PeacockWatch believes that government should be small, extremely restricted in its activities, honor the bill of rights, be fully transparent in its financial activities including all sources of income and all areas of expenditure, and that it should be strongly controlled by the population it serves. There are other things we believe but you get the picture.
For decades we have been watching the government grow dramatically in size, extend its reach into more areas of our lives, diminish the bill of rights, become more intricate and sneaky in generating increasing percentages of overall tax revenue, hiding expenditures by quietly tacking on riders to bills, and extending its control over our day to day activities.
Note that the previous paragraph starts with the statement “for decades”. This growth, increased intrusiveness into our lives, insidious undermining of the bill of rights, and financial irresponsibility is being practiced by both political parties. PeacockWatch is not made up of Republicans or Democrats. We are Americans scared to death that we are losing our country to a government that is becoming stronger by taking away the money and freedoms of the population it is supposed to be serving. The government is moving the population from being the served to being the serving.
We call ourselves PeacockWatch because we are also concerned that an entire news bureau that is supposed to be an honorable and independent fifth estate is now acting like a wholly owned subsidiary of the current administration. An administration that is accelerating government’s growth, intrusiveness into our personal lives and now promoting a Marxist agenda.
But today’s article is not necessary about NBC and MSNBC. It is about what was a gradual, and now is an increasingly rapid, loss of the freedoms fought for by our founding fathers. It is about a government that operates by a set of rules that turns our elected officials into princes and potentates while the rest of us are serfs who must bend to their will. In reality, it should be the other way around in a free country. An example is the McCarran-Ferguson law which restricts the access of citizens to health care provided only by a selected list of companies within their state but has given federal government employees almost unlimited access to any health care company in the entire country! Obama has even said in a televised interview that, at a minimum, he wants all Americans to have access to the kind of health care enjoyed by him and U.S. senators and representatives.
So, why doesn’t the government simply repeal the McCarran-Ferguson law and allow all Americans to select from the menu of all health care companies across the country just like Obama and our senators and representatives? Such a move would not require a thousand page health care bill, or a single-payer government-run health care system. We will come back to this question later in this article.
PeacockWatch invites all readers to ask themselves if they are more afraid or less afraid of the federal government than they were 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Do you believe the population fears the government more than the government fears the population?
PeacockWatch suggests that we all take a few minutes to figure out what all the sources of revenue are that the government has. There is the income tax at federal, state and local level, property tax, gasoline tax, sales tax at the state, county and local level, social security tax (a double tax since we pay tax on social security income once we start collecting it) medicare tax, telephone taxes and fees of various kinds, franchise fees for your cable TV service as well as a tax on cable TV service, license plate fees, dog license fees and many others. If you total up all of these fees, and perhaps the cost of a tax preparer because this is all so complicated, you might find that you give more to the government than you take home.
In the last few months we have seen the government propose even more taxes. On the low scale end there is the tax on soft drinks. On the mid scale a national sales tax has been suggested. At the high end it is being proposed that the payments we willingly make to private enterprise for health insurance should be replace by what is in reality a tax on health care controlled by the federal government.
If all these new fees are approved on top of the taxes we already pay then the percent of our income we give to the government makes taxes our greatest single category of expense by a very large margin.
The more taxes we pay to the government the more powerful the government becomes. If it is true that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely then we the taxpayer, by agreeing to pay all these taxes, are enabling the government to eventually and inevitably become corrupt.
Now let’s look at how the government spends all this tax money. Guess what? We probably don’t know except in very broad categories. National defense is certainly a big category. Social programs is another big category. Infrastructure is another area.
However, just as the details of what taxes we pay are effectively hidden by the complicated tax raising mechanisms the details of how the money is spent is just as effectively hidden. In other words, “We the people” have already lost control.
And that is only part of the story of how we have already lost control of our nation.
How do our elected officials receive money? Certainly they receive a salary from our tax money. They also receive tax money to pay large staffs. They receive contributions from individuals and corporations that are, in their aggregate, much greater than the tax money we provide to them for salary and staffs. Then there are free dinners, plane trips, golf games and “studies” provided for “free” by lobbyists.
That is another part of the story of how we the citizen have lost control of our nation.
This is supposed to be a country of “one person, one vote”. It has become a country of “one dollar, on vote”. And even though the taxes we pay are, for many of us, much more than the money we take home to our families, our “dollar vote” is insignificant compared to that of the special interests and lobbyists.
We have lost control of our nation.
And now the people who are in control in Washington want to turn it into a socialist country by redistributing the massive wealth we provide to them from the income we earn. We provide this wealth without really knowing how much we are giving and where it is being spent. If we understood how much we are really giving we would be screaming.
Let’s go back to the question asked earlier in this article. Why doesn’t the government simply repeal the McCarran-Ferguson law and allow all Americans to select from the menu of all health care companies across the country just like Obama and our senators and representatives? The answer is clear. Repealing the McCarran-Ferguson law would grant the American citizens, the serfs, the same health benefits as the President, senators and representatives, our princes and potentates. Keeping McCarran-Ferguson and putting in place a government controlled health care system increases the flow of money, and associated power, from the people to the “rulers”. It makes the government more powerful and the citizen even less powerful.
PeacockWatch suggests that you take some time to look at what you give to the government – and then scream very loudly if you think it is too much while remembering that power and money go hand in hand. Moreover, if we fully understood how the money was being spent we would be stunned. We need to demand that all expense by placed in an expense sheet on the Internet so that we know what the outgo of the government is by amount and by category with explanation.
PeacockWatch has some suggestions for how “We the people” can take back control of our out of control government which is piling up debt at record rates. An outline of this suggestions is listed below. We will provide more detail as time goes by. We would like to have your suggestions to add to this list so that we can again become a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.
Here are a few initial suggestions for how we citizens will take back control of our country.
- Government Employees may not accept anything except their pay
- Prohibit government officials from accepting any money other than their salary
- Nothing from lobbyists
- Nothing from companies
- Nothing from individuals
- No lunches, dinners, gifts, etc.
- Expense accounts are limited to that of a middle manager in industry
- Campaigns will be paid for from tax revenue only
- People running for election will be provided a fixed amount of campaign money based on the job they are campaigning for. This is provided from tax revenue. If there isn’t enough for everyone then they will have to share.
- They may not use their own money
- They may not accept money
- Move to one tax source only
- Tax law may not be longer than one page
- Move to Fair Tax with the rate decided by popular vote.
- Applies at the Federal, State and Local level by law
- This keeps everything visible
- Eliminate all other taxes (gasoline, property, dog license, license plates, etc.)
- No deficit spending.
- Clear line item accounting posted on the Internet daily for all government expenses
- Adopt the military academies honor code
- Jail terms without parole for government official who violate these rules.
- Reduce the percentage size of government (dollars and people) to what it was 100 years ago.
- Cannot increase above that percentage size without a popular vote of the people
Popularity: 56% [?]
