This week the Obama campaign transitions from gay marriage to placing blame for the looming government debt crisis on the only people who are doing anything to alleviate it.  He continues to insist that the problem is everyone is not “doing their fair share.”   He never discloses the details of his notion of “fair,” except to emphasize that high income tax payers, those earning over $200,000, should pay more.

The Treasury Department just released it’s monthly statement and it shows what you’ll not hear from any of the political-media establishment: without the increase in tax rates the President demands, income tax revenue for 2012 is on track to set a new record.

Even though the economic recovery is very weak with both GDP and job growth at lower rates than any previous recovery since the 1930s, a few Americans have begun to produce more income than they did in the depths of the recession.  As always the government will share in their success.  The income tax is steeply progressive, with fewer than 2.8% of taxpayers, those who earn over $200,000, providing half of all the tax revenue the government receives.  Of those over-$200,000 folks two-thirds are small business owners. 

There are approximately 310 million people in America.  This tiny minority, these 2.6 million taxpayers, are the economic engine that drives the American economy, providing the goods and services, most of the jobs and most of the income tax revenue.  Their personal assets are at risk every day.  They never get a bailout and they struggle to comply with ever more complex regulations.   Yet these are the people Barack Obama insists are “not doing their fair share.”

In a rational world these folks would be honored as economic heroes, not targeted for punitive tax increases.  Mitt Romney should ask: “Mr. President, how much more would be fair?”

“A card for Michelle” was the subject of the email.  So I clicked on the Happy-Mothers-Day link and was transported to a web page.  There they were, Barack, Michelle and Malia grinning back at me along side this invitation to wish Michelle a happy Mothers Day and “see what the President has to say about the moms in his life.”  So I filled in my email and clicked on “sign the card” and was immediately delivered to….  (scroll down)

... a new page that transformed me from well-wisher to “Contributor.”   No place for me to write a greeting to Michelle.  Nothing from the President about moms in his life! 

Is this the card for Michelle?   I guess so.

He [opposing candidate] is spending an awful lot of time talking about me. You notice that? I haven’t seen an ad yet where he talks about what he’s going to do. And the reason is because he knows they don’t have any good answers, they know they’ve had their turn…and made a mess of things.”

They know that you’re not real happy with them and so the only way they figure they’re going to win this election is if they make you scared of me.

If you guessed this was Mitt Romney speaking you get credit for logical thinking, but you’re wrong.  This was a direct quote of Barack Obama in October of 2008, bashing his opponent John McCain by linking him to the outgoing Bush Administration.

Now, in May 2012 the Obama campaign is coordinating with friendly media to make you scared of his challenger, Mitt Romney.  Most recently they characterized Romney as an evil rich guy who gleefully fires hapless workers, and as a bully who assaulted a high school classmate five decades ago.

Our businesses have now created more than 4.2 million new jobs over the last 26 months — more than 1 million jobs in the last six months alone!

If you’re not in the habit of studying Labor Dept. statistics this might seem like a lot of jobs.  But is it?  This chart provides what the Obama campaign and the media do not: context.

As the chart shows the current recovery in private sector jobs is the weakest since 1950.  The strongest was the recovery of the 1980s when the government response was the opposite of Obama’s, reduced government regulation and lower taxes.

Note that the President seeks to focus your attention on private sector jobs instead of the usual statistic, all jobs, including public and private.  He still thinks government is more important than the private sector but his stimulus, which was sold in part as insurance against layoffs at the state and local level has failed.  State and local governments have shed a half million employees over the past 26 months.

Not only is the current recovery the weakest in six decades it has come at a steep cost.  We’re living through and will eventually suffer the consequences of the largest deficits and fastest growing debt in American history.  After adjusting for inflation, the deficits of 2009-10-11 are twice the size of the annual deficits during World War II.

In the first week of his Administration in 2009 Obama’s economic team published a report with predictions of very specific outcomes from his so-called stimulus spending surge.  There were several predictions regarding jobs, none of which has come true.  This chart compares their core jobs prediction, upon which all the others were based, with reality.  In January of 2009 these economists told us that if no stimulus were enacted there would be 133.9 million jobs at the end of 2010.  Or, if Congress passed the stimulus there would be 137.6 million jobs.  At the time this was presented as verified wisdom.  We could simply choose to have 4 million more jobs by enacting a stimulus. 

As the second chart shows 2010 and 2011 came and went and we’re still 4.5 million jobs short of these predictions.  But the money has been spent, the debt is owed, interest must be paid.

The take-away should be the same lesson Americans have had to learn the hard way, over and over since the 1920s.   Ordinary men and women do not acquire super-natural powers by winning an election or being hired to make “policy”  for the President.  Yet the political-media establishment will always present the economic predictions and projections of these ordinary men and women as if they were indisputable truth.

Even the establishment media have begun – grudgingly – to acknowledge what we’ve been reporting here since last summer: behind these marginally positive numbers are more ominous statistics that track the relentlessly deteriorating economic circumstances of tens of millions of Americans.

Included in each monthly report is the Labor Force Participation Rate or the percentage of working age people who are counted as part of the labor force either by being employed or by qualifying for the status of “unemployed.”  The statisticians properly exclude from the ranks of “unemployed” those adults who don’t want a job, such as stay-at-home moms and students.  Also excluded are those who want jobs but did not “participate” in the labor force by actively looking for a job in recent weeks.  The unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number who qualify as “unemployed” by the total labor force.

As the above chart shows, for 31 months the participation rate has steadily declined, in tandem with the unemployment rate.  The difference between the April participation rate of 63.6% and the 65% rate of October 2009, the first month in the chart, is 3.45 million people who want jobs but are not counted as unemployed.  If they had been counted the unemployment rate for April would have been 10.1%, unchanged from 31 months ago.

All across the internet Obama supporters snort that unemployment statistics have been compiled and calculated the same way since the 1940s, but no previous President suffered critics like us calling a declining unemployment rate bad news.  They’re right.  But, since the government began compiling these statistics in 1947 there have been nine recessions with job loses.  The current recovery is the only one out of the nine to see a decline in the unemployment rate result from reclassifying millions of jobless people from “unemployed” to “not in the labor force.”

The charts to the right show the first 31 months of each of the last three post recession recoveries.  During the 2003-06 and 1992-94 periods The Labor Force Participation Rate was virtually the same at the end of the first 31 months as at the beginning.  During the Reagan recovery of the eighties, the participation rate soared higher at the same time the unemployment rate dropped dramatically.

Here are the most shocking, numbers of all:

• From the beginning of 2009 through April, 2012 the total working age population increased by just over 8 million people. 
• Over the same period the labor force, the sum of those who are employed plus those who are seeking jobs, increased by only 129 thousand, less than one percent. 
• The increase in the number classified as “not in the labor force,” or not working and not seeking a job has grown by 7.9 Million, or 99% of the increase in the working age population.
• In April alone, while employers reported creating 115,000 jobs the number of Americans classified by the Labor Department as “not in the labor force,” or not working and not looking for a job increased by 522,000.

At a rally in Florida I pointed out that I was paying taxes of roughly 28 percent on my income. My question was, “How come I’m not paying 50?”

In 2009, the latest year IRS statistics are available 470 thousand taxpayers reported incomes in excess of $1 million.   They paid $131.5 billion in income tax.  Mr. King asks why he’s not required to pay 50%, or nearly double his current rate.

The chart shows what would have been the effect on the deficit of doubling or even tripling tax revenue from millionaires.  In 2009 the latest year for which IRS income tax statistics have been published, the deficit was $1.413 Trillion.  Had Congress been able to triple the tax take from millionaires the deficit would still have been over $1 Trillion – far and away the largest in US history.  In fact, after adjusting for inflation, $1 trillion is twice as much as the annual deficits the government ran during World War II, the previous high water mark.

Mr. King attacked New Jersey Governor Christie’s statement that if Warren Buffett thinks he should pay more income tax he is free to write a check and pay it.  Mr. King had no rebuttal to this simple, common sense except to sneer that Christie is fat and might have indulged in “the all-you-can-eat cheese buffet at Applebee’s in Jersey City.”

Mr. King continued:

It’s true that some rich folks put at least some of their tax savings into charitable contributions. My wife and I give away roughly $4 million a year…Warren Buffet does the same; so does Bill Gates; so does Steven Spielberg; so do the Koch brothers; so did the late Steve Jobs. All fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. What charitable 1-percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts…

Mr. King seems to believe millionaires can pay enough additional tax to make add significant spending to all these priorities, education, entitlements, infrastructure and repayment of the debt.

The chart should help Mr. King put his ideas in context.  Put simply, there aren’t enough millionaires to fund significant spending increases for his favored government activities, even if it were possible to double their tax payments, which, as we’ll discuss below, is probably not possible.  In fact, the cost of entitlements was virtually equal to all, pre-tax income earned by millionaires.

By the way, since the Obama Administration began in 2009 the combined cost of Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider “war on terror” has totaled about $554 billion or 11% of the $5 trillion increase in the national debt since the day the President was sworn in.

Mr. King continues:

That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry. 

Mr. King like the President, is angry because more than half of America has refused to unite behind an agenda of ever increasing government cost, intervention and control over the private economy that inevitably results in lost economic opportunity for most of us, with the blatantly obvious exception of a politically connected unions and campaign-donor cronies rewarded with funds for unworkable, green energy schemes.

Mr. King’s angry rant continues:

Most rich folks paying 28 percent taxes do not give out another 28 percent of their income to charity…And what they do give away is—like the monies my wife and I donate—totally at their own discretion. That’s the rich-guy philosophy in a nutshell: Don’t tell us how to use our money; we’ll tell you.

The opposing philosophy of the progressive left is that by running for office, or securing a job in the bureaucracy ordinary men assume the self-anointed power to manage other people’s lives and other people’s income.  Mr. King doesn’t seem to notice the manifest failures of vast government bureaucracies, not the  least of which is Congress and the President running up spending so high that there is no plausible scenario wherein the tax payers ever catch up and balance the budget and start chipping away at the debt.

Mr. King complains about several issues that have nothing to do with tax rates on the rich such as his opinion that America is insufficiently regulated.  But it wouldn’t require any more tax revenue for the existing bureaucrats to write even more odious regulations.  They’re only restrained by fear of voter blow-back as they recently suffered when they tried to make it illegal for farm children to do chores.

 Mr. King gives sneers and dismisses verified, validated arguments against higher top bracket tax rates:

• A dramatic tax rate increase, enough to double revenue from the rich is likely to result in less, rather than more revenue.  The rich, more than the rest of us have the means to avoid taxes by shifting income from one tax year to another, holding assets instead of selling them for a taxable capital gain, and myriad loopholes that politicians universally condemn but never seem to find a way to repeal.  The chart at the bottom of this post shows that government collected more tax revenue from millionaires when their effective tax rates were lower.
  
• The rich are the investors who provide the capital resources an economy must have.  Without capital resources jobs are not created and goods and services can not be produced.
  

Stephen King’s anger is misplaced.  Rather than blame America’s troubles on taxpayers, even rich taxpayers he should confront reality: America’s problems are not caused by a government without enough money to throw around.  Our problems are due to the people not having enough economic liberty.

The Chart compares recent GDP growth with the recovery of the 1980s. [continued below the chart]

Historically, deeper than average recessions, such as we suffered in 2008 and 2009 spawned stronger than average recoveries.  Before 2008 the worst economic downturn since the 1930s had been the recession of 1982.  By some measures it was worse than than 2008-09.  The unemployment rate was higher and mortgage interest rates spiked as high as 16%, compared to 4% – 5% this time.  Similar to the current downturn, house prices plummeted and foreclosures soared.  

But the 1980s recovery was much more robust.  The big difference between the two recoveries has been  government action.  Presidents Bush and Obama responded to the downturn by launching several interventionist initiatives that enhanced the power and control of government over the economy with new regulations and bailouts of insolvent financial firms and unionized car companies.  President Obama, a disciple of Keynesian economic theory launched the largest non-military spending increase ever to “stimulate” the economy.  His supporters now say the economy failed to grow and create the millions of jobs, Obama had promised not because stimulus is a bogus economic theory but because Obama didn’t spend enough!

To satisfy their political supporters Obama and the Democrats scheduled several massive tax increases to begin at the start of 2013.  Businesses appear to be scaling back in anticipation of these new burdens but Obama does not seem inclined to do anything to prevent them.  In 1982 President Reagan responded to recession with historic tax cuts and by scaling back government regulation and intervention.

In 1984 President Reagan ran for reelection on his economic record of restoration, recovery and astounding job growth.  President Obama’s reelection campaign so far has been an effort to divert attention away from his record with divisive attacks on American energy companies and high income taxpayers, most of whom are small business employers.  Reagan won a second term in the largest Electoral College landslide in American history.  Obama will be lucky to win by 1%, if at all.

In several campaign speeches President Obama has asserted that voters face a choice between maintaining the current tax rates for high income Americans, most of whom are small business employers, or raising those tax rates in order to continue providing governmental benefits and services. 

The choice is false because as we showed here the current tax rates generated more, not less revenue than previous, higher rates.  And, as we showed here income tax revenue from millionaires nearly tripled within 5 years after the current (Bush) tax rates were enacted.

What about the relationship between middle class jobs and million dollar incomes?  Is the middle class deprived of jobs and prosperity when there are more rich people and their incomes are higher?

Any improvement in the human condition requires two economic inputs: human resources (given the old fashioned label “labor” in economics textbooks) and capital resources, including land, buildings, machinery, vehicles, computers, software, and cash.  Production, economic growth and job creation are not possible without capital resources.  Reinvestment of after tax profits has always the biggest source of capital resources for small businesses.  This source is even more important since new banking regulations have restricted bank lending to small businesses.

The business income of small business Partnerships, LLCs and Sub-Chapter S corporations are reported on the owners personal tax returns, and IRS data show that three quarters of taxpayers who report over $1 million are small business owners.  (The most recent IRS data is for tax year 2009, reported on tax returns filed in 2010.)

As the chart below shows, over the last decade there was consistent correlation between the number of jobs and the number of Americans with million dollar incomes.  [continued below the chart]

The number of millionaires grew rapidly after enactment of the current (Bush) tax rates in 2003, reaching a peak in 2007.  As the chart shows, the number of jobs grew with them.  However, the recession was particularly harsh on millionaires.

• In 2007  approximately 3 of every 1,000 taxpayers earned more than $1 million.
• By 2009 the number had fallen by 40% to fewer than 2 of every 1,000 taxpayers earning over $1 million.

The decline in business owners and investors with million dollar incomes to reinvest is not the only reason for the decline in jobs.  but obviously, with fewer millionaires, total capital resources to invest in small businesses, where most American jobs are created, declined as well.

Without ever explaining how, Obama seeks to promote the impression that the middle class would be better off if there were fewer Americans with million dollar incomes.  Given the data in the chart above he should be held accountable for an explanation.

…we live in the real world, with real choices and real consequences. Right now, we’ve got significant deficits to close.  We’ve got serious investments to make to keep our economy growing.  And we can’t afford to keep spending more money on tax cuts for millionaires who don’t need them and didn’t even ask for them.

So in the President’s Orwellian vocabulary when a taxpayer keeps some of his own income it’s “spending money.”  But when government spends money it’s “investment.”

The perception Obama hopes to plant in the mind of the listener is that the government’s cash shortage is caused not by his massive spending surge, but by the tax rates that apply to million dollar incomes.

The chart tracks income tax revenue from taxpayers earning over $1 million from 2000 through 2009, the latest year for which IRS statistics are available.  It shows a dramatic revenue increase after tax rates were reduced in 2003.   As the red line shows, the average, effective tax rate paid by millionaires went down because the Bush tax cuts of 2003:

• lowered the top tax bracket rate for “ordinary income” (salaries and business profits) from 39.6% to 35%
• Lowered the top rate for capital gains from 20% to 15%
• Lowered the top rate for stock dividends from 39.6 to 15%.

A taxpayer’s “effective tax rate” is the amount of tax dollars paid divided by adjusted gross income.  Typically, high income taxpayers’ effective rate results from a blend of ordinary income taxed at 35% and capital gains and dividend income taxed at 15%.

The “Bush tax cuts” enacted in 2003 are still in effect.  In 2007 more tax revenue was collected from millionaires than any previous year, ever.

However, the recession was particularly harsh on millionaires.

• In 2007  approximately 3 of every 1,000 taxpayers earned more than $1 million.
• By 2009 the number had fallen by 40% to fewer than 2 of every 1,000 taxpayers earning over $1 million.

As a consequence the chart above shows that revenue from millionaires went down, even as their effective tax rate went back up, because the recession drove down income from capital gains and dividends.

If Obama’s only goal were to maximize revenue to the government he would enthusiastically support the current tax rates as – to use one of their favorite words for government policy – “smart” because:

• The capital gains tax is voluntary.  It comes due only when an asset that has appreciated in value is sold.  Obviously, people are more likely to sell when the tax is lower.  Throughout it’s history the capital gains taxed has consistently generated more revenue at lower rates and less revenue at higher rates.
• Stock dividends are the investors’ share of corporate profits remaining after payment of corporate income tax, as high as 35%.  Thus the investor’s individual tax is a second levy on the same corporate profits.  When the individual tax rate on dividends was higher companies paid smaller dividends or no dividend at all because investors wanted to avoid double taxation and preferred profits to be deployed in ways that might enhance the market value of the stock.  After the tax rate on dividends was reduced investors looked for stocks that paid dividends and companies responded by paying more.  Thus, the government is now collecting taxes on dividend income that did not exist when tax rates were higher and would disappear if the rates went back up.

In addition to to generating more revenue to the government, lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains also benefit the economy in general and those who seek jobs in particular:

• When people sell an asset they look for new investments for the funds they receive, including business start-ups and business expansions that generate jobs.  If the capital gains tax rate is higher they are less likely to sell and those new start-ups are less likely to come into existence.
• When investors receive dividends they seek new investment opportunities for those funds, including job creating business start-ups and expansions.

By the way, taxpayers in all brackets pay lower rates on capital gains and dividends than they do on ordinary income.  In fact capital gains are tax free for taxpayers whose ordinary income rate is 15%, which would include most families who earn less than about $80,000, and some who earn even more.

The President’s call for tax increases on high income earners is a good example.  It’s an obvious effort to exploit the unseemly human emotions of envy and resentment to promote his political objectives.  This chart showing revenue received by the government since implementation of the Bush tax cuts puts his rhetoric in perspective. [continued below the chart]The President’s standard campaign speech, already repeated to several audiences includes:

…we live in the real world, with real choices and real consequences. Right now, we’ve got significant deficits to close.  We’ve got serious investments to make to keep our economy growing.  And we can’t afford to keep spending more money on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans who don’t need them and didn’t even ask for them.

Obama’s goal is to plant in the mind of his audience the perception that because of the Bush tax cuts the government is collecting less revenue than in the past and is deprived of the cash it needs to balance its budget and fund “investments.”  But as the chart shows government revenue increased dramatically after implementation of the current tax rates, usually called “the Bush tax cuts” in 2003.  Revenue went down when the recession hit in 2009 but higher tax rates during a severe recession would only impede recovery, not generate more revenue.  The Office of Management and Budget projects 2012 revenue will be about the same as 2007 and will continue to increase every year, even if all tax rates remain the same.

This was not the first time tax revenue went up following cuts in tax rates.  It happened in the 1920s.  It happened again in the 1960s when President Kennedy’s tax cut plan was implemented. [continued below the chart]

In the 1980s President Reagan enacted two sweeping cuts in income tax rates.  The first was phased in over three years during in a severe recession.  Income tax revenue increased after the recession ended.  The second round of tax cuts was coupled with elimination of loopholes and revenue soared. [continued below the chart]

If the economy continues to recover from recession tax revenue will increase every year without an increase in tax rates.  The real cause of the government’s enormous deficits, projected by the Obama budget to continue, literally forever even if his proposed tax increases are enacted,  is excessive spending, not lack of tax revenue.

After three months of moderately strong job growth the establishment media had been crowing that the economy was no longer an election issue, improving President Obama’s shot at a second term.  But then the Labor Department released a disappointing jobs report for March.  Employers created only 121,000 new jobs.

The first chart compares job losses and gains during the last four recessions and recoveries.  [Continued below the chart]The current cycle is the worst for jobs since the Great Depression.  There have been eleven recession-recovery cycles since the end of World War II, 67 years ago.  In every case except the current recovery all lost jobs were replaced within 50 months.  By this time in the recovery of the 1980s there were 6.4 million more jobs than there had been before the recession started.  Today, there are 5.2 million fewer jobs than in 2008.  If job growth continues at the March rate it will take until 2016 to replace the rest of the jobs that were lost in 2008 and 2009.

President Obama’s first political success, less than a month after his inauguration in 2009 was a staggering increase in government spending and debt, hailed by the media as brilliant economics that would cut the recession short and “put America back to work.”  Obama said his “economic stimulus”  would, in his words, “immediately jumpstart job creation and long term growth.”

So far, the “jumpstart” has been in the creation of unsustainable borrowing and debt. The next chart compares government spending during the current recession/recovery cycle with the three previous cycles. [Continued below the chart]The academic justification for a huge spending increase is the old Keynesian theory of “counter-cyclical” government intervention to “increase aggregate demand” in the marketplace.  Keynesian economic theory is especially attractive to politicians of the liberal/progressive persuasion because it gives them an excuse to do what they always want to do anyway, expand government.

As the chart shows, it turns out that a massive spending surge is not a proven economic strategy that has been used successfully in the past.  The last time it was tried was in the early 1930s and it utterly failed to shorten the Great Depression.  The chart shows only the most recent four recessions, but Obama’s spending surge is the largest ever.  There was nothing like it during any of the previous post-war recessions, and it coincides with the weakest jobs recovery since the Labor Department started using the current statistical methods in 1946.

The Keynesian fallacy is the assumption that the economic outcomes that are measurable, especially government spending, are the only ones that matter.  What is not measurable are the losses to the economy when government uses its taxing and borrowing power to divert resources from investments that would have been chosen by entrepreneurs, small businesses and corporations to government projects chosen by the political elite.  There is no way to identify or quantify the job creation from business start-ups and expansions that would have occurred if the trillions Obama borrowed for extra government spending had instead been invested by the private sector.

Keynesians simply ignore the experience of previous recessions when, without massive government intervention, the private sector recovered and jobs were created much more rapidly.

The Keynesians, who never seem to notice the flaws in their theories, are already laying the groundwork for another tsunami of government spending when the next recession hits.  Astoundingly, their explanation for the failure of Obama’s spending binge to create as many jobs as were created in any of the ten previous recoveries is that his unprecedented increase in government borrowing and spending wasn’t enough!

Jesus did not accept the cultural norm of the time that women were less than men and treated like the property of men.  It’s fitting then that the good news was first revealed to women.

The Following excerpt is from the Gospel of Matthew.  It’s Friday, the day before the Jewish Sabbath.  Jesus has been hung on the cross to die.

We begin quoting at Chapter 27, verse 45:

At noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock. ⁴⁶ At about three o’clock, Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

⁴⁷ Some of the bystanders misunderstood and thought he was calling for the prophet Elijah. ⁴⁸ One of them ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, holding it up to him on a reed stick so he could drink. ⁴⁹ But the rest said, “Wait! Let’s see whether Elijah comes to save him.”

⁵⁰ Then Jesus shouted out again, and he released his spirit. ⁵¹ At that moment the curtain in the sanctuary of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, rocks split apart, ⁵² and tombs opened. The bodies of many godly men and women who had died were raised from the dead. ⁵³ They left the cemetery after Jesus’ resurrection, went into the holy city of Jerusalem, and appeared to many people.

⁵⁴ The Roman officer and the other soldiers at the crucifixion were terrified by the earthquake and all that had happened. They said, “This man truly was the Son of God!”

⁵⁵ And many women who had come from Galilee with Jesus to care for him were watching from a distance. ⁵⁶ Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary (the mother of James and Joseph), and the mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee.

The Burial of Jesus

⁵⁷ As evening approached, Joseph, a rich man from Arimathea who had become a follower of Jesus, ⁵⁸ went to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body.  And Pilate issued an order to release it to him. ⁵⁹ Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a long sheet of clean linen cloth. ⁶⁰ He placed it in his own new tomb, which had been carved out of the rock. Then he rolled a great stone across the entrance and left. ⁶¹ Both Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting across from the tomb and watching.

The Guard at the Tomb

⁶² The next day, on the Sabbath, the leading priests and Pharisees went to see Pilate. ⁶³ They told him, “Sir, we remember what that deceiver once said while he was still alive: ‘After three days I will rise from the dead.’ ⁶⁴ So we request that you seal the tomb until the third day. This will prevent his disciples from coming and stealing his body and then telling everyone he was raised from the dead! If that happens, we’ll be worse off than we were at first.”

⁶⁵ Pilate replied, “Take guards and secure it the best you can.” ⁶⁶ So they sealed the tomb and posted guards to protect it.

Matthew 28

The Resurrection

¹ Early on Sunday morning, as the new day was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went out to visit the tomb.

² Suddenly there was a great earthquake! For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven, rolled aside the stone, and sat on it. ³ His face shone like lightning, and his clothing was as white as snow. ⁴ The guards shook with fear when they saw him, and they fell into a dead faint.

⁵ Then the angel spoke to the women. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. ⁶ He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead, just as he said would happen. Come, see where his body was lying. ⁷ And now, go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and he is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there. Remember what I have told you.”

⁸ The women ran quickly from the tomb. They were very frightened but also filled with great joy, and they rushed to give the disciples the angel’s message. ⁹ And as they went, Jesus met them and greeted them. And they ran to him, grasped his feet, and worshiped him. ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t be afraid! Go tell my brothers to leave for Galilee, and they will see me there.”

We won’t know for sure until June, but based on the reaction of Supreme Court justices to oral arguments last week it now appears a bit more likely than not that the Court will rule that the individual mandate is Unconstitutional and may even void the entire law.  Predictably there is outrage from the Left.  President Obama made some remarks to the Press that some have interpreted as an attempt to intimidate the Justices.  He began:

The justices should understand that in the absence of the individual mandate you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people wit a pre-existing condition can actually get health care.

This is simply not so.  There are mechanisms in place and people who are currently uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions do receive health care every day.  There are government programs including Medicaid.  Federal law requires all hospitals to treat anyone who shows up, without regard to their insurance or ability to pay.  Finally, there still is what used to work pretty well before the politics made the federal government the dominant force in health care, medical services provided to the needy and the uninsurable by churches and charities.

For example, The Shriners Hospitals for Children where some of the most intractable and expensive childhood maladies are treated without charge and without any government assistance are entirely funded by donations.  Families are not billed for services to their children.  They voluntarily donate whatever they feel they can afford, which sometimes is nothing and rarely is more than a tiny fraction of the actual cost of the care their children receive.

There is a lot of dissatisfaction with the American health care status quo to be sure.  Almost everyone wants it to be reformed in some way.  But the streets are not littered with sick and injured people unable to access care.

The President continued with his remarks directed at the Justices of the Supreme Court:

There’s not only an economic element to this and a legal element to this but a human element to this and I hope that is not forgotten in this political debate.

Actually, this is no longer a “political debate,” or at least it shouldn’t be.  The Court’s job is to rule on Constitutionality.  Be assured he won’t call it “political” if the Court rules in his favor.

Obama’s term “Human element” refers only to the humans he intends to be direct beneficiaries of his health care leviathan with the expectation that they will forever vote Democrat.  When he says “human element” he is not thinking about:

• the humans who will lose their employer-provided health plans, the plans he promised at least 100 times they could keep.
• the humans who will  be forced to close their small businesses, due to the costs and requirements of ObamaCare
• the humans who will lose their jobs and/or be unable to find jobs because employers are hesitant to risk capital with the threat of yet unknown healthcare costs and mandates.
• the humans who will be paying a higher cost for health insurance in order to fund new, unwanted mandates cooked up by Obama’s political appointees in the bureaucracy.
• human physicians who will lose their autonomy and become subject to new restrictions and bureaucratic controls.

President Obama continued:

Ultimately I’m confident that this supreme court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.

Well, the first time the Supreme Court overturned a law passed by Congress on Constitutional grounds was in 1803.  Since then the Court has ruled that scores of laws were Unconstitutional and overturned them.  By claiming that overturning his health care law would be unprecedented Obama shows either that he is appallingly ignorant or he believes we are.

His term “strong majority” indicates that either his memory is failing or he thinks ours is.  In 2010 Democrats had huge majority in the House of Representatives, one of the largest ever.  Yet ObamaCare passed by only seven votes, 219 – 212.  Every Republican and 97 Democrats voted against the measure.  In the Senate ObamaCare got 60 votes, the minimum required to pass.  Some of those Senate votes were openly bought and paid for with special concessions and kick-backs to certain Senators’ home states that were not given to other states.

The day after these remarks the President was challenged by a reporter’s question:

Mr. President, you said yesterday that it would be ‘unprecedented’ for a Supreme Court to overturn laws passed by an elected Congress. But that is exactly what the court’s done during its entire existence. If the court were to overturn the individual mandate, what would you do, or propose to do, for the 30 million people who wouldn’t have health care after that ruling?”

Obama answered very slowly and haltingly, seeming to find it difficult to put his thoughts into words:

We have not seen a court overturn [pause] a [pause] law that was passed [pause] by Congress on [pause] a [pause] economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce. A law like that has not been overturned [pause] at least since Lochner, right? So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre-New Deal.

Lochner was a New York State labor law that was brought to the Supreme Court and overturned as Unconstitutional.  It was not a federal law and is thus irrelevant to the current controversy.

“The point I was making is that the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws and all of us have to respect it.  But its precisely because of that extraordinary power that the court has traditionally shown restraint … so the burden is on those who would over turn a law like this.

So is he saying that because the court has the authority to declare a law Unconstitutional it should not do so?  Actually, the “burden” is on those who would defy the Constitution with the claim that it grants Congress and the President, in Nancy Pelosi’s words, “unlimited power” over every American’s health insurance and access to health care.

The very idea of unlimited power was repugnant to the authors of the Constitution.  Unlimited power was exactly the outcome they sought to prevent.  If the court upholds ObamaCare, if the Justices agree Congress has the authority to compel every person to purchase a health plan whose terms and coverages are dictated by the Executive Branch then the 236 year American era of individual freedom under a government of limited powers will have ended.

“The Affordable Care Act addresses a fundamental and enduring problem in our health care system and our economy. For most Americans, for more than 80 percent of Americans, the insurance system does provide effective access. But for more than 40 million Americans who do not have access to health insurance either through their employer or through government programs such as Medicare or Medicaid, the system does not work.”

Mr Verilli’s “insurance system” is mostly health plans provided by employers.  So how did these plans plus government become “our health care system?”  It’s not as if several competing ways to finance medical services have been offered.  It’s not as if a majority of customers chose employer-provided insurance plans over any alternative.  In fact, employer health plans came about almost by accident.

Employers began providing health plans during World War II as a work-around because  war-time regulations banned salary increases.  From the beginning, tax law permitted employers to treat the cost as a business expense, like wages.  But, unlike cash wages and other forms of non-cash compensation, tax law also allowed the employee to receive the health plan tax free.  To this day there is no payroll tax or income tax on the dollar value of health insurance, as long as it is provided by one’s employer.

Through the years federal and state governments imposed upon the health care market additional incentives to enshrine employer-provided plans as the politically preferred arrangement and to penalize other ideas by making them more expensive.  Today, most Americans are too young to remember a time when government didn’t heavily regulate and influence health care finance.

Mr Verrilli continued:

Those individuals [who do not receive employer-provided insurance] must resort to the individual market, and that market does not provide affordable health insurance. It does not do so because it — because the multi-billion dollar subsidies that are available for the employer market are not available in the individual market.

By “subsidies” he means the tax free treatment of employer-provided health plans.  People who purchase their own plans must pay with after tax income.

So why aren’t individuals who don’t receive insurance from an employer entitled to the same tax treatment as those who do?  It’s not as if there were some holy principle that can’t be breached.  Congress changes the tax code almost every year and could immediately empower individuals by deleting the tax punishment they suffer for the offense of buying health insurance.  Instead Congress enacted 2,700 pages of impenetrable legalese that will ramp up scores of new government agencies and bureaus, and compel every American to purchase a health plan that complies with new government commands.

According to a CBO analysis part of the new revenue ObamaCare will raise will be in the form of higher income tax payments from people whose employers elect to terminate health insurance benefits as a result of the high cost compelled by ObamaCare.  The CBO assumed those employers would increase the cash wages of those employees by an amount equal to the cost of the terminated health plans.  Thus, ObamaCare punishes even more people for the sin of buying insurance individually instead of through their employers.

While supporters don’t openly acknowledge it, ObamaCare’s underlying assumption is that the status quo, mostly employer-provided health plans, is the last, best idea best idea there will ever be.  Indeed, the effect of ObamaCare is to permanently entrench the most expensive type of health plan, mostly employer provided as the only means of financing outside of Medicaid, which is already on life support.

ObamaCare effectively blocks all future health care financing ideas or innovations by making them illegal.

If the government had obeyed the Constitution in the first place there would be no tax punishment imposed on those who purchase their own insurance.  If the government obeyed the Constitution the challenges of health care finance would be met by competing ideas offered to voluntary customers by private sector entities.  Each incremental step in expanding government’s role in controlling how medical services are delivered and financed has been sold as a problem solver.  But each has brought with it a new set of problems to be solved by yet more government intervention.  The process won’t end until every hospital belongs to the federal government and every health care professional is a government employee.  And when that finally happens the problems will be more intractable than ever.

If the court strikes down the individual mandate President Obama and future Congresses will be on notice that there are still limits to government’s power over the people.

The “individual mandate,” is the requirement that every person in America purchase a health plan, with the terms and specifications of that plan dictated by federal officials.  President Obama and the progressives he represents argue that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause authorizes government to issue the individual mandate decree.  Unfortunately, politicians and judges and Supreme Court Justices have brazenly violated the Constitution for nearly a century, largely through deliberate misinterpretation of the commerce clause which says:

“The Congress shall have Power To…regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”

The term “Commerce” meant buying and selling transactions, in this case across state lines.    It was seen as a modest federal power to prevent state governments from erecting tariffs or other barriers that would inhibit transactions across state lines as had happened during the years leading up to the drafting of the Constitution.  James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper #22 of problems caused by state governments:

“The interfering and unneighborly regulations of some States, contrary to the true spirit of the Union, have, in different instances, given just cause of umbrage and complaint to others, and it is to be feared that examples of this nature, if not restrained by a national control, would be multiplied and extended till they became not less serious sources of animosity and discord…”

Madison was concerned that some states had already tried to restrict interstate transactions with various forms of taxes and regulations and could cripple interstate commerce as had happened in the German empire.

But Progressives don’t care about the original purpose or meaning of the commerce clause.  They hold that ObamaCare is authorized based not on what the Constitution says but on Supreme Court precedent, notably the decision in Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942).  During the Great Depression Congress, dominated by progressives, had imposed limits on crop production, in an effort to reduce the food supply and cause prices to rise.  Progressives claimed, preposterously, that the Constitutional power to regulate transactions across state lines included the power to dictate the amount of wheat a farmer was allowed to grow.

Mr. Filburn was fined by the government for growing “too much” wheat.  He argued that Congress had no Constitutional authority to regulate his wheat production because his entire crop was consumed on his own farm, and was not sold to anyone, and therefore could not possibly be part of interstate commerce.  The government agreed that Filburn didn’t sell any of his wheat but argued that he affected interstate commerce by not buying wheat on the open, interstate market.  The court took the government’s side and the rest is history.

Based on this precedent and ignoring the plain language of the Constitution, President Obama and the Democrats and Progressives  now justify a federal law requiring us all to purchase a health plan designed by bureaucrats in Washington because not buying it has “an effect on interstate commerce.”

The word “effect” is not in the Constitution and it is clear that the Founders’ intent was not to grant Congress such sweeping power.

But since it could be argued that virtually any human activity could, however remotely, effect interstate commerce, we are now told that The Founders meant for Congress and the federal government to have unlimited power to intervene and control every aspect of our lives.

There are obvious, simple questions the progressives should be able to answer.  If the founders intended for Congress to have unlimited power why did they include a list of limited, authorized powers in Article I, section 8?  The progressives have no answer.  If they wanted to empower Congress to be able to require or regulate anything, without limit, why did they add the tenth amendment?

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  —Tenth Amendment

The progressives have no answer.

The Administration’s position in court will be the progressive position that an individual decision to not buy government approved health insurance is an “affirmative economic activity” subject to regulation by the government.  This position begs the question: Do progressives recognize any action or inaction that is not subject to government command under the Commerce clause?

Progressives often complain that Conservatives want to “regulate what goes on in the privacy of our bedrooms.”  But under the progressive interpretation of the commerce clause even those bedroom happenings can be regulated since they “effect” commerce by diverting participants from shopping or watching TV commercials.

A Court ruling that ObamaCare is permitted under the Constitution would consummate the progressive movement’s dream of implementing the very sort of authoritarian control the founders fought the Revolutionary War and wrote the Constitution to avoid: a system where all the limits are on the liberty of The People, with no limits on the power of government.