Note the conclusion in the third to last paragraph: To abide by the law, leads to a violation of our moral teachings. To ignore the law makes us subject to fines and other consequences. To act within the “nonexemption” leads us to abandon our mission to serve people in need. None of these is acceptable to people of faith.

This is what lead to the founding of our great nation. Freedom from religious persecution.

And the critical last question posed by the Nevada bishops: “Where else will this regulation lead?”

Obama and his ilk must be stopped for the sake of our freedoms.

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President

Any day now, news reports suggest you will ask Congress to approve yet another increase in the debt ceiling. The expected request is another $1.2 trillion, adding to a three year debt binge that has totaled $4.5 trillion on your watch and that has enabled our overall debt to surpass $15 trillion. Your latest request will push the federal debt limit well above $16 trillion.

This pending request will be the sixth time during your Presidency that Congress is being asked to keep allowing government and spending to grow at rates that are unsustainable. In other words, you have made it a routine part of your job to ask for more room to spend without any plan to reduce our debt.

Instead of making debt ceiling increases a routine Washington exercise, we need to make it routine to actually spend no more than we take in. Until then, I will oppose your request to continue borrowing and spending recklessly.

As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal in March 2011, I will oppose a debt ceiling increase unless such an authorization is accompanied by a real plan to tackle our debt. Ideally, such a plan would feature both pro-growth elements and spending restraints, including fundamental tax reform, regulatory reform, meaningful cuts to discretionary spending, a balanced-budget amendment, and reforms to save Social Security and Medicare.

If we had done this in mid-2011 when we last debated the debt ceiling, we could have set America on a path to economic growth and prosperity. This would have led to more jobs and, in turn, to more duly employed taxpayers generating more growth-driven revenue to help us pay down our debt. Instead, you failed to lead, punted the tough decisions and, in doing so, our credit rating was downgraded for the first time in our history. It’s a tragic reality but, on your watch, more and more people have come to believe that America is becoming a deadbeat nation inevitably heading toward a European-style debt crisis.

When you served in the Senate in 2006, you called raising the debt limit “a sign of leadership failure.” Using your own standard, this request will mark your sixth “sign of leadership failure” on the debt ceiling issue alone. Throughout our history, Americans have revered courageous leaders and celebrated them as profiles in courage. Unfortunately, the first three years of your presidency have been a profile in leadership failure. While you may choose to run your reelection campaign against a “Do-Nothing Congress,” your insistence on doing nothing to meaningfully tackle our debt poses a direct threat to America’s exceptional character and is leading us towards a diminished future.

America deserves leaders who will stand front and center, level with the American people about our challenges and offer real solutions to solve them. Instead of simply asking for another debt ceiling increase, I urge you to come forward with a real plan to tackle our debt in 2012.

Sincerely,

Marco Rubio
United States Senator

The “war” will of course fail. The lives ruined and wasted in the process will be the price. Perhaps it is time for a change. Like alcohol, regulation and taxation may indeed be preferable. We learned a lesson with the 21st Amendment. Can we relearn that lesson, and soon?

For the U.S. cutting expenses is the only answer. Real cuts are necessary, not mere reductions in the rates of increasing government spending.

The sad truth is that there is no justification for public employee unions in the first place. The system that tolerates them is dark and unjust existing only for (i) the benefit of the politicians dependent on union contributions and support to get themselves elected, (ii) the union bosses that get power and wealth from their members, and (iii) the few deadwood employees who would fail in any competitive environment and are dependent on union seniority to remain on the public payroll. Excellence is not even mentioned, mediocrity is the norm.

Also true, the good, dedicated, high-preforming public workers are held back by the same unions that claim to represent them. Performance bonuses that could otherwise be available to reward excellence in performance are nonexistent. Seniority governs, holding back the top performers. This disincentive enforces mediocrity, the stuff of a declining society. Likewise the union members really have no voice. The cliques supporting the union bosses pressure conformity. If work slowdowns are called for, work slowdowns are socially enforced. Then, there is the lack of political choice in where political contributions generated from the pockets of public employees from their union dues go. In essence, they are paying for incompetent political leadership but have no choice in the matter. Finally, there is the false promise of retirement benefits which, because of the incompetent political leadership, will not be available to them on retirement. In short, the public employee union members are used for short term gain by others.

There is a critical difference between private sector unions and public sector unions, PRIVATE SECTOR UNIONS ARE SUBJECT TO THE LAWS OF THE MARKETPLACE. PUBLIC UNIONS ARE A MONOPOLY WITHOUT MARKET COMPETITION.

This fact is lost on the voting public. Private unions work for companies that compete in the marketplace. If their demands are too exorbitant in terms of wages, benefits or work rules, their employer will lose business to it competition. If the employer loses enough business, the employees lose their jobs. So a competitive market forces parties to be reasonable and respond to market conditions; in short, to excel in their jobs.

In the public union case, the government by definition is a monopoly free from competition. There is no market in which it must compete. Governments are by definition inefficient necessities in society. If their workers are allowed to unionize and collectively bargain for wages and benefits, there is no check or balance on their ability to extort increases, security, tenure, etc. A strike, walkout or slowdown creates a situation where there are no substitute government services. No competition.

A public union labor negotiation, is really no negotiation at all. The ritual of collective bargaining in the public union case is just a union boss talking to the incompetent politician who was elected with the help of the union dues. This incestuous relationship is driving our states, counties and cities to the brink of bankruptcy. It is dis-economic at its core.

Public employee unions perpetrate a fraud not only on the unsuspecting public but on the public employees themselves. We all lose with this unjust, uneconomic system.

Time for a change!

Consider the WSJ editorial, The Spenders Won in 2011. Republicans controlled the House yet failed to get any significant reduction in spending. Deficits generated by a Democrat controlled Congress were $2.98 Trillion in 2008, $3.52 Trillion in 2009, $3.45 Trillion in 2010; and even with a Republican House are $3.59 Trillion in 2011 and  projected to be $3.65 Trillion in 2012. We are over $15 Trillion in national debt. This is debt that we will pass onto our children and grandchildren. How moral is that? We take handouts that our grandchildren will pay for!

There must be a debate on the role of government. It does everything as Obama, Pelosi and Reid propose. Or is is limited as our constitution suggests. If the nation opts for the “free lunch,” our nation will become another Greece. If the nation chooses the moral course of eliminating the “free lunch” our children and grandchildren will have a chance to live productive lives in this country.

I was impressed with Ed Crane’s comment in a WSJ op-ed on Ron Paul that the U.S. spends more than the rest of the world on defense–in essence defense of the western world! ”…an overreaching military presence around the world is inconsistent with small, constitutional government at home. The massive cost of these interventions, in treasure and blood, highlights what a mistake they are, as sensible people on the left and right recognized from the beginning. Of course we want a strong military capable of defending the United States, but our current expenditures equal what the rest of the world spends, which makes little sense. It is futile to try to be the world’s policeman…”

My point is that to the extent we overspend on defense, Europe doesn’t need to spend. Their taxes to the extent paid go to increase statist expansions and welfare in countries like Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain.

To top that off, our Fed seems to think it legitimate to help finance Europe’s profligate ways. Jerry O’Driscoll exposes Bernanke’s covert effort to bail out the ECB in his recent WSJ op-ed highlighted in our blog. This is clearly ultra vires, beyond the legal power of the Fed and against what its chairman has publicly stated.

In effect we have given Europe the leeway to expand its welfare state beyond its capacity to pay for that expansion. Our president who has no concept of economics admires the European model and seeks to expand our own welfare state beyond its capacity to pay for the expansion. His statist stimulus expenditures were nothing more than payments to increase the size and scope of government. His Obamacare takeover of medicine is nothing more than an unsustainable entitlement addition to the already unsustainable entitlements of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

We have enabled Europe’s welfare/statist addiction at a time when we can’t afford our own addiction. That latter addiction is theft from our grandchildren. Immorality par excellence! It must stop!