Constitutional Distortion and America's National Debt

The United States is drowning in a sea of red ink. The national debt currently stands at just shy of $39 trillion. To retire the debt, every American citizen would have to kick in over $115 thousand. Considering that fewer than half of American adults have enough emergency savings to cover three months of expenses, a national assessment would be futile.

Some dismiss high debt numbers by claiming we just owe it to ourselves, which means there is no need to worry. That is not true. Foreign countries hold nearly twenty-three percent of American debt (Japan, the United Kingdom, and China account for the top three).

So how did we arrive in the present situation? The answer is clear: by ignoring the Constitution’s limits on the federal government’s powers. Social Security, healthcare, and welfare payments account for six out of every ten dollars of federal spending. Congress, however, has no delegated power authorizing it to spend on these matters. Rather, it has garnered additional power through inventive and dishonest interpretations of our fundamental law.  

The current situation has been a long time coming.

The Anti-Federalists at the time of the Constitutional Convention worried that Congress’s power to tax and spend for the “general welfare” meant unlimited power. Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, for example, feared that those two words permitted Congress “[t]o judge of what may be for the general welfare” and to pass laws “with every possible object of human legislation.”