Make the States Sovereign Again

As long as we are making America great again, and making America healthy again, and making all things new and great again, perhaps we could include returning to constitutional order making the states sovereign in a federalist republic again.

How might we do that?

First, we could end the federal ownership of state lands, including national parks. Everything but federal military bases. Most of the Western States are in large part owned by the federal government, as they were admitted to the Union with a congressionally mandated proviso that everything that wasn't owned by anyone else remained under the ownership of the federal government. Eighty percent of the land in Nevada is federally owned (maybe that was OK when the US was doing atmospheric atomic testing in the 1950s and 60s, but that time is long past). Most Western states have above 50% of the land under ownership of the federal government... No Western state, with the exceptions of Texas and Oklahoma, has less than 20% of its land owned by the federal government. (Texas and Oklahoma are unique in that they were the Republic of Texas before they became part of the US and were not subject to the diktats of Congress regarding land ownership. They got a better deal. Oklahoma was subsequently split off from Texas.). Most Eastern, Midwestern, Atlantic, New England, and Southern states have around 1-3% of their land owned by the federal government. Unfair in the extreme. The Western states are still seen almost as territories rather than states in regard to land ownership. Were this land returned to the states, along with the national parks (make them state parks), we could eliminate the BLM (that's the Bureau of Land Management, not Black Lives Matter), the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Forest Service. And the Department of Interior to boot.

This would have the salutary effect of disallowing the federal government from dictating resource extraction in the Western states. Or, rather, blocking it with malice aforethought as with Biden and Obama, or for a quid pro quo, as with Clinton and southern Utah energy extraction to accommodate his campaign finance benefactors, the Riady Family, via their connections with the Chinese military. (Admittedly, Biden went whole hog and blocked offshore everything, and this proposal wouldn't help that).

The foremost reform that would restore the sovereignty of states in our so-called Federalist Republic would be to eliminate the federal income tax (as various Ricochetti have described). Re-ban once again any direct tax on citizens (federal income tax). This would take a Constitutional amendment to rescind the 16th Amendment. Such an amendment should also specify that only an indirect tax could be levied on the states, at a set amount per capita, so that each state would remit to the federal government a tax based on the population of the state. In my extremist view, I would favor a provision in such an amendment that disallows tariffs completely. I would reluctantly allow the federal government to levy transactional taxes — very reluctantly. If we have learned anything from the 16th Amendment, it is that any taxing power allowed to the federal government will be taken to an extreme, abused, exploited, and used as a club to beat the citizenry into submission. (Think Lois Lerner, the Tea Party, and 503 slow walking to block a large segment of the electorate from participation in a national election--which though perpetrated by the Obama administration, was supported by the Republican party as well--that alone should be enough to forever ban a direct federal tax on citizens, as it will be used as political warfare against citizens--one of the greatest shames ever perpetrated on the American electorate by the federal government). The federal government needs to be severely constrained in its taxing ability. As it stands now, based on recent Supreme Court rulings, there is no limiting principle at all on Congress' taxing power. That needs to change. (Recall Roberts' opinion on the Obamacare tax/penalty--that sly quantum legal wave-particle duality theorist and Chinatown aficionado--"She's my daughter-slap. She's my sister-slap; she's my daughter AND my sister-stunned recognition-- and Kavanaugh's opinion in Moore regarding retroactive taxation of unrealized capital gains--truly obscene.)

Such an amendment, in my view, would include a ban on any federal money going to states. Also, a ban on any federal money going to NGOs, nonprofits or foundations. Period. Not allowed. Federal money, collected from the states as indirect tax revenue, would only be allowed to pay for federal government necessities. Money should flow in one direction only — from local to state to federal. Not the other way around. As it stands, the federal government bypasses states to collect revenue directly from citizens, which it then uses to fund state activities, such as Medicaid, education, etc. That should not happen. Sending money from citizens to the federal government empowers the federal government at the expense of the states, and that centralization of power completely unbalances the original constitutional balance of power. It is not just the tripartite federal government (legislative, executive, and judicial) balance of power, but the balance of power between the states and the federal government that is crucial to a viable federalist republic. That balance has been destroyed by the federal income tax, among other things.

Further, there should be a ban on federal money going to individual citizens for any purpose whatsoever. This would essentially ban both means-tested entitlement programs (which are dangerously propelling our debt) as well as non-means-tested programs (SS and Medicare/Medicaid). This would need to be spun off from the federal government, made optional at a minimum, privatized, or ended for upcoming generations. This would allow younger generations to avoid the impossible burden of the intergenerational involuntary Ponzi scheme that is SS and plan for healthcare outside the purview and iron boot of the federal government (for those unaware, we have a defacto single-payer healthcare system with fixed prices and regulations that are Orwellian: Everything that is not permitted is forbidden.)

Whatever entitlements may be desired can be established at a state level. That would at least allow different approaches, as opposed to the monolithic centralized approach we now have. Vastly superior approaches to retirement security (an example is found in Chile) can be developed in different states. The same with healthcare. Let states decide what kind of healthcare financing they wish to establish. Universal health savings accounts in one state, a Canadian-style system in another state. See what each prefers and what works.

Ending the federal income tax would end the favorable tax treatment of nonprofits, foundations (both public and private), and NGOs. No longer would George Soros get a tax benefit for funding riots that resulted in the burning of federal buildings. Or the Rockefeller Foundation for supporting forced sterilization of the "unfit". Foundations and charitable organizations would not cease to exist — they existed before the federal income tax — but all too many foundations, including the Rockefeller and the Lilly foundations, were established specifically for tax purposes. And the federal tax system adds to the distortion of healthcare financing, as Michael Cannon has energetically argued, resulting in rising healthcare costs and distortions of worker benefits.

States could decide how they want to extract revenue from citizens to pay the federal bill for the state. Some states have no income tax. Some states have no property tax. Nevada obtains royalties on gambling revenue. Transactional taxes alone could likely suffice to pay the federal tab. A state could impose a flat tax. California might opt for a steeply progressive income tax along with steep corporate taxes in concordance with its Socialist/Communist orientation. Of course doing so might induce more companies, far beyond Tesla and Chevron, to flee the Golden (Fleece) State. And, since the federal levy is based on population, states would have an additional incentive not to admit illegal aliens as Sanctuary States (which illegal immigrants California insists on counting in the Census to procure more House seats) as that would increase their tax bill.

Returning to state legislatures the election of senators would be a great boon to allow state interests to be better represented in the national government. With an indirect tax levied per population, states would definitely want a say in the federal budget, as it would dictate what the state would be required to cough up to the federal fisk. With the 17th Amendment, the election of senators became party-based rather than state-based. The senators represent the interests of the party, not the state. This leads to serious limitations on states' abilities to have their interests represented at the federal level. Just because there was a corrupt senator from Montana who bought his seat from the legislature in the late 19th and early 20th century was no reason to upend the constitutional order to vitiate state representation. This, in my view, created a severe distortion in power, tilting the playing field steeply in the direction of federal power and party interests.

The federal budget should be divided among the states on a per capita basis. The federal government should be required to stick to that budget unless there is a 2/3 vote of Congress to deficit spending in case of war or another major emergency. With that type of decision reserved to Congress, with representation of the people in the House and the states in the Senate, a modicum of constraint on federal spending would be in place, and there would be some hope of fiscal sanity, which has long since been abandoned in the nation.

The idea that the US government has the prerogative to establish departments and agencies dealing with ever more local matters (Housing and Urban Development, Environmental Protection, Dept of Education, HHS, OSHA, CFPB, SEC, etc.) needs to be abandoned, forever and anon. Otherwise our liberties will be submerged in a bottomless sea of regulations and federal overreach. The Progressive ideas that have hamstrung the nation for well over a century need to be jettisoned. Progressive policies pave the road to serfdom.

It is getting to the point that old codgers, at least myself, feel like we are living in the South in the era of Reconstruction, with the feds dictating every policy. (Except, of course, in the case of California, which is trying to dictate policy for the rest of the states, going beyond what even the federal government has done, with their diktats on electric vehicles. Hopefully Trump can succeed in stopping California's power grab--or Californians themselves will come to realize that the Leftist policies are poison for their state--by recalling Newsom and reversing course).

Touch those entitlements, President Trump!

So far has the nation devolved into centralized tyranny, that I almost begin to think George Mason was right about ratification.