Repeal The 17th Amendment

George Will wrote a column in the Washington Post, within which he called on Senator Feingold to call for the repeal of the amendment, rather than a modification for situations in which a replacement Senator must be chosen by a Govenor, as was the case in the recent Blago debacle.  You can read his comments here.

If you are new to the 17th amendment issue, please take a few minutes to read this earlier post, “The System Is Broken”.

I also happened across this chart of government spending as a percent of GDP since 1870.  The purpose for which this chart was created was to illuminate whether incumbents were re-elected in up or down spending years, that’s what the white and black dots mean.  You can ignore the title.  Percentage of spending is on the y axis and years x-axis.  Note the 17th amendment was introduced in 1913 and was ratified a year or so after that, as was the 16th amendment which initiated the Federal income tax.

 Now one can argue that this was the impact of the income tax as established with the 16th amendment and I think that they are in part, correct.  However, that actually assumes that it matters to Congress whether or not the Government can raist the money that it intends to spend.  The spending, as we have seen, is the problem.  And that side of the equation is more impacted by the effects of 17th amendment than by the 16th amendment.

In any case, I will draft a letter to my Senators this week and I’ll post a generic verion of it on here if any of you are interested in putting it to use.

-OMB