I am tired of all of these bandwagon PBS fans.

The constitution argument is silly.

You are correct. You and I cannot personally decide what is and isn't the government's function. Thankfully it is spelled out very clearly in the Constitution as to what is the responsibility of the Federal Government. And if a power is not expressly given to the Federal Government in the Constitution then it falls to the states. And Big Bird isn't one of the enumerated powers given to the Federal Government.

Yeah because everything the federal government does is laid out in the constitution.

The constitution argument is silly. Did the constitution give the federal government the responsibility to create NASA and to explore space? No but the federal government did it anyway.

You are correct. You and I cannot personally decide what is and isn't the government's function. Thankfully it is spelled out very clearly in the Constitution as to what is the responsibility of the Federal Government. And if a power is not expressly given to the Federal Government in the Constitution then it falls to the states. And Big Bird isn't one of the enumerated powers given to the Federal Government.

What is the role of the Federal Government? I think it's very evident where Obama and Romney stand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1...re=related

See 2:57 for where the Constitution fits in.

Promoting the general welfare is in the very first line of the Constitution.

According to the Supreme Court, the General Welfare Clause "has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or on any of its Departments".

It is merely tells the basic concept of creating the Constitution in the first place. The federal government was always intended to have extremely limited powers which were clearly defined and the individual states were left to determine how to best do things in a way that fit best with their unique circumstances.

When you're $16 trillion dollars in debt and hemorrhaging $1+ trillion dollars a year, everything should be on the table.

I agree it's a good smokescreen, but it's a smokescreen more for Obama and Obama supporters. Romney hasn't made a huge deal about defunding Big Bird. He mentioned it as one thing to defund if it fails the "should we borrow money from China for this" test. How is Obama going to balance the budget, or even "cut the deficit in half his first four years"?

According to the Supreme Court, the General Welfare Clause "has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or on any of its Departments".

It is merely tells the basic concept of creating the Constitution in the first place. The federal government was always intended to have extremely limited powers which were clearly defined and the individual states were left to determine how to best do things in a way that fit best with their unique circumstances.

the Supreme Court interpreted the clause even more expansively, disavowing almost entirely any role for judicial review of Congressional spending policies, thereby conferring upon Congress a plenary power to impose taxes and to spend money for the general welfare subject almost entirely to Congress's own discretion. Even more recently, in South Dakota v. Dole[31] the Court held Congress possessed power to indirectly influence the states into adopting national standards by withholding, to a limited extent, federal funds. To date, the Hamiltonian view of the General Welfare Clause predominates in case law.