Everyone is familiar with the traditional connections of
money to government. These include granting contracts to persons who make
substantial campaign donations, funding entitlements to voter identity groups,
and many other abuses.
But
the Democratic Party and President Obama developed this connection between
money and government farther than anyone else in US history. In order to
understand what they did, it’s necessary to review the nature and financial
usefulness of our monetary system. Briefly stated, the monetary system
creates the value of paper money and its electronic equaivalient as a means of
the federal government purchasing products and servicing debt through a
government controlled central bank, the Federal Reserve, purchasing the debt
issued by the Fedral Government. Unlike barter or gold backed currency, this
monetary system introduces the element of time.
That
the monetary system introduces time into financing can be easily understood by
looking at the terms of a mortgage. A mortgage allows a person to put a
down payment, for example twenty percent, on a mortgage loan, then agree to
make monthly payments for twenty years or so. The advantage of the
mortgage payment plan to the homeowner is that the twenty year value of
the homeowner’s income can be borrowed today to purchase a home, giving the
homeowner the advantages of home ownership.
But
this is not the whole story. This alone doesn’t explain the connection of
national debt to the ballot box. President Obama expanded, more than any
other president, another, far deeper and more dangerous layer of connection
between the monetary system and the control of national government.
Obama’s
method was not to seize control of the ballot box but to seize control of the results of the ballot box: the
choice of what legislation is funded in the future. Voters are supposed
to be able to completely control the funding of policies of national
government, but Obama, more than any president before him, took most of that
control away by comitting taxpayers to repaying debt incurred to fund current
spending. Just as a consumer can personally choose how future income is
used today through borrowing, Obama seized control of the will of tomorrow’s
electorate by expanding his party’s practice of using time to control
legislation.
This
concept is so abstract it has largely escaped detection, yet here is the proof:
no matter what voters do in the future they are forced to service the debt
created by Obama’s party’s choices; and since those choices have already been
made and the debt must be serviced in the future, future voters have no
opportunity to give their consent. This is not just an abstract theory it
is the most real fact of financial and legislative life for Americans.
These programs exist, the debt exists, and the debt cannot be wiped away with a
vote. If it were, the US would lose its credit rating and ability to
borrow. So for now, this setup prevents the voters from reducing the
debt. The debt can only be eliminated by being paid down by the taxes of
the people.
At
first glance it may seem that the concept of debt service over time does not
violate voters’ rights. But Scotus has ruled that the value of a person’s
vote cannot be diluted, diminished, or impaired. The
central issue of the analysis, then, is whether future voters have lost their
right to consent to how their taxes are spent when they
are forced to support debt incurred to pay for earlier programs.
The
Constitution mandates that the legislation passed by Congress must be
authorized by the consent of the governed expressed through the ballot box. To
guarantee that power comes from the people, the Framers of the Constitution
wanted House members to face voters every two years, and Senators every six
years; with one-third of the Senate up for reelection every two years.
The reason Congress must defer to the “consent of the governed” every two years
was explained by James Madison in Federalist No. 37:
“The
genius of republican liberty, seems to demand on one side, not only that all
power should be derived from the people; but, that those intrusted with it
should be kept in dependence on the people, by a short duration of their
appointments; and that, even during this short period, the trust should be
placed not in a few, but in a number of hands…. A frequent change of men
will result from a frequent return of electors; and a frequent change of measures,
from a frequent change of men.”
The
opportunity to vote for a “frequent change of measures” is denied to voters through their commitment to
repay the debt. National debt denies future voters their
right to influence legislation in two ways. First, the taxes they pay are
wasted to service interest costs for appropriations made years
before. Secondly, taxes that go to service debt aren’t available to
finance the new policies voters may wish their legislators to enact.
Their votes are then diminished, diluted and impaired; and this practice, the
Supreme Court has frequently ruled, violates the
Constitution.
The
national debt indentures tomorrow’s voters to repay
money borrowed to finance programs today; so the consent of the governed is
also stolen in a similar proportion: if one-tenth of the budget is debt
service, that one-tenth of the present legislative power of voters was usurped
by a previous Congress. The nation’s republican form of government is nullified
by degree as the portion of expenditures devoted to the debt increases.
The Framers were primarily concerned with the
distribution of power over the three branches of government. But the
Democratic Party found a shrewd way to bypass both the consent of the governed
and the checks and balances of the original three branches. Since the
will of the people can only be realized through legislative appropriations, past
Congresses have usurped the realization of today’s voters’ will by
pre-appropriating the funds needed to realize any newlegislative
policies. Since Democrats are the party of entitlement spending,
financing of public sector unions and the bureaucracy, they have intentionally
developed and financed this strategy to keep themselves in power. The Framers
never envisioned massive entitlements or debt not limited by a limiting
quantity of gold.
It
would take a revolution in legal thinking for the Supreme Court to apply this
thinking and rule unconstitutional the funding of current expenditures by the
national debt. But legal thinking does change over time, and the best way to
encourage this idea is to discuss it.
