Tuesday, April 03, 2012
There Ought to be a Law, But Not So Many
The fact that the last time I published anything on my blog was July 16, 2011 make it seem that I am missing the whole point of having one, but I have been finishing up a Master of Arts degree from American Public University in Political Science and writing for the courses there has drained my energy for writing. I have now finished the requirements for the degree (with honors); conferral date is May 15. It will be my fourth degree, which makes me nearly as much of an education junkie as my wife Sandy, who has six. Now that I am done writing about things because I have to, I can write about things because I want to. Sandy also has ambition to do more writing, both on her own and in collaboration with others and me. A couple of topics that interest me are (1) the rule of law (2) Article V of the United States Constitution, the one about how the Constitution is amended. I intend to write more about both topics in later posts, but let me get started scratching the surface of one of those two topics, the rule of law.
Plato sparked my interest in the rule of law when I read about an observation of his in my course on the history of political philosophy. Plato observed that lawlessness does not mean the absence of laws. It can also mean the habitual disregard of laws by the government, especially those laws that are meant to restrain it. A government that can change laws merely because it finds current laws to be inconvenient is lawless. He made that observation more than 2000 years ago. It occurred to me that we are currently developing a type of lawlessness caused laws that are too numerous, too complicated, and even laws that contradict other laws. It is becoming more difficult to be a law-abiding citizen because to obey the law, one must be able to know what the law is (or at least be able to find out what it is with reasonable effort), be able to understand it, and not be forced into a situation in which to obey one law one must disobey another. In most cases it is easier to obey laws that are harsh and unreasonable than laws that cannot be understood, are too numerous to follow, are contradictory, or can be interpreted in unpredictable ways by an adjudicator. Since I am writing this in early April and haven’t filed my income tax returns, the example that springs first to mind of a set of laws that is way too complicated is the Internal Revenue Code, or what it would be named if names of acts of Congress were more accurate – the Attorneys and Accountants Full Employment Act. If the only goal of the federal income tax were to raise revenue, the Internal Revenue Code would be simple and complying with it would be uncomplicated. However, the Internal Revenue Code has developed multiple goals that are designed to engineer behavior – to encourage behavior that the federal government approves of and to discourage behavior that it does not approve of.
More recent examples of laws that are not only large and complicated by themselves (over 2000 pages each) but invite countless regulations to be written to further complicate the lives of people in regulated industries trying to obey the law are the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
I have much more to say about the rule of law, but that will have to wait until later. Meanwhile, I would appreciate comments from readers about personal experiences regarding difficulty following laws because of their volume or complexity or situations in which following one law required disobeying another. Comments reflecting a different viewpoint are also welcome.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Two Lies for the Price of One
Recently, President Obama responded to the question of a reporter about whether Social Security checks would go out on August 3 if the debt ceiling was not raise by August 2 by saying, “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3 if we haven't resolved this issue because there simply may not be the money in the coffers to do it.”
I have seen a few comments that this points out the lie that politicians have told for years that there is a Social Security trust fund that guarantees that Social Security benefits will be paid. In truth, the so-called trust fund is a promise by the rest of the government that when payroll taxes become inadequate to pay the Social Security benefits that they are intended to finance, the government will raise the money to pay the short fall – by either taxes or borrowing. In other words, the trust fund is not really backed by anything other than a bookkeeping entry and a promise by the government to pay – provided of course that it is able to.
What everyone seems to be overlooking, however, is that even in the absence of a trust fund and even in the middle of a weak economy, there are enough payroll taxes being collected to pay for nearly all of the Social Security benefits that need to be paid. More importantly, as long as they are needed to pay Social Security benefits, those taxes cannot legally be used for any other purpose; they are dedicated specifically for the purpose of paying Social Security benefits. In other words, there will be plenty of money in the coffers that can be used to pay for Social Security benefits and for no other purpose. There may be some shortfall, but I am so confident that the government can and will make up whatever shortfall there may be with the other tax revenue that comes in, that I will do what the President is unwilling to do and guarantee that Social Security benefits will be paid in full. Well, OK, I am not really guaranteeing that because I don't actually have the billions of dollars it would take to make good on such a guarantee, but the point is I think the President has made so many promises that he has no ability, and perhaps no intention, to keep that he overlooked that a promise to pay Social Security benefits on August 3 is one of the easiest promises off all to keep – no matter what happens with the debt ceiling by August 2.
I have seen a few comments that this points out the lie that politicians have told for years that there is a Social Security trust fund that guarantees that Social Security benefits will be paid. In truth, the so-called trust fund is a promise by the rest of the government that when payroll taxes become inadequate to pay the Social Security benefits that they are intended to finance, the government will raise the money to pay the short fall – by either taxes or borrowing. In other words, the trust fund is not really backed by anything other than a bookkeeping entry and a promise by the government to pay – provided of course that it is able to.
What everyone seems to be overlooking, however, is that even in the absence of a trust fund and even in the middle of a weak economy, there are enough payroll taxes being collected to pay for nearly all of the Social Security benefits that need to be paid. More importantly, as long as they are needed to pay Social Security benefits, those taxes cannot legally be used for any other purpose; they are dedicated specifically for the purpose of paying Social Security benefits. In other words, there will be plenty of money in the coffers that can be used to pay for Social Security benefits and for no other purpose. There may be some shortfall, but I am so confident that the government can and will make up whatever shortfall there may be with the other tax revenue that comes in, that I will do what the President is unwilling to do and guarantee that Social Security benefits will be paid in full. Well, OK, I am not really guaranteeing that because I don't actually have the billions of dollars it would take to make good on such a guarantee, but the point is I think the President has made so many promises that he has no ability, and perhaps no intention, to keep that he overlooked that a promise to pay Social Security benefits on August 3 is one of the easiest promises off all to keep – no matter what happens with the debt ceiling by August 2.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
The President's Real Plan to Improve the Health of Americans
I finally figured it out. President Obama has a plan to improve the health of Americans and it isn't the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare). That was a distraction. The President was never really serious about that, as evidenced by the fact that he let Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the other Democrats in Congress write it for him with little or no help from the White House. He didn't care what it said because that is not his real plan to improve the health of Americans. To understand what his real plan is, you need to understand that that most of the health problems of Americans are related to obesity and physical laziness. You can tell just by watching the President that he is not a fan of obesity and sloth. For one thing, he is skinny. For another, have you ever seen him walk slowly up a flight of stairs? No! He jogs up stairs. Since I am a former resident of Chicago myself, I also recognize that he plays basketball Chicago-style – meaning it is not a foul unless blood is drawn and someone needs stitches. He is one tough dude, and he wants the rest of us to be equally tough. He wants us to eat less and get more exercise.
The main part of President Obama's plan to get us to eat less is to take an idea that began under a previous President's administration and run with it, and that is to require cars to burn ethanol in place of part of the gasoline that they burn. In simple terms, the idea is to make sure that we take crops that would normally be turned into food and burn them in our motor vehicles. We are converting about 40 percent of our corn crop into ethanol for fuel, which is probably healthier than turning it into ethanol for making liquor. Mixing ethanol with gasoline is less tasty than some other things you can mix ethanol with, but cars don't run well on mixed drinks. To make sure that it is American corn that is used to make ethanol for transportation and not something else, the American government does two things. First, it subsidizes growing the corn, using it to make ethanol, and making sure that the ethanol is burned as fuel. Second, it puts a stiff tariff on ethanol imported from Brazil, which is made from cane sugar and is much less expensive to produce. Obviously, the government's policy to encourage the burning of ethanol for fuel has nothing to to with benefits of ethanol, or we would be buying inexpensive ethanol from Brazil rather than paying extra to produce it here. The goal is obviously to reduce the amount of corn in the food supply. Since most corn in the United States is actually grown for animal feed, it affects the price of meat and dairy products even more than food made of corn. This makes it harder for Americans to get fat on a diet of bacon cheeseburgers and Doritos. It also has the unfortunate side effect of making food more expensive in the rest of the world. Since hungry people tend to get grumpy, this may have something to do with the rioting and demonstrations in other countries, but the President's responsibility is to the health of obese Americans and not to the health of starving foreigners.
The President's plan for getting Americans to exercise more is to get us out of our cars and walk or ride bicycles. The best way to do that is to raise the price of gasoline to the point that it is barely affordable for the average American. He had some help in this with the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico about a year ago. He used it as an excuse to shut down much of the drilling for oil that was happening in the Gulf of Mexico and to delay the issuing of permits until after many of the deep water drilling rigs were moved to other parts of the world – like off the coast of Brazil. Maybe we can buy some oil from them to make up for the ethanol that they aren't selling us. Unlike most countries, which jump at the chance to tap energy resources, the policy of the United States seems to be to discourage oil companies from drilling where there might actually be oil, like in parts of Alaska that give the appearance of what hell would look like frozen over, and in shale oil deposits states in the middle of the country. One might think that discouraging domestic oil production might increase imports of foreign oil, but President Obama has been working on making less foreign oil available by stirring up a civil war in Libya, a major oil producing country, and using the time-tested Vietnam strategy of fighting just hard enough to make sure the war goes on for years without resolution. I guess he felt he had to do that because of the winding down of the long war in Iraq, another oil-producing country. Maybe if the fighting in Libya dies down, he can stir up enough unrest in Saudi Arabia to mess up their oil production. In any event, so far the President's strategy to get Americans to drive less seems to be working. The price of gasoline is more than double what it was when he became President and is continuing to climb.
The increased cost of food and gasoline will probably help me improve my health. My doctor wants me to lose some weight and says that a diet of bacon cheeseburgers and Doritos would be really bad for my health. I already took my bicycle to the shop to get it tuned up, so I am ready for the cost of gasoline to go up more. I am ready to lose weight and get fit. One thing bothers me, though, and that is how I am going to keep up the exercise when winter comes again. I haven't found any way to use snow tires or chains on my bicycle wheels. I guess I will need to buy snowshoes or cross country skis.
The main part of President Obama's plan to get us to eat less is to take an idea that began under a previous President's administration and run with it, and that is to require cars to burn ethanol in place of part of the gasoline that they burn. In simple terms, the idea is to make sure that we take crops that would normally be turned into food and burn them in our motor vehicles. We are converting about 40 percent of our corn crop into ethanol for fuel, which is probably healthier than turning it into ethanol for making liquor. Mixing ethanol with gasoline is less tasty than some other things you can mix ethanol with, but cars don't run well on mixed drinks. To make sure that it is American corn that is used to make ethanol for transportation and not something else, the American government does two things. First, it subsidizes growing the corn, using it to make ethanol, and making sure that the ethanol is burned as fuel. Second, it puts a stiff tariff on ethanol imported from Brazil, which is made from cane sugar and is much less expensive to produce. Obviously, the government's policy to encourage the burning of ethanol for fuel has nothing to to with benefits of ethanol, or we would be buying inexpensive ethanol from Brazil rather than paying extra to produce it here. The goal is obviously to reduce the amount of corn in the food supply. Since most corn in the United States is actually grown for animal feed, it affects the price of meat and dairy products even more than food made of corn. This makes it harder for Americans to get fat on a diet of bacon cheeseburgers and Doritos. It also has the unfortunate side effect of making food more expensive in the rest of the world. Since hungry people tend to get grumpy, this may have something to do with the rioting and demonstrations in other countries, but the President's responsibility is to the health of obese Americans and not to the health of starving foreigners.
The President's plan for getting Americans to exercise more is to get us out of our cars and walk or ride bicycles. The best way to do that is to raise the price of gasoline to the point that it is barely affordable for the average American. He had some help in this with the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico about a year ago. He used it as an excuse to shut down much of the drilling for oil that was happening in the Gulf of Mexico and to delay the issuing of permits until after many of the deep water drilling rigs were moved to other parts of the world – like off the coast of Brazil. Maybe we can buy some oil from them to make up for the ethanol that they aren't selling us. Unlike most countries, which jump at the chance to tap energy resources, the policy of the United States seems to be to discourage oil companies from drilling where there might actually be oil, like in parts of Alaska that give the appearance of what hell would look like frozen over, and in shale oil deposits states in the middle of the country. One might think that discouraging domestic oil production might increase imports of foreign oil, but President Obama has been working on making less foreign oil available by stirring up a civil war in Libya, a major oil producing country, and using the time-tested Vietnam strategy of fighting just hard enough to make sure the war goes on for years without resolution. I guess he felt he had to do that because of the winding down of the long war in Iraq, another oil-producing country. Maybe if the fighting in Libya dies down, he can stir up enough unrest in Saudi Arabia to mess up their oil production. In any event, so far the President's strategy to get Americans to drive less seems to be working. The price of gasoline is more than double what it was when he became President and is continuing to climb.
The increased cost of food and gasoline will probably help me improve my health. My doctor wants me to lose some weight and says that a diet of bacon cheeseburgers and Doritos would be really bad for my health. I already took my bicycle to the shop to get it tuned up, so I am ready for the cost of gasoline to go up more. I am ready to lose weight and get fit. One thing bothers me, though, and that is how I am going to keep up the exercise when winter comes again. I haven't found any way to use snow tires or chains on my bicycle wheels. I guess I will need to buy snowshoes or cross country skis.
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