TOO BIG TO FAIL

Do you remember the banking industry bailout? How about the automotive industry bailout? Remember how billions of our tax dollars were used to save companies deemed too big to fail. Most people will agree that our federal government has gotten too big, well except federal politicians. Has Washington D.C. become too big to fail? Within the roughly 4000 words of the US Constitution are very specific powers given to the federal government. A clear list of between thirty and thirty-five enumerated powers, depending on how you count them. This limitation was so important to the foundation of our republic that they were reinforced just a few years after the constitution was ratified in the tenth amendment. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Healthcare, education, and housing are three words that don’t appear in the constitution at all. How is it that those three things comprise over thirty percent of federal spending? How does our federal government get around the strict and clear limitations set forth by our founding document? The most common workaround politicians use is extortion. In 1984 Ronald Regan signed the National Minimum Wage Drinking Act. This act did not force all states to set the minimum age to purchase alcohol to 21 because the federal government does not have the power to do that. Instead, it extorted ten percent of federal highway money from states that didn’t raise their drinking age to 21. A more recent example of federal extortion was President Obama’s transgender bathroom executive order. That order threatened to withhold education funds from states that did not comply with the policy that it set forth. There are just two examples of how the fed decides what it wants to accomplish then either bribes the states to do it or blackmails the states into submission. If so much of our tax money is being doled out back to the states, then why is that money collected by the federal government at all? The only reason that I can come up with is so the fed can keep bribing and extorting the states. Most state and local budgets are around thirty percent federal dollars. It seems to me that it would be far more efficient and less expensive if the state and local governments just collected those taxes themselves. At the beginning of our country, the federal government collected the money it needed from the states. Now the federal government collects the money directly from we the people and uses it to control the states. Our republic was built on the idea that Good Governance Begins Close to Home. The limitations to federal powers were written into our constitution because all governments grow. Our founding fathers looked at history and saw that the scope and power of the republic that they were creating must be restrained. I look at our government now and think, “If only those restraints had worked.”

#smallgovernment #10thamendment