Free Republic

Tax Plan. Trump’s tax plan is certainly conservative. He proposes lowering the top tax bracket to 25 percent, drops the capital gains tax to 20 percent, dumps the death tax, and drops the corporate rate to 15 percent. Our analysis finds that the plan would reduce federal revenues by $11.98 trillion over the next decade. However, it also would improve incentives to work and invest, which could increase gross domestic product (GDP) by 11 percent over the long term. That’s different from his past positions on taxes, which include fighting the flat tax and proposing a wealth tax that would...

Donald Trump is "far and away the front-runner," for the GOP presidential nomination and the establishment is "living in a fantasy land," by denying that big changes are happening, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday. "Trump is tapping into something in the country that's real," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "If you take Trump's vote and Cruz's vote and Carson's vote -- the three outsiders -- they are once again at about 62 percent in South Carolina, and they have been consistently above 60 percent everywhere in the country. If you pull together all of the...

Donald Trump comfortably defeated his Republican presidential rivals on Saturday in South Carolina's GOP primary. Trump's resounding victory isn't simply a boon to his prospects for winning the Republican presidential nomination, an outcome once thought impossible that is looking increasingly more plausible. It is also an embarrassing repudiation of conservative orthodoxy that has dominated Republican politics for decades. It suggests that the party's intellectual leaders, who organized the base around the National Review/Weekly Standard consensus -- small government, free trade, pro-Israel, deregulation, low taxes, social conservatism and an aggressive foreign policy -- have been generals of a phantom army. The...

If you give Obama a pass when he is dishonest or breaks the rules, because he seems like a good man, or is at least better than those guys; if you argue he had to change the law himself because Congress is dysfunctional and Republicans are unreasonable; if you lambast Bush for starting a war, but give Hillary a pass for both Iraq and Libya; then you are adopting one set of rules for your tribe and another set of rules for everyone else. That shows a lack of respect for people who disagree with you. They notice. They resent...

America doesn't need two secular, cosmopolitan parties. Trump's secret is that he has found an unoccupied space to practice politics. Call it the politically incorrect, moderately traditionalist, main-street economics zone, where winners and losers exist (just as in the real world) and it is not a crime to believe unabashedly in American greatness. Trump has stoked xenophobic fears and used his crass showmanship to mark out this territory. His tactics of strong demagoguery make it completely understandable to lament his success. Yet, in order for our political system to work, people must feel as if they have real choices that...

Trump is not a conservative. He's an economic nationalist whose limited involvement in politics over the years has largely consisted of furthering his own interests by contributing to members of both political parties. His current policy positions often contradict those he's publicly expressed in the past, and his governing philosophy, to the extent he has one, combines crony capitalism with government activism (eminent domain; ethanol; protectionism; universal, government-paid health care).Des Moines, Iowa - The shorthand understanding of the likely three-man race for the Republican nomination goes something like this. Donald Trump is the populist outside agitator, running on economic nationalism...

Conservative ideologues want to keep things essentially as they are, making only marginal and generally ineffective changes. Populists want to change things to be more consistent with what "we the people" want. Often, what we the people want is better than what our "leaders" want or try to provide. Under these definitions, Trump is a populist, not a conservative ideologue. That's good.According to Dictionary. com, these are attributes of "conservatives:" Disposed to preserve existing conditions, restore traditional ones, and to limit change. According to the same source, "populism" means: Any of various, often anti-establishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that...

Last night, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump’s “very special guest,” endorsed him at Iowa State University. Of course, a lot of people are shocked that she would endorse him over Ted Cruz. She’s the Tea Party darling after all, standing for conservative values from supporting gun rights to defunding Obamacare. Cruz communications director Rick Tyler said earlier Tuesday that the campaign would be very disappointed if Palin supported Trump because she:...has been a champion of the conservative cause and if she was going to endorse Donald Trump, sadly she would be endorsing someone who's held progressive views all their life on...

Longtime political strategist Karl Rove is warning Republicans not to nominate a presidential candidate that reflects the same "populist anger" that gave birth to the rise of Donald Trump. In his latest op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Rove explained the GOP will have two choices when delegates gather in Cleveland, Ohio, next July to determine which remaining Republican hopeful they wish to see challenge Democrats in the general election. "Will the party choose a nominee with a conservative agenda or one reflecting populist anger?" Rove wrote. "The two are hardly the same," he noted. "Conservative principles provide a winning...

Candidates of the left, right and center have something in common: They all want to be seen as populists. Hillary Clinton attacks income inequality and issues booklets showing how well she stacks up, even against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, as a booster for the embattled middle class; Sen. Marco Rubio invokes the American dream; Mike Huckabee and putative libertarian Sen. Rand Paul are against giving President Obama a free hand to negotiate the Pacific trade pact. Meanwhile, pundits and journalists prowl for populists everywhere: Sen. Ted Cruz is a “populist egghead.” Rubio showcases “populist themes” of up-by-the-bootstraps success. Huckabee is going...

With the Autumnal Equinox now behind us, We, the People of Massachusetts, are reminded that in less than a month’s time we’ll be called upon to elect (or re-elect) a Senator to represent our interests in the upper house of the United States Congress. T’was not always thus. Those among my readers who stayed awake during Mrs. McGuffey’s 9th Grade History class will recall that, until the 2nd decade of the 20th Century, U.S. Senators were (per Art. 1, Sec. 3 of the Constitution) chosen by state legislatures, not elected directly by the people as at present. The most contentious issue facing the...

L. Frank Baum claimed to have written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz “solely to pleasure the children” of his day, but scholars have found enough parallels between Dorothy’s yellow-brick odyssey and the politics of 1890s Populism to suggest otherwise. Did Baum intend to pen a subtle political satire on monetary reform or merely an entertaining fantasy? “The story of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was written solely to pleasure children of today” (Dighe 2002, 42). So wrote L. Frank Baum in the introduction to his popular children’s story published in 1900. As fertile as his imagination was, Baum could hardly...

Happy second birthday, Tea Party! You're in the midst of your Terrible Twos -- screaming up a storm, being finicky about what you eat, rebelling during nap-time and driving your babysitters crazy. We nearly saw a budget deal to keep the government open derailed because of Tea Party antics. We're anticipating a fierce battle over raising the debt ceiling. Democrats got walloped by more than a handful of Tea Party candidates in 2010, but now it's Republican incumbents feeling the heat as Tea Partiers threaten their jobs in ferocious primaries. And we're on the eve of the first debates in...

Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement is Fundamentally Remaking Two Party System won't be on in the bookstores until the middle of September 2010 although it is already available on Amazon.com. The book coming out soon after Glenn's Beck rally on August 29, 2010 in Washington at the Lincoln Memorial may be serendipity or excellent timing.

MANCHESTER, N.H. – It is the historic mission of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary to give us the establishment candidate in each party, and then the insurgent candidate. The two pairs then battle it out in South Carolina to give us the probable nominees for November. Year 2008 looks no different, with this exception: The insurgents, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, swept the first contests and now have the momentum. And both establishments are reeling. Twenty-four hours before New Hampshire, the GOP establishment has not even settled upon a champion. If Mitt Romney wins the Granite State, he...

Commerce: An ill wind is blowing through America's stalled trade treaties. New calls for tariffs and misplaced xenophobia are finding a home in the Democrat-led Congress. All that's going to do is make us poorer. Even respected liberal economists like former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder have started uttering nonsense against free trade, so there's no doubt a bad current of populist thought has taken hold. In Congress, the blight's the worst. Anti-free-trade Democrats like Charles Schumer of New York and Max Baucus of Montana, and Republicans like South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham, are weighing in with encouraging Smoot-Hawley-like tariffs...

"I'm concerned about protectionism, isolationism." Those were the first words President Bush spoke as he sat down Wednesday at an editorial board meeting at The Wall Street Journal. Reading his remarks calls forth only sadness. For neither the president nor his acolytes at the Journal appear to have learned anything from the disasters their ideas have visited upon the party and country. Can Bush not see that the isolation of America is a result of the war he launched on a nation that, no matter how odious its regime, did not threaten us? Can he not see clearly now the...

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

For someone as conservative as myself, I usually harbor far less respect and admiration for George Will than most people would think. He may gaze more astutely at his navel than I do mine, but there’s an asymptotic limit to what the guy can tell me about lint hair that I would really care about. Today, however, he cut through the mendacious cattle droppings with a sharpened broadsword of an opinion column. Today, he unloaded on the farcical issue of the minimum wage. It seems that The Democratic Party has made it a cornerstone of their plan to fight poverty...

LA PAZ, Bolivia - Students attending a conflict resolution course in this politically tumultuous Andean nation got some unexpected extracurricular experience when Bolivia's leftist government accused the program's sponsor of being a front for U.S. spies.