Liberty Reborn

I was conversing with a friend the other day and she said that what she wishes the Republicans in Congress would do is commit to a balanced budget. I added that such wasn’t enough and that what we really needed was not just a balanced budget but a budget balanced while stripping out unconstitutional spending.

Why? Because “dalancing” the budget is simple in the mind of most politicians including Republicans – raise taxes. But the problem isn’t revenue and raising taxes rarely if ever actually increases revenues over the long haul. Short term they might until those paying the taxes find ways to shelter their income. The problem is spending.

As long as we allow our federal government to exceed its Constitutional powers (see Article I of the Constitution), we will never have a balanced budget because they will always find more things to spend money on and increase spending faster than new revenues can be raised. It’s a fact. Sorry. We have decades of history to prove this.

We could balance the budget tomorrow and even cut taxes if we would drop programs like Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, SCHIP and things like the Department of Education from the federal budget. Each of these exceeds the mandate we the people have given to our government in the form of our Constitution. Programs like those I mentioned total over 60% of the federal budget and all American taxpayers could have their taxes cut 60% if they were done away with.

But you’d have to fight the revolting senior and other citizens who actually think that it is government’s role to take money from the pockets of taxpayers to provide them the comforts of life they desire. I sincerely doubt that there is a single politician in Washington with the balls to stand up and say they are willing to take on that fight.

So instead we will get pious claims about how what we really need to do is simply balance the budget and all of our problems will be solved. Until the next unconstitutional welfare program is added to the budget and taxes are increased to “balance” it again. Hey, if you think that just “balancing” the budget is all it takes that is exactly what will happen.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 1:44 am and is filed under J.J. Jackson's Daily Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.