Former Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn says that
millennials will be hardest hit by an out of control federal government, and
explains why they must embrace the responsibility of taking back the government
for themselves.
Self-interested politicians, more concerned
about their grip on power than doing what's right for the nation, have created
a federal government that is systematically destroying personal liberty and
prosperity, Coburn says. Regulations written by unelected bureaucrats, out of
control spending that shows no sign of abating, and incumbent career
politicians who effectively face no opposition in their reelection efforts:
Millennials stand to be the generation hardest hit. That's the argument
advanced by former Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), and it's why he now advocates
for an Amendments Convention to be convened as described in Article V of the
United States Constitution.
In fact, he has written a book about it,
due out May 30, called, Smashing
the DC Monopoly: Using Article V to Restore Freedom and Stop Runaway Government.
Coburn explained why he believes
millennials are going to need an Article V Convention the most:
Here’s the
financial consequences of inaction. I saw an explanation on the web of what a
trillion dollars is. If you make 40,000 per year, you have to work 25 years to
make a million dollars. You have 25,000 years to make a billion. You have to
work 25 million years to make a trillion dollars. That’s how you can get some
appreciation for what a billion and a trillion is.
Sixty-four
percent of milliennials don’t trust Washington, but fifty-six percent of them
want more government. Millennials are not looking forward and seeing that
they’re not gonna have any money. They have to be educated. They have to read
this book. They have to understand how big the problems are.
Coburn laments the attitude of lawmakers in
Washington who refuse to make difficult decisions to fix what's broken in
our federal government, regardless of who's in charge:
Ask yourself this question: We’re
going to run maybe a $400-$500 billion deficit this year, maybe $500-600
billion next year. You hear anybody talking about fixing that? You see anything
in the news? Where is the effort to fix it? We have $20 trillion worth of debt.
We can continue, because we’re a reserve currency, to print money. But it only
works if people continue to buy our bonds. The way we’ve gotten out of it the
last eight years is that the federal reserve has bought our bonds. So all they
did is create fake money. Now if that doesn’t get resolved, what that implies,
if it’s $4 trillion, out of a $20 trillion economy, that means the value of your
money is going to decline by 20%. So what they’re doing is, the way they’re
handling our debt, is decreasing the value of our money, which decreases the
value of our retirement savings, everything we’ve ever worked for. It decreases
the value of everything except hard assets. So if we all owned gold, and we all
owned a home, we’d all be ok. But we don’t get paid in gold. We get paid in
dollars that decline in value every single day.
Explaining exactly what this means for the
generation that's going to have to pay back all this debt, Coburn paints a
bleak picture:
It effects everybody from the
upper-middle incomes on down. They say the upper-middle family income declined
$8000. They went from $78,000 to $70,000. The median family income went from
$64,000 to $52,000. This is going to hurt everybody who isn’t in the top 10% in
our country. And it’s really going to hurt the people who are dependent and are
struggling today. It’s just going to make them poorer. The moral question is,
is it ok to steal the future and the standard of living for all the
millennials, and their kids and grandkids, because we don’t have members of
Congress that have the spine to stand up and make the hard choices? Is that
morally ethical? Is that right to do that?
The problem of an out of control federal
government extends beyond party lines, and the solution is nonpartisan. Both
parties are responsible for the expansion of governmental intrusion into our
lives, and the limiting of personal liberty. Smashing the DC Monopoly
sets out to explain how unbalanced the government has become, and how we can
take back the power over the government to eliminate the dysfunction in D.C.
The entire point, as Coburn explained, is to return local decision making to
the states.
It's bipartisan. If you really want
decision making returned to the state, you gotta be for this. What can we do?
Can we actually return, and renew, and recapture, the intent of our Founders on
individual rights, and states’ rights, and the balance of power between the
three branches of government, which is now totally askew? That includes the
balance of power between the states and the federal government.
Coburn believes the answer is yes, but
firs, we must understand the root of the problem—the disease, as the doctor
says, not just the symptoms.
The disease is we don’t have good
representatives. Why don’t we? Because the incumbent has such an advantage that
no one can defeat him. Plus we’ve gerrymandered all the districts to where if
you’re a Republican, you’re locked, if you’re a Democrat, you’re locked, so
there are very few districts up for competition.
President Trump was elected on a platform
of draining the swamp, but Coburn believes that is impossible without drastic
action to rein in the federal bureaucracy.
I think he’s done more than any
president in my lifetime in terms of turning things around with Executive
Orders. So I think they’ve done a lot. But you can’t drain the swamp. It’s not
drainable. In 2010 the Republicans took back the House from the Democrats. Then
in 2014 they took over the Senate. Then in 2016 we got the White House. Tell me
what’s changed? Here’s the problem. You have to put muzzles on the alligators.
You can’t drain the swamp, but you can catch them and put a muzzle on them with
a balanced budget amendment, with a big change to the commerce clause, with
limiting terms. If you do all those things, we’ll actually cure the disease,
instead of just treating the symptoms. You’re never going to change the Senate.
I used to have this debate with Jim DeMint all the time. He thinks you could
eventually get 60 Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns. You can’t! You have to limit the
damage from the people who are not Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn with a return to
our Constitution via Article V.
It's bipartisan. If you really want
decision making returned to the state, you gotta be for this. What can we do?
Can we actually return, and renew, and recapture, the intent of our Founders on
individual rights, and states’ rights, and the balance of power between the
three branches of government, which is now totally askew? That includes the
balance of power between the states and the federal government.
Coburn believes the answer is yes, but first,
we must understand the root of the problem—the disease, as the doctor says, not
just the symptoms.
The disease is we don’t have good
representatives. Why don’t we? Because the incumbent has such an advantage that
no one can defeat him. Plus we’ve gerrymandered all the districts to where if
you’re a Republican, you’re locked, if you’re a Democrat, you’re locked, so
there are very few districts up for competition.
Coburn is a smart man, and his ideas are
good in theory, but I remain skeptical that a convention called for and run by
career, partisan politicians currently occupying state legislatures will change
anything. If a Convention is called, who
does Coburn think will appear and demand to "represent" the governed
at such an event? "I have
experience and expertise. I and my party
should represent the people in this momentous event" will be the argument.
It will be the career politicians, party
apparatchiks and lifetime bureaucrats/judges who have caused this mess in the
first place at the table to ensure their gravy train and power is not
interrupted.
Don't get me wrong, the governed SHOULD be
calling for sweeping change, but the majority of Americans no longer even vote
when it matters. In primaries, where the
brain trust we choose among in November are elected, only 17% of the eligible
electorate casts a vote. In the last
Presidential election, I read that only 54% of the eligible electorate voted. In the last mid-term election -- when members
of Congress are elected -- only 36% of the eligible electorate votes. In my view, it is unrealistic to think that
Americans who are too lazy to even vote will support much less actually
participate in a convention.
Americans interested in change should NOT
be looking to amend the Constitution, but to the complete “draining of the
swamp” at both the State and Federal levels. Needless to say, in order to accomplish such
an undertaking, we MUST first have term limits…