Quote:
Originally Posted by zimmy
I agree. That is why I find "Corn Subsidies** in the United States totaled $81.7 billion from 1995-2011" or the $10-50 billion annual fossil fuel subsidies to be pretty ridiculous. The mandate is estimated come in at about $2 to 3 billion per year and only applies to people who go uninsured. The cons typically love those big business subsidies. They also proposed those health mandates. But now that it was passed under Obama it is the end of the world. Horse hockey.
|
you can thank FDR for providing Congress with the power to do these "ridiculous" things
Things came to a head in the New Deal, when Congress imposed a tax on food and fiber processors and used those tax dollars to provide benefits to farmers. Though in U.S. v. Butler (1936) the court adopted a more expansive view of the taxing power—allowing Congress to tax and spend for the "general welfare" beyond the powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution—it still held the ends had to be "general" and not transfer payments from one group to another. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened to "pack" the Supreme Court in 1937, it accepted such transfer payments in Mulford v. Smith (1939), so long as the taxes were paid into the general treasury and not earmarked for farmers.
Paul Moreno: A Short History of Congress's Power to Tax - WSJ.com
In United States v. Butler (1936), the Supreme Court invalidated the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Justice Owen Roberts, writing for himself and five other justices, held that the AAA "invade[d] the reserved rights of the states" by endeavoring "to regulate and control agricultural production, a matter beyond the powers delegated to the federal government." Specifically, the Court held that the AAA violated the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which declares: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Assuming that Congress could not directly compel farmers to reduce acreage or cull livestock, the Court held that Congress "may not indirectly accomplish those ends by taxing and spending to purchase compliance."
.................................................. .......
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...-presidential/
In November 1936 voters gave Roosevelt a second overwhelming mandate at the polls.
His New Deal policies, constitutional or not, had put millions of Americans back to work and given people hope.
Now, mandate in hand, FDR would move to challenge the Supreme Court threat to the New Deal.
On February 5, 1937, with little or no warning, FDR announced what would become known as his "court packing" plan. Citing the inability of the federal courts to deal with an overwhelming caseload, he proposed judicial reforms, including the addition of one justice to the Supreme Court for every one who did not retire by age 70-1/2, with a maximum five justices added.
It was an uncharacteristic political mistake for the usually astute Roosevelt. His plan to influence the Court provoked outrage nationwide. Many perceived it as an attempt to rig the American judiciary system and give the executive branch almost dictatorial power. In a public speech in March, Roosevelt managed to turn American opinion his way, but when the Supreme Court reported that it had no problem keeping up with its caseload, support for his plan declined.
As Roosevelt worked on behalf of his "court-packing" plan, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor several times, further weakening the President's arguments for court reform. On March 29, the Court upheld a Washington State minimum wage law. In May, the Court upheld the Social Security Act. When Joseph Robinson, Roosevelt's last significant ally in the court-packing scheme died in July, the plan died too.
The attempt to influence the Supreme Court was one of the worst episodes of Roosevelt's presidential career
.................................................. ....
Emboldened by the apparent change in the Supreme Court's attitude toward the constitutionality of the New Deal, Congress passed a second Agricultural Adjustment Act, designated as the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. Rather than using the proceeds from taxes on processors to motivate farmers to lower production in exchange for benefit payments, the 1938 act applied marketing quotas and overproduction penalties directly.
In Mulford v. Smith (1939), the Supreme Court upheld the 1938 act with little fanfare. Even though the marketing quotas imposed by the 1938 act intruded far more aggressively into the agricultural economy than the processing taxes at issue in the 1933 act, Mulford found no fault in the 1938 act. Just three years earlier the 1933 act had been condemned as an unconstitutional stratagem by the federal government to interfere in agricultural markets. Yet the ruling in Mulford blessed the 1938 act as
a program "intended to foster, protect and conserve [interstate] commerce."