Are American Indian tribes truly sovereign?

Navajo Nation Council Chambers, Window Rock, AZ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My immediate question to this article in the local newspaper this morning was the same one I’ve been asking for years: If American Indian tribes are sovereign nations, why then must the rest of America subsidize them? Or why can’t the tribes be self-sufficient?

The largest Indian nation in the United States is the Navajo Nation, yet with its casinos and other financial enterprises it can’t seem to support its people without the help of others. At least that’s this layman’s viewpoint.

While I’m the first to support private enterprise and agriculture, the part that hit me most from the newspaper article was how the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry (NAPI) plans to sell its newly created flour to stores cheaper than its competitors can.

On the surface you can call that good business. If they can sell their product cheaper than their competitors, and still turn a profit, then I’m all for it. But the skeptic in me says they’ll either: a) not turn a profit, or b) find US government funding to cover the difference, or c) both.

My money is on the idea that they’ll find a way to profit and still bilk the US taxpayer.

Following local media reports on the large American Indian nation as I have over the past several years I’ve discovered that the government structure of the Navajo Nation may in fact be more corrupt than even the US Government, if that is even possible. Stories continue to be reported of troubling issues within the local chapters of the Navajo Nation wherein money is embezzled and blatantly taken for personal use by chapter officials with total impunity. Meanwhile, many Nation residents appear to live in abject poverty.

If these sovereign nations are truly that — sovereign governments with no need of external support — why then must a US Senator promise to find funding for irrigation projects to support the agricultural enterprises of a nation not his own?

Related articles

• Navajo Nation Member Treated As New Mexico Resident For Income Tax Purposes (forbes.com)
• Brownstein Hyatt Lobbying for Navajo Nation on Water Rights (legaltimes.typepad.com)

Overstepping sovereign bounds

Image via Wikipedia

The US taxpayer will fund the cleanup of uranium on the sovereign lands of the Navajo and Hopi Indians, according to a story in the Farmington Daily Times newspaper.

Why?

The Navajo and Hopi nations are sovereign lands, run by sovereign governments. What purpose does the US taxpayer, through our environmental protection agency, have in cleaning up their mess?

Why is it that every time someone comes out against an Indian casino, the Indians espouse their sovereign right to control their own destiny and their own lands? If these uranium mines need to be cleaned up, and they exist on the lands of the Hopi’s and Navajo’s, then let them clean them up!

It’s not the responsibility of the US taxpayer or the government we employ!

The Social Security tipping point

As if this comes as a big surprise, we’re now being told that the Social Security trust fund (it never WAS a trust fund) is now insolvent and in the red. Yet for some reason we still allow the government to simply take a percentage of our income on the promise (insert hysterical laughter here) that this money and more (more laughter here) will be available to us when we retire.

What’s even more troubling is we’ve allowed this to happen. Government, which we like to hold up as being of, by, and for the people, has so mismanaged the public treasury that nothing they do is fiscally sound or responsible. The fiduciary responsibility they have to protect the public treasury is so far removed from their thinking that it’s astounding that we haven’t once again taken up arms against the ruling authority and asserted our independence from it.

Imagine if you will the chief financial officer of a private company, coming in and telling the CEO and board of directors that the company has been paying out more than it’s been bringing in, and that he’s cooked the books for years in order to make it look like the company was making a profit when in fact he was simply borrowing against a promise concealed by a smoke screen. How long would that CFO be employed? How long would he be alive given this kind of news?

Yet here we sit in America today, with news reports that social security is no longer capable of meeting its obligations, with a whole crop of Baby Boomers nearing retirement while their stock market portfolios have dwindled to a small percentage of what they once were when America was a booming bastion of private financial activity. But not to worry, Uncle Barry’s going to fix it all.

Yeah, right.

The picture in the Washington Times that goes with this story says it all. Here you have Timothy Geithner, the treasury secretary of the United States, flanked by Social Security Administration Commissioner Michael J. Astrue, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius with a classic deer-in-the-headlights stare on their faces as America’s chief financial officer tells the public: “hey, you know all that money we forced you to give us so that we could hold it for you to give back when you retired? Well, uhm, we don’t have that money anymore; and, uhm, you’re not going to get any of it back.”

To add insult to injury, in the same story it’s reported that President Obama has promised that his recent health care reform package gave Medicare an additional 12 years of solvency.

How long are we going to allow this kind of graft and extortion to continue, with the associated smoke screen promises associated with kicking the proverbial can down the road? Twelve more years of solvency? Then what? Wasn’t Social Security supposed to be solvent for at least another 20 years? That’s what they were telling us earlier this year. Now it’s broke. The amount of money coming into the program in the form of taxes is not enough to cover what’s going out in the form of benefits.

Why does Timothy Geithner still have a job? Why is he not in prison yet? Why have we allowed any of these folks to continue stealing from the public treasury absent another revolution?

Maybe this is what it takes to wake people up and spur the kind of drastic change we need to affect in America.

It’s time to scrap the tax code for a simpler plan

The latest discussions over economic stimulus should lead us into a serious discussion over how the federal government collects taxes and how we change it. The US Constitution is concise in its language: “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.” (Article 1, Section 7)
In 25 words the framers of this great nation established a system to fund the federal government. How did our US Tax Code grow to such a gargantuan document that it requires a forest of trees on which to print?

For years Steve Forbes talked about simplifying the US Tax Code by implementing a flat tax on everyone earning an income in the United States. The idea is simple: completely do away with the Tax Code as it exists now. Start over from scratch and write a one-page law that establishes a fixed percentage of your income as the new tax rate. Rather than a document that is apparently too complex for our current Treasury Secretary and many members of Congress to understand and comply with, we could draft a document that would free millions of Americans, many with multiple part-time jobs, from the onerous requirement of seeking professional tax help every year in order to comply with federal law.

It’s ridiculous that a family of four, earning a combined income of less than $60,000 from three or four low-paying jobs, with two cars and a mortgage, must employ the services of a certified public accountant in order to file its income taxes once a year.

Our current system of taxes seems to reward those who conveniently fit into a host of seemingly custom-fit categories that allows them to take deductions and write off expenses. Some businesses that make millions of dollars annually can effectively not pay any taxes whatsoever because someone in Congress has written into law cleaver ways for that particular enterprise to get all of the money back that it fronted the government throughout the year. Not everyone is entitled to such a luxury.

A flat-tax system would immediately do away with the need for millions of Americans to pay someone else to file their annual tax statements. This alone would save taxpayers money and help boost the economy. More than that, a flat-tax system would eliminate the unfair reward-for-behavior system that Congress has written into the tax code.

Under current tax code statutes the American taxpayer has become little more than a trained circus seal, barking on command for some morsels from our trainers — Congress — just to meet our basic sustenance needs. Those who comply by barking the correct tune and clapping loud enough can earn even more morsels from Congress.

A truly fair and equitable system would be to establish a flat tax on all income. For argument’s sake, let’s establish it at 10 percent. The person making a million dollars a year would pay 10 percent of his income, or $100,000 to the US Treasury. The family making $100,000 a year would pay $10,000 to the US Treasury. Under this system there would be no deductions, credits or breaks. That alone would allow us to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service, as it would streamline the system by which the government is funded. You could hire a few unemployed accountants to record and count the money coming into the treasury. Rather than deducting that money from employee payroll, taxpayers would simply submit their payments once a year with proof of their annual salary. This would release employers from having to do this.

States would require much less income since they’re not tasked with the constitutional obligation of national defense, thus the flat tax charged by states could be much less.

Such a system would also force government to live within its means, knowing that once a year the US Treasury would see an influx of cash payments from taxpayers. It would also give taxpayers a much clearer picture of just how much they’re paying in taxes to those they employ in the state and federal government.

Simplifying the US Tax Code, and the state tax codes, would give greater accountability to the taxpayers and would help shrink the size and reach that government has in our lives. Government has a few necessary roles to play; as it currently stands, government has outgrown the ability of the US taxpayer to support the political empire-building endeavors that our elected officials continue to erect for themselves.