I couldn't resist responding.
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Warren
Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum
of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do
likewise.
While I understand the emotion behind this message,
anger over the fact that Congress fails to do its Constitutional duty, fails
to represent its constituents, passes bills without reading them, engages in
conflicts of interest (crony-capitalism, crony-environmentalism), and
statism, a reform act is not necessary. This email chain is cute and
good for a chuckle, but uninformed and reactionary. Voting Congressmen and
Congresswomen out works well when the voting public takes the responsibility
to educate themselves on the issues, on our catholic morality, and on what
Congress is truly doing. Failure to educate ourselves and hold
representatives responsible has led us here. It is our fault.
The term “reform” is heard
quite often, and I believe it is used in a very misleading way. When we
hear the word reform, we think of un-complicating things, bring them back to
a simpler time, back to common-sense understanding and plain-English
interpretation. But to reform literally means to re-form
something; change it, form it again in a new way. We’ve witnessed quite
a bit of reform in this country over the last five years, with calls for
more, and I don’t think anyone could honestly say things have become more
simple, more common sense, with plain-English interpretation.
This
document also has a tone of envy, of do-unto-them, of get even. I
understand the sentiment, but the items below are vengeful, wouldn’t
accomplish much, and reveal an ignorance of the liberty available to us in
this exceptional and unique country in the history of the world. Is
America perfect? No. But it’s better than the alternatives.
As is
attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging
thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot
help small men up by tearing big men down. You cannot help the poor by
destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage-earner up by pulling the
wage-payer down. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your
income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish sound social security on borrowed money. You cannot
build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and
independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they
could and should do for themselves.
We
won’t solve the problem of our congressional representatives by tying them to
devices which are bad for us as human beings, no matter how much fun that
might appear.
There is no tenure beyond the fact that congressional
representatives are re-elected term after term. This can be fixed by
not re-electing them term after term.
A nice symbolic gesture; I’d be surprised if Congress
wouldn’t do it on their own for votes. Our president just took a
voluntary paycut himself.
It would be better for all
Americans if Social Security were made optional or disbanded entirely.
By taking 12.4% of an individual’s income (you pay 6.2%, your employer pays
6.2%), you’re robbing individuals of money they could invest or save, and of
the compounding growth that income could have through the decades they work
in exchange for a pittance, a fixed distribution from the government when
they retire. Educating someone on the time-value of an investment can
be done in ten minutes, can be done in a high school course. Instead,
many spend their adult lives living in financial ignorance and discovering in
retirement that they have fixed incomes. When an individual saves 10%
of their income through their lives, they will do better than what Social
Security provides.
You don’t purchase retirement plans. You save
for retirement. You prepare for retirement. You retire
from wage earning when you can affor to, not when you’re “old enough.”
As Americans, we are responsible for our own retirement. Be it through
corporate pensions, tax advantaged retirement accounts like IRAs and 401ks,
stock purchases, owning business or other assets that return income, or just
stuffing money into jars, you’ll need income when you’re no longer earning
wages. It is not difficult, but it might require sacrifice or thrift.
Should congress get a
pension? I could care less, other than I pay for it and that it is a
very sweet pension. Other government employees get pensions at the
federal, state, and local level. Shall we envy them as well and remove
their pensions? They have sweet pensions too, although some states and
municipalities are discovering that they can’t afford them. They’ve
spent too much. How will they fund these obligations?
In the private sector,
pensions are few and far between because employment doesn’t often last the
20-30 years it has in some industries in the past. And it’s less costly
for a corporation to match contribution to retirement plans than have the
liability of pension payments for decades. It’s also less risky and
better return for individuals to own their own retirement moneys rather than
depend on a corporation that may disappear.
It does seem a conflict
of interest, doesn’t it? But we can always vote them out if they do
something we don’t like. Although we don’t seem to be angry
enough. As the CPI (Consumer Price Index) doesn’t include the cost of
gas or food, it’s not a very good indicator of inflation of the cost of
living. 3% sounds nice, but what if we experience inflations of 10%?
15% It’s happened in my lifetime, in America. Back to that Social
Security thing. A fixed income isn’t very good when the price of things
goes up.
The American people don’t have
a health care system. We participate in a highly regulated yet open
market of health care providers. Competition in this market keeps the
prices down a little and keeps the service quick. Businesses, in order
to attract employees, have through the decades offered more and more
compensation in the form of health insurance benefits.
Costs of health care have
risen due to regulations on the nature of the health-care itself (everything
sanitary, everything documented, nothing can ever be permitted to go wrong
…gets expensive) and to the over-coverages of health insurance in
general. Over-coverage? Yes. When a service like a doctor
visit is “free” because it’s covered by insurance, people tend to use more of
it. When a service costs you something out of your own pocket, you will
be wiser and more conservative with how much you use. How much wine
moves at the wedding reception when it’s an open bar compared to the guests
buying their own drinks?
Insurance is to insure you
financially against catastrophic and rare events. It’s not meant to pay
for expensive services every time your child has a runny nose.
… Congress doesn’t have to abide by laws? That
they get away with transgressions of the law and are derelict in their
responsibility (their oath) to uphold and defend the Constitution is both a
moral and a public problem. This also can be resolved by voting them
out.
Where does the mindset come
from that we must do as we’re told by Congress, that they can impose laws on
us? The American government is one of representation and the consent of
the governed. These people are not our leaders and they certainly
aren’t our rulers; they are our representatives, our servants, and must be
reminded of this, held to this. If a Congressman or Congresswoman told
you to pick up their dry cleaning, I do hope that you would laugh at them and
taunt them with a childish “you’re not the boss of me. Pick it up yourself.”
I really wonder what this
means. Does it suggest that all Congressmen/women should be out of a
job January 1, 2014?
I chose neither to pass it on
nor to delete it. I chose to read it, think and send it back for
further consideration. I am an individual with a brain, dignity, and
liberty, with Catholic moral guidance, and am not a serf of a government or
ward of the state. Our representatives have ignored their
responsibilities and over-extended their reach. The way to keep liberty
is simple, it is clear, and it does not require reform. It requires
review and renewal of fundamentals and recognition that mankind, and its
governments, are constrained by, as Thomas Jefferson so eloquently put it,
inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.
You are one of my 20 - Please keep it going, and thanks. |
And I encourage
you to send this back down the chain so that Americans come to
realize that they already have the power to fix Congress. Vote with your
head. Now click your heals three times, Dorothy. There’s no place
like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.
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