THE SPEECH I’D GIVE IF I WERE RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on July 14, 2011. It was written in the hope that some GOP presidential candidate for 2012 would have the courage to give it. None did, least of all Rino Romney. It’s more necessary today with the Democrat-caused danger to our country far more dire than twelve years ago. Who among the current crop has the courage? DJT? RDS? Vivek? Scott? Or perhaps RFK2? Or tragically, none at all? One thing is for certain: our country cannot survive 2024 being 2012 redux.]
TTP, July 14, 2011
[Note: No, I have no intention whatever of running for president. This is the address that Palin or Perry or Bachman or some major candidate needs to give if we want an end to our current political insanity.]
I am running for president because freedom in America is being systematically destroyed by Demagogues in Washington, and I am determined to restore it.
That capital “D” is there because it is the more appropriate label for Democrats. The Democrat Party should be referred to as the Demagogue Party, and that is what I shall do until the day comes when they abandon their opposition to fundamental American values and their advocacy of Marxist-Fascist ideology.
We are gathered here today to discuss solutions to the economic crisis the Demagogues have created – a crisis to which they claim there is no solution. Their Treasury Secretary, Mr. Geithner, has stated this publicly, saying that for a lot of Americans, their lives are going to be, quote, “harder than anything they’ve experienced in their lifetime now, for a long time to come.”
This is a textbook example of Demagogue Marxist idiotic nonsense. But it is nonsense with a purpose. Its purpose is to con people into believing it is true, into getting people so depressed and hopeless that they feel they must depend on government handouts for a living – so they will vote for Demagogues providing the handouts, instead of Republicans who want to provide economic opportunity and freedom.
Folks, restoring prosperity in America is easy. It can be achieved quickly, virtually overnight. Not automatically. It will require a lot of energy, a lot of focused and intelligent effort by all of us. The solution to America’s Malaise is so simple it can be summarized in seven words.
Those seven words are: Get the government out of the way.
Those seven words will be the mantra, the theme song, the purpose of my presidency. Admittedly, I cannot do this on my own. The President is not a King, as the current occupant of the White House thinks he is. I will need a Republican Congress to legislate and authorize what I propose.
And here is what I initially propose, a quintet that will quickly result in an explosion of job creation and investment in a rapidly growing American economy:
*The immediate freezing of all proposed federal agency regulations and the retroactive suspension of all regulations by any federal agency issued during the 18 months preceeding my assuming office (January 20, 2013). Note that this requires only a Presidential Executive Order, no legislation of Congress.
*The elimination of taxes on capital gains.
*The elimination of corporate income taxes.
*The elimination of the depreciation schedule, allowing full expensing of capital assets.
*The repeal of both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sarbox), and the Dodd-Frank Act.
This is just for starters. There is an immense amount of work to be done to dig us out of the abyss the Demagogues have dug us into.
Which brings me to the First Rule of Holes. When smart people pretend to be stupid, insisting that the way to dig yourself out of a deep hole is to dig the hole ever deeper instead of stop digging, you know you are dealing with cheats, crooks, and shysters – in a word, with Demagogues.
The insane debate right now over raising the debt ceiling is a classic example. For Demagogues to play Chicken Little and claim the sky will fall into default and economic Armageddon if the debt ceiling isn’t raised is a bald-faced lie.
To be specific, Mr. Obama lied when he threatened on July 12 that there wouldn’t be enough money to send out Social Security checks on August 3 if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.
The federal government receives more than $200 billion in tax revenue a month. Interest on federal debt per month is $29 billion. Social Security costs per month are about $49 billion. Medicare and Medicaid about $50 billion. Active duty military personnel and veterans programs some $2.9 billion each. Those monthly costs add up to around $134 billion – which leaves $66 billion per month left over.
The problem is – and get ready for this – the federal government is spending $108 billion more than it takes in every month now. The CBO estimates are that Washington spent $973 billion more, which means borrowed, than it received for the first nine months of FY2011. The Demagogues are digging the hole we’re in $108 billion deeper every month – and they say the only way out is to keep digging and borrowing more!
I say no. I say this has to stop. Which is why I must admit I am keenly disappointed by my fellow Republicans in the House leadership, whom I feel have been suckered into a red herring trap on this.
They keep proposing ridiculous alternatives to Mr. Obama’s impossibly destructive demand to raise both the debt ceiling and taxes – such as “entitlement reform,” and agreeing to raise the debt ceiling by trillions right now in exchange for what Congressman Allen West appropriately terms “fairy dust” cuts in spending years from now.
I feel what they need to insist on is spending reform right now. As we saw in the numbers above, this requires the following actions by the House:
*Refusing to raise the debt ceiling. (Remember that only the House has the Constitutional authority to raise it, or indeed to authorize any and all spending by the federal government.)
*Specifying that the approximately $200 billion in monthly federal revenues be first spent as itemized above (debt interest payment, Social Security, et al).
*Negotiating with Mr. Obama on how the remaining some $66 billion in monthly revenues should be prioritized. This is the only discussion the House leadership should be having with Mr. Obama.
The discussion should go something like this. Mr. Obama, you’ve been spending $174 billion a month beyond the most essential priorities of debt service, Social Security, etc., and as of next month, you’ll only have $66 billion. As Commander-in-Chief, a most basic responsibility of yours is to provide for the national defense, so a significant fraction of that $66 billion must go to the Pentagon. How do you propose to spend what’s left, realizing that a majority of the House has to agree?
Of course, the very first thing that must be tossed overboard like Osama bin Laden’s corpse is ObamaCare. Next should be the EPA, the Departments of Education and Energy, and such abominations as ethanol subsidies.
This will start clearing the path for what will be the primary goal of my presidency. For “Getting the government out of the way” is only an intermediate goal, to jump-start our economy back to job creation and prosperity. My primary goal is Constitutional government.
Succinctly, the relationship between citizens and government created by our Founders is: citizens can do whatever they want unless it is legally prohibited, while the government cannot do anything unless it is legally permitted. (The Demagogues want it to be the other way around.)
Thus the purpose of the Constitution is to specify what the federal government is permitted to do. These permissions are called “enumerated powers.” This means that if there is not a specific enumerated power giving the government permission to do something – like those in Article I, Section 8 regarding coining money and maintaining a navy – the government can’t do it.
In other words, there is no enumerated power and thus no constitutional authority for the existence of a Department of Labor, Education, Energy, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Health & Human Services, Homeland Security, Interior, or Transportation. There is no authority for the existence of, e.g., the EPA or the Federal Reserve.
There is such constitutional authority for a Department of State, Defense, Justice, and Treasury.
I realize that the elimination of these unconstitutional agencies and departments will not be achieved overnight – Rome wasn’t torn down in a day. But this will be a clear goal my presidency will work steadily towards.
Constitutional government also helps provide a solution to our long-term debt liabilities, such as those in the tens of trillions regarding Social Security. We often hear the argument now that these unfunded liabilities make the federal government bankrupt, but this is not so.
Bankruptcy occurs when a company’s assets are overwhelmed by its liabilities. But it turns out that the federal government possesses assets which can pay those liabilities off.
The federal government claims ownership of some 650 million acres or 30% of all the land in the United States. Yet the Constitution allows (Article I, Section 8, clause 17) it to own land only for “the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings.”
Add to this the value of offshore mineral resources such as oil and gas of the federally-owned Continental Shelf. Scheduled sales of these assets could easily fund the now-unfunded liabilities of Social Security, as well as pay down our national debt.
As for the fantastic unfunded liabilities of Medicare/Medicaid, we must realize that health care in America is so expensive because of government interference in the medical marketplace. Once again, the solution is to Get The Government Out Of The Way.
I’ll be presenting a policy paper outlining ten steps needed to replace the Health Fascism that we have now with Health Freedom.[1]
In summary, besides eliminating any vestige of ObamaCare, we need to open enrollment in medical schools, reduce hospital administrative costs, eliminate state and regulatory barriers to low-cost health insurance, allow doctors to have waivers for malpractice, eliminate emergency room requirements to serve anyone and absorb the cost, repeal the Effectivity requirement for FDA drug approval, and in general work towards a true medical marketplace.
You know, the great irony of what I’m telling you today is that it provides Mr. Obama with the blueprint he needs to defeat me and win a second term going away. For if he implements my get-the-government-out-of-the-way plan, the economy will take off like a rocket ship and he’ll be in like Flynn by November 2012.
Yet I have no fear that he will do so. It’s not that he’s too stupid to. I don’t doubt that he’s quite bright – although there will always be wonder until he releases his college transcripts from Occidental, Harvard, and Columbia which he refuses to.
No, it’s because he is emotionally incapable of being pro-economic freedom, having a Communist as a childhood mentor (Frank Marshall Davis), attending a Hate America church for 20 years whose preacher prayed for God to damn America (Jeremiah Wright), for choosing Saul Alinsky radicalism as a profession (being a “community organizer”), for never having a private sector job or running even a corner store or gaining the tiniest understanding of business.
What he does understand is crony capitalism, of rent-seeking moocher capitalism, of taking bribes in the form of “campaign contributions” and doling out unconstitutional subsidies and government largesse in return. A perfect example are the billions he’s paid out for various “renewable energy” scams while he incessantly screws the one industry capable of providing us with dependable energy, namely the petroleum (oil and gas) industry.
Make no mistake. During my presidency, we will Drill, Baby, Drill! to provide Americans with low-cost abundant energy for an ever-more prosperous economy while liberating ourselves from foreign oil.
I can’t resist a word here about the greatest scientific fraud in human history: Warmism. Anyone who believes that human-produced carbon dioxide (a trace of a trace gas, about 1/10th of 1% of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere) is either a crook or an idiot.
Scientists who took bribes (government grants) to “prove” the crock of Warmism have disgraced themselves and the once-noble profession of science. When I’m president, trust me, they can kiss their grants goodbye – just like all crony capitalists can kiss their subsidies adios.
This is only a beginning sketch of how I plan to restore prosperity and freedom to America, but I’ve gone on too long already. I haven’t touched on how I plan to reinstate the 10th Amendment or lead a repeal of the 16th and 17th, but that’s for another day. Let me conclude with a warning to the Demagogues and a prayer for Republicans.
The warning is this: Your days of thieving are coming to an end. Mr. Obama infamously told “Joe the Plumber” his goal as president would be to “spread the wealth around.” Those are the words of a thief.
Mr. Obama: it’s not your money to “spread around” to your moocher cronies. Honest people think of how to earn money, and once it’s earned it’s theirs. Dishonest people think of how to steal money earned by others. Demagogues call it “redistribution,” which is just another word for “theft.”
So get the picture, Dems. No more thieving, no more borrowing – which is stealing from our children and grandchildren who have to pay it back. Finita la musica – the music is over.
My prayer is this: That my fellow Republicans will have the courage of their values. If you don’t have the courage to act in accordance with your values, you will abandon them. Psychologists well know that when someone has a conflict between his or her beliefs and behavior, their beliefs will change to excuse their behavior. Rarely is it the other way around.
Your values are individual freedom and personal responsibility, of earning what you receive in life, of taking pride in being an American, of standing up for America and its founding principles with no apology. I salute you for those values and pray you act on them without reservation.
My friends, as Ronald Reagan once said, you and I have a date with destiny. The nightmare of the Obama presidency will soon be over. America’s freedom and prosperity will be restored. I pledge you that, on my sacred honor.
May God bless the United States of America.
[1] Cf. Health Freedom Vs. Health Fascism, May 2009.