"Notes and Quotes"

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. - Elbert Hubbard

Monday, March 23, 2009

An Open Letter to President Obama - # 5

An Open Letter to President Obama - # 5



Good Morning Mr. President,



In one of your campaign speeches about a year ago you said:

"Just words? - Don't Tell Me Words Don't Matter!"


With that in mind can we discuss the meanings of a few words or phrases?


A contract is "a written (or spoken) agreement, especially one concerning employment, sales, or tenancy, that is intended to be enforceable by law."


A Bill of Attainder is a legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial. (Confession time... I had to look it up.)

The Constitution of the United States (you remember that from your days teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago), Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 provides that: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed."

Per U.S. v. Brown, 381 U.S. 437, 440 (1965), "The Bill of Attainder Clause was intended not as a narrow, technical (and therefore soon to be outmoded) prohibition, but rather as an implementation of the separation of powers, a general safeguard against legislative exercise of the judicial function or more simply - trial by legislature." (I had to look this up too because I am not a constitutional scholar, but you are.)

Mr. President, if contracts are subject to change, after the fact, then they in fact, have NO meaning in the present. As Charles Krauthammer said, "there is such a thing as law. The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress summarily cancels contracts? Even worse are the clever schemes now being cooked up in Congress to retrieve the money by means of some retroactive confiscatory tax."


I find it hard to believe congress (your congress) this week has passed a bill to RETROACTIVELY tax the bonuses of certain A.I.G. employees. I will not and perhaps cannot, defend the appropriateness of these bonuses but if they were legal contracts, no-one, including you and/or congress has a right to tax, modify or void those contracts. To do so will destroy our legal system. Not just in this situation but for all future contracts. Who would want to work for or do business with any company or organization whose contracts and agreements were subject to retroactive taxation or negotiation? Please don't tell me words don't matter.


In early March the "Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009", was approved in the House (your house). This too is a contract modification program. If Congress wants to deal with the rising number of foreclosures, it should not create a new problem by converting the mortgage crisis into a bankruptcy crisis. Doing so will open the door to a host of unintended consequences that will further freeze credit markets, raise interest rates for new home buyers, and spread the mortgage contagion to other types of consumer credit. Congress needs to reject this plan and look for better solutions. Are we beginning to go down an irreversible slippery slope?


You do not need any help from me. But I have a few suggestions, if you insist on this course of taxing, changing or voiding contracts after the fact.


If Chrysler and General Motors take billions of bailout cash, should not congress (your congress) pass a law to cut the salaries and benefits of union workers retroactively because their leadership had negotiated sweetheart deals earlier?After all, the plan calls for limiting executive compensation as a condition of taking the bailout money. It seems to me if you want to have government oversight on executive pay you will soon want oversight on the pay for the rest of working America. After all, there are many more of us. Or at least there were before your congress and your administration started to fix things.


Would it not make sense to renegotiate the labor contracts that caused at least part of the automotive companies current financial woes? Or perhaps we could just impose a tax on the excess portion of their compensation over and above, say, the national average. More reasonable and competitive labor prices would surely help these companies pay us back. I am sure the U.A.W. (United Auto Workers) would find that fair and reasonable. These line workers make very little compared with the A.I.G. executives, but the principle does not change. Does it?


Fair warning to retired America... the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, has seriously discussed legislation to place an additional tax on retirement (401k and pension) income. Obviously, working hard and saving for your future is a bad thing and as such it must be taxed.


Your new budget and stimulus package nearly doubles our spending on education. Throwing more money at our education system will solve nothing without clear goals and objectives. How about renegotiating the N.E.A. (National Education Association) teacher contracts? We could institute a bonus plan for, say, 50% of their total compensation based on student achievement levels. That is, unless we do not wish to hold teachers accountable for results. We already spend more on education than almost any country in the world but consistently turn out substandard students particularly in math and science. The teachers clearly have not lived up to their contractual obligations. At least with this proposal the baby sitters will earn less than the teachers.


Since nearly every state is going to take billions from your stimulus package they too should renegotiate their government employee union contracts downward to be more competitive with the non-union workforce. Or, at least, we should retroactively tax their health care and pension benefits that all of us will now be subsidizing. Isn't that exactly what we are going to do to the AIG executives?


Do you see where I am going with this logic? Voiding or rewriting legal contracts has many unintended consequences, none of which can turn out well for the country. We are still and must remain a nation of laws. If you or your congress feel a wrong has been done, craft a law to correct it for the future.


I am sure you have noticed that I keep saying you or your congress or your administration. The actions or proposed actions discussed above have all been advanced without input or compromise from the loyal opposition. All have been purely partisan efforts. I know "you won," and I know this is how politics works. I also know you must, as of January 20, 2009, take full and total responsibility for the havoc you and your congress are wreaking on the American people both now and in the future.


Your congress wrote the legislation unilaterally and rushed it through to passage without reading or reviewing it per your previous promise. Please don't tell me words don't matter. Then, without reading and reviewing it, you signed it into law. You must have agreed to all the provisions in the bill or you would not or should not have signed it. Now it comes to light that your administration actually did know about the A.I.G. bonuses IN ADVANCE and now feign outrage that these greedy executives dare take the bonuses you, in fact, authorized in the legislation. Mr. President, it is your own stimulus package which included a measure to protect "any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009." It would be nice if you and your congress would cool down the rhetoric and take responsibility for this blunder.


Mr. President, on the subject of the your just proposed budget. The budget deficit will hit nearly two trillion dollars this year. It is projected to produce over nine trillion dollars in deficits in the next ten years. That is more than four times those of the previous administration. Remember how you railed about those deficits during the presidential campaign? Please don't tell me words don't matter. That is four times more WITHOUT a war to fund. Two trillion, ten trillion... it just takes my breath away.


Sir, if deficit spending stimulated an economy, the last seven years should have done the trick. If regulation fixed things, the 80,000 or so pages of regulations already on the books (30 times more than the middle of the New Deal) should have worked. If increased government spending, especially on education and health care helped, we should be in great shape by now. Spending trillions is not the answer... cutting spending across the board is the answer. We do it at home when things are tight and we should expect no less from our government.


I don't say this lightly, but, if you continue down this road, which I am sure you will, I too hope you fail. Please don't tell me words don't matter.



Respectfully,




Steve Mishket

stevemishket@comcast.net

03/23/09

Posted by at
Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

"Notes and Quotes" Archive

  • **“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.” – Justice Tom C. Clark (1899-1977) US Attorney General, 1945-1949
  • **"If the Constitution no longer matters, then the federal government no longer exists. The same document that restricts the federal government is also the document that created them and gives them their authority. Either it is in effect, or it is not." Gary Henderson
  • **"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in the time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." Dante
  • **“When anyone gets something for nothing, someone else gets nothing for something.” -Anonymous
  • ** "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane" Author unknown
  • ** “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter F. Drucker
  • ** “If getting employer benefits without paying union dues is BAD, why is getting government benefits without paying taxes GOOD?”
  • ** “It's not that ‘the rich’ aren't paying their ‘fair share,’ it's that America isn't. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it's not willing to pay for.” - Mark Steyn
  • ** "One of the penalties of not participating in politics is that you will be governed by your inferiors." ~ Plato
  • **"Fathom the hypocrisy of a Government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured...but not everyone must prove they are a citizen."
  • **If it matters, measure it: How do you know how much you’ve slipped or improved in an area unless you measure it? How do you take something “to the next level” if you don’t know what level you’re already at? How do you set concrete goals without a sense of where you are and where you want to go? If the success of your venture depends on it, you need to find a way to measure it.
  • **The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. - Mark Twain
  • **Political correctness is an approved form of censorship.  Based on emotional appeals at the expense of reason, political correctness mandates that inconvenient truths or facts be swept under the carpet.  Or else. Free speech, guaranteed to all Americans under the First Amendment, is on its way to becoming moot.  The political, media, and intellectual elites who control the terms of national debate and the rules of civil society have succeeded in censoring opposing views, limiting debate, and demonizing dissent.  Perception is on its way to becoming our new reality. Nancy Morgan
  • **Ronald Reagan once defined an economist as somebody who sees something working in real life and wondering if it will work in theory.
  • **"Fathom the odd hypocrisy that Obama wants every citizen to prove they are insured, but they don't have to prove they are citizens." ~ Ben Stein
  • **“America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.”--Dinesh D'Souza
  • **No politician has any business talking about tax increases until ObamaCare is repealed. It’s the most comprehensively failed legislation of the modern era. Like a taxi that runs on plutonium, it’s costing us a fortune, and making us sick, even while it’s sitting there and doing nothing. Sold with fanciful promises and fraudulent cost estimates, it’s another expensive scheme to buy votes with taxpayer money, ending with a planned crisis the government will be only too happy to step in and “solve” by seizing even more of our wealth and liberty. Its passage stymied serious attempts at real improvements to our health-care system, including tort reform and allowing the interstate sale of insurance plans to increase competition. As with so many other delusional Big Government programs, the opportunity cost of passing ObamaCare, and passing up on reasonable plans that enhance individual liberty, rivals its staggering price tag. We’ll come trillions closer to a balanced budget by shredding it. -- Dr. Zero
  • **'If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel' -- Benjamin Netanyahu
  • ** This is almost unbelievable. Barack Obama is more concerned about Jews building homes in Jerusalem than about Iran building a nuclear weapon. --Ben Stein
  • ** I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts. --Ronald Reagan
  • ** "As an American I am not so shocked that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name, but that America gave him the White House based on the same credentials." - - Newt Gingrich
  • ** An ideal Federal government in our country wouldn't take much from you, do much for you, or get in your way . --John Hawkins
  • ** The banking crisis wasn't caused by a lack of regulation. It was caused by regulation that pushed banks to make bad loans. --John Hawkins
  • ** An ideal Federal government in our country wouldn't take much from you, do much for you, or get in your way . --John Hawkins
  • **Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.--Ronald Reagan
  • ** A final word on Tea Party numbers.  The Obama Inauguration left in its wake 100 tons of trash on the Mall that required herculean efforts by the District and the Park Service to clean up.  And it devastated the grass surfaces of the Mall that necessitated budgeting millions of dollars to repair.  Saturday’s Teapartyers left behind a west lawn and Mall that could be used for the U.S.Open.   The sparse trash that was left was neatly stashed in and closely around the too few receptacles provided.  And police reported zero arrests.-- William Campenni
  • ** There is no distinctly Native American criminal class...save Congress. --Mark Twain
  • ** What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. --Edward Langley
  • ** To be born a U.S. citizen is, as Cecil Rhodes once said of England, to win first prize in the lottery of life.
  • **"Free speech does not include the right to deceive". --Author unknown
  • ** Although racism certainly exists in this country, it has become blessedly rare and marginalized. Some of the best evidence you can find for that is Barack Obama's election as President. Only in a country as colorblind as America could a black man easily win the Presidency when 75% of the votes were cast by white Americans. --John Hawkins
  • **I think we need a Constitutional Amendment that says: 1.  Congressional salaries are tied to increased jobs, per capita income and increased GDP. 2.  Any raise for any member must be approved by a super majority in his/her home district or state. --Tom Hall
  • **There is a certain irony in an administration denouncing ordinary Americans who get together to express what they believe and to confront authority, when that administration is led by a man who began his career as a community organizer, whose job, as I understand it, is to take ordinary Americans, get them together to express what they believe, and express demands against the authorities. So it's unbelievably hypocritical. And, of course, as we just heard, this only happens when you have a conservative protest. It is called a mob. If it's a liberal protest, it is called grassroots expressing themselves. -- Charles Krauthammer
  • **Government does not solve problems... it subsidizes them! --Ronald Reagan
  • **When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President -- I'm beginning to believe it.’ - Clarence Darrow
  • **The liberals will give free medical care to illegal aliens who are on welfare but will deny it to American citizens who have worked all their lives and made their contributions to American society.-- Charles Hakes
  • ** Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let's see what "better management" looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country. -- Virginia Postrel
  • ** You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think. -- Milton Berle
  • **We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. --The Talmud
  • **You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think. -- Milton Berle
  • **We're getting too much lip service and not enough action from the Obama administration on nuclear power, and the impression is being left that we can run this big, complex country on electricity from the wind, the sun and the earth. ...Climate change may be the inconvenient problem, but nuclear power is the inconvenient answer. -- Lamar Alexander
  • **The government may very well come up with a health insurance product that is cheaper (to the consumer) and more effective than those offered in the private sector. Think about this though ... Could that possibly be because the government will be under no pressure whatsoever to make a profit on its health insurance? When you can operate at a loss indefinitely you have no problem undercutting your competitors. When you can call on endless government subsidies you can run anyone you chose out of business. -- Neal Boortz
  • **I'd like to quote from an e-mail I recently received from a reader named J. Pyle. In response to a piece I had written ridiculing the state of higher education, he wrote: "I remember when 'Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies' meant trying to figure out what's wrong with those people. In fact, if your child is majoring in something that ends in 'Studies,' you better not turn their bedroom into a den, because that one is coming home after college." --Bert Prelutsky
  • **People are gushing over the late Michael Jackson. I suppose they will honor him on a postage stamp, in a new “Famous Child Molesters” series, to go with Elvis from the “Famous Drug Abusers” stamp series. Meanwhile, men and women dying to protect an America pass with little but perfunctory notice. One wonders, in the black hours of the night, if this nation deserves protecting. -- Robert Hall
  • **I sincerely hope that when the president goes in for his annual check-up, the doctors at Bethesda will do a brain scan. Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran. --Bert Prelutsky
  • **"Even if the majority agrees on an idiotic idea, it is still an idiotic idea." Sam Levenson
  • **The most hilarious thing about the Democrats' attempt to engulf the health care industry in the inky blackness of the federal government is their primary selling point: that a government takeover will actually lead to reduced costs. How's that plan working out with Medicare so far? Oh yeah, it's on track to bankrupt the entire country. So let's expand that -- what could go wrong? Well, besides all the features that usually come along with socialized medicine: reduced quality of care, long wait times for operations, and allowing old people to die in order to cut costs. Obamacare would lead to health care with the compassion of the IRS, the competence of FEMA, and the well staffed work force of our border patrol at a much higher cost, but on the upside, you won't live as long, so you'll have less time to complain about it. -- John Hawkins
  • **President Obama wants greater transparency from businesses, banks, the government — everyone except the union movement. This clearly benefits the union leaders, who will become less accountable to their members. But it’s hardly the change Obama promised to bring to Washington. — James Sherk
  • **Being politically correct is, unfortunately, not the same thing as being correct politically.-- Bert Prelutsky
  • **If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a "stimulus," then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power. -- Thomas Sowell
  • **“The big mistake of Republican leadership is thinking that going through the motions of listening to their ‘base’ is the same thing as actually listening to the base. They keep trying to drag us to where they think we should be instead of joining us where we are.” -- John Hawkins
  • ** Torturing prisoners should never be our policy, both because it's immoral and because it's usually ineffective. But it's madness to declare that there can never be exceptions. Forget the argument about the "ticking bomb" and the terrorist who might have information that could save numerous lives. Let's make it personal. Whether you're left, right or in between, ask yourself this yes-or-no question: If torturing a known terrorist would save the life of the person you love most in the world, would you approve it? If your answer is "no," you're not a moral paragon. You're an abomination. And please make your position clear to your husband or wife, mother or father, son or daughter. Just tell 'em, "Sorry, honey, but I'd rather see you dead than mistreat a terrorist. It's a moral issue with me. --Ralph Peters
  • **The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife. -- Teddy Roosevelt
  • **The prudent capitalist will never adventure his capital... if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the Government will repeal tomorrow what it has enacted today. -- William Henry Harrison
  • **The price of a postage stamp has gone up to 44 cents. The government says they had to raise the price because fewer people are using the mail these days. That's government thinking for you — "Hey nobody's buying our products . . . let's raise the price!" --Jay Leno
  • **If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand. -- Milton Friedman
  • **Since torture doesn’t work but waterboarding did work on KSM, doesn’t that prove that waterboarding isn’t torture?
  • **"The world is controlled by those who show up." --George Allen
  • **John Maynard Keynes, responded to a challenge about his changing views, saying, “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”