a letter to the editor about guns and gun rights

The Sun-Times printed a letter today (Feb. 16) with the heading “Second Amendment or inalienable rights?”  I know the writer doesn’t choose his captions. but I think it captured the thought well.

The Founders debated whether to include a Bill of Rights to the Constitution.  They had two main concerns: one was that people would read them and think that their rights were limited by only those specifically mentioned.  And, secondly, they were concerned that people might think that these rights came from the government rather than being natural rights given by their Creator.

It’s interesting to note that the First Amendment had to do with freedom of religious expression and free speech.  Two matters that people are trying very hard to limit today.  And then the Second Amendment has to do with the right to own and bear (carry) arms.  It sounds like these two matters were very important in the minds of those who wrote our Constitution to put them first.

Remember, they fought a war in order to be able to establish this Constitution. I contend that the two amendments are related.  John Adams, our second President, made the remark in a speech that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” 

A people cannot be trusted to be free if they don’t share a common value system and the will to live by it.  Our country has rejected the Ten Commandments which have been the basic moral code of our country since before its founding and has been trying to create a new one built on tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity, a code that is requiring the government to enforce it rather than seeing its people willingly live a life of self-discipline and love for one’s neighbor. 

They called our nation an “armed people” in the Federalist Papers and considered that a good thing.  They thought it was essential to preserve their freedom.   

The solid foundation of a people who recognized their responsibilities toward God were also considered responsible as well to possess and carry guns.  Take away the one, and you might find problems with the other.

the high cost of free trade

The Trib had an article (Feb. 7) on NAFTA which was misleading, because it didn’t give the whole story.

You can always make something cheaper somewhere in the world.  So free trade can bring consumers the lowest prices possible; and, we are told, this will help American jobs by helping our export business.

There are two problems here that nobody wants to talk about.

When a country loses jobs because we are buying something cheaper from Somewhere, not only do we lose the tax revenues from unemployed workers, we are also paying them while they are not working.  This becomes a hidden tax where the cost of running government becomes higher, both through higher interest payments on government debt and the added expenses of more government assistance.  Calls for higher taxes are then not associated with the costs to our society from lost jobs.

Relying on exports for jobs is foolish, because we are relying on other countries to do well so they can buy our good before we can prosper.

Any increase in cost by taxing imports will in the long run be cheaper than the cost of lost jobs and increased government spending to compensate for it.

Oh, and don’t forget.  Taxes on imports go to the government, and so this should relieve the pressure of the government getting all its revenue from income taxes, as in, they can lower them.

a letter to the editor about taxing imports

A reader complained about some new taxes on imports (January 26).  Taxes on imports allow our government to rely less on income taxes for needed revenue.  They are also a factor in bringing jobs back to our country, because when people are working, they are paying taxes and not relying on the government.  All of which helps everybody.

Yes, the tariff law early in the Great Depression didn’t help anything, because we had a good export market.  But the Depression lasted over ten years, and high taxes had more to do with that.  FDR needed tax money to pay for all the new government programs he started.

When I was growing up, foreign products were all more expensive, but they were also true foreign products, not American companies shipping their goods back here. 

Right now one of our biggest needs is to bring the jobs back.  Taxes on foreign-made products should be one of the top priorities, because you can always make something cheaper somewhere, and then we will have no jobs here at all except for service workers.  And you wouldn’t want that.

letter to my state senator who is running for governor re: property taxes

Hi Daniel

Happy New Year!  I hope you are doing well.

I read the article in the Sun-times today about politicians and property taxes which features you.  I didn’t know that property taxes were a big part of your agenda.

Did I ever tell you my plan for property taxes?  I’m sure I did, but maybe that wasn’t on your mind much back then.  I first really got interested and involved with property taxes a long time ago when I had been out of work for a while and then had to pay them.  The inherent unfairness of taxing someone on a nonliquid asset while having no real income got me to thinking.

Rich people want to be able to spend more on their kids’ education, and poor people don’t have enough money for many basic things.  I think rich people also like high property taxes as a way to keep rich neighborhoods rich. 

My proposal:

The state first determines a basic amount per student to provide an adequate, good education.  Let’s say $7,000 per student.  This amount would be collected through the income tax. 

Now, and this is very important this money must be raised and collected totally apart from the general fund.  I would say, first figure out what percentage of general revenues now goes toward education.  So we then, for example, would say, of the 5% current state income tax, 4% goes toward the general fund and 1% is the education tax. 

Add up the number of students in the state, multiply by $7K, and the education portion of the state income tax is adjusted to add up to that amount.  Say, add 2%, so the education tax is now 3% of income. 

Now every school taxing district will know that they are receiving $7K for every student in their district.  They know how much they will receive from the state, and this amount is then deducted from the property tax bills. 

If a richer area wants to spend more on education for their students, they are free to raise their taxes any way they see fit.  But everybody has at least the basic education funding that the state considers adequate.

There is also another very important part of school funding that needs to be addressed, and seeing that you are running for governor, this can give you a good boost.

People who want to send their kids to private schools now currently have to pay tuition and still pay enormous amounts to the state for public education.  I believe this is the main reason so many Catholic schools are going out of business.  A lot of people can’t afford both property taxes and tuition.  And they shouldn’t have to.

Anyone who pays tuition to a private school should be able to deduct that amount from their property or their income taxes, depending on which way you want to go.  But nobody should have to pay both.  But the amount of their deduction should not exceed what they would owe in taxes. for education.

The plan is simple and fair.  Some may consider the plan regressive, where poorer people are affected more by an income tax increase than richer people.  The easiest way to fix that is by raising the standard deduction. 

I know you favor a progressive income tax.  My biggest concern with that is that the state will then see this as an unlimited source of new revenue, when the state really needs to cut its spending in a major way.  Too many agencies with too many employees making too much money and with unrealistic, unsustainable pension liabilities.

You could make that the main part of your platform, if you really want to win.  Tell the people that you want to change the State Constitution to be able to change the pension plans to make them more realistic and in line with actual revenues.  And more in keeping with people get in the real, I mean private, sector.  I get about $12,000 a year of taxable pension income. 

Thanks so much!  I hope you actually read this and found it helpful. 

I wish you well.  I don’t normally vote Democratic, but if you agree with my plans, I could certainly reconsider.

Larry Craig

Why the Alabama Senate Election Should Concern You, and It’s Not What You Think

Alabama just voted to replace a Senator who was picked to serve in the President’s administration.  It was a very close election and was won by a Democrat.  If you support Trump’s agenda, you will be disappointed more than you would if the Republican had won the election.  That will concern a lot of people, but that’s not why I am writing this.

There are a number of reports of voter fraud: buses of people brought in from out of state to vote.  This is why automatic voter registration is a bad thing and why voter registration rolls need to be kept updated and cleared of non-eligible voters, like dead people, people who have moved, and non-citizens:  they provide more potential for non-eligible voters to vote.  This should concern all of us, but that’s still not why I am writing this.

The vote tallies were very close, but neither candidate received a majority of the votes.  This should make us hopping mad and prompt everyone to do something about it.   If not write letters or protest in the streets, we should at least agree that it is not right, needs to be changed, and we should at least talk about it enough so that maybe other people will do something that might lead to change.

Think about this for a minute.

We have 330 million people in our country, and the only two people we got to pick from for President were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  Really? 

We have a two party system that tries to cram everybody into two polarized political parties that are getting further apart by each passing election.  On the Republican side, we had Republicans, Tea Party, and Libertarians competing for the nomination, and the Democrats had a Democrat, a Socialist, and I think the Green Party going for top honors.  And then we hear that the leaders of the Democratic Party rigged the system giving the Democrat their support in ways that made the Socialist lose in what would have been a much closer primary election if they hadn’t.

And then, of course, there are the independents and undecideds who can go either way, depending on what is trending in the latest news cycle. 

We are told that’s what the primaries are for, to weed out the candidates who have no or little chance of winning, but that is not the case at all.  If you have, say, 17 candidates running, like the Republicans did, and everyone got single digits in a primary vote, and one candidate got 30%, is that candidate the best choice?  We don’t know.  You still had over 60% of the voters who didn’t vote for him, or her. 

I had about 8 candidates that interested me, but I could only vote for one.  That’s no way to pick a candidate.  Let everyone vote for as many as they want, or maybe no more than 5.  Now that will tell you which candidate has the best chance of winning. 

But even then, when you get to the final two, one from each party, if a third candidate wants to run, it only screws things up.  People know he, or she, can’t win, but should they vote for them anyway to make a point?  Should they vote their conscience, or think politically?

What can happen in a three-way Presidential race, or in the Alabama race where write-in ballots were highly encouraged, is that a person can win the election with as little as 34% of the vote.  And that is just wrong.  And stupid. 

A President still needs a majority of the Electoral College to win, but the state elections don’t require a majority to win.  So you never really know who the majority of the people want. 

But you say we do.  We have the national totals.  But the Founders chose an electoral college system for choosing a President, but that’s for another article.  But simply, the Founders knew that people all over the country were different and had different needs, interests, and wants. 

Determining a President by popular vote would become a tyranny of the majority, where minorities of opinions would have less say in the final results.  For example, people who live in large urban areas tend to vote differently from people in rural America.  People in largely populated states vote differently than people in less populated ones.  The Founders wanted a President for all America, not just the most heavily populated states.

Our country needs third party or independent candidates.  We need more options in the final election.  And there is only one thing that makes that impossible in our political process, and it’s not money. 

Now money is certainly one of the reasons the system doesn’t want to change it or hasn’t changed it so far.  They don’t want to make it any harder for their candidate to win.  But raising or having a lot of money is not the main reason independents or third-party candidates don’t run.  It’s why we shouldn’t expect the system to change.  This is why ordinary people need to get involved, at least simply just start talking about it.

The only thing that stops a third party or independent candidate from running in most elections is that everybody knows that if you give your vote to that candidate, you are more likely to get the candidate that you don’t want the most a better chance of winning.

You are used to voting for one of the two major parties, but this time you are intrigued by the third person.  So instead of voting for whomever you ordinarily would have voted, you vote your conscience, taking votes away from the person you would have voted for, thus essentially giving your vote to the person you really didn’t want to win.

Nobody should have to make that choice.

Nobody should win an election without winning a majority of the vote.  The Presidential election is unique in that the Founders intended for states to have more of an independence than they do today.  Originally the Founders had state legislators choose their senators, because they wanted the Senate to represent the states.  The only people they wanted directly elected by the people were those in the House of Representatives. 

Yes, I know things change, but with too much change, you lose the country that we were founded to be in the first place.  That is why changing the Constitution is not an easy process.  We have the most stable country in the world because of our current system.  We have had the same Constitution longer than any other country.  And I think that has been a good thing.

So, every election should require a majority of the votes to win.  This is why we don’t get more choices, independent candidates. third party candidates.  This means there need to be runoffs in any election where nobody has the majority of the votes. 

Or a cheaper and faster way to go is that, when there are more than two candidates, allow voters the option on their ballot to pick a second choice.  This will allow people to vote for whom they really want rather than the lesser of two evils, in some cases.

This one change will revitalize our elections and break the two-party control over our lives.  Which, of course, it is why it will never happen.  Unless people start talking about it and demanding it.  If you personally don’t have the time or energy to actively work for change, at least just talk about it.  And eventually people who can do the work for change will be more inclined to do the work. 

This one change can do more in a positive way for our country than possibly any other one thing, except, of course, for term limits.  But that’s for another article. 

The bigger issue in the Christian baker case and why it affects all of us

The Bill of Rights lists some of the rights that our Founders considered to be natural rights.  These are rights that are not conferred by government but endowed to us by our Creator.  These rights are all things that we can do without government interference or are prohibitions on the government that might seek to limit those rights.  These also are rights that are foundational to what we are as a country and the reason for our existence.

The government is also free to create its own list of rights, but it cannot create new rights that supersede or infringe on the natural rights without destroying the very idea of our country.  Our natural rights would cease to be rights, and the Bill of Rights would no longer be a list of some of our rights but just a list of current laws subject to change, like our tax laws.

None of these natural rights puts requirements or restrictions on other people.  That is, I don’t have a right that depends on the government coercing the cooperation of other people to fulfill.  E.g. I don’t have a natural right to a home that must be paid for by other people.

The government could theoretically create a right of home ownership funded by the other members of the society.  What will inevitably happen as the government creates new rights is that conflicts will arise between the natural rights that our nation was founded on and the new rights created by our government.  If the new rights supersede the natural rights on which our nation was founded, then the foundation of our country has been destroyed, and our country is no longer the one that we had.  It would be no different if it had been taken over by a foreign power. 

In the case of the Christian baker who refused to make a cake in honor of a gay ‘marriage,’ the government-created right of not being offended requires another person to do something against his will.  Sometimes this case is portrayed as one of discrimination, but, no, the baker didn’t object to making the cake because the customers were gay, but because the cake celebrated something he considered to be immoral. 

Why are all these court cases involving Christians anyway?  Would there be a court case if the baker were Muslim?  Has anybody asked a Muslim baker if he would make a cake for a gay wedding?  Or a Jewish baker if he would make a cake in honor of Naziism?  Or a black baker for a KKK event?  Or a gay baker making a cake in honor of Focus on the Family, an organization commonly despised in the gay community for its efforts in opposing gay marriage?

Rather than focusing on whether a Christian wants an exemption from a law so that he can discriminate against a protected class of people, the real question is whether the government can create laws that supersede natural law and how that affects what our country is all about in the first place.  You make not like Christians or what the baker did, but once the precedent is set, you may find your own favorite right taken away or truncated next, as the government keeps expanding its role in our society.

Thoughts on Immigration Reform

There are lessons here for those who have eyes to see.  While these lessons have broad applications throughout life, they are particularly relevant with regard to government and governmental policies.  Briefly they can be summarized like this:

1)         If you start a policy, it is very hard to end it.

2)         If you give people something, it soon becomes a right.  They will then expect it, and it will be very hard to take it away from them.

3)         The smallest thing will usually grow to something very large, and this is why you have to nip things in the bud before they take root. 

4)         If you create something, ask yourself where this could lead in 30,40,50 years, because it will go there.

It is illegal for a person to cross the border into another country without the consent of that country, assume an identity, and continue to live there.  Many people who do that have brought their families, including young children.  They are illegal as well, we get that.

The problem is that for years our government was not serious about stopping this.  At times it was even encouraged, though not openly.  And this was known to those who wanted to come to our country. 

Now many people are complaining about illegal immigrants, but they should have started complaining 20,30,40 years ago.  I know. It’s hard to regular people who have jobs and families to organize or be heard by the powers of government.  Now we have somebody in authority who wants to do something about it, but he is facing immense pressure from others in government to just go along with the program.

I would like to offer some thoughts in resolving this issue:

1)         President Trump is right to let DACA expire.  When it was first enacted, everybody knew that President Obama did not have the authority to enact it.  It was a law, and Presidents don’t make laws.  Congress does.  Congress is totally inept in solving any problem, so I am not hopeful they will get it right.

2)         The first and biggest problem is that Congress will pass a blanket amnesty.  The problem has gotten so big, they will want to try to solve it all at once.  Immigration used to be and needs again to be an individual process.  A country has to know who it is letting into its country.  And that, of course, implies the right of refusal.

3)         But first things first.  No program of legalization for illegal immigrants should even begin until a wall is built to secure the border.  Why?  Any kind of legalization will encourage more illegal immigration, because it will hold out hope for a future legalization.  But, secondly, President Reagan agreed to a blanket amnesty when he was promised that a wall would be built.  That was in 1985.  Get the wall first, or you will have this same problem ten years from now.

4)         I would give these children of illegal immigrants six months to apply for legal status.  But first we need to establish again the rules, or standards, for legal immigrants.  I have a government textbook from 1949 that lists over a dozen requirements, including literacy at least in their original language, healthy, normal as in not crazy or really stupid, good morals (by our standards, not theirs), and not likely to require government assistance.

If the line is too long, give them a letter of intent that will protect them deportation if they can show they meet these requirements.

5)         But what about their families?  If the children are still dependent on their parents, or even if they are not, should their parents be protected as well?

If families are so important, then by that reasoning we should never imprison somebody who has a family.  If somebody in a family is deported, they can decide if it is more important for the family to stay together or for some to remain in this country.

6)         Could this lead to citizenship?  I have no problem with that, but we need to think again about what citizenship really means.  You can’t have allegiances to two countries.  You also need to speak, read, and write English.  How can you be an informed, responsible citizen if you can’t read an American newspaper, watch the evening news, talk to all your neighbors, read our books, and listen to our politicians?

And they should also be required to learn about what made America what it is, not just a few facts about the branches of government.  They should be required to take and pass a college or high school level class on Western Civilization, taught in English, of course.  A citizenship loyalty oath to the United States doesn’t mean much if a person doesn’t understand the essential nature of our country.  This oath should also include a commitment to those values. 

Now that DACA is due to expire, Congress will work very hard, in a big hurry, to address as many immigration problems as they can, so allow me to offer some more thoughts on the subject.

1)         Birthright citizenship is a very important issue if we have any intention on controlling illegal immigration, and it is also being highly abused.  Children of foreign workers and people visiting our country do not automatically become American citizens if they are born here.  The American Indian didn’t even receive citizenship under birthright citizenship.  That required an act of Congress.  So why would we think that children who are born to people who are in our country illegally should be considered United States citizens? 

This must end, otherwise our country will still be encouraging illegal immigration.

2)         We need a pause on legal immigration until we get the jobs back.  We have way too many people who are not in the labor force who should be and who are on government assistance.

3)         We must end chain migration.  This is where legal immigrants are able to bring their extended families over here as well.  Most Western countries are encouraging immigration now, because their populations would shrink without getting more people into their countries.  Westerners are not having enough children to maintain their population, so the population grows older, and younger people are needed to help pay the social costs for these older people.

Bringing family members of immigrants into our country basically defeats the whole purpose for bringing these immigrants here in the first place.   Any benefit of a new taxpayer is generally offset by family members who are more likely to need some form of government assistance or government services, whether public schools or public health services. 

4)         Look after the interests of our own country first if you want to continue having a country that can help people in the first place.  We are told we are a nation of immigrants, but that was before multiculturalism and diversity.  We used to have a distinctly American culture that we were proud of and that we fully expected immigrants to embrace and assimilate to.  But now we don’t teach American culture, or at least Western Civilization, and we are told to embrace diversity.  They say that diversity enriches us, but they don’t say that it unites us, which is what our Constitution prioritizes.  And it’s not.

We are told we are a nation of immigrants, but we are not told that for most of our nation’s history, those immigrants came almost entirely from the same nations of immigrants who founded our country.  And that was by design.  It was always regarded as wise to maintain the same demographics in our country.  It was only recently historically that we were told that diversity is our strength. 

Now immigrants come almost entirely from what we used to call Third World countries.  And they will make our country more like those countries from which they came and less like the country they wanted to come to in the first place.

Immigration is not a right that people have to move to another country.  Houses have doors, and yards have fences, and countries have borders.  If you don’t want strangers pitching tents in your yard, walking into your house, helping themselves to the food in your refrigerator, then you might understand that countries exist for the general welfare of the people living there.  If people are free to enter them without restrictions, then countries cannot ensure the welfare of their people.  Immigration exists either to benefit a country or at least to try not to hurt it.

Any attempts to deal or resolve these issues in a manner that puts the interests of our country and its citizens over that of the people who want to come here are being labelled as racism, bigotry, phobias, hate, nativism, or nationalism.  And those who want to have a common sense immigration policy will need a better understanding what that entails if they want to withstand that verbal onslaught.

5)         Focus on the best and brightest immigrants.  We are told that we have a responsibility to help all the poor and refugees in the world, because we are so rich.  What they are not telling you is that we are no longer rich.  We cannot be rich if we are 20 trillion dollars in debt and we have to borrow money from other countries to pay our bills.

There are between 19 – 55 million refugees in the world today, depending on who’s counting, and most of the rest of the world is living below our standard of living.  Should we take them all, or are we allowed to choose between them?  Choosing some means rejecting others, so it would be hard to do that today without somebody being up in arms over how we made that choice. 

So let me suggest that if we choose the neediest first, then any aid we give to them will be a direct one to one transfer of money.  We feed them, we clothe them, we house them, and maybe they will get some kind of job that pays enough where we will actually receive some tax dollars from them to offset in some way what we have given to them.  Is that a selfish thing to consider?   You decide, but it does mean that we are only able to help the least amount of people.  There is a limit on how much money we have.  In fact, we have none, if we have to borrow money to do this, which we do.

If we chose people on the basis on how much these immigrants can contribute to our society, educated people who already know English perhaps with marketable skills and from a culture similar to ours, then their dependence on the wealth of others for survival is limited and what they can pay into our system in tax dollars is more substantial, which means that we can theoretically help far more people.  Our government is already so deeply in debt from being ‘compassionate’, it’s at the breaking point.  There is compassion, and there is stupid.  You don’t give your kid’s college money to feed, house, and clothe a homeless person.

Any debate on immigration will be emotional.  You will see and read stories about real people.  OK, we help create this problem.  But we must not be lured into trying to do too much where we end up doing something stupid, like giving things to a million people who you don’t know who they are, where you are spending money you don’t have (i.e. borrowing) and can never pay back, and you give up things that don’t belong to you.  Governments do this when they spend your money, give things to people and send you the bill, or give away your children’s future for their political gain.