.

It shouldn’t be news to you that candidates for public office, particularly national office, spend millions of dollars bombarding us with a cacophony of campaign BS.  Politicians do this in part in an effort to re-image themselves, much like the ‘paint’ used by an aging courtesan.  Yet if you depend solely on a candidate’s sexy and sensationalist campaign hype or the information you are fed by the biased media or even the opinions of your peers, then I submit that, at best, you are getting limited information or at worst, being duped.

I contend that part of being a conscientious citizen is being a knowledgeable citizen.  One of the reasons we have legislators who relinquish their responsibilities to the executive branch and an executive branch which mictrates on the Constitution and the judiciary making law, is that too many of us do not do our due diligence as citizens.  Too many of us simply vote along party lines, we vote for the candidate with the best hair, we vote based on who the New York Times endorses, or we hold our noses and ’vote for the lesser evil’, if we even vote at all.  This must be rectified if we are ever to get back the freedoms that the government, which we elected, has usurped.

With the near perpetual campaign season already upon us for 2008, we voters must decide on how we are going to determine who the candidates really are, in spite of all their campaign hype and media rhetoric.  I propose that one way to determine what a candidate really believes is by their actions, not just words.  For previously elected officials, one of the best methods is to review the record of their actions while in office.  For most of us, this process is paramount to watching paint dry.  I can commensurate.  Yet we can plainly see where abrogating our due diligence to campaign handlers and those who control the media has lead us.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my candidate for President of the United States in 2008 is unabashedly, Dr. Ron Paul.  This is because of his unwavering support of our Constitution and his consistent, straightforward, and dare I say, honest approach to politics.  Ron Paul is not deity, for like the country song goes, ”after all he’s just a man” but I submit to you, he’s “just THE man” we must have in the White House.

Okay, enough of my pitching Ron Paul.  Let’s look at the man and what he believes.  Let Rep. Ron Paul’s actions speak for him.  The actions of a legislator, to a great degree, are defined by the legislation they (co)sponsor and the votes they cast.  Thus this series of posts will look at Ron Paul’s sponsored legislation and the votes he has cast.

Thus far during the 110th Congress, Rep. Ron Paul has sponsored 49 bills and is on record as cosponsoring 221 additional bills.  One thing you can say by looking at the record is that Ron Paul is consistent and persistent.  A number of the bills he is sponsoring/cosponsoring have been submitted to Congress numerous times.

For example, consider HR 191, the Senior Citizens Tax Elimination Act.  Rep. Paul submitted the same bill as HR 424 in the 108th Congress, as HR 1897 again in the 108th Congress, and HR 180 in the 109th Congress.  The bills have not been able to make it out of the House’s Ways and Means Committee, but Rep. Paul continues the good fight.  Looking at the bill you can see that, in fact, it is a good fight.  The summary of the bill given by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) is:

Amends the Internal Revenue Code to repeal the inclusion of any social security or tier I railroad retirement benefits in gross income. Appropriates funds to cover reductions in transfers to the Social Security and Railroad Retirement Trust Funds resulting from the enactment of this Act. It expresses the sense of Congress against using tax increases to provide revenue necessary to carry out this Act.

The Liberty Committee had this to say about HR 191:

Here’s a practical way to directly help senior Americans. The Senior Citizens Tax Elimination Act, H.R. 191 would eliminate income taxes on Social Security benefits.

Congressman Ron Paul reintroduced this legislation on January 4, 2007, for himself and Representatives Thaddeus G. McCotter, Robert Wexler, Trent Franks, Vito Fossella, Chris Cannon and Jo Ann Davis.

The following is his press release on introducing this legislation in the 109th Congress:

Stop Taxing Social Security!

Washington, DC: Congressman Ron Paul recently introduced legislation that would eliminate income taxes on Social Security benefits, giving millions of older Americans a boost in their retirement income and ending an unjust form of double taxation. Paul introduced the “Senior Citizens Tax Elimination Act” immediately after the new Congress convened last week.

“Many Americans don’t realize that Social Security benefits were not taxed until the 1980s,” Paul stated. “When the program was created in the 1930s, Congress never intended to treat Social Security benefits as taxable income. Those benefits are funded by taxes in the first place, so it’s nonsensical to tax them as ordinary income to raise revenue. The whole process is nothing more than a circular subterfuge that allows Congress to reduce Social Security benefits by stealth. Nobody in Congress claims they want to reduce benefits, but that’s exactly what happens when benefits are taxed.”

Under Paul’s legislation, Social Security benefits would not be classified as taxable income nor reported on an individual’s tax return. This is consistent with the ostensible purpose of the system, which is to provide a pension in exchange for a lifetime of payroll tax payments.

Rep. Ron Paul is absolutely right regarding this legislation.  It floors me to see that the rest of Congress “doesn’t get it” and the legislation can’t make it out of committee.  Why can’t AARP get behind this legislation?  They do lip service to ‘Reimagining America’ and keeping Social Security solvent but do not mention legislation that would help Seniors now!

I will continue to explore Rep. Ron Paul’s record in subsequent posts in this series.

Read all the reports in this series here.

Note: the emphasis of The Liberty Committee text is mine.

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This article is copyright © 2007, by Gary Shumway. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and distribute it electronically and in print, other than as part of a book and provided that mention of the author’s web site www.redpills.org is included. (Email notification is requested.) All other rights reserved. Gary Shumway is the author of Winging Through America and SCUBA Scoop.