ALEC and Article V Academy in Salt Lake City
By Mike Kapic – August 22, 2021
My wife, Joanne, and I drove to Salt Lake City on a Tuesday in late July to participate in the Article V Academy (sponsored by LUV4BBA) put on by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) on the following Friday afternoon. The general conference drew 2500 legislators from across the country. Being late in the week, the Academy drew about 60 legislators to hear a panel discussion on our hideous debt, taxing, and spending crises and a likely solution.
Economists, scholars, historians, spoke and delivered PowerPoint charts showing the magnitude of what you and I have allowed our political parties, lobbyists, special interest groups, and government leaders & bureaucrats to create. None of it to be paid by them or us, but instead by your and my future generations.
From 1790 to the 1930s, the cost of government remained at about 3% of our GDP (total revenue from goods and services). Since then, the cost of government has risen to over 104% and is still climbing. That doesn’t include mandatory entitlements, by the way. Can you image your credit card not only maxed, but debt so high it is outside your ability to service it? And that’s before the mortgage!
There is nothing in the Constitution to constrain, control, or limit our government from spending, nor prevent them from taxing to cover it! And government does not understand the economic fact of revenue and taxation (the Laffer curve-a fact proven by D & R administrations). Beyond a certain point on the graph, increasing taxes reduces revenues. We the people are at the mercy of their “good character” for our fiscal security.
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse and law making; the Executive to enforce it; the Supreme Court to ensure it is Constitutional; but none of them have the (political) will to resolve its abuse. They aren’t listening to us but to their inner circle of elites.
In Salt Lake City, the Academy panel came to a unanimous conclusion and a solution: The Constitution, they intoned, authorizes the states and their legislatures to remedy any problem that the National government will not. The panel recognized the 400-year-old convention process of the people and their local representatives meeting to solve problems that larger congresses could not.
To that end, they discussed options that might be discussed in a convention by state legislators and citizens. How do we limit spending? How big should the national government be? How would we handle an emergency such as war or a new pandemic? The convention would ask and debate those issues, ending with an agreed solution to be submitted for approval to their states, back home.
Article V authorizes repairing the cracks and fissures in America’s foundation by Congress itself or by the states and people through its federalist powers.
There is a safe and legal solution to what troubles Americans today. To make it happen, we must stand up, show up, and speak up. Please help us return this Nation to God and to the consent of the governed.
Here is more information on the race to 34 states: Let Us Vote For a BBA.
