Government Spending as a Measure of Individual Freedom

I am a rational individualist.  As such, I cherish the ability to make the decisions of what my own values in life are and how I will achieve them.  Basically, I want as much control over my life as possible, without infringing upon the equal rights of others to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

We are now voting or about to vote in a major national election, which as such elections are wont to do, will bear on the ways and broad degree in which governments will exercise control over our lives.  The core legitimate function of governments is to prevent others from depriving us of our individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  There is a small sphere of other functions of governments which extends to cover situations in which the scale of resources required to address a problem of the general welfare and/or the range over which that issue extends is so great that only governments can reasonably handle them.  In this set of functions, I would include a role in transportation systems, international trade, pandemics, the mail in the early USA, and dangerous substances and pollutants.  However, our governments are much, much too bossy and controlling today.

Our governments take and spend far too much of the money those of us in the private sector earn through our hard work.  We ought to be very conscious that the money they take is a taking of many hours of our lives.  The taking of those hours represents a very real form of enslavement.  Governments do not stop with taxation.  They require endless paperwork, especially directed at businesses in the private sector.  They also make many irrational laws that limit our choices.  These limitations on our choices may totally deny us the pursuit of perfectly valid values or they make us pursue them in very inefficient ways.

As a rational individualist, when I face an election, my primary focus is on how can I vote to minimize the growth of governments, which I believe are uniformly too damn big.  As the population of a country grows and as its economy grows, it is reasonable that government will spend more money.  Some of the legitimate functions of government grow as the population grows and some grow as the economy grows.  At least prior to the massive illegal immigration under the Biden administration, the economy has grown in the U.S. faster than the population has grown.  Our governments ought not to have grown faster than GDP in that case.

The GDP is the sum of the private sector economy and that of government spending -- federal, state, and local.  A large portion of the control of the governments over the individual can be measured by the amount of government spending.  As noted above, this leaves out the effect of many irrational laws and mandates and of many regulations, so it is only a partial measurement.  Let us examine the size of the federal government and of all government in the United States as a percentage of the GDP:

The most recent data is for the second quarter of 2024.  The Q1 2020 data was used because this preceded the spikes in government spending due to Covid 19.  The Q4 2016 data was chosen since it immediately preceded the Trump administration.  Q1 of 1960 was chosen because that was the earliest Federal Reserve data I readily could find covering All Government Spending and it was within my long memory of life.

I did not think that the U.S. had far too little government in 1960.  If anything, it seemed too big and intrusive even then.  Since then, the federal government percentage of the GDP has grown by a factor of 11.50!  Total federal, state, and local government spending as a percentage of the GDP has increased by a factor of 10.67.  Total government spending is now 43.74% of GDP, while federal government spending alone is 29.56% of GDP.

I very much feel the reduction in my freedom that has been caused by this insane increase in the size of government.  This added spending comes with ever-increasing laws and mandates, regulations, hours of paperwork, and a host of infractions of our many and broad individual rights.  Governments are imposing restrictions on our freedom of speech, our freedom of association, our freedom of assembly and the right to petition governments when they err, our property rights, our privacy, our ability to educate ourselves and our children, our ability to earn a living, our freedom to pursue excellent health care, our freedom to invest money, our independent opinions (pandemics, so-called climate change, history, Marxism, and so-called social justice), and the equality before the law of individuals no matter what their ethnic origins may be.

The private sector allows us the broadest freedom of choice that can be available to us.  Government when expanded beyond its core legitimate functions, reduces that freedom of choice.  Government has the monopoly on the use of force.  When we turn to government to do something, we do so for the purpose of unleashing that use of force or at the least the threat of using it.  I prefer a society in which force plays as minimal a part as possible.  In fact, government is supposed to do just that.  It is supposed to minimize the use of force -- not to become the biggest, most threatening brute in the nation.  Unfortunately, irrational, dangerous brutes are exactly what our governments have become.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been guilty of growing governments way beyond their rational limits.  Nonetheless, it is the Democrats who are almost always seeking to spend the most and seeking the most control over our lives.  The Democrat Party has always been the party of slavery.  When a party acts to prevent another such restriction of our individual rights, it is usually the Republican party.  I believe this is still the current case.  Republicans are usually more interested in individual rights than are Democrats.  The Democrats used the Covid 19 pandemic (even after it was over) and their false claims of catastrophic man-made global warming as excuses to massively expand government budgets and controls.  This is in accordance with their maxim that no crisis should ever go to waste as an excuse to expand the role and size of government.

This expanding role is very evident in the employment statistics that show that most of the hiring for many months has been for government jobs and for the health care industry, now principally run and controlled by governments.  There will be no way to even pretend that the people are not enslaved when governments employ everyone or completely control every industry in America.  We know how that has turned out in the USSR, Nazi Germany, Red China, Cuba, and Venezuela.  Despite all of these historical lessons, the Democrat party is eagerly pursuing a mixed Marxist and Fascist model for governing the United States of America.  This effort must be opposed at the polls if we are not to lose the ability to exercise many more of our individual rights necessary to the management of our lives as rational beings.

On Covid-19 Spending from letter from Craig Rucker of CFACT

Adjusted for today’s dollars the Second World War cost $4.1 trillion. 

The United States just committed to spend an additional $1.9 trillion, boosting total taxpayer pandemic spending to over $6 trillion.

This is half again what it cost to liberate the world from fascism. 

We posted policy details and an extensive financial breakdown to CFACT.org.

The U.S. has not yet finished spending the funds from the last rounds of COVID relief.

Sadly, combating the virus and its economic impact is merely the tip of this latest $1.9 trillion fiscal iceberg.  The bulk of the spending in the "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021" goes to a colossal left-wing wish list and a cornucopia of good old-fashioned government waste, albeit on a 21st century scale.

The Foundation for Economic Education calculated that total federal COVID spending just hit $41,870 per taxpayer.

Less than one percent of the latest spending goes to vaccines.  Only ten percent is directly related to the virus. 

Here's a sampling of where the rest will go:

• $350 billion to cities, states and Indian tribes, including those running fiscal surpluses.  The methodology was changed to favor states that voted for Biden.  Enjoy your $26 billion windfall, California!
• $169 billion to schools and colleges, including those that refuse to open.  Where's the party teachers' unions?
• $422 billion in $1,400 per-person stimulus checks, including to those who never missed a paycheck and even federal prisoners.
• $58 billion to bail out union pension plans.
• $25 billion in increased Obamacare subsidies.
• $30 billion to AMTRAK and transit agencies.
• Expansion of the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600, extending the credit to people who don't work for the first time, effectively ending the Clinton-era work-based welfare reforms.
• $1 billion in loan forgiveness for farmers based on "racial justice."  Didn't the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbid discrimination based on race?  The Left is calling this the start of "reparations."
• $50 million in environmental justice grants.  Whom do you think will receive those?

America's national debt is approaching $30 trillion.  What if (heaven forbid) we had to fight an actual world war?

Craig Rucker is President of CFACT.

Charles' Comments:

The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly highlighted the many harms promulgated by our governments.  The NIH and Dr. Fauci provided funding for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in a Wuhan biological laboratory known to have inadequate safety procedures and whose employees were the first known to suffer the Covid-19 disease.  Then the federal, most state, and many local governments over-reacted with shutdown orders to large portions of the private sector economy.  Most schools were shutdown, forever depriving American children of about a year of much needed education.  Now, many state and local governments are inhibiting the distribution of the vaccines.  The Craig Rucker letter above directs our attention to still more of the harm our federal government has done to us.

Those who rule in America are incompetent to perform the excessive scope of function they have taken upon themselves in their quest for power.  Those who desire power over others are generally people of low moral character as well.  When they are not intending to do harm, they are sufficiently unthinking that they simply do not understand the harm they are doing.  Craig Rucker ends his letter with that classic Ronald Reagan quote:

"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Spending Plans of the Presidential Candidates

But don't worry.  Only the rich will be taxed to pay for all of these promises.  The socialists of the Democratic Socialist Party, who do not actually believe in democracy, have assured us that very few of us will be taxed to pay for all the goodies a much multiplied bureaucracy of swamp creatures and the special interests their handouts will spawn will provide.  We will just tax the producers of wealth in America and hand their money over to politicians and bureaucrats and we will be well taken care of.  No worries.

Reality: You will have to work mighty hard to become one of the special interest factions able to soak up the money unless you want to join the vast majority of Americans in a lower standard of life.  Forget about voluntary associations and acts of cooperation in a free society.  Forget about choosing your own values and dreams.  Forget about managing your own life in accordance with your self-chosen values.

Stop working hard -- if you do, everyone else will just take all you produce, stealing the very hours of your life.  Don't be a slave to government -- go fishing or watch endless hours of TV, or stare at your cell phone all day.  This is the good life according to the many socialists among us.  Any purpose but the pursuit of power over others is pointless.  Is it any wonder the majority of the people will turn to alcohol and opiates in their ideal society, while the ambitious will become brutal savages in the pursuit of the power to deny everyone else their voluntary associations and acts of cooperation?

Socialism only appeals to the unbelievably ignorant, the insane, and the most brutish persons of a society.

Update on 6 March 2020:

Only Sanders and Biden remain of the Democratic Party significant contenders of the spending plans plot above.  Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Steyer, and Klobuchar only wanted federal spending over 10 years of $68 trillion or less.  That was not enough for the modern Democratic Party.  They all failed to acquire enough votes from their highly socialist party adherents.  Biden promises to spend $75.6 trillion over the next 10 years and that might be enough to satisfy enough party members for him to secure the party nomination with the generous help of the party political hack delegates who do not need to get votes.  Sanders wants an unbelievable $139.5 trillion in spending over 10 years.

Sanders wants to spend enough to collapse the federal government.  This is the real revolution he has been advocating.  Collapse the federal government and in the ensuing chaos, create a communist government to take its place.  His passion has always been for the kind of socialism that makes everyone equally poor.  He has never had any use for people who produce the goods and services of the private market.  His is a real passion for socialism and he has no real interest even in stealing from the private sector in an ongoing manner.  No, he only wants to steal all its wealth once.  Once and done.

Biden and the political establishment of the Democratic Party do not want to collapse the government.  They do not want to entirely kill the wealth generating private sector.  No, they are parasites and they have just enough self-interest not to kill their host.  They need the wealth-generating private sector to generate the wealth they will steal and the money they will use to acquire more power over the American people.  These people include most of the media, almost all of academia and the bureaucrats, almost all the lobbyists, and some environmentalists and labor leaders.  They want to maximize the amount of wealth they can steal, which means they have to allow wealth to be generated still.  If they understood economics better, they would allow more wealth to be generated than they will allow and they would actually get away with stealing more, though at a lower percentage.  However, these are also envious people who depend heavily upon getting the votes of envious people, so they have to compromise by maximizing some combination of envy + stolen wealth.

Independence Day Thoughts on Freedom

When Americans declared their independence from Great Britain 240 years ago, they were a people who were largely self-employed and proud to manage their own lives.  They believed they had no need for a government to choose their values for them and to micromanage their lives.  Their principal need for a government was to prevent individuals from initiating the use of force against one another and to protect them from outlaw gangs, warring Indians, and attacks by other nations. Most of those needs they were quite willing to fulfill in large part at the very local level, including a local militia. They certainly did not need a government dominated by special interests and aristocrats a long distance away from them dictating numerous laws and taxing them.

But what is the American condition today?  Relatively few people are self-employed.  The result is that relatively few people believe that they are capable of controlling their own lives.  For the ease of being an employee, most people have given up the ability to earn their own living under their own management.  Most people have consequently lost a key ingredient to their independence and their self-confidence.  This is a loss partly brought on by political decisions in which a people more and more frequently employed by others came to be in greater and greater numbers in the electorate. Frustrated with their lack of control and holding a great political power in their numbers, but lacking self-direction, these Americans became susceptible to special interests who wanted to gain power and wealth at the expense of the less numerous employers who had made their wealth in a largely free market.  More and more legislation came to regulate employers and to transfer their wealth to groups politically favored by government.  This further weakened the spirit of self-sufficiency, independent mindedness, and encouraged the creation of huge barriers to starting and operating businesses. Americans became more and more dependent upon their government and the whims of the special interests that came to control that ever more powerful government.

Today, government and the education system it dominates insist that we are not really individuals at all.  No, we are simply members in some identity group.  White males are only capable of thinking like a stereotypical white male does.  Black males are only capable of thinking as a stereotypical black male does.  Those exceptions, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, Dr. Thomas Sowell, and Professor Walter E. Williams are simply abominations abhorrent to nature and traitors to their group identity.  In an interesting twist, it is fine however for a white male to think outside his abhorred group, provided he thinks like one of the approved identity groups.  Well, that is true to a fair degree, though there are increasing numbers who now resent such a person's theft of their identity.  Overall, our special interest serving government found it very convenient to lump Americans into a few groups so that we might be divided and controlled more readily.  This also serves the critically important function of obscuring the fact that the government cannot know us as individuals and cannot do anything but suppress our individuality with its ever-increasing legislation and regulations. People will be less aware of the suppression of their individuality if they have been taught that they only have a group identity.  This is a fundamentally collectivist idea.

Americans are a self-contradictory group these days.  They want less government, but they rarely want to give up any program that currently exists, except for ObamaCare, maybe.  They want the government to spend less, except on a few new programs that they want.  They are not infrequently willing to break a law they think the government will not notice, but they are eager to create new laws to prevent others from doing anything that might aggravate them.  Indeed, Congress is held in super-low regard because it is so often in gridlock, though the last time it was not in gridlock it passed the hated ObamaCare act.  Generally, the people believe that a legislature is not doing its job unless it is passing loads of new laws.

Now, because I view the only legitimate function of government, as did the Declaration of Independence, as being the protection of the rights of each and every individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of personal happiness, I see little need for new laws doing what most new laws have done in recent decades.  Most new laws further restrict the freedom of action of at least some Americans, though most laws are aimed at a minority subset of Americans if great harm is to be done to them.  Those laws restricting most Americans are usually designed to cause them only a small and largely unnoticed loss, but which in the aggregate allows a substantial transfer of wealth or power to a small, politically favored special interest group.  After many decades of following such a "practical" and unprincipled political course, we now have a government that does most Americans far more harm than it does us good.

We do presently have a need for much new legislation.  We need to repeal decades of laws that have interfered with our natural individual rights.  We have far too many laws providing for the theft of the value of the hours many put into productive work.  We have far too many restrictions on our freedom of association.  We have far too many prohibitions against our exercise of freedom of conscience, which includes, but is not limited to, our freedom of religion.  We have ever more constraints on freedom of speech and of the press.  Our property rights are in frequent jeopardy, whether it be to use our property for production or to keep it from being confiscated because some law enforcement arm of government imagines that it might have been used in a crime or even only that some action involving it fits a pattern of some organized crime or terrorist action, however implausibly that may apply to this particular property owner.

It is an interesting phenomena, though only one among many contradictions, that those who favor ever-larger government are constantly making claims that human activities cannot be sustained by the environment, yet ever-increasing spending based on the confiscation of the fruits of productive work can be sustained without limit.  So let us review a few charts on government growth provided by the Cato Institute:

Since 1900, Federal spending went from 2.8% of GDP to 21.4% of GDP in 2016, which is a 7.6-fold increase.  Total state and local government spending increased by only 2.2 times in comparison.  The more local government is, it would appear, the more solid the constraints on its spending.  Now that government spending is such a large part of the economy, it is critical that we stop using GDP as the measure since that government spending is actually counted as GDP.  Yet that money has to be produced outside government, while only a fraction of government spending is returned to the government for spending from taxes on money earned by doing the governments' bidding.  Total government spending here is 32.4% of GDP.  The Non-Government GDP (NG GDP) is then 67.6%. If government taxed the functions it spends money on at the same rate it taxes the general private sector economic activities then one could estimate that 32.4% of the money spent by governments is returned to government in taxes of the money spent by governments.  So, 0.324 times 32.4% is 10.5%.  The reality is that government actually taxes these activities at much lower rates.  It is probably generous to assume that taxes return 5% of the government money spent.  So let us subtract 5% from total government spending to find the drag that government spending itself puts on the private sector economy.  Net total government spending of (32.4 - 5.0)% /  67.6% = 40.5%, which is substantially more than the 32.4% the presentation of the data against the GDP provides us.  Let us bear this in mind as we look at some more charts of our unsustainable government growth.

The national defense is certainly a legitimate function of the government and it has a constitutional validation in the enumerated powers of the government.  This represents 15% of federal spending and it certainly includes some waste and abuse and suffers from the greatly diverted attention of our hired managers in Congress.  Interest payments are justified by the Constitution, but there is no legitimate reason for those payments to have grown to be 6% of the budget.  That is a percentage which would rise rapidly if we did not have an economy suppressed by government requirements that have greatly reduced the velocity of money in the economy.  The All Other Activities covers a few constitutionally valid functions, such as some of the foreign affairs activities, the post offices and post roads, the minting of money, immigration controls, the maintenance of weight and measure standards, the operation of the Patent Office, and the operation of the federal courts at a level appropriate for a nation of many fewer laws and regulations.  Had a proper philosophy of government prevailed, as stated in the Declaration of Independence and mandated by the Constitution, the spending of our present federal government would be closer to 20% of its present spending than to 25% of present spending.

Since 1970, it sure is a good thing that defense spending as a percentage of the GDP has trended down substantially and that non-defense discretionary spending has come down a bit, because entitlement spending has climbed prodigiously.  Entitlement spending has no constitutional basis and no basis in the legitimate function of government as defined in the Declaration of Independence.  It is generally funded by the theft of the fruits of the productive work of Americans so that it can be rerouted to those favored politically by those who lust for the power to distribute the money.  This huge expansion of entitlement spending makes the so-called beneficiaries dependent upon the government, which suits the government just fine.

An appreciation of the degree to which our government has become one dominated by special interests would not be realistic if we did not acknowledge the huge increase in federal subsidy programs shown above.

This final graph is the number of pages in the Federal Register from Wayne Crews' Ten Thousand Commandments 2016 report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In the 1940s and the 1950s the total number of pages of final regulations in the Federal Register for the decade were running at about 110,00 pages a decade.  In the decade from 2001 -2010 the number of pages had grown to 730,176.  Presumably, the government considers it our duty to have read all of these regulations so that we might abide by them.  Did you do your government mandated duty?  Remember, ignorance is no defense for violating the law or any regulation.  More and more of the binding regulations or the interpretation of the regulations can only be found in court proceedings or in website announcements of the thousands of government regulatory agencies, which the government itself cannot enumerate. Good luck you lost, ignorant soul if the government decides to come after you.  Do you trust the likes of Obama, Hillary, or The Donald not to do so?

Oh that we might be free!  It would be incredibly wonderful to celebrate the 4th of July as a free man.
It would be a joy to be among free men who had maintained the principles of freedom set forth in the Declaration of Independence and then largely implemented in the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1791.  To live in a society based on the free trade of values in a rich and robust private sector rather than one dominated by the forceful taking of wealth and service by governments would be to live in a genuinely life-sustaining society.  It is not possible to imagine how much our standard of living would be improved with the flowering of productivity, creativity, justice, and benevolence one would find in such a society.

President Thomas Jefferson Slashed Government Spending -- We Need a Jeffersonian Slasher

I am reading Six Frigates -- The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy by Ian W. Toll.  After the War of Independence, the United States had no navy until the Quasi War with the French under the John Adams administration caused the government to re-establish the U.S. Navy.  In the Quasi War with the French, the revolutionary government in France was raiding American ships at sea and confiscating them and their cargoes.  The French were trying to do this on the sly, because the Americans traded with their enemies, especially Great Britain.  This confiscation of American ships was a rather profitable business for French privateers and even the French navy.

Congress authorized the building of six naval frigates of a size larger than those of the common British plan for naval frigates.  Four were to be 44-gun frigates and two were 36-gun frigates.  This was viewed as a very expensive venture, but shipping losses at sea were very high.  Not only were the French preying on the thousands of American ships involved in international trade, but so were the Barbary Pirates of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco.  These original U.S. Navy frigates were the United States, President, Congress, Constitution, Constellation, and Chesapeake.  The USS Constellation fought and captured the French frigate L'Insurgente in the Caribbean on 9 February 1799 which had earlier captured American ships.  Napoleon took over the French government in a coup and decided to end the conflict with the United States shortly before Jefferson became President in 1801.  Jefferson would very soon find it necessary to deal with the Barbary Pirates.

While this is interesting history, especially for me since my father was a career naval officer, this paragraph about Jefferson's commitment to frugal and limited government caught my attention:

In his first inaugural, Jefferson promised "a wise and frugal Government, which ... shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."  In private letters, he made the point more sharply: the Republicans would "reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it."  Using presidential authority whenever congressional authorization was not needed, Jefferson and his cabinet simply dismissed federal officeholders they considered superfluous.  The State Department closed all foreign embassies except those in Madrid, Paris, and London.  The Treasury Department's internal revenue inspectors were fired en masse.  "We are hunting out and abolishing multitudes of useless offices," Jefferson told his son-in-law in June; "striking off jobs, etc., etc."  The magnitude of federal waste they were finding, he told James Monroe, was even greater than the Republicans had expected: "agencies upon agencies in every part of the earth, and for the most useless or mischievous purposes, and all of these opening doors for fraud and embezzlement far beyond the ostensible profits of the agency.  These are things of the existence of which no man dreamt, and we are lopping them down silently to make as little noise as possible."

Firing government employees en masse, driving away vultures by spending less, abolishing whole useless offices and agencies dedicated to useless or mischievous purposes with doors open to fraud and embezzlement, and lopping them down silently were Jefferson's purpose to provide a wise and frugal government.  Yet today, we are faced with such problems of overblown government as would surely cause Jefferson apoplexy.  We very much need a President with a Jeffersonian commitment to wise and frugal government.  But anyone with but a fraction of such a commitment today is considered far to radical, an extremist of the right, no matter how wise such a commitment to frugal and limited government is and no matter how federal spending lures special interests to mischievous purposes and fraudulent claims of public benefit.

Do the Democrat Senators in Close Elections Disagree with Obama or Each Other?

We are hearing constantly about how Democrat Senators up for re-election and other Democrats who are trying to move to the Senate from the House are distancing themselves from Obama and Harry Reid.  Some will not say that they voted for Obama and others try to claim that they have some significant differences with him.  Every Democrat Senator up for re-election voted for the PPACA or ObamaCare.  They all claimed the government owns every American's body and mind and gets to dictate how we will care for the government's property.  Without a clear title to self-ownership, all individual rights become a sham, which is why Saul Alinsky and every serious socialist wants government control of healthcare.

One of the most notable traits of Democrats in the Senate and House is that they all vote in very nearly lock-step with their leadership, however they may talk more independently when they visit their constituents in their home state.  What goes on in Washington, DC stays in DC.

The Club for Growth keeps a scorecard on how Senators and Representatives vote on issues affecting economic freedom, taxation, and spending.  A 100% rating would be held by someone who they believe voted correctly on all the votes they score.  Some of the Senators with high scores are:

Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican, Texas, 100% in 2013, 100% lifetime
Sen. Mike Lee, Republican, Utah, 100% in 2013, 100% lifetime
Sen. Rand Paul, Republican, Kentucky, 97% in 2013, 99% lifetime

In comparison, Senator Harry Reid's lifetime score is 5% and Rep. Nancy Pelosi's lifetime score is 7%.

So, let us examine the scores of the candidates running for the competitive Senate seats who have such voting records.

Alaska, Sen. Mark Begich, Democrat, 3% in 2013, 6% lifetime

Arkansas, Sen. Mark Pryor, Democrat, 12% in 2013, 16% lifetime
                 Rep. Tom Cotton, Republican,  92% in 2013, 92% lifetime

Colorado, Sen. Mark Udall, Democrat, N/A in 2013 (skipped too many votes), 8% lifetime
                 Rep. Cory Gardner, Republican, 69% in 2013, 75% lifetime

Iowa, Rep. Bruce Braley, Democrat, 6% in 2013, 1% lifetime, worst record of current Iowa Reps.

Kansas, Sen. Pat Roberts, Republican, 84% in 2013, 74% lifetime

Kentucky, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republican, 87% in 2013, 85% lifetime

Louisiana, Sen. Mary Landrieu, Democrat, 8% in 2013, 15% lifetime
                  Rep. Bill Cassidy, Republican, 64% in 2013, 76% lifetime

Michigan, Rep. Gary Peters, Democrat, 3% in 2013, 8% lifetime

Minnesota, Sen. Al Franken, Democrat, N/A in 2013 (skipped too many votes), 2% lifetime

New Hampshire,  Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat, 3% in 2013, 7% lifetime
                             Sen. Scott Brown, Republican, 62% in 2010, 49% in 2011 (Massachusetts)

North Carolina, Sen. Kay Hagan, 3% in 2013, 8% lifetime

The best of any of the Democrat scores in this list is Sen. Mark Pryor's lifetime score of 16%.  The worst score of any Republican in the list is Sen. Scott Brown's 2011 score of 49%.  So the worst single year score of a Republican was still more than three times better than the best of the Democrat lifetime or 2013 scores.

It is a popular belief among libertarians that both parties are equally bad.  While the Republican Party is often disappointing, at least on issues of economic freedom there is a significant difference between it and the Democrat Party.  Senators Lee, Cruz, and Paul do make a difference and every Democrat is almost their polar opposite, right along side Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi.

Either - Or: Big Government or Children

Big Government is often partly justified as necessary to provide services to children, but rarely do people think about the effect that Big Government has on whether people decide to have and raise children at all.  The USDA estimated in 2013 that a child born in 2011 to a US couple with a middle income will cost the parents $241,080 to raise to the age of 18.  This does not even include any costs for a college education or a failure to launch with 36% of 18 -31 year olds living in their parents homes in 2012.  Both of those costs have been increasing rapidly in recent years, while the median inflation-adjusted family income has fallen by $4,000 a year since 2000.

Now, we know that fertility rates are sensitive to a couples' economic security and their available resources.  Fertility rates dropped sharply in the US during the Great Depression.  Fertility rates dropped due to the back to back 1958 and 1960-1961 recessions.  They dropped substantially during the economic malaise of the late Nixon, the Ford, and the Carter years.  The fertility rate has dropped since 2008 as well.  We know that recent efforts of France and Sweden to decrease the cost of raising children have resulted in an increase in the fertility rates.  In December 2011, the Pew Research Center found that 22% of 18 -34 year olds said they were delaying having children for economic reasons.

So what do you think the effect of the great increase in government spending relative to the size of the economy has been on the fertility rate given that the increased spending came at the expense of transferring wealth from the private sector that pays child-raising expenses to the government sector?  The plot of the sum of federal, state, and local government spending from 1950 to 2013 as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is shown below:

In 1950, the birthrate per 1000 people was 24.1, in 1970 it was 18.4/1000 people, in 1990 it was 16.7/ 1000 people, and in 2009 it was 13.8/1000 Americans.  Total government spending in 1970 was much higher than in 1950, then again increased greatly by 1990 and still more in 2009.  The fertility rate fell substantially with each of those jumps in total government spending.  Now, I am not claiming this is the only effect on fertility rates, but it is a very logical one and the evidence is that it is a substantial effect.

But, the median household income in 2012 according to the Bureau of the Census was $51,371 a year.  At a 38% total tax on this income, the governments are taking $351,378 from this household over the course of 18 years.  To be sure, the family with the median income is paying less in taxes than the average tax rate, but this is probably made up by increased costs they pay for goods and services as tax costs are transferred to them and inflation caused by the government deficits over the years.  Supporting Big Government is the equivalent of raising about 1.5 children for 18 years.  This has to affect the calculation on how many children to have.

Big Government also saps the ability of the private sector to increase worker productivity by reducing private investment in productive equipment, new facilities, and worker training.  It reduces the number of new start-up companies.  The result is an economy which instead of growing in real per capita terms of 4% per year, stagnates to zero growth in real per capita terms as we have seen for the last 5 years.  The governments largely caused the recession and have kept the private sector from growing us out of the recession.  It helps tremendously when a married couple can have confidence that their income will exceed an average per capita increase of 4% compounded over 20 years as they add their own increasing experience and skills by the time the child they might choose to have is in the middle of his college education.  It is much, much easier to undertake having a child with economic growth than if there is no growth due to government-induced stagnation.

In 2012, the average American woman was giving birth to 1.88 children in her lifetime.  This is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.  This means that minus immigration into the US, the population would be decreasing over the long run at this birthrate.  That means a lowered number of future productive workers in the US and an increasing number of retired people and people on major entitlements per worker in the US.  This means very wrenching problems of sustainability for the many Big Government entitlement programs.

It also means that many people who otherwise would be enjoying raising children cannot do so because so much of their income is being diverted to Big Government.  That impact on families is not spread evenly across the country.  Couples earning more than $105,360 in the urban northeastern US will spend $446,100 per child.  This is also an area of the country with a particularly high cost of state and local governments.  Imagine the effect on the decision whether to have children or not?  On the other hand, families earning less than $61,590 per year in rural areas will spend less than $143,160 on the first 18 years of raising a child.  These rural areas usually have a lower tax expense.  All of these factors make for interesting calculations on whether to become parents.

Anna and I raised three children and sent one to college for 4.5 years, one to college for 4 years, and one to college for 1.5 years, while living in the Northeast.  It was a hugely expensive proposition which many people will not attempt.

Though many Malthusians are very happy to see low birthrates, the rising population of the world has been consistently combined with an increased standard of living around the world.  The USA is a particularly sparsely settled land, most of which has been reverting to wild lands as our agricultural prowess has increased so that less land was needed for farmland.  The foolish government mandate requiring ethanol additions to gasoline has recently interfered with that trend toward using less and less land for farming.  Of course, the trend of less and less land for food production has continued.  The innovations of the developed countries have also led to fewer and fewer problems with polluted air and water.  What we are losing with low birthrates is many keen, productive minds which would otherwise enrich our lives and advance civilization.

Proposed Constitutional Amendments

I am proposing the following constitutional amendments.  Many would not have been necessary had Americans understood and lived by the principles of the Framers of the Constitution.  Given decades of ignoring the Constitution and a huge excess of laws, regulations, and government spending, I think these amendments would go far in correcting the many problems we have with excessive, tyrannical government.

Good law requires that the welfare of every individual is increased by the law.  For this reason, it a super-majority of individuals do not approve of a law or a regulation, it should not become law or it presently law, it should be repealed.

My amendments are:

1) Amend the 16th Amendment authorizing an income tax to state that one and only one marginal tax rate will be applied to incomes equal to 75 percent of the median taxable household income and all higher taxable household incomes.

2) Repeal the 17th Amendment requiring the popular election of Senators.  Return to the original election of Senators by state legislatures.

3) Every adult owns his own mind, body, and labor and may use them, maintain them, and dispose of them as he pleases, so long as he does not initiate the use of force upon others.    Individuals have the right to protect their minds, body, and labor from violence.

4) Every adult has the right to the results of his labor or thought and to his property.  The goods he has made, the land he has improved, and the ideas he has originated and put into the form of a product or process are to be protected from theft by government.  No government taking of property is permitted except with just and reasonable compensation or because that property was used by the owner in the commission of a crime as determined by trial.  No government taking of property not used in the commission of a crime is allowed except for necessary and proper government use.

5) Every adult individual has the right to associate with others for the purposes of his choosing in voluntary relationships, contracts, and trading.  Adult individuals have the right to exercise their own judgment in their associations, contracts, and relationships with others.  Government will protect individuals from violence and fraud which has actually happened or is in the process of happening, but will not limit the freedom of association out of fear of potential future violence or fraud.

6) The government does not control or manipulate the economy or trade and commerce.  It provides a constant value supply of currency for government functions and general use, but does not prevent the circulation of other distinctive currencies.  It forbids state and local governments from interfering with trade, commerce, and travel by the People across state boundaries.

7) Individuals have the right of privacy so long as they are not engaged in acts of violence or fraud.  Information not available to the general public will not be collected and saved about any individual without a court order attesting to the reasonable likelihood that the individual is engaged in violent acts or fraud.  No means of obtaining private information on individuals will be used without due process.

8) Any law or act of Congress may be repealed by a vote of 40% or more of the members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  The President may not veto such repeal votes.

9) Any law or act of Congress requires a vote of 60% or more of the members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  The President may use his veto power on such acts of Congress.  The same 60% approval is required for all Executive Branch appointments reviewed and consented upon by the Senate.

10) Any member of Congress who has voted for a bill must attest in a written document that the member has read the bill and believes it to be in the interest of the general welfare, necessary, proper, and constitutional.

11) Any federal law may be repealed by act of 40% or more of the state legislatures.

12) Any regulatory rule by an executive branch agency of the federal government may be nullified by votes of 40% or more of the members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by 40% or more of the state legislatures.  Any new regulation produced by a government agency which will impose costs of $25 million or more must be specifically approved by both the House of Representatives and the Senate with votes of 60% or more.  Any legislative attempt by Congress members to review any regulatory ruling which has the support of 40% of the members of that house cannot be kept from a vote in that house.

13) No federal law shall exempt members of Congress or federal government employees from its application to them, except by an explicit and recorded vote in favor of such an exemption by at least 80% of the members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

14) No member of Congress shall serve in Congress more than 12 years continuously and no more than 20 years in a lifetime.  After 12 years of service, there must be at least a ten-year period of non-service in the federal government before further service commences.

15) Senators and their staffs will be paid by the state they represent.  Senators will not receive any payment or benefits for services, nor will they receive any payments or benefits after the termination of their service, from the federal government.

16) Members of the House of Representatives will not receive any payments or benefits from the federal government after the end of their service in the House of Representatives.

17) Authorizations for the existence of each and every executive branch agency or department must be renewed by an individual, specific act of Congress every four years for that executive entity.  The budget for every such agency or department must be individually reviewed and approved at the same time.  Congress will also at that time review and evaluate the actions of that agency or department over the last four years and make that review available to the public, with only national security exceptions upon the vote of 60% or more of the members of each house of Congress.  If Congress does not authorize the agency or department and its budget individually on this four-year cycle, all operations of that agency or department must cease at that time.

18) No appropriations may be made by any Congress which are binding upon any future Congress.

19) Decisions of the federal courts may be overturned by a vote in both houses of Congress of two-thirds of the members of each house.  Federal court decisions may be overruled by two-thirds of the states by acts of their legislatures.

20) Annual federal government spending may not exceed a fixed percentage of the annual national gross domestic product except in times of declared war and then by no more than half the annual cost of that war unless both houses of Congress approve such additional spending with a vote of 80% or more.  The upper limit fixed percentage will initially be 18% and will be decreased by 0.5% with each new Congress, until it reaches 8% of gross domestic product. 

21)  Annual federal government spending may not exceed government revenues by more than 3% except in times of declared war and then by no more than half the annual cost of that war unless both houses of Congress approve such additional spending with a vote of 80% or more.

22) Total government debt may not exceed the annual national gross domestic product except by the vote of 80% or more of the members of each house of Congress.

23) No one may vote in a federal election unless they present a valid picture identification at the time of voting.  Only federal employees on duty outside the United States of America may cast their vote more than 2 weeks prior to the day of the election.  They may not vote earlier than 6 weeks prior to the election.

I plan to revisit these proposed amendments to discuss them in more detail.  I am sure that some of them need to be tuned up and I will welcome comments with suggestions on how to do that.

Increasing Mobility of Low Income People to Higher Incomes

I am going to comment on an article by W. Bradford Wilcox posted at the American Enterprise Institute on income mobility in the United States.  He has presented some data of Harvard economist Raj Chetty, a principal investigator at the Equality of Opportunity Project, based on local variations of local income growth, the share of single mother households locally, and local government spending.  The mobility is question here was actually one with a very high bar.  A child born into a lowest quintile household has to be a highest quintile earner by age 30.  Most highest quintile earners are well into their careers and tend to be much older 30.

Wilcox has fit these data sets with linear functions.  The data are interesting, though the linear fits are problematic for two of his three plots of the data.  In light of the recent renewal of Obama's redistributionist efforts, only partially and even falsely carried out by ObamaVaporCare, this is a good time to talk about what really affects income mobility.

The first plot, which is reasonably fit with a linear function, is:

This is not surprising.  Where income growth is strong in America, labor is more valued and those who want to work hard have many opportunities to make money.  Of course Obama's anti-business policies, high energy costs, excessive regulations, and the costs of ObamaVaporCare decrease income growth and are therefore likely to decrease income mobility on the national scale.  Nonetheless, local government efforts to suppress the free market will still leave a strong imprint on local mobility variations.  There is no question that it is much easier to start a business in some areas than in others, as an example with important affects on mobility.

Another critical effect on income mobility is:

Clearly an increasing share of households run by a single mother has a very negative effect on income mobility for their children.  The linear fit here is nonsense.  The proper fit is with a hyperbolic curve, which indicates a much stronger impact of single mother households on income mobility than a linear effect.  It has long been understood that there was a strong effect, but this data makes it very clear how strong and dominant that effect is.  It is well-understood that entitlement programs tend to increase the number of single mother households, so most of Obama's likely efforts to decrease income inequality will likely make it worse.  One of the many impacts of his policies already has been to increase energy costs, which really hurts those with little income badly.  How local government welfare programs are run will have a big impact on the number of single mother households.  Generally, the more money spent on such programs, the more single mother households.

The third plot is:

The thought here was that local government spending supports education, so with better local education systems, income mobility would be increased.  There probably is some such effect in some school districts, but we also know that generally increased spending on schools does not really correlate well with greater learning.  In some school districts, the people do have a high regard for education, but in many other districts it is just another labor union entitlement program to gain the teachers union votes.  Many inner city school systems are well-funded, but horribly managed.  So it is not surprising that the data does not follow any definable dependence in this case.  The data more nearly resembles a hand print with the palm pressed firmly and the fingers splayed out and pressing lightly.  Indeed, the thumb is nearly straight up, indicating that one can get virtually any result from spending $2,000 per capita on income mobility.  Clearly, neither local government spending nor local education spending is the primary effect on income mobility.  This is not to say that real learning is not important.  That I am sure is a critical effect.  But, sad to say, real learning is not something Obama is interested in.

Income mobility depends upon the opportunity to earn a living, which is heavily dependent upon government policies not shutting down or over-regulating opportunities.  Because freedom of contract is heavily suppressed in the USA, many opportunities to earn are decreased.  One such egregious way to decrease opportunity to earn and to develop a career is to increase the minimum wage.  Doing so hurts the under-educated the most by keeping them from getting their first jobs.  This keeps them from acquiring skills and from establishing a record as a worthy employee.  It forces many to turn to crime.  The high costs of providing health insurance under ObamaCare and the minimum wage increases that took effect just before and during the start of the Great Socialist Recession have already had a disproportionate impact on ensuring the unemployment and part-time employment of those in the lowest quintile income households.  Obama has been no friend to the small businesses that often hire young people and give them their first opportunity to prove themselves.

It is another Obama farce to claim that he is going to do something to increase income mobility and to reduce income inequality.  As always, he will cause effects opposed to those he claims he will achieve.  Of course his main purpose in this income inequality rhetoric is to distract the American People from the disasters he has already caused in the economy and with our medical care.

A Piecemeal Approach to Appropriations is Exactly the Way for Congress to Proceed

We are constantly hearing from most of the media and from Obama and his allies generally that the proper way to appropriate funding for government is to pass an omnibus authorization to continue the massive spending of the government and every current program.  They demand a "clean" continuing resolution that includes the very dirty ObamaCare program with full funding.

They choose to ignore many things in this assertion.  Among them:

• The debt due to this unsustainable spending has surpassed the GDP and will be harder and harder to roll-over.  The debt will saddle the People with much higher interest rates in the future.  Any attempt to increase taxes to pay the increased debt payments and the increases in Medicare, Social Security (retirement and disability), Medicaid, and ObamaCare spending, will slow the growth of the economy enough to result in a decrease in tax revenues.  In other words, only spending less is a possible sustainable solution.  This solution is to be avoided at all costs according to Democrats.

•  It is the job of Congress, especially the House of Representatives, to carefully review spending and only authorize that spending which is constitutional and necessary.  This constitutional responsibility is forfeited in the continuing resolution process.  Only in a piecemeal consideration of government program funding will irresponsible, unnecessary, and unconstitutional programs be ended as they ought to be.  Programs should be examined closely by Congress.  This takes time and effort, which it is all too clear Congress is not up to.  Neither is Obama up to it.  This is a great reason to demand huge reductions in government spending and in the number of programs all by itself.  Giving Congress so much money and so many programs is like giving a five-year-old a house, a gun, and a car of his own and filling the house to the ceiling with hundred dollar bills.

• The infamously named Affordable Care Act is very unpopular with the People.  It is a major source of increased government spending.  This spending will add greatly to the national debt.  Many will push for higher taxes to fund it in the future, despite the fact that higher taxes will result in less tax revenue over time, while lowering our standard of living.  Of course a past Congress passed ObamaCare without reading it and without regard to its many violations of individual rights and of the limited powers given the government by the Constitution.  This does not mean that the present or future Congresses are not obliged to stop the funding for this program if they assess it to be unworthy of funding, unconstitutional, or against the will of the People.  Indeed, if any is the case, then it is Congress' responsibility to stop the program.

So much for the nonsense that only a Continuing Resolution to fund all government programs at present levels is responsible.  Nothing could be more untrue.

Obama is Chicken Little

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University prepared the graphic above to allow us to see the catastrophe that Obama is warning us about due to the sequester he requested and refuses to prevent.  Now he is playing Chicken Little and telling us the sky is falling due to the decreased growth in federal spending from 2013 to 2021 from 55% growth to 51% growth.  Or a decrease in super-high growth to 2023 of 72% to super-high growth of 68% is sure to be our doom.

Look, our doom is due the failure of the government to make the drastic cuts needed to bring spending down to the levels of tax income.  Our doom is due to having a government that has grown over the last 80 years to the point it is spending four times as much as it is constitutionally empowered to do while exercising powers appropriate for absolute monarchs and dictators.  We are in this financial fix because more fundamentally we have allowed government to become the chief violator of our sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of our own bodies, minds, and labor, and to choose our values for us rather than to allow us to pursue our own happiness.  It is very expensive to give up the management of your life to government.  This lesson is perhaps the most repeated and obvious lesson of history.

Obama Wants Bigger Government on Top of This?

From his State of the Union address, it could not be more clear that Obama wants a much bigger government with much more spending and much more control over our lives.  He wants to impose this further growth upon the already unbelievable increases in government spending since 2002 as shown in this great graphic from the current issue of the magazine of the National Federation of Independent Businesses:

Of course there is no limit to the extraction of money, time, and other resources from the private sector for the use of the government sector in this fool's mind.  All of these programs have grown much faster than real, per capita income has in that time.  This has been especially true during the four years Obama has occupied the White House.  This is a huge problem he simply does not recognize, which means he is either incredibly dumb or incredibly evil.

Obama's Job Destruction Plan Illustrated

We have long been seeing updates of the graph that Obama and his henchmen used to illustrate the effect of their jobs creation plan with comparison to the jobs recovery with no such plan.  The effect of his distributing huge sums of printed and borrowed money among his campaign contributors and such of his constituents as he expected had purchasable votes is clearly shown in this most recent update of that graph.  The actual unemployment (actually understated) through the recession is shown with the red dots and this far exceeds the anticipated unemployment rate if Obama did nothing.

Surely we should assume that the difference between the original projected unemployment rate and the actual unemployment rate is the result of Obama's policies.  In other words, instead of improving the jobs situation, those policies clearly worsened it during this Great Socialist Recession.  They worsened it far worse than this plot implies too, since the actual unemployment rate is really much higher than the stated rate as I have many times pointed out.  This is due to the many people who have given up hope of finding employment and stopped looking for it.  It is also due to the many people who have become comfortable on food stamps, extended unemployment benefits, and on Social Security disability payments under Obama's inducements to do so.

Economic Stagnation, Unsustainable Debt, Lawless Government Chosen

The majority of voters rejected the American Principle of limited, constitutional government whose purpose is the protection of our sovereign individual right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of our own bodies, minds, and labor, and the pursuit of personal happiness. Socialism and anti-human extreme environmentalism coupled with crony mercantilism and constant, blatant lying were chosen by the majority of voters within the boundaries of America.

I cannot say how unbelievably disappointed I am in half of the people of this country.  I cannot even think of them as Americans due to their failure to value the American Principle.  I cannot understand how so many could so radically embrace organized thievery, thinly veiled as redistribution in the interest of materialistic equality.

The voters have chosen four more years of such violations of economic rights that economic stagnation is assured.  We are assured four more years of very high unemployment and decreased full-time employment thanks to ObamaCare and a weak economy.  We are assured of the further destruction of whole industries, such as the coal, oil, and natural gas industries.  We can count on continued high gasoline prices.  We are assured of a government controlled medical system characterized by fleeing doctors, deteriorating medical service and expertise, aging medical equipment, lengthening waits for critical medical care, and of course much increased costs.  Government-run schools will become still greater propaganda factories deceiving the minds of our children and college students with tall tales of how government control will solve most any problem.  They will serve blue collar union teachers and not the children who will be deprived of real knowledge about American history and civics.  The cost of this hollow education will continue to skyrocket.  America's producers will be vilified for another four years and then taxed heavily, not to fill the gap between government spending and tax revenue, but to penalize the productive for being so productive.

Most voters say they want smaller government, but most voted for Obama.  This is a total disconnect.

Most voters say they want less national debt, but they chose the debt champion of all Presidents.

The voters also chose to return a Democrat Senate so they could continue the Obama-Reid regime record of no budget for a total of 8 years, in violation of law.

They chose Obama and a Democrat Senate so they would continue to have the unpopular ObamaCare, really ObamaUncaringTax, shoved down their throats by rationing bureaucrats and IRS thugs. 

Most voters cared not a wink about the cover-up of the New Black Panthers, Fast and Furious, and Benghazi.  Most care nothing that Obama flushed tens of billions of dollars down the toilet of hollow green energy companies with no possible market run by his campaign bundlers to fill their pockets in a race to the company bankruptcy.  Most voters did not mind the constant misrepresentations of the truth, the constant lies, and the fallacious arguments.  They embraced their celebrity con man.

This con man and the Democrat Senate will not address the fact that the U.S. government spending on ObamaCare, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Food Stamps, and the interest on the debt are unsustainable.  We are hurtling down the road hacked out by Greece.  Collapse of the government is coming.  The only hope to avoid that was to free the economy and allow growth in it that exceeded that of the government.  Most voters never understood this simple fact.  Thanks to Obama and the Democrat Socialist Party and their most unworthy, unthinking supporters, collapsed government is our future.

Obama Calls for More Spending on Education, But Does More Spending Improve Education?

In the last debate, Obama said that a cornerstone to recovery from the never-ending Great Socialist Recession was an increase in federal spending on education.  This he says is critical to improving the economy.

Now, we can all agree that an American population of thinking individuals with a broad and accurate knowledge base and excellent problem-solving skills would be a major economic factor.  One can even imagine an education system based on sound principles which might do a better job of educating the People if it had more money.  However, the present American education system gives no evidence that spending more money on education has any beneficial effect upon the knowledge base of Americans and on their development of critical thinking skills.  Let us examine the recent history of total spending on education:

Since 1981 there has been an almost 6-fold increase in education spending in the U.S.  To be sure, if we believe that education spending should be proportional to the GDP, then this is only a 23% increase in spending as a proportion of GDP.  In 1981, education spending was about 6.4% of GDP and in 2010 it was 7.9% of GDP.  However, the student population has not grown at anything like the rate of the growth in GDP, so one should be able to expect an equal level of educational results with a decreasing fraction of the GDP being devoted to education.  The trend is clearly in the wrong direction.

There are very fundamental reasons why the massively increased spending on education and on a per pupil basis has not resulted in any significant increase in student knowledge and thinking skills.  In almost every community, the local school labor unions assemble a slate of Board of Education members who appear to have good education credentials and their election is backed by lots of union money.  This slate wins almost every position on the school boards.  Because of this and the power of the teachers unions in also greatly influencing the election of city and county officials, the schools are managed for the benefit of the teachers labor unions, not for the education of the children.  Increasing the pay and  benefits of teachers who are blue-collar union members unable to even negotiate their own pay and benefits with their employer, guarantees that few of them will have the teaching skills, knowledge, self-confidence, and managerial skills needed by a professional educator.  Union members are not picked and not rewarded for their teaching professionalism.  Of course, as so often happens when a con is being performed, teachers present bogus certifications proclaiming them experts in teaching.

We have government-run schools specifically because Progressives saw them as a means to indoctrinate children to believe that big and socialist government was needed and moral.  Of course a government-run school could be counted upon to advance the never-ending quest of governments for power.  Such government schools could be counted upon to subvert the American Principle that government should be highly limited and only act to protect the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of personal happiness.  Thus, government-run schools have become increasingly anti-American even as they became the dominant force in the education of American children.  The general viewpoint of American government-run school teachers is well-aligned with the socialist and extreme environmentalist viewpoints of Obama.  It is opposed to a healthy and robust private sector in which Americans should be free to exercise their freedom of association to cooperate with others to achieve their self-chosen goals.  The government-run schools are generally bastions of Progressivism and opponents of Capitalism.

Despite the large increases in education spending, we have not seen an increased ability of American young people to perceive reality and understand it.  In fact, they are more and more removed from reality and less and less capable of performing real productive work in the private sector without more and more massive training efforts by private businesses.  Few students graduate with a proper respect for those with the skills and motivation to produce in our society.  Few are able to communicate well and solve problems well.  Despite our spending more and more and spending far more of our GDP on education than does almost any other country, we keep losing ground to other countries in rankings of educational attainment.  It could not be more clear that we are throwing our education dollars into a black hole.

Marcos Cordero in an article called The Link Between Unemployment Rates and the Lack of Qualified Professionals in America notes that

The Defense Department found that 75 percent of Americans age 17 to 24 are not qualified to serve in the armed forces. In fact, 30 percent of the high school graduates who take the Armed Forces Qualification Test, a test of basic reading and math skills, fail it.

A very fundamental reform of American education is desperately needed and it will not come from government.  Governments are only eager to increase their power and politicians are easily bought by the massive teachers union money accumulated as the government automatically deducts union dues from teachers paychecks.  Labor unions and government increasingly see their interests to be largely in common and the interests of students and good governance are not now able to compete with them.  Only when the People understand these problems and massively rebel will there be any real hope of fixing this problem.

But most of the American People are largely in a feel good mode on education.  Because labor union members provide children with inflated grades, most parents think their child is doing well in school and they are inclined to assume that that means that they are actually learning.  The labor union policy of easy grading and of placing few demands on students lulls the parents and students to sleep.  Until parents and students wake up to the fact that they are being poorly educated and heavily indoctrinated in socialism and extreme environmentalism, America will continue to go downhill.  Obama is happy to push us down that hill.

Misdirection on Medicare by Obama Ad

Obama is running an ad now that claims that Romney is going to cut $6000 from seniors Medicare benefits and shows various seniors in the ad.  First of all, Romney is not proposing any cut for anyone 55 years or older.  Second, in the future for those less than 55 years old, should legislation be passed to make Medicare sustainable, it is by no means clear that seniors will lose $6,000 of benefits many years from now.  That number has little credibility.  It is simply pulled from a hat.  But it works to scare people. 

It works to create a division between the young and the elderly. The AARP is quoted by Obama's ad, but this group specializes in inter-generational warfare.  It is at war with the children of the elderly.  The young cannot possibly be taxed heavily enough to continue to pay the costs of Medicare given the demographics of the huge Baby Boomer generation and the too small generations following them, unless changes are made.  The best way to control medical costs is to give individuals a stake in how much those services cost.  Vouchers are the means to do this critical task.  You need them to decide that pointless visits to the doctor are expendable.  You need them to put pressure on medical service providers not to overcharge them.  When government says it will control costs, we know that to be nonsense.

The Democrats refuse to deal with the reality that Medicare is not sustainable, much as they refuse to deal with Social Security's problems or to recognize that several terrorist attacks were just that.  The Republicans are manning up and are willing to make the changes needed to make these programs sustainable.  The pretense-given Democrats are standing by as both Medicare and Social Security are spending more money than they are taking in.  We have switched from a situation in which excess Medicare and Social Security tax revenues were used to fund irresponsible general government spending to one in which general income tax income has to be used to make up the shortfall in Medicare and Social Security expenditures.

The Backfiring Democrat Santa Analogy

Former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland when speaking at the Democrat National Convention (DNC) in Charlotte said that if Romney were Santa he would "fire the reindeer and outsource the elves."  Since Romney is a candidate for the presidency, it appears that Strickland thinks the President has a job analogous to that of Santa.  This does seem to be very compatible with the Welfare State mentality of the Democrats.

According to the Democrats and their DNC promotional video, we all belong to the Government.  The head of the Government is the President, who is supposed to be Santa.  This is clearly Government for Children, not for adults who believe their General Welfare is only served when the Government protects their equal, sovereign individual rights.  Santa, or the President, is supposed to have many, many reindeer employees, which is code for many government workers who are supposed to be no brighter than reindeer and only work a small portion of the year.  Ideally, one night each year.  Government is not supposed to be efficient.

The elves are the private sector producers who are heavily taxed and assigned brutal mandated hours of unpaid work for the government, or Santa, to produce the gifts to be given to the Children on Christmas Day.  The gift receivers are deceptively called children to earn our unqualified love, but they are really disguised special interests such as the labor unions, government employee reindeer, green energy companies, trial lawyers, tax lawyers and accountants, and radical anti-human environmentalists, and the like.  Santa Obama redistributes the wealth created by the elves to these special interests so fast that he has just sent the national debt soaring past $16 trillion dollars.  When interest rates on the national debt return to long-term averages, the interest on the debt will exceed the cost of Medicare!  No matter how much a future Santa may want to take from the elves in taxes, he will not be able to take enough to pay the interest, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security costs even if he spends nothing on any other Government program.

The elves are not actually outsourced.  It is their jobs that are outsourced.  Because Santa, really the President and the Democrats, has expanded Government gift-giving, or spending, from 18% of the economy to 25% of the economy, the elves who are in the private sector have been deprived of the means to grow the economy at a rate to match that of the 39% growth of Government spending.  As a result, many are unable to compete with foreign elves whose productive organizations pay lower taxes and may have fewer and less expensive regulatory mandates.  Other private sector elves are not able to consume as much as they used to, so fewer elves are needed in jobs. Elves have become unemployed in droves.  There are fewer elves with jobs now than when the present Santa became Santa.

What is worse, the population of elves and reindeer has been growing and there are about 3 million more elves and reindeer a year.  This means that the sum of elves and reindeer need about 2 million new jobs each year so that those who want to have jobs will have them.  Over a three year period they need 6 million jobs just to keep up with the population growth of elves and reindeer.  Of course, many of the out-of-work elves of three years ago also want to have jobs again.

Meanwhile, Santa is boasting that he has created 4.5 million new jobs since the depths of a recession reached three years ago.  He counts all the reindeer jobs and all the elf jobs as jobs he has created.  Some of the elves say that they created their businesses, but the Santa President says that they did not.  He did, because he creates all jobs, even the jobs of self-employed elves.  Many of the 4.5 million jobs, actually all of them in net, are due to increased self-employment by elves.

The Santa President is a very arrogant man.  He has a horde of black shirt special interest comrades who want his rules strictly enforced, which are too complicated for the reindeer and the elves to understand.  His rules also change very quickly.  He only likes those who vote for him and give him big presents in tribute for his ruling over them.  This Santa gives reindeer favors and agrees to favor or not to hurt certain elves if they give him tribute.

Most of the elves are given a lump of coal at Christmas time and no other gifts.  Because the President Santa is not allowing coal to be used for energy, coal is an even worse Christmas present than it used to be.  President Santa also hogs huge areas of land and all offshore areas and will not allow elves to get oil and gas in his private reserves.  The cost of gasoline has more than doubled under this Santa, so the elves are having trouble driving to work, if they have any work.  Santa forces the elves to turn their food corn into ethanol and mix it with gasoline, despite knowing that this makes food more expensive, creates no energy, and increases pollution.  The elves are finding energy to be more and more expensive and more and more unreliable, so their productivity in the private sector is suffering and the 5% growth they used to have has been replaced with 1% growth.

The elves' homes are colder in the winter and warmer in the summer.  Their homes are also worth about 40% less than they used to be.  Many elves owe more on their mortgages for their homes than their homes are worth.  Many of the elves were supposed to retire soon, but can no longer afford to retire.  Elves have less income now than they did when the Santa became Santa.  More and more elves are angry at Santa.  Santa has violated Christmas and the entrepreneurial spirit of plenty that the industrious elves of our land once created.

Santa Obama is about to be replaced by President Romney, who the elves hope will be less a Santa and more of a protector of individual rights so that the elves will be able to choose their own values more in the private sector and can work to create very big pies and other goodies.  They do not want to have to give so many of their pies and goodies to the Santa President so they can improve their own lives.  Santa Obama was a rabble-rouser and a special interest lawyer before he became Santa.  The future President Romney was a elf who made many pies and goodies himself and claims to like busy elves.  It is highly unlikely he will be as bad a Scrooge as the present pretend Santa has proven to be.