I’ve decided that the most important issue that is not being talked about in this current political season – the most tumultuous one I can remember in my forty-six years of life – is welfare reform. Now, let me provide some context for the “most tumultuous” political campaign statement. I was just about to turn five years-young when Ford pardoned Nixon on Sep. 8, 1974. It didn’t mean a thing to me… I was busy playing with Matchbox® cars, Lincoln Logs®, and these amazing pressure-launched, plastic toy rockets that would undoubtedly be the subject of a class action lawsuit today. (As a side note, I was born in the same year man first walked on the moon – 1969 – so you should not be surprised to hear that Americans as a whole, even poor, blue collar ones had their imagination captured by rockets. While I was pretty bummed out to have the toy taken away after accidentally tripping the switch with my face over the launchpad – twice – and getting that plastic cylinder right in the teeth the first time and my eye the second, that parental intervention undoubtedly preserved my eyesight). In any event, while the Watergate years occurred during my lifetime, I knew those years only through my mother’s reaction to them,* so I’m not counting those campaigns. Call it from ’76 forward.

(*For the record, her reaction was: “Every fucking one of them is crooked.” So would say my beloved, saintly Mother. They ruined it all for her, but then again she was 16 when JFK got shot, then watched Ruby shoot Oswald, then Oswald die before his second trial, Martin Luther King’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy’s, Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, Nixon’s resignation, the Church Committee hearings, and Ford’s pardon of Ol’ “Tricky Dick.” I’m thinking she might have had what most people would call ‘valid enough reasons’ for how she felt.)

Whenever someone brings up “welfare reform” you can just feel the blood pressures rising on both sides of the issue. I have a proposal that I think everyone in America would be agreeable to if I’m any judge of the overall mood in our country and it is this: we need to completely reform one particular kind of government welfare program, the worst and most wasteful, most harmful one of them all… Congress.

Like many entitlement programs, it has become bloated, inefficient, wasteful, and entirely self-serving, largely for the same reasons that people always criticize government: because it has monopoly power, has no competition for providing whatever service or product it decides to take over, and thus has no incentive to get better, or be more efficient. Moreover, it’s legally unaccountable. Legally unaccountable? you might say, with voice raised.
Try suing the government, I would reply. I know, I’ve done it for a living. Try teeing it up against the bureaucracy in DC federal district court, be it the FDA, the DoD (multiple times), DoN, etc. Try to show that some bureaucrat didn’t act within their “discretionary authority” when your client gets screwed by one of said bureaucrats. Hell, I’d like to see people try to get a federal employee fired, even if you work there, and then talk to me about accountability in government.

Nope, the biggest, worst-of-all, money-transfer welfare programs of them all is Congress itself.

Wait…wha-

Oh, yes. It’s the worst of them all.

First, let’s start off with an understanding of how government works. I hate to be pedantic but it strikes me as I scroll around various social media and the ‘Net generally, the striking dearth of knowledge about even the most basic civics matters by most people. Government is paid for by you, the taxpayer. Meaning that the salaries of the Congresscritters comes directly from the money that gets taken out of your paycheck – every. single. payday. – no matter what. Likewise, your state taxes pay for that awesome service at your local DMV.

What do these generous, benevolent, and totally not self-interested, nor self-serving people we call politicians sacrifice for such honest and faithful public service? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot, which makes one wonder what’s really going on…

How vast is the discrepancy in their fortunes? The median net worth of a member of Congress was $1.03 million in 2013, compared with $56,355 for the average American household[,]

explains a NY Times article from 2015, reporting on the average net worth of these wonderfully dedicated public servants. Let me just say that I am not one to start class warfare because I would someday like to be a millionaire myself. I am not suggesting there’s anything wrong with being a millionaire and being a Congresscreature. I’m suggesting there might be some consequences to having a Congress filled with people who mostly have no clue about the day-today financial considerations and concerns of the approximately 350,000,0000 or so people, spread across 50 diverse states with varying kinds of economies, public interests, cultural and environmental considerations, that they purport to represent. Maybe that’s a perfectly fine way to run a government. I’m not so sure, however.

Potential Republican presidential candidates appear to have comfortable nest eggs. Senator Ted Cruz’s average net worth was $3.1 million, and Senator Rand Paul’s was $1.3 million. Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio’s net worth was a more modest $443,508.

I will fill in the blanks that the NY Times seems to have, ahem, overlooked regarding the money of the Democratic contenders for office. (Seriously? Has there ever been a rag so in-the-tank for a candidate while it so self-seriously pretends to be doing honest-to-God journalism? Holy shit, NY Times. I liked it a lot better when I learned that newspapers in the 19th century just openly stated their political affiliations and made a distinction between news and opinion.)

The Clinton Cash Machine? Oh, it works. It works very, very well. From Fortune‘s piece entitled, “How Hillary and Bill Clinton Parlayed Decades of Public Service into Vast Wealth”:

In 2013, Hillary gave 36 speeches for about $8.5 million, most at about $225,000 a pop, to customers such as Goldman, Sachs and Fidelity Investments. The same year, Bill gave 34 talks for $10.22 million. The couple’s 2014 tax return listed combined income of a whopping $28 million. President Clinton earned $8.44 million (net) from speaking, and more than $6 million from consulting, while Hillary earned a net $8.7 million from speaking and $4.6 million from her books.

Not bad for neither of them ever having held jobs that paid more than $145,000 per year. And I haven’t even delved into the Clinton Foundation. Ohhhh, no, that has a book all its own, and if I understand the law at all, it will be the subject of a rather interesting trial, perhaps sooner rather than later…

No, my problem isn’t that Congress has rich people, it’s how they got rich as public servants. That’s not supposed to be the nature of the gig. But then again, we probably shouldn’t be surprised. All that a legislator has to offer “constituents” is…legislation. Think about that for a moment.

What exactly can a politician offer in return for large donations to their foundations, or campaign coffers, or pockets directly, in some cases? The only promises that a politician can make: favorable action on some piece of legislation or other matter over which Congress has oversight. The William Jefferson piece I have linked to is a perfectly illustrative case and I don’t for a second believe his is all that unusual.

The Clintons, as noted above, reported $28 million in income to the IRS in 2014 alone, all of it due to notoriety surrounding and directly from his and her government service and not, for example, for building the iPhone or Pixar studios. Corporate CEOs may be extraordinarily overpaid, but at least they have shareholders and consumers to hold them in check – and at least they make a frigging tangible product that must be good enough to convince people to willingly buy it. It’s pretty ballsy for Hitlery be spouting about how the rich don’t pay their “fair share” while she is both exorbitantly rich AND drawing a salary on the American taxpayer’s dime. Where are all of the checks where Hillary gave back what she thought was her “fair share” as one of those rich people? Because Hillary and Bill are among the 0.1% richest people in this country. I would love to know just what number she would put on such a hypothetical-but-never-going-to-actually happen return of what she deems to be excess – at least when talking about other people’s wealth.

The NY Times also pointed out:

While Mr. Issa’s worth suffered the biggest year-on-year decline, dropping by $15.6 million, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, had a very profitable 2013. With her property investments doing well and her investment in the United States Football League thriving, Ms. Pelosi’s net worth rose to $100.8 million from $87.9 million, breaking the elusive nine figure mark.

I also love this comparison. Issa made his money in a perfectly legitimate business: he founded a company in Vista, California, in 1982 that manufactured after-market car alarms. He made a fortune off of it. But ya gotta love that the times lumps him in with Nancy Pelosi, that redolent hag who was ranked as the richest member of her Party. National Review’s look at the Pelosi’s finances, as well as the financial reporting around everyone else, is rather illuminating.

So, what’s my bitch with the rich? None, actually. I have some very wealthy friends and colleagues. I begrudge no one who earns their money honestly a single penny of it… I just wonder why I’m paying the salary for a Congress that averages $1MM mean of net worth among its membership.

That is, to my mind, way worse than any other wealth transfer program, no matter how wasteful it is, even where my – and your – tax money goes to some poor people so they can buy food, or even trade their EBT funds for black market goods, like drugs. I’m a lot less alarmed that my money might be wasted in its delivery to the poor than I am in knowing that I’m paying the salary of a guy or a gal whose worth is more than I’m likely to ever accumulate in a lifetime of hard work.

Now if it wasn’t bad enough to each Congresscritter is drawing a cool $174,000 as a base salary plus benefits, what makes it worse is that the Congress-millionaire does nothing but pass shitty laws that (a) gives the NSA the right to read my email; (b) the cops lawful sanction and protection from the legal consequences of no knock warrants and of (c) overzealous enforcement of the completely inane War on Drugs, put way more broke people in jail than any other kind, all while pandering to the public about how they need more of my money to overspend – even on shit I might support.

Has no one noticed we’re $20 trillion dollars in debt?

Instead of just whining about the problem like most libertarians, however,  I have serious ideas for Congressional reform to help eliminate all of that wasteful spending on providing salaries to asshole millionaires who lecture me about things they generally don’t know shit about, like the difference between right and wrong, public safety, and how to protect myself from terrorists. I’ve been trained in all of those things and as a fully-functioning adult, I don’t really feel the need to have some guy in Washington, D.C. constantly telling me – or all of us – about how to live our lives. Or that the threat level in the airport is “Orange.”*

*I would also greatly appreciate it if all of you busybodies on Team Red and Team Blue would go fuck yourselves about electing people specifically to punish the OTHER group, whomever happens to be your particular political enemy. The innocent of us who would just like to be left alone and, as in most wars, it always seem to be We, the Tax-donkeys, who get splatted by the laws you’re all trying to pass to control each other.

Because I happen to think Citizens United was correctly decided, it’s hard for me to decry all of the money that politicians make while they’re in office. My left-leaning friends swear that what we need is serious “campaign finance reform,” but you can’t do that without gutting the heart of the First Amendment. Money is political speech. If some of my friends and I want to pool our money to take out a political ad in the Washington Post, and we form a corporate entity to do so in order to limit our liability, that can’t be made illegal or regulated without seriously impinging on the First Amendment. So, it would seem we have an impasse…

But alas! I have come upon some very concrete, serious, and simple reforms to Congress that might just eliminate the problem. So, in order of importance, here is Dale Saran’s Plan for Welfare Reform to that Plutocratic Fiscal Sinkhole Known as the Congress of these United States…

1.  Term Limits – Watch the Congresscritters scurry for the corners like roaches under the bathroom light in my old college apartment if this idea ever gets momentum as a serious political reform. TERM LIMITS. Say it slowly, and sexy-like… Term limits. Use your Barry White voice if you have to. If I could conduct one mass hypnosis event on the entire US population (and not simply some sub-population like Victoria’s Secret models, for example) my most fervent desire would be to make Americans pull the lever for either statutory or a Constitutional Amendment for term limits. We had to do it for the presidency over concerns that the President would become like an Imperial Dynasty. Two terms (plus whatever might be left over from taking over a deceased predecessor as Vice President) was the limit decided upon by the 22nd Amendment, passing easily sixty-five years ago, in 1951. I can see no reason why the same kinds of considerations do not pertain to Senators, some of whom are in the line of succession to the Presidency by the Constitution itself. More important are the likely second and third order effects, however. These, to my mind, are truly critical in helping to solve our Congressional welfarism problem.

First effect – In any new job, there is a break-in period. New Congress(wo)men will need some time before they will be able to set up the necessary graft mechanis- er, lobbying relationships – that have come to define Beltway politics. If a Senator has only two terms – no short stint at twelve years, I might add – that generally will allow him only half of his first and half of his second term to really be worth the investment to industry, union, or other outside big money interest that doesn’t give a fuck about you or me – all while it should be noted our Senator is supposed to be looking out for us, of course. When you limit politicians’ terms, you essentially dry up the market in buying them off. It becomes limited to only the time when it’s known they’ll be there, know how to navigate the ropes, and be effective in Congress. 8 years for Representatives is plenty of time (four terms), and twelve is fine for Senators. If you can’t get whatever it is you want done in that, I think you need to move on anyway.

Second Effect – Not only do Congresscritters suddenly become much less valuable commodities to own for potential purchasers, the Congresscritters themselves are now forced to realize that they are going to have to go back home somewhere, to some state, to some place, and be accountable under the very laws they’ve passed. In other words, perhaps we awaken the conscience of all of these people so keen on passing laws for the rest of us, and in a higher order effect, maybe we start attracting an entire different class of people because they know going in they’re going to have to leave in some reasonable time and come back to get real jobs like the rest of us slobs here in these United States.

2. Expiration dates on laws – This was an idea I came up with on my own and was so proud I told a friend, who then casually mentioned they’d read the same thing in some book… Okay, whatever. My reasoning came from the Progressive claim that the Constitution needs to be “malleable” and “fluid” to reflect the modern realities that the Founders couldn’t possibly have intended or known about… you know exactly the kind of bullshit of which I am speaking. It’s the justification for getting a judge to give you what you don’t have the political will to get through democratic means. Let’s just accept the proposition for the moment: if it’s true, doesn’t it follow that most of the bullshit legislation FDR rammed through a pliant Congress over eighty years ago probably doesn’t really apply to the modern reality of transacting business. I mean, do we really still need a Raisin Control Board? There are thousands upon thousands of laws, agencies, and regulations, many of which are obscure, outdated, and utterly nonsensical, yet these bureaucracies linger on infinitely. Once created, they never go away. It’s the nature of bureaucracy.

The page count for final general and permanent rules in the 50-title CFR seems less dramatic than that of the oft-cited Federal Register, which now tops 70,000 pages each year (it stood at 79,311 pages at year-end 2013, the fourth-highest level ever). The Federal Register contains lots of material besides final rules.

Still, the CFR “Archive-Of-All” is big. Very big. Back in 1960, the CFR contained 22,877 pages in 68 volumes.

The pace picked up. The CFR stood at 71,224 pages by year-end 1975, in 133 volumes.

Now, new data from the National Archives shows that the CFR stands at 175,496 at year-end 2013, including the 1,170-page index… That’s a 146 percent increase since 1975. The number of CFR volumes stands at 235 (as of 2012; the 2013 count remains unavailable for the time being), compared with 133 in 1975.

It’s time to prune the bushes, kids. The weeds are overgrowing and choking the actual fruit-bearing trees. I’m not going to suggest we need to go full minarchist or abolish the Administrative State. I’ll leave that argument for another day. I just think we need to have an honest discussion about the proliferation of laws that long outlive their usefulness and become justifications for an ever-expanding Mandarin class of apparatchiks that can’t be removed because they’ve got some enabling legislation that means they HAVE to exist. We’re paying for it… oh, man, are we paying for it.

First Effect – If you put expiration dates on laws, say, something between 5 and 10 years, you start by treating laws regarding the public interest as what they should be: brief social experiments that allow sufficient time for feedback and then consideration of whether or not the policy works as intended. In the US, we treat every law as if it needs the same force and effect as a bleeping Commandment on a tablet. How about we start from the premise that maybe none of us are that smart, either individually or collectively, to really know what the vast unforeseen consequences of something might be, say, for example, like… trying to reform the entire health insurance and health care delivery mechanisms for 350 million people through one-party diktat?? Maybe when you consider that our government couldn’t even build a fucking website… maybe trying to control healthcare costs in single-party politics wasn’t such a great idea. Maybe that one needs to have a date of expiration even sooner than the milk in my fridge.

Second Effect – Expiration dates on laws would force Congress to continually have to re-look at their work and discuss whether it’s really doing what it should and therein be subject to more input from their constituents – you know, US, the people who always have to bear the burden of those shitty ideas about public policy. It would also have the salutary effect of limiting how much new shit they could possibly do in any given session. Yes, this is a good thing. It would also force them to do some much needed prioritization and decide what laws and regulations really well and truly matter.

3.  A Balanced Budget – In no other walk of life could you overspend money and get away with it like you can in Congress. Again, if the criticisms of “welfare mothers” have any validity, and I know there certainly are clear cases of large-scale fraud, waste, and abuse in the welfare and Medicare system, they aren’t even a rounding error in comparison to the scale of overspending of Congress. I know no one will touch it, but entitlement spending will never decrease until we stop it at its core: Congress. During this rather tepid economic recovery post-2008 housing meltdown, the U.S. has added almost $10 TRILLION to the national debt. It will likely top $20 Trillion by the time the current President leaves.

Presidents take a lot of heat for budget deficits, as they should, but here’s two important facts to understand:

First, Congress does have an important role, since it must approve the budget. Each house of Congress prepares its own budget, and negotiates with the Executive Office to complete a budget each year.

[Second], the deficit created by the Mandatory portion of the budget isn’t created by the President. That’s because the Mandatory budget is simply an estimate of what these programs will cost. They’ve already been approved by the Act of Congress that created the program. Unless the President can get Congress to remove or modify the program, he’s got to live with that spending. The Mandatory budget includes Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as TARP and the Affordable Care Act. Social Security and Medicare are usually the two biggest expenses any President has. 

Link here.

I happened to have a case in Houston over the last few years. I had to be deposed there and spent some other time down there. I was immediately struck by the fact that the economy there seemed to be booming, as compared to other places I’ve traveled around the country. I was informed by many proud Texans over my time there that they have a budget surplus in the billions. If you check google and type in “Texas budget surplus,” you get suggestions by each year. It’s all very publicly done and the state’s comptroller general announces the matter each January to much coverage by the press. It certainly helps with a state that has an economy that would be 12th largest in the world if it were a sovereign nation. Texas’ economy, at $1.648 Trillion in GDP (2014) ranks ahead of countries like Australia and South Korea. But what REALLY helps is that Texas has a state Constitution that requires a balanced budget.

First Effect – To return to the idea of welfare reform, people on the left often scream about “corporate welfare” and they will find me a willing partner in railing about the taxpayers’ money – my money – being used to provide bailouts to billion dollar failed concerns. No one should be surprised, however, that corporate welfare is a byproduct of the Congressional welfare that I propose to reform. Again, why do people think businesses buy off Congressmillionaires? In order to receive favorable treatment in legislation. And what is it that monied interests want out of that legislation that they are donating $$ to said Congresscritter for? Money in return. And where does that money come from? The plutocrats in Congress aren’t taking it out of their own fortunes. Nancy Pelosi has yet to give back any of her over $100 million to her political donors. Nope. They use YOUR money and MINE to pay off their political debts. DUH. That’s all they have to spend. Make a law (or Constitutional Amendment) that the President must submit a budget that does not exceed 95% of projected tax revenues (in the case of existing debt) and Congress may not pass anything more than that, except in time of a Congressionally declared war (and not one of these bullshit “authorizations of force” for the President where Congress abdicates its Constitutionally required role of declaring war). See how quickly the money train dries up for and from all of the Congresscritters’ donors.

Second Effect – Virtually everyone agrees that the tax code needs to be reformed and simplified. I was a second year law student taking the “Personal Tax” course taught by the Dean of my law school, Dean Colleen Khoury. She was a tax lawyer by trade, so this was her wheelhouse. One day, while I was struggling to reconcile some obscure portion of the tax code in class in response to her question, the good Dean stopped me, put a hand on my shoulder, and smiled gently at me: “Oh, you poor soul, you think the tax code is some kind of coherent, cohesive piece of legislation passed with some overarching goal in mind…” I looked up quizzically at her. “Dear boy, the tax code is how Congress pays off its political favors.” She walked past me and asked someone else for an answer. It was at that point I began to understand that tax reform would never happen until the incentives for Congress to use it as political payback changed. Tax reform, like a new crop, has to have fertile soil as a precursor to even be planted. That has to start with disincentivizing Congress from using our tax revenues to pay off the people who have paid them, through either gifts, tax breaks, exemptions from the morass that you and I have to wade through every year. That ground can only begin to be tilled with a balanced budget. Until and unless Congress can send no more of our money than it takes in, we will never get tax reform. Never.

4. Limits on Sovereign Immunity – Government actors sure do love them some sovereign immunity. Yessirree! When I first graduated law school I started a paper on sovereign immunity. I was a bit curious about the entire concept because so far as I was aware as a matter of historical fact, the United States’ principle raison de naissance was to combat the unaccountable nature of the British Parliament and Crown to We, the People. Let me point to Wikipedia for the negative proof – or I could implore that you read the entire Constitution looking for the words “sovereign immunity” in there, but you won’t find them.

In the United States, the federal government has sovereign immunity and may not be sued unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit. The United States as a sovereign is immune from suit unless it unequivocally consents to being sued. The United States Supreme Court in Price v. United States observed: “It is an axiom of our jurisprudence. The government is not liable to suit unless it consents thereto, and its liability in suit cannot be extended beyond the plain language of the statute authorizing it.”

The principle was not mentioned in the original United States Constitution. The courts have recognized it both as a principle that was inherited from English common law, and as a practical, logical inference (that the government cannot be compelled by the courts because it is the power of the government that creates the courts in the first place).

I must confess that my own experience has shown just what horrors such a seemingly innocuous importation of English law into our own has wrought. If you think that an exaggeration, I would encourage you to read Feres v. United States, 340 U.S. 35 (1950), commonly known as the Feres doctrine) and United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669 (1987).

The short summary of Feres is that several U.S. military servicemembers who were injured and killed in what appeared to be negligent or grossly negligent conditions. For example, in one of the consolidated cases, “[a]bout eight months later, in the course of another operation after plaintiff was discharged, a towel 30 inches long by 18 inches wide, marked “Medical Department U.S. Army,” was discovered and removed from his stomach. The complaint alleged that it was negligently left there by the army surgeon.” Yeah, I’m kinda thinking he probably didn’t eat it or cut himself open and put it in there, Judge. Perhaps we could stipulate that the Army is responsible, Your Honor?

The Court gave a lengthy lecture about military discipline in combat being ruined, etc., etc., yet none of the cases involved a troop questioning the wisdom of a decision to storm a beach, nor did anyone suggest that such decisions should be subject to tort suit. But, in any event, a barracks fire as a result of a shoddily installed heater and no fire watch was excused, as was the medical malpractice mentioned above, and in the other accompanying case.

In U.S. v. Stanley, poor ol’ Stanley only found at years after the fact that the Army had used him as the unwitting subject of a medical experiment, in conjunction with the CIA in the MKULTRA project. Stanley was given LSD without knowing it.

In February, 1958, James B. Stanley, a master sergeant in the Army stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, volunteered to participate in a program ostensibly designed to test the effectiveness of protective clothing and equipment as defenses against chemical warfare. He was released from his then-current duties and went to the Army’s Chemical Warfare Laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. Four times that month, Stanley was secretly administered doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), pursuant to an Army plan to study the effects of the drug on human subjects. According to his Second Amended Complaint (the allegations of which we accept for purposes of this decision), as a result of the LSD exposure, Stanley has suffered from hallucinations and periods of incoherence and memory loss, was impaired in his military performance, and would on occasion “awake from sleep at night and, without reason, violently beat his wife and children, later being unable to recall the entire incident.” App. 5. He was discharged from the Army in 1969. One year later, his marriage dissolved because of the personality changes wrought by the LSD.

On December 10, 1975, the Army sent Stanley a letter soliciting his cooperation in a study of the long-term effects of LSD on “volunteers who participated” in the 1958 tests.

This was the Government’s first notification to Stanley that he had been given LSD during his time in Maryland. After an administrative claim for compensation was denied by the Army, Stanley filed suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), 28 U.S.C. § 2671 et seq., alleging negligence in the administration, supervision, and subsequent monitoring of the drug testing program.

Stanley got exactly $0.00 in a 5-4 decision that affirmed the “wisdom” of the Feres doctrine.

First Effect – I’ve had these arguments over and over again in court, on both sides of it. I was a military prosecutor and defense attorney, so I have some appreciation of the arguments for and against, as it relates to the military specifically and government officials more generally. Here is all I would ask anyone who isn’t sure about this to consider: how comfortable would you feel if officials in large companies had no liability for their impacts on, say, the environment? Or consumers? If you feel that corporate entities deserve no special exemption from the law, then why don’t the same reasons that underlie allowing civil and criminal liability there pertain when speaking of government officials? Is there some special motivation or consequence in being a government agent that changes human nature? The truth is that government AND business are both only good where they are accountable to the citizenry and consumers. If pharmaceutical companies enjoyed immunity from the consequences of their actions, how long do you think it would be before some people got hurt?

As it turns out, I happen to know the answer is “not long” because as Stanley’s case intimates, when governmental agencies – and the civilian companies they hire as contractors – also enjoy immunity, it’s frequently the military that gets the drugs used on them. Perhaps not accidentally. In 1994, Senate Report 103-94, the “Rockefeller Report,” named after the Chairman of the committee that did the research, documented 50 years of government experiments on military members. It continued after that, as well, with the anthrax vaccine in the late 90’s. I know because I defended a number of servicemembers who refused the vaccine and were court-martialed for their refusal to disobey what was a patently illegal order, in direct violation of a federal statute (10 USC §1107) enacted to prevent exactly such a thing from happening after the Gulf War Illness fiasco, also the result of as-yet unapproved drugs being allowed by the FDA to be used on servicemembers in order to protect against the anticipated possible use of chemical and biological weapons by Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War.

Second Effect – It’s amazing how differently people act when there is the possibility of personal accountability arising from their negligent or grossly negligent acts or omissions. It’s the same consideration you or I have when we’re doing everything we do in our lives, both personally and professionally, from driving our cars to talking with colleagues in the office to having a BBQ in our backyard to letting our kids’ friends come over and swim in the pool. Incentives matter and we have completely disincentivized our politicians to act with even the most basic kinds of care that we expect of our children.

I could probably go on, but this seems to me to be a good place to stop. Four very simple, very understandable, very obtainable ideas for the worst welfare program that currently exists: U.S. Congress. Fix that one and you’ll have not coincidentally fixed a ton of other problems that plague this country. I’ll go on record as saying this: the biggest problems in this country are not the American people, at least not directly. The biggest problem is the politerati who currently occupy the District of Columbia. They are largely unaccountable and, because of name recognition, once they are in there, they’re harder than termites to de-elect. They enjoy a virtually insurmountable advantage over challengers. Term limits, people. Start there and you would be amazed at the second and third order benefits. Add a balanced budget to that and this country’s economy might be headed in the right direction. Numbers 2 and 4 would help solve the over-legislation of America, but I’d be happy to start with only 1 and 3 and see if I’m right. Finally, I’d also be willing to support un-doing these suggestions if they don’t turn out to have the effects I imagine. Unlike the people in Congress, I’m actually interested in getting it right. I would even consider using my own ideas to test out the concept of limiting their duration right from the start. Let’s start by just trying a balanced budget for five years and see if it helps the country and our economy, for example. I suspect I already know the answer and I think most people who give it honest consideration do, too.