[Senator_Blutarski]

Since President Obama took office in January 2009, the United States has embarked on the most ambitious failed experiment in Washington meddling in US history. Huge increases in government spending, massive federal bailouts, growing regulations on businesses, thinly veiled protectionism, and the launch of a vastly expensive and deeply unpopular health care reform plan, have all combined to instill fear and uncertainty in the markets. Free enterprise has taken a backseat to continental European-style interventionism, as an intensely ideological left wing administration has sought to dramatically increase the role of the state in shaping the US economy. The end result has been a dramatic fall in economic freedom, sluggish growth, poor consumer confidence, high unemployment, a collapsing housing market, and an overall decline in US prosperity, with more than 45 million Americans now reliant on food stamps – that’s over one seventh of the entire country.

Great paragraph, great summary. That paragraph should be the basis of every Republican's 2012 campaign.

[p. henry]

The most significant long term problem we face is a decline in the strength of the private sector of our economy. This problem has many fathers, including an inadequate public education system, an immigration system that looks the other way while we are inundated by unskilled labor from the Third World but requires foreign graduate students with talents and entreprenurial urges we need to return to their own countries upon graduation, self-interested zealotry in the environmental movement both within government and the major environmental advocacy groups, a criminal justice system overwhelmed by the products of a war on drugs that we are unlikely to win, a federal government in which progams once they are enacted never die or even shrink, a welfare system that incentivizes sloth and irresponsibility, the most progressive income tax in the developed world, pro-union policies being followed by the current administration, and a corporate income tax which is among the highest in the world and discourages the repatriation of foreign profits and foreign direct investment.

Increasing the progressivity of our income taxes would exacerbate this problem by reducing even further the private capital needed to rebuild the private sector of our economy. To do so in the name of fairness when 47% of our citizens pay no income tax and the upper three deciles pay income tax far in excess of their share of national adjusted gross income would be Orwellian.

While neither major political party should escape blame for the evisceration of our economy, the Democrats have been responsible for most of the carnage. They are the ones who support the expansion of the welfare state and oppose its reformation, who advocate for an even more progressive personal income tax system, who oppose tort reform for the further enrichment of their trial lawyer supporters, who oppose reform and reduction of corporate taxes, who support teachers' unions to the detriment of students, and who constantly burden our economy with ever more stringent and unproductive environmental policies.

Obama is merely the most extreme of the Democrats who hold national office. The more significant source of their power is in Congress. Therefore, to truly measure the most recent effects of their policies, it is misleading to simply compare the economy today with the economy in the last year of the Bush administration. You really should be comparing 2011 with 2006, the year which preceded the Pelosi Speakership. In fiscal 2006 federal outlays were approximately $2.655 trillion and constituted 20.1% of gross domestic product. In fiscal 2011, after four years of Democrat control of Congress (and one year of joint control) and more than two and one-half years of the Obama Presidency, annual outlays by the federal government will have increased by approximately $1.164 trillion, or 43.8%, to $3.819 trillion, and they will constitute 25.3% of gross domestic product.

On December 31, 2006, the outstanding public debt of the United States was $8.68 trillion, and annual deficits were declining. The Pelosi Congress and the Obama administration reversed that trend. By June 30, 2011, the outstanding public debt of the United States had increased by 65% to $14.343 trillion. Rememeber that the next time you hear a Democrat say that we must increase tax rates on those who start and invest in new companies in the private sector to solve our deficit spending: annual federal outlays increased more than 43%, and our national debt increased 65%, while they controlled Congress.

To solve our current economic malaise and to assure that our children will have a productive future, we must revitalize the private sector of our economy. That will not happen while Obama and the rest of the Democrats retain significant power in Washington.