DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEMS WE MUST SOLVE

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

– Abraham Lincoln

The problem:

It is more than just the federal debt. It is systemic federal government financial mismanagement.

We The People send about $4 trillion to the federal government every year and there are no rules in our Constitution about what Congress may, or must, or cannot do with it. None. Our Constitution says very little about money and offers no safeguards that could help insure wise financial policy. So Congress does the expedient things, the most politically advantageous things, often the self-serving things, and We The People forgive them year after year by overwhelmingly reelecting them. Congress jealously guards its powers of the purse while doing almost nothing to ensure that it wields those powers responsibly and effectively.

We The People send about $4 trillion to the federal government every year and there are no rules in our Constitution about what Congress may, or must, or cannot do with it. None. Our Constitution says very little about money and offers no safeguards that could help insure wise financial policy. So Congress does the expedient things, the most politically advantageous things, often the self-serving things, and We The People forgive them year after year by overwhelmingly reelecting them. Congress jealously guards its powers of the purse while doing almost nothing to ensure that it wields those powers responsibly and effectively.

The budget of the United States federal government in 1791 was $4 million. Our nation’s operating budget today is about $4 trillion, one million times larger than it was when the Constitution was ratified. One would think that when our national government has grown so large and powerful our Constitution should be updated to help our elected representatives better manage so much of our money. But the Constitution stays the same, the behavior of Congress does not change, abuses continue, and the problems get worse.

Laws do not constrain Congress either. When Congress passes laws it can exempt itself from following them, or simply ignore them altogether. So when it comes to our money Congress is not constrained by either the Constitution or by the rule of law. Congress is not constrained by anything.

Congress does not promulgate rules limiting its own flexibility and power because it is not in their interest to do so. There is no upside for them from doing it and no downside for them from not doing it.

The interests of members of Congress differ from the interests of the people they are supposed to serve. And unless there is a crisis of some sort, We The People can’t be bothered to exercise the responsibilities of free citizens to rein in our federal government because it’s too hard.

The cumulative result of this irresponsibility of the Congress and the inattention of our citizens is massive federal fiscal mismanagement.

Most of us know that spending is out of control. Congress has authorized our federal government to spend more than its revenues for 67 of the last 79 years. In fiscal year 2019 the federal deficit is approximately $1 trillion, in a boom year, more than the entire gross domestic product of our United States just 47 years ago. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic our accumulated national debt exceeded $23 trillion with no plans to stop, much less to pay back the huge sums that we owe. And the interest cost on that massive debt will itself soon cost over $1 trillion a year.

Many people now believe that spending is the only federal government problem that we should fix. The reality, however, is that runaway federal spending and our huge cumulative national debt are symptoms of decades of this more significant condition of federal fiscal mismanagement.

Solving the problem of federal fiscal mismanagement will require a national initiative to persuade our citizens to help ratify as quickly as possible a common sense, four-page-long package of Amendments to our Constitution to provide the important process imperatives to fix our financial management problems once and for all. This package of Amendments is called  The , the first interrelated package of amendments to our U.S. Constitution since the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791. An effective version has been written and is ready to go. It is about four pages long. A copy is attached to this proposal.

In addition to pernicious deficit spending, federal fiscal mismanagement means that lacking Constitutional constraint our Congresses over many decades have:

  • created a complex, 75,000 page, unmanageable Internal Revenue Code full of deductions, exemptions, exclusions, alternatives and other special circumstances, called in the aggregate “tax expenditures”, that total over $1.6 trillion a year, designed to engineer social and/or political outcomes by picking winners and losers through the sausage grinder of national partisan politics. The results permit one in five large, profitable U.S. companies and 47% of our citizens to pay no federal income tax while our government is drowning in debt. Our present Code is complex, secretive, corrupt, confusing, and unfair and rightfully the subject of profound and increasing distrust among our people.
  • misappropriated approximately $3.2 trillion of our citizens’ Social Security and Medicare funds to pay other federal government obligations, thus preventing our people from earning competitive rates of investment return on their retirement and healthcare accounts and jeopardizing the future availability of enough money to pay promised benefits. This money must be timely repaid, thereafter to be separately held and professionally invested and administered in accordance with all the federal trust laws and powers long ignored by the Congresses that enacted them for the private sector.
  • employed improper accounting, confusion, secrecy, and misinformation that massively understate our national government’s liabilities, mistakes and inefficiencies and prevents a complete, transparent, documented, and independently audited presentation of its true financial condition, according to generally accepted accounting principles developed and required by experts outside of government, free of political or bureaucratic pressures.
  • authorized 175,000 pages of federal regulations full of unfunded mandates and stealth taxation without representation, many of which may not even be authorized in law, with no fair means by which the regulated can challenge the legality, applicability, or interpretation of the regulations other than through lengthy and costly litigation.

Justice Felix Frankfurter said, “The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.” Therefore we should recognize that we have almost no procedural safeguards in our Constitution to insure wise financial policy, and it is way past time that we amend it to include them. Because Congress itself is the problem, and its Members show no inclination or ability to solve the problems their decisions have produced, then it falls to We The People to bring forward the proper structural solutions to change the rules by which our government must function in the future.

The goal of this project is to organize like-minded citizens, executives and professionals to create and lead a national campaign of education, persuasion, and action that will help secure ratification of the as the next five Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The budget of the United States federal government in 1791 was $4 million. Our nation’s operating budget today is about $4 trillion, one million times larger than it was when the Constitution was ratified. One would think that when our national government has grown so large and powerful our Constitution should be updated to help our elected representatives better manage so much of our money. But the Constitution stays the same, the behavior of Congress does not change, abuses continue, and the problems get worse.

Laws do not constrain Congress either. When Congress passes laws it can exempt itself from following them, or simply ignore them altogether. So when it comes to our money Congress is not constrained by either the Constitution or by the rule of law. Congress is not constrained by anything.

Congress does not promulgate rules limiting its own flexibility and power because it is not in their interest to do so. There is no upside for them from doing it and no downside for them from not doing it.

The interests of members of Congress differ from the interests of the people they are supposed to serve. And unless there is a crisis of some sort, We The People can’t be bothered to exercise the responsibilities of free citizens to rein in our federal government because it’s too hard.

The cumulative result of this irresponsibility of the Congress and the inattention of our citizens is massive federal fiscal mismanagement.

Most of us know that spending is out of control. Congress has authorized our federal government to spend more than its revenues for 67 of the last 79 years. In fiscal year 2019 the federal deficit is approximately $1 trillion, in a boom year, more than the entire gross domestic product of our United States just 47 years ago. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic our accumulated national debt exceeded $23 trillion with no plans to stop, much less to pay back the huge sums that we owe. And the interest cost on that massive debt will itself soon cost over $1 trillion a year.

Many people now believe that spending is the only federal government problem that we should fix. The reality, however, is that runaway federal spending and our huge cumulative national debt are symptoms of decades of this more significant condition of federal fiscal mismanagement.

Solving the problem of federal fiscal mismanagement will require a national initiative to persuade our citizens to help ratify as quickly as possible a common sense, four-page-long package of Amendments to our Constitution to provide the important process imperatives to fix our financial management problems once and for all. This package of Amendments is called  The , the first interrelated package of amendments to our U.S. Constitution since the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791. An effective version has been written and is ready to go. It is about four pages long. A copy is attached to this proposal.

In addition to pernicious deficit spending, federal fiscal mismanagement means that lacking Constitutional constraint our Congresses over many decades have:

  • created a complex, 75,000 page, unmanageable Internal Revenue Code full of deductions, exemptions, exclusions, alternatives and other special circumstances, called in the aggregate “tax expenditures”, that total over $1.6 trillion a year, designed to engineer social and/or political outcomes by picking winners and losers through the sausage grinder of national partisan politics. The results permit one in five large, profitable U.S. companies and 47% of our citizens to pay no federal income tax while our government is drowning in debt. Our present Code is complex, secretive, corrupt, confusing, and unfair and rightfully the subject of profound and increasing distrust among our people.
  • misappropriated approximately $3.2 trillion of our citizens’ Social Security and Medicare funds to pay other federal government obligations, thus preventing our people from earning competitive rates of investment return on their retirement and healthcare accounts and jeopardizing the future availability of enough money to pay promised benefits. This money must be timely repaid, thereafter to be separately held and professionally invested and administered in accordance with all the federal trust laws and powers long ignored by the Congresses that enacted them for the private sector.
  • employed improper accounting, confusion, secrecy, and misinformation that massively understate our national government’s liabilities, mistakes and inefficiencies and prevents a complete, transparent, documented, and independently audited presentation of its true financial condition, according to generally accepted accounting principles developed and required by experts outside of government, free of political or bureaucratic pressures.
  • authorized 175,000 pages of federal regulations full of unfunded mandates and stealth taxation without representation, many of which may not even be authorized in law, with no fair means by which the regulated can challenge the legality, applicability, or interpretation of the regulations other than through lengthy and costly litigation.

Justice Felix Frankfurter said, “The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.” Therefore we should recognize that we have almost no procedural safeguards in our Constitution to insure wise financial policy, and it is way past time that we amend it to include them. Because Congress itself is the problem, and its Members show no inclination or ability to solve the problems their decisions have produced, then it falls to We The People to bring forward the proper structural solutions to change the rules by which our government must function in the future.

The goal of this project is to organize like-minded citizens, executives and professionals to create and lead a national campaign of education, persuasion, and action that will help secure ratification of the as the next five Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.