Tag Archives: morality

Gun Control and the Purpose of Guns

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Governor Mario Cuomo (D, NY) has demanded we “end the madness now” and surrender control of our firearms to government.

No one hunts with an assault rifle.  No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.

The tragic events of just the last few weeks in Newtown, CT, and West Webster, NY, have indelibly taught us guns can cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment[.]

A couple of things about this.

First, government doesn’t get to dictate to us our purpose in owning firearms or our purpose in owning magazines with capacities of our choosing.  Leaving aside the reason for the 2nd Amendment in the first place, which was to allow a population to protect itself from an overreaching government more than to put victuals on the table, this goes beyond the 2nd Amendment.  If we let government determine our reasons for owning or not owning a thing, it becomes a very short step to letting government determine what me must own or not own, what we must buy or not buy.  Like health insurance.

Second, Cuomo is right that guns can “cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment.”  When the murdering begins, and help is summoned, the responding police will be only minutes away.  In those intervening moments, though, the killing of the unarmed, including unarmed adults also on the scene, continues apace.  It’s the folks present at the start who are in the best position promptly to interfere with the killer, but when they’ve been carefully disarmed by a Know Better government, they’re as helpless as those children.

What He Said

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President Barack Obama said from his vacation home in Hawaii that if the two parties

focus on the interests of our country above the interests of party, I’m convinced we can cut spending and raise revenue in a manner that reduces our deficit and protects the middle class[.]

Indeed.  If the Progressives will heed the President’s advice and work toward cutting spending, we can not only “protect the middle class,” but we also can restore upward economic mobility to our poor—a group of Americans whom the Progressives ignore as assiduously as they disparage successful Americans.

Moreover, such a move will unburden our economy, allowing it to grow and thereby raise revenue for the government in, to coin a phrase, a responsible way.

So—when are you going to start, Ace?

On Raising the National Debt Ceiling

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Mr President, I rise today to talk about America’s debt problem.

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.  It is a sign that the US.   Government can’t pay its own bills.  It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.

Over the past 5 years, our federal debt has increased by [$5.7 trillion to $16.4 trillion.] That is “trillion” with a “T.”  That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers.  And over the next [4 years, between now and 2017, the President’s budget will increase the debt by almost another $3.5 trillion].

Numbers that large are sometimes hard to understand.  Some people may wonder why they matter.  Here is why: This year, the Federal Government will spend [$483] billion on interest.  That is more money to pay interest on our national debt than we’ll spend on Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.  That is more money to pay interest on our debt this year than we will spend on education, homeland security, transportation, and veterans benefits combined.  It is more money in one year than we are likely to spend to rebuild the devastated gulf coast in a way that honors the best of America.

And the cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the Federal budget.  This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and States of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investments in education and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on.

Every dollar we pay in interest is a dollar that is not going to investment in America’s priorities.  Instead, interest payments are a significant tax on all Americans—a debt tax that Washington doesn’t want to talk about.  If Washington were serious about honest tax relief in this country, we would see an effort to reduce our national debt by returning to responsible fiscal policies.

But we are not doing that.  Despite repeated efforts…the Senate continues to reject a return to the commonsense Pay-go rules that used to apply.  Previously, Pay-go rules applied both to increases in mandatory spending and to tax cuts.  The Senate had to abide by the commonsense budgeting principle of balancing expenses and revenues.  Unfortunately, the principle was abandoned….

As a result, tax breaks have not been paid for by reductions in Federal spending, and thus the only way to pay for them has been to increase our deficit to historically high levels and borrow more and more money.  Now we have to pay for those tax breaks plus the cost of borrowing for them.  Instead of reducing the deficit, as some people claimed, the fiscal policies of this administration and its allies in Congress will add more…debt for each of the next 5 years.  That is why I will once again cosponsor the Pay-go amendment and continue to hope that my colleagues will return to a smart rule that has worked in the past and can work again.

Our debt also matters internationally.  My friend, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, likes to remind us that it took 42 Presidents 224 years to run up only $1 trillion of foreign-held debt.  This administration did more than that in just 5 years.  Now, there is nothing wrong with borrowing from foreign countries.  But we must remember that the more we depend on foreign nations to lend us money, the more our economic security is tied to the whims of foreign leaders whose interests might not be aligned with ours.

Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally.  Leadership means that “the buck stops here.”  Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.  America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.  Americans deserve better.

I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.

Senator Barack Obama (D, IL) 16 Mar 2006, Congressional Record Volume, 152, Number 34 (Thursday, March 16, 2006)] [Senate] [Pages S2236-S2241]

What he said.  Figures in brackets updated to 2013.

Compromise

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The Wall Street Journal also wondered a bit ago why it’s so hard for the two parties in DC to get along—”the two parties have a hard time even agreeing to disagree,” is the way they put it.

I think they’ve missed a key factor.  Here’s the basis for the WSJ‘s conjecture [emphasis in the original]:

Even when the differences between the two sides seem relatively small—whether, for example, to raise the top tax rate four percentage points for families earning more than $250,000, or whether to make that income level $450,000—compromise is difficult because both sides think important precedents would be set.  Today’s decisions will set the backdrop for broader debates on tax reform and spending later in the year.

When Republicans agreed to raise any tax rates at all, for example, they knew that they had opened the door for a new set of arguments about which rates and at what level.  The question had shifted from whether to raise rates to how—and that’s a significant shift.

It’s more than a significant shift.  It’s a complete surrender of a fundamental conservative principle: lower taxes, which benefits the economy and American citizens; don’t raise them, which achieves the opposite.

For the Democrats’ part, the WSJ says

Similarly, when Mr. Obama said he could accept the idea of reducing entitlement costs by embracing a formula for lowering cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients, he was setting a precedent as well—a precedent saying that Democrats were willing to consider policies that reduced entitlement spending not just by holding down costs but also by reducing benefits to recipients.

But there is no precedent at all here.  The bit about Social Security was just idle chit-chat—bad faith negotiating.  There is no such thing in the actual deal; Obama accepted nothing related to entitlements, and he set no precedent at all.

Compromise requires a number of factors in order to be possible; among these are a need-driven interest in compromise.  The Republican Party has that interest—indeed, they beg for compromise, any compromise, so they can have a fig leaf of having accomplished something, and they’ve shown they’ll give away the store for the smallest trivium.  The Democrats, on the other hand, have no need of compromise, and so they have no interest in one.  They know that they can get whatever they want out of the Republicans—to the extent they need deal with them at all—because they know the Republicans will fold even on their most fundamental principles.

This is why it’s so hard for the two parties to get along—it’s a strictly one-way affair, with the dominant party having no need of it.

Too Many Laws

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Here’s an example of the over-complexity that results from too many laws on our books, and of the injustice that is inflicted as a result of that over-complexity.  Jacob Gershman, writing in The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog describes an instance of rape that isn’t rape.

Here are two cases.  In one, a man has sexual intercourse with a woman by tricking her into believing he was, in fact, her boyfriend.  In another, a man has sexual intercourse with a woman by tricking her into believing he was, in fact, her husband.

A lower court convicted the man in the first case of rape, and an appellate court reversed—no rape had occurred.  Here’s the law on that, as described by that appellate court:

…a victim of a crime is deemed “unconscious” when he or she is “not aware, knowing, perceiving, or cognizant of the essential characteristics of the act due to the perpetrator’s fraud in fact.

But pretending to be someone else is a fraud of “inducement” not “fact.” That means that the jury couldn’t convict [the…man] on that basis[.]

A married woman, similarly tricked (differing only by the…man…pretending to be husband rather than boyfriend), would get the rape conviction, as the appellate court also pointed out in its ruling in the first case.

…California’s penal code “provides that rape includes an act of sexual intercourse ‘[w]here a person submits under the belief that the person committing the act is the victim’s spouse, and this belief is induced by any artifice, pretense, or concealment practiced by the accused, with intent to induce the belief.'”

California’s Attorney General Kamala Harris is on the case, though.

The evidence is clear that this case involved a nonconsensual assault that fits within the general understanding of what constitutes rape.  This law is arcane, and I will work with the Legislature to fix it.

Look for yet another law on the books, rather than a merging of these two laws into a single one with a unified definition of rape.