Obama should give back his tax refundFollow

There is a Constitutional process for changing the document - it's called "amendment." You don't believe in the Bill of Rights? Unless you're implying the founding fathers weren't correct in 1803 when judicial review was established in the courts through the interpretation of Article III of the Constitution.


Damn, John Marshall was such a modern-day liberal

Yup. Now show me the amendment in the Constitution which changed the meaning of "general welfare" to mean that we can seize property from those who earned it, not to protect the remaining property from theft or war, but simply to provide it to others who did not earn "enough" for themselves? When did property rights, enshrined in original document, become something that only applies as long as no one else needs your stuff more than you do?


They didn't write an amendment to do that. They just argued that it should, but instead of changing the document, they gradually over time appointed enough judges who viewed the law their way to rule that it always meant that. Thus, they bypassed the process. When liberals speak of the constitution as a "living breathing document", they don't mean that it can be legislatively changed. They mean that it can be judicially re-interpreted to mean whatever they want it to mean.


Which, as I stated earlier, effectively means that it doesn't mean anything at all. Some of us don't agree with that. We believe that there are principles enshrined in the constitution and that all interpretations of the constitution should take those principles into account. Lose sight of them, and you just have a piece of paper.

I see where you are going with this, and while these social programs* do cause some "self-fulfulling", not all of the people on them fall under this. The problem is the abusers of these programs and the problem with the abusers is that they are hard to detect without more personnel which would cost more money. The bigger problem in this country isn't the wars or the social programs, but the unwillingness of our two-party system to compromise and work together.

Democrats want to increase taxes, Republicans want to cut spending. What need to happen is a compromise between these two. I think cutting spending could be a permanent way to decrease the deficit and the debt over time, and raising taxes would be a temporary way to pay down the debt faster. But our government is failing to work together and as a result of that, is failing the American people.



*I'm not counting medicare or social security in this because people pay into them in good faith and should be entitled to them when the time comes. Of course this could change in the future, but these programs are a whole other mess.

Edited, Apr 21st 2011 6:06pm by Ailitardif

I was speaking of Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution, since that's where the whole "general welfare" phrase comes in:



While the list is not intended (nor interpreted) to be an enumeration of all the things Congress can do, with all others prohibited. It is clearly intended to be a guideline of the types of things the writers of the constitution felt the government should be doing. While there are lots of examples of protecting us from foreign invasion and internal rebellion, protecting the currency, creating roads and otherwise promoting commerce and communication, there is absolutely zero mention of "provide food for the poor" in there, or anything even remotely similar.


But since you mentioned the 5th amendment, it does sorta touch on this issue:



Now this is more specific to the idea of having property taken via either criminal proceedings or eminent domain, but the principle is pretty clear, especially that last part. We're not supposed to have property (which includes income btw) taken from us for "public use" without just compensation. Now, in most of the examples given in the list from Section 8, the public use is also a "common use". Everyone benefits from roads, postal services, defense of borders, protection of currency, etc.


Taking money from one person purely because he has it, and giving it to another purely because he doesn't is so far outside the bounds of what is written that it's laughable. Somehow we've managed to stretch and twist and bend the rules until most people think that it's not just normal to do so, but to fail to do so is somehow a violation of rights "owed" to the people.

It clearly was not intended to be interpreted that way, and they clearly intended private property to be protected from public seizure and allowed only for things that benefit all in common. There is simply no way to justify direct individual assistance from the federal government using public moneys under the constitution as it was written. There's nothing that even hints at such a thing being expected much less required, and quite a few references which strongly suggest that they were opposed to the idea entirely.


So yeah. I think it's relevant to ask where the amendment that says that our property rights end when the government decides that someone else needs our property more than we do. Doesn't that effectively mean we don't have any rights anymore? What if someone else "needs" all of what I have? Can you justify taking some of my property for this reason but not all of it? And if you can't draw a clear dividing line, then isn't the principle you're operating on incredibly dangerous?

Edited, Apr 21st 2011 3:38pm by gbaji

Which is precisely why we should not be doing it in the first place. Allow private charities to provide help for the truly needy. They tend to be much much better at weeding out the abusers, and those organizations which aren't tend to start losing their donations to those who do. When you've got one federal government and you don't willingly donate the money, nor have much control over where it's spent, that contributes significantly to the amount of abuse and fraud which occurs. This is why I've been saying repeatedly that the solution is to get the government out of the charity business.

Do that, and private citizens will have that money back to donate to the charities they choose. And that money will be much better spent helping the needy than it is right now.




More correctly, Democrats want to increase spending, while Republicans want to cut taxes. They're obviously linked, but it's important to first note what the "goals" of each party are and realize the the current situation is a reaction to prior actions.



Ok. But look at the goals I wrote above. The Democrats want to increase spending. That is their goal. They achieved that by increasing spending over the last couple years. But as a result of that, we are running massive deficits. What you call "compromise" is really just demanding that the GOP give up their goal to allow the Democrats to achieve theirs. They get to spend more, while taxes go up.

Stop and think about it. Start at a status quo prior to this crisis. If the Democrats increase spending by say $500B/year, creating a deficit problem, but then offer to compromise with the GOP by paying off that deficit by raising taxes by $250B/year and cutting spending by the same amount, haven't we just let them increase spending by $250B/year while the GOP paid for it by losing ground on their goal by the same amount? That's not "fair", and that's not a compromise.


And if you think that the compromise the Dems want is anything close to a 50/50 split on spending and taxes, you are pretty darn naive. As you say, raising taxes is the quickest way to fix the problem. So they'll propose raising taxes "just for awhile" to pay down the deficit, with some token spending cuts to show that they're compromising with more cuts promised for later. But when the economy recovers, the impetus to cut spending will disappear as will the public will in the face of all those "poor people who'll be hurt if we cut these necessary programs". The cuts wont happen. The taxes will become permanent, and the "compromise" will be forgotten.


And the next time we're in a similar position, they'll do it again.



Working together should not be synonymous with "we get what we want and you get screwed". I mean, where were the Dems saying we should "work together" when they pushed through all those partisan spending bills in 2009 and 2010? Should not the nearly 100% GOP objection to those things have suggested that they weren't working together then? Yet, somehow we're supposed to forget the whole "not working together" during which all that spending was done and only work together now that the bill has come due? So Dems don't have to work or compromise with the GOP when making spending decisions, but the GOP has to work and compromise with the Dems now?

And that's fair, how exactly?

Of course it's a plan. You've just adopted the assumption that any "plan" must include the government spending money and "doing something", so you can't wrap your head around the idea of *not* spending money as a viable alternative.

I think you're assuming that I'm a democrat, no where did I say we need to do what the democrats want. I said we need to work together to solve this problem (decrease spending permanently and increase taxes temporarily). I certainly didn't say we need to increase spending and increase taxes. Obviously increasing spending at this point would be a mistake.

Um... Cut spending on those programs? We could look at the Ryan plan if you want, or any of a number of other similar plans put forth by Republicans. Or we could at least acknowledge that had the Dems not outvoted the GOP in congress when all this spending occurred, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Of course you did. When you say "compromise" and "work together", and then follow that up with a suggestion that we bot cut spending *and* raise taxes to solve the current debt crisis, you are saying we need to do what the Democrats want. It doesn't matter if you are a Democrat or not. You are supporting their agenda by repeating their talking points.



But we already increased spending. That's why we're in a debt crisis right now. So when you propose raising taxes as a "solution" to the spending we did over the last two years, you are in fact supporting an agenda of "increasing both spending and taxing". You're just conveniently ignoring the fact that we increased spending first, created a debt crisis, and are now proposing tax increases to pay for it.




It should be equally obvious that increased spending over the last two years was a mistake. Yet they did it anyway. When you ignore that, you are doing exactly what they intended you to do from the beginning. If You'd like, I'll see if I can pull up a quote from a thread a couple years ago where I predicted exactly what is happening now.

Some of us saw this coming and knew that the reason the Dems were spending so recklessly was because they knew that they could convince people after the fact that tax cuts would be needed to fix the crisis they caused. So when you write what you are writing, it both saddens me at how gullible some people are and confirms just what I suspected would happen all along. It sucks to be right sometimes.

So Gbaji, all should be done by private charities. You really think that people will give all that much more than they do now to charities? What happens when they private charities just can't keep up? How do you keep those charities from discriminating (assuming you want to get rid of those horrible govt agencies that monitor that)?

Let's face it Gbaji, the Republican plan is ********** the poor".

Lol. Here's an intersting thread:



and...




and...




It's like I'm freaking psychic or something! And that's just in one thread. And in that thread, we weren't even talking about Obama, or economic meltdowns, or anything else. Just a general discussion of how the two "sides" deal with deficits and taxes and spending. But in it, I pretty much predicted exactly what the Dems would do once they had sufficient political power to do it. Rack up spending to the point of crisis, then insist that the only way to fix the problem is with higher taxes. Shocking, isn't it?