Last night US Congressperson Tim Walberg (R-Tipton) met with
Monroe County constituents in Temperance and I
was in attendance. Most of us have watched clips of conservative politicians
speaking to their audience and we shake our head in disbelief at what we hear
them say. This Town Hall meeting was an amazing 60-minute clip that left me
with a stiff neck form shaking my head “No” and a sore face from all the
jaw-dropping I did.
Walberg says you are
going to need your guns
Tim Walberg preached the good word of the 2nd
Amendment to the delight of his supporters. Most of us believe that we have the
5th Amendment right to defend ourselves, our life, our liberty and
our property, including self defense with a weapon. Walberg and his supporters
believe that they have a so-called 2nd Amendment right to arm a
private militia to overthrow the government.
The 2nd Amendment reads, “A well regulated
militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep
and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
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| A "well regulated militia" |
A “well regulated militia” is the regular military as
opposed to the volunteers. The difference between the two is that the regulars
have an officer appointed by the Governor; they are provisioned (made regular) with uniforms,
weapons and other supplies by the state government; and they are under the
control of (regulated by) the state government.
The “people” referred to in the 2nd Amendment are
not all of the people, but they are a specific subset of the people; they are the
people who serve in the military unit of the state. The 2nd
Amendment does not recognize any right of people outside of the regular
military units to keep and bear weapons of any kind; weapons for self defense
are properly a 5th Amendment issue.
My personal position is that I will defend your right to
have a handgun, rifle, shotgun or any number of weapons suitable for
self-defense, for hunting or sport shooting or even as a novelty for
collection, but I will not defend anyone’s right to have weapons for the
purpose of overthrowing the government that we have established by election.
That being said, some weapons should clearly be off limits,
such as nuclear missiles, bazookas and fragmenting grenades. Where a person’s
right to a weapon for self defense ends and the weapon is clearly for military
purposes is a question worthy of debate.
Anyone who can’t have that discussion, either because they
cannot tolerate any allowance for the ownership of weapons or because they
cannot tolerate any restriction on the ownership of weapons, has earned my
contempt.
Walberg thinks a low
minimum wage is a good thing
Tim Walberg told us how important low minimum wages were to
unskilled workers looking for entry level opportunities, especially young
people just getting out of school. His audience loved it! But there are serious
problems with this belief.
First, while a very high percentage of young workers without
college degrees have minimum wage jobs, they are not the majority of the people
holding these minimum wage jobs. Let me reword this, most of the people who
have minimum wage jobs are not new entrants to the workforce who lack skills,
education and job experience.
Second, he pointed out how grateful he was for his first job
which was a minimum wage job. But in 1968 or slightly later when Walberg was
looking for that first job as a teen or young adult, the minimum wage was $1.60
per hour; expressed as 2013 dollars that would be $10.58.
Supporters of a minimum wage increase are asking for $9 per
hour adjusted over a period of several years which would be less than what
Walberg and others his age earned at their first minimum wage job.
Finally, most minimum wage jobs are not entry level jobs.
The people who take these jobs have little or not opportunity for upward
mobility over time.
Walberg acknowledged that young people entering the
workforce were competing for jobs with people who are trying to live on two or
more low wage jobs, were dependents of people with better income or people who
might have retired by need a little more income to subsist.
What this means is that the profits of businesses that employ
at minimum wage are being subsidized by primary wage earners or retirements.
Walberg excuses
businesses that evade new taxes established by “Obamacare”
Walberg seemed to literally praise business owners who
employed part-time, minimum wage, no-benefit people and had taken action to
avoid having to help pay for the tax credits and Medicaid benefits that these
underpaid employees depended on.
One employer was reducing all of their employee’s hours to
less than 30 hours per week. Another employer was reorganizing as three
companies all working from the same business address.
I am no expert on the tax issues, but it looks like they
were trying to reclassify their business so that they would look too small to
have to pay the tax. Technically, what they are doing is called tax avoidance,
but I think it is damned close to being tax evasion.
In a recent interview for the Monroe News, Walberg referred
to the Republican Party as one that stood for personal responsibility and high
moral values. These business described by Walberg are neither! They do not pay
their employees enough to live without government assistance and then they
avoid paying the taxes to cover the cost of government assistance provided to
their underpaid employees.
Walberg says that
government is growing and that it spends too much
The brilliant satirist H. L. Mencken said, "For every
complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." The
message that government is too big and spends too much and is growing, growing,
growing, never gets old but it has just plain incorrect for many years now.
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| Non-defense spending as a percent of GDP is stable |
The cost of healthcare is going up, but this is not because
government is buying more healthcare, it is because healthcare companies
including, insurance companies and payment processors and big new corporate
healthcare networks are driving up the cost to create more profits for
themselves.
The cost of maintaining a wartime military is high,
especially the cost of outsourcing services to big corporation that are
profiting from war in the Middle East.
The cost of borrowing money to run the government is going
up, but only because one Congress after another has refused to be fiscally
responsible and tax from wealth to pay for government instead of borrowing from
wealth to pay for the same government.
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| Deficits would have been small without Bush Era tax cuts |
Excluding healthcare, military, and debt related expenses due to tax breaks for the wealthy,
the size and cost of government relative to the economy (population and GDP)
has either been stable or shrinking.
Walberg supports the
flat tax
The so-called flat tax never stops being attractive to
ignorant people who lack math skills or just don’t care about the impact of the
tax on the working poor. When one Walberg support volunteered that she
supported the flat tax, Walberg was quick to agree.
First. The myth shared by conservatives is that the bottom
50% don’t pay any Federal Income Tax, but I went to the IRS web site and based
on the latest data that was available I learned that every tax bracket in the
bottom 50% except for the very lowest one (under $10,000) pad roughly 10%. This
is actual payment of taxes versus actual earnings.
Second. People who don’t do math well can’t seem to grasp
the difference between income and disposal income after cost of living. A
single parent earning roughly $20,000 and support one child has no disposable
income whatsoever; $2,000 in taxes would devastate them. A double-income, no
children household with two professional incomes totally $500,000 would hardly
miss $50,000 in taxes and in fact would be in a better position to pay $175,000
than the single-parent would be to pay even $175.
Walberg blames the
President for Congress’s failure to budget
How is it even possible that Obama could be responsible for
Congress’s unprecedented inability to budget? This is an explicit duty of Congress;
not the President!
Walberg told his audience that very reasonable Republicans
had offered the President budgets and that the President rejected them out of
hand and refused to make any concessions. Democrats no better, but the
Republicans in the audience were eating this up.
Here is how government works: Congress tells the President
what government must do and how much it must spend to do it. Then, Congress
tells the President how much he can collect in taxes and how much he can
borrow. Then the President has to figure out how to pay for the government that
Congress has told him to pay for with the money that Congress authorized him to
spend.
I’m sure all of you got it; Congress is responsible for the
budget, not the President. But Walberg’s audience is hopelessly stupid and they
will never get it.
Walberg is still
running against the President
I was amazed that Walberg was still wasting time on rhetoric
about how they lost the election to Obama. Oddly it hasn’t occurred to him that
the reason they lost the election was because more people wanted Obama to be
president than didn’t. Instead he focused on how low voter turnout by
Republicans cost them the election.
Let me just say this, the Republicans turned out in numbers.
Republicans were not turned away at the polls and were not discouraged in any
way from voting. The Republicans lost! They are in the minority! Republicans
only dominate representative government because of very clever design of
districts … gerrymandering.
Beyond that, it is time to quit running against Obama and
start working with him. Well it would be for any rational human being, but that
might be too much to expect from Walberg.
The trip home
We left after one hour. I have no idea how long the Town
Hall went on, but we had as much as we could take. We spent most of the trip
home taking turns shouting at the windshield. I spent the last part of the trip
have a phone conversation with a fellow Democrat in the 7th Congressional
District about what we need to do to make sure that Tim Walberg doesn’t get
reelected in 2014.
Blue Tigers Rawr!
