- Unemployment is persistently high at 9%, setting a record for still being this high months following the end of every other recession in our history.
- This 9% translates into 14 million Americans without jobs.
- There are another 9 million Americans or so who are either underemployed or who have stopped looking for a job and are not included in that 9% number.
- The last time this administration implemented an economic stimulus program it resulted in a cost per job created or saved of well over a quarter of a million dollars each, half of the stimulus bridge repair money was spent on bridges that were not in need of repair, stimulus money was used to replace windows in a Mt. Saint Helen’s visitors’ center that has been closed for years and is unlikely to ever be opened, other stimulus funds supported work to catalog insects on an island off the coast of Africa, and while there were hundreds of other pork laden wastes of money, unemployment still not come down.
However, it does not have to be that way. Let me recommend what the President should say if he was bold and courageous and then I will predict what he will say given his track record of being just another politician.
Infrastructure
1) What he should say: We have a crumbling infrastructure. Our bridges and roads are in much need of repair. Thus, tonight I am proposing a Federal government infrastructure initiative that will help put people to work fixing these problems that will serve the country well into the future.
Given our dire national debt situation, I will fund this initiative by cutting back on unnecessary government spending elsewhere. Since my administrative has been responsible for hiring over 200,000 more Federal workers over the past few years, I will issue termination notices to them immediately and funnel whatever money would have been used to pay them into this infrastructure initiative. This is a better use of taxpayer money since what the infrastructure projects accomplish will have a long lasting affect. Whatever these extraneous new Federal employees would have contributed to the country will pale in comparison to the permanent infrastructure improvements.
Further infrastructure funding will come from:
- The termination of unnecessary Pentagon programs such as the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle and the V22 Osprey, and other redundant and/or unnecessary systems and programs.
- Most corporate welfare programs will be immediately terminated including the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the Market Access program, and all Federal subsidies for foreign marketing by domestic trade organizations.
- Given the current high profits of the American agriculture industry and the sky high prices of American farm lands, I will terminate all farm subsidies to farmer operations with over $500,000 in annual revenue immediately. This includes the termination of all Federal subsidies for ethanol production.
- I will ask Congress to redirect resources that are currently allocated to building out a high speed rail line to be directed to fixing existing infrastructure problems. The high speed rail line work may never get completed and may never fulfill its purported benefits while we need to fix existing infrastructure that is broken today and being used, in a dangerous way, by Americans today.
What he will say: We need to incur more debt at the Federal government level in order to get thousands or tens of thousands of construction workers back on the job regardless of the deficit impacts.
Obama Care
2) What he should say: It has become pretty obvious that Obama Care has turned out to be a disaster. It will add to the national deficit, it will cause companies to terminate their health insurance programs for tens of millions of Americans since the legislation makes it less expensive to not offer insurance than to offer it, it will not address the root causes of our high health care costs in this country, and most importantly, it has introduced an unprecedented amount of uncertainty into the minds of business owners and leaders.
These owners and leaders have no clue how Obama Care will impact their business since the political class has written an almost unreadable 2,500 page law that no one really understands. As a result of this uncertainty, businesses have become “deer in the headlights,” concluding that it is better to hunker down with current employees rather than hire new ones, take the risk to expand their businesses, and possibly/likely be burdened with onerous Obama Care taxes, fees, and unforeseen costs.
Thus, given all of the negatives aspects of Obama Care and the non-existent positive ones that have been identified so far, I am asking Congress to repeal the bill immediately in order to remove much of the uncertainty in the private sector. I am asking Republicans AND Democrats to come together and authorize a blue ribbon panel of experts to start over on health care reform in this country, free of the political and lobbying influences that ruined Obama Care. By returning to the status quo while this panel does the job correctly, we can inject a high level of certainty and confidence back into the job market.
What he will say: Nothing.
Overseas Corporate Profits
3) What he should say: We have a very broken tax code. It is long, complicated, unfair, and requires too much effort from Americans and American companies to comply with, time and resources that could be better spent on growing businesses and jobs rather than dealing with the tax code. This has resulted in American companies stashing untold hundreds of billions of dollars in profit overseas because our tax laws make it a better decision for them to sit on cash elsewhere than to invest it in America.
Thus, I am proposing a one time, six month tax holiday for any American company that repatriates their foreign earnings back to America for investment in America’s economy and America’s job market. During this tax holiday, the effective tax rate will only be 5%, the proceeds of which will be used to fund the infrastructure initiative. The remaining 95% of the returned earnings can be used to increase stockholder dividends, open new factories and facilities, hire more workers, and invest in research and development. It cannot be used to increase executive salaries, sit idle to make company profits look better, or to close existing U.S. factories and move the work overseas. Companies would have up to five years to prove they invested back into America to avoid paying taxes beyond that 5%.
However, this is a short term, one time effect. There should never have to be a tax holiday like this in the future. Our entire tax code needs to be revised so that everyone and every business pays a fair share. Thus, I am asking Congress to authorize another blue ribbon panel of experts to rewrite the tax code away from the partisan bickering in Washington, a tax code that is simplified, fair, easy to comply with, and which contributes to investment in American without giving the Federal government more taxpayer wealth than it gets today.
What he will say: We need to reform out tax code.
Excessive Regulation
4) What he should say: The Federal government has become far too intrusive to the lives and operations of Americans and American businesses. Thus, I am ordering the Federal government to halt all regulatory activities that do not directly impact human safety and environmental safety. I am also asking Congress to immediately repeal the Sarbannes-Oxley law, a law that has proven effective only in generating tons of work and paper trails that no one ever looks at. This will free up those business and corporate resources to do more productive things.
In addition, the Federal government and political class should stop meddling in the private affairs of businesses who are trying to make the right business decisions for their companies to increase their financial health and create more opportunities for hiring and expansion. Thus, I am asking the National Labor Relations Board to immediately stop prosecuting Boeing for the simple business decision of moving a part of their business from one part of America to another part of America. Boeing should be able to execute that business strategy without an overbearing Federal bureaucracy picking at their decisions and diverting business resources.
Also, the Federal government will stop its over zealousness intrusion into the Gibson Guitar business and other companies for what appear to be non-events. These and other regulatory heavy-handedness, almost tyrannical, efforts will stop immediately in order to allow business owners to focus on expansion, not fighting nonessential regulations.
What he will say.: We have too much regulation.
Energy
5) What he should say: My administration and every administration and Congress that has preceded mine has failed to come close to formulating a strategic, effective, efficient, and coherent national energy plan and related policies. Thus, in the short term, we will necessarily have to continue to rely on fossil fuels to generate the power and energy we need to run our economy and country.
Developing other, non-carbon based fuel sources will take time. In the meantime, we continue to ship our nation’s wealth overseas in return for energy sources from regimes that do not often have our best interests at heart.
Therefore, in the short term, I propose that we immediately put people to work building up our internal energy infrastructure and sourcing using Americans to do the building and retaining our energy wealth on our shores. To serve this short term need, I propose the following actions to free up domestic energy and create the environment for more industrial jobs:
- Terminate all oil drilling moratoriums on Gulf of Mexico drilling. Simultaneously, I will increase the quality and number of oil rig inspectors in order to minimize the possibility of another BP oil rig disaster.
- I will support drilling in the Arctic with government oversight increased significantly and requiring oil companies to have a detailed, and tested contingency plan and resources in place before drilling begins.
- I will support the construction of the proposed pipeline from Canada to Gulf oil refineries to bring dirty crude to the United States for processing into fuel from the tar sands. But I require those refineries to do everything known to clean up the potential pollution impacts. This oil will be burned somewhere in the world once it is pumped out of the ground. Better to keep it here and do whatever is possible to clean up the refining process than let it be shipped around the world to countries and refineries that may not be as environmentally friendly as us.
- The above three steps will use no Federal funds, it is our approval to drill and the oil companies responsibility to fund that expanded drilling.
Simultaneously, I am asking Congress to authorize an energy blue ribbon panel to develop the first ever, long range national energy policy. That policy must rest on five principles: it must move us away from fossil based fuels as quickly as possible, it must integrate renewables into the energy mix as quickly as possible, it must be domestic production focused, it must not significantly increase the cost of energy in the country, and it must minimize government intervention in the energy sector.
What he will say: I know that the government’s investments in energy companies have been a failure but let’s do it some more.
Education
6) What he should say: We have allowed the education of our children in this country to sink to unheard of depths over the past few decades. Even though the Reagan commission on education reform identified the problems with education in the United States way back in 1983, we have failed to provide the necessary skills needed by our citizens to compete at a high level in the world economy.
As a result, we have watched as the rest of the world has gained ground, and in some cases, passed our ability to integrate a vibrant economy with a highly educated, motivated, and trained workforce. We have both a short term and long term problem in education.
Short term, we need to retrain and increase the skills of our existing workforce. Therefore, I am announcing tonight that the dozens of Federal job training programs that currently exist will be combined into a single Federal government job training organization within the Health and Human Services organization.
This centralized training organizations will be the one stop shopping for retraining Americans and connecting those Americans with companies that need well trained personnel. There is no need for dozens of independent, sub-optimizing Federal groups to have job training responsibilities. They need to all be consolidated and focused on only one thing: improving job skills and connecting job seekers with job openings.
Long term, we need to completely overhaul our education processes, not necessarily by dumping more taxpayer dollars into a dysfunctional system but by fixing our education system to be effective. I am asking Congress to appoint yet another blue ribbon panel, this one of education experts to accomplish this task and provide a blueprint for the future of American education. A primary task of this panel will be to bench mark what dozens of other countries are doing in the realm of education, dozens of countries who are doing a better job of educating their kids than we do educating ours.
What he will say: We need to fix our education process.
Taxes
7) What he should say: Last fall we extended the Bush tax cuts for one year for every American and we cut the Social Security tax. Tonight I am proposing that we follow the lead of the Federal Reserve Board, which recently stated it will hold interest rates low and steady for the next two years, and extend those lower income and Social Security tax rates for at least the next two years. Both actions are aimed at removing some uncertainty from the economy so that people know how to plan for the next two years around a non-changing tax rate.
What he will say: Let’s extend those tax rates for only one year n order to get past the next election.
National Debt
8) What he should say: It has become obvious to me that our national debt crisis is like an anchor on the economy. It sucks productive wealth out of the nation’s economy to pay what is becoming a staggering debt load on the financial viability of the Federal government. This debt load will burden future generations of Americans unless we can get it under control.
The political class in Washington has been unable to reach a satisfactory compromise to significantly reduce this debt burden. Therefore, I am asking Congress to create a super debt commission panel whose job is to quickly, within four months, combine the work of the original debt reduction commission, that I created but ignored, with other fine work such as what has been done by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Cato Institute, and others to present to Congress an integrated plan of debt reduction.
Congress would then vote for the entire plan, approving all of it or disapproving all of it, no changes, not tweaks, no exceptions. Failure to approve their findings, if that is the wish of the Congressional majority, would automatically result in the decreasing of the Federal government budget by 10% across the board for the next five years.
Only when we have a definitive plan on how to control government spending will the private sector have enough confidence to get out of the headlights and start investing in a stable government and economic environment.
What he will say: We need to reduce government spending and it is not my responsibility to come with a the plan, it is the responsibility of Congress to do so and their fault if they fail to do so.
Unemployment Benefits
9) What he should say: Every legitimate study that has been done on unemployment benefits, including one done by my new top economic advisor, has shown that continuing long term extensions of unemployment benefits actually encourages long term, chronic unemployment. Therefore, starting six months from now, the Federal govenrment will no longer support payments to anyone who has been on unemployment benefits for more than six months. This should provide those currently unemployed ample time to find some form of employment.
What he will say: We will extend unemployment benefits again on an open ended basis, contrary to what has proven to be the best remedy for unemployment, shorter unemployment benefit periods.
International Trade Treaties
9) What he will say: We need to approve the pending free trade treaties that we have reached with other countries in order to open up those markets for exports of American products.
What he will say: We need to approve the pending free trade trade treaties that we have reached with other countries in order to open up those markets for exports of American products.
What should he say vs., what will he say:
- Will he be a leader who is bold and thinks out of the failed frame of thinking he has used so far?
- Will he just trot out new words to describe the same old failed economic policies?
- Will it be forward thinking initiatives or more Cash For Clunkers and Cash For Caulkers?
-Will it be strategic thinking with the potential to change the world or small time tactical thinking designed to get him re-elected?
- Or will he be just another politician, afraid to tick off his voting blocs and backers while hurling slings at his political opponents?
We shall see by the end of the week but I think we all know the answer before he even speaks and the words bold, strategic, forward thinking do not come to mind. I dare him to surprise me.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available, at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday Please visit the following sites for freedom:
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http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment.com/
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