and do what they want.
Like Congress does with inconvenient parts of the U.S. Consitituion. It doesn’t matter what ammendments we add to the Constitution, if we elect people like Nancy Pelose, Harry Reid, Barney Frank and Barak Obama, we’ll get the out-of-control government we have today. Look at the way they deal with taxes and regulation themselves. Laws are for the little people, not for the new nobility.
Whatever limits we want on government won’t be enforced by a piece of paper. We have to enforce them.
Yeah – and the $30 tabs? They managed to find a way around that too – how can your car potentially carry/tow? That’ll cost you! Now the lowest rates for car tabs is ~$45. And they’ve raised the tabs on my utility trailer from what was $12 (IIRC) to ~$37 now – it can carry 1500 pounds.
You’ve hit on the real mystery in Washington State – we pass these voter initiatives to limit taxes in whatever form it takes – then when the legislature (clever bastards I’ll give em that) does an end run around the citizens’ votes we (collectively) keep returning these thugs to Olympia? I don’t get it.
Ya gotta wonder had – Queen Chrissy not stolen the election from Rossi – what might have been. But I guess you only have to win 1 time in 3 to steal the crown. Rossi won the first 2 recounts but Chrissy – compliments of the thieves in the King County Elections office – won the last recount – then declared herself winner. Yes I’m still as mad as hell over that one. Look for more of the same if the Patty (dumb as a cow – thick as a brick) Murray can manage to poll within 1% of Dino. It’ll be close – that’s for sure.
How about an Amendment to get rid of this, first:
Because the income tax is the easy to go to money pot for the federal government. Without doing something about this, first, you will never get a spending cap of any sort put in place with an Amendment or without it. And if you make a ‘cap’ for income tax, then that becomes the absolute amount every citizen will owe directly to the federal government: which is what you get if you repeal Amendment XVI. Debt was limited when Congress felt it did not have the power to get income… after it got the power to tax you directly and disproportionately based on what you make, then the deficits and accumulated debt grew and grew.
This taxation ability allows the government to wage class warfare and divide the people based on income. Yet we all should benefit from government and be treated equally by it in all instances. ‘Fairness’ is in the eye of the beholder as to what ‘Fair’ is. Equality without regard to station in life, save for true destitution, is what this governmental concept was founded upon. Letting Congress decide what is ‘fair’ by income has not worked, save to bloat government and cause conflict between income sections and allows goodies to be disproportionately distributed in the name of ‘fairness’.
Get this government out of our jobs and income, first. Then we can talk about spending.
Debt was limited when Congress felt it did not have the power to get income… after it got the power to tax you directly and disproportionately based on what you make, then the deficits and accumulated debt grew and grew.
With passage of the 16th amendment began the federal government’s fantasy of the American people as its own private piggy bank.
And the genesis of massive federal spending, by people who had no personal stake in the acquiring of those monies.
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
~James Madison
And the gradual evolution of some kind of entitlement mindset of legislators in Washington DC, entitled to our cash to spend on grandiose boondoggles.
The 17th amendment changed the Constitution to allow for direct election of US Senators by popular vote instead of by state legislatures.
Which got us Al Franken.
True, but the current group in power doesn’t really believe money is a tangible “thing” – the Federal Reserve can always print more. It’s all just “numbers in a computer”. Even with limits on taxation, they can simply print more worthless dollars to fund their newest schemes.
It seems clear that some form of constraint needs to be placed on the federal government. Maybe tying the fed spending to a % of GDP – if government allows the private sector to grow then government can grow. Stifle growth (like what we are seeing now) and you stifle your own growth – cut back spending when GDP shrinks.
Imagine if such a program were in place today – Obama would be eager as all hell to re-institute the Bush tax cuts and fire up capitalism. And don’t tell me he doesn’t believe tax cuts don’t work – why else is he eager to get the cuts done for the $250K and under crowd? He knows what the effects are – he just has a problem with taxpayers keeping ‘his’ money (this is how he thinks of taxes).
Our Federal Government has become like a many-headed beast. We all fear for what it’s capable of. It is insensitive to the real needs of business and individuals alike and takes more than it gives. All we need to do is get it the hell out of the way but in doing so we risk getting trampled by the very institution that is “here to help”.
Like they listen to the 1st & 2nd amendments?More like we just drag their sorry ass’s into the street for a good “Tar & Feathering” than run them down to the Potomac on a rail for a dunk!
I practice working on my second amendment skills every day by doing any number of things like buying more ammunition and sometimes going to the range to hone my skills.
I also use the first amendment almost everyday to express my disgust with the current administration and legislatures in our once GREAT country.
Soon it might become necessary to use only the second amendment to stop the insanity unless there is Real Change in this country!
The proper way to deal with federal taxation is to eliminate it. It’s the hay that feeds the beast.
Repeal the 16th amendment (income tax). Replace it with a tax by the federal government on the states.
Repeal the 17th amendment (direct election of Senators). Replace with appointment by the State Legislatures. No six year term; they serve at the pleasure of their Legislature.
The end result is a House of the People (Reps), a House of the States (Senate), and a natural check on federal growth.
Further, amend the Constitution that no disbursement may be made from the Federal Treasury but for valuable goods or services received.
If there is no term on Senators, there is no reason to give each State two of them. If we’re repealing the 17th Amendment, we may as well cut the size of the Senate in half.
The 16th Amendment did not create the income tax, and repealing it would not eliminate the income tax. The Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895) ruled taxes on rents, dividends and interest to be direct taxes (and, therefore, subject to apportionment among the states). The 16th Amendment just says that an income tax doesn’t have to be apportioned, no matter what the source of the income.
Having the Feds tax the States based on population is more or less equivalent to direct taxation of individuals, except that a State would have the option of taxing its citizens some other way that by a head tax. Anyhow, anything that moves control of taxation closer to the people would be a good thing.
The 17th Amendment broke a very important check and balance between the States and Feds and should be repealed. Prior to the 17th Amendment, the Senate *was* a House of the States. Notice that important powers like Advice and Consent and Ratification of Treaties were given to the Senate, i.e., the States. Service at the pleasure of the State Legislature is an interesting idea, but I would still keep 6 year terms so that Legislatures would have to consider the issue at least once every 6 years.
I meant that I would *also* have 6 year terms in addition to “recall” by the State Legislature.
I suppose the people of a Congressional District should also have the right to recall their Representative by (prompt) special election where those voting to recall would also vote for their choice of a replacement. The 2 year term does present some interesting time constraints though.
Federalist 62
I. It is equally unnecessary to dilate on the appointment of senators by the State legislatures. Among the various modes which might have been devised for constituting this branch of the government, that which has been proposed by the convention is probably the most congenial with the public opinion. It is recommended by the double advantage of favoring a select appointment, and of giving to the State governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government as must secure the authority of the former, and may form a convenient link between the two systems.
a good idea, needs some work. i have always been in favor of an amendment limiting how often congress can be in session. say no more than 3 times a year, no longer than 45 days, must be at least 90 days between sessions. with less time there would be less chance of them doing evil things they do. longer time out of session means more time they have to let constituents bend their ear. maybe even require a certain amount of time each year spent at home in district. of course some provision for emergency sessions, but requiring the agreement of minority party leadership so that majority party couldnt just call emergency sessions for no reason.
The best Balanced Budget proposal I’ve seen is the one with the fewest specifics-that-could-go-wrong. It was in Randy Barnett’s Bill of Federalism and it would ordain that whenever expenditures exceed income, there shall be a line item veto. It also requires that budget bills be budget bills, and that nothing shall be attached to them, nor they to anything.
Unfortunately even amending the Constitution will not stop an out-of-control and lawless Congress and administration. In today’s reality law does not pertain to Congressmen or they would never pass the trash that goes for law today.
We already have a limit on how much the government can spend if we choose to enforce it . The federal reserve bank emits unbacked notes which are legal tender in all 50 states. However the constitution says that:
“no state shall make anything but gold or silver coin a tender in payment of debts”
Consequently it seems to be unconstitutional for sellers to be required to accept federal reserve notes (“greenbacks”) for goods services or payment of other debt.
Federal reserve notes would be displaced by lawful money, such as treasury issued silver and gold coin and certificates . Once the currency of the united states becomes limited to hard money (and hard money backed notes) then the spending of the US goverment becomes limited to hard currency which must either be borrowed from the market or raised by taxation
Currently becaue we use united states debt as money the government can create AND spend as much money as it wants to without raising any money by taxation or market borrrowing. Instead the federal reserve creates the money , debt, in its computers . Stop using goverment debt as money , which means killing the Federal reserve system, and goverment spending will automatically be limited by taxation and what the goverment can raise in the credit markets.
A good start would be an amendment that says:
The Constitution’s purpose is to define and to limit the powers of the Federal government.
The Federal government only has those powers enumerated or specified by Amendment. Liberty, the General Welfare, and Commerce are only protected when government’s powers are constrained.
Federal powers shall be interpreted in the narrowest possible way that meets the purposes of those powers. The States and the People shall retain all remaining powers.
—–
Such re-affirmation would make it much more difficult for Congress and the Courts to expand Federal power–everyone would have to acknowledge that the Constitution is a limiting document.
An Amendment on spending would be helpful, too.
Until we have a Congress inhabited by individuals who honor the Constitution, it won’t matter, will it? We are no longer a nation of laws.
We need to send a bunch of people to prison as a starting point. If law enforcement won’t enforce the law on our Congress, maybe we the people can?
we need a combination of three things:
1) a currency freely convertable to gold (the gov’t can only print what it has gold reserves to service)
2) an across the board “fair tax” (the gov’t has to tax the lower and middle classes in equal proportion to the productive class)
3) a balanced budget amendment (the gov’t can’t spend what it doesn’t have through methods 1 and 2)
all at the same time. Remove any one part of that trio and the loophole will be begging for exploitation. Taxpayer ire will see to it that those who attempt to simply jack up tax rates to throw good money after bad down the progressive sinkhole will not be reelected.
Here’s another section: In time of declared war, the budget deficit shall not exceed one half of the total Defense budget, including war supplementals, and any violation of this limit shall render all appropriations bills other than the Defense Appropriation and any Defense or War supplemental appropriations null and void, retroactive to one year prior to the violation. Debts incurred in violation of this section shall be considered illegitimate and subject to repudiation by court order, and deliberate disregarding of any provision of this section shall be considered to be Fraud, and anyone convicted under this provision shall be subject to a fine of up to $1 million, imprisonment of not less than three and no more than five years per count, and permanent prohibition on holding any position in government, whether elected or appointed, as well as a forfeiture of all accrued emoluments of any sort. Sitting Congressmen and Senators shall not be immune to charges of Fraud under this Section.
I’m certainly for starving the federal beast a bit, but I think the plan has a few problems.
Inflation, as measured by what? CPI? Implicit GNP Deflator? All scores kept by…. the government.
Why inflation plus 2%? What have they done to deserve a 2% increase in spending every year?
Might rescinding all existing taxes on Americans, and replacing them with a constitutionally mandated flat consumption tax work better? You’d have to cap borrowing at some percentage of tax revenue.
Keep working on it. The fundamental idea is right.
I just don’t see this having an effect. Amendments to the constitution are pointless when the current limits aren’t respected anyway. We are already too legalistic in our approach to attacking federal government as it is. How does a legalistic approach help? You are singing their tune even if you’re trying to mouth different words.
The heart of the problem is really the entrenched interest of the Ruling Class, as Codevilla calls it.
The only way to really get at them is to deconstuct their power. What is the source of their powerbase? It is not really actually the federal government. That is the machinery. But the base is still the culture war. And by culture war, I mean the common education and progressive language that guides our national discussion (including this ‘yet-anotha-amendment’ idea).
You attack the power base at its weak points, not its strong ones. Congress and its dependents, and the judiciary, are emphatically well fortified. They could take this down without breaking a sweat, as the folks from Wash State can tell you. If you’re going to attack a strong point, you do it as a diversion, because that shifts the enemies attention. In that case, an amendment like this would have value as a diversion from a real attack on the Ruling Class(RC). But the real attack on the RC has to focus on isolating the various segments of the RC that are in the RC coalition only for the benefits that the RC bestows on them via the power of government.
What these segments have in common, besides banding together to enrich their parties at the expense of the common good, is that they are all actually only tiny segments of the electorate if taken in isolation.
So take them in isolation. Hit them where it hurts them but doesn’t hurt the electorate one whit.
Let me throw out a couple:
1. Intellectual property royalties that last “lifetime + 70 years” (well over 100 yrs in the modern age) and keep the Ruling Class’s Praetorian guard, the MSM and Hollywood, excessively isolated from public feedback. Cut them to something reasonable, 25-30 years. By constitutional amendment if necessary. (who cares about royalties, really? Who would fight this except the MSM and hollywood?)
2. Public employee unions. These leeches have had the appearance of strength only because their demands have been nibbling at our toes. But as Chris Christie is showing in NJ, when push comes to shove, they in actuality are still a tiny part of the electorate. The key is isolating them and showing them to be the enemy of the public good that they have nearly always been. Once their power is broken, one leg of the Ruling Class stool will be severely weakened. There’s many ways to do this, the most obvious but immediately impossible would be congressional action+executive enforcement outlawing federal employee participation in unions, tough as that would be. More subtle attacks will require sustained effort in disrupting their money sources like federal grants.
3. End ALL private-action enforcement of regulations such as the clean water/clean air/wildlife acts. These segments of environmental laws currently act as regulatory multipliers and funding sources for another leg of the RC stool. Again, like the royalties, WHO WOULD CARE? except the enviro wackos already on the take? This would do a lot to end the current nuttiness that holds up natural development, with virtually NO (politically loud) CHANGE in the standards the governement sets, while utterly reversing field on the environut political pressure groups.
4. Force each of the entitelment programs that mail out “your benefits/earnings” sheets to include segments on important but misunderstood facts like -the actual non-existence of a Social Security Trust Fund -the actual current budget trends given current demographics -the actual burden people’s children and grandchildren will assume based on current projections.
How do you amend the Constitution to say that the Supreme Court can’t “interpret” its way around it? “We really meant the Tenth Amendment to mean what it says?”
When Franklin said, allegedly, “A republic, if you can keep it,” he wasn’t being frivolous. No constitution can be self-executing and retain the flexibility to apply under all circumstances. Ours has sufficient language to hem in governmental excess, but when the people elect politicians willing to ignore that language and they appoint justices who will cover them in doing so, the people have nobody to blame but themselves.
I’m not opposed to an amendment such as Mr. Anderson proposes, but I can already hear the arguments against it, such as “It will mean an end to Social Security and every other entitlement.” It’s going to take a majority of at least 75% to pass such a measure and we’ll have another civil war to make it effective.
Hmmmm.
1. Too many loopholes would make this completely useless.
2. Without enough loopholes it would be too restrictive in emergency situations.
3. With just enough loopholes it would be gamed beyond imagination.
4. Tying spending to inflation just means someone is going to monkey around with the definition of “inflation”.
5. Don’t clutter up my Constitution with garbage thinking. The US Constitution has a great deal of beauty within it. Start throwing endless nonsense into it and all you’ll end up with is the EU Constitution. If I want that I’ll move to France.
6. You want to control spending then vote the bastards who spend too much *out of office*. If that’s too hard then perhaps you need to refer to a dictionary as to what the meaning of “Democracy” is.
I like the amendment.
However it should define “formally declaired war”. You neatly sewed up all the other holes.
This amendment is foolishness. Inflation is not a singular, objectively-measurable quantity; it is a set of different estimates of the change in price level in various markets depending on an ever-shifting basket of goods to estimate. Because of that, it is perfectly possible for the political branches to goose the rate of allowable increase effectively without limit. The amendment might as well read, in its entirety, “Don’t spend too much!”
And mr. burns, the meaning of that clause of the Constitution is that the states themselves can not make any thing lawful tender other than specie. It was specifically a reaction to Rhode Island issuing its own currency and passing a law making it compulsory for private creditors to accept it as payment from private debtors, even in contracts that had explicit specie clauses. It does not prohibit the states from paying debts in paper money, it simply prohibits the states from making their own paper money.
Amendments won’t work. Look at illinois where there’s a totally ineffective constitutional provision trying to keep the pols from spending money they don’t have. Kick them all out. That will work for a while, then we’ll have to do it again.
A further comment about the 16th amendment. When income tax was started, there was no withholding. Individuals and corporations broke out the old check book and wrote a check to the government for the whole amount each year. Withholding taxes started in 1943 so the government could have a continuous uninterrupted supply of money while fighting a war. Just repealing withholding and making everyone write a full check to the government before April 15th of each year would really incense the people who would finally realize just how much the government costs. Only when the people get mad enough will you get any change, and unfortunately, as many have already noted, we have a propensity of returning the big spenders election after election, and what do they do…..spend, spend, spend, and increase taxes. It is going to take an outraged public before there is any change. There is a low level of unhappiness right now, but it is not near strong enough to scare the likes of Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Frank, Kerry, or their minion, and cause a change in their spending habits.
The biggest question I have is will the public get mad enough to stop this insane spending before the country reaches fiscal collapse. I don’t have the correct answer, but if I were to bet, I would bet that it will take a total and complete fiscal collapse before we start to control spending……..Good Luck America, you are going to need it !!!!!
Amen to all who recognize that further amendments to the Constitution aren’t what’s needed: what’s needed is an electorate who insist that those they elect will honor the Constitution that we all ready have. Until/unless that happens the Republic is doomed.
2 admittedly small, but growing trends that give me some hope:
1. Amongst the ‘intellectual class’, those who understand the Constitution as it was meant to be understood are significantly outbreeding those who deny or ignore the limits on gov’t that it imposes. A significant number of these parents are also homeschooling their children so that their values will be consistently passed on, not contradicted by gov’t schooling. (A humorous side note to this is that, even when a liberal is confronted with the blatant evidence that conservatives are out-reproducing them, they still won’t change their selfish ways; after all, kids can really put a cramp in your activist/partying lifestyle, eh? And these are the folks who claim to believe in evolution. Just think of it as survival of the fittest.)
2. Unlike how it was in the Baby Boomer generation and before, it now takes next to no effort to read the Constitution and related documents: 2 clicks on the cell phone and it’s right in front of you. We no longer need to rely on the gov’t school/SCOTUS twisted interpretation we’ve been fed for years. More and more young people are reading and understanding it, and recognizing that our gov’t as it currently exists is wildly out of line with its clear meaning.
Will these trends kick in big enough/soon enough to save the Republic? Stay tuned…
An Amendment limiting legislation to a single subject would be a good idea even if application of such rules in State Constitutions have been hard to interpret/enforce. Every piece of legislation should state its Constitutional basis from enumerated powers. The General Welfare Clause could not be such a basis. Every bill must be read aloud in each House, a quorum of which must be present during the entire reading. These provisions should be strictly construed, and any citizen would have standing to challenge a law based on a violation of these provisions.
2% above inflation?
I don’t think you’ve thought this through. Inflation is a policy, and your proposal offers nothing to prohibit the government or its agent, the Federal Reserve, from inflating at will.
-jcr
“Until we have a Congress inhabited by individuals who honor the Constitution, it won’t matter, will it?”-Emma
Great question, Emma. No, it won’t matter and we won’t have a Congress of such fine individuals until we have a large majority of voters who themselves “honor the Constitution.”
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty but most voters prefer sleeping.
Nope. Don’t do it. As sure as you come up with a rule of thumb that works right now, it’ll fail at some time in the future.
Do the hard work of forcing the election of responsible, intelligent people. Deal with today’s problems today. And Heaven help us all.
Reigning in the Federal Government (as well as state and local governments) is highly desirable. But radical change – even good ones are extremely dangerous. The most economically damaging actions of this (and the previous) administration were not the vast increases in spending but suddenly changing all the rules. In that way the current situation mirrors that of the great depression.
Your amendment is too complex and too easy to circumvent. Mr. Barnett’s sounds better. But simpler still is just requiring a super-majority of each house to approve all spending bills. In a way that restore’s the effects of the 17th amendment. The so called checks and balances are primarily impediments to federal power requiring more than a simple majority to accomplish anything.
Even requiring as little as 60% would stop an enormous amount of legislation. And the formula works in times of war and peace. If congress can not find a supermajority for defense spending in times of war, maybe the war is not such a good idea. It is also perfectly enforceable. The courts need not care about the purpose or intent of the bill, just whether it constitutes spending, and what the vote was.
There are 3 good reasons why this will not work. All were mentioned by several people in the comments, but put them all together and you see the enormity of the problem.
1. Nothing you add to the Constitution will have any effect unless you rollback all post-1908 Progressive amendments. They were the toe in the door for the Progressive program, which inevitably led to our current situation. Unless we chop off that toe, the Republic of our forefathers will continue to slip away.
2. Of what use is an amendment to a document which is routinely “interpreted” away to mean anything one likes? That is, when it is not simply ignored. Just the abuse of the Commerce Clause alone has enabled the Federal government to cast off nearly all of its shackles and allowed our wannabe masters to insinuate themselves into every corner of our lives. If we cannot enforce the intent of the present Constitution, no amount of amendments will help. Indeed, you would only be opening the door to more mischief.
3. Our government has broken down in every branch at every level. It has become largely populated by individuals of low character, with no allegiance to the Constitution, and a fondness for lording it over their fellow citizens.
As an illustration, take the RICO law. The Legislative branch passed a law allowing prosecutors to seize the assets of a suspected criminal without said criminal being convicted of a crime. This is expressly prohibited in the Constitution – “No man shall be deprived of Life, Liberty, or Property without Due Process of Law”. Which, when it was written, meant in a court before a jury of his peers. The Executive branch happily approved this wonderful, unconstitutional tool for sticking it to the bad guys. The Judicial branch had no objection, using the rationale that it was a process, imbedded in a law and a judge was involved at some point – so it must be Due Process of Law. Of course, it is now painfully obvious why that was forbidden in the first place. Police and prosecutors now routinely pad their financing with the proceeds from property seized from citizens without them ever being convicted. Normally before they go to trial and many times without them even being charged. And they do not seem to have any pangs of conscience whatsoever about robbing their fellow citizens.
The government attracts these people because it has Power. Power will always attract the vilest creatures. Not only the political animals vying for money and status at the top, but also the busybodies and worms who revel in forcing others to live as they wish to or simply enjoy humiliating others. We need not mention the con men and outright thieves.
We can do nothing until these creatures are no longer at the levers of power. They are like moths to the flame, wherever the flame burns brightest, they will come. It is an inescapable law of nature. The only way to wrest control from them is to reduce the flame that draws them from the roaring bonfire it is today to the candle it was intended to be.
The power of the government, its ability to interfere in our lives, must be drastically reduced. It is the only way forward. All else is folly.
The concept of a spending limit is a good one, vital really if America is to remain an economic power of any stature. But this implementation of it is a loser from the start.
Firstly, unless the set level of spending is only 30-40% of current outlays it simply locks in generations of liberal spending policies, the exact same policies that have done so much damage to date.
However that is a small matter next to the shockingly bad idea of granting spending increases above inflation. Get out your calculator and work out how long it takes for an annual increase of 2% to double total spending. And then to double again takes the same amount of time. So within the lifetime of a child born today, you’ve locked in the right of the congress to quadruple their spending over and above inflation. For those not keeping track, that is 100% of GDP within a lifetime. And you think this is a good idea?
Spending limits MUST be linked to something that specifically prevents above inflation increases. A percentage of GDP perhaps, although GDP would then need to be defined in great detail in the amendment as congress would simply change the way they measure GDP when they want to spend more. Alternatively, it might be linked to the number of working people in the population, again, with “work” being well defined.
Cast off the vast bulk of spending to the states and let them fail or succeed on merit. If the federal goverment only dealt with genuinely federal issues, it wouldn’t need much of a budget. 8-10% of GDP would be more than adequate, you could probably get away with even less and still maintain a strong military and effective federal institutions.
But above inflation increases? You may as well hand the liberals the keys to the safe. The entire GDP will be theirs to do with as they please before long anyway.
So long as the government is too large, the incentives to ignore new amendments – especially financial limits – will be too large. The government would override this by defining it into nonsense, the same way they do the rest of that poor tired old list (cf Commerce Clause).
The only way something like this could work is if the government were sufficiently small and limited so that the incentives would be too small to cause corruption.
Such a government is currently politically impossible; therefore this proposal is fantasy.
It’s a pleasant fantasy, but seriously — wave the magic Constitution wand and suddenly government will start obeying the rules?
Sounds like it ought to be at least as effective as the 27th amendment was at limiting Congressional pay raises. IOW, not at all.
The fundamental problem with all constitutional amendments at this point, is that the Supreme court is letting Congress violate the Constitution. What makes you think this amendment would be an exception? I can think of a half dozen ways around this amendment, so long as the courts are inclined to cooperate.
Until we do something to restore enforcement of the Constitution, changes to the Constitution will accomplish nothing.
Government spending is not the problem, it’s a symptom of a government with no limits on its power. Check the scope of power and the spending will take care of itself.
I think a better approach is to reform the taxation power in such a way that simplifies the issues for voters. That reform would include restrictions on taxing powers to an imcome tax and asset tax. Deductions would be limited to a single personal exemption. All forms of tax credits and exemptions would be outlawed. The details are spelled out at http://www.hedgehogparty.com.
The only way a spending limitation could work would be to outlaw federal govt funding for a range of activities…like education, medical care, social security, or all forms of federal insurance.
Everyone is pointing out how utterly impossible this would be and I agree.
However it would be possible if the country were to split which I have been advocating for over four years as the only way to save some semblance of America. The NE liberal cancer centered in DC is not operable. Decent, sane, God fearing Americans need to move S and W and form a new nation. A new nation modeled after the Constitution prior to the institution of the income tax and every amendment since that one.
The new nation would quickly become an economic power house while the decrepit liberal states withered away. Within ten years we could rejoin the temporarily separated states and just put ‘New’ in front of the former United States. There need not and probably would not be any violence but for isolated incidents committed by criminal liberals within the seceding states. The military would not attack its own people and the federal thugs would not have the numbers.
This might provoke a military coup but that ‘could’ be a good thing. Chances are great that such a coup would quickly lead to reinstitution of constitutional government. Only RADICAL change can save our nation. Yes the risks are great but there is no alternative.
Define inflation.
Inflation is when the government allows the printing of money or issue of coins that exceed the Gross National Product. If a country has a Gross National Product with a market value of lets say 1 trillion dollars and it then authorizes the printing of 2 trillion then it has doubled the supply of money but at the same time has devalued real monetary value by one half and this will help for a while until the real economy figures out there is too much money for the real goods.
This happened with Jimmy Carter who acted as if Aliens from outer space were causing it when his administration went full blast with the money printing presses along with other really awful bad policies, we are seeing more of the same but only on a larger scale. Welcome to Jimmy Carter and administration on steroids!
I have a little different take on inflation. It is the injection of inert material into business overhead. That inert material can be counterfeit money printed by our government but backed by an empty bank account. A hot check, in other words. It can be rules, such as mandatory liability insurance or requirements such as seat belts and air bags. The point is not whether seat belts and air bags are a good idea but that they are mandatory. They add to the overhead. Another source of inflation is labor laws where union rules require a man hired to do a specific task that should be incidental to the job. A job the primary employee is forbidden to do. Then there are unreasonable wage demands, all which militate against an optimum wage and rob us of our prosperity. That optimum wage will be the best compromise between the interest of the employer to keep overhead down and the employee’s wage up. The good pay lets the employee spend his money on more items, resulting in more jobs while the business is still able to make a satisfactory profit. There is both a benefit and an conflict here and we need to have them pull even, like a team of horses.
A business has little control over the cost of raw materials and moderate control over labor cost but it is government cost that is inflationary and has been beyond the control of business because they can be outvoted. All government is not inflationary but all inflation is government.
There is exactly no chance that the political class will ever pass a Constitutional amendment that limits their ability to steal from the taxpayers.
Forget it. Ain’t going to happen.
There are a couple of gaping holes here, namely unfunded mandates and penalties, so lets add two other sections:
Section 5: No entity of government or entity acting on behalf of government may take any action of any kind which imposes a spending requirement on a subordinate level of government without providing the funding to cover that spending. “any action of any kind” means any and all conceivable actions, and specifically includes:
The enactment or creation of any legislation, law, rule, regulation, order, directive, instruction, procedure, or other output of government which creates or has the effect of creating a spending requirement; legal action of any kind whatsoever, including legal action which consists of or results in a judicial ruling, jury verdict, settlement or other action which creates or has the effect of creating a spending requirement; the altering of the interpretation of any legislation, law, rule, regulation, order, directive, instruction, procedure, judicial ruling, jury verdict, settlement or other legal action which creates or has the effect of creating a spending requirement.
Section 6: Serving as President, Vice President, or a member of the Senate or House of Representatives for any portion of any year in which total federal spending exceeds the limits defined in this amendment is a crime, with a mandatory penalty of:
- Forfeiture of all personal assets, including retirement accounts, homestead property or other assets normally protected by bankruptcy laws.
- A term of not less that 20 years in a randomly selected maximum security state prison.
Any person determined by a federal jury to have attempted to circumvent the provisions of this section shall be executed. If such a person has fled the country, the president will use US military and intelligence assets to repatriate or execute the violator.
I agree that an amendment to fix spending at a given percentage of GDP would be more to the point and less open (but not free of manipulation). I gather the percentage has been about 20% in recent years and will rise to 25% or more by the time Obama has his way. Less than 5% goes to defence. How much of GDP the federal goverment should spend is open to debate as well. Who should pay how much and how is another issue.
This proposal is more nibbling around the edge of the problem… The Progressives seriously altered the Constitutional mechanisms that the Founders had established through Amendment in the early 20th Century. The only way to fix our current problems and avoid future problems is for Conservative Constitutionalists to put things right through their own Amendments. DC needs to be cut back to size and the States need to be given more responsibilites and powers (instead of being clients states of DC).
1) An Income Tax Repeal & Tax Reform Amendment featuring a) specific prohibitions on income, gift, estate taxes but permitting a Uniform retail sales tax; b) a prohibition on any tax over 10%; c) a 3/4ths requirement for Congress to raise any tax; d) a prohibition on any expenditure not specified in Art.1 Sec.8. and finally e) a repeal of the 16th Amendment — basically starve the Beast & specify in excrutiating detail (for Statists) what taxes are allowed & how much is allowed.
2) A Fiscal Accountability & Responsibility for the Federal Government Amendment featuring a) prohibitions on Congressional exemption from its own laws; b) a real (21 day) public review period for all laws; c) a requirement for each law to name its Constitutional authority; d) strict limits on the Commerce Clause; e) limiting the size of government to 10% of GDP; f) a prohibition on unfunded mandates on the States; g) a specific legislative calendar, limiting Congress’s time in session; h) a 3/4th requirement for Congress to approve public debt; i) make State Legisltures solely responsible for the compensation of their Congressional Delegation — basically clip Congress’s wings, limit their purview and keep them out of Wahsington most of the time. Reintroduce Congress to the concept of Public Service (not elected Royalty).
3) Term Limits Amendment – 6 years/3 terms for the House, 12 years/2 terms for the Senate, no more than 14 years total in Congress regardless — the cliche applies here, diapers & politicians should be changed often and for the same reasons.
4) State’s Powers Amendment (Teeth for the 10th) – a) repeal the 17th Amendment & enact a regular method for all State Legislatures to appoint their Senators; b) allow State Legislatures to repeal Federal laws with 2/3rds of passing a resolution of repeal; c) allow State Legislatures to amend the Constitution without having to call an Article V Convention or having to get approval through Congress — start treating States like a co-equal partner in government and strengthen this neglected Check & Balance.
5) An Original Meaning & Interpretation Amendment – a) courts may not alter the Constitution through “interpretation;” b) the words & phrases of the Constitution shall be interpreted according to their Original Meaning; c) treaties or the laws of other nations shall not supercede the Constitution and shall not be used in interpreting the Constitution; d) reiterate that the rights of Americans are God-given & precede the existance of the Constitution or the US Government and e) any citizen shall have standing in court to challenge any law that they believe infringes on their Constitutional rights — basically the Founders really meant it, and enhanced ability of citizens to challenge the government to protect their rights.
Here is how things could play out if this amendment became a reality:
Politicians would be incentivized to increase taxes, and there would be tax increases. However, such increases have no chance of achieving compliance with the amendment because entitlement program spending is simply astronomical. Thus, the entitlement programs would be pressured a little at the margins to achieve year-to-year compliance. No politician is going to abolish or even reform the entitlement programs if the Tea Party tolerates higher taxes plus nibbling around the edges of entitlement programs.
Tremendous back pressure would follow against the nibbling, however, because you have already specified that the moral basis for the nibbling is budgetary. You are essentially telling people that they have a right to entitlements and the issue is only about balancing the books. People will thus still feel entitled to entitlements, they will feel that the budget is not their problem (or it is too abstract a problem), and somebody else somewhere can take cuts. Just look at what is happening Greece. Even during a crisis, people are not going to suddenly develop a moral center when everyone around them is tacitly supporting the very idea of entitlement programs. Everyone will be in denial that we are facing an existential threat that requires phase-out of entitlements, and the back-and-forth between interest groups will continue until national bankruptcy and the collapse of the U.S. as a world power.
Ladies and gentlemen, it might be wiser to go all in for legislation that sunsets the entitlement programs in a reasonable fashion, followed by a Constitutional amendment to prevent them from ever happening again. Then we could probably adopt such a balanced budget amendment (but we probably wouldn’t need it at that point).
If you have other thoughts on how things might play out, please share. I am willing to listen and reflect, but hope is not a method.
Please see Item Number 11.
Thank you.
1. Congressional Term Limits: One four or six year term*
2. Members of Congress shall purchase their own individual retirement plans.
3. Members of Congress shall participate in the general Social Security system.
4. Members of Congress shall no longer be able to vote themselves pay raises.
Congressional pay raises should be approved at the ballot box by the general electorate
5. Members of Congress shall not be given any special health care benefits not accessible by all Americans
6. Members of Congress shall be barred from enacting laws that usurp Private Enterprise under the general welfare provisions of the U.S. Constitution.
7. Members of Congress shall equally abide by all laws enacted and impose on all.
8. Members of Congress shall enact the flat tax, with no exemptions up to a set amount.
8a. Members of Congress shall restore the federal income tax deduction for medical expenses, including medical insurance expenses
9. Members Congress shall call for a Congressional investigation to address Barack Obama’s presidential qualifications as per Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, as well as any future president and vice-president.
10. Members of Congress shall call for a Constitutional Convention to take away the power of the executive or legislative branches of government to print money without the consent of the electorate, except in extremis cases, where a two/thirds majority would be required by Congress and approved by the general electorate at the next election.
11. Members of Congress shall call for a Constitutional Convention to limit deficit spending to 10% of the previous year’s GDP, except in extremis cases, where a two/thirds majority would be required by Congress and either approved or disapproved by the general electorate at the next election.
12. No person holding political office shall declare for another office without first resigning their present office.
13. All candidates running for public office shall not be allowed to accept campaign contributions from outside the district they wish to represent.
14. Congress shall repeal employer withholding of taxes.
15. Each bill addressed by Congress must have a Constitutional declaration or it will be non-binding.
16. Enact voter verification procedures to insure accurate elections.
17. Any labor contracts served by the collection of public taxes are strictly limited to the taxes collected, including pension plans.
18. Eminent domain cannot be used by the state to benefit a private entity.
19. Children of illegal aliens are not U.S. citizens but citizens of their parents country.
20. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives shall create independent investigative offices to address ethics charges against the executive brance of government.
21. Members of Congress shall pass federal legislation that outlaws gerrymandering in congressional and state legislative districts to put an end to the Incumbency Protection Plan of Washington.
22. Congress shall pass no law that requires citizens to buy any product or service.
ex animo
davidfarrar
Let us lock in permanent government enlargement as a Constitutional ammendment! Great idea!!
Seriously?
Assuming that average GDP and population growth is over 2% long term, this amendment will decrease government relative to GDP and population growth. It definitely riegns in spending growth from what is the present long term growth rate, more like 5-10% after inflation. And this amendment limits the maximum growth in any one year, but limited government administrations can limit growth to under that limit for their years in power if they wish, and now will not have to worry about later administrations passing huge increases that undo their work.
The problem is that all these proposals try to paper over the real problem- the incentive to spend money from other districts. All the incentives are to spend, but there is no direct benefit to a representatives voters for him saving money.
1a. Representatives get one proxy to vote for each person that voted for him.
1b. Each Senators proxy count is proportional to the percentage of the states population that voted for him.
1c. States whose proxy representation of eligible voters in the house or senate is below 70%, may hold additional elections to increase the representatives or senators from that state.
2a. All bills must be posted for 4 days (96 hours) before being voted on. 2b. Emergency bills percentage needed to pass increase by 1% for every 2 hours less than 96 hours after being posted that the vote count begins.
3a. All votes are to be decided by proxy count.
3b. Each voter can remove his proxy and/or transfer his proxy to a different senator or representative. Proxy changes shall be posted within 24 hours.
3c. No bill can be passed that does not have Proxies for over 50% of all eligible voters.
3a. The total tax revenue from all the proxies that a representative holds is “Proxy Revenue”. Revenue from proxies that are transferred to or from the
rep in the middle of the fiscal year are pro rated.
3b. When voting on a normal spending bill, each representative also allocates the amount of money that he select to fund that bill from his Proxy Revenue. No representative can be forced to allocate any money for a normal spending bill.
2. Unspent revenue at the end of the fiscal year is rebated to the proxies in proportion to the amount they paid.
3. A mandatory spending bill is funded with an equal percentage of each representatives total tax reserves. The same percentage is also spent from each unrepresented tax payer. Mandatory spending bills require proxy vote of 60% of eligible voters. If that bill will result in any representative running a deficit for his Proxy Revenue, then the bill also requires a 90% Proxy vote.
I prefer more of a “scorched-earth” policy. To whit:
– Strip from the Federal Government the power to independently write any binding policy. They may write recommendations only.
– Strip from the federal government any ability to raise funds except by tarriff and for specific purposes. All other fiscal and taxation policy must be written and managed at the state level.
– All federal recommendations must be forwarded to any and all states that would be effected for ratification in their state legislatures.
– After state legislatures ratify the recommendation, it must forward to the state governor along with the budgetary process by which the plan will be financed for his approval and signature.
– The approved package would be returned to the federal government and held until all packages are received. If 2/3 of the states return approved packages, then the whole proposal can be forwarded to the senate for final ratification and presented to the president for his signature.
– After the plan is signed into law, it would be returned to the states for implimentation as interpreted by each state and funded as desired by each state.
Sound cumbersome – you bet! Sound time comsuming – right again! Sound like it would be hard to get anything done – absolutely! I count these things as GOOD things. Meanwhile, EVERYTHING happens at the local state level. This is as it should be. DC suddenly has very little power over any domestic policy. This, too is as it should be! Suddenly, senators and congressmen have a pressing need to be in their states most of the time, at the local state house and attending to local state matters; yes, please!
This turns the entire process on its’ head! Look at it this way; “It cannot possibly be worse than what we already have!”
We need something much simpler. We also need to restrict the central government’s power more directly. My thoughts:
1. Budget must be balanced unless 60% (or 66%) of both houses and the President agree.
2. Change and limit congressional terms: Senators limited to 2 4-year terms; Congressmen limited to 3 2-year terms; combined limit 12 years. These would be lifetime limits.
3. Eliminate or drastically narrow the scope of the commerce clause.
4. Eliminate the general welfare clause.
5. Other changes could also be needed.
Interesting but ultimately futile. What this proposal and other recent ones miss is that politicians are smart and bent on power and wealth and will find a way around static limitations. A spending limit is like the Maginot Line, easily flanked with regulation. Consider the hopefully dead “cap and trade” legislation. This regulation amounted to a huge transfer of wealth from energy consumers, which is nearly all of us, to a relative handful of politically connected energy producers.
What the people need is the political agility to sucessfully keep our wanna be rulers in check. We need to make the people the “fourth branch” of government, giving them the ability to govern themselves directly. 24 states already give their citizens the right of popular initiative; let’s do the same thing at the national level. Then maybe more than 20% of the governed will think the government has their consent.
Sure, it’s not a panacea; just look at California. But, on balance, it does empower the people to check political power grabs. Is there any doubt that Obamacare would have failed if the people were empowered to vote on it this November?
Not bad, but I think we need other measures as well. Term limits, properly constructed, would seem to dampen the ability to accumulate power. But, I agree, power is the real attraction to many politicians.
Now that most Americans are getting freebies from the treasury we’ve passed the point of now return. It is no longer possible for us to fix the system outside of extreme measures. Those who support the continued growth of give-away government are in turn elected by those benefiting from it. And as John Stossel recently explained, just about every part of our financial and manufacturing sector is being manipulated by the federal government. We haven’t had a true free market since the 19th century, and even then it wasn’t as free as it could be.
Am I wrong? Tell me how we can fix it when the very moochers we are feeding are the ones who decide who is elected to give them more of our money?
My futile contribution.
The key issue is taking away Congresses ability to raise its credit limit (aka national debt limit) virtually at will by maybe requiring that the States (electoral college style) affirm or ratify any increase in the debt limit. If 26 States had to ratify an increase, that would insert a degree of uncertainty into whether anymore debt could be issued and provide a measure of control. If you wanted to make it harder make it 3/5 or 2/3 of the States.
DECREASING the debt limit can be done by Congress with both chambers agreeing to do so.
Require the national debt also encompass unfunded liabilities of Federal government programs. That would take up a lot of slack.
Set the initial debt limit (irregardless of what it currently is) to say 25% of the GDP in the amendment and then if the Federal government wants to expand the limit (to continue to issue debt) it has to present the issue to the States at the next general election.
Not a perfect solution, maybe unworkable, but my 2 cents for a possible solution. Anyway…
While trying to control the growth in spending seems like a good idea, I think that it can be circumvented in devious but legal ways, certainly inventive ways. I doubt that a spending amendment would be worded/structured in a fashion that would allow necessary things to get done and be able to deal with emergencies.
I think that Congress’s real problem is that it can spend without end (on a practical basis) because it can raise its debt limit at will. In that case, there is no limit to the demands that can be made and to not spend would take a collective act of fortitude that might manifest itself from time to time but could not be sustained. Too much vote trading and spending comes about because when there is no practical limit on available money, the sky’s the limit.
Nobody has to make the hard choices of allocating scarce resources (money) because the resource is not considered scarce.
The problem with all limited spending amendments is enforcement.
So I offer a simple unique, and self-enforcing, Balanced Budget Amendment, in a mere 25 words.
“No member of the legislature, may stand for re-election who shall not have voted for, and implemented, a balanced budget in their previous term in Office”.
“The only exception to the Amendment above shall consist of either
a) A State of Declared War, or
b) A State of Declared Emergency.”
“A Declared Emergency is defined as a period of no more than one year, declared under recorded vote by 2/3 of elected legislators of both houses, and written approval of the Declaration by the Chief Executive.”
In my humble opinion, the only way to enforce any such spending limitation is by soliciting the self-interest of the politicians. Politicians have a self-interest in continuing their careers, which overrides their interest in providing constituents with favors, in return for votes.
Stratagems created to bypass this amendment, result in more turnover in office, which is another thing devoutly to be desired. Vacancies as they occur, in office, only serve to make it tougher to pass an Exception. I purposely restricted the penal condition to a singular, immediately, previous term in office, thus preventing manipulation through voting in some previous term for such a condition,which then might “innoculate” and qualify them to continue in office, without ever voting for limited spending again. I see the danger of perennial Declarations of Emergency, but I believe there is a neccessity for flexibally adapting to conditions like: a)a multi-year year War, or b) a 5 year Civil insurrection, or c)a Katrina-like calamity.
Can anyone else see a potential loophole which we need close?
We stopped amending the Consutution because now the government simply ignores it.
Congress and the Executive branch do anything they want. Anything Congress cannot get passed as a law, it simply has a bureaucracy “regulate” and anything the President wants to do but can’t, he simply hands off to an unelected “czar” with unlimited powers.
Who needs a Constitution?
Politicians attempt to solve all problems with one magor bill, which is impossable. No Congress can solve even small problems with one bill, they are too corrupt to accomplish a complete cure.
The best solution would be not to allow earmarks, which is causing most of the overspending.
There is one other easy solution. Before the President can sign a bill, the bill has to be passed by both the House and the Senate. Present rules allow individual members to slip in “earmarks” which does not require further approvel. If a bill has been changed in any way, financial or procedual, then the bill would have to be voted on again for approval, Then and only then could the President sign each bill without further changes. This would force the complete Congress to approve all earmarks or other changes.
This would provide a simple change and if it doesn’t solve the problem, then a more comprehensive change to then be attempted.
AND Remember, “Art, like the Alamo, has to draw the line somewhere.”
—–Gene Elder, San Antonio
Just repeal the 16th and the problem is solved.
KISS
We need some kind of government control; the feds needs to stop raising debt and treat the disease of wasteful spending. By restricting government’s spending over a long term it will limit government’s desire to tax and to collect those deficits. We need a balanced budget and national debt retirement because without retiring the national debt we will have to pay a large portion of all future spending to service that debt. I feel that the government not only needs to address this concern but change it with a federal amendment. If we want a strong economy we need to make this country a great place to do business. Therefore we must lower taxes on businesses big and small because they create the jobs, not the government. We have long lived with the idea that we must strictly tax the producers to pay for the poor, but there would be far less poor if there were jobs. We can prosper jobs and the economy by limiting taxes, spending, and government borrowing by balancing the budget each year.
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