The Fifth and 14th Amendements of the Constitution

Can the Government legally take your property? No, unless they continue to trash the Constitution of the United States. This from a legal standpoint:

The last phrase of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, known as the takings clause, reads: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Its potential application to a significant chunk of the economic recovery programs is straightforward. A facial reading of the above text suggests the U.S. federal government (and state equivalents, similarly bound through the Fourteenth Amendment) cannot unilaterally restructure the contractual obligations of a given entity, summarily dismiss its outstanding debts, or even choose to pay some arbitrary fraction of these while waiving the rest. Curiously, however, there has been precious little commentary on just this point. Laurence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, summarily dismissed the issue when evaluating the legality of a 90% tax on bonuses in his email to the Atlantic. Mayer, Morrison, and Piskorski gave it a bit more coverage in their mortgage modification proposal, but still seemed to be glossing over the main point by citing to a recent Supreme Court case that dismissed a very loose standard for takings jurisprudence without explicitly stating whether a taking took place.