All of this government is absolutely impossible without the Federal Reserve and a fiat currency. Its the foundation of the Progressive State.
It took 25 months (or maybe 28 months if “fiscal 2012” means October 2012) for the Census Bureau to calculate how much all levels of government spent in fiscal 2012.
Why can’t the Republican Party or Heritage or AEI calculate that number in six months?
That’s the kind of political information we need to be shoving down the throats of the Democrat Party and MSM every year - in real time!
As evidenced by the referenced Townhall.com article, just because a web site is conservative does not mean that it is up to speed with the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers. Please consider the following critique from a related thread about the federal government’s limited power to lay taxes which the article overlooked.
Regarding the constitutionally indefensible proposed federal budget, the Supreme Court has historically clarified that Congress is prohibited from laying taxes in the name of state power issues, essentially any issue which Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
So given that the plurality of clauses in Section 8 mentioned above deal with military issues, and also given that the Department of Defense (DoD) budget for 2014 was $500+ billion dollars, I will generously round the DoD budget up to $1 trillion (but probably much less) as a rough estimate as to what Section 8 should be costing taxpayers every year.
The bottom line is that if Congress was respecting its limited power to lay taxes then we should not be hearing about multi-trillion annual federal government budges that the corrupt media, including Obama guard-dog Fx News, along with "Constitution-respecting” web sites like Townhall.com, are reporting without mentioning Justice John Marshall’s clarification of Congress’s limited power to lay taxes.
So how did voters get themselves in to this taxation mess? Please consider the following explanation.
The way that taxpayers abused their voting power to create the Frankenstien federal tax monster that is now walking all over them is the following imo. When the Founding States established the federal Senate, they gave the power to vote for senators uniquely to state lawmakers. Part of the reason for state lawmakers' unique control of the Senate is probably the following imo.
Federal senators would be expected to protect their states from the House of Representatives by killing House appropriations bills which could not be justified under Congress’s Section 8-limited powers, such bills not only stealing state powers, but also stealing state revenues associate with those powers.
The problem is that the anti-constitutional Progressive Movement tricked Constitution-ignorant voters into pressuring their state lawmakers into ratifying the ill-conceived 17th Amendment, state lawmakers foolishly giving up their voices in Congress by doing so.
And since voters were inexcusably cluess about Congress’s limited power to lay taxes, voters ultimately began trading their votes in exchange for federal spending programs which corrupt Congress could not justify under its Section 8-limited powers, Obamacare a recent example of such deception.
What a mess! :^(