Posted on 06/22/2011 3:16:28 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Foreward By Newt Gingrich – August 2010
I wish this book had never needed to be written.
It almost came too late.
America is recklessly accelerating toward economic disaster. Fed Up! may be the last warning sign to the danger that lies ahead.
Rick Perry, Texas governor for the past decade, is uniquely qualified to offer a firsthand perspective on why the United States—the most successful civilization in human history—is being threatened with economic collapse.
First Principles
Faith, freedom, and free enterprise are the pillars of a strong, safe, prosperous society. Rick knows that when these principles are protected, America succeeds, and when they are undermined, America fails. But the Left has a different belief. The Left believes that most people are not capable of pursuing happiness and that a strong centralized government is best able to provide for them. While claiming compassion for humanity, the Left's policies are destructive to the human beings subject to them—as we have had to learn painfully again and again.
The Left's self-serving solution to every crisis, economic or otherwise, and many of their own doing, is always the same: inflict higher taxes on Americans to create more government programs with more rules and regulations that result in less freedom, less innovation, less safety, and less prosperity.
The problem with the Left’s one solution, as Rick forcefully explains in the pages that follow, is that it doesn't work. It's never worked, and it never will work. The record shows it.
But what the record also shows is that when power and freedom are returned to the people, when people are rewarded for work, and when government holds the line on spending, individuals and opportunity thrive. We have seen that result most spectacularly recently in Texas, and in the mid-1990s with the Contract with America Congress, when I served as Speaker of the House.
The Texas Record
Upon taking office, President Barack Obama repeatedly said that he was open to ideas on health care policy and on reversing the economic crisis. But he had to look no further than Texas to see ideas and policies that work.
Texas has no state income tax, no capital gains tax, and no tax on corporate dividends. In contrast, California taxes all three. It has the highest state income tax rates in the nation, with a top rate of 10.3 percent and with most income earners paying 9.3 percent. The California sales tax stands at 8.25 percent. In Texas, the state sales tax rate is 6.25 percent. With both the highest personal income tax and the highest state sales tax in the nation, California also has the largest budget deficit of any state.
Texas has economically outperformed California by any measure. Since 1998, economic growth in Texas has been nearly 20 percent higher than it is in California. Since the end of the tech boom, the rate of real economic growth in Texas has been 48.5 percent higher than in California. From 1998 to 2007, personal income in Texas grew 21 percent faster than in California. Since 2002, real personal income has grown 46 percent faster in Texas. From 2000 to 2007, California lost a net of 1.2 million residents. Texas, over the same period, gained more than half a million in interstate migration, the third highest in the country.
Prior to 2003, Texas was losing doctors at an alarming rate due to predatory practices of trial lawyers who were driving up the cost of malpractice insurance. In 2003, the Texas legislature passed a measure to limit medical liability. In that same year, a state constitutional amendment was approved by voters to cap noneconomic damages awarded by juries. These two provisions reversed the trend and improved care, accessibility, and the overall economy by making Texas a more attractive place to live, work, and own a business. Malpractice claims dropped, and physician recruitment and retention went up. Doctors saved more than $50 million on insurance premiums, and hospitals' insurance rates went down.
People in Texas, like anyone living in any state, have a choice. They can vote with their feet. Many living in California simply became fed up with their state's high taxes and regulations. Many who moved out moved to Texas, where on average they are safer, freer, and more prosperous. Competition among the states is a powerful incentive for states to keep taxes and the cost of doing business low. And as this California versus Texas example shows, conservative economic policies work and socialist policies don't.
Yet both the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress continue to ignore success stories like Texas. They are going in the opposite direction, passing a massive government takeover of health care while planning similarly massive tax increases to pay for it and for the rest of their job-killing agenda.
Now, it may not be surprising that a politician from Chicago would not naturally look to the Lone Star State for solutions. And you wouldn't expect a Texas governor to look in Illinois for answers (thankfully).
And that is precisely the point of this book. States have been called laboratories in democracy precisely because every problem potentially has fifty different approaches to solving it. Some solutions work in some states and not in others. Some states prefer some solutions over others. Some solutions may work in every state, and some just don't work at all. But the best way to find the best solutions is to allow the states to discover what works best for them, without the federal government interfering.
In today' s global economy, each state is competing not only with other states for businesses, workers, and investors but also on a global level. The fact is, with the right principles and policies, you can make any place rich, as happened in Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, the opposite applies as well. With the wrong principles and the wrong policies, you can make any place poor, as happened in Detroit. In 1950, 1.8 million people called Detroit home. It ranked first in median income of all major cities in America. But after Detroit's political leaders, ignoring the principles of freedom and free markets, governed with runaway government spending and taxes, Detroit shrank by more than half. Today, the Motor City is number 66 in median household income in a list of 68 major American cities. One-third of its residents are living below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate is the highest of any major metropolitan area in the country.
The Record of the Contract with America Congress
The Left's willful ignorance of the historical record concerning principles and policies that work is not limited to Texas. The Left also ignores the success of the Contract with America Congress from just fifteen years ago.
Beginning in 1995, after the Republicans gained the majority in both Houses of Congress, the policies generated by the Contract with America set out to put America back on the road to prosperity and keep it there.
Among the historic accomplishments of this Congress were congressional accountability, welfare reform, fewer regulations, the lowest increase in federal spending since the 1920s, the first tax cuts in sixteen years, and the first four consecutive balanced budgets (reducing the public debt by over $400 billion) since the 1920s.
The federal deficit went from $107.4 billion in 1996 to a $125.6 billion surplus in 1999. During that time, unemployment dropped 1.4 percent, from 5.6 to 4.2 percent, with the creation of 8.4 million new jobs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) rose 140 percent, from 3,834 to 9,213, between January 1995 and January 1999.
By comparison, since 2008, the Democrat-controlled Congress has added an astonishing $4.6 trillion to the public debt, including $1.6 trillion in 2010 alone. Nearly 7 million jobs have been destroyed under the Pelosi-Reid Congresses between January 2007 and June 2010. Unemployment has risen 4.9 percent, from 4.6 to 9.5 percent. And would be 10.4 percent if it included discouraged workers, those individuals who are unemployed but are not actively seeking employment, usually because they have had no success finding a job after searching for a long time. The total number of unemployed and underemployed workers in July 2010 stood at an astonishing 26 million. Between January 2007 and August 2010, the DJIA dropped 1,823 points.
During the 1990s, at the same time that the Republicans were cutting taxes, we were also cutting spending. As a share of the gross domestic product (GDP), federal spending fell from 20.2 percent in fiscal year 1996 to 18.5 percent in FY 1999. But even as the economy grew dramatically from 1994 to 1999, federal revenue as a percentage of GDP actually increased. That is, even with lower taxes and a higher GDP, more money came into the federal treasury.
The Pelosi-Reid Congresses have increased spending as a share of the GDP from 20.7 percent in FY 2008 to 25.4 percent in FY 2010, the highest since it spiked in FY 1945, at the end of World War II. Between FY 2007 (the last Republican budget) and FY 2011 Congress has increased spending by a total of $1.105 trillion.
Since World War II, the average duration of a recession had been ten months, with the longest lasting sixteen months. July 2010 marked thirty-one months since the current recession began, and we're still losing jobs. Yet despite this fact, the Pelosi-Reid Congress has set in motion comprehensive, across-the-board tax-rate increases for next year on both businesses and investors that will extend the downturn indefinitely.
Moving Power Back to the People
The evidence of what works and what doesn't is empirically irrefutable, yet the ideologically stubborn Keynesians in the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress refuse to acknowledge it. They ignore both the Texas success under Governor Perry's leadership and the Contract with America success in the 1990s.
Instead of pursuing the policies that have time and again demonstrated success, the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress insist on following job-killing economic policies rather than the job-creating policies that we know work. Chief among these job-killing policies are a failed trillion-dollar stimulus package and the bound-to-fail “Obamacare.”
Unfortunately for America, the Obama administration is creating a job-killing economic system based on an ideology of centralizing power, which most people considered a failure after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These failed policies have brought us to the edge of the cliff. This gets us back to the importance of moving power away from Washington and back to the states and the local level.
For most of our history, Washington was a far-off place that had little inf1uence on the daily lives of most Americans. More recently, the federal government has usurped or seduced enormous power away from local and state governments. There are in the United States today 513,000 elected local, state, and federal officials, but only 537 are elected on the federal level, or about one-tenth of 1 percent. Yet so much power has been consolidated in the hands of federally elected officials, as well as in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and federal judges. We need to reverse this trend or we will suffer lasting consequences.
Devolving power out of Washington is critical to our long-term survival.
Rick has done a great service by explaining how we got here and what we can do about it. His position as governor of Texas gives him a tremendous platform for helping us change course and return to sound conservative fiscal policies. But he can't do it alone. Every American has a duty to rein in the out-of-control federal government. Fed Up! is your handbook. It will arm you with the facts so that you can inform your family, friends, and neighbors. An informed citizenry is the best tool we have in the arsenal to defend our Republic.
Newt Gingrich, August 2010
MegaRINO Gov. Garadasil-Perry ought not have
demanded that children take untested dangerous
materials useful ONLY for making Gov. Garadasil-Perry
a few more bribe $$$$$ from BIG PHARMA.
Rick Perry — “TORT REFORM!”
Rick Perry — “LOSER PAYS!”
Thanks Cincinatus’ Wife.
Good point, FRiend.
However, He SUPPORTED GARDASIL BY EDICT.
Gardasil Perry signed his fascist EDICT in 2007.
How about we examine the FACTS from 2006?
2006 population of women per the census was 151,795,031.
Number of cervical cancer cases
diagnosed in 2005 per the CDC was 11,999.
That means that 00.07904% of women
were diagnosed with cervical cancer.
Number of deaths by cervical cancer in 2005 were 3,924.
Percentage of deaths were 00.00258%.
The problem is
1. Long term effects of Gardasil are still unknown.
2. This drug was not adequately tested on girls given
its known side-effects
3. Cervical cancer is both curable if early, and uncommon.
In that light, what Perry did cannot be excused,
and he certainly has not EVER addressed it.
That means he is a RINO from the fascist RomneyWING.
Doesn’t Perry favor in-state tuition for illegals? No thanks.
Doesn't merely "favor" it. SIGNED the nation's first such LAW as Governor in 2001.
WHO do you want to be President?? Obama again?? WHO??
Your law practice must have really suffered under Rick Perry.
Millions upon millions were spent by trail lawyers to stop Perry.
Trial lawyers: Biggest Democratic Party campaign workers and campaign $$$ angels to Democrats after public sector unions/teachers unions.
Perry FORCED the toxic material
which MAY have some antiviral activity
— on CHILDREN.
That is A-OK with you? Why?
Perry has not addressed it.
That is A-OK with you?
Perry has not apologized for it.
That is A-OK with you?
FACT Perry is a BIG PHARMA PIMP.
PIMP. Do you understand?
Here’s another good article on Rick Perry.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2011/06/a-case-for-rick-perry
Palin likes him
Rush likes him.
I think I might like him too.
‘Trail’ lawyer?
If they worked against FASCIST Gardasil Perry
on that, then they did good and were more
conservative THEN he.
There was an opt-out for parents. Do you not understand this?
My shortlist of candidates, in order of preference and assuming they will all run:
Palin
Perry
Bachmann
Your link is to the book on Amazon, not to the article you posted.
I’ve researched this issue.
It is not law.
It was always opt-out.
In TX people speak and our government listens.
When they lowered the speed limit in Houston (new speed signs went up across the massive freeway system) the people spoke up and the speed limit went back to normal and the old signs were replaced.
When they put up red-light cameras the people spoke up and the cameras were turned off.
We do it that way here in TX.
The sign of someone with no argument is that they pick on a typo in someone else’s post and try to make a big deal of it.
I transcribed it.
(((chuckle)))
I just realized that it IS the foreward of the book. (I am so backward!)
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