Halftime in America: The Challenge Years: Fighting to Stop Progressive Tyranny in the United States

By Dan S. Wible and Timothy McHenry

The United States of America finds itself in a political halftime show, and if something doesnt change soon, the second half could see a continuation of disorganized policies that stifle liberty.

Author Dan S. Wible, an aerospace engineer, applies engineering principles to seek solutions to prevent the countrys problems from escalating; his thought provoking application of common logic reveals how

free trade without balance of trade has resulted in a loss of manufacturing capability and undermined Americas infrastructure;

the Federal Reserve has been completely irrational in its attempt to manipulate the world economy, creating an economy that is now fundamentally unstable;

a return to a limited federal government would enable the free market to once again flourish;

free-market capitalismwith the federal and state governments doing only what the people have authorizedis the best way to allow all people to excel.

Its Halftime in America, and the United States is at risk of becoming a European-style socialist nation, which is the very style of government the countrys patriots sought to extract themselves from more than two centuries ago. Wible offers insights to how and why this is happeningand what can be done to prevent it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475951264

Dan S. Wible

Dan S. Wible is an eighth-generation US citizen whose forefathers emigrated from Germany. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Washington. He has started two businesses—one in the automotive aftermarket world and one in the commercial and scientific exploration of the underwater world. He currently lives in Washington State.

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Copyright © 2013 Dan S. Wible

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-5124-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5125-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5126-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012917499

iUniverse rev. date: 12/27/2012

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1    Halftime Show

Chapter 2    Rediscovering the American Way

Chapter 3    Free Market System Boundaries

Chapter 4    Practical Magic of Politicians

Chapter 5    Forces Driving Us

Chapter 6    We Can Make It

Chapter 7    A Cause for All

Chapter 8    Basics that Don’t Add Up

Chapter 9    Enter the International Socialist

Chapter 10   Cause for Concern

Chapter 11   The End Game

Chapter 12   Obama Under the Radar

Chapter 13   Dramatic Policy Shifts under President Obama

Chapter 14   Consequences of Remaining Uninvolved

Chapter 15   The Way to Proceed

Chapter 16   Review of Fiscal Policy in the United States

Chapter 17   Review of United States Foreign Policy

Chapter 18   Using Our Strengths to Create a Winning Future

Chapter 19   Specifics of Further Government Action Needed

Chapter 20   Motivation to Pursue a Focused but Limited Government

Chapter 21   Religion and Moral Code in Government

Chapter 22   Clarifying the Reasons For the First and Second Amendments

Chapter 23   Clarification of What Constitutes Citizenship by Birth

Chapter 24   Clarification of What Constitutes a Natural Born Citizen

Chapter 25   Acts to Restore American Rights and Preserve the Union

Chapter 26   Amendments to Restore America’s Constitutional Charter

Chapter 27   Choosing the Right Path

Chapter 28   The Resolute American

Epilogue

A   Discriminatory Practices within Obamacare

B   Discriminatory and Overreaching Objectives of the American Jobs Act

C   The Oath Keepers Pledge

D   Website Guide and How to Get Involved

E   Castle Doctrine

F   The Stand Your Ground Doctrine

G   The Pianist (a letter to)

H   The Observer (a letter to)

I    Economic News Release Employment Situation Summary

Notes and References

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To my beloved family

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Introduction

Six months after graduating in Civil Engineering and getting my first job, my lead coworker told me my salary increase looked like I was on track to be vice president. But it wasn’t due to my merit. Salaries of new hires were skyrocketing to keep up with nearly 14% annual inflation. The year was 1979. I watched as inflation ravaged the effective income of those older than me, causing severe salary compression with those senior engineers who were making effectively less and less relative to new hires. I began to wonder what was causing this. Was it the workers demanding more and more or was it the government policies being enacted by then President Jimmy Carter that was eroding the dollar’s value?

I had further curiosity developed when I watched as the dollar had recently been separated from the gold standard and gold prices rocketed upward. My father had a few silver dollars from his grandfather who farmed wheat in Kansas in the 1930’s. I watched as these coins rocketed upward in value even faster than gold. I began to read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Federalist Papers to see if any clues could be uncovered as to what was going on; if we were straying from what the forefathers wanted for this country. I began to see that these documents were very similar to procedures that would be found in any company’s structure to guide and direct proper functionality. It dawned on me that what was happening around me economically was a direct result of government action not following what elected representatives should be doing if they had simply chosen to operate by the procedures outlined in this nation’s charter, the United States’ Constitution.

How government influence had changed society over the past century and a half was of particular interest to me. An ancient sword in my father’s possession had planted a seed of curiosity about my past. I found out that my forefathers had immigrated to the United States in the 1750’s, well before the United States’ Declaration of Independence. They had settled in the area controlled by the Penn Esquires, which later became known as Pennsylvania, and further settled in the Dutch farming region known as Gettysburg. In 1863, the Battle at Gettysburg occurred on my great-great-great-grandfather’s farm. My great-great-grandfather fought as a 19 year old in the 21st Cavalry, and afterward he received a sword; the same sword which I had seen and held as a child. Reviewing that history kindled in my mind how this nation had grown to greatness but then begun to shudder as consequences of lack of cognitive thought applied to government policy had taken hold.

Using analytical skills combined with my growing skills as an inventor of several products and impassioned by learning about my own family history, I was able to immerse myself into the flow of politics and economic sways through the past 150 years. I began to see the influence of government policy, how it could be deciphered and measured; comparing government actions through the years with writings of the founding fathers.

I began investigating the methods of government policy in earnest in 2007 when the Federal Reserve intervened in assisting the sale of asset-backed security auctions being held in Europe. The asset backing those securities was U.S. real estate; and the real estate prices were dropping rapidly, making those securities they backed look like very risky investments to bid on at auction. This affected both the U.S. stock market and further depressed U.S. home prices. My research spanned published books to radio to the internet to original investigative research.

I noticed that there were not any books published that applied a clean set of core principles to suggest refinement and maturation of legitimate Constitutional functions of government across the broad spectrum of civil society. So I decided to put my ideas into this book. The findings and conclusions presented herein have followed a logical perspective from an engineering analysis approach. What appeared to be true was sometimes in the end concluded to be not so. Other conclusions arose from piecing together the myriad of data available through multiple media sources, revealing the depth of underlying political forces.

Those born in America since the 1960’s have not had the opportunity to see the liberty that has empowered us through our Constitution. There are clear signs that behind the scene of government operation there hide power brokers who have duped our elected representatives to enact policies farfetched from original thoughts of our founding fathers and push policies to take action under the radar to subvert, derail and ultimately replace what has made this country great.

This book is a guide to discovering liberty, the liberty that is our due, that has been slowly eroded from us through very influential individuals bent on removing this nation’s once great potential for liberty and pursuit of happiness availed us as citizens of the United States of America. Individual sovereignty is championed by the Constitution and is the opposite of what enables the few to dominate the many. Yet subtle seduction has entered our political thought process through loopholes in our political system, sending us down a path far from original and primary principles of ordered liberty that once made us uniquely different in the world.

Our nation once operated as a limited Democratic Republic, based on the principles of a unique Constitution authorizing limited power to the Federal Government, with other powers held by state governments and by the people. The United States Constitution empowered individual sovereignty; individual liberty that empowered us to pursue happiness and wide spread prosperity. It was the true equalizer for the common man and woman and enabled each of us the freedom and path to successfully achieve our dreams, making them our reality.

The United States Constitution was created as a charter for a government intended to enlighten our citizenry to every imagination possible, with power available to determine our own future. Government was limited to be merely our servant; only our aid in achieving greatness; only a facilitator to expand society through innovation that could only be achieved in a free country. Our government authority was legitimately chartered by its Constitution to keep tyranny from overtaking us and to keep our borders safe from invasion.

Observing the changes that we have now come to realize are upon this nation stir us. We face consequences of these changes that may alter our freedom forever. In the hope of changing this course while there is still time, in the belief that we can still avail ourselves of this great nation’s inherent workings to affect change, and with a call to our fellow citizens that we do deserve better, this book was written.

We have set before us unprecedented liberty combined with amazing natural resources, all available to us to foster continued development of this greatest nation on earth. It is the author’s fervent hope that we will not relinquish this nation to the socialistic status quo of the European style of governance, sequestering personal freedoms in a press toward the illusive quest for equal outcome, rather than the achievable liberty that fosters equal opportunity; a hope that we so fervently fought for when we declared our independence some 236 years ago.

Halftime in America was written, in part, to answer the question: What if a handful of the founding fathers were able to teleport to the present, observe current events, and then teleport back in time. What changes might they have suggested to amend the Constitution to plug some loopholes and mature the document to better address the issues that have arisen through the past 200 years, including the issues facing this generation?

A revised edition was published December 30, 2012, to include historical events up through December 18, 2012, including the U.S. presidential elections. Recent events in the Philippines, and the attack on Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Stevens, and a review of gun rights in light of the December 2012 school massacre have been added.

CHAPTER 1

Halftime Show

The goal of civil government is to stabilize society for peace, prosperity and the pursuit of happiness. The time has come where we must decide whether we want to authorize a larger, centralized government, or work to restore original principles of a limited government; one authorized and funded for legitimate acts that stay largely out of the private citizen’s business, in order that we might most readily and assuredly achieve these goals. This decision has been forced upon us due to a growing trend by our elected representatives to head down the path of the ever increasing, centralized government approach to society. This big government approach is not what our Constitution authorized. To complicate matters, we’re being told by mainstream media, academia, and even by the recent Executive Branch and liberal senators controlling the Senate, that Capitalism and prior government’s limited agenda has not allowed a process to provide adequate prosperity for most Americans.

The wave of thought streaming across our social media is that the dream of excelling through hard work has been subverted by those at the top of the food chain, those dressed in suits and commanding titles such as Corporate Executive Officer (CEO). There is a movement afoot that the 99% are being fleeced by the 1%, that upper echelon of elites that hold 80% or 90% of the wealth in this country, and that this gap is increasing. The government is making a pitch that we should ask for fair shares of redistribution of wealth so that all may have a better shot at the American dream.

Americans have, over the past several generations, enjoyed an across the board living standard that has become the envy of the world. The distribution of wealth, although certainly not equal, actually is one of the best distributions seen in any country of this size, ever. The actual facts of the matter are that 34% of the wealth is held by 1% of Americans as of 2004, not 80% or 90%, as can be seen in Figure 1.¹ These top 1% pay about 38% of the income taxes.² The wealth held by the lower 40% seems small by comparison, but that relatively small percentage provides a standard of living equal to or exceeding any other similarly sized nations. These lower 40% pay zero federal income taxes.³

The structure of the United States government is a large part of what has been availed to us through our constitutionally limited Republic. It isn’t perfect, but it’s been the best vehicle to smooth out the distribution of wealth. The premise is to let anyone enter the marketplace with their acquired set of skills and compete with as low an entrance bar as possible. You present your wares, your ideas, your product to the marketplace with some relatively minimal quality assurance standards that says you are producing what you say you are, and you can prove it with written records, and you’re in.

Figure%201%20-Distribution%20of%20Wealth_U.S._Households_2004_lg.jpg

Figure 1 – Distribution of Wealth, U.S. Households, 2004

Capitalism and free market principles, combined with limited government that respected a strong bill of individual rights, has created one of the best distributions of wealth in the history of mankind. The problem hasn’t been with Capitalism, the problem has been with government grabbing more and more of the free market assets that create jobs in the form of confiscation through unequal taxation and burdening job creation with stifling regulations. This effectively raised the bar on who could enter the marketplace with their new innovations.

Think of the government confiscation of assets through taxation as a water level in a swimming pool, with the columns of wealth shown in Figure 1 allowing a segment of population to exist poking upward, with the top of the many columns either above water, or underwater. As the water rises, the lowest columns of wealth are the most vulnerable to sink underwater, shifting the remaining holders of wealth lower as well, but relative to each other, simply shifting the remaining wealth toward the upper echelons. No matter how hard the government works to redistribute wealth, its very intrusion causes all to suffer, yet the rich suffer the least and the poor suffer the most as government intrudes and confiscates. Those intended to be helped by such redistribution suffer perhaps more than all, because they are deprived of the normal stresses that hone competitive skills.

Wealth shifts by this process to a very few percentage of the very rich; a tiny slice of those 1% who don’t work for a living and are independently wealthy. This very small slice of society, a tiny portion of the very wealthy, are responsible for the processes that infiltrates via subtle forms of bribery to cause elected representatives to become corrupt and do their bidding.

One of those biddings is to keep increasing government confiscation of wealth. These elites don’t confiscate the wealth of others merely to become richer, but to manipulate the average citizen by using other people’s money to sway opinion, resulting in shifting voter decisions at the voting polls to elect those types of representatives and create a popular climate of thought in academia where these elites can take advantage. When these elites can’t confiscate wealth through taxation to redistribute in favorable ways to their own objectives, they’ll readily include government debt, which is really the people’s debt. This has the further effect of devaluing the currency, causing inflation of core goods and services. Combine that with the consequential reduction in available money for market innovation and jobs creation, together with big business attempts to outsource for cheaper labor in an ever spiraling failure of the entire system that was initially designed to protect the American citizens and you have the recipe that crushes most Americans’ dream for prosperity. This process affects the rich too. Only that tiny slice of society behind the scenes end up positioned to enhance their wealth and power. All the rest are being duped.

You can’t really ferret out and destroy these very corrupt elite people. They come and go. They make international alliances and then change those alliances. Those who rise up to the occasion are those who happen to be poised for the latest wave of opportunity. It is even a small subset of those who rise up who also take the road to perdition. There is another way to keep this process from occurring altogether.

In the broader, healthier view of the world, this whole issue of thinking the rich shouldn’t be so rich doesn’t really have its inception from why we have government or what our ambitions as a society should be trying to accomplish. It is a ruse, a creation by those very elites hidden away within the ranks of the mostly honest rich to defray from view the real issues. The real issues are that the government is being manipulated and the voters blinded to the tools of the elites to control masses by currency manipulation and depriving workers from fair opportunity to live and work in a vibrant society.

Inflation causes a loss of stored wealth due to more and more dollars being required when deployed in the market place to acquire an asset. Deflation causes people to lose in competition to the more skilled, thereby becoming deprived of effective income and their kept goods deprived of stable value.

Deflation occurs when there are fewer jobs available than there are available workers. As the unemployment rolls rise among homeowners, with unemployment benefits inadequate to support maintaining mortgage payments, home prices crash, new home development falter and foreclosures climb. Then with lackluster interest to buy foreclosed properties that are underwater financially, increased bank ownership of real estate occurs, called REO’s (Real Estate Owned). This causes banks to tighten credit, making refinancing and home line of credit very difficult to obtain. This in turn removes a common source of discretionary income from the average person and a deflationary spiral ensues in the retail market industry. Deflation is accelerated by spiraling loss of home equity, causing businesses to pull back growth investment and further increases unemployment.

All of this is due directly to upper echelon elites influencing government to confiscate and redirect assets out of the free market through taxation and debt creation; even when those assets are used in way that appear to help redistribute wealth, such as through legislation to make it easier for lower income families to obtain lower threshold requirements for obtaining home loans in an attempt to boost home ownership and thereby boost the economy. This keeps a very few elites who have affixed themselves to the government in great power, and keeps the working class from acquiring any real ability to rise above the system. It is a normal consequence to a policy of taxing and wastefully spending free market generated wealth. You lose the naturally occurring freedom for innovation, for expansion of the economy, and this ends up especially impacting those on the lower end of the scale.

That’s what happens with Socialism, Communism and Totalitarianism. Try as we might, it just never has worked like the popular revolutionary people’s rising anticipated it would. The American Revolution occurred under non-repeatable circumstances of vast separation of powers and overwhelming technical advantage domestically. Revolutions that topple governments in today’s world are all heavily funded from external forces. It always starts with an inception of wanting to compel some form of social engineering to level the playing field by pushing around one or more subsets of the population designated as the enemy. But in the end, the result of these government intrusions and discrimination tactics has been that the act of confiscatory redistribution of wealth, and in the end it ruins the lives of both those intended to be helped and of those intended to be pulled down. Government dependency would be getting less and less if it had worked. Instead, it has been getting greater and greater, and the more the government gets involved, the greater is the downward slide of the economy.

Redistribution has been tried, reverse-discrimination has been tried, and for good or bad, certainly now there is no need to continue these policies. Everyone has more than fair opportunity to compete. The problem is that the jobs are not there and the real estate, which accounts for half the world’s wealth and drives nearly one third of the U.S. economy,⁴ has floundered due to wasteful, reckless and intrusive government policy. The problem is that within the process of controlling people’s wealth and opportunity, corruption always pushes the greedy to confiscate more and more of people’s wealth, once they are given the power to do so through government intervention.

If you look at Communist or Socialist countries, their wealth distribution is not flatter, but rather shuffled radically further towards a class division of wealth. This also happens with older, more established cultures. It is very difficult to keep an ever stratifying momentum out of the system of governance, which if only contained would allow the working class to flourish.

The United States of America has been the bastion of freedom for over 236 years, allowing for individual prosperity and a lifestyle unmatched anywhere in the world. This has been accomplished through limiting the government’s reach into the lives of individuals and letting the free market operate unfettered. Occasionally, monopolies such as the AT&T phone company, forced to break off its regional divisions in 1984,⁵ have needed to be addressed. But it’s one thing to force a company to split up and have competitive bidding of skilled business people become participant in a restructuring effort using their own funds, which is what happened. It would have been quite another outcome had that corporate break up been forced to be restructured by transferring business assets to underrepresented, economically disenfranchised groups from poor economic strata, with grants given particularly discriminatory to those who had not been in the business before. That is not what happened, but it is exactly what the government tried with the Recovery Act ⁶ and subsequent set aside funding through the Federal Business Office (FBO) from 2009 to 2012. It just didn’t work. It didn’t create new infrastructure; for the most part billions of dollars were simply squandered. People learn to take advantage of large infrastructures. Greed goes both ways, from the top down and from the bottom up.

Finding and correcting government corruption is not a simple matter. The three branches of government in the USA, Congress, the Judiciary, and the Executive Branch have worked well in the past. But the last decade has proven to be too corrupt. Solving the creeping insurgency of corruption will require specific acts, such as targeting lobbyists’ time at bat with congressmen and congresswomen, eliminating insider trading with threat of criminal charges, eliminating targeted funding of favored programs called pork, and eliminating the ability for offering post elected position guarantees, for starters. Then we as citizens will need to vote for elected officials to pass a flatter tax structure with a low maximum rate by amendment to the Constitution. That maximum range should be picked to cover legitimate government programs and current commitments, but eventually be reduced to the maximum of around 8%. The threshold per person of when to require first dollar of taxable income should be something in the dollar range of the equivalent of three ounces of gold value. This is not so much to allow redistribution of wealth, but to avoid crushing levels of paperwork on a budding youth trying to enter economic commerce. You need a little warm up grace period before reaching into their pockets for taxes.

A flat tax seems regressive but in fact it is not. It drives citizen responsibility and expectation of having someone’s money spent wisely and removes the ability of the government to buy votes by giving the majority of citizens’ benefits for ever increasing dependency with commensurate reduction of individual rights. Freed from this spiraling increase of dependency, with everyone who labors participant in contributing financially to a system, trust in government will slowly build up, as will a robust economy, giving folks greater discretionary money with which they can invest and improve their lives.

Further, a balanced budget amendment will be needed, as was attempted August of 2011 by the Republican-controlled House. A combination of lower income taxes and a requirement to balance the federal budget will force expenditure cuts. The best way to achieve this would be to force spending limitations within the areas where the government is authorized to legitimately function.

A transition period would need to be established for drawing down to only performing legitimate government functions using a priority system. Those entitlement programs not authorized in the Constitution, those environmental agenda’s, those educational promotions targeting segments of underprivileged, these all need to be sharply curtailed and re-proportioned to the state’s authority, as well as to private industry.

Over one trillion dollars a year needs to be cut out of our national spending habit. These cuts don’t mean we can’t have a clean earth and people who are cared for. But there are far better ways to accomplish those hopes and goals than through the Federal Government. We correct government corruption by removing the ability to fund lavish and illegitimate functions of government. We only leave enough food for austere governance. We starve them as needed, drawing them down to a natural and appropriate level of existence. That is how it is done biologically, and it works anywhere and everywhere. Let the government do very well what it has been chartered to do. Then let us together rise up to the challenges regarding the planet’s health and providing a support structure for the underprivileged, the sick and the infirmed.

The bottom line is you collect taxes to fund the operation of legitimate service functions of the government. You don’t collect money so that it can be redistributed unevenly to try and create social justice. An equal playing field for developing independently thinking successful population occurs by getting the government out of the lives of people except to provide power to the people to uphold individual rights, to secure the borders and to defend the nation from external aggression, and to keep corruption out of the internal workings of the Federal Government and occasionally out of the private sector. Along the way, the Federal Government through the judiciary keeps a keen watch on the states, that they are not usurping their authority in violating the rights of the people. That’s pretty much all that the Federal Government is purposed for.

The kind of people that would be willing to run for office in this setting would evolve into the kind of people who like austerity in government; the kind such as we found in conservative congressmen and women elected in 2010. See Appendix D subsection Conservative Voter’s Guide for details and a process to follow. Then we would need to elect a president who won’t veto the proper legislation needed to restore limited government; who will champion the selection of Supreme Court justices who believe in original meaning of the Constitution; and who will resist recent trends to bow to international socialist pressure in the United Nations to become subservient to the United Nations regarding deployment of funds and military forces for social change without first seeking U.S. congressional authorization. This conservative combination will give the USA the boost it needs to redirect towards the right direction of prosperity.

The current direction in the Federal Government has taken us down a rabbit hole that is subverting the very nature of legitimate limited government. Deception is rampant as can be in a system that is supposed to have a First Amendment right to free speech. Misleading statements disseminated from the government and by the media, backed up by academic thought driven through federal direction, even including the sciences, are deceiving the public. This deception of the public has been accelerating since the dawn of the New Millennium. Let’s take a look at what’s really been going on.

February 2, 2012 saw a monumental rally in the stock market as it was disclosed that 243,000 jobs had been created in the previous month.⁷ This dropped the unemployment rate near the much-coveted 8% milestone that President Obama had said he could achieve if given his stimulus package and the healthcare reforms of 2009.⁸ When President Obama was first elected, during a Today Show interview February 2, 2009, he said, If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.⁹ That unemployment rate now stood at 8.3%, only a hair breadth from breaking 8%. The 243,000 jobs reported occurred in the face of an expectation that only 150,000 jobs had been created that month.¹⁰ The stock market traders were ecstatic, and the buying spree sent stock prices rising to levels not seen since before the big dive that happened when Congress couldn’t decide how to pay the interest on our national debt in August of 2011. President Obama told Congress, Don’t muck it up¹¹ reflecting on that previous low point when Congress was embroiled in a fight over how to fund the government; finally resolved when he signed a bill authorizing continued funding of the economy and in doing so rescued it from what would have become, in his words, a man-made economic disaster. ¹²

The next week of February 8, 2012 brought significant activity in a suite of Executive orders by President Obama to create pressure on employers to hire the long term unemployed under penalty of law suits and to create a relief settlement with the nation’s banking institutions to alleviate a nasty circular spiral for 10 million home owners whose home value exceeded their mortgage value, an all too common condition of being underwater. Legislation proposed would combine with the President’s orders to create a way for those home owners to refinance without charge at the much lower rates of February 2012, below 4% for a 30 year guaranteed fixed rate. The stock market again responded and firmed up a solid uptrend. This occurrence gave broad expectations that a true economic recovery was in the works. This offered hope that President Obama and his stimulus policies were finally working. It formed a great platform for a strong presidential reelection bid.

Upon closer examination, the story unfolding for the newly energized economy was not quite matching with actual reality. The government’s National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) statistics, reported that same day that in January 2012, that same month when 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate had dropped to 8.3%, 1.2 million people had suddenly left the workforce,⁷ dropping the civilian participation in the workforce to an alarming 63.7%, the lowest recorded in nearly 30 years. See Figure 2. ¹³

Figure%202%20-%20Labor%20Force%20Participation%20Rate_lg.jpg

Figure 2 – Labor Force Participation Rate

Examining the worker participation rate, meaning the number of people working or looking for work relative to all able bodied adults between the age of 16 and 64, there had been an ever increasing rise in the nonworking population over the past five years, not at all abating, but actually accelerating, and that number had just jumped from 87 million non participants to over 88 million non participants.⁷ Yes, there was a total workforce of 132 million working but over 88 million able bodied adults were not working. See Figure 3. ¹⁴

Figure%203%20-%20Persons%20Not%20in%20Labor%20Force_lg.jpg

Figure 3 – Persons Not In Labor Force

The bigger question is why would 1.2 million people suddenly give up applying to work and even give up unemployment benefits? The answer to that question surrounded those formerly earning above average wages. Those traditionally earning higher than average wages didn’t fit well into the typical reemployment process in use by the states. Often higher wage earners needed to meet before a judge to justify not taking lower paying positions more often offered through the unemployment office.¹⁵ Sometimes these formerly higher wage earners now unemployed were forced off the unemployment and even required to return all unemployment benefits taken previously, which could amount to thousands of dollars, all because a judge has decided on his or her own that the unemployed had not followed the guidelines and attended the proper job submittal and retraining seminars.¹⁶

But starting in January 3, 2012, a new policy began taking hold among the states. Authorizations from recent state legislation began forcing unemployed workers to take low-wage jobs after ten weeks of benefits regardless of the amount of income or type of work they did before they became unemployed. In Michigan, for example, 400,000 unemployed workers were handed that ruling.¹⁷ It turns out that this was to a large degree to blame for what caused those unprecedented 1.2 million unemployed workers to simply leave the work force and stop looking for work through the unemployment office in January 2012. Had these workers and those who had left the workforce in the few months prior remained engaged to find work, the unemployment rate would have been over 11% in January 2012¹⁸, a new high, not 8.3%.

What also wasn’t mentioned in the media was that the companies in the USA were doing well largely because of the money flowing as a result of continued entitlement benefits offered the millions of people who could not find jobs or who had given up searching for replacement careers. All that money had to be going somewhere. With nearly a trillion dollars going to benefits paid out from the government each year for the past three years¹⁹, the USA had arrived at a paradigm shift to an economy being driven by a consumer society where a significant proportion of those consumers were the entitlement recipients rather those spending discretionary savings from wages earned.

Even Nancy Pelosi, minority speaker of the House, said that unemployment checks were a stimulus.²⁰ We were better off than Europe due to the government induced cash flow into the economy, and the dollar was even strengthening due to that fact.

The lowering from 8.7% unemployment in November 2011 to the 8.5% unemployment in December to the 8.3% unemployment in January 2012 ⁷ was painting a picture that didn’t match with a typical economic recovery. It was lowering not by significant job growth but from people so discouraged in the process they just stopped looking. One in two college graduates could not even find a job.²¹ This trend was further supported by a growing support for relief programs such as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - food stamps), Welfare (state block grants called TANF which stands for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), WIC (Women Infant Children) and a host of other programs: free home vouchers²², free car vouchers²³, one program that even pays for cellular phones and monthly cellular phone bills (the Lifeline program).²⁴ These heavily funded programs pay out a trillion dollars a year in benefits²⁵ and consume the equivalent of the entire income tax revenue of the United States.²⁵ They are also long lasting benefits, making it a viable choice to just walk away, rather than take whatever job the unemployment office was saying would be an available job at a much reduced rate of pay. The unemployment dropped because people were just giving up; there were just no good jobs out there and the benefit packages were becoming seen as entitlements, so why work?

Also on this January 2012 in particular, 265,000 never before working became part of the workforce job seekers,²⁶ an unusually large number. So it turns out that the jobs actually didn’t even keep up with the new additions of workers for that month.

There should be about 155 million people in the workpool,⁷ but this number should be ever increasing due to an unstoppable tide of young workers reaching that age where they need to secure jobs, increasing the potential workforce relative to the diminishing force of elderly retirees, especially since many elderly were putting off retirement. But there were only 132 million people working in 2012,⁷ a 23 million person drop from where it should be had the economy had jobs for all who wanted them. That number is tracked in what is called an alternate u6 government unemployment number. The younger population entering the working age, a net number greater than the number of those retiring, are calculated at around 120 to 160 thousand a month increase.²⁷ These are new potential workers entering the workforce, a net number of those entering the age of 16 and older, available for work, above and beyond those numbers of retirees subtracting from the available work pool. There are about 18 million of these youth struggling to find work. Then there are 5.6 million who have left the work force since 2009 yet to find work again or who have found work but again been laid off, and you have a total of over 23 million missing from the workforce as of the beginning of 2012. That’s still not including the number of under-employed workers.

Now add to that another approximately 10 million who are working jobs far below their former skill sets formerly afforded them, many of these who also either lost their homes or their homes have gone underwater, so they had become stuck and couldn’t move to where the jobs might be. That’s 23 million people without a job but who wanted and needed one and another 10 million living significantly below their comfort level in part time or full time jobs which paid significantly lower wages than they had lived on previously, often with lowered or no health benefits. These would be a good portion of those with food stamp (SNAP) participation, estimated at 46 million in January 2012.²⁸

If it is assumed that it would take about as long recovering as it took to get to that level, which was about 36 months from the winter of 2008 to the winter of 2011, it would take around 36 months to recover to a reasonable unemployment rate. A reasonable unemployment rate would be 5% unemployment and an overall worker participation level of around 55%, which is what the case was back in 2001.²⁹ That would leave about 8 million still out of work. To get these 15 million people not working employed would mean we’d need to see a steady new jobs creation of over 400,000 a month for the next three years. Now add into that the 160 thousand still coming into the workforce fresh, above and beyond those retiring, and we’d need to be creating 560,000 jobs each and every month for the next 36 months for the U.S. economy to actually recover. 243,000 is a long way from that mark.

All in all, since President Obama took office January 2009, there were 1.2 million¹ fewer jobs available in the USA on January 3, 2012 to spread over those unemployed as well as the growing population of millions of new working age citizens cropping up over the past 36 months who needed to find work. The number of unemployed in January 2012 was still far greater than at the time President Obama took office January 2009. As a comparison, when Ronald Reagan was president, 19 million jobs were created over a period of eight years.³⁰

At the same time the country desperately needed tax revenue, President Obama reduced the tax payer rolls by 15 million in 2009 ³¹ so that only the top 54% of wage earners actually paid any significant income taxes. In 2011 he dropped the payroll tax for most of those already paying no income tax to only 4.2%, down from 6.2%, with an additional 6% hidden tax paid by the employer. This dropped the income tax revenue, relative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to a level not seen in decades and placed Social Security clearly in the red for the first time in its existence, meaning there was now more going out to pay for retirees than there was income generated by the payroll tax taken from the younger workers. It was supposed to be a retirement fund, but it had become an underfunded tax for funding retiree’s pensions. The money those retirees had saved was long ago spent on other elective choices of the government, leaving the retirement savings account concept fundamental to Social Security bankrupt.

Combine that with the massively increased entitlements authorized by Congress, and the U.S. economy was left having to subsidize itself by spending over 1.1 trillion a year more than the tax revenue. The public debt climbed from 9 trillion dollars in 2007 when the Democratic Party took control with the 110th Congress to over 15 trillion dollars in January 2012, with the 112th Congress trying as hard as possible to stop the flood, accumulating a debt which exceeded the country’s GDP, the first time since during World War II, in the fall of 2011. Including the debt that was spent through 2012, this represents an increase in public debt of greater sum than all the debt incurred by for all prior Congresses, from the 1st, with George Washington presiding, through the 109th Congress, with President Obama’s immediate predecessor, George W. Bush presiding. ³²

This debt increase is presented based on the congresses, rather than presidents, because a congress ultimately drives the rate of debt increase, whereas the president as Executive Officer will preside to inhibit debt increase or promote debt increase, depending on his belief system. Notwithstanding, President Obama is himself the most grandiose promoter of debt increase in the history of all presidents combined, promoting an increase above his already accumulated 6 trillion dollar debt and a projected additional 10 trillion dollars in debt over the coming decade.

Unlike during World War II debt incurred, this new millennium debt was not primarily from producing military equipment and transportation infrastructure. This debt was primarily from priority entitlement spending for the lower wage earners and the unemployed. These outlays today are systemic and reflect a deeply flawed infrastructure to the U.S. economy. This problem of deficit spending is not going away; in fact it has been skyrocketing upward at 100 billion a month increase at the time 2012 dawned with the feel good news of diminishing unemployment.

At the current rate of deficit spending the USA would hit 25 trillion in total public debt in the next decade. That number was essentially verified by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). They were a bit more optimistic at predicting only a 22 trillion dollar debt by 2022. 25 trillion in public debt would put the USA’s debt at 167% of GDP in ten years, well above the level of where Greece is at right now. And Greece is in default; they’re bankrupt and can never recover. Except the size of the Greek economy’s GDP is about 400 billion a year compared with the USA’s 15 trillion a year GDP (as of 2012). The USA is the big bull in the china closet. Its debt already exceeds that of the entire European Union.³³

To add to the misery of the situation, those unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare are now estimated at around 100 trillion dollars.³⁴ That is 100 times the annual 2012 income tax revenue of the United States. That is twice the combined wealth of the top 10 percent of the nation, for comparison.³⁵ Add to that the home owners have lost 16 trillion in home equity since the fall of 2008 and taken on a trillion dollars in additional credit card debt, and you have an economic catastrophe of unfathomable proportions.

How could any of this look rosy? Obviously it’s not. Our nation has entered a phase where its future existence as we know it is in serious jeopardy. We’re in the thick of a change in what will define America for decades to come. It’s halftime in America. As such, it has fallen to us Americans, us United States of America citizens, to review what type of America we want for our future.

CHAPTER 2

Rediscovering the American Way

The American way is that which defines the culture and society of United States citizens. It describes the kind of life we each expect when we wake up each morning; it enables the hopes and dreams we take to heart as we head out from our homes into the world and dutifully apply ourselves to our daily struggles; it is to these expectations and pursuits that we stand up and say, We are Americans.

The idea of an innovative and dynamic self-governed individual living in a free country, making his or her own decisions, having protection of property through ordered liberty of a limited government controlled by that same sovereign individual, adorned with a strong set of rights protected by that government – this is an idea that has defined the right leaning political thought of the American way. It is a thought process that is unknown anywhere else on the planet.

In the European realm, there exists the left, the socialist mentality of big government, and the left of left, those deviant strands of Socialism that have formed tyrannical Fascists and Communists, both of whom subscribe to very controlling government policies. True, the right wing Americans have harbored big business dominance and religious inclinations to allow government overreaching powers to further economic and social oversight of the individual. However, in the original thought presented in the Constitution, upon which we have built our culture and society, of these big government concepts there was not such a support, rather a warning of. The concept that individuals with their sovereignty run the government and the government is subservient to its limits that are defined in the Constitution, and to the will of the people within those constraints; this is unique among all governments. This defines the conservative manifesto of America and characterizes the American way.

This has always been the American way until three waves washed against it. These progressive and freedom eroding waves occurred in the early 1900’s, then again in the1960’s and 70’s. Finally a third and by far largest wave of progressivism hit around the turn of the Millennium. This wave has grown in size and continued to the present.

The concept taught in schools that majority rules, and whatever people vote for is the way the country should go, is a wave of progressivism and is not at all the concept laid out by the founding fathers. The words democracy and democratic were never used in the Constitution. The concept of a limited Republic, with a careful division of the powers of government to keep it from becoming corrupt, was what the Constitution was all about. Majority voting was to give direction within carefully defined limits. The right to bear arms and maintain free speech for political discussion, with peaceful demonstration to address grievances, were two primary points that defined the uniqueness of the government of these United States of America. Mob rule, referred to by the founding fathers as majority faction,¹ would occur as a result of unrestrained democracy. Majority voting power to enable a centralized government must be highly constrained so that minority opinion and behavior can have room to exist, including that minority which finds financial success in life. This is one of the primary concerns of the Bill of Rights. This carries the concept that people need to vote for not necessarily the popular choice, but the choice that best fits within the charter of legitimate government function.

Our progress as a society has grown to greatness using uniquely derived principles to create an unprecedented experiment in government, and perhaps just by luck, perhaps because of this form of government, we have also had the luxury of riding the wave of the greatest industrial revolution in the history of our planet. These unique conditions have availed to us astonishingly grand lifestyles. On top of that, we enjoy grand landscapes, grand transportation, grand communication, grand opportunities for personal growth in wealth, and we have even become a society of unique cultural blending and development unlike any other nation on this planet, unlike anything culturally ever seen on this planet before.

It is interesting that a country so grand would have to now face influences so ominous that it risks us losing this social-political experiment that has enabled the average person the ability to achieve unbelievably grand dreams. So much has happened over the past half dozen years it is difficult to sort through and make sense of it all. Here we are, looking at a nation with grand natural resources stretched before us, and up to this point relatively low corruption in government, with relatively easy credit available for financing our dreams, together fostering a climate for economic growth that has allowed us to become the greatest nation on earth, perhaps the greatest nation in the history of our planet. Yet we now stand in the face of stunning developments. We find ourselves distressed because our wonderful experiment in a limited republic has faltered and federal authority has expanded beyond its authorized boundaries. The sources of these sinister and powerful influences are not obvious. It is not even obvious what has gone wrong, what is going wrong, and what our future will bring if we continue on this current path.

We need to understand our plight and the truths of what is undermining our progress. Once identified, once seized upon as to the magnitude of the problems we face, we can then analyze and discover solutions to our problems. Once we find these solutions, then we must act to solve them.

We stand today nearly toppled by an undercurrent of political warring to fight for an economic direction and an unprecedented level of control of individual’s lives and livelihood for Americans. This warring is for our political direction, our economic direction, and our security as a nation, whether we continue existing as an ordered republic that holds liberty at its highest regard, or whether we are swept away to dangerous control by a corrupt government.

Solutions to our nation’s current struggle politically, economically and in national security are apparent. All it takes is seeking them, finding them and implementing them with a balanced approach that is fair to the intentions of our founding fathers, for it is largely because of the structure they laid out in the Constitution that we have been able to find such success as a people. The solutions to the problems currently encountered by these United States of America are found by looking at our nation’s efforts and consequences of those efforts using basic life principles combined with basic analytical tools, holding the Constitution in highest regard as we formulate our plan of action.

The first question we must ask of ourselves is, What is it we want of our government? And then we need to ask ourselves, Is this within the charter of our government’s purpose for existence? We need to first define the role we have envisioned for authorizing others to be empowered with ambitions and functions that will control how we are able to live, and then we need to decide to what end we expect our government to flow consequential restrictions, limitations and redirections to our lives.

Once we have established what it is we would like out of our government, we then would like responsible representation by our elected officials, so that when we want to be heard, we trust we will be listened to when we contact them. A few basic things would be in order for us to expect from our elected representatives. We would like the hard earned money we give authority to those elected to take from us to be used to its best value to accomplish a limited authorized set of priorities: Namely, to maintain a secure and defensible boarder through a minimal but effective and respected border control force; to have enough infrastructure in our congressional branch of government to function on a basic background level of maintaining an economic monetary system that can be trusted to be of use from cradle to grave; to keep corruption at bay by enacting enough regulation to maintain a level playing field for businesses large and small, so that wages can be competitive relative to the skill sets they represent, but also so that compensation affords a reasonable living, based on those skill sets achieved through education; that the communities are enhanced by a system of free competition, without overly burdensome regulation or taxation; that property of citizens be held in high priority with commensurate protection of law; to have the Executive Branch, led by our president, keep a watchful eye that corruption in both private industry and the office of the three branches of government be held at bay, and that the right and passion of the people, within limits authorized by our Constitution, be protected and respected. It would be left to the states to enforce criminal justice, with the oversight of a federal judicial system to enforce interstate needs of criminal justice, as well as enforce any civil rights violations as defined in the Constitution of the United States of America, and to organize an infrastructure that allowed for equal opportunity for economic and social advancement among the citizens of each state.

How do we interpret these principles and expand into legislation specific solutions designed to promote our objective for government, and how do we specifically alter the current processes to address our current problems we face, such as high unemployment and massive debt spending? Let’s take our economy as our first challenge to address.

The economy is an engine that produces wealth. In a capitalistic society, it is paramount that our economy be robust. For it to grow, we need basic judgments about how to run a business to result in a clear path to success. Let’s say we as a private company want to develop a new product and bring it to market. What are two of the most fundamental questions we will need to answer? First, can our product be made cheap enough to compete with other similar types of products that already exist? One of the primary concerns is if it could be made domestically and still be competitive with products made in high volumes in China or Taiwan or Thailand, for example. Under the current imbalance in the cost of product development in these foreign countries, if every decision must follow that premise, then the choice to use American manufacturing capability and skills will almost never be a viable choice, as long as the currency exchange rate is so vastly unbalanced as it currently is, other than some specific operations such as initial conception of the product and then final assembly and packaging of the product with marketing and sales representation. This limited scope of work will not leave enough employment opportunity for the number of people living in the United States. We see then that we are being out-competed due to much cheaper product development costs overseas.

Then secondly, can we produce our product and bring it into high volume production and distribution using local labor? Most any business decision would look at the cost of high volume production costs, including final assembly labor costs in the United States. If we as a company can bundle up a work package and hire an Indian firm to do the engineering development and create high volume manufacturing capability it at one third the cost of here, what incentive do we have to keep that work in this country? We might have good will, but if we want to have a competitive business that can stay in competition when things get rolling, we find we are drawn to overseas labor for product development and overseas for manufacturing and assembly, other than for a few operations that are best accomplished in the United States.

We need to rekindle a few basic principles to stop the outflow of our money and jobs from this country. One is the principle of mutual trust in each other, that there must be, there should be, and there will be, by our committed trust in each other, a better way found. Rather than outsourcing our jobs and importing products that, due to their much cheaper cost, undercut our ability to manufacture and earn living wages here in America, what can we do? A weaker dollar is one approach, but in so doing we are devaluing past fruits of our labor that has been stored in the form of the dollar, placed in savings and used for investment. Any devaluation robs past reward. It simply doesn’t balance out. In the end, saved dollars will buy less over time, and at the same time all labor will need ever increasing wage rates to try and balance the drop in standard of living from the rising cost of goods which rise as the dollar falls in value. Dollars are supposed to represent commensurate wealth of stable value. Not only investment dollars and labor wage rates, but the elderly depend on their savings to achieve a retirement portfolio. Weakening the dollar to make our effective wages less cheats everyone. That is not the best solution; in fact it is a criminal solution, for it defrauds our trust in the value of labor over time.

There must be another solution. We need to search until we find it. As luck would have it, there is a solution, and it is