$9,128,000,000,000+.
That is what our national debt sits at as I write this article. I can’t put the actual number because it is increasing so fast it would be wrong within minutes. In fact, the debt is increasing at a rate of one million dollars a minute. That’s about $1.36 billion dollars a day, according to the U.S. National Debt Clock. We are spending money like there is no tomorrow.
And if we don’t stop, there might not be a tomorrow for our republic.
Why are we spending so much money? Our elected leaders have warped the phrase “general welfare” into something it was never meant to mean.
The term “general welfare” appears only two times in the Constitution. The first time it appears in the Preamble:
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The Preamble is nothing more than an introduction to the Constitution. It doesn’t grant any powers. The second time “general welfare” appears is in Article 1, Section 8. It reads:
To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
The Congress can collect taxes to provide for the general welfare. What does that mean though? Does it mean the Congress can just decide what they think the general welfare is and then tax us to pay for it? Not according to Thomas Jefferson:
“[T]he laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They [Congress] are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union. In like manner, they are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose.”
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, shared the same opinion as Jefferson. In a letter to Edmund Pendleton in 1792, Madison wrote, “If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions.”
On March 3, 1817, he refused to sign a public works bill for “for constructing roads and canals, and improving the navigation of water courses, in order to facilitate, promote, and give security to internal commerce among the several States, and to render more easy and less expensive the means and provisions for the common defense,” siting:
I am not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the improved navigation of water courses, and that a power in the National Legislature to provide for them might be exercised with signal advantage to the general prosperity. But seeing that such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution, and believing that it can not be deduced from any part of it without an inadmissible latitude of construction and reliance on insufficient precedents; believing also that the permanent success of the Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the General and the State Governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherishing the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort for the necessary powers to the same wisdom and virtue in the nation which established the Constitution in its actual form and providently marked out in the instrument itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest.
This attitude was not shared by all of the Founding Fathers though. Alexander Hamilton was of a different mind. As the first Secretary of the Treasury, he convinced the Congress to use an elastic interpretation of the Constitution to pass laws that were more far reaching than Madison and Jefferson would prefer. Congress continued to interpret the Constitution as Hamilton wanted them to and in the Supreme Court case United States v. Butler, the High Court sent Madison spinning in his grave. Justice Roberts wrote:
Since the foundation of the Nation sharp differences of opinion have persisted as to the true interpretation of the phrase. Madison asserted it amounted to no more than a reference to the other powers enumerated in the subsequent clauses of the same section; that, as the United States is a government of limited and enumerated powers, the grant of power to tax and spend for the general national welfare must be confined to the numerated legislative fields committed to the Congress. In this view the phrase is mere tautology, for taxation and appropriation are or may be necessary incidents of the exercise of any of the enumerated legislative powers. Hamilton, on the other hand, maintained the clause confers a power separate and distinct from those later enumerated, is not restricted in meaning by the grant of them, and Congress consequently has a substantive power to tax and to appropriate, limited only by the requirement that it shall be exercised to provide for the general welfare of the United States. Each contention has had the support of those whose views are entitled to weight. This court had noticed the question, but has never found it necessary to decide which is the true construction. Justice Story, in his Commentaries, espouses the Hamiltonian position. We shall not review the writings of public men and commentators or discuss the legislative practice. Study of all these leads us to conclude that the reading advocated by Justice Story is the correct one. While, therefore, the power to tax is not unlimited, its confines are set in the clause which confers it, and not in those of Sec. 8 which bestow and define the legislative powers of the Congress. It results that the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution.
Since then we have seen the debt do nothing but grow. In 1936, when Butler was handed down, the national debt was $33,778,543,493.73. Within fifty years, it had ballooned to $2,125,302,616,658.42. Granted, we had fought in several wars, but there was also a great deal of spending on social programs. During that time, we saw the introduction of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. We saw the addition of the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. We spend billions annually on a losing war on drugs. And possibly the most disgusting of all, we have see the explosion of earmarks.
According to the 2006 “Pig Book” by the Citizens Against Government Waste, while operating in a budget deficit of over $371 billion, the Congress found it important to give $5,600,000 to the Gallo Center, to “study basic neuroscience and the effects of alcohol and drug abuse on the brain.†This was found in the Defense portion of the budget. Other wasteful earmarks, including $13,500,000 for the International Fund for Ireland, which helped fund the World Toilet Summit, are to numerous to mention here. The new Democratic Congress led my Nancy Pelosi pledged to curb the earmarks. Instead, we find them being air-dropped into omnibus bills.
What is the solution? I think the obvious first step is to stop borrowing. That means we have to stop spending more than we are making. Some think a Constitutional Amendment is in order to ensure a balanced budget. I think that is a fine idea. But it doesn’t go far enough.
What has to happen is something that is difficult to pull off in Washington, D.C. Massive cuts need to be made in the budget. An article I read a while back described how to cut $2.1 trillion from the budget. And that was back in 2001. While I don’t agree with everything it said, like cutting money for Veteran’s Affairs, there are some very good ideas in there. Take the savings and start applying it to the principle. Start paying off the debt. If you look back in history, the debt used to go down. The last time that happened was in 1957.
If we are to survive as a republic, we need to remember the words of Benjamin Franklin: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” Our country is in dire need of fiscal responsibility. Unless we get control of our spending, we will be then next great nation retired to the dustbin of history.
