JR & The Supremes

It was an interesting week. The Supreme Court finished its term and released some significant rulings that, depending on your point of view, either destroyed the republic or saved the lives of millions of uninsured Americans. Thankfully it did neither because the republic is much stronger than that and the lives of millions of uninsured Americans were really never at risk. No, the two rulings released on Thursday represented major thefts by an overreaching government abetted by a bunch of out-of-touch lawyers.

I would like to talk about the one that was overshadowed by the healthcare case. That was the case challenging the constitutionality of the Stolen Valor Act. The essence of the law was to make it a crime to lie about military service, medals and awards, etc. Apparently with us being at war for well over 10 years and sending millions of young men and women into battle a cottage industry arose of people that would lie about military service, usually to defraud patriotic yet somewhat gullible public. People claiming service where there was none took resume' enhancement to a new level. The approach of the challenge to the law was that lying was protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution as free speech. The Supreme Court agreed and struck down the law as unconstitutional, thereby forever making it legal to tell a lie. Mind you it doesn't make fraud legal just the lies you tell to commit that fraud. How do you separate the two? More work for the Court next term I guess.

As you might have guessed my opinion is not favorable to this ruling. In light of the Court ruling flag burning as protected free speech a few years ago it really wasn't a big surprise. My problem with the Court on this one is they took a spray gun to try to touch up a portrait. In other words they struck down a specific law that dealt only with specific misrepresentations and struck it down under the broad brush of free speech. It was if they thought that the law, or their ruling, would make all lying illegal. Just think of the people you know that would go to jail? Maybe they were trying to protect their brethren of the bar. Lord knows lawyers tell a disproportionate number of them!

But my main problem is the people it hurts. We have men and women that have served valiantly for their country and should be respected and honored for their service. The honor belongs to them and not to someone who never served or who served but not to the capacity they embellish. So do we need to do a background check on everyone that claims service before we honor them? Does this ruling do anymore than validate what I see as a societal leap of the cliff of honesty and somehow legitimize it? Not too long ago if you were asked about military service it was assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that you were telling the truth. However, when purchasing a car last week the company offered a $500 discount if you had served in the military. But ONLY if you could produce a copy of your DD214, the record of your military service. How many people, besides me, can lay hands on that document 38 years after discharge? Apparently the Court has no problems with lying. Unless you lie in Court, in Congress, etc.Then may God help you!

The second ruling is the one that set everyone's hair on fire was on the Affordable Healthcare Act, Obama's signature piece of legislation. The lynchpin issue was whether the government could compel someone to purchase health insurance. The law said that if you are breathing you had to purchase insurance or pay a penalty. Interestingly, the Court ruled against this, seemingly giving a victory to the opponents of Obamacare. Not so fast, Bucko. In the majority opinion, obviously inspired by some hallucinogen, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Congress could basically tax anything and that the penalty was not a penalty but a tax. Huh? The law calls it a penalty, Obama argued it was a penalty, but Roberts and his fellow trippers decided to rewrite the law and call it a tax. Mind you I am just a layperson trying to make sense of a ruling that will be analyzed by great legal scholars for generation. Apparently it is a done deal and it is full steam ahead. 

The theft in this case is in the form of money and is basically the largest transfer of wealth in our country's history. And I am not talking about the rich paying to take care of the poor. It is a generational theft of epic proportions! Our generation has already left a sorry legacy of greed, avarice, overindulgence and general wastefulness that our children and grandchildren will be paying for in the decades to come. My national debt calculator is well over $15 trillion and rapidly growing. Regardless how they cook the books this Affordable Care Act will add significantly to the national debt. Add to that increases from deficit spending each year for the foreseeable future and We will probably be looking at a national debt in the neighborhood of $25 trillion by the year 2020.

How long is it going to take to pay off $25 trillion? The first thing you have to do is stop the bleeding. QUIT SPENDING MORE THAN YOU BRING IN!!!!! That means balanced budgets by the year 2020. Then after 2020 you will need a budget surplus to start reducing the balance of the debt. How much that will need to be will depend on the interest rates we will be paying on that $25 trillion. Right now would be the best time to reduce the debt because interest rates are at an historic low. But we keep borrowing more! What the Hell?  Even though the most optimistic estimates do not show a balanced budget in 10 years lets assume we are there by 2020 and interest rates are running at 4%. The interest on that will be $1 trillion per year. So to balance the budget you have to include that trillion and then to reduce the debt another trillion. A simple question: where is that money coming from?

This has nothing to do with whether people should have healthcare. In fact the Affordable Care Act does very little to improve healthcare. What it does is improve accessibility, albeit forced, to regular healthcare for a few million people. The theory is that there are two kinds of uninsured people : those that can't afford it and those that choose not to buy it. It goes on to assume those without insurance are subsidized by those that do because the uninsured will get care but not pay for it. So the government knowing what is best for us we get the Affordable Healthcare Act. It forces insurance companies to allow parents to keep their children on their insurance until the age of 26. Also, it prevents insurance companies from considering preexisting conditions when insuring clients. And they are precluded in charging anymore for these benefits. There are dire predictions of the death of the private healthcare system and the single payer system that Obama wanted but couldn't get. Many predict that all healthcare will be administered by the government, state or federal, within ten years.   Businesses, seeing the penalty being cheaper than the insurance may decide to drop healthcare insurance shifting the burden to the state pools. Times they will be a changing!

There appears to be a disconnect in this country. I will blame it on the Baby Boomers for lack of a better scapegoat. We are a society that demands instant gratification in every aspect of our lives. Young couples expect to own a home when they get married and some overindulgent parents mortgage their retirement to make that happen. Nobody waits for anything! So we want everything and as long as the credit card has "room" on it we get it. As regular citizens we eventually meet reality and either we go bankrupt or cut up the cards and pay them off. Hopefully a lesson learned. But the country has a Black American Express Card, no limit! Right now it's at $15 trillion and growing. Will our creditors get nervous eventually and pull back on the reins? Maybe. At what level? Do you think they are comfortable now? I wouldn't be.

If we are to survive as the great country we are, the envy of the rest of the world, we need to grow up and take responsibility. We have set a bad example for our children and the rest of the world and it's about time we changed.