A New Year, The Same Problems

The President gave a good State of the Union speech last night. It covered the gamut of problems facing the country. He strove to set forth the vision and goals that the country needs to pursue in overcoming its present troubles and regain the strength and robustness that America has attained before by the achievements of its citizenry. The problems facing the President and the country are not unusual ones, they are simply isomorphs of the same problems that America has faced before. That doesn’t mean that most of us alive today have experienced or dealt with the preceding instances of these problems, but these problems are not so new and unique that they would not be solved by remembering what it took to address them before. One of the most essential activities that is part of the solution is sacrifice. The reason that sacrifice is required to deal with our national problems is that at the root of these problems is our own foolish wasteful dissipation.

So given this problem of our own making, it cannot be a surprise that the only way out is going to be to take our punishment, pay our debts and start thinking about what the hell we are doing in and with our society.

Now we can look to our leaders to help us find our path, our resolve, and our courage to undertake this journey. And there is the biggest problem of all. Our leaders! These politicians that have done such a bang-up job to date to actually play a critical role in the creation of our problems. So we can surely expect that these fine men and women will work together effectively to provide the Governmental force to drive us forward.

Don’t hold your breath.

The Supremes Hit A Sour Note

The US Supreme Court made a major ruling today on campaign financing law. They restored the rights of corporations and labor unions to contribute funds on par with any other private citizen. The limitations that had been in-effect that restricted their contributions was deemed a violation of their free-speech rights. This decision reverses a century of Supreme Court established rules that was viewed as protecting the private citizens against the undue influence that corporations and labor unions could leverage against individuals with no-where near their resources. That interpretative view had persisted under Supreme Courts that favored Republican and Democratic appointed members.

So I want to join in with all the rest of you in celebrating this grand victory for the corporations. I have fretted for years at their lack of influence in Washington. Finally, they will be able to choose your legislators and leaders, I mean join with you in helping your choose them. No longer will they be excluded from the back-rooms and closed door meetings that you and I are allowed to attend and that they are not. Wait! I don’t remember any Administration task-force or any Congressional committee letting average citizens into their deliberations (or inequitable distribution of funding). Well at least, they have never let corporate and labor union leaders participate in such meeting either. We have never had to worry about nor heard about the improper influence that Congressmen or Administration officials have allowed corporations or labor unions.

I am sure that this day will be remembered and celebrated in coming years as a re-affirmation of free-speech and basic American rights just like we celebrate the 4th of July. That is if the corporations and labor unions what us to, otherwise they will have their personally selected politicians entertain us with some other critical and essential issue that is of no importance or impact to their interests. Of course, we free citizens can also contribute to the political campaigns of our preferred candidates, who will no doubt pay as much attention to our views as they will to the super-huge donors that are now free to express their views on what is important and what needs to be addressed in legislation and administration of our government.

I would like to have one thing changed in the system however. Since corporations and labor unions have equal status as individuals under the law that given the absence of a corporeal entity who is treated according to the same legal consequences that you or I would, that the CEO or President of these entities be held accountable to the same legal consequences that you or I would. So if the corporation or union was found guilty of a criminal action that would have you or I put to death then as the stand-in individual for these non-living citizens that they would be executed on the corporations’/unions’ behalf.

If this one rule were put in place then I suspect that corporate executives and union leaders would be vigorously advocating that they should not be treated as citizen-equals who can spend money that is not even their own to influence the politics of the country. I suspect that corporations and unions would be willing to trust in the wisdom and judgment of the citizenry and the electorate.

And now that I think of it, why aren’t corporations and labor unions already properly and adequately represented by the citizenry and electorate that well own and constitute these entities. Don’t these individuals already have the right to fund political campaigns and to exercise their right to free-speech?

Isn’t letting corporations and unions participate in politics given some people extra rights, above and beyond those of most other citizens? Is this really protecting my freedoms? Well, as long as I am one of the people benefiting from the advantage and getting more rights than the rest of you, it will be ok with me. Otherwise, no, I don’t approve.

Americans Selecting The Cave - Losing International Perspective

Are Americans increasingly thinking that the best approach to life is to retreat from international affairs? A newspaper item about a recently released Pew Research Center poll provides some indication that a sizeable portion of the current generation (30 and under) is of the opinion that America should “mind its own business internationally” and leave others to their own interests, and that we “should go our own way” without consideration of other nations’ agreement.

While this boiled-down and grossly over-simplified assessment of American opinion regarding how the US should deal with other nations is a broad brush view, it is undoubtedly a telling perspective of how the latest generation sees our place and responsibilities in the world. This generation has grown up in an era where the highly media-covered American efforts and actions abroad have for the most part been very unsuccessful. We get engaged in wars and conflicts that we can quickly bring to a military end, but are then unable to extract ourselves from ever extending follow-on situations where success not only evades us, but we begin to lose ground on the very victory that we thought we had attained. I am not just speaking of the wars in Iran and Afghanistan, but the general conflicts throughout the Middle-East, Africa and Southeast Asia. We have tried and failed to win our wars on Poverty, on Drugs, and on Crime. The current generation has lost ground in education, health care, job security and earning potential relative to the previous generation. And as a nation we are more dependent on foreign entities for oil & other resources, consumer and business goods, and economic stability (foreign investment). We are the greatest nation in the world, a true super-power that is suffering from a debilitating degenerative disease that is sapping our strength and will.

So given all these troubles and astonishing lack of successes, it is no wonder that people are starting to think that America could solve most of its problems if we stayed out of international affairs to the greatest extent possible and if we focused on going it alone doing it our way. This may be an attractive and easily understood approach to want to pursue; but it neither will nor could work out for us. It violates the basic reality that we do not live in an isolatable system.

First to be left alone and to leave others alone requires that the ‘others’ agree to allow you to be left alone. Now while this ‘just leave me alone’ approach has always worked out extremely well for everyone who previously used it, like the Aztecs, the native American Indians, the opening of Japan to the West in 1853, the Roman Empire to the Mongal horde just to mention a few. When someone else has an interest in what they view you as having, they rarely just leave you alone.

Next, the very greatness of America to a large extent is derived from the fact that people came to America to make a better life for themselves. They came to a place where the ‘rules that everyone lived by’ were not rigid and age-old traditions that you could not violate. People found new and better ways to do things and America prospered. We kept taking the next step, seizing the opportunities, enriching ourselves from our creativity, and opening doors that others did not even see as doors. To choose to close ourselves off from the ‘outside’ only limits our access to more opportunities to advance and prosper.

And then there is the most important reason of all to live in the real world. America was created and grew from a spirit that looked outward, that sought the distant horizon, and that truly reached for the stars. Shrinking back from what is hard and difficult, what everyone thinks cannot be done is not the American way. We may have lost focus and have gotten lazy, but to live we must choose to move forward or we accept that we are not the future and let other overtake us. Either we believe in ourselves and our affirmation that freedom and democracy are the only way that we will live; or we crawl away to our caves and leave the world to the fitter survivors to come. You can hide and die, or do and live. It’s your choice.

Bagging Bank Bonuses – Another Miss

The Obama administration and many politicians are looking to score big with the public by going after the ‘fat cat’ bankers. With the recent announcements that exceedingly large bonuses were in the offing for major financial companies there was a seismic-scale reaction among the new media, the public, and therefore of necessity the politicians. Everyone in their own appropriate way predictably went postal.

Now I can understand how this little factoid would prove to be a highly effective irritant given the current economic problems and difficulties that have affected everyone, not just domestically but internationally. It doesn’t require any special insight or intuitive feel for the emotional and subjective reactions that have and are playing out in public and private. And I have to admit that I also thought that the bonuses were inappropriate and that the banking and financial institutions executives and probably many of the employees receiving such bonuses should be held to account for the “wrongness” of these bonus amounts/levels. But I think that my reasons for believing that the bonuses are unjustified are different than the vast majority, if not everyone else.

I also think that the remedies that are being pursued are either mis-guided and/or ill-conceived.

So as to why the bonuses are wrong, let’s see where I deviate from the norm.

Everyone* holds that the financial institutions and banks were the primary actors responsible for the financial crisis due to their unconstrained willingness to take risks that they did not understand or probably in some cases did not care that they understood. I agree that these players were essential parties in the disaster, and that they exercised exceedingly poor judgment given their fiduciary responsibilities. They were not alone however. Politicians, policy-makers, government bureaucrats, and let’s face it the public in general were all contributors to the fiasco in any number of ways. Some are more guilty than others, but it would be irresponsible to make just the ‘bankers’ the scape-goats for this mess. I don’t want to let them off the responsibility-hook, but I think there are others to consider for their own appropriate remedial repercussions.

Now since the disaster and the bail-out that saved their (and our) collective asses, the economy has struggled and started to recover. And these companies have also experienced improvements in their status, which is the very thing that set the stage for their action to award the big bonuses. In fact, given that the companies that took TARP money when they were in trouble, these institutions deliberately and aggressively sought to re-pay the bail-out funds. And they did this with full intention of getting out from under any Government over-sight or influence in their operations. Now free of such constraints, they decided that their successful rebound from the precipice is sufficient justification to warrant awarding very good (perhaps obscene) bonus amounts. And that’s where everyone says, hey it’s not fair. We bailed you out, and got nothing or worse; and now you’re getting rewarded for you part in the crisis.

I don’t see it that way. They aren’t being rewarded for their part in some of the stupidest investment decisions that they could possibly have made. And it is not true that we did not get anything out of the bail-out. We did save ourselves from the greater disaster that could have come from hiding our heads in the sand and doing nothing.

What the bankers and their ilk are being rewarded for is the inevitable. The economy had to recover to the current point eventually (or else it had to crash), and in this case it recovered in part because the excessive fear of a collapse had abated. Investments were returning and the economy was and is improving. Did this recovery really happen because of the banks? Did the financial institutions and their management really do anything that ‘caused’ the recovery to the point that we have now? Or did our bail-out produce the stability? And did not the return of our businesses and industry to a positive growth outlook create an economic value that required the banks to attain “profits” from the positions that they had caused their businesses to have sunk to from their own mismanagement?

So my problem with the bankers is that they are rewarding themselves for returning to profitability that they were not directly responsible for, and perhaps not even contributory to. So if the bankers are just benefiting from our risk, for our actions, and from our work; I think the bonuses are misplaced.

And the efforts to tax the banks to get our funds back is not unreasonable; but the approach will be used by the banks to make this a cost that we pick up and pay for. And they will still pay large bonuses whether they do a good job or a bad one. And it’s not just the banks that are stealing money from your pockets in this manner. The executives of most large corporations are using the same approaches to rewarding themselves huge bonuses. Rewards for achievements that “only they could have delivered” and that is why we have to give them these fortunes; otherwise we can not “keep these special individuals working at the company” without these large payments. If they would leave to be paid more elsewhere, well let them go. If enough of them leave, the price for their high-caliber talent will either crash like the economy did, or we will find that there are a lot of even more talented people who will do even better then them.

Notes:

* I concede there is always some none-zero subset of people who will be an exception, but in this case it is certainly a uniquely small subset.

Owing Not Owning Your Future: Your Deficit / America’s Deficit – Another Intelligence Test

It’s a new year, so it seems appropriate to take another perspective on the state of intelligence in America. Due to some recent mentions of the country’s budget and its deficit, this just occurs to me to be an appealing theme for a test. So I will follow the usual format, I will present a handful of questions, and some commentary to place a particular context for the questions, and at the end I will provide my answers to these questions. As before, your score is your responsibility to assess. And a willingness to deceive yourself as to the accuracy of your answers or beliefs is just another measure of the actual intelligence level that is being measured. To paraphrase Lincoln:

Some of us can fool ourselves all of the time, and all of us can fool ourselves some of the time, but all of us can not fool ourselves all of the time.

So now we can get to it.

Question 1: If the United States were a person, let’s say it was you, would you say that you are managing your household budget prudently, responsibly and within your means?

Yes No

Context: Your household budget is what you are spending on all the things that go along with running the house (country). So are you spending what you have wisely given what you are getting in return, and given that it all has to come out of what you earn (here your taxes are the same as your wages, they both come from the same place – what you get paid).

Question 2: The U.S. Government has promised to pay a number of people a fair amount of money every year for, well the rest of their lives. Now since big-G doesn’t put aside any money for this purpose they have to get it from you (citizens) every year. Big-G doesn’t have enough to pay out what they promised, so what should they do?

A. Increase your taxes

B. Pay less than promised

C. Borrow more money

D. Cut all spending (everything) equally

Question 3: Who is responsible for creating the budget deficit?

A. Politicians

B. Political Parties

C. Voters

D. All of the Above

Question 4: Many economists will say that some deficit spending can be advantageous for the economy, or can be necessary under certain situations in order to help prevent or recover from economic downturns. If it’s good for the economy then it’s good for everyone, and the more we do the better it will be. Many people use their credit cards in this fashion. They keeping adding to their balance, buy more products, and help stimulate the economy. The financial industry grows its credit business and the economy is booming. No reason this should not go on forever.



Shouldn’t we therefore let our deficit grow every year?

Yes No

Question 5: Congress prepares and submits a budget each year. They get input from all the departments, bureaucracies, lobbyists, special interest groups, and every entity reaching out for a piece of the pie. And every year Congress approves the budget with full knowledge from the Budget Office how much more it adds to the deficit. Every once and a while Congress has to approve raising the debt limit allowed, and yes they approve raising it every time.

Who will actually pay for the spending decisions that Congress continues making each year?

A. The Government

B. Businesses

C. You, the public

D. Investors in Government bonds

The Critical Question X: Think how you think your preferred Congressional representatives would answer these questions. Are they answering the same as you or differently? Given the deficit problem, isn’t at least one of you really doing a bad job?

A. Yes, me B. Yes, the politician C. Yes, both of us D. No, there is no problem

Ding! Times up. You are done, and you can now decide if you scored high, low or in the middle. For anyone with an interest, here are my answers.

Q1: No    Q2: D     Q3: D     Q4:  No    Q5: C      QX: B

You can probably tell that I hold the citizens responsible for the situation we are in. It’s not hard to have a poor opinion for people who do not accept the basic responsibility for their Government’s actions, and disregard for their obligation to prevent their elected officials from frittering away their heritage. If you want something from your Government, then you should be willing to pay for it (and not expect everyone else to pay for it).

How Dare They Let Me Be Stupid!

This apparently is the attitude of many consumers. There was a news article in my newspaper today (yes, I still get a paper) that indicated the shocking surprise that a man and woman had when they noticed a gas station’s price sign. The sign simply showed a much reduced price for a gallon of gas for cash versus the price for the same gallon purchased with a credit card. The couple seemed to think that this was not right and the station owner was somehow cheating them, as they decided to not purchase their gas at the station.

Now I don’t think that all consumers are represented by these two individuals; but I am equally sure that the couple does represent a large rather than trivial percentage of consumers. What were they shocked about? And more importantly, what did this startling revelation imply that they understood; or more to the point, what did it demonstrate that they had not understood about credit cards and costs to consumers?

The couple perhaps had never thought about the true and total costs of using a credit card. We can assume that they understood that when they charged something that they would pay interest on any unpaid balance that remained on their card after the billing date. This is a pretty basic and essential concept of credit cards. And while there are some folks that don’t grasp this concept, I have to believe that that group is less than one in ten people. Now if this is all that you understood about credit cards then seeing a difference between cash for gas versus credit for gas should probably tick you off.

But obviously there must be more to the true costs of credit cards then that, or I would not be discussing this. What the couple was not considering or aware of was that there are other costs when using credit cards not only for themselves, but also for the merchants who accept them and for everyone related to abuses attributable to the cards. The couple is likely to have a credit card issuer that charges them an annual account fee and there may be various charges for other events and situations related to their account, charges and payments. These extra charges all add to the true cost of using their credit card; but doesn’t explain why the gas station owner would presume to charge more for a credit purchase than a cash one.

What the couple is not factoring in is that the credit card companies do is to charge the merchants, who accept their cards for purchases, a percentage of the price that is being charged. Additionally the merchant has to have equipment for accepting the card, and today that means a system that allows them to have the credit card validated in real-time to help protect the consumer, the credit card company and themselves against fraud. This protection also adds a cost to the merchants operation, since there is a cost for the verification system/operation. Now you might argue that the validation cost is really a savings, since it prevents abuse. And you would be right, it does do that. However, it really only reduces the amount of abuse that the merchant is exposed to from the absolutely ridiculous to something more economical and “affordable”. There is still a cost of fraud to the merchant and you, and it comes in two phases. First the merchant is likely to be charged some amount of the fraud that is associated with their own operation; and then the merchants (and you and I) all have to absorb the cost of fraud from throughout the entire credit card issuer’s system. For every dollar of fraud that occurs on an issuer’s cards, the issuer makes that cost part of their operating expense and distributes that dollar into the costs that they charge in interest, in fees you pay directly, and in merchant fees that you pay indirectly. All this cost is why a credit card is more expensive to use than cash is. And it’s more expensive for everyone, and thus the reason that the gas station owner would offer you a better deal on cash.
For those of you to young to remember, when credit cards were yet to have become the necessity that they are today, it was not uncommon for merchants to offer a cash discount on the price to be able to keep more profits from their sales. Then more and more consumers became addicted to the plastic and merchants found out that they sold more stuff on plastic because people spent more than they could afford. So instead of encouraging you to go cash, the merchants helped trap our economy in the credit death spiral. And it has gotten so bad, that we may see more merchants experimenting with cast discounts to see if they can make more money this way.

But don’t blame the merchants. It’s the consumers that did this to the consumers. The couple is outraged because they have always been charging themselves more for everything; and they just hate that the gas station has the nerve to rub it in their faces.

Facing Consequences: What It Mean When You’ve Been Living Beyond Your Means

Let’s see if I can present a reasonably accurate description of the situation that is occurring ubiquitously throughout the United States. And by ubiquitous I do mean everywhere. It will not be surprising to you, once identified, that this situation has a national scope. The situation’s reach is pervasive in our governmental system; and while I do not maintain that the situation effects every governmental organization regardless of jurisdictional levels and across the entire range of size and geography, it does reach into the majority. The “situation” is the un-affordability of governmental structures and operations. I am not proposing that every individual and every type of governmental organization conceivable is by it’s nature unaffordable (though that is hard to avoid), only that in the US we have been sufficiently complacent to allow most such structures to have evolved into unprecedented levels of un-affordability.

This un-affordability of Government operations has surfaced under the harsh light of hard economic times. Politicians (of most any stripe) and bureaucrats will maintain and say that the current budget short-fall (read that un-affordable) situation is only because of the hard economic conditions that we are experiencing at the moment. And they will add that once the economy recovers then we can return to the normal operations which we had before the downturn. This position lets them help allay the inconveniences, difficulties and pain that spending cut-backs and lay-offs are causing throughout municipal, state and federal entities.

They were and are not incorrect in that the problems that have surfaced were because of the near catastrophic financial contraction of the economy, but they appear to continue to turn a blind-eye (I prefer, dead-brain) to the real problem. That real problem, it’s that US citizens are allowed to be unaccountable for their choices and are unwilling to accept the consequences of their demands upon government entities. We elect politicians who promise not to spend more money, who will not raise taxes, and who will make sure that our tax dollars are not wasted on unnecessary programs. Then once they get into office they do nothing to curb costs, they find essential reasons to create some new spending program or government task that requires additional funding, and they add a special interest earmark that they add each time a new bill comes before them. Gradually they pile more and more costs onto the budget and then complain how there is nothing that they can do to prevent it.

Compound this spendthrift approach to an illogical expectation that once we get through these economic problems that we will have learned our lessons and not let ourselves get into this situation again. We will be wise and prudent and not spend more than we can afford. After all, we have shown that after every previous time when we had gotten into a dire economic situation or when the cost of government was clearly more than what was affordable that we recognized the problem and did not allow it to happen again. OOPS! How did we get here again? We lived beyond our governmental affordability. We let the politicians and bureaucrats find ways to spend more and more and more. These illustrious leaders did these things sometimes with our eager agreement, sometimes because we were afraid, and sometimes because we were blissfully ignorant of what they were doing. But they were only able to do it because we are willing to elect such as these as our representatives. We are willing to hope that we will not have to pay the price for what we want and that it will come from someone else’s pocket. Well, we are as wrong as the anointed and elected few.

Do I expect that we will learn to do better from this situation? I do not! I think that we will go right back to beliveing that we can just choose what we want and not worry about what it really is costing us. I believe that we will ignore responsibility and thoughtful decision-making because it is hard and the people we elect are not trained in these techniques, nor are they aware of their limitations.

Credit Cards: Many Ways To Bilk You

Finally the public will be protected from the rates and fees that Banks charge their credit card account holders. Congress passed legislation restricting the rules on Banks changing rates as freely as they have been able to in the past. Unfortunately as with most laws, the timing of when the law goes into effect and when it was passed gives the Banking industry plenty of time to make changes before they are restricted. As a consequence many, if not most, credit card holders are getting letters announcing rate changes and new fee structures for various activities to basically increase the Banks’ ability to get as much revenues from you as possible. Now there is nothing illegal about what the Banks are doing. They are a business operating within the laws and regulations that constrain them.

What the Banks are doing is ensuring that these many changes to allow you to pay even more than before for the same service and benefits that you have had for years. The biggest problem for individual credit card holders is that they will have to be very alert to how their particular bank is treating them. The rates and fees being charged can vary greatly from one issuer to another. And thus there are some people who will be paying enormous amounts to their bank, and probably way beyond what is affordable for them.

The sad part of this is that the Banks’ actions are detrimental to both the Banks and to the consumers. The Banks are trying to maintain high levels of profits for their stockholders and for their bonuses. In the short term this will allow them to take a large amount of the public’s money and divert it to their accounts. No real benefit or value will be provided in exchange for this transfer of wealth, it will just make sure that more of your money goes to protect their income stream. In the long term this will actually suppress the financial industry, the market-place and the economy overall. This retraction will come from diverting consumer income to none-productive spending on interest charges and fees that do not drive any product or service sector of the economy to help stimulate business. This effectively will reduce the dollars going into these businesses which will result in lower growth, or worse a real retraction that damages everyone.

It would appear that the Banks have forgotten that one of the values that the credit card industry contributed to the economy in the past is that it helped stimulate purchases which provided growth to businesses and in turn to the incomes of their employees. These increasing incomes from employees get directed back into the economy through their purchases both cash and credit. What the banks are overlooking is that they benefit in proportion to the growth in the economy from contributing to a prosperous middle-class. The extra-high rates and fees are reducing the number of people who are in the middle-class and thus their own revenue base. While people in the lower income groups are sources to credit card companies, they are not responsible for most of the revenues.

So what should the banks be doing, and what should Congress have done? The Banks should be looking to keep their rates and fees a low as possible not the opposite. And Congress, well as usual they reacted to the stupidity of the Banking industry going ultra-greedy and just tried to limit how quickly and easily the Banks could reach greedier and greedier levels. Congress should have looked to solutions that would reward intelligent bank credit card operations and disadvantage predatory and ill-conceived profit strategies by banks that are clearly only in the business to rip off the consumers.

Once again we see a lack of insight and intelligence on the part of our Government and on part of the executives that we are all allowed to reward with boundless salaries, bonuses and perks.

Hey! Ya get what ya pay for!

Making Health Care Illegal, Well At Least Un-Constitutional

Apparently the political forces aligned against the Health Care Reform bill are seeking to pursue defeating the bill on yet another front. This does not mean that they have given up on opposing the bill in the legislative process. That effort is still under full throttle and is still trying to defeat and/or limit the bill in any number of ways. But the Constitutionality front is an interesting approach that offers some unusual dimensions, along with both high risks and rewards depending upon how the question plays out in that area.

On the high reward side of the approach is the possibility to get the Supreme Court to render a ruling that affirms their contention that the Health Care Reform bill violates one or more Constitutional requirement or limitation upon the Federal government’s right to impose some or all of the provisions in the legislation. This would undoubtedly put the whole Health Care Reform effort in jeopardy of ever succeeding since it would create sufficient additional barriers to the proponents of the reform bill that they could never get enough members of Congress to agree to terms and conditions that would have to be overcome and compromised upon. If they can just barely get enough Senators to pass the bill when they are only required to protect their own special interest groups and campaign contributors’ needs; what chance do they have when on top of that that they have to find solutions and approaches that comfortably fit within the constraints that the Supreme Court could inject into such a bill’s requirements. The problem here is that Congress would no longer be free to write the reform bill without having appropriate language that covers the objections and requirements imposed by the Court. And this assumes that the U.S. Supreme Court did not rule at such a broad level that they fundamentally stated that the Federal Government had not Constitutional basis for ever requiring citizens to have health care insurance coverage. So under an optimal outcome, the opponents could get a Court sanctioned prohibition against a core component that any Health Care Reform bill would depend upon.

Of course there is the high risk side to this approach, where the same Court would rule that the legislation is completely within the purview of Congress’ Constitutional authority; and that Congress has not exceeded it’s responsibilities in any regard. Such a ruling would not only thwart the bill’s opponents, but would add weight to their efforts as being intended by the founding fathers as their responsibility in support of promoting the general Welfare. This could imply that the opponents were not only wrong in their appreciation and understanding of their responsibilities; but that they were in fact failing to carry out such responsibilities that they had taken their oath of office to perform.

The question of course is: How will the current Supreme Court rule on this question? Assuming that is that the Court will even elect to bring the case up for question. They could decide that this not a question that they should weigh into, and reject the question at this time.

But let’s assume the Court did decide to make a declaration on the question then the table could be set for an historic decision as long as the breath of the issue that is brought before the High Court is sufficiently broad and will allow the Justices to apply their authority to the full extent of the matter. Then we will have a whole new public dialogue brought into the fray. Factions on every side will proclaim their views and point out the errors of any decision made no matter what the decision is, if it’s not exactly the one that they wanted.

So at the end of the day, the Supreme Court will be deciding what the current collective view is for the country regarding this issue. The Court will decide and explain to the country what they see the responsibility that the Constitution both grants to and requires of the government in handling the issue of Health Care for its citizens. The Court will be divining the will of the people in terms that they can explain from the context of the Constitution and all the interpretations that have preceded this one. Whether they are right or wrong will depend upon their reading of America’s zeitgeist. If they support the effort to reform Health Care in their decision then the people will be more convinced that they are entitled to a guaranteed Health Care system and that it is a right that must be supported by the society.

If they rule against it, then the people will have to find another way to provide for the basic human necessity of health care.

Regardless of the Court, Congress or especially the vested interest groups there will always be a fundamental fact. The society will always pay the price for the Health Care system that they provide. This is simply because there is no avoidance of reality, and if you provide universal care then you pay the costs that that requires; and if you don’t then you pay the costs that come from the consequences of not providing universal care. Reality is a world of consequences to your choices, not just a world of choices. You always have consequences to what you do, and you always pay for them.