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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery

The question seems to be what is a government -- a group of warlords who rode in and took over, or our collective decision making for the common good.

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again, the fundamental question is, to whom does money belong. the individuals who are paid with it, or the government.

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and as a corollary to that, what is the governments role in "providing" for people who don't provide for themselves. one might even re-word that question, a la Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper, what is governments role when the country is full of grasshoppers?

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Perhaps no other clause in the Constitution generated as much debate among the Founders as the “Spending Clause”—the first of the 18 powers granted to Congress under Article I, Section 8. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the principal authors of The Federalist, famously disagreed about the meaning of “general Welfare” and the limits to Congress’s spending power. For the past 70 years, however, this fruitful debate over the meaning of the Constitution has been replaced by the view that there are no limitations whatsoever on Congress’s power to spend and that the “general Welfare” means whatever Congress says it means. Today, no project is deemed too local or too narrow not to fall under the “general Welfare” rubric. It is therefore incumbent upon Members of Congress to consider, once again, the limits of their spending power and recognize, as even Hamilton did, that it is not unlimited. This essay is adapted from The Heritage Guide to the Constitution for a new series providing constitutional guidance for lawmakers.

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“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

Although the Spending Clause is the source of congressional authority to levy taxes, it permits the levying of taxes for two purposes only: to pay the debts of the United States, and to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. Taken together, these purposes have traditionally been held to imply and constitute the “Spending Power.”

To many today, those two purposes are so broad as to amount to no limitation at all. The contemporary view is that Congress’s power to provide for the “general Welfare” is a power to spend for virtually anything that Congress itself views as helpful. To be sure, some of the Founders, most notably Alexander Hamilton, supported an expansive spending power during the Constitutional Convention; but such proposals, including an explicit attempt to authorize spending by the federal government for internal improvements, were rejected by the Convention. Hamilton continued to press his case by arguing during George Washington’s administration for an expansive interpretation of the clause (which Washington adopted). In his “Report on Manufactures” (1791), Hamilton contended that the only limits on the tax-and-spend power were the requirements that duties be uniform, that direct taxes be apportioned by population, and that no tax should be laid on articles exported from any state. The power to raise money was otherwise “plenary, and indefinite,” he argued, “and the objects to which it may be appropriated are no less comprehensive.”

Hamilton’s broad reading met with opposition from many of the other Founders. James Madison repeatedly argued that the power to tax and spend did not confer upon Congress the right to do whatever it thought to be in the best interest of the nation, but only to further the ends specifically enumerated elsewhere in the Constitution, a position supported by Thomas Jefferson....

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To inaugurate the 112th Congress, Republicans reintroduced liberals to something they seem to have long ago forgotten: the Constitution.

Liberals responded in predictable fashion by accusing conservatives of having a “fetish” for the Constitution. One Time columnist wrote a piece entitled “The Cult of the Constitution” and Salon attributed Tea Party constitutionalism to “neo-Confederate ideology.”

But the reading was a much needed, if perhaps superficial, reminder that Congress does not wield unlimited power. Far from it, the Constitution granted Congress a finite list of enumerated powers. And therein lies liberals’ inherent animus towards the document: It limits what good they can inflict through Congress.

To liberals, government is capable of perfecting society (or coming close). Whereas conservatives see in the Constitution a necessary constraint on inherently selfish and limited human beings, liberals see an obstacle to the nation’s brightest decreeing the end of injustice in America.

The problem for liberals, however, is that Americans, both in 1787 and 2011, deeply distrust unrestrained central government. We fought a war over being governed without our consent. So Americans created a national government to handle defined national affairs. Its power would grow only when three quarters of the people’s representatives agreed to an amendment.

The result was that the federal government created by the Constitutional Convention was a very limited one. The powers of Congress, for example, are specified in Article I Section 8, and they do not include many liberal schemes, such as enforcing workplace diversity requirements or cap-and-trade. All other powers are reserved the states and the people.

Alas, liberals found a way around the pesky Constitution. Congress and the Supreme Court have stretched the interpretation of “interstate commerce” so far as to cover virtually any action undertaken anywhere in the U.S., and if Obamacare’s individual health insurance mandate survives the Supreme Court, “interstate commerce” will now extend even to inaction in the health insurance market. If Congress can force a citizen to buy a product from a private company, what can’t it do?

The Constitution has become so irrelevant to liberals that when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked, regarding Obamacare, where in the document Congress is granted the power to force people to buy health insurance, she asked incredulously, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Whenever confronted about the constitutionality of their proposals, liberals also reflexively point to the general welfare clause.

James Madison addressed this very argument in The Federalist Number 41: "Some . . . have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the [Constitution's] power . . . ‘to provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States,’ amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare.”

Sound familiar, Nancy?

What follows is a statement that tears the Constitutionality of many of Congress’s laws of the past century to shreds.

"Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it . . . But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon?"

There you have it. The general welfare clause was not, as liberals believe, a carte blanche for the federal government to do anything proclaimed to be good for the country. It was a general term alluding to specific objects: the enumerated powers. The other oft-cited “necessary and proper” clause permits Congress to make all laws necessary to carry out these powers, no more.

Admittedly, the federal government has done significant good through its extra-constitutional activity (Social Security, Americans with Disabilities Act, etc.), but because both Republicans and Democrats impatiently bypassed the amendment process to expedite popular proposals, and the Supreme Court abetted the mischief, Congress now has the ominous “unlimited commission” to do anything allegedly good for us. If an idea truly is good for Americans, it should not be difficult to get three-quarters of them to agree.

Liberal accusations of conservative “fetishism” of the Constitution and the Founders expose their fundamental misunderstanding of why conservatives have rallied around the document. Few conservatives believe the Constitution was perfect in 1787 or that the Founders were demigods. They do believe the power of the federal government should only be increased by the people’s consent through the proper channel the people agreed on: the amendment process.

Few of the framers thought a Bill of Rights was necessary to include in the Constitution, for, as Alexander Hamilton phrased it in the Federalist Number 84, “Why declare things should not be done which there is no power to do?” If only the Founders knew how badly the Constitution would be interpreted.

What conservatives are expressing when they wave pocket Constitutions in air is their indignation that the principle of limited government in the U.S. has been so disrespected, endangering our freedom. They see a government that long ago grew beyond the boundaries the people had given to it, a government that no longer draws its power from the people by their consent, but from itself, through its own successive misinterpretations of the Constitution.

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ORIGINAL: servantforuse

Maybe because social security is already going broke. It needs to be fixed.

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ORIGINAL: tamaka

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery

The question seems to be what is a government -- a group of warlords who rode in and took over, or our collective decision making for the common good.

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ORIGINAL: Lucylastic

For most workers, the bill would cut Social Security benefits substantially. As Michael Linden, associate director for tax and budget policy at Center for American Progress, pointed out on Twitter, a letter from Social Security’s Office of the Actuary calculated workers making around $50,000 would see checks shrink by between 11% and 35%.

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ORIGINAL: A50shousehusband

Your grandparents would be eating cat food. The same as before.

That old chestnut!



Michael

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ORIGINAL: ManOeuvre

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ORIGINAL: Lucylastic

For most workers, the bill would cut Social Security benefits substantially. As Michael Linden, associate director for tax and budget policy at Center for American Progress, pointed out on Twitter, a letter from Social Security’s Office of the Actuary calculated workers making around $50,000 would see checks shrink by between 11% and 35%.

I'm sorry for quoting such a small chunk of your original text, Ms. Lastic, but I don't understand what's being said here. Is the assertion that workers who are earning around $50,000 per year will see their paycheques shrink? Or are people who earn $50,000 on the receiving end of some social security renumeration of some kind, and that is what will be shrunk by 11 to 35 percent?

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ORIGINAL: servantforuse

When more money is going out of the pool and not enough going in to replace it, it can and will go broke.

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Under current law, CBO projects, Social Security’s trust funds, considered together, will be exhausted in 2029. In that case, benefits in 2030 would need to be reduced by 29 percent from the scheduled amounts. [oh but its just a GOP lie right comrades? I didn't know the GOP ran the CBO.]

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Social Security is funded by the payroll taxes of current workers to pay the benefits of current retirees. Projected long run program costs are not sustainable under current program parameters. The Social Security Trustees project that the cash flow deficits that began in 2010 will continue permanently. That means that to pay full Social Security benefits, the government must cut spending, raise taxes, or borrow more money to finance pension payments.

A central factor in the looming financial crunch is the fact that our society is aging. The “Baby Boom” generation has already started to collect their Social Security retirement benefits. As a result, the number of retirees has grown more rapidly than the number of individuals whose taxes pay for future retirees’ benefits. There are currently two workers supporting each retiree compared to the 17 workers that supported each retiree at the time Social Security was created. Increasing life expectancy and the approaching retirement of more Baby Boomers continues to put increasing pressure on Social Security. According to a Congressional Budget Office report, the number of beneficiaries is expected to increase by nearly one-third from 59 million in 2014 to 78.2 million in 2025, an increase of 32.4 percent. Because of this, the number of workers supporting each Social Security recipient is projected to fall.

According to the most recent Social Security Trustees Report, beneficiaries will face a painful 21 percent benefit cut in 2034 when the Trust Funds are exhausted. At that time, even those who are currently on Social Security may experience indiscriminate cuts in benefits at a time when they are increasingly reliant on the program...