Tag: Supreme Court

Breakfast – Biden Tax Hikes – Journalistic Ethics

George Noga

America’s founding fathers established the weakest federal government possible.

Breakfast – Biden Tax Hikes – Journalistic Ethics

By: George Noga – April 25, 2021

This posting addresses FDA nutrition guidelines, the Constitution, Biden’s tax hikes and my letter to the editor of our local paper about journalistic ethics (oxymoron).

Breakfast and the USDA: One morning while enjoying my breakfast of orange juice, bacon, egg, buttered toast and coffee with cream, I had a Eureka moment, i.e. my government was wrong about every one of the seven items I was having for breakfast. The USDA warned Americans against eggs, butter and cream (cholesterol), coffee (caffeine) and bacon (fat). They encouraged consuming orange juice (fruit) and toast (grain). Every item they advised against now is deemed healthy, while both items they deemed healthy are now considered unhealthy, i.e. toast (carbohydrates) and orange juice (concentrated carbohydrates). Why would anyone trust, or want more of, a government that was wrong seven out of seven times – and that’s just for breakfast?

Constitution: Our founders intentionally wrote the Constitution to establish the weakest possible form of federal government – capable of performing only its essential and enumerated functions. This was for three fundamental and intertwined reasons. First, they understood government is inherently dangerous and the less power it has the better. Second, the states are closer to the people and more sensitive to regional needs and differences. Third, the states existed prior to the federal government. It was the people, through their states, that created the federal government, not the reverse.

Biden tax hikes on the rich wind up devastating the middle class.

Biden Tax Hikes: Democrats don’t really want to tax the rich and couldn’t do it even if they tried because of Hauser’s Law. Their real aim is political misdirection, to appear to be taxing the rich in furtherance of their class warfare agenda. And so it is with Biden’s proposed tax hikes on corporations and individual capital gains and dividends. Everyone knows corporations are merely vehicles for collecting taxes, but they don’t actually pay them. The tax burden falls on their customers in the form of higher prices. When capital gains and dividend tax rates rise, tax collections decrease as taxpayers modify their behavior. Biden’s taxes on the rich will devastate the middle class.

Packing the Supreme Court: The Constitution created three co-equal branches of government and provided for a separation of powers between them. If the court can be reconstituted whenever the executive and legislative branches change hands, there is a prima facie case the court not only is not independent but that there is no separation. Therefore, the Supreme Court should rule that court packing is an unconstitutional violation of: (1) separation of powers; (2) independence; and (3) co-equality.

Media Ethics: Our local newspaper recently wrote a self laudatory (and self delusional) puff piece touting the strength of its ethics policy. I wrote the following in response.

“I’m sure you have been in many restaurant rest rooms festooned with signs in uber large fonts commanding ‘Employees are required to wash their hands before returning to work.’ Such conspicuously placed signs are posted not to remind employees to wash-up but to disingenuously assuage customers’ concerns about sanitation. Just like the signs in restrooms, written codes of ethics are mostly window dressing. They are nothing more than platitudes from cans unless they are deeply embedded in the culture of the organization, scrupulously honored and strictly enforced. Enron had a 64-page code of ethics distributed to all its employees; how did that work out?”

“Your newspaper’s ethics are eerily similar to Enron’s, i.e. they are observed in the breech. Your ethical stricture to ‘make news decisions without the influence of any political preference’ is laughable. Every edition of your paper contains numerous and flagrant violations of this ethic. Your reporters and editors violate this policy with scorn and impunity because they understand it is only window dressing. When, if ever, was anyone sanctioned for violating this policy? As with restaurants, your paper doesn’t really care about clean hands. Your code of ethics is not intended for employees; it is for virtue signaling and maskirovka to hoodwink your readers.”

Next on May 2nd, in observance of May Day, we blog about socialism.

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More Liberty Less Government – mllg@cfl.rr.com – www.mllg.us

Slaves, Socialism, Supreme Court and ICE

George Noga
Did the US Constitution consider slaves 3/5 of a person? Can socialism ever appear to work? Can the world run out of money? These questions and more.
Slaves, Socialism, Supreme Court and ICE
By: George Noga – October 28, 2018

Micro Topics: “Medicare for all” is the new cry of lefties. Single-payer health care has been tried and it failed miserably – with Native Americans and veterans. It adds trillions to the deficit, but the real cost is in lives. . . . . “The left destroys everything it touches, sports, comedy, schools, fun, everything”. (Charlie Kirk) . . . . . In the latest PC craze, schools abolish homecoming kings and queens, substituting “royals“. But aren’t royals a privileged hereditary aristocracy? . . . . . For 2015-16, uber-liberal NPR can confirm only 11 school shootings; with 96,300 schools, that is one shooting per 8,755 schools. . . . . Not long ago, liberals and media applauded when jack-booted ICE agents conducted a pre-dawn raid to seize a 6 year old boy; his name: Elian Gonzalez.

Only 3/5 of slaves were counted per the Constitution but it was not due to southern racists, but northern abolitionists. Nor did the 3/5 have anything to do with the putative human worth of a slave. In 1789, there were 1.8 million freemen in the north but only 1.1 million in the south. The south wanted to count all 650,000 slaves to achieve equal representation in the House of Representatives; the north didn’t want to count any, hence, the 3/5 compromise. The Constitution refers to slaves as “persons“, nowhere as 3/5 of a person. This issue is misunderstood and often demagogued by liberals.

Socialism can appear to work  briefly because socialists plunder a nation’s wealth to create the illusion of progress. They confiscate assets, loot industries, banish managers and pad payrolls with hacks. They strip natural resources and despoil the environment. They run giant budget deficits and borrow all they can before defaulting. They tax the upper and middle classes into oblivion. They hyperinflate and print worthless currency. They pillage banks and make phoney loans to acolytes. They impose price and rent controls and prohibit evictions. They freeze prices and impose currency exchange controls. Wealth creators flee along with their capital and knowhow. After socialists ransack a nation’s patrimony, it always ends the same, i.e. starvation amidst plenty. Never has socialism created sustained prosperity, only short-term pillage and plunder.

The world is running out of money. The supply of money is finite and when it’s gone, it’s gone. Seriously! We can’t just keep printing money because that only inflates, i.e. more money chasing the same supply of goods and services. Space aliens, pandemics or climate change won’t do us in; in the end, the planet simply runs out of money. World government debt is $64 trillion while GWP is $76 trillion for a ratio of 84% and spiraling upward. Total global debt (public and private) is $230 trillion, over 300% of GWP. Who will be the one to borrow the last dollar in the universe?

SCOTUS confirmations are circuses as Congress quit legislating, leaving lawmaking to courts. Uncertainties about vacancies create angst, as justices now can serve 40+ years. To fix this, MLLG resurrects an old, but simple and elegant, idea which may be new to readers. Justices (limited to one term) would serve staggered 18-year terms with one term expiring every 2 years. Every president would have 2 appointments each term. This removes all the angst and uncertainty and no president could ever appoint a majority. Eighteen years is enough to serve; moreover, this change would enable more experienced justices to be appointed because longevity would no longer matter.

Our next post November 4th offers perspective about the midterm election.
MLLG

School Choice: The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time

George Noga
By: George Noga – December 1, 2014
        In seven years of authoring this blog, I  wrote about school choice only one other time – once in 300 posts. I have shied away from that subject despite (perhaps because of) having been deeply involved in the school choice movement for ten years from 1994 to 2003. I started the first school choice program in Florida, and only the fourth in the entire USA, in 1995. The program I began (now called Step up for Students) funded 68,000 scholarships this year with a budget of nearly $300 million. During much of that time I also served on the board of the leading national school choice organization, Children First America, which began school choice programs in 100 US cities. This subject is not a new one to me.
“Imagine many kids died because ambulances drove right past private hospitals and would take seriously injured kids only to a public hospital.”
        It is not hyperbole or overstatement to assert school choice is the civil rights issue of our time. Actually, it is far more than that. Although people of color suffer most from the current educational paradigm, everyone is victimized. Imagine there was a terrible accident involving a school bus full of kids and there was a private hospital nearby ready, willing and able to provide high quality care. Now imagine the ambulances would not take the severely injured children to the nearby private hospital – insisting they could only be taken to a more distant public hospital that provided inferior care. Imagine some kids died as a result and imagine the ensuing public uproar. That is precisely what is happening in our schools; poor and middle class kids are dying educationally (and some literally) – yet there is little or no public outcry.

       Never have I seen an issue so demagogued and so rife with downright lies and with those promulgating the lies knowing full well they are lies. In the following parts of this post, I address many of these canards.

  1. School choice takes money from public schools: Let’s stipulate there are one million students in a particular school district and spending is $12,000 per pupil; total spending therefore is $12 billion. If 20% are given vouchers for $6,000 (50%) and total spending remains the same, the per pupil spending on the remaining 800,000 kids in public school now is $13,500 – an increase of $1,500 per pupil. Yet educrats and teachers unions want you to believe public school funding has been cut when it actually increased $1,500 per student or 12.5%. If every student had a voucher we could slash spending on education by 30% to 40% and improve school quality to boot.
  2. Private schools are not accountable: This is the biggest lie of all. If a parent has a problem with a public school, it is nearly impossible to seek redress. Public schools are accountable only to stultified bureaucracies and unresponsive school boards and not to students or parents. Private schools are directly accountable to students and parents. A consumer armed with a free choice is the most potent force on earth – recall New Coke and Blackberry.
  3. We don’t spend enough on schools: Real (inflation-adjusted) spending has doubled or even tripled in recent decades while schools got much worse. The US spends more per pupil than nearly any other OECD country while test scores in math, science and reading are in the middle of the pack. Actual public school spending is much higher than reported because much of it is hidden, i.e. off the school budget in capital budgets, pension plans, health care, debt service and grants. Often, real spending is double that shown on the education budget. Washington D.C. in 2010 spent $30,000 per pupil and had the worst schools in America. Sidwell Friends, one of the most elite private schools in the USA and where the Obamas send their children, spends only slightly more. Moreover, there is no proven correlation between school spending and any measure of educational output.
  4. Teachers unions and educrats care about students: The educational blob is nothing more than a jobs program for adults. New York state (population 19 million) has more school administrators than all of Europe with a population of 700 million. The head of the teachers union once said he would begin to care about students once they started paying union dues. Out of over 100,000 teachers in California, an average of 2.2 are fired each year for poor performance. Union tenure and seniority rules are nothing but a union racket.
  5. Private schools skim the best students: Every study published shows this is false. Voucher students in private schools are indistinguishable from public school students in every demographic. There is absolutely no skimming of the best students. The popular movie, Waiting for Superman, depicts the cri de coeur  from ordinary, anguished parents facing long odds to save their kid’s life by securing a voucher in a lottery.
  6. Teachers are underpaid: If this ever was true in the past, it has not been true for a long time. When accounting for hours worked and all benefits, teachers are overpaid by more than 50% per a study by the American Enterprise Institute. A typical teacher with a $50,000 salary will receive another $52,000 per year in benefits compared to $20,000 in benefits for a worker in private industry. Teachers have great pay, outstanding benefits, light work loads and ironclad job security despite graduating in the bottom two quintiles of their class.
  7. Vouchers favor the rich, resegregation, scare tactics: With all the facts against them, the education blob (educrats, unions, politicians) resort to scare tactics. They play the class warfare card by asserting vouchers favor the rich. News flash: the rich already have school choice by controlling where they live and via private schools. The blob then says the “rich” could add to the vouchers and send their kids to even better schools. Their argument is they don’t want to help poor kids just because some rich kids might possibly do even better. Race baiters play the race card claiming private or charter schools are more segregated – an argument shot down by the Supreme Court.
         In addition to the above myths, many other significant facts favor school choice. Foremost among these is the matter of values. Public schools teach a vapid, secular, valueless orthodoxy. School choice permits parents to select schools that reinforce, rather than contradict, parental values. Another issue is child safety. Public schools require metal detectors and a perpetual police presence and for good reason. Public schools, particular those in inner cities, have become petri dishes for social dysfunction and breeding grounds for behavioral pathologies. The blob is holding the kids hostage.
“Inner city schools are petri dishes for social dysfunction and pathologies.”
         The favorite story from my time in the school choice movement concerns Tommy. When he attended a failing public school, he continually feigned illness and did everything possible to avoid going to school. In utter desperation, his parents applied for a voucher from our organization for Tommy to attend a private school. After a few months at his new school, Tommy awoke one morning with a fever and obviously was ill. Nonetheless, Tommy insisted on attending school that morning. When his astonished mother asked him why, Tommy replied, “Because my teachers are counting on me.”
        There are millions and millions more Tommies in America and we are killing them educationally just as surely as the ambulances that would not take dying kids to a private hospital. The ones we don’t kill, we doom to lives of dysfunction and desperation. Shame on educrats, teachers unions, politicians, NAACP and their enablers. And yes, shame on unionist public school teachers too, for they are part of the problem. All these people are standing in the schoolhouse door, just like Orval Faubus in 1957, blocking desperate children from leaving. School choice is the civil rights issue of our time!

Reviving the Citizen Grand Jury

George Noga
By: George Noga – June 20, 2014
        Grand juries trace their inception back to 12th century England. King Henry had problems with the pope’s ecclesiastical courts which, in Henry’s view, failed to charge or indict to his satisfaction. King Henry therefore instituted a citizens grand jury. Fast forward to the USA. The Bill of Rights (5th Amendment) states: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous, crime unless on the presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.” The Bill of Rights introduces grand juries although they are never mentioned in the main body of the Constitution. Hence, grand juries are a constitutional construct in their own right. The founders intended them as a fourth branch of government that belongs  solely to the American people and serves as a buffer between the people and the government.
“Any citizen could bring a matter directly before a grand jury.”
       In the decades immediately following ratification of the Constitution, grand juries played a major role in public life. Any citizen or layman could bring a matter directly before a grand jury including complaints about the conduct of public officials. Grand juries then could (and did) conduct their own independent investigations; if they found sufficient evidence to bring charges and if the act was a crime under law, the grand jury would return an indictment. Of course, the grand jury also screened out charges which were unfounded or of malicious inspiration.
“A prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.”
       It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the current paradigm emerged in which prosecutors control grand juries. Today there is so much abuse of grand juries by prosecutors with an agenda that it has given rise to a now-famous bon mot linking grand juries and ham sandwiches. The origin of this aphorism can be traced to comments made by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in 1940. However, many attribute it to Judge Saul Wachtler who stated: “A prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.” Once empanelled however, grand juries have independence and great power; they occasionally go off on their own – thus giving rise to the term “runaway jury“.
Movement to Return Grand Juries to Citizens
       The widespread abuse by politicians of the grand jury system has led to a growing movement to return grand juries to ordinary citizens – much as they functioned in the first half century of our republic. In fact, six states currently allow citizen (or common law) grand juries in one form or another. These function in different ways. In Oklahoma citizens can petition to request a county grand jury to convene. Montana law allows judges to call grand juries. In other states, citizen grand juries can report their findings to prosecutors or to regularly empanelled grand juries.
        Current state laws do not go near far enough for many. There is a powerful movement afoot to revive the citizen grand juries of the 19th century – not under the control of prosecutors. In recent years a  number of such self-styled citizen grand juries have been formed – including at least one in (Ocala) Florida. One case in Gallatin County, Colorado garnered much attention with over 30 law enforcement officers representing 10 agencies on hand for one proceeding. In Montana different groups are forming advisory grand juries to report findings to judges and also to publish them for the record.

       There are a number of organizations competing to revive the common law grand jury in the USA. They range from the serious and well organized to some with marginal (at best) credibility. For the time being however, citizen grand juries are limited to advisory and public relations roles. Although it is unlikely grand juries will return to their 19th century roots anytime soon, it is not hard to discern that some major changes – such as the following – may come in the years ahead.

  • The beauty of our federal system is that there are 50 states and citizen grand juries may need to catch on only in one or two states to spread like wildfire. Also there are over 3,000 counties and since most grand juries operate at the county level, it is possible significant changes could even originate at the county level.
  • The movement could inspire more and more regularly convened grand juries to become runaway juries.
  • Significant marginal changes are possible. At one time ordinary citizens were allowed to pass information directly to a sitting grand jury. Bringing back this feature could really shake up politicians prone to abuse their power.
  • It is easy to foresee rapid growth in citizen grand juries with an advisory role, i.e. they could report their findings to a regular grand jury and/or independently publish their findings – similar to the present situation in Montana.
       At bottom, the movement to resurrect citizen grand juries is a manifestation of a much broader and more significant reaction by a growing number of Americans against the size, power and arrogance of government. As such it is a welcome trend and could play a significant role in bringing about more liberty and less government in America.