Posted on 02/11/2014 2:10:40 PM PST by Kaslin
Obama's peak spending year was 2011, at 25.3% of US GDP.
Of that, only 20% was for defense, meaning that in 2011 80% of federal spending was for non-defense programs.
US defense spending fell from:
bump
Great post. BTTT
States just don't 'voluntarily' enter the Union. They must be approved for admission by the other states. So then it 'logically follows' that a state wanting to leave the union have the agreement of the other states.
I didn’t know about this letter - Great post.
ping
It wasn't even the Supreme Court... it was Justice Taney alone acting as a circuit court judge in his ruling in ex part Merryman.
The full court never ruled one way or another on the case and even today it is an open question if the exectutive has the power to invoke Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution.
Thank you for correcting my memory on that.
Taney was not the only Supreme Court justice supported the Confederate cause while still in office...
Taney became a very arrogant man who was among the first activist Justices to 'legislate' from the bench'. His Dred Scott decision blatantly ignored both the letter and spirit of the Constitution as well as completely ignoring established precedence to the point of rewriting history to fit his political preference.
I suspect your 1861 expenditure numbers are actually for 1860.
Spending accelerated greatly, as always, once the war started. The 9 months of war during 1861 would have blown that percentage all to pieces.
In raw numbers, it’s always wise to remember the entire federal expenditure in 1860 was $60M. With the most tyrannical intentions in the world, that just won’t buy much of a dictatorship, even with 1860 dollars.
Dred Scott was such an atrocious decision. As you say, it was wrong both historically and on legal precedent.
For one thing, he flat out claimed that Negroes were nowhere in the United States accepted as full citizens and voters at the Founding. This is flatly untrue. At least five states, if memory serves, made no racial distinctions in their voting requirements.
One of them being NC(!), which did not disenfranchise free men of color till it revised its Constitution in 1830s.
Did he support it? In January 1861 Taney wrote a memorandum to be used if the matter came before the court. In it he said, "The South contends that a state has a constitutional right to secede from the Union formed with her sister states. In this, I submit the South errs. No power or right is constitutional but what can be exercised in a form or mode provided in the constitution for its exercise. Secession is therefore not constitutional, but revolutionary; and is only morally competent, like war, upon failure of justice."
Here are some of the raw numbers:
Your comments about the timing of these expenditures may be somewhat correct, since doubtless "fiscal year 1862" began sometime in 1861.
I’m sure you’re right. No way actual spending during the calendar year 1861 went down as a percent of GDP.!
Massive federal spending started to ramp up in May and continued accelerating through the rest of that year. Although much of the initial expense was paid by the states, possibly with later reimbursement by the feds.
I note your numbers show GDP doubling in three years. You will excuse me if I take that with a grain of salt. Especially when a very large part of the 1860 economy was no longer part of the equation.
During the equivalent period of WWII GDP increased only by about 50%.
Righto.
The President takes an oath to " preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Military officers take an oath to defend the Constitution against "enemies foreign and domestic."
The Founders knew well that domestic enemies would likely arise. They provided for temporary suspension of civil rights as necessary to defend the government set up by the Constitution.
To get a good look at what the Founders themselves thought about what was necessary to do to win a civil war, take a look at how they themselves dealt with Tories. Habeas corpus and civil rights did not play a large part in how Tories were handled. Which gives one no reason to assume they would have been appalled by Lincoln's considerably more limited actions against pro-secessionists.
They might very well have thought Lincoln should have allowed the seceding states to leave peacefully, but they would not have been shocked by his methods of making war or dealing with dissenters.
I believe at that time the Federal fiscal year ran from July 1 to June 30.
Hmmmmmm....
I was under the impression that a number of southern justices resigned to join the confederacy, and that while Taney didn't resign he was quite sympathetic.
Now I see that only Alabaman John Campbell actually resigned, and served in the Confederate government.
Others like Georgian James Wayne and Tennessean John Catron remained on the Court.
Wayne's son was a Confederate general.
In the 1863 Prize Cases, Taney and Catron opposed President Lincoln, while Wayne was the deciding vote authorizing Lincoln's blockade of southern ports.
Bottom line: seems to me, while Taney opposed secession in theory, in practice, he did everything he could to block Lincoln from defeating the Confederacy.
Do you agree?
I couldn't tell you how those numbers are determined, but note that US GDP remained in the $8 billion per year range from 1863 through 1873, when it began climbing towards $20 billion in 1900.
Also note that US GDP rose from $38 billion in 1914 to $88 billion in 1920.
GDP also rose from $92 billion in 1939 to $223 billion in 1945.
Clearly there has long been a strong correlation between major wars and US GDP increase.
In part. Let me begin by saying I'm no Civil War expert, and my knowledge of Taney comes from paper I had to do on him years ago in college, dealing with Scott v. Sanford. But I learned a lot more about him in the course of my research.
To answer your question, I don't think Taney supported the Southern acts of secession. Taney first and foremost believed what he said in Dred Scott. He did not believe blacks were citizens or that they ever could be citizens. This was a belief he had been expressing back when he was in Andrew Jackson's cabinet. He believed slavery was legal and the government had no place interfering with it. He also had a narrow view of the Constitution and his opposition to Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was due to that and not due to any sympathy with the Southern cause. He voted in the minority in the Prize Cases because Lincoln had not asked Congress to recognize the existence of the rebellion prior to the establishment of the blockade. It may appear that Taney acted in the manner he did out of loyalty to the South but that would be wrong. He acted as he did out of loyalty to his view of the Constitution. An odd view at times to be sure. But in that he was no different than current justices like Sotomayor or Roberts.
Interesting quote. I’m keeping that one ;’)
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