ON "GUN CONTROL"
MEMORANDUM dated December 24, 2012
TO: My Elected National and State Leaders
SUBJECT: Efforts to restrict assault weapons and equipment
I strongly urge you to oppose any efforts to impose restrictions on lawful ownership of military-style individual weapons, such as the AR-15 clones like the Bushmaster allegedly used in the Newtown school tragedy. Similarly I urge you to oppose efforts to restrict high-capacity magazines or other ancillary equipment for these weapons.
We are all shocked and deeply saddened by the Newtown killings of children and teachers. But we should be taking actions that will have REAL impacts on gun crime, and not just make us feel good while accomplishing nothing in reality.
Here are the steps I think should be taken to prevent future such disasters:
1. Deprive potential shooters of publicity that accompanies such a violent act, by prohibiting the disclosure or use of the shooter’s name in any form of media. No one should be able to make a place for himself in history by committing such a heinous crime. There is no public benefit from constantly repeating the criminal’s name in the news.
2. We need a new commitment at all levels of government to provide effective mental health treatment for both children and adults.
3. There needs to be a voluntary cessation of production and distribution of ultra-violent videogames and films. Public pressure needs to be brought to bear on the persons and corporations that profit from this multi-billion dollar industry to take responsibility for the violence their products encourage.
Doesn’t it seem inconsistent to defend the First Amendment “free speech” rights of the producers of games that glorify violence and encourage wanton killing while proposing restrictions on the Second Amendment “keep and bear arms” rights of citizens who have done nothing more than to lawfully collect and maintain the weapons guaranteed by Bill of Rights?
4. Parents need to do a better job of supervising their children’s TV and video-game activities, to prevent obsessive playing of those games.
5. Gun owners need to be pressured to properly secure their guns, to keep them out of the hands of children and criminals.
6. Our educational system needs to be redesigned to provide a comprehensive education for all children. Too many schools still merely warehouse kids until they age out of the system.
7. The economy needs to be fixed so that working parents can have time to invest in parenting, and still make enough to support their families.
8. The “gun-show loophole” needs to be closed and every gun sale needs to require a background check, which should be rapidly completed and effective in identifying persons with known mental problems. Many states have not provided adequate information about persons with potentially dangerous mental conditions who should be prevented from buying guns.
YOU, as the nation’s leaders, need to recognize that, contrary to the rhetoric in the media, we don’t have the Second Amendment to allow us to have arms for self-defense or to enable hunting or other sporting activities.
The Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights solely to enable citizens to have military-type weapons to be able to muster an effective militia to oppose tyranny, whether foreign or domestic.
There is no other reasonable explanation for including the right to bear arms in the Constitution, other than that the colonies had just had to use their personal weapons to oppose domination by the British, and at least one British official, General Gage, had tried to disarm colonists. If they had not been able to use their own weapons against the British, the American Revolution would have failed.
The modern military-style weapons that are being so roundly attacked in the media are the present-day equivalents of the muzzle-loading flintlock rifles of the colonists. Those weapons, with their high-capacity magazines and other equipment specifically designed to make them more effective fighting weapons, are exactly what the authors of the Bill of Rights intended to protect from government restrictions.
The presence of such weapons in America is a huge deterrent against any power who would seek to impose itself on America and Americans, and has been a force for stability for over 200 years. The success of our nation, as a model for democracy, owes its existence to the ubiquitous presence of armed citizens.
We can see what happens to citizens where the people are not armed. Nation after nation around the world, lacking personal arms, has fallen prey to dictatorships and worse. Nazi Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, were all overrun by armed forces. More recently, Bosnia and Croatia saw 250,000 citizens killed by the turmoil generated by Slobodan Milosevic. The first thing Milosevic attempted to do was to disarm the Yugoslav republics. Only when Serbs attempted to take over Slovenia, and discovered that, contrary to the instructions of Milosevic, the Slovenians still had their weapons, did the Serbs back down. Slovenia alone, in northern Yugoslavia, escaped the brutality of the civil war. Modern day Syria is in the throes of a revolution, seeking to overthrow a despot, and is slowly succeeding as the citizens liberate arms from their own military. In Libya, still not settled, citizens were able to overthrow the dictator Gadhafi only when they obtained arms.
As much as we would like to believe otherwise, there is nothing about America that would prevent the rise of a dictator, if disarmed citizens lacked the ability to protect the Constitution. None of us wants America to ever become a “police state,” and the best defense against that is private ownership of military-style weapons.
Beyond that foundational reason for the Second Amendment, the reality is that gun crimes are committed by criminals, not by law-abiding citizens. If assault weapons are banned, and law abiding citizens no longer have them, that does not mean that they won’t still be out there in the hands of criminals. That doesn’t mean that creative criminals won’t find ways to manufacture their own weapons, as they did with “zip guns” and “Saturday night specials” in New York City when handgun ownership was strictly against the law.
Please don’t listen to the NRA. They are extremist wackos who have failed to acknowledge the serious urban gun issues in our society or to participate meaningfully in the discussions on ways to reduce that crime. Their refusal to participate in a meaningful way has made the situation worse, not better.
Sincerely,
Michael F. Chenoweth
LTC, US Army, Retired
**************
December 11, 2012 Letter on the "Fiscal Cliff"
President Barack Obama
Speaker John Boehner
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
Dear President Obama, Speaker Boehner and Senator McConnell:
STOP IT!
Your recent behavior, both from the White House, Speaker Boehner and Senate Minority Leader McConnell, is like a bunch of kindergarteners. This stupid public posturing with one side putting up a position, and then waiting for the other side to respond to it, which is almost always a negative response, is what the American people have had their fill of. You were all elected to go to Washington and solve America’s problems, not to do more of the same childish exercise. All of you, get in a room, sit down, take the federal budget, and go through it item-by-item, and decide what items are important enough for Americans to pay their taxes for, NOT “what is important enough to borrow money from China for.” Borrowing money is not a way to get out of debt. That he was willing to borrow more money, in my opinion, was the biggest reason Mr. Romney wasn’t the right person to be president.
Here is a proposed framework.
On the military spending bill, as it impacts military retirees, I urge you to adopt the House of Representatives’ version of that bill. The Senate version places too big a burden on military retirees, by shifting to them costs that they were promised, when they were risking their lives to serve our nation, would be covered by the government during their retirements. That is a promise that we should not be breaking.
On the “fiscal cliff”, I suggest the following parameters for a resolution of these issues.
1. As was suggested by Mr. Geithner over the weekend, Social Security and Medicare have to be made sustainable separately from the “fiscal cliff” discussion. Remove the income caps from Social Security and Medicare collections, and make it applicable to ALL income, including capital gains. If someone makes a million dollars a year in dividends, he should pay 12.4 percent for Social Security and 2.9 percent for Medicare, just like the rest of us. We all pay school taxes even if we don’t have kids in school, and by the same token, we should all be contributing the same percentage of our income to the cost of Social Security and Medicare, because having our older citizens secure in their income and medical expenses is good for all of us, and helps support the economy on which we all depend. That addresses the revenue side of Social Security and Medicare.
2. On the expense side, we need to “means test” payments to Social Security recipients. There is no reason that people who are old enough to receive Social Security and still have incomes greater than a quarter-million dollars a year should receive full Social Security payments. Stop calling them “entitlements.” They are payments we make because it is good for the American economy for everyone to have a base they can rely on for their retirement.
3. The suggestion to remove the “Bush” tax cuts for everyone earning less than $200,000 is too high a cap. Protect the tax rates for people making less than $100,000 a year and return the old tax rates for the rest of us. This will probably mean a tax increase for me, and I don’t object. We need to be responsibly paying our obligations.
4. Get rid of the estate tax. I am an estate planner and I know how particularly unfair this is to the families of decedents, destroying family businesses, particularly where the family’s property consists of farms or other real-estate based assets. The government has already been paid taxes on the income that went into building large estates, and will have a chance to collect taxes on the gain on the assets when the beneficiaries sell the assets.
5. Eliminate capital gains tax rates. Make all net income taxable according to the same schedule. Having a different tax rate for investments is one of the most unfair taxes for people who have to work for their income. There is no reason that people who are rich (and have capital investments) should pay at a different and lower rate from everyone else. Allow normal business deductions, but require payment at the full tax rate for all net income.
6. The Internal Revenue Code is 80,000 pages of special breaks for the influential. It needs to be substantially revised, to eliminate every tax exemption that does not make sense in today’s society. The tax code has many provisions that should be kept, such as exemptions for like-kind exchanges, home mortgage interest deductions (but not interest deductions on second homes), and charitable deductions. That is a very large and long-term project, but you can set it into motion and need to do so now.
7. These changes will mean that I will pay more taxes, even though my income is less than $200,000 a year. Fair is fair, and what we have now isn’t fair, particularly to those who are less affluent and struggling to succeed.
The American people are tired of gridlock in Washington, DC. We send you there to get the job done for America, so that we can all move ahead and restore American jobs and productivity. A healthy economy requires a healthy middle class. The middle class is not healthy today and is progressively failing. That is very bad for America. What happens to America depends on the decisions that are made in Washington. Get to work.
Sincerely,
Michael F. Chenoweth
Lieutenant Colonel, US Army Retired
**************
LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA ABOUT URBAN GUN CRIME
November 11, 2012
Honorable Barack H. Obama
President of the United States of America
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, District of Columbia 20500
Dear President Obama,
Congratulations on winning your second term. We are all celebrating.
I am writing today because, as you said in your acceptance speech, this is MY government, and I want to be involved.
This letter is to share with you some of my thoughts on policies America needs to move forward, or rather the goals on which we need to focus in order to get to where we need to be.
As I begin, I warn against the dangers of extremism and polarization, which distract from a productive dialogue. As Michael Douglas’s character, President Andrew Shepard, says in “The American President”, this (governance of our nation) is “advanced citizenship.” Easy answers are inevitably the wrong answers.
For the record, my wife and I worked on your re-election campaign here in Key Largo, we walked our neighborhood, asking people to support you, and offering to drive them to the polls if they needed transportation. We sat all day at the street in front of the polling place, waving signs until the polls closed. We celebrated at midnight when the media finally announced our victory and we stayed up late to hear your speech.
There is (at least) one issue on which I may disagree with you, and that is assault weapons. The Second Amendment is there to insure that the population is armed with military-style weapons to protect the Constitution from its enemies, both foreign and domestic. The framers were not concerned about protecting the right to own muzzle-loading flintlocks for hunting turkeys. They were concerned that America, and Americans, never be disarmed as the British had tried to do, because they felt that would make us weaker and easier to overpower. Less able, as it were, to assemble “a well regulated militia” using the military-style weapons we have under our beds or over our mantle pieces (or in our gun safes).
That said, I agree that gun violence has no place in our cities. Both South Chicago, with which you are so familiar, and Miami, where I have lived for the last 50 years, like other big cities, are plagued by criminal use of firearms. I know, and understand that you recognized in your second book, the very different attitude toward guns that rural gun owners have, compared to city dwellers who are threatened every day by gun violence.
With that in mind, I urge you to convene a broad-based conference, including gun control advocates, sportsmen, collectors, and the NRA (which I am not a member of because I disagree with their tactics) to work to find consensus on methods and programs on which they all can agree, to fight against and prevent gun violence, without interfering with the ability of law-abiding and patriotic citizens to collect and own modern military-style weapons. Not only does gun violence create victims from innocent bystanders, it threatens our Constitutionally protected gun rights when well-intentioned gun control advocates are rightfully outraged by another senseless killing.
Because I understand, I think, the difficulty of finding consensus on many of the difficult issues facing America today, I have begun circulating a draft of a policy statement, not only to my Democrat friends, but also to my Republican, Independent, Tea Party, and Libertarian friends, in an attempt to develop a broad set of goals on which we can all agree. Perhaps I am naïve, but I think this might help find a path to move America forward more easily. If I can find agreement from people whom I consider to be reasonable people, regardless of their political affiliation, it might help all our elected officials better focus their efforts and find agreement where up to now they have been unable to do so.
The draft goals and strategies document is out there right now, being circulated and seeking comments. I don’t know when I’ll start getting feedback, but hope that is soon. When I get something to report, I will forward it to the White House and to our Representatives and Senators. In the meantime, I am offering to you and your staff a copy of the first draft. Until I have a document that has been more widely discussed, I hope it can support your efforts in finding common ground between all the competing interests in Washington, DC, as you work to avoid the problems that will inevitably come if sequestration kicks in.
Sincerely,
Michael F. Chenoweth
Lieutenant Colonel, US Army, Retired
**************
ON THE DEBT CEILING AND FISCAL REFORM
A LETTER TO CONGRESS
November 22, 2011
Senator Bill Nelson
Senator Marco Rubio
Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
All other members of Congress
Dear Members of Congress:
I have watched the reports about the “super committee” with interest, and a lot of skepticism. Now, that committee has failed. Why am I not surprised?
I am writing to urge you, as MY members of Congress, to step up and push for serious and responsible changes, particularly to the tax laws, to stop this stupid impasse and get America moving forward again.
The super committee’s charge, to make $1.2 Trillion in cuts over 10 years, was a bad idea from the beginning. The serious and necessary task, which should have been their charge, is to balance the budget. There is talk in DC of passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. I think that would be a bad idea, but if anyone believes in that, they should demonstrate that belief by putting their money where their mouth is and passing a balanced budget now. The current budget is $2.6 Trillion and the government’s estimated income is only $1.6 Trillion. That means that we are borrowing 40 cents on every dollar we spend. That is not acceptable. America has to first achieve a balanced budget, and then work from there to produce a surplus in order to start reducing the national debt. Our national debt is a constant threat to our fiscal solvency, kept away for now only because of very low interest rates. If interest rates climb, just the interest on our debt can wreck all the rest of the federal budget, or worse, force the US into a default.
There are some basic rules that a realistic plan to balance the budget has to begin with.
1. The changes that need to be made cannot put the burden of balancing the budget on the bottom half of our population, because there isn’t enough money there to solve the problem. There are neither sufficient federal payments going to that population to make any significant difference by cutting those payments, nor sufficient income in that component of the population to pay any significant amount of taxes, even if their taxes were raised. Taxes must be raised by progressively taxing the people who make most of the money.
2. Social Security payments to retirees must not be cut. These payments are the difference between survival and starvation for millions of elderly Americans. You need to be honest and distinguish between Social Security and Medicare, which working Americans pay special taxes for, and all other federal expenditures, which are paid for by income taxes and other taxes. Blurring the difference between Social Security and Medicare spending, and everything else, is just a way to avoid solving the problem.
There is a significant surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund. The difficulty is that Congress has for years treated Social Security Payroll Taxes as money available for their pet (non-Social Security) projects and has thereby spent the trust fund money, replaced it with IOUs, and must now come up with the funds to pay for the money it stole from the trust fund earlier. It is time to pay the piper. I have no sympathy for Congress in the situation it created for itself through dissolute spending.
3. Everyone benefits from the Social Security System. It is NOT an “entitlement” and it is NOT a gift to Social Security recipients from Congress. It is something that Americans have paid for through deductions from their pay for their whole lives. And it doesn’t just benefit retirees. Even those businesses, which do not receive Social Security retirement benefits, benefit nonetheless from retirees buying their goods and services with those Social Security funds. Accordingly, everyone should be paying into the Social Security Insurance program, whether their income is from salaries, wages, or investments, and there should be NO CAP on income subject to Social Security (or Medicare) tax.
There does need to be a restructuring of Social Security, for the long-term viability of the program. Americans are living and working longer. Many are affluent enough that they don’t need a Social Security check to survive. There should be a upper limit on the amount the government pays to any single person for Social Security benefits, particularly if that person is already rich. People, who are unable to work as they get older, should have Social Security available to them. We are not all genetically disposed to a healthy old age and the Social Security system has to be sensitive to that. The trust fund is theoretically viable for another decade or two, but now is the time to make the changes to make it permanently viable.
4. Likewise, Medicare provides essential medical services for older Americans. Congress missed the boat when it failed to expand Medicare to cover everyone under a clean single-payer health care system, with the Medicare tax rate adjusted to cover the cost of the program, as most other industrialized countries have. What we are left with is an unworkable system that still subsidizes insurance companies and overpaid medical professionals. The present plan inserts employers into their employees’ health care, when there is no logical connection or reason for the employer to be involved. There still has been no visible effort to address skyrocketing health care costs at the provider end.
Health care costs, which continue to rise uncontrolled, will continue to endanger our fiscal situation, until YOU get serious about getting health care costs under control, but I don’t think you should address that right now. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act needs to be left alone for a while to provide time to test its provisions and see what works and what doesn’t.
5. The Internal Revenue Code has been exposed as a bad joke. It is something like 10,000 pages of favoritism and special exceptions from income and capital gains taxes for people and corporations who have used their moneyed influence to get Congress to pass special laws for their behalf. I have an advanced law degree in a tax-related field, so I know what I’m talking about. Most of the exceptions should be revoked, while retaining the deductions for charitable contributions.
So what should the tax code provide?
For starters, eliminate the Estate Tax. This is a particularly destructive double tax that destroys family farms and small businesses. It is essentially anti-American. Have the beneficiary keep the decedent’s basis in the property he or she inherits and let the government collect its taxes on capital gains when the beneficiary sells.
Restore the pre-Ronald Reagan marginal tax rates on income. Make all income, both earned income and capital gains, subject to the same tax rates. That would eliminate the inequities that Warren Buffet and others have pointed out, between the rates paid by the rich, who get most of their revenues from capital gains, and the rest of us. Provide deductions for interest paid on all loans, including both home loans and consumer credit. Provide deductions for student tuition and educational expenses, to encourage Americans to become better educated. Retain the income exception for like kind exchanges under Sec. 1031.
Provide appropriate income deductions for business expenses that increase productivity or improve property. This would be for property acquisitions, equipment, salaries, and other expenditures that positively impact productivity. That would allow deductions for legitimate business expenses, and none for imaginary costs, like “oil and gas depletion”.
6. Make all debts dischargeable in bankruptcy, including student loans. It is discriminatory to enable businesses and working people who spend themselves into a hole to escape their creditors, but not to provide that ability to young people who are trying to become productive citizens. In an ideal situation, we would provide free educations for our youth, but I don’t think that is reachable right now. Don’t forget it though. America is only as strong as its students’ educations.
7. Reinstate Glass-Stegall and eliminate securitized mortgages. These changes would eliminate the abuses that got us into this mess. Banks should make loans with their own money and be on the hook if the loan they initiated is not repaid. Under the present rules, banks are making huge profits while most Americans are still struggling. They have taken the federal TARP money and invested it in the stock market, rather than investing it back in our communities and businesses. That needs to stop for good. A bank that is too big to fail is too big.
8. Set a national usury limit on interest rates at 15%. This would level the playing field between banks issuing credit cards and credit unions. The seeds of the present economic mess began in 1978, when Congress failed to set a national limit on interest, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Marquette Nat. Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp. (439 U.S. 299). The window that decision created has encouraged exploiters within the banking system to victimize Americans through excessive interest charges. Any business that cannot survive on 15% return on its revenue should not be in business. Senator D’Amato proposed a federal law in 1991, which would have capped interest rates at 14% and in 2009 Senator Sanders proposed a similar law, with a 15% cap. That law is long overdue. When Senator D’Amato introduced his bill in 1991, it passed the Senate by a vote of 74-19. Let’s get it passed now.
9. There DO need to be cuts in spending. Looking at the federal budget, it is obvious that we are spending too much on some things (where the lobbyists are most powerful) and not spending enough on other things. We need more universities for our growing student population and we need to pay what is necessary to maintain other national resources, like our roads and bridges, and our national parks.
The biggest expense, that is paid from income taxes and not from payroll taxes, is the military budget. There are ways to economize there that will not compromise our national security, but will nevertheless cut costs. For example, over the past 30 years, America has replaced work that was previously done by soldiers, with work done by contractors. As a result, there are huge payments and profits going to contractors, who make large profits while employing cheap labor with few benefits, at the same time our soldiers are paid too little. Those private employees, when they retire, become a burden on the rest of us, because they received no pensions or other benefits from their employers. That is false economy and is specifically designed to shift federal funds into the pockets of the “military-industrial complex.” It is a welfare program for industry.
It is a disgrace for all of us, particularly for Congress, that some soldiers have to receive food stamps in order to feed their families. It is a disgrace for military families to have good base schools closed and have their children dumped into inferior schools around their military bases, or to have commissary and exchange services cut, while private contractors (such as Halliburton) are making fortunes providing logistic services to the military that uniformed personnel could provide for themselves.
Similarly, America has to keep faith with its retired military. Promises are made to military personnel, to induce them to spend their lives in a career serving America, rather than going off and building their own personal wealth, and it is despicable for our government to break the commitments made, after the service person has risked their life and devoted the most productive part of it to our nation. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a retired Army officer.
10. We are sick and tired of a dysfunctional Congress. From the Tea Party on the right to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators on the left, Americans are pissed off by Congressional distain for what ordinary people want and need. Doesn’t it concern you that the American people’s approval rating of Congress is only 9% while the approval rating of communism is 11%?
There is a message there, and it is directed at YOU.
You have the opportunity to change the way business is done inside the beltway. Kick out the lobbyists and start listening to your constituents. We are tired of Congressional posturing and political rhetoric. It is time for action to balance the budget and start acting for America, rather than worrying about your reelection campaigns. My personal belief is that incumbents have the advantage of experience in the job, but if you fail to act, there is good reason to believe you will be replaced with someone without your experience.
11. America needs to move as rapidly as possible away from fossil fuels and toward an economy that is powered by clean, renewable energy. This is not because of global warming (although that is important, as we need to recognize here in Florida) but because there is a rapidly growing market for a diminishing supply of fossil fuel. The cost of energy is about to skyrocket, and that increase in cost can only be damaging to our economy and way of life, which means to our security. Now is the time to make the change to energy we will be able to afford when the oil runs out, while we still have energy available to implement the change. Comparing the cost of a clean renewable energy plant, such as a solar array, with the present-day cost of a conventional gas or oil plant, is dishonest because it doesn’t include the cost of providing fuel to the conventional plant in the future, when there is no fuel or it has become very expensive.
12. America’s work force is in big trouble. Robert Reich is correct in his analysis of the situation. We have exported lots of jobs, but many more workers have been replaced by automation and there simply are no jobs for them. An in-depth and comprehensive examination is essential, of how our economy works and how we can change it to provide meaningful job opportunities for our entire workforce. America is in a death-spiral, as the polarization of rich and poor continues to grow, and as more and more people find themselves unemployed.
The choice today is for Congress to do revolutionary things with legislation to fix the mess, or to have a real revolution that would likely destroy the American dream. The only entity that has any chance or the ability to put in place a process to move us out of this mess is Congress.
Pretending, that these issues are not critical to America’s survival in the 21st Century, will not make them go away. We are in an international competition with the Chinese, Indians, Europeans and Brazilians, for the leadership of the future world. Too few recognize these connections, and too few lack the courage to address them head-on.
I urge you not to try to hide from these issues. Even if you succeed in pretending they don’t exist, if not addressed, they will nevertheless overtake America and profoundly impact or destroy the qualities that make America special in the world. If that happens, you will have failed at doing the job you were elected to do. It isn’t the legacy you want to leave.
Sincerely,
Michael F. Chenoweth
LTC, US Army, Ret.
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