CELEBRATE CONSTITUTION DAY 2025:
RESOLVE TO RATIFY THE Bill of Financial Responsibilities® TO PROTECT OUR PEOPLE’S MONEY
Dear Fellow Citizens,
On September 17 of each year we celebrate Constitution Day, the day 238 years ago in 1787 when our Founders signed our U.S. Constitution, officially establishing our United States of America.
With this remarkable achievement, together with the Bill of Rights added roughly 4 years later (December 15, 1791), our wise and brave Founding Fathers gave us a playbook that is still going strong two and a half centuries later.
But they didn’t finish the job. Nor have their successors. We have not yet established any Constitutional rules requiring our elected representatives to properly process and safeguard all the money we send to our central government every year.
Maybe the Founders didn’t foresee it would ever get this big and unwieldy. When the Constitution was ratified our federal budget was $4 million. Today our federal budget is about $5 trillion. That’s over one million times larger. But we continue to use the same Constitution, with no rules for proper financial management, as we did when our government was one millionth the size it is today.
It should come as no surprise therefore that the fiscal condition of our federal government today is a dangerous and extensive fiscal mess, and is getting worse, and nothing constructive is being done to fix it. I am a retired financial executive with a proposed solution, and I am writing to ask you to help me build support for it and get it done.
This is not partisan. It is not about partisanship. It is about our country, and our kids.
It’s not a task our elected representatives can do. Only We The People can make the changes we need, and we must, and soon.
When it comes to mismanaging the people’s money, most of the blame rests with Congress. Congress is broken and does not perform even its most basic fiscal responsibilities. It has been this way for a long time and is getting worse.
Most of us know this, so rather than wring our hands and pass along this mess to our children and grandchildren, let’s fix it, all of it, while we still can.
To be clear, I do not hold nor am I a candidate for any political office, nor have I any commercial products or services to sell. I am doing this because I know that We The People must make this right for all of us who are so privileged to be American citizens, whatever our politics. We will all be better off if we get this solution right, and much worse off if we don’t.
Spending is dangerously out of control for sure. But our resulting national debt, now about $37 trillion and counting, is not the only fiscal problem we urgently need to solve. The future obligations of our federal government for which no funding has yet been provided exceed $160 trillion.
The components of our federal fiscal mess are interconnected and must be dealt with comprehensively. Balancing expenses to revenues, for example, means reforming both. Additionally, Social Security and Medicare are going broke because they are improperly designed and operated, not just because fewer workers are paying in, or that beneficiaries are living longer.
We must keep our eyes on the ball. There are no rules in our Constitution requiring that Congress and the President safeguard and properly manage our money. None. So they don’t, both parties don’t, and haven’t for a long time. Perhaps that’s the way they want it, because accountability and discipline can be inconvenient, even difficult.
To check Congress we need common-sense, easily understood rules in The U.S. Constitution that elected representatives must follow, with consequences, possibly court-imposed, when they do not, to stop endangering our fiscal future. We can’t delegate this job of setting the rules. As a free people, this is uniquely ours to do.
I built a package of Amendments to accomplish this. It’s called the 
, (BOFR) four pages long, with five clear, easy-to-understand Amendments. It is drafted and ready to go, with full text here: https://bofrusa.com/bill-of-financial-responsibilities/. To summarize, when BOFR is ratified, Congress and the President will be required to:
- Professionally manage custody and investment of all federal trust funds, especially Social Security & Medicare. Congress will be forbidden from using Social Security & Medicare money to fund government operations.
- Balance annual government operating revenues and expenses except during declared emergencies. Congress and the Executive must pay down a large amount of existing national debt every year.
- Empower the President with the line-item veto that permits the President to cancel specific parts of a bill (usually spending provisions) while signing into law the rest of the bill.
- Simplify federal taxation by limiting its use to only financing government operations, not changing taxpayers’ behavior. No special favors, no loopholes.
- Require that the federal government adhere to generally accepted accounting principles determined by independent accounting professionals, with required annual independent audits and timely reporting to the public of all federal agencies. Audit failures would mean loss of funding.
- Settle regulatory disputes through our independent judiciary, not the regulators’ administrative courts. Tie regulations tightly to law.
Only We The People can do this. Our elected representatives, both federal and state, are too conflicted, and/or risk averse, to get the job done. We know that elected officials will respond to the will of the people when they hear it, or when a few representatives lose their jobs because they turned a deaf ear.
We need a national messaging campaign to educate our citizens and build their active support. That will cost money, maybe lots of it, and state-of-the-art technical expertise and strategic thinking. But we have no choice. It is the price of citizenship for an America in trouble.
The ultimate goal is to create and sustain enough citizen pressure on Congress and the various State Legislatures so that both will propose and endorse our Constitutional solution, the , for ratification by the people.
Will you join me in a resolution of We the People that Constitution Day 2025 will officially begin our journey back to financial discipline and responsible stewardship?
Will you, your neighbors, friends, and colleagues help me do this? Will you share a copy of this letter with them?
Please let me know if you would be willing to meet on a conference call and explore this. I welcome your thoughts and I need your help. Thank you.
Sincerely,
John H. Ramsey, Founder
(BOFR) Project
Senior Fellow, Reason Foundation
https://bofrusa.com/
jhramsey@icloud.com
Telephone: 941-323-9609
