Can an amendment to the U.S. Constitution fix the deficit problem?

Polls show most Americans think we need a balanced-budget amendment. Yet serious scholars of the issue understand that the deficit is merely a symptom of the problem, namely, that people want more benefits from government than they wish to pay for.

Various forms of balanced-budget and tax-and-spending-limitation amendments have been proposed. Almost everyone realizes that an amendment must be flexible enough to deal with national emergencies, such as a major war.

But if the amendment is too flexible, politicians will quickly find ways around whatever limitations on spending, taxing and deficits are imposed. And the more tightly drawn any proposed amendment is, the more difficult it will be to pass it because an effective amendment will limit the powers of the very people who are required to vote for it.

As we struggle to try to devise a constitutional fix to the structural problem of destructive debt, spending, regulation and taxation, it would be useful to consider the following.  Call them Rahn's Three Requirements for A Constitutional Fix:

Four months ago, on March 16, I told you about The Real Lockbox - a real fix of Social Security being devised by Republicans in Congress, superior to President Bush’s and designed to drive Democrats up a defensive tree. I then promised I would update you on its progress - and now I can report it is fast becoming legislative reality.

The wonders of US shale gas continue to amaze. We receive fresh evidence by the day that swathes of American industry have acquired a massive and lasting advantage in energy costs over global rivals, demolishing assumptions about US economic decline.

Some fifty new projects have been unveiled in the US petrochemical industry. A $30bn investment blitz in underway in ethelyne and fetilizer plants alone.

This is happening just as other clusters of manufacturing - machinery, electrical products, transport equipment, furniture, etc - are "re-shoring" back from China to the US. A 16% annual rise in Chinese wages over the last decade has changed the game. PricewaterhouseCoopers calls it the "Homecoming: Why a resurgence in US manufacturing may be the next big bet."

The revival of the chemical industry is a spin-off from the greater drama of America's energy rebound, though a very big one. The US Energy Department announced last week that the country will produce 11.4m barrels a day (b/d) of oil, biofuels, and liquid hydrocarbons next year, almost as much as Saudi Arabia. This is largely due to hydraulic fracturing - blasting rock with water jets - to extract shale gas and oil.

Europe is going in the opposite direction, drifting towards energy suicide. So is Japan.

Happy New Year! 

You may be wondering how to cheerfully greet the coming darkness of 2012.  Sounds like the folks getting crucified by the Romans singing Always Look On The Bright Side of Life in Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Well, screw the darkness.  Screw Obama and his fascist minions, his fascist regulations, and his fascist enemedia lapdogs.  Life is about rising to the challenge, and that's what we're going to do in 2012.

Other people are.  Like in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad has had his goons gun down Syrians by the thousands, yet the Syrians keep fighting for their freedom.  They are not giving up.  Each day Assad gets weaker and they get stronger.  Next year, they will win, with Assad ending up in a coffin or exile.

Let the Syrians be an inspiration to us.

If you were canoeing with a friend and you believed, based upon reading the maps, that you were within five minutes of going over a massive and perhaps lethal waterfall, while your math- and geography-challenged friend believed that you had another 15 minutes before going over the falls, would you compromise by agreeing to go another 10 minutes before returning to shore?

It is delusional to agree to compromise in such a situation. Sometimes it makes sense to compromise -- other times it can be fatal.

President Obama claims that the Republicans are being irresponsible in not wanting to close "tax loopholes" for private jet owners and oil companies. As long as the government continues to grow faster than the economy -- as it has been doing -- there is no tax increase that can solve the problem.

It is delusional to think that the kind of tax increases the president has talked about would do anything serious to solve the debt situation, and would not make the unemployment problem worse.

Let’s say a young white fellow is caught entering a New York subway station by a watchful policeman, who discovers 50 pounds of high explosives in his backpack. Upon interrogation, the fellow explains he was instructed to blow up the station by the Holy Cheendon, whose voice he hears in his head, because for doing so the Cheendon will send him to Paradise located in the Andromeda Galaxy.

Such a fellow would not be a Moslem crazy, just plain crazy. But what if there is something specifically screwed up in his brain that’s making him crazy - and it is this same something that turns some Moslems into suicidal terrorists?

Matt Damon's new film Promised Land - scheduled for theatre release on December 28 - sounds really promising.

It's about a cynical young man sent by a large wind farm company to a lovely village in rural Pennsylvania to seduce the locals with tales of the massive sums of money they'll make if they sign a deal to have huge wind turbines built on their farmland.

Dollar signs flash in the greedy hicks' eyes. This wind farm scam is crazy: no way would they have made that much money in their entire lives from just farming. Every one rushes to Damon: "Where do I sign?"

But Damon has begun falling in love with a local farm girl who tells him the truth about wind farms: that they're ugly, that they kill birds and bats, that they ravage the countryside, blight views, divide communities and make people sick with their Low Frequency Noise.

So instead of bribing locals to have these bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes erected in their village, Damon leads the fight back. NO MORE WIND FARMS!

The village is saved and he and the girl live happily ever after.

If only.   The sad truth is...

Many a democracy has been upended by excessive government spending - and, unfortunately, America, despite the latest budget agreement, is well on its way to fiscal and, perhaps, democratic collapse.

As long as those receiving government benefits are much smaller in number than those paying for the benefits, politicians are more dependent on the taxpayers than on the beneficiaries. But the United States has reached the point at which there are more people receiving government checks than paying income taxes.

As the political balance shifts away from taxpayers to recipients, the pressures to increase government spending accelerate until finally the golden goose is fully plucked and the economy collapses.

President Obama is the agent and spokesperson for the taxtakers and not the taxpayers, which is why he keeps arguing for tax increases and saying it is only ‘fair' that the rich pay more.