WhackyNation

Holy Ballot Box, Batman! Here it is, the season of endless gab by the presidential candidates, and Congress still hasn’t adopted a bright idea the first President Bush proposed 17 years ago. Sad to say, his son, the second President Bush seems to have ignored his father’s idea.

The first President Bush suggested to Congress and the people that we should turn over to the American public the big job of chopping the enormous, ballooning cost of federal government and the national debt. It’s one of the cleverest and most important ideas any President has offered.

Bush proposed that deficit reduction, a gigantic slash in government spending, and budget-balancing could be accomplished through the income-tax system — and through your tax report and mine. By checking a box on a tax return, the taxpayer would start a chain reaction that would force — a move that would free billions for much better use in the U.S.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Congress refused even to consider Bush’s proposal in the early 1990s, and subsequent Democratic lawmakers also turned thumbs down on the idea. President Bill Clinton ignored the Bush proposal and, in two terms, seemed interested only in increasing taxes and shutting out the voice of the people.

Even the Republicans who took control of Congress in the mid-1990s failed to heed the brilliant proposal of the first President Bush. If they had implemented Bush’s remarkable idea, I think they would have denied a second term for President Clinton and his spend-spend-spend mania.

All of which moves me to bring up once again a suggestion I have made so many times in commentaries, articles, speeches, and even books. That suggestion is to amend the U.S. Constitution to include the right of the American public to make laws or get rid of bad laws made by lawmakers.

It’s called the public-initiative process, and it is already operating frequently in Washington State and many other states. Under the initiative process, petitions are circulated among the voters, and if a certain specified number sign the petitions, an issue proceeds to the ballot box for the voters of the state to consider.

It’s no surprise that, in Washington State, the Democrats shy away from or even try to abolish the initiative system. Obviously, they don’t want the general public to interfere with their pet projects and their ever-continuing penchant for solving any problem by taxing an already over-taxed populace.

I know that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is usually a long, drawn-out process, but the initiative idea is so important in this free country that it must eventually be extended to the federal level. I’m positive the American public would vote overwhelmingly for such an amendment, despite the opposition of Democratic lawmakers.

Anyone who is not deeply concerned by the dangers of a constantly ballooning Big Federal Government should read the recent Associated Press revelations detailing how federal executives and employees have been splurging by charging personal expenditures to their government credit cards, which are supposed to be used only for government business.

The investigation revealed that federal employees

“have charged millions of dollars on government credit cards to pay for lingerie, gambling, iPods, Internet dating services and a $13,000 steak dinner.”

The misuse of the credit cards was reported in a new audit by the Government Accountability Office.

The examination by the G.A.O. covered a 15-month period. It said the transactions

“were improper because they were not authorized correctly or did not meet requirements for the cards’ use.”

That’s a rather polite way of saying that the employees were, in effect, stealing funds from the federal treasury and from the pockets of taxpayers!

It’s hard to believe that the G.A.O.’s review found that

“nearly 41 percent of roughly $14 billion in credit-card purchases, whether legitimate or questionable, did not follow procedure.”

Imagine that! Nearly half of the purchases made using the government credit cards were questionable. Broken down, that means that about $6 billion or more in purchases were for personal and not government-business purposes!

The improprieties were noted in many federal departments and agencies, including the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security. The “Smart Pay” cards, as they are called, have been issued to at least 300,000 federal-government employees and, as the AP noted, are the feds’ equivalent of corporate credit cards.

This pregnant paragraph appears in the AP article:

“Out of a sample of purchases totaling $2.7 million, the government could not account for hundreds of laptops, iPods, and digital cameras worth more than $1.8 million. In one case, the U.S. Army could not say what happened to computer items making up 16 server configurations, each of which cost nearly $100,000.”

If that doesn’t make your blood boil, you may need a transfusion!

Perhaps the most irritating aspect of the G.A.O.’s startling investigation is that nothing apparently will be done to penalize those federal employees who have literally stolen funds from the federal treasury to pay for personal purchases. The two agencies that are responsible for administering the credit-card program were simply advised “to improve accounting for purchased items.”

Hell! What should be done is that every federal employee found to have used the government credit cards for personal purchases should be fined or fired — or both! Why the pussyfooting? These employees are, in essence, thieves, and they have been caught red-handed. Little wonder that Big Government is out of control!