Original Proposal - Reports By Two Deficit-Reduction Commissions - Feb 9

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Click here for a short background summary of the two Deficit-Reduction Commissions.

We will focus on the two issues that will dominate both the 2011-2012 Congress and the 2012 Presidential Campaign –- deficit reduction and the failure to finance 2010 Health-Care Reform (the Congressional Budget Office rated it “deficit neutral” on the assumptions (1) that half of the admitted cost could be taken from Medicare which is already facing bankruptcy and therefore won’t happen, (2) that half of the admitted cost could be dumped on the states in the form of an increased Medicaid mandate when the states are already bankrupt, and (3) that most of the non-admitted cost in the form of higher premiums for health insurance now required to be purchased by healthy young people is constitutional which is under challenge in litigation by 22 state Attorneys General).

This all against the backdrop of the Tea Party movement and the bankruptcies of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, etc.

Please help us formulate a third way (vs. the obvious relish with which the two established parties want to demagogue the tax rate for the top personal-income-tax bracket which will probably lead to gridlock).

The third way would be to kill four birds with one stone by financing social security and universal health care with a European-style (that is, dramatically higher) gasoline tax. The four birds = adequate financing for social security and universal health care, reducing carbon emissions, reducing the international balance-of-payments deficit, and increasing national security by reducing the reliance of the U.S. and its allies on foreign oil.

A potential fifth bird, as discussed briefly at our 1/12/2010 meeting, is the preservation of (vs. mere financing for) Universal Health Care. Attended by 4 attorneys and 4 non-attorneys, the meeting considered Tom Chancellor’s Discussion Outline and then considered how the US Supreme Court is likely to decide three cases that are likely to reach it in the near future = (1) the gay-rights litigation currently pending before the Ninth Circuit, (2) the 43 detainees at Guantanamo Bay whom the Obama Administration will not grant trials (civilian or military) and will be held as enemy combatants until the end of the War on Terror (please see the materials for our 12/15/2010 meeting), and (3) the litigation brought by 22 state Attorneys General challenging the constitutionality of 2010 Health-Care Reform (specifically arguing the requirement to purchase health insurance is not Constitutional under the Commerce Clause because, if the failure to act comprises interstate commerce, then there is nothing that is not interstate commerce and presumably America’s Founders thought that there must be something that was not interstate commerce if they specified it as a requirement for federal legislation.)

At our 1/12/2010 meeting, the consensus was that with a majority of “strict constructionists” on the Supreme Court (as well as a sixth Roman Catholic member vis-à-vis the gay-rights litigation), the Supreme Court will rule AGAINST gay rights, enemy-combatant rights, AND THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF HEALTH-CARE REFORM!!!

So our looming Six-Degrees-Of-Separation E-mail Campaign proposing a European-style (i.e., large) gas tax to finance social security and universal health care may be the only way to save them!!!
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