Ground Zero Mosque Insanity

Regarding the constitutionality of requiring the purchase of health insurance

Atlanta Journal/Constitution article printed Monday, September 13, 2010:


This article was taken from the online version of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution

Pro or Con: Is requiring the purchase of health insurance constitutional?

Yes.

By Bogdan KiplingHealth care debate will have been for nothing if court invalidates law.

The health care reform law is on the books, and yet nothing is settled. Chiefly, it is far from clear how to pay for the new, multi-trillion dollar national plan President Obama bulldozed through Congress in the teeth of widespread public hostility, and now increasing opposition from many moderate Democratic incumbents.

The law will be tested in the Supreme Court, and I believe it will be affirmed. The sum of that is the old if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em — or, as the Irish quip would have it: “No matter how you jump, your rear is always behind you.”

Obama tells Americans his program is good for them. In this, he imitates old-time doctors saying take your cod liver oil because it is good for you. Now, merely thinking about it may make you retch — but nevertheless, it is good for you.

Canadians can feel smug about their southern neighbors’ trials and tribulations. They have learned over the last 44 years how to pay medical bills. They tax everybody and use the money to pay for doctor and hospital care of every enrolled resident of Canada.

The concept is perfectly logical — at least, on paper. But poll after poll after poll shows most Americans disagree. That majority, I sense, sees Obama’s insurance program as an unseemly governmental encroachment on the rights of American patients and their doctors.

Canadians build on a different foundation. Canada’s early history shows public undertakings for public good praised and accepted by all.

I offer just three examples.

In 1905, Sir Adam Beck, an Ontario philanthropist, politician and cabinet minister, inspired the creation of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario as provider of electricity to Canada’s industrial heartland province. This staunch conservative businessman-politician believed in “donae nature pro populo sunt” — Latin for “the gifts of nature are for the public” — and he vigorously promoted the benevolent concept of “power at cost.” Thirty years later, Trans Canada Air Lines took off as the national air carrier. And three years before that, in 1932, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. went on the air as a radio link for all Canadians.

These remarkable state enterprises were launched by conservative governments. As late as 1983, such “crown corporations” accounted for 26 percent of Canada’s fixed assets. Ironically, many of them were later sold to private owners by Liberal administrations.

Canada’s Medicare belongs in the crown corporation category, and after 46 years of working experience, Canadian health experts should know all the pitfalls. Yet for all their invocations of Canada, it is my sense that American experts will choose to make their own mistakes.

The U.S. was the only industrialized nation without universal health care. That changed (on paper) when Obama signed his health bill in March. With his signature, the U.S. joined the world in the doctor’s crowded waiting room.

If the Supreme Court legitimizes Obama’s new baby, it may take years before Congress does anything to disown it.

Yet, if the court rules the bill unconstitutional because it forces people to buy insurance or face tax penalties, the American health care debate will have been for nothing.

My sense is the court will bless the baby and Americans may as well grin and pay. I can’t believe I said that because insurance companies will make a mint, and they are not among my favorite enterprises.

But if the law stays in place Americans would do well to recall the advice English mothers used to give their daughters on their wedding days in Victorian times when pre-arranged marriages were common: Close your eyes and think of England.

In this case, strike the word England and add Canada!

Bogdan Kipling is a Canadian columnist based in Washington.

No.

Obama may win on tax argument, but not on the commerce clause.

By Burke A. Christensen

The Obama health care law requires Americans to buy health insurance starting in 2014 or pay a penalty. The penalty is the higher of a fine of $695 or 2.5 percent of your income. If your income is $50,000 and you don’t buy the required “minimum essential coverage,” your 2014 income tax bill will increase by $1,250. This is not small potatoes. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the new law will take $4 billion from American taxpayers’ pockets in 2017.

You are exempt from the penalty if your income is below the IRS filing limit or if the cost of health insurance would be more than 8 percent of your annual income.

Despite the fact that the penalty will be paid to the government and reported to the IRS on your income tax return, President Obama has said that he “absolutely rejects” the notion that the penalty is a tax.

Perhaps this is because the president has also said that under his health care plan “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

That was then, this is now.

Is it constitutional to mandate that Americans must purchase health care insurance from private companies or pay up to the IRS? The Constitution gives the administration two sources of power to defend this law. The first is the power to regulate interstate commerce and the second is the power to lay and collect taxes.

The interstate commerce clause regulates interstate economic activity that crosses state lines. But the failure to buy health insurance is intrastate economic inactivity.

The Constitution was drafted to limit the power of government. Why should the interstate commerce clause regulate a person’s decision not to engage in interstate commerce? To support the administration’s argument that inactivity can still actively affect interstate commerce, it may not surprise you to learn that the administration cites a nearly 70-year-old case, Wickard v. Filburn.

In that case, Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn was penalized because the Supreme Court decided he had engaged in interstate commerce when he grew a small amount of wheat purely for his own use but in excess of his federally imposed production quota. The government argued that even though Roscoe’s entirely in-state production was trivial, lots of Roscoe Filburns, each one locally growing a little bit of wheat for his own use, was bad for the government.

What about the taxing power? Forget the president’s claim that the mandate is not a tax. He is now defending the mandate in court as a valid exercise of the power to impose taxes, and Obama will probably win because the taxing power is even broader than the commerce clause. But should he?

The president may be taking both sides of the “Is it a tax?” debate because his mandate has no teeth. The law does not permit the IRS to bring a criminal prosecution against anyone who violates the law but does not pay the penalty. Perhaps that is what he meant when he said that under his plan your taxes will not increase.

Under the president’s plan, we have the best of all possible worlds: Everyone has health insurance, the poor get it for free, you don’t have to pay the penalty, the government pays for it, and your taxes don’t go up. If you buy that last part, you probably sent money to that guy in Nigeria.

Politicians who continue expanding the size of government should at least be honest about who is going to pay for it. You are! Wasn’t it former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who said: “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money?”

Burke A. Christensen holds the Robert B. Morgan Chair of Insurance Studies at Eastern Kentucky University.

Another CZAR for the Current Administration?

Another CZAR?  Just what this Republic needs, isn't it?  Our Federal Government not only wants more of my money (and yours), they want to decide how my money is spent and to whom it is given, even if it goes against my conscience, my faith and my moral philosophy.  Not matter that I was the one who worked for it, earned it and was forced to give it up (often called robbery.)

Here is an article from Investors.com that highlights the ideology of the current Federal Administration.  (This article was copied from the web link
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/547421/201009151907/Another-Pay-Czar-.htm)


Taken from IBD Editorials, Investors Business Daily
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Another Pay Czar?

 Posted 09/15/2010 07:07 PM ET

Bernstein: No extra cash. View Enlarged Image

Unequal Protection: The vice president's chief economic adviser has decided that one group of Americans doesn't need all the money it earns. What gives him such authority?

Joe Biden's top economic adviser, Jared Bernstein — who does not hold an economics degree — entered on Tuesday the tax-cut debate that is preoccupying Washington. But rather than bring light to the discussion, he revealed the darkness that lives in the hearts of Democratic and progressive left.

"The most important thing we have to do right now," Bernstein said on Fox News, "is hold the line for the tax cuts for the millionaires and billionaires who, frankly, do not need the extra cash."

Bernstein's claim is not self-evident. There is, however, a unsettling feel about it. The America envisioned by the founders and defended with life and blood is not the sort of nation in which the government dictates how much of their own money its citizens can keep.

Nevertheless, our ruling class magisterially insists that it has the right to determine how much cash some of us need.

We shouldn't be too hard on Bernstein, though. He's merely following the administration's lead.

Recall when President Obama himself said in April, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money"?

And when he told Joe the Plumber, "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody"?

That wasn't merely a slip made by a weary candidate on the campaign trail. It was confirmation of a statement he made seven years before he talked to Joe the Plumber. In a 2001 interview with Chicago public radio station WBEZ, Obama lamented the civil rights movement's failure to "put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change."

Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on Obama, either. The Democratic Party and its supporters have long been obsessed with wealth redistribution and shrinking what they believe to be high salaries.

These class-warfare fixations are so deeply ingrained that they refuse to acknowledge they violate the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law — and exceed the bounds of any legitimate governing. They're political toxins in this Tea Party era.

Glenn Beck: After the "Restoring Honor" Rally in Washington D.C.

C-SPAN recording of the Rally
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/08/28/HP/A/37551/Restoring+Honor+Rally.aspx