Why comprehensive reform bills are a bad idea

Letter to the paper

The Sun-Times printed a piece by a Congressman (July 27) lamenting Walgreen’s possible move of its headquarters overseas to save on its tax bill.

I thought it ironic that four times in his article he mentions as the solution to the problem what is actually one of the main causes of the problem in the first place. 

He says that we need comprehensive tax reform, something that will require compromise and difficult choices. 

When the government talks about comprehensive reform, whether taxes or immigration, it means that they want a bill at least 800 pages long.  One reason is that it will cut down on the number of people who actually read the bill.  It also means that most of the bill will never be debated, let along even see the light of day until it has long passed.

It requires compromise, because Congressman are forced to either take the whole thing as it is or reject the whole thing.  Anybody outside of Congress will just ask the question why?  Why not break it down into the individual issues, debate them, and vote on them? 

Walgreens, like every other business, knows that no company is guaranteed to even be in existence in ten years.  Even the largest and leading companies can go bankrupt in a matter of years if they don’t watch their bottom line carefully. 

Our tax rates are high, because our government is greedy.  It is hungry for money to pay for all its aid and assistance programs.  Our government, meaning we the people, has to choose: Do we want more of our companies to go overseas and take a lot of our jobs with them, or do we want government to be one large welfare agency, spending money it doesn’t have to try to make everyone’s life more comfortable?

How to Fix the Debt and Spending Problem in Washington

How to Fix the Debt and Spending Problem in Washington

a paper sent to the Republican Party in DC for a contest

750 word limit 

I recently read the Federalist Papers, those papers written to explain and defend the Constitution prior to its ratification.  It clearly states that the House controls the purse. All spending bills have to originate in the House.   If we have a spending and debt problem, it is the fault of the House and only the House. 

The House is afraid to cut spending.  They are totally unable to explain to the American people why the debt and deficit spending is a problem.  It has gone on for so long that their cries are like the boy who cried wolf.  Why is the House finally waking up now?

If you actually want to fix the spending and debt problem, the first thing you have to do is to educate the American public.  The only way you are going to be able to get their attention is to state now that there is no other business more important than this, and you will not consider any other legislation until this is resolved, barring a declaration of war or something of that magnitude. 

You have to declare now that there will be no more debt limit increases.  Do not wait until three weeks before the deadline.

Now that you have the nation’s attention, you need to explain to them how all this affects the economy and them personally.  Do not talk about their children’s debt.  This means nothing.

What you need to explain:

1)         All money given to the government is money out of your pocket, and there is no benefit to the economy.  If I spend all my money on myself or if I give some of it to you to spend, it is still the same amount of money being spent.

2)         When the government spends more than it takes in, the value of the money in your pocket decreases when the government prints more money to pay for these expenses.

3)         When other countries lend us money, it puts our economy at risk and gives other countries too much control over our economy and policies. 

4)         When too many people rely on the government for money, for anything, it is just money from other people’s pockets and everybody is living on less money.  Everybody will do better if more people are working than less.

5)         All this increased spending has put so much pressure on the government for money that it taxes our companies at the highest corporate tax rate in the world.  So millions of our jobs have gone overseas, and the burden of paying for everything falls on fewer and fewer people.  Jobs will not return to our country until our taxes are low and our culture supports that so that this concept doesn’t change back and forth with different administrations. 

6)         The dollar is the world’s reserve currency.  If we lose that status, our economy could collapse a lot worse than it did in 2008.  It is our debt and only that which would cause that change, and other nations are already working on doing that.

7)         The more money you give to the government, the less you have to spend on yourself.  Even if you don’t pay federal taxes (the 47%), you still pay Medicare and Social Security and all kinds of state and local taxes which are all part of the same problem, dependency on government rather than being able to take care of yourself.  The more people rely on the government to take care of them, the less money everybody will have for themselves.

8)         Buying things with borrowed money always costs more than paying in cash.  Our government buys almost everything with borrowed money, which means we are wasting a lot of our (your) money.

9)         The debt is all money that we owe to people, many of them are in foreign countries.  If we had to pay our debt, our economy would collapse.  Our economy is based on everybody (government and people) buying things on credit.  At some point, the credit can stop and you have to pay your bills.  That can happen easily when so much of our debt is held by foreign countries.  When we move the debt around within our own country, it just takes from the value of the dollar in your pocket. 

You need to talk like this is about the best interests of our people and our country and not any political advantage.  People are tired of politics and all the BS.  Do what’s right.

Why immigration reform is stuck in Congress

Why immigration reform is stuck in Congress

A letter to the Sun-Times

The Senate has passed an 800 page immigration bill.  How do we expect 435 Representatives to even read this bill, yet alone discuss, debate, and then vote on it? 

Many of our Congressmen are finally recognizing that one of the serious problems with Congress has been the proposing of massive bills with the implied intent that nobody is going to read the whole thing.  In this way, hundreds of laws have passed and billions of dollars spent all of which would never have passed if they were introduced on their own, debated, and then voted on.

Specifically with immigration, just as the first step in dealing with a sinking ship is to stop the leaks, so the first step in immigration is to secure the borders.  Right now our southern border is being swamped with thousands of children requiring huge amounts of attention, while thousands of other people are able to pass by unobstructed.  Of those who have been caught, there have been many from countries with significant anti-American extremist groups, like Pakistan and Yemen.  In the past year, there have been over 600,000 crimes committed in Texas alone by illegal immigrants.

To characterize House Republicans as more interested in seeing Obama fail than in what is in the best interests of our country is not only unfair but shortsighted.  There are a lot of issues with immigration.  Take them one at a time, debate them, and then vote on them.  To vote on an 800 page bill means that everyone will get something they disagree with and all of us will get surprises we won’t like. 

We have had too many surprises in big bills in the past.  Break them down into manageable pieces, and let’s talk.  And this is where the Senate becomes the immoveable object.

The Killings in Chicago

A letter to the newspaper

Your headline on today’s paper (Outgunned) sadly and aptly portrays the reality on the city streets of Chicago.  But I think we are missing something very important here.

There are over 300 million guns in our country.  Shootings and killings are only indirectly related to the number or presence of guns.   

Killing people is a moral problem.  Morals is a value system of what is right and what is wrong. 

Parents are supposed to teach morals to their children.  But we as a society have encouraged people to have children without being married, so that leaves only one parent to raise the child.  But that person needs to work, so who is raising the child?

We encourage people to abort their babies if there are perceived difficulties in raising that child.  But the attitude of disposable babies doesn’t end when the baby is born.  It cheapens life, and we should not be surprised when people grow up that life is still considered cheap.  It is religion, and only religion, which values life, because people are seen as created in God’s image rather than just a biological organism closely related to mammals.

We used to teach values in schools, but we were told by a court we call supreme that anything that smacks of religion has no place in our schools, so we only teach our children about fairness, equality, and tolerance there.  We teach them nothing about love, forgiveness, honesty, integrity, sacrifice, hard work, virtue, faithfulness, patience, and kindness.  Most resources that teach those things are religious, and we wouldn’t want to have our kids learn anything about that in school.

The killings in Chicago I submit are the aftermath of years of purging our society from the influences of religion, specifically Christianity.

The Three Bigger Issues about the Hobby Lobby Decision That Nobody is Talking About

The Three Other, Bigger Issues about the Hobby Lobby Decision

That Nobody is Talking About

The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision is well on its way to dividing further a country that is fast approaching a breaking point.  A great number of people applaud the decision as a win for religious freedom, and another great number of people are disappointed, no, angry at the decision for what they see as doing more harm than what such so-called religious freedom is worth.  I won’t try to figure out here which great number is greater or even try to show which side I think is really in the best interests of the country. 

There are bigger issues here at stake.  At least three.

1)         What law exactly was Hobby Lobby trying to get out from complying with?  The Affordable Care Act?  Well, not exactly.  The mandate for employers to have their insurance providers supply free contraceptives to their employees was not a part of the Affordable Care Act.  This mandate was added by the Department of Health and Human Services. 

That means that this part of the law was never discussed, debated, or voted on by elected representatives in Congress.  But you may say, a lot of governmental departments make rules and regulations that are binding on the people of the country.

Well, that’s precisely the problem.  There are regulations, and there are laws.  I don’ think the Supreme Court would hear a case about a regulation.  This mandate is commonly touted as the law of the land.

But the Constitution of the United States, in the very first sentence says that:  “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

The Constitution spells out in Article 1 Section 8 the powers of the Congress, and at the end of that section it basically repeats that first line:  Congress has the power “[t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

All laws are to be made by Congress.  But you say that would require way too much time and knowledge for our representatives to be able to do.  That’s why they created all these agencies to run things for them.  But this would not be necessary if the Congress limited itself to the powers expressly given to it by the Constitution in the first place. 

But you may say that the writers of the Constitution couldn’t foresee the kinds of issues that would surface two hundred years later.  The fact is that they knew that, and that is why they established a means by which the Constitution could be amended. 

But through neglect, ignorance, wilful abuse of power, wilful abdication of power, or a wilful grab of power, Congress has allowed other people and agencies to exert power that belonged solely to them.  By assuming far more duties than the Constitution allotted to them in the first place, they delegated some of those duties to people and agencies which they had no right to do.

I believe the Supreme Court should have based their decision entirely on the fact that this was not in fact a law, but a regulation from a department that transcended its Constitutional powers.

2)         The second other, bigger issue in this case is that suddenly the people of the United States have been granted a new human right.  There are at least two problems here. 

Rights as originally understood by our Founders as in the Declaration of Independence attributes our rights as endowments from God.  They precede government and make our present form of government possible, because our form of government is a natural result of those rights.

But this right to free contraceptive is a new right, granted to us by the largess of our government.  As such, it contributes to and solidifies the trend in modern thinking that rights come from government.  That court called supreme which ultimately runs our country rules that our government must be entirely neutral on matters of religion, which essentially has meant that anything relating to the idea of God must be excluded from government decision making, except of course for those practices that are merely symbolic and traditional. 

So any thought of rights being given to us by God had to be downplayed, because that has a strong resemblance to a statement of theology.  So more and more rights are being seen as under the jurisdiction of the government.  And what the government can give, the government can take away. 

Now if the government can make laws that regulate and control the lives of its constituents, then our rights can and will gradually diminish as government works to ‘improve’ our lives and society. 

The second problem here is the idea of a right.  Originally rights as outlined in the Bill of Rights were all things that you could do or that the government could not do to you.  Now we have a whole new idea of rights, foreign to our country as designed and foreign to what our country has always been. 

Now rights are seen as things that are owed to people, things that people should have, as in must be provided with, just because they are human beings here. 

In two short years, women now have the right to free contraceptives.  Anybody who thinks this is not a good idea is branded as a hater of women.  If you are a politician, you better be able to explain your case very well and have a lot of opportunities to do so, or your political future is in serious trouble. 

This whole issue of rights has become a valuable tool for one of our major political parties, because they are the party of yes to any and all new rights, because government is then seen as the Great Benefactor and their party as the party of compassion.  And people then as always vote for the party that gives them the most benefits.  Which leads to the third other, bigger issue in this case.

3)         When people have rights, as in things to which they are entitled and which must be given to them, then it means that somebody else is paying for it.  Now there is this idea of a social contract that many people see as the idea behind society, where everyone has certain obligations to the group as a whole and to other members of the group. 

This is where you need to step back and see the bigger picture.  When our country still embraced a Christian worldview and didn’t shrink from acknowledging God throughout our society, including schools and government, there was a very high rate of volunteerism, as people rallied around those in need.  But as our nation moved to secularism, due to several rulings by that court called supreme, the government assumed most of the responsibility for social needs and volunteerism dropped.

As the role of government expanded and continues to expand, the cost of running all these programs continues to climb, to the point that a large portion of government expenditures are paid for with borrowed money, which as anybody can tell you, unless you are in government, always costs more than if you paid in cash.

But it might be argued, contraceptive costs are not borne by the government but by insurance companies.  But insurance company premiums are like government taxes.  You pay for things you don’t usually see the direct benefit of.  The costs keep going higher, and this is money that is taken out of the private economy and dampens the economy and job markets.  Government employees do well as do insurance company employees, but this is an economic drag on everybody else.

But it is said that contraceptive costs saves the insurance company in the long run, because they will have less claims in the future due to the expenses of having a child.  Yet without a constant influx of new children, the population ages, and the more expensive costs associated with an aging population are borne by a shrinking group of everybody else, as are the costs of all these new rights.

There is a name given to a form of government that aims to provide for the needs of all of its citizens and relies on everybody else paying for it.  The name doesn’t mean a lot to the younger generation today, because, well, it just isn’t used too much anymore.  The name has gone out of common use, because it was considered a major failure, though there are still ardent advocates of it today. 

The name is communism.  Basically the idea is to give to people according to their need and take from the others according to their ability.  This was the system of the Soviet Union where a common joke was: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. 

A system of government or society where the responsibility of providing for one’s needs is essentially removed from the individual and placed on the government was found to be contrary to human nature.  Those who produced a lot produced less, and those who worked less worked even less.  I see some of this quite often at work where people are discouraged from working extra hours, because the amount of their pay that goes to the government is then proportionately and noticeably higher.

So in an effort purportedly to help people, though the cynically minded among us see it merely as a ploy to buy votes, the harm to the society as a whole to me is larger than any perceived gains.

We are giving up the responsibility of making the laws that affect us and giving it to people that were not elected by us and are not answerable to us.  We are confirming the thinking that our rights come from the government, and as such government has the right to restrict our rights for reasons they don’t need to explain to us.  And it keeps raising the cost of government and everything else ultimately such that our prosperity is lost in the name of security and comfort.

Homosexuality: Nature and Nurture

Homosexuality: Nature and Nurture

One thing that I think is missing in this debate about whether gays are born that way is the role of education and training in the life of a child.  If a child grew up without parents and any education, he wouldn’t know how to eat right.  He would eat whatever tasted good whenever he wanted.  He wouldn’t exercise.  He would only work to get something he wanted at the moment.  He wouldn’t know about the importance of faithfulness in marriage or even what marriage is.  He would copulate whenever he could with whatever he felt like.

A lot of straight people have or have had homosexual impulses at times.  Sex is a powerful force that only seeks release.  Committed relationships are something that has to be taught.

Whether you believe that God created and designed all of this or evolution brought us to where we are, children are important to any society to keep it going.  Every woman needs to bear at least two children for a society to maintain itself.  And it takes a man and a woman to create this new life.  Yes, we can now create life without the need for a man and a woman to actually have a relationship, but I would say confidently that evolution ‘intended’ for a man and a woman to have a child and raise it together.  And certainly this is what Christians believe the Bible teaches.

So, yes, a person may have homosexual tendencies.  Fine.  That still doesn’t change the fact that if a man insists on living his life with a man, he will never know what it is like to have a child with the person he loves.  And any child he wants to raise will not have its natural mother, which would be a crime if she were alive and able to raise it.

To insist that because you have homosexual feelings, you cannot and should not pursue a committed marriage with a person of the opposite sex is a political and moral decision, but I don’t believe that it is one borne out of necessity.  Having a child through a sexual relationship is possibly the greatest experience you will have in life, and it is very important for a society to encourage this.  Children born of this union do best in life.  And, yes, of course, there are exceptions.

But this is the program set down by either God or evolution.  To try to make intentional changes to something that has been in place from the beginning is not wise.