Federal Laws

I wonder if anyone really thinks about the never ending list of federal laws, rules and regulations that flow out of Washington year after year?(1)

Now obviously, to have a civilized society we need some laws to set a level playing field for all the citizens. But you would kind of think that at some point, say after a couple of hundred years, you would have all the laws you needed to structure a free and functioning democracy. My concern is that, in most cases, every new law, regulation or rule decrease our freedoms. Take for instance the new health insurance laws, over 1000 pages of new rules that did not exist before passage of this law.

Before this law, you had the right to decide if you wanted to spend your money on health insurance. You no longer have that right. Before this law, you had the right to decide exactly what options were included with the health insurance you bought. You no longer have that right. Before this law, you had the right to decide if you wanted to have your insurance cover your adult children. You no longer have that right. And the list goes on and on. A 17-year-old college student used to have the right to a credit card without a co signer, no longer. A long time ago you had the right to decide for yourself if you wanted auto insurance, no longer. No longer can you decide if you want to wear a seatbelt, or own a establishment that allows smoking.

I am not saying that some of the rules don’t have a positive effect. What I am saying is we are a lot less free than we were 20, 30 or 100 years ago. And our freedoms continue to be infringed upon with every new addition to federal law. It’s a little scary when I think about where it all will end.

So, I started to think about what we really should consider when we are deciding, as citizens to support or oppose any new federal law and I came up with three basic areas that we should consider when considering some new law.

1. Is it constitutional? No matter how much good we think a law will do, no matter how much we want a particular regulation to be enacted, it must adhere to the constitution.

The founding fathers were very familiar with the problems of an un-checked government. Heck, they had a king appointed by God. One can’t really disagree with his decisions. So they set out to write a constitution that protected our basic human rights, as laid out in the Declaration of Independence, and limited the power of the federal government to a very basic area of control. They stated very clearly that any powers not granted to the Federal government in the constitution are reserved for the states. Now, the first few laws passed were pretty easy to understand. We needed a law against murder because to murder someone deprived them of their basic human right to life. Same thing with stealing, an infringement on you right to liberty. Things get a little cloudier with laws that seize you income so the government can distribute it to someone else. This type of law now gets the government picking the winners and losers on our system Government give a tax break to people buying hybrid cars, winner, people who buy hybrid cars, losers everyone who paid taxes so it could be given to hybrid car owners. Think about this, this is not the government collecting taxes to support the government, this is the government seizing your property (income) just so the government can distribute it to people the government has decided are more deserving of the fruits of your labor than you are. Thinking of it another way lets say you have 3 TV sets and your neighbor has only one, the government decides that’s not fair, comes to your house, takes one of your TV’s and hands it to your neighbor. No matter how well meaning these wealth redistribution type laws are it is pretty hard to find the power granted in the constitution to allow your property to be seized and distributed as our elected officials see fit.

2. What are the intended consequences? Will the new law or regulation really accomplish our intent? The new health care bill is expected to improve health care. Yet, in the over 2000 pages, there is almost nothing about health care, only health insurance. Is the only problem with our health care caused and related to our health insurance? Does limiting you options for health insurance and benefits really improve your chances for good health? Will the trillions of new tax dollars spent really improve most people’s health?

3. What are the unintended consequences? In 1963, the government started mandating seat belts in new cars. No longer did you have the right to decide if you wanted this feature, the government mandated it. As the years went on this mandate expanded from just the front seat to all seats, then to mandatory seat belt use (enforced by the federal government withholding federal tax money to states that did not enact mandatory seat belt laws). So, the government collected taxes from all states, then used that collected money as a bribe to get states to do as the federal government wants but really did not have the power under the constitution to enforce. Then the government, seeing that people still were not behaving like the federal government wanted, enacted laws to make air bags mandatory. “Sorry you don’t get a choice, the people in Washington know what is good for you.” And then we find out that the new federal mandated safety device forced on us actually kills people, from 1993-1996 alone 32 people died from air bag related injuries including 21 children (2). So then we get more laws and now it is not legal to put your child in the front seat of your car. We actually have safety warnings in new cars (another new law) telling you to be careful because your federally mandated safety device could kill you. Now that is what I call an unintended consequence.

We are slowly trading our liberty for the security of mommy government, protecting us from the challenges of life. We are slowly trading away our personal freedom, the one real thing that makes this country great and unique.

(1) How Many Federal Regulations are There?
According to the Office of the Federal Register, in 1998, the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), the official listing of all regulations in effect, contained a total of 134,723 pages in 201 volumes that claimed 19 feet of shelf space. In 1970, the CFR totaled only 54,834 pages.

(2) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that since 1990, airbag deployment has killed 227 people in low-severity crashes, including 76 drivers, 10 adult passengers, 119 children between the ages of 1 and 11, and 22 infants. Of the 76 adult drivers killed, 28 were women under 5 feet 2 inches tall, and 4 of the 10 adult passengers killed were females smaller than that height

The tax man cometh, and he's wearing a disguise

We have seen over the last four years the federal government suing states. The feds have sued Arizona, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and Florida among others. Of course we have seen the feds sue companies; Boeing, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are just a few. But not many people have heard about the latest list of federal “enforcement actions” the Federal government suing cities. In this case of Federal government expansion of jurisdiction is to punish cites, and by extension the tax payers, for violations of recently changed EPA rules about waste water run-off.  

Most city sewer systems have some safety system to dump waste into water ways to prevent backups into citizen’s basements. But now the EPA has mandated city’s sewer systems can only have four discharges a year.

·         Does the EPA take into consideration how much rain a city gets? . . . . . . . . Nope

·         Does it consider how much a city discharges in one instant? . . . . . . .Nope

One gallon or a million gallons, it still counts as one discharge.  The best thing for the government is that no Congressional oversight is required; just more bureaucratic rule making that is a hallmark of this administration.

From a list of 227 violators identified by the EPA there has been 25 cities fined 21 billion dollars in the last four years and if Obama is reelected you can be sure the EPA will vigorously pursue these supposed law braking municipalities. 

It’s not that American cities have not made extensive efforts to combat the problem of waste being discharged into waterways during heavy rains. For years cities have developed rain gardens, catch basins and other “green” solutions to control rain water run-off. These are lower cost solutions than the federal mandate of rebuilding complete city sewer systems.  

The Confederation of Mayors insists they are making progress and the EPA vendetta can’t be justified by science. Cities are spending twice what they were 25 years ago on controlling discharge and still being forced to spend more and more to make smaller and smaller gains. It will take more than 300 billion dollars to make upgrades to meet expanding EPA regulations. Forcing cities to accelerate upgrades on their systems will mean new bond issues and increased water rates; the mayor of Lima Ohio testified to Congress that the new rules will increase annual sewer bills for city residents which averaged $330 a year to $ 850 a year.

A recent Wall Street Journal article labeled this EPA overreach the “The Obama Storm Tax”.  I am sure the administration would insist this was not a tax, just like the “fine” for not purchasing health insurance is not a tax, and the 3% fee on sales of medical equipment manufactures is not a tax. I guess you can make the claim you have not increased taxes on the middle class when nothing the federal government does that takes money out of the citizens pocket is actually called a tax.

To me it is not surprising that a government that already borrows 40% of every dollar it spends it will find new and inventive ways to separate the citizens from their money – you from YOUR money. Obama will tell you he only is going to increase taxes on the very wealthy but if you spend ten minutes looking at the amount of money available from that segment of the population compared to Obama’s 16 trillion dollar federal debt, you will realize all their money is NOT going to cover the check Obama is writing and as soon as he is done with the “wealthy”, once again the tax man WILL cometh and he will be coming for you.

Facts are stubborn things, or did Obama just lie?

My good liberal friend Rich told me the other day that spending under Obama has not increased.  The whole cause of the massive increase in federal debt was only caused by the decrease in federal income because of the poor economy. This has been a line from the Liberals supported by the media, the other line being ” it’s all Bush’s fault”.

To quote President Obama in his 2009 State of the Union address, “By the time I took office, we had a one year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door”

This would be a good argument to explain the exploding federal debt under Obama if it was true. But as we have seen so many times in the past, the President has a real problem with the truth. Let’s look at some of the facts.

In 2008, President Bush sent a 2009 budget to the Congress with 3.1 trillion dollars of federal spending and a projected deficit of $400 billion dollars. Voting for this budget along with almost every Democrat in Congress was then Senators Obama, Biden, and Clinton, along with Rep. Rahm Emanuel. In fact, the final bill passed the Senate with only two Republican votes and passed the house with no Republican support at all. Now it is true that President Bush, in the interest of getting along with Congress and finding common ground, signed the final bill but, it is a little a little difficult to see how Mr. Obama can conveniently forget his (and the major players in his administration) role in supporting the very bill he blames for “the mess”. President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton also voted in favor of the 700 billion dollar Troubled Asset Relief bill that piled more debt onto the federal government. This, buy the way, was the last time the federal government passed a budget. The democratic leadership in Washington has failed to pass a budget since Obama came to office.

Obama has said many times during campaigning that we can’t return the government to the very people that created the fiscal mess.  I have to agree, and seeing it was Obama and a Democratic Congress with a signature from President Bush that brought us the 2009 federal budget that produced the first one trillion dollar deficit, I would say we should not return any of them to Washington.

Of course this does not explain the last three fiscal years that produced three more years of over trillion dollar deficits, two years with total democratic control in Congress. Federal spending increased every year from 2009 to 2012, and in 2012 spending was over 1 trillion dollars more than 2008. All this along with anemic federal tax recites due to the non-existent Obama economic recovery has led to a record 16 trillion dollar federal debt, over 6 trillion more than when Obama took office. The federal debt has increased more in 4 years of Obama “leadership” than 8 years of President Bush.

The Presidents confusion about the 2009 budget might be understandable seeing his first debate coach was John Kerry, maybe Obama was for the 2009 budget before he was against it.

What does the IRS have to do with health care?

The ill named “Affordable Care Act” (aka: Obamacare) has many parts that are downright terrifying. There is the yet to be named panel that will make far reaching decisions about our health care. I say yet to be named because although the panel members were supposed to be selected by this time it appears the President is delaying the appointments until after the election. No sense in drawing attention to a board of bureaucrats deciding what kind of health care you can get before an election.

And the 3% tax on every single medical devise sold in this country. It’s an interesting way to lower the cost of health care, tax all medical devices and assess that tax on total sales not profit, so even if a company has no or little profit it still is hit with this tax on every product it sells. Need a pace maker, it will cost you 3% more under Obamacare, need a wheel chair, knee brace, crutches, all 3% more thanks to the bill that is supposed to make health care affordable.

But nothing is more concerning than the agency that will be enforcing the majority of the Obamacare provisions is the IRS. Yep let’s get the IRS intimately involved in our health care. The extra work load will mean the IRS will hire 4000-4500 new employees with most of them working on enforcement. The IRS will be charged with making sure every citizen has “adequate” coverage and each employer provides “affordable” coverage. What’s “adequate”? Well no one really knows. We have to wait for the un-named panel to decide exactly what that means. And if the health insurance you have picked or the one your employer provides does not meet the yet named criteria, the IRS will assess a penalty.

According to a recent Fox New article by y Elizabeth MacDonald  the Taxpayer Advocate Office [TAO] (a Federal IRS overseer) states that tax payers will now be complied to share with the IRS.

    *Insurance plan information, including who is covered under the plan and the dates of coverage;

     *The costs of your family’s health insurance plans;

     *Whether a taxpayer had an offer of employer-sponsored health insurance;

      *The cost of employer-sponsored insurance;

      *Whether a taxpayer received a premium tax credit;

     *Whether a taxpayer has an exemption from the individual responsibility requirement.

Makes you warm and fuzzy sharing a lot more personal information with the IRS doesn’t it? To adequately determine if you have “adequate” coverage the IRS might have to communicate and share information with insurance companies, employers or other government agencies. Because your penalty for not having adequate coverage is based not on your income status but on your “household” income this means the IRS must not only track your earning but compile earning information on you household.

For small employers we have a $2,000 penalty if they don’t proved “affordable” health insurance. To help the employer understand if the health insurance is “affordable” by the government definition the government says it must cost less that 9.5% of the employees gross income. So for the employee we base weather his coverage is “adequate” on his total household income, but to determine if the employer is providing “affordable” coverage we will use employee gross income. 

Like everything involving the federal government and the IRS simple huh? And we have not even scratched the surface in understanding what is in the 2000 pages of new federal law. Speaker Pelosi was not far off the mark when she said “we have to pass the law to know what is in it”. So much of this law is left to be defined by federal bureaucrats we will not know what it all means for years.

By then it just might be too late. 

Joe Biden and the Effective Tax Rates of the Buried Middle Class

"This is deadly earnest," Biden said. "How they can justify raising taxes on a middle class that has been buried the last four years? How in Lord's name can they justify raising their taxes with these tax cuts?

Joe Biden, Vice-President, Charlotte, NC

 

Yes, Mr. Biden, they have and we know who has been running the last four years of economic turmoil. There are two problems, however in your direction of angst.

1 – Mr Romney, if elected, has not issued, discussed or proposed raising taxes on the middle class; the class that you have so effectively buried, though obviously not with shovel ready graves. He has proposed extending the current tax rates and closing the loop holes the rich use so effectively to avoid excessive taxes.

2 – The middle class bears so very little of the transparent Federal income tax burden. I say transparent because we all, ALL citizens, pay the enormous burden of the Federal Government’s regulation policies. Gas tax, corporate tax (passed on to the consumer and among the very highest in the free world) along with a plethora of other little cuts that you and your policies make us pay

The Tax Foundation has done another great job in displaying who pays for what and just how progressive your system has become. I’ll note for honesty that the Bush Tax cuts help move the burden from the middle class by lowering tax rates and the Child tax credit. I have heard that Mr. Romney wants to extend these and close the loop holes for the very wealthy thus closing the gap.

Tax Foundation

Our Progressive Tax System

 

Thanks to blog "For love of Family and Country" for this .

So you think your vote does not count?

In 2008 Barack Obama won by almost 9.5 million votes. It is easy to think that your one vote would not have made any difference in that election, and really you are correct. Your one single vote against Obama would have just meant Obama won by 9,499,999 votes. Not even a moral victory there.

But the power of the voter to influence the direction of our government, and hence the direction of our country is not in the single vote, it is the combination of single votes into a block. It is my single vote and your single vote and your neighbor’s single vote.

According to the census bureau, in 2008 there were 229 million people eligible to vote but only 131 million voted. That’s 98 million voters who failed to vote! About 1/3 of the country is registered as Republican. So if we assume 1/3 of the people who were eligible and did not vote were Republicans that would be over 32 million non-voting Republicans….. we only needed 30 % of those 32 million voters to defeat Obama. 

And if it was a close election, it gets even more evident how every vote is important. In 1962, President Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by 112,000 votes; the University of Tennessee gets more people than that for a football game. Think how different the world would be if Nixon had won in 1960. 

Votes for Senators and Congressman can be even more important. In 2008, Al Franken won his Senate seat in Minnesota by 231 votes. Why is that important? That Senate seat gave the Democrats a filibuster proof majority and they used that majority to pass “The Affordable Care Act” aka: Obamacare. Without that seat the Republicans would have blocked Obamacare with a filibuster. 231 republicans in Minnesota who thought their vote did not count made possible the federal government taking over 20% of the US economy and changing health insurance as we know it.  

In 2008 President Obama won by almost 9.5 million votes, but he did not win because 9.5 million more people voted for Obama than McCain. President Obama won because 9.5 million republicans failed to vote because they thought their vote did not count. 

When in reality, the only time your vote truly does not count, is when you don’t cast it.

After 19 trillion dollars of welfare spending are we better off?

The main theme I have tried to follow with this blog is the inherent unconstitutional nature of the many well-meaning but miss guided programs and laws that are coming out of the US federal government.  But the real crime of the continued infringement on our civil liberties is not only don’t most of these programs work as intended, but many times they do more harm than good.

We see examples every day of failed money wasting government programs. A few months back we talked about the vast amounts of money poured into the Department of Education yet we see no tangible evidence that it has done anything to raise the level of education in the US.

 My good liberal friend Rich often accuses me of being uncaring because I don’t support federal tax dollars used as a form of charity. Even if I could get past the issue of the government redistributing the citizens wealth (which I can’t) or that nowhere in the constitution is the federal government charged with seizing the property from one citizen to give it to another citizen, I cannot get over the total lack of success or accountability of the vast majority of these programs.

Recently a researcher for the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, testified before Congress about the size and scope of the welfare programs in this country. Now critics of Mr. Reactor or the Heritage Foundation in general might disagree with the opinions of Rector but you cannot disagree with the facts of his report.

Today in the US there are 79 overlapping separate mean tested federal welfare programs. Means tested programs are programs that provide aid directly to individuals or families.  Unlike programs like Social Security and Medicare, no prior financial contributions are required to participate. In 2011, total federal and mandatory state payments to all federal welfare programs amounted to 930 billion dollars. That amount of money if distributed in cash to every person in the lowest 1/3 of wage earners in the country would amount to over $9,000 per person. Mr. Rector concludes that this amount “is more than sufficient to bring the income of every lower income American to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, roughly $44,000 per year for a family of four. (This calculation combines potential welfare aid with non-welfare income currently received by the poor.)”

Since President Johnson declared a war on poverty in 1964, total spending on welfare programs has topped 19 trillion dollars. As a comparison the Heritage report notes that total spending on all wars from our Revolution through the war in Afghanistan was only about 7 trillion dollars. If America had performed as poorly in our military wars as we have in our war on poverty we would not be here to even have this discussion.  When the war on poverty started, welfare spending equaled 1% of GDP.  In 2011 that had jumped to 6%. Spending on means tested programs has increase 290% from 1988-2008 faster than any other government program. Everyone knows that federal spending on Social Security and Medicare is huge, but few people realize that means tested welfare spending equals 75 cents for every dollar spent on these two programs. And although the majority of welfare money goes to families, 8% actually goes to abled bodied adults with no dependents.

And what does the future hold? Under the last three years of the Obama administration we have seen welfare spending soar. From 2008 to 2011, spending on means tested programs increased 40%. Much of this could be contributed to the lack of recovery from the recession that ended in 2009 but looking at Obama administration projections in the future we see welfare spending increasing not decreasing after the recovery takes place, maybe the President does not anticipate a recovery any time in the future. By 2014 administration projections have welfare spending exceeding one trillion dollars and over 1.5 trillion in 2022.

After 50 years and almost 20 trillion dollars we see absolutely no decrease in the rate of poverty in America but the Presidents solution is to keep doing the same thing.

What if all that money had been left in the hands of the people? What if every citizen had more money to contribute to private charities? What if small business had more money to expand their business and hire more employees? What if the money used to provide office space to the thousands of federal workers who administer the billions of dollars allocated to poverty programs was just used directly at the local level to actually help those living in poverty? Would the country and its citizens be worse off or better?

The Liberals say I am mean for opposing continuing the same failed policies of the past, but then apparently Liberals believe spending 20 trillion dollars of other people’s money and leaving 15% of our citizens mired in poverty is being compassionate.

Their definition of compassionate is a little different than mine.