While I do not condone the violence in Baltimore, I think it would be beneficial to understand the root cause of the anger that fueled the violence. That anger does not just exist in specific locations like Ferguson and Baltimore. It's all over the country.
I suggest that perhaps there would be less anger if....
1. If the 2013 official poverty rate in the U.S. was not 14.5 % of the U.S. population (ap. 45,841,600 people) (http://www.census.gov/...).
2. If there was not 10.2 million able and willing to work Americans receiving unemployment compensation.(http://www.statisticbrain.com/...)
3. If there were not nearly 28 percent of those with disabilities ages 18 to 64 living in poverty in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (http://www.disabilityscoop.com/...).
4. If 51% of America's public school children were not from low income families in 2013 (http://www.southerneducation.org/...).
I could go on and on. The point is there is a serious problem of poverty in this country. The solution lies below.
I define poverty for an employable adult as earning less than what one needs to afford a healthful lifestyle*. For those unable to work, poverty is receiving less than what one needs to prevent health deterioration. I make a theoretical distinction between those who are voluntarily poor, i.e., able but unwilling to work a good job and the involuntary poor, i.e. those willing and able to take a good job if one were available. I regard those unable to work as involuntarily poor as well. The term "poverty" in the remainder of this diary refers only to the involuntary poor.
I want to understand why the Federal Government has allowed poverty to occur and why they have not moved heaven and earth to solve the problem. In my last diary, I demonstrated why the Preamble to the Constitution gives no power to the Federal Government to promote the General Welfare or Common Good. But what about Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, also known as the "General Welfare Clause"? I will use the terms "general Welfare" and the more contemporary "Common Good" interchangeably.
Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states, "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the Common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Section 8 specifies a number of Congressional Powers and at the end of the Section gives Congress the power "to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing powers". This is known as the "elastic clause" because it has allowed Congress to expand the powers specified in the original Constitution.
Two questions occur to me. The first is whether the power to raise funds to provide for the general Welfare, aka, the Common Good, authorizes Congress to pass specific legislation to provide for the Common Good? This may be "splitting hairs" since what sense would it make for a congress to have the power to raise funds to do a thing, i.e. "provide for the...general Welfare", if they have no power to actually do that? In the case of the Common Defense, not only is Congress given the power to raise money to pay for it, it is also given the specific powers "to raise and support Armies" and "to provide and maintain a Navy". I understand that Congress has the implied power to implement provisions for the General Welfare.
According to the CliffsNotes web site (http://www.cliffsnotes.com/...) implied powers are those not specified in the Constitution and which are derived from the power of Congress to make all laws "necessary and proper" to exercise its enumerated (specified) powers. "The Supreme Court upheld the concept of implied powers in the landmark case McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), ruling that the federal government had the right to establish a national bank under the power delegated to Congress to borrow money and control commerce."
According To Wikipedia,
...the Supreme Court held the understanding of the General Welfare Clause contained in the Taxing and Spending Clause adheres to the construction given it by Associate Justice Joseph Story in his 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States.[4][5] Justice Story concluded that the General Welfare Clause is not a grant of general legislative power,[4][6] but a qualification on the taxing power[4][7][8] which includes within it a federal power to spend federal revenues on matters of general interest to the federal government.
The second question that occurs to me is whether the power to do something is the same as the obligation to do it? According to the Dictionary, power and obligation have two distinctly different meanings. In other words, even though Congress has the implied power to spend money to provide for the Common Good, does that mean it has the legal obligation to do so? I have been assured by a professor of Constitutional Law that, although power and obligation are not the same thing, in the case of the Constitution, a power to do a thing carries with it the obligation to do that thing. In regard to providing for the General Welfare, then, it may be that the Legislative and Executive branches of our government don't feel compelled to carry out that duty in a consistent manner.
In the case of United States v. Butler, 56 S. Ct. 312, 297 U.S. 1, 80 L. Ed. 477 (1936), the Supreme Court
established that determination of the general welfare would be left to the discretion of Congress. In its opinion, the Court warned that to challenge a federal expense on the ground that it did not promote the general welfare would "naturally require a showing that by no reasonable possibility can the challenged legislation fall within the wide range of discretion permitted to the Congress." The Court then obliquely confided,"[H]ow great is the extent of that range … we need hardly remark."
(
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/...)
In South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203, 107 S. Ct. 2793, 97 L. Ed. 2d 171 (1987), the Court....
questioned "whether 'general welfare' is a judicially enforceable restriction at all."
(
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/...)
From Court rulings I surmise that Congress has the power to raise funds to provide for the Common Good and the discretionary power to determine what the Common Good entails. The Constitution gives Congress the implied legal authority to pass legislation to implement aspects of the Common Good not specified in the Constitution and gives the Executive Branch the implied authority to enforce the Congressional legislation relating to aspects of the Common Good not specified in the Constitution.
I believe this pretty much proves the lie promoted by the Tea Party that the EPA, Department of Education, OSHA, etc. are unconstitutional. According to an article in The Guardian, Michelle Bachman "advocates abolishing the EPA as soon as God puts the Tea Party in charge". One may wonder if Michelle spent even a New York minute to consider the more than 16,000 EPA employees whose jobs will be "killed" if the EPA is abolished. There are thousands more jobs that have been created in the private sector by businesses whose purpose is to help industries comply with EPA regulations. Those jobs would also be killed if the EPA is abolished. In August, 2013 there were 2,721,000 people employed by the federal government. If the Tea Party succeeds in shrinking the federal government, where will all those people find jobs?
If one googles "General Welfare" one finds its meaning seems to be commonly associated with a government's concern for, or promotion of, the health, safety, morality, and peace of its citizens. I like that this meaning does not mention micro or macro economics. While health and safety are clearly related to welfare or well-being, I don't feel this meaning of the general welfare sufficiently emphasizes the "general" part of the expression. The word "Welfare", by itself, can mean health, safety, morality and peace of a country's citizens. When you add "general" as a modifier, it indicates that "welfare" refers to all of a country's citizens, the whole community. This should not be surprising since the writers of the Constitution were familiar with the wording of the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I believe it is in this context that the original intent of the term "general Welfare" can be understood.
What about the impoverished? What justifies excluding poor people from the benefits of the General Welfare, i.e., the Common Good? Ideally, the private business community would step up to the plate and provide jobs that pay a healthful living wage** to those willing and able to work but who are unemployed or underemployed. American companies keeping billions in profits on foreign soil to avoid American taxes and paying their CEOs up to 300 times what the lowest paid company employee makes, in my opinion, indicates an unwillingness on the part of private enterprise to create a sufficient number of jobs to eliminate poverty. Nor is the solution to these problems for the Federal Government to borrow more money. Federal borrowing benefits the large banks and the foreign countries that lend the money. It does not benefit the Common tax payers of this and of future generations.
By raising taxes on the Upper 1% earners, enough money could be raised to employ all those economically challenged individuals who can't now afford a healthful lifestyle in government jobs that would promote the Common Good. If the $118,500 earnings limit above which high earners are exempted from paying Social Security tax (http://www.ssa.gov/...) were eliminated, there would be sufficient funds to insure that all disabled people received what they needed to prevent health deterioration.
These are two simple solutions to the problem of poverty that would, in my opinion, enhance the Common Good. Why won't they be implemented? The answer is threefold.
(1) Some Congressmen have a number of excuses. These solutions are not Constitutional. They are socialistic. They threaten the Common Good based on the theory that concentration of wealth at the top (i.e., the 10% wealthiest Americans controlling two-thirds of the country's private net worth), is a sign of a prospering economy and is, therefore, in the best interest of the Common Good.
(2) The rich want to hang on to as much wealth as they possibly can and gain even more.
(3) Most Congressmen would rather not pass legislation that would anger their largest potential campaign contributors.
The Supreme Court has left it up to Congress to decide what the General Welfare (Common Good) entails. My definition of the Common Good is that which is owned and/or administered by some level of civil government and which benefits citizens in general but which most individual citizens could not afford. On the Federal level the Common Good includes such things as National highways, bridges, dams and buildings, Parks, Monuments, and Wilderness Areas, the Library of Congress, public health protection, environmental preservation, the Federal Courts, the Postal System, National Security, employment security, and providing for the disabled in need.
I think it is pathetic that the Constitution allows Congress to arbitrarily decide, based on their own self-interest, what the general Welfare entails. Furthermore, it is also pathetic, in my opinion, that the Constitution allows the Federal Government to prioritize the interests and aspirations of the wealthiest, most powerful American earners and the largest national and multi-national corporations over what I consider to be the Common Good of all Americans.
Those who are concerned about the Federal Government gaining more power than the Constitution was designed to give it, seem to be mainly motivated by money. They think it is OK for some Americans to starve and live in poverty so that the economy of the wealthiest can continue to expand. As long as this callous, indifferent unwillingness to tackle the problem of poverty persists, we can probably expect growing anger.
Why? Imagine you are young and impoverished and have an E-mail account. You may sense that Progressives care more about citizens in general than either Conservatives or Liberals. And yet every couple days you receive e-mails to sign petitions from Progressives who believe the government should give everyone a free college education and that the minimum wage should be raised to $15/hour for people who already have jobs. If you are a poor person who can't find a steady job, you might realize that college isn't everyone's cup of tea and that $15/hour could employ two people at $7.50 each. You may wonder why you don't receive any Progressive petitions to end poverty. If poverty is not a priority for Progressives, you may conclude that no one in government cares about the millions of poor who are in your situation.
If the Federal Government did not have the authority/obligation to solve the problem of involuntary poverty, that would be one thing. But, as I have explained in this diary, that is not the case. If it ever comes to a vote, my choice would be for everyone to be able to live a healthful productive life even if it means billionaires would have to squeeze by with mere millions of dollars. Not because I am afraid of violence, but because it is the right thing to do.
My next diary will explore the issue of what limits there should be on the power wielded by the Federal Government and which social problems the Federal Government cannot/should not try to solve.
* A healthful lifestyle - For most people this includes a good balanced quality diet (minimally processed, preferably organic), physical exercise, hot running water, a warm safe healthful living space, quality health and dental care, the help one needs to kick health-threatening habits. To live a healthful lifestyle some people require allergen-free food and living space, special diets, prescribed medications, food supplements, etc.
** A healthful living wage is the amount of money necessary for a person to afford to live a healthful lifestyle in a particular location. I estimate that a healthful living wage for the average American male 18-50 years of age would be ap. $9.87/hour for a 40-hour work week. Depending on where one lives, that amount could be higher or lower.