Earlier today I read the following Letter to the Editor in USA Today:
“‘Tea Party’ all talk
Jonah Goldberg‘s commentary should have read: Democrats understand the link between taxes and government services. Somehow, Goldberg and the “Tea Partiers” just don’t get it (“How much taxation is enough?,” The Forum, April 6).
If Goldberg wants to cut taxes and eliminate deficits, what spending cuts does he propose? Abolishing the military? Stop building highways? Selling off the national parks? Since Republicans and Tea Partiers never come up with realistic ways to cut spending, it’s clear that they are just whiners who want a free lunch.
James R. Paulson; Oshkosh, Wis.”
As a member of the National Committee of the Boston Tea Party (not affiliated with the “Taxed Enough Already” groups, Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Nation or the Tea Party Express) I take issue with his attempt to paint all dissent with such a broad brush.
I have a real solution, repeal the 16th Amendment, abolish the income tax, eliminate the Federal Reserve – which is responsible for ensuring the US government stays in debt – eliminate unconstitutional spending and return the government to it’s Constitutional limits. In 2007 over 56% of all federal spending was outside of Constitutional authority. This includes but is not limited to the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, HUD, the Interior, Labor, Transportation, EPA & the Social Security Administration.
If you think the federal government has a Constitutional authority to do any or all of the things listed, please read he words of James Madison, “With respect to the words “general welfare,” I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” And when he vetoed a federal public work bill he wrote, “The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation with the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States.
“The power to regulate commerce among the several States” can not include a power to construct roads and canals, and to improve the navigation of water courses in order to facilitate, promote, and secure such commerce without a latitude of construction departing from the ordinary import of the terms strengthened by the known inconveniences which doubtless led to the grant of this remedial power to Congress.
To refer the power in question to the clause “to provide for common defense and general welfare” would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them…”
A view he held consistently, as shown when in Federalist Paper #45, he wrote, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”
As a side note, I quote the Grace Commission, “100 percent of what is collected (by the IRS) is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal debt…all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from their Government.”