Norma White

This column was printed on October 21, 2008 in the Amarillo Globe-News as a Guest Column. It's titled "You want change? Try these ideas" by Norma White.

Perhaps you've seen it passed around by email, with the clipping on the left. She struck a sympathetic nerve among the American public, and that's why the email is so popular.

As many other Americans, I think change is past due... not the liberal, socialist agenda that will give all power to the government, but a return to the logical, reasonable system of government that founded this country.

That's where we start to play with fire, because everybody says things that sound fine to them. Without thought and maturity behind the thoughts, the result would be far worse than the existing condition. For example, let's say an unsupervised child wants a cookie; in fact, he wants all the cookies in the jar. The other child agrees with him, and so the two of them, forming a majority of two, proceed to take the cookies. This is the type of thing that will happen when people start playing with politics when they have no adult experience in it. If you don't know what you're doing and why, you're going to have a lot of trouble.

That is the type of politics Norma White is engaging in. Let's take her bullet points one by one and see where it leads us. My explanation appear in normal font following Ms. White's statement in bold-face font..

 

The Article says this,

 

You want change? Try these ideas
Opinion by Norma White, Guest Columnist

Each presidential candidate is giving his rendition of the changes he wants for America.

Here are a few I believe all Americans want.
That's a little too broad, as you must know. Not all Americans do want these things.

•   Limit Congress from serving more than two terms.  That is all that presidents are allowed.
Many people feel term limits are a bad idea.
  · Term limits will always put amateurs into office. We will always have people with little to no experience. Do we really want the greatest, most complex country in the world always to be governed by amateurs?
  · Term limits is a sword that cuts both ways. It also removes good congresspeople from office.
  · Term limits takes away the will of the people expressed in voting. Term Limits deny us our right to vote for the senators and representatives that we want.
  · We already have term limits. When we vote the politician out of office, his term is up.

•   Stop Congress from voting for their own raises. How did that ever get started?
It got started in 1787 by the Constitution of the United States, framed by this nation's founders. If you don't understand that basic thing about our government, how are you qualified to question it? How would you prefer it to be done differently? Should we form another, fourth, independent branch of government to set the governments workers' pay? Then who would regulate their pay?

•   Stop paying for lawmakers’ high-priced insurance premiums. After all, they are only part-time employees. They might pass some law changes on the insurance companies, if they had to find one.
  · Not sure what you mean by "part-time employees." Being a congressperson is a full time job, regardless of whether it matches up to your full time job or not.
  · Lawmakers should make no law regulating a business except to keep its product from harming the public and requiring full disclosure. Capitalism means competition, which is the most powerful weapon in the hands of the people to regulate prices. Pricing of a company's products should always be kept out of the hands of the government; that is fascism, if the government regulates pricing.

•   Stop paying lawmakers their full salary after serving just one term, or at retirement. We need to get rid of that pension plan; they’re let other companies get rid of theirs.   You were lucky to get 40 to 50 percent of your salary after working somewhere for 35 years, but they get 100 percent.
Amen to that! Congress (the liberal, socialist congress, I mean) is already hammering CEOs for getting large bonuses, but they have no qualms about granting themselves unlimited funds at the taxpayers expense. We need to limit congress pay, except for that one nasty little problem, the Constitution. What Constitutional amendment can we make that will take away these obscene profits and bonuses from congresspeople?

•   Make Congress pay into the Social Security system. They make laws for it. If they spent some of their own money, they might be interested in making it solvent.
That would be all right, except for one thing. The Social Security system in the hands of the government is a disaster. The government should have no business in that business. Rather than making Congress participate in Social Security, let's take Social Security away from congress altogether.

•   Stop handing out aid to illegal aliens. If we did, then Medicaid and the food stamp program would have enough money to aid the aged and the poor.
I don't want people starving to death on our streets, so I'm in favor of giving illegal aliens all the medical, food and humanitarian support they need for the time it takes to get them from where they are to the nearest border of their home country. Better yet... ship them to their own embassy in this country, and let their embassy pay for their return home.

•   Secure our borders.
No argument here.

•   Stop allowing babies born to illegal aliens in the United States automatic U.S. citizenship.
Constitutional Amendment 14 was set up to give citizenship to former slaves born here. It was broad, and the Supreme Court re-interpreted it to give all babies born here citizenship. The only option we have now is to pass another amendment. Do you know how hard that is? Currently the most potent option we have is to enforce laws already on the books, and secure our borders... if we can only force the government to do that.

•   Stop the abuse of our benevolent welfare system. We feed children free meals three times a day until they are 7. Churches give away good, clean clothes.  Companies buy and donate school supplies.  Emergency rooms provide health care at taxpayer expense and the food stamp program is buying food at home.  What are parents doing for their children?
Again, no argument. The constitution does not give the government the authority and power to engage in welfare. They assumed it and the citizens did not vote those politicians out of office. And now we have a system of the government buying votes for welfare money.

•   Have a computer program that cross checks Social Security numbers with fingerprints to stop fraud on many fronts.  Use it on voter registration, too.
And just how does one do that? The system of reading Social Security numbers and the system for reading fingerprints are not the same. That idea is easy to say, but how would one go about doing it?

•   Stop bailing out mortgage companies and banks that give loans to people who cannot afford them.
Things are worse than that. The government should stop forcing banks to give loans to people who cannot afford them. The 2007 real estate market collapse was caused by the socialist government telling banks to give everybody loans so that everybody could own a house. Such foolish thinking. But socialists think like that.

•   Stop companies from paying CEOs and other executives outrageous salaries and bonuses while doing away with workers’ pensions.
That statement is the most communist thing I've heard in this article. Do you have any clue how capitalism works, how competition works and how the government works? The government must not interfere with a company's payroll. Nor should the government bail out failing companies. It's survival of the fittest.

•   Stop all unnecessary spending so we will have the money for our nation’s security, and to help needy and elderly Americans.
Who gets to decide what is "unnecessary" spending?

•   Stop permitting anyone to have a photo with their face covered on driver’s licenses.
No argument here.

Whoever wins the presidency will not be able to make these changes. Only members of Congress can do this, as they are the lawmakers.