Announcing the Conference on the Constitutional Convention
Larry Lessig, hero of Creative Commons and Fix Congress First, has joined with Tea Party Patriots to call for an exploratory meeting about calling a first-ever Constitutional Convention under the Constitution. You can't make up stuff like this alliance. Still, both are talking about cutting the War Department (We don't have a Defense Department) so who knows? But remember that when it was proposed in the pre-Constitution Constitutional Convention that the US Army be limited to 5,000 men, George Washington stage-whispered, "Excellent idea! And we should also put in that no country shall attack us with more than 5,000 men." So that was the end of that.
There are incredibly strong reasons not to hold a new Constitutional Convention, which would be under no constraints as to what it might propose. Any Amendments passed out of the Convention would go straight to the states, without requiring or even permitting any action by Congress.
On the other hand, I don't know of any possible amendments that would actually get passed in 3/4 of the states (38). Not the Balanced Budget Amendment, not any Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment, not the repeal of birthright citizenship (14th Amendment), nor the repeal of elections for Senators; and on the other side not the DC Voting Rights Amendment, nor the Equal Rights Amendment, nor the Child Labor Amendment from the 1920s.
Since we are unquestionably in the realm of fantasy, however, I have an equally fantastic proposal to put before you.
Conversation
On receiving notice of this Conference, I wrote to a group of college classmates:
Larry Lessig + Tea Party Patriots at Harvard, on holding a Constitutional
Convention.
Oy, vey iz mir! Things aren't bad enough for you, you're trying to out-Obama
Obama?
"How we will celebrate ouah victory! We will invite the whole team up for
tea! How jolly!"--Fight Fiehcely, Hahvahd, Tom Lehrer
and a friend replied
An interesting amalgam. Featuring special alumnus guest speaker, Ted Kaczynski? Lessig's a YLS [Yale Law School] guy, too. What does this conference mean?
It means that the lunatics have decided that they are to be in charge of the asylum, no matter what the rest of us might think, and that Lessig has become an enabler. Presumably he has followed out to the end with "foolish consistency" the logic of his one idea of Fixing Congress, like Thoreau's "men of one idea, like a hen with one chick, and that a duckling." His mind didn't seem to be that little before, though.
Unbalanced Budget Amendment
If I could get my expenses paid, I would be willing to go there and talk about my Unbalanced Budget Amendment, which would require Federal and State governments to run surpluses in good times and deficits in bad times, with surpluses greater than the deficits overall until state and federal debts were in line with standards for corporate debt. With an explicit reference to Joseph and Pharaoh, and the seven fat cows and seven lean cows. ;->
I would consider having tax rates go up automatically when the stock market is booming and unemployment is low, and go down during recessions. Or we could have corporate rates follow the market, and personal rates follow employment.
Any assistance that anybody here could provide in creating the appropriate economic model for setting the measures of growth and decline, and the function to apply to tax rates as a result, would be gratefully received.
Let us begin with a trivial rule. Take the percentage growth/(decline) rate in the stock market for the previous fiscal year, and increase/decrease taxes in that same proportion for the following year. Let's say the market goes up 10%, so then tax rates would be multiplied by 1.1, in the simplest version. A real version would use a logistic function, not an exponential, so that it would level off at some point. Similarly, with a 10% decline in the market, we could multiply by .9 or divide by 1.1, with a similar logistic tail.
We would almost certainly need a fudge factor to get the economic impacts right. Perhaps a 10% increase in the market should result in adjusting taxes by a factor of 1.2, to hold off stock-market bubbles, or even more. Certainly the multiplier cannot be fixed at 1.0. This simple model has just a few adjustable parameters. I wouldn't want Congress to be able to fiddle the results any more deeply.
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Edward Mokurai (默雷धर्ममेघशब्दगर्जدھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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