This pledge is meant to be followed up with explicit legislation addressing the problems and directions we see as necessary for America to return to sound fiscal policies, creation of worthwhile jobs for all citizens, providing for adequate defense of the nation, and correcting the drift away from our Constitutional government, while also halting or even reversing the trend to expand the power and roles of the Federal Government.
Finances
First, we must get our financial house in order, which must entail significant strategic planning to figure out just how to do three things: raise the GDP which will create both jobs and tax revenue, institute a payback plan for the national debt, and reduce government spending by a substantial amount across the board.
The immediate key to raising the GDP has a number of components, including rapidly exploiting our national resources, such as energy from oil, gas, coal, solar power, nuclear power, wind power, and perhaps biofuels. It is not just one source that is important, it is all possible sources, including some technologies, such as clean coal, and advanced nuclear power units, that need a jump start. We need to clear the way through the bureaucracy for immediate starts on such efforts, especially nuclear power, using environmentally sound methods. Our power distribution network needs considerable extension and improvement as well. The sooner we start or augment these efforts, the sooner we build up job demands in the energy and related businesses.
We need to emphasize scientific research, and engineering development in a number of areas that lead to jobs, profit and tax revenue. To mention some of the areas that require both private and government investments there are: weather research, pollution reduction, water desalinization, energy, both conventional and nuclear, medical research, space and aeronautical research, and military weapons research. There are inventions in these areas that may well become successful products that benefit man everywhere, if proper seed money can be supplied.
We need to encourage manufacturing efforts within the US, as opposed to shipping jobs overseas. Increased automation is one path to lower cost production. Jobs can abound if production plants crank up their businesses.
Our national infrastructure needs repair especially bridges and roads nationwide, water management projects, and the power grid also as was mentioned earlier. These projects are good job producers and add value to our lives.
We need to continue to support small businesses with loans, advice, and orders. A preference should be shown to use US businesses over foreign businesses. Some 70-80% of jobs lie in the small business sector. We must encourage small businesses to be more entrepreneurial.
Taxation
The second key is taxation. Given that we have arrived at the need for a certain payback amount on the national debt per year, that sum must be put aside and paid incrementally, every quarter, for instance, so that the temptation to rob the fund is reduced. We then must examine entitlements, since their budget percentage is increasing to over 60-70%, which is not sustainable. There are hard choices to be made here, and restructuring to be done on a graduated basis so that the impact of reductions is phased out over time, and the guarantees made in the past are not ignored. There are well over 50 different programs dev**ed to the support of the elderly, the disadvantaged, the ill, and the indigent. Surely combining these efforts would reduce administrative costs.
The defense program and its operating costs are yet another major element of spending. We need to find the right compromise here between maintaining a first-class military force and overspending on new weapons, maintenance of old weapons and keeping too many men in service all over the world. A first-class force requires significant research and development of new products, followed by test and production of adequate numbers of proven products to meet the future.
We must pay for adequate defense, and hence we must study and determine what is truly required in a non-political manner, and then provide for it in the budget and tax approaches. In the past, we have armed for war, then disarmed even more rapidly, only to find that a few years later we must arm again. It would be more cost-effective if we maintained a sufficient force ready to go that needed reasonable augmentation for war, but not the almost total rearmament that we faced before WWII, and the significant rearmament we needed for Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf wars. A policy of preparing for one big war and two small wars may be the right mixture. Obviously, this must be supported by continued research, development, test and evaluation of new capabilities and their production needs.
Taxation in the US has been a football for many years, with those who claim that reductions benefit the creation of jobs and boosts the economy, and providing greater revenue for the government, pitted against those who claim that the benefits are not real and the economic boosts that did occur were due to other factors. The direction we should take is to review every tax or quasi tax or tariff or duties or wh**ever that the federal government has in place for their need, then we need to assess their effectiveness, and the impact if that tax was eliminated altogether. This would most certainly include corporate taxes and personal income taxes.
Review of Government Organizations
Such a review would have to be done in conjunction with a second review of every government operation, agency, bureau, commission, board, and such, of which there are over 1177 now in existence. Elimination of duplications of missions and functions alone in high budget agencies would most likely have a great effect on the need for a number of budget line items, or at least their cost.
More significant payoffs would result from reducing or eliminating entire government organizations, such as the Education Department.
Such an effort would most likely upset many rice bowls, but that is the political cost of creating greater efficiency and lower costs of government, meaning less need for revenue and hopefully a smaller government footprint.
In the end, the question of redistribution of wealth versus a fair tax must be answered. The conservative answer is that everyone must become a stakeholder and support the government, and it is not the government’s task to do redistribution. Hence, a fair or flat tax is preferable, provided that it can be phased in to produce the revenue required. An objective review of tax approaches should be implemented to result in a recommendation of the best way forward for the nation.
Given that such reviews can be conducted in the space of a few years, with incremental useable products, and given that those that conduct the reviews can do so objectively and honestly, it would be reasonable to expect that a substantial payoff to the taxpayers could be realized as the recommendations are implemented incrementally over time.
Government Regulation
The entire approach to government regulation of all commerce should be examined to determine whether it is feasible and practical to create regulations and enforcement means sufficient to the need, yet without stifling the business world with excessive costs or reducing our dedication to free markets. Currently, small businesses are seriously encumbered with reporting requirements and their costs that may or may not be effective in reducing fraud and corruption, collusion and outright theft.
Constitutional Law
A significant theme of conservatives is return of the nation to constitutional government, as opposed to the extra-constitutional laws, decrees, regulations and opinions (or what have you?) laid down by the Congress, the Administration and the Supreme Court in recent years. This too, must be reviewed and carefully studied, for it has been claimed by some parties that practically every law passed since the FDR administration, or even the Wilson era, is in some manner outside of the purview of the Constitution. If so, we are continuing on the wrong track, trusting that our current desires and opinions outweigh those of the Founders in collective session, which may or may not be true.
Maintaining the charade of constitutional government, on the other hand, while wildly careening into uncharted legal waters, is sheer madness worthy of Wonderland.
Thus, phase one of this Pledge is to institute some fundamental studies and analyses, that result in concrete recommendations for implementation of cost savings and job creation that can be debated in Congress and presented to the nation for approval through their elected representatives, or by referendum of the citizens. It is expected that many of these recommendations, when implemented, would actually reverse much of the damage that the Biden/Obama Administrations have done to the government, the marketplace, industry, and citizens in favor of more fiscally sound and politically conservative policies.
Congressional Reforms
Congressional reforms are needed. To mention a few that have been placed on track to be legislated: 1) Term limits for Senators (2) and Congressmen (4); 2) Revision of House and Senate rules of operation, including fixing the rules for all time instead of allowing the next Congress to change them without legislating them; 3) Campaign financing reforms directed towards reducing the need for continual fund-raising; 4) Requiring that all amendments and riders to bills pertain explicitly to the substance of the bills, and not attaching entirely different legislation to bills; 5) Requiring that all bills contain a clear, plain-English statement of all of its provisions, thus avoiding the almost impenetrable language of the bills proper; 6) Reducing the plethora of committees, and eliminating as far as possible overlapping jurisdictions between the committees; 7) Eliminating the practice of passing bills that contain unfunded mandates for States to perform; 8) Requiring that the budget process and the appropriations process be consolidated; 9) Requiring all bills to be given sufficient time for them to be read not only by the legislators, but also by the citizens and the media, through publication of the plain text on the internet well before floor action, say, a minimum of two weeks; 10) Complete and full elimination of the practice of Earmarks; 11) Other practices where found to be out of line or questionable with respect to constitutional governance.
Immigration
Our porous borders must be closed to i*****l i*******ts as soon as practically possible, we must also be able to have law enforcement officers identify and arrest i*****l i*******ts wherever encountered in the nation, for subsequent deportation actions. Use of fully armed National Guard and Army units, together with other services as needed, and with an aggressive yet practical ROE, must be authorized as a stop-gap measure.
Proper identification must be carried by aliens in the US at all times; failure to do so may result in immediate deportation. A migrant worker program must be devised that ensures sponsorship responsibilities, proper identification of the migrants, and heavy fines for employers of i*****l i*******ts. The loose quota system currently in practice must be revised and extended, along with significantly augmented supervision of visa provisions.
Education
Despite massive sums being spent through the federal government on education programs, our students are not receiving the education they need. This function is best performed at the State level, and the dissolution of federal involvement would be a great benefit.
The education system is well-overloaded with non-teaching positions, ostensibly to ensure an effective learning experience for the students. This has failed. We need a return to proven methods of teaching, along with curricula that ensures students acquire the necessary knowledge to become effective citizens and productive workers. We need to make the student and the public aware of the forthcoming nature and impact of AI and automation. Book publishers need to be brought into line with American values.
The Global War on Terror (GWOT)
We have used this title for the worldwide conflict between the Western nations and the nations of Islam and their radical, fundamentalist Jihadists that have performed terrorist acts of unspeakable horror around the globe in the name of Allah, perhaps the greatest being their destruction of the Twin Towers in New York with the loss of over 3,000 lives.
We have refrained from labeling this war as The Global War on Islam (GWOI), sensing that might work in our disfavor within the Islamic world of 1.2 billion adherents. However, it is the Jihadists that we are fighting; there must be no mistaking this fact. Accordingly, we should label the war properly as The Global War on Jihadists (GWOJ) and be done with it! If moderate Muslims cannot recognize our right of self-defense against Jihadist acts, then they are making cause with the Jihadists, and are supporting Jihad. If moderate Muslims cannot fully support our nation against the Jihadists, then they are tacitly against the US, however pious they may seem.
There is no objective way to tell which camp a Muslim falls into, whether the Moderates, the Sympathizers, or the Jihadists, or whether a given moderate Muslim may decide to join up with Jihad later on. Thus, the only way to tell the bad Muslims is by their acts and their associations, which leaves us with either a reactive approach after the fact of some horror event or another, or a condemnation of all Muslims as either passive, potentially active, or active Jihadists, and act accordingly.
At the very least, we should be leery of massive immigration of Muslims into the nation, and we should have under deep surveillance those Muslim groups that we suspect of Jihadist leanings. We should also be leery of allowing Muslims to take sensitive government jobs, even if we do need Arabic and Farsi t***slators.
It should be noted that our First Amendment is not meant to be a suicide pact protecting those that would practice a religion such as Islam that is fully dedicated to the o*******w of our nation.
Further suggestions welcome.
LostAggie66 wrote:
An Interesting post Manning. Do you think however will the MAGA Majority adopt this as a Platform in 2024. I noticed it did not mention any plans to reducing the impact of the L***Q community in the Military and possibly in other areas. I believe it is the desire of many on the right to do this. Secondly, May I ask what you mean by book publishers need to abide by American values? Is this just in reference to education? I am in agreement with the ideas put forth in Congressional reforms. I am in favor of term limits. I also like the idea of permanent ID for migrant workers and I have always supported ID needed on e******n day. The financial and taxation proposals I need to study more carefully as I am not sure what they all mean. I personally favor a flat tax but the proposed rate of 27% across the board seems to myself a little too high but I could be wrong. I am concerned just how strong will the executive become if Mr Trump or another of the GOP candidates are elected. Overall this appears to be a fair and equal pledge plan. I would hope however that in the next admin whoever it may be that more co-operation from all parties is able to occur.
An Interesting post Manning. Do you think however ... (
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Thanks for your measured comment!
On the L***QXXX question, I didn't call anything out, since they are simply citizens and should be treated as such. It seems to me that the publishing industry has followed closely the l*****t desires for inclusion or exclusion of topics in textbooks. This trend includes serving up information that has been disproved fully by the left and right, notably when the subject is evolution. Then, if in that instance, there must be more violations of the t***h by omission or inclusion that need correction.
Grover Norquist has been the leader in championing flat taxes, and as I recall, he too found the single rate to be excessive. He went to all sorts of maneuvers to allow a single rate while reimbursing lower income people in some scheme or other. I am in favor of a three-rate system based on income, with some strategic deductions available at the lowest rate, but not at the higher rates. Everyone pays something, but low-income people need help. However, I am not a tax expert, I just resent the whole scheme of things we have now for all the obvious reasons, and I believe some form of flat tax would be far more efficient. One problem is, if they accept a flat tax, they must end fully any notion of also running another version of the income tax in parallel, or a VAT either. Then too, the citizens must not face any other taxation whatsoever! Glory! Glory!
This pledge is strictly mine, and any resemblance to what may appear from a GOP caucus is purely accidental. But, the closer the GOP version is to mine, the happier I will be!
I did not include a number of topics that I believe need to be handled, but the how and who escapes me for the moment. WOKE is one. PC is another. CRT is a third. G****r language, other than man and woman, is a fourth. Any form of child molestation is yet another, including promotion of t*********r efforts among school children. Banning parents from supervising their children's education is still another.
Going further, what is the answer to the idea of the "Deep State", and what should be done about it? Do we have an elite class, a wealthy class, that is organized and supporting such legal changes that benefit them...to our detriment? And there is more...do we really have a generation that is saturated in the false lore and lure of socialism and c*******m, and if so, what must we do about it?
Are there wealthy men in country that are lavishing money around to various causes that are contrary to our way of life and Constitution? What should be done about it if so?