[Continuing ...]
The same with union-busting. Regarding government pensions, leftists hide behind heroes. They hold the pay and pensions of firefighters, rescue workers, and police hostage.
Solution?
Divide and conquer. Grandfather the heroic side of unions.
I would even not object to ‘grandfathering’ current postal workers. It's theoretically a self-funded service and arguably honest work.
- Cutoff Period -
But future firefighters, police, rescue workers, etc. should not have union power. ‘New-hires’ can enter the job with their eyes wide open, no union-based expectations.
And that is basically how Social Security can be reformed too, a grandfathering sliding-scale plan so that no household currently in need ends up in a crisis due to abrupt reforms.
And a sliding system that ‘phases down’ future recipients by 1% each year [each ‘grandfathered’ at that reduced level] with a ‘cutoff’ point, such as possibly 40 years from now. Anyone who is financially vigorous for three consecutive years would no longer be grandfathered.
At first it will be easy to buy private insurance to supplement potentially lost S.S. Only people 20 years from now would feel a 20% loss, and they have time to anticipate it.
In the meantime, no new redistribution schemes — no more leaks in the ship.
During this process, people could be incentivized to save for themselves, to buy their own contingency supplemental insurance, and ‘opt out’ of Social Security. And no taxes on insurance or protected savings — etched in constitutional stone.
Employers could offer fatter paychecks if a waiver can lead to no ‘employer matching’ and FICA reduction.
At some point down the road, our nation could once again enjoy the the blissful simplicity of personal accountability. [And that simplifies the Constitution too.]
But it's decades away.
Another idea is also to debate the impact of grossly-self-inflicted disabilities on taxpayers. Where's the personal accountability? Someone contracts AIDS through risky behavior, or someone suffers mental problems from drug abuse, etc.
Why not voluntary charity from-the-heart that does the soul good? That could be part of education reform [such as debate].
[Just a quick thumbnail of a future suggestion. Only union busting at the federal level is covered in the plan of this thread however. That's one of my compromises here to keep this plan from getting more complex.]
Back to the Commerce Clause
Good scholars explain that ‘deregulation’ is original intent of the Commerce Clause, but few legal graduates of today agree with that. Whether original intent is true or not isn't the point.
That is the way DC grabs power, and ‘breathing document’ ‘commerce clause’ interpretation is probably embedded in almost every modern text book on constitutional law. In their minds, we originalists are Don Quixote jousting with windmills. And the few patriots among them shake their heads sadly, knowing that today's voters would refuse to tolerate original intent. That's the hard truth that few conservatives are willing to face.
So they don't say much when Congressman Conyers oh-so-brilliantly quotes the ‘Good and Plenty Clause’ [which Pat on the Glenn Beck program pointed out is part of the Preamble.]
[Mister Good-and-Plenty wanted to promote his product, so he ‘snuck’ it in the top of the Constitution. I guess Mister Good-and-Plenty had a time machine.]
But now I'm digressing to future ideas rather than state power.
Amendments should be “unnasty, unbrutish, and short.”
That's the most common demand for constitutional amendments, but we're in a ‘war of attrition’ against scorched-earth enemies of freedom. Right now I don't see any handy ‘brevity’ weapons laying around, so let's build some verbal freedom-tanks, liberty-battleships, constituional-air-craft-carriers, and most importantly, verbal smart-bombs to avoid collateral damage.
We need to construct constitutional weapons with tough armor, with speed, with range, and with superior firepower because these domestic enemies mean to roll their tanks right over us, chop us up, and feed off our entrails while laughing about it. These are godless heartless bastards and we need to wake up to the kind of enemy we face.
When the war’s over, we can beat our constitutional swords to plowshares with a new convention. But that's decades down the road.
I assure everyone that pro-freedom reforms will never come anywhere close to the IRS tax code.
Today's political leaders take pride in exploiting every loophole they can find — it's a ‘high-five’ moment. Every omnibus bill EVERY YEAR is ‘brutish and anything-but-short’, sometimes even nasty, and always wasteful.
At the very least, give the states a tool to freeze and hack away at wasteful federal spending. But let's not forget the ‘power’ side too.
The EPA alone enjoys more power than the English dynasty had for several centuries. It can seize any amount of land imaginable — without new legislation — due to the ‘sacred rights’ of a sucker fish, a fly, or a rat. If it feels ‘nasty’, the EPA can destroy the cattle industry [without legislation] and most any industry. It can even regulate cow farts and the air we exhale as ‘pollution’ [CO2].
The IRS — brutish, anything-but-short’, and when I say ‘nasty’, I mean it.
So we need a plan that does not scare people on tight fixed incomes, that empowers states, that solves the border crisis immediately, that is structured with checks-and-balances, that cuts waste, that ends a presidential monopoly of judicial nominees and other key nominations, that puts higher learning in perspective, that counters judicial tyranny, that perpetually combats centralized power, and that busts open the sunshine of national deliberation and debate.
What other plan crosses that political minefield with fewer words than the one proposed here?
Sure, it can be revised. But to utterly discount it? I don't think that's a reasonable notion. I wish we could set the clock back to originalism. Then we could warn people of future dangers like biblical prophets.
But this is the world we live in. For all our ugly problems, I think we can save this battered hulk of a ship and make her trim and glorious once again — greater than ever. And believe it or not, this plan makes it easy.
Criticisms are easy, but solutions are a wonder of the world. Some people get them in a flash, but ideas that seem simple now took thousands of years for someone to discover.
The Constitution ‘as is’? A sinking ship. Original intent? That was chucked overboard a long, long time ago. Our ship needs her holes plugged up, and emergency repairs never look as good as a new vessel on her maiden voyage.
After a counterrevolutionary election we now must appeal to McConnell and Bonehead?
!!!!!!! .... I ...... REFUSE .... !!!!!!!
Not angry at anyone on this thread, not yet anyway. I expected exactly the kind of criticism that was posted here. Been spoiling to counter it, and wrote rebuttals in advance, but spontaneous thoughts keep coming.
[more coming up]