First Amendment, Marriage, Corporations, Supreme Court

I had an email exchange with a liberal friend who insisted that the Supreme Court decision regarding corporate donations to political campaigns was "activist" because the Founders meant the First Amendment to apply only to individuals, not corporations.  Her reasoning was that corporations aren't individual people because they are subject to different accounting and tax law.  She was concerned that a candidate would be bought and paid for by some evil corporation with nefarious interests.

Twaddle.

By her logic, my husband and I could't write a check to a candidate because we're subject to different accounting and tax law than individuals.

Uh-huh.

I don't see anything in the letter or the spirit of the First Amendment to suggest that the rights within it are abridged because my tax form looks different from the guy standing next to me.  If the Fed says that my citizenship means I have to pay taxes to them, than the Fed ALSO says I enjoy all the rights and privileges of that citizenship.

Can't have it both ways.

I and my business partners and my employees who are all American citizens have legal standing to speak if we feel our health or very survival as a group is being somehow threatened by the government that taxes us, together, as a corporation.  We're not houseplants or space aliens that collectively form the corporation.  We are individual American citizens operating under federal law to self-sustain, asking nothing from our federal government, and in fact pay (federal taxes) for that very privelege to live and work in this great nation. We are, as a group, contributors to our federal government, not parasites on our federal government.

Now, that's not to say that the federal government can't regulate it to make sure it's "fair" but they can't FORBID our group speech.  For example, the requirement that all political advertising have "I'm John Smith and I approve this message" and that the entity that bankrolled the ad be clearly disclosed on all campaign advertising is an excellent idea.  Excellent because sunlight is, as they say, the best disinfectant.  If Pepsi pays for all of John Smith's advertising and John Smith is running on a plank that purports to outlaw Coke and every ad has "I'm John Smith and I approve this ad" with "Paid for by Pepsi" written right across the bottom of it, well, I trust the American people to have rudimentary reading skills and a basic sense of fairness, don't you?

Anything less is censorship.  You can't let one "group" of people give money and not another group.  You can't let PETA give money just because they are "non-profit"  They may be non-profit but SOMEBODY's getting paid... And as long as that somebody, or collection of somebodies is American, they can exercise their First Amendment rights, in the name of the entity that provides them with the pay that sustains them and, by the way, is subject to Federal withholding.  Again, you can't have it both ways.  You are either a citizen with all the rights and responsibilities attendant to that status or you're not.

You see, you can't say one group is allowed and not another, because then you have a situation ripe for corruption.  Whoever is in power could suddenly decide that this group or that group is unlikable for some reason and have their rights abridged.  You can't say one group is allowed because they file their taxes one way and another isn't because they file their taxes another way.  Again, ripe for corruption.

Liberals like to argue that the Founders couldn't have foreseen the technology that would come along, so therefore, the Constitution is somehow the antiquated notion, however noble, of a bunch of dead white guys.  Again, twaddle. 


The document is so brilliant, and so beautifully short, because they meant for us to honor the underlying sense of freedom and fair play it lays out.  As long as there is full disclosure of who is paying for what, I, unlike my liberal brethren, believe in the magnificent sense of fair play Americans have always shown, whether they've gotten their political advertising by candlelight and parchment, or by cable modem and plasma.

Those Big Meanies! They Want to Say Something Not Nice!

Below are the final paragraphs from an eminently sensible piece on the Supreme Court decision Comrade Obama was ill-mannered enough to browbeat the Justices with during the SOTU.  It discusses the ridiculousness of believing polling data without investigating the inherent bias in the questions they pose.

Thanks once again to biggovernment.com for keeping a clear head when approaching matters of constitutionality when all their liberal colleagues in "big" media have lost theirs...

The question asked by ABC and the Washington Post was: “do you support or oppose the recent ruling by the Supreme Court that says corporations and unions can spend as much money as they want to help political candidates win elections?”

No bias there. It sounds suspiciously close to Constitutional Professor Obama’s summation of the case: “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”

I wonder how many realize that the first amendment protections on free speech were at stake in Citizens United?  And I’m not talking in a rhetorical sense either. The actual case was based on whether a corporation had the right to distribute a motion picture. The US district Court of DC had decided that “Hillary; the Movie” could not be distributed as a Pay-Per-View” movie, because it said unkind things about a US Senator and was produced by a Corporation.

All movies today are produced by corporations. Why even the Anti-Corporate propaganda film “The Corporation’ was produced by the Big Picture Media Corporation. (Who says “Irony is dead?’) Allowing the Federal Government the power to decide whether or not a movie can be viewed is something the entire nation should rally against. Arguments in front of the Court actually suggested that if this ruling were to stand, that corporations would not even be allowed to print newspapers or books if the FEC determined them to be “electioneering communication”

I think if someone over at ABC or the Washington Post had actually read the case, they might have come up with a little different question, like: ”Do you Support the recent Supreme Court decision that prevents the Federal Government from controlling which movies you can watch in your own home on Pay-Per-View?” You might have seen a little different result.

You would think Newspapers and  Broadcasting Corporations would be a little more sensitive about this stuff.

Oops, He Did it Again.

I remember when the major networks used to do this kind of reporting.  Thank God we have the internet, now, huh?  And speaking of the internet, didn't Obama's climate change buddy Al Gore mention it to him? You know, the internet that he invented? Cuz it sure seems our pal Obama forgets, with breathtaking regularity, that it's out there, and can play video...

Thanks, yet again, to biggovernment.com, for posting the video below, showing Obama having a "senior moment" (I'm trying to be charitable, here) regarding his relationship to ACORN.  It's long.  It's short.  It's close.  It's not.  Which is it comrade?

Fun Tax Facts... Not.

Thank you once again to The American Daughter for fascinating reading.  The entire article below was cut and pasted from them. Highly recommended website.

Our unvarnished opinions  Tax Facts 2010 – Part I

By Harris Sherline  |  Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 12:30 am

Another year of tax season agony has begun, and it’s time to make my annual observations about taxation in America.

Following are some random facts (in no particular order) about our income tax laws, who pays, who doesn’t, and the impacts our system of taxation has on the nation’s productivity:

When the 16th Amendment to the Constitution established the federal income tax in 1913, the intent was to tax only the very rich. Rates began at 1% and increased to 7% for taxpayers with income in excess of $500,000. Less than 1% of the population paid any income tax at all, compared with almost 50% of taxpayers paying as much as 35% of their taxable income today.

The federal tax code grew from 14 pages in 1913 to over 9,000 pages today, and it now requires some 66,000 pages to document all the IRS regulations and other source material.

The Tax Foundation’s 2007 survey reported that 83 percent of Americans felt the income tax code was too complex. While the average American paid 32.4 percent of their income on taxes, they believed the total of federal, state and local taxes should not exceed 14.7 percent.

It’s almost impossible to accurately comply with the federal tax law, no matter how honest and well-intentioned taxpayers may be. In 1998 there were 34 million civil penalties assessed by the IRS.

Today, the top 5% of wage earners pay a little over 54% of total individual income taxes, while the top 10% pay about 60%, and the top 50% pay approximately 97%. Translation: Just half of all taxpayers pay almost 100% (96.54%) of all income taxes, while almost 50% pay no income taxes at all.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has approximately 94,000 employees (FTEs or full-time equivalents) and a total 2010 budget of $12.4 billion.

Estimates of unreported commercial activity in the U.S. amount to between $2.0 and $2.25 trillion dollars a year, and the IRS Oversight Board report for fiscal 2007 notes that the tax gap, “the difference between what is owed and what is collected…is estimated at $600 billion of lost revenue annually.” 

Question: If it’s an underground economy, how does anyone know how much income is not reported?

The Tax Foundation reported that businesses and individuals now waste over 6.6 billion hours on federal tax compliance activities each year, at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $368.4 billion in 2010. 

That amounts to a 22.8% surcharge on the total amount collected through the tax system and is equivalent to over three million people working full time, just to deal with tax compliance.

In 1913, when the sixteenth amendment was passed, the federal tax code was comprised of 1,337 words. Today, according to the Tax Lawyers Blog, it now requires over seven million words to document.

When the General Electric Co. filed the corporation’s tax return electronically, it took 24,000 pages to document. The Associated Press (June 1, 2006) noted, “If GE had sent paper forms, the return would have staked up eight feet high…”

In 1993, the General Accounting Office (GAO) audited the IRS for the first time in its history and found widespread evidence of financial malfeasance and gross negligence, including the fact that the agency was not able to account for 64% of its congressional appropriation.

The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) “was created in 1969 to target 21 – yes, 21 – millionaires who had managed to avoid paying any taxes at all.” (Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2007). “… more than three million taxpayers (were)…hit by the Alternative Minimum Tax on the(ir) 2006 income. The next year (2007) that number could have increased to 23 million except that Congress passed a so-called “patch” to prevent it.

The federal income tax, currently as high as 35% of taxable income, is increased by as much as 11% in state and local income taxes, plus another 6.20% and 1.45% in social security and Medicare taxes, which makes the total tax burden for some taxpayers almost 54%, not including excise, sales and property taxes, along with a host of other taxes, assessments and fees to numerous to mention. 

Medieval serfs were required to give only one-third of their production to the lord of the manor, and they were considered slaves.

© 2010 Harris R. Sherline, All Rights Reserved

Read more of Harris Sherline’s commentaries on his blog at www.opinionfest.com