[COLUMN] Time to resurrect Reaganomics

A peculiar thing is occurring in the shadows of our economic disaster. More and more people are talking about President Ronald Reagan as they look for answers to solve today’s fiscal problems.

Liberals are trying to rewrite history by portraying Reagan as a big government Republican who raised taxes and would support President Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes to offset his irresponsible and reckless spending.

Hogwash.

Reagan cut taxes, reduced government growth, deregulated many industries and created the largest economic expansion in U.S. history that only ended thanks to the reckless spending of President Bill Clinton, who should have reaped huge government surpluses thanks to Reaganomics and a plan known as PAYGO, instituted by President George H.W. Bush.

PAYGO enforces economic restraint by requiring new spending or tax changes to be budget neutral or offset with savings derived from existing funds. It worked well under the Bush administration. However, Clinton began looking for loopholes and ended up spending any surplus we could have had.

The Clinton surplus myth is perpetuated even today. In his last year in office, he borrowed $18 billion. Why would he borrow money if we had a surplus? Only in Washington can government borrow money and claim it had a surplus.

But I digress.

To pull us out of the current mess, we need to look at the Reagan playbook instead of Obama’s misguided belief in the economic model created by John Maynard Keynes, which is basically a fantasy that government can somehow spend its way to prosperity.

The Reagan model had four common-sense elements and he delivered on all four, which led to the long economic expansion.

First, we need to reduce government growth.

Most years of the Reagan administration saw the growth of federal spending below 3 percent, well below inflation. In 1987, government spending actually decreased by 1.4 percent from 1986. Reagan lowered the federal deficit from 6 percent of gross domestic product in 1983 to 2.9 percent in his final budget. So much for liberal attempts to label Reagan as a big spender.

Before Obama took office, our budget deficits were routinely around $100 billion to $400 billion. Under Obama, we’ve had nothing but trillion-dollar deficits as he expanded federal spending and it appears we will for at least the next decade if we don’t curb that spending.

The second leg of Reaganomics is to reduce income taxes.

Reagan reduced the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. In the 11 instances when Reagan did raise taxes, it was mostly simplifying the tax code and eliminating tax bias and pointless deductions. Our current code could use some flattening and simplifying but the government does not need more money.

We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem. The list of dubious government expenditures is long and storied. 

Anyone with any sense of fiscal responsibility knows that raising taxes while the federal government spends $2.6 million to teach Chinese prostitutes how to drink more responsibly on the job or spends money on a university study examining how much alcohol college freshmen women require before agreeing to casual sex is a ridiculous idea.

As Reagan said: “We do not face large deficits because Americans aren’t taxed enough. We face those deficits because the Congress still spends too much.”

The third leg of Reaganomics is to reduce government regulation.

The government does nothing as efficient as the free market. For example, the Postal Service was paying about a million dollars a week to employees to do nothing, thanks to union contracts. And Obama wants that same government mentality running our health system.

The final leg of Reaganomics is to control the money supply to control inflation. 

In other words, stop printing money to compensate for the government’s reckless spending policies.

Sane people, when given the choice between doing something that has worked in the past or doing something that has failed in the past, usually take the successful route.

If we are looking for a model of fiscal responsibility to salvage what is left of our economy ruined by the Keynesian economic nightmare wrought by Obama and his Democratic puppets in the Congress, it was laid down 30 years ago by Reagan.

[COLUMN] America is declining before our very eyes

Three things that caught my attention this past week have me weeping for the future of American freedom.

The first was a June Gallup poll that showed that about half of Americans believe the proper role of government is to take money from those who earned it and give it to those who didn’t.

It is astounding that so many Americans think the government should enact heavy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth, which is patently un-American. Less surprising is that 71 percent of Democrats think that way. I suspect the other 29 percent were Florida voters who didn’t understand the question. Also not surprising is that 64 percent of nonwhites believe in wealth redistribution compared to just 41 percent of whites.

Another disturbing figure from Gallop’s 2011 Economics and Finance poll is that 31 percent of Americans say there are too many rich people in the country. Nearly half of Democrats say that.

In addition to showing how large the green-eyed monster has become in this country, it shows the ignorance people have of how the economy works and how government is funded.

In a free society, one based on capitalism and the free-market system, the number of wealthy citizens is a sign of a healthy economy.

Unless you are living off government entitlement programs, your paycheck is likely coming from a wealthy person, a company owned by a wealthy person, or a corporation owned by wealthy people.

And, as the IRS tells us, if you are living on government entitlement programs, that money also comes from the wealthy.

The top 1 percent of wage earners in this country earn somewhere between 21.4 percent and 23.5 percent of the income but pay about 40 percent of federal income taxes.

The top 1 percent actually pay more in federal income tax than the bottom 95 percent. In fact, 51 percent of wage earners in this country pay no federal income tax.

The second item was a July Marist poll showing that only 58 percent of residents know the United States declared its independence in 1776. Fifty-eight percent! Even more troublesome is that only 31 percent of adults younger than 30 knew that 1776 was the year in which the United States broke away from Great Britain.

[COLUMN] America, the land of the free — hardly

It’s been 235 years since some of the greatest thinkers ever on our continent gathered in the small town of Philadelphia. Amid the backdrop of an oppressive government and a year-old insurrection, they debated the lofty ideals of a free society, one absent the absolute power of a monarch.

How times have changed:

Go to an airport and be groped by a government thug from the Transportation Security Administration. The Patriot Act. Warrantless wiretaps. No-knock, predawn government raids by thugs with machine guns and wearing black balaclavas. Popular referendums to enact freedom-restricting laws such as smoking in private places, restricting gambling, blocking same-sex marriages, etc. Confiscatory tax codes.

I could go on and on and on.

We Americans, as a whole, clearly are not as free as we once were.

I have no misconceptions about the freedoms of the founding era. While the freedoms then, in many respects, were wider, the number of Americans to whom they applied was by magnitudes smaller.

Today, however, we are all in the same sinking ship of liberty.

Sure, we like to say — and most of us probably believe — that we are free. And to some extent, that is correct. Every society, in fact, has some level of freedom.

But here in the so-called land of the free we are missing real freedom, the kind of freedom our Founders fought a bloody revolution to win.

Today, 235 years after those brave men told King George III where to go, those same great thinkers would weep in disgust at what our country has become.

[COLUMN] The growing tyranny of ballot initiatives

During the summer of 1787, 55 men representing 12 of the 13 states gathered in Philadelphia for four months to address problems concerning the confederate government that had been in place since the young nation’s founding.

Of course, as we all know, the men went beyond their mandate and created the Constitution, the framework of a new government, this time a federal system structured as a representative republic.

The Framers categorically rejected the idea of a direct democracy and for good reason.

"It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government," Alexander Hamilton wrote. "Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny."

Or, if you prefer a less-scholarly but more succinct assessment of direct democracy, we have Winston Churchill: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

Yet, today, many states continue to move closer to plebiscitary rule through the use of referendums bypassing the built-in protections of a republican form of government. However, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny.

This movement has become noticeable this year as Republicans in more than a dozen states and are trying to push through common-sense legislation to restrict the ability of government unions to bankrupt the people.

In Wisconsin, the unions have organized a recall movement to oust some politicians, mostly because Wisconsin wisely does not permit lawmaking by referendum.

Here in Ohio, however, the unions will this week turn in petitions to put a referendum on the ballot to overturn the state’s new law curtailing the ability of government unions to hold Ohioans hostage through the collective bargaining process.

[COLUMN] Obama thumbs nose at rule of law

We all know President Barack Obama has no regard for the U.S. Constitution. His latest hypocritical thumbing of the nose at our charter document brings that point home succinctly.

Obama is making the ludicrous claim that he does not have to comply with the War Powers Act in Libya because American forces are not engaged in hostilities.

Seriously.

Killing thousands of Libyans and dropping bombs all over the country, including on the home of the nation’s leader, is not, in Obama’s world, hostilities.

The U.S. Constitution limits the power of the president to wage war by requiring the president to seek permission from the Congress.

Specifically, Article I, Section 8 reads: “The Congress shall have Power ... To declare War,” which, if given a strict, i.e., proper, reading, means the United States cannot go to war without a specific declaration of war from the Congress. The least strict reading would still require congressional approval to wage war, such as a statute authorizing the use of force, similar to what we have for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Constitution does not prevent the United States from defending itself if attacked absent such a declaration, provided approval is sought in a timely manner.

In fact, the Framers changed the wording in the Constitution from the proposed “make” war to “declare” war exactly to give the president the power to repel attacks without waiting for congressional approval. However, the Framers specifically rejected the idea of giving the president the power to conduct offensive military action without congressional approval.

The War Powers Act of 1973 was meant to codify that.

It permits the president to engage in hostilities for 60 days without congressional authorization with 30 more days allotted for withdrawal of forces. Further, that use of force by the president has to be for “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

Something Obama knows, as he said in December 2007: “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Clearly, then, the war in Libya was unconstitutional from the get-go as there was no national emergency or attack on U.S. interests. 

Still, one would expect the president would at least try to comply with law even as he ignores the Constitution.

Not this president.

[COLUMN] Freedom must include right to die

Who owns your body?

Judging from our nation’s body of law, the ruling class wrongly believes the government does.

However, you own your body and, with that ownership, you have a God-given natural right to do what you will with it, even if that means ending your life.

That is the lesson we should take from the life of Dr. Jacob “Jack” Kevorkian, who died June 3 at the age of 83. As he once said, “Dying is not a crime.”

Throughout the 1990s, Kevorkian advocated the right of the terminally ill to end their lives in a safe and painless manner. By his own admission, he helped more than 130 people take their own lives and eventually spent more than eight years in prison on a murder charge.

Yet, little has changed since Kevorkian was actively pushing for right-to-die legislation.

Today, only three states allow the terminally ill to humanely end their lives, Oregon, Washington and Montana. 

In California, the FBI is harassing 91-year-old Sharlotte Hydorn, who is selling mail-order do-it-yourself suicide kits. Apparently the federal government has nothing better to do than harass a nonagenarian for selling stuff anyone can buy at a hardware store.

Hydorn is not the only one, however. There are numerous websites selling materials and information on how to take your life. Lawmakers, including those in the U.S. Congress, are struggling now to determine what it means to assist.

That question would be moot, however, if they accepted the fact that people have a right to die with dignity.

It is inhumane for government to prevent terminally ill patients from safely and humanely ending their lives and forcing them to die lingering, painful deaths. We do not even force that fate on animals.

[COLUMN] Government salaries reach obscene levels

Anyone who claims government employees need unions clearly is unaware of how well federal workers, who do not have collective bargaining rights, are paid.

A new report by the Congressional Research Service reported that 77,057 federal workers earned more than their state’s chief executive in 2009. To make matters worse, the report, requested by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., does not even include federal employees at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Postal Service and other agencies. It also excludes the judicial branch and all legislative agencies except the Government Printing Office and a few select commissions.

If those agencies were included, the figure would likely skyrocket. For example, Ohio’s governor is the 14th highest-paid governor in the country. Yet, there are at least two postal workers in the state earning more than he does. In fact, 33 postal workers in the state of Ohio earned more than $100,000 last year. Overall, there are 1,740 federal employees working in Ohio who earn more than the governor’s annual salary of $144,269.

The average salary earned by U.S. governors is $128,735. Governors’ salaries range from $70,000 a year in Maine to $212,179 in California. Colorado (10,875) and Maryland (7,283) had the most federal workers outpace its governor, while Delaware, with just 37, had the fewest.

Now, some of these numbers are understandable. For example, the most common occupation for an employee who earned more than the governor of the state in which he or she worked was medical officer; 18,351 medical officers earned more than the governor of the state in which they worked.

However, medical officers only account for 23.8 percent of the 77,057 employees.

The report found one federal interior designer and more than a dozen recreation planners who made more than their respective governors, as well as more than 5,000 air traffic controllers and roughly 4,300 attorneys. Additionally, there were 122 park rangers, 271 environmental protection specialists, 14 chaplains, one prison guard, 21 archaeologists, three sociologists, 48 social workers, four food-service workers, five civil rights analysts, and 22 librarians who made more than their governors.

[COLUMN] Religion fails when it ignores reality

One would have to travel far and wide to find a more staunch proponent of the First Amendment than yours truly. I believe all speech deserves the utmost protection.

Still, with great freedom comes great responsibility.

Enter Harold E. Camping, the 89-year-old nut job who also is a radio personality at Family Radio, a religious radio station.

Camping is notorious for his failed end-of-the-world predictions. His claim that the rapture was going to occur May 21 and God would destroy the world come Oct. 21 received extensive media coverage.

When the rapture failed to materialize, Camping said God had made a spiritual judgment on that date and that he would still destroy the universe Oct. 21.

Unfortunately, the damage is done. I have read and heard stories of people quitting their jobs and spending their retirement money to help Camping advertise his silly “revelation.” Of course, Camping said he has no intention of giving any of the money back.

I, however, have no sympathy for those people. Stupidity has consequences. The fact that Camping also predicted the judgment would occur on May 21, 1988, and Sept. 7, 1994, should have clued these people in to the fact that Camping is just another religious nut who thinks he can discern the plans of the Almighty by using stories in a book patched together with writings by more than 40 authors over the course of more than a millennium and which has been rewritten and retranslated countless times since.

Silly preacher, divine knowledge is for gods.

[COLUMN] Yellow Pages, food stamps, adult babies and the welfare state

Sometimes, the government makes it easy to be a libertarian and even easier to be a libertarian writer looking for ways to demonstrate the folly of big government.

In recent days three events struck me as being especially ridiculous.

First, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday decided city residents no longer needed to let their fingers do the walking and all but banned the Yellow Pages, requiring those who want the book to specifically ask for it.

It also requires the city to create a public outreach program to educate San Francisco residents and businesses about alternatives to the Yellow Pages.

While not an outright ban, city supervisors know most will not bother to call and request a Yellow Pages. Advertisers know this as well and will opt to spend their advertising dollars elsewhere, in essence killing the Yellow Pages business.

This really is a matter for the market. Those who don't want the Yellow Pages can already opt out. Besides, as the Internet and smartphones become ever more present, the Yellow Pages will go the way of the dodo, but will do so the way most industries die, slow and orderly.

But what can you expect from the city that banned plastic grocery bags and restaurant kids meals.

The next story is about a guy who gives even government freeloaders a bad name.

[COLUMN] Government, Fed to blame for high gas prices

I do a lot of driving. I probably fill my gas tank up three or four times a week. So, needless to say, I feel the pain when gas prices soar.

Unfortunately, President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress want to make things worse, as they are wont to do when it comes to all things economic.

Obama has decided, wrongheadedly of course, that the evil oil companies are the problem.

He told a crowd in Nevada recently that price-gouging by oil companies is the cause of the high gas prices: “The attorney general’s putting together a team whose job it will be to root out any cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices — and that includes the role of traders and speculators. We are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain.”

There needs to be an investigation, all right, but of the government and its complicity in our high gas prices.

There is no mystery, usually, as to why gas prices soar. In 2008, it was mostly a supply-and-demand issue.

Today, the root cause of this spike in gas prices is wholly at the hands of the government.