The Republican Agenda 2010 (AndrewPrice Version)

For some time now, I’ve said the Republicans need to come up with an agenda. History has shown that a party that wins an election without an agenda usually achieves nothing except being tossed out of office again. The reasons for this are simple. Without an agenda, there are no common goals to hold your party together and there is nothing to set the public’s expectation of what you will do. The latter is particularly dangerous because silence allows the creation of conflicting expectations, which guarantees disappointment. So what should the Republican agenda be?

An announced agenda should be short and easy to understand, and it should consist of concrete policy ideas. It should include only things that will generate both broad public support and intense public interest. It should not be all inclusive, nor should it be littered with esoteric concepts or ideas that appeal only to the base. Those are best dealt with in a larger platform or direct contact.

Here is my take on the best agenda for November 2010:

1. The Fiscal Responsibility Act: As I explained before, and as Admiral Mullen of the Joint Chiefs recently agreed, our deficit has become a national security threat. We must get this under control immediately. To that end, I propose the following spending cuts:

• Cancel The TARP: We should not be using tax money to enrich banks, nor should we allow this pool of money to become a slush fund as the Democrats are trying to use it. At last count, $364 billion remains outstanding.

• Cancel The “Stimulus”: The “stimulus” was classic throwing good money after bad. Much of this can still be avoided.

• Cut Federal Employment & Salaries: During the last decade federal pay far outstripped private pay. We need to force the government to do what the private sector does in recessions: cut 10% of the civilian workforce and cut pay 10% across the board. For political reasons, I would limit the pay cuts to anyone making more than $25,000 a year.

• Non-Defense Discretionary Spending Cut: A 10% cut in spending across the board would be significant yet would not even reduce the budget to the levels it was at under free-spending George Bush -- making this something the government can do with little problem.

There are other cuts I would add, but these should be the “highlight points.” We should be able to reduce Obama’s $1.6 trillion deficit to $500 billion in the first year without even touching entitlements or defense spending, though I would touch both. . . just not in the agenda. For example, to save Social Security, we need to raise the retirement age to 70 and I would offer people a reduced “buy-in” if they want to get Social Security earlier (something like a 10% permanent reduction for every year earlier they want to start receiving it). Click here for additional details on the spending cuts above.


2. The Economic Recovery and Revitalization Act: America needs a genuine, long-term stimulus. Years of creeping regulation and taxes have hurt our economy, and now government spending is threatening to wipe it out. And everything both parties have offered for “stimulus” is an economic joke. I propose the following instead:

• Cut Payroll Taxes Across the Board by 2%: As I explained before, such a cut makes working more valuable for workers and it makes employees cheaper for employers, all of which leads to an increased desire to work and an increased demand for workers. By expanding the desire to produce more “work,” we actually stimulate the economy to achieve more, as compared to stimulus spending which merely shifts demand from the future.

• Eliminate Payroll Taxes on the Elderly and Teens: The idea here is to encourage older workers to work longer, to encourage younger workers to start working (and develop beneficial habits), and to encourage employers to bring these people into the workforce. Making non-productive “assets” (e.g. the retired and the young) productive is another way to permanently stimulate the economy. In fact, this is the basis of the various “Asian miracles” -- non-productive peasants and women being brought into the labor force.

• Cut The Capital Gains Tax On Asset Sales: As explained previously, cutting the capital gains tax encourages companies to buy new equipment quicker. This increases demand and makes companies more productive. It also gets older equipment into the used market quicker, helping smaller companies. To counter the idea that this is about stock sales, I would propose limiting this capital gains tax cut to the sale of capital equipment (or eliminating the capital gains on the recapture of depreciation). This would allow the Republicans to paint the Democrats as opposed to workers if they opposed it.

• Reduce the Top Income Bracket: It’s time to flatten the tax bracket. First, I would cut the top bracket by 2% and schedule it for further 2% cuts every two years until it hits 20%. Secondly, I would raise the lowest bracket at the same time until it reaches 20% as well. The idea is to flatten the tax code and to make sure that most Americans pay some tax, I’ve explained the reason for this before. To prevent the charge that this is anti-poor, I would include a $2,500 a year credit, which would NOT be indexed to inflation, meaning its value would fall over the next 10-15 years.

• Energy Independence: Last year, the United States bought $470 billion in imported oil -- about half came from countries that don’t like us. If we opened more land for drilling and invested in the conversion from an oil-based economy to a natural gas-based economy, about half that $470 billion would be spent in places like Arkansas, California and the Dakotas instead of Saudi Arabia. At a minimum, this would add $235 billion flowing through the American economy each year. Additionally, the new supply and competition from gas would drive down the price of oil, which would make food, goods and everything cheaper. Finally, switching to natural gas would dramatically reduce the amount of carbon put into the air. . . if you believe in global warming.

3. The Genuine Health Care Reform Act: The United States health care system is broken. It costs too much and achieves too little, its costs are out of control, not enough people have access to regular care, and it suffers from poor quality control. ObamaCare only makes this worse. Republicans should be pushing CommentaramaCare. But they won’t. So at the very least, they should be promising:

• Repealing and replacing ObamaCare.

• Fully funding Medicare.

• Granting federal licenses to doctors to allow them to work anywhere in the country.

• Opening the insurance market to interstate competition.

• Encouraging a switch to out-of-pocket payment, supplemented by catastrophic care insurance.

• Opening the medical market to new forms of competition by allowing providers to organize freely, just as any other company can, and by allowing them to introduce new pricing models.

• Requiring medical providers to make pricing available prior to treatment.

• Malpractice reform, and improving doctor training and supervision.

4. The Clean and Accountable Government Act: Corruption and abuse of power have become endemic. It’s time to change that:

• TARP/Stimulus Audits: It’s time to bring in independent auditors to examine the TARP, the TALP, and the Stimulus, to determine exactly where the money went, how it was spent, and whether we have been paid back in full.

• Require independent audits of Congress with full release of the results.

• A Perk-Free Congress: It’s time to end the perks that Congress gives itself. No more private planes, no taxpayer-funded alcohol, junkets, parties, vacations, office decorations, etc. There should also be an anti-nepotism act to prevent Congress members from hiring their own family members.

• Tighten the rules on lobbyists to stop the revolving door between big business and government.

• Campaign Finance Reform: It violates the First Amendment to tell people how they can spend their money to support campaigns, but we can (and should) require full disclosure of donations. In particular, we should require corporations to disclose their donations to their shareholders, and unions to disclose their donations to their members. We should also require unions to allow their members to “opt-out” of contributing to the union’s political funds, with a private right of action to enforce this, i.e. civil suits by members.

• Eliminate All Federal Czars: These are unconstitutional, unaccountable positions that are making informal laws that apply only to certain people. This is unacceptable in a democracy.

5. Immigration Reform: Finally, we have immigration reform. This requires its own separate post, but generally the Republicans should stick with the following principles:

• Protecting the border.

• Creating a system that lets employers verify if a prospective employee is legally in the country, and punishing employers who hire illegal aliens.

• Ensuring that guest workers can still be brought in where labor shortages exist.

• Refusing to create “a path to citizenship” for people who are here illegally.

• Taking the burden off of states.

As I said before, there are many other things I would want the Republicans to do, but they should not be included in a published agenda. For example, I would look at regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and I would redo the Dodd-Frank financial regulation. But trying to sell this to the public would put people to sleep.

You may also notice an absence of social policy and foreign policy. The reasons for this are simple. Right now, the public is focused almost entirely on issues of economic policy, corruption and abuse of power. Highlighting social issues at this point would not be wise. Similarly, foreign policy is omitted because it doesn’t excite the public and because it remains the zone of control of the President. This is not to say that these issues shouldn’t be addressed, but I would not include them in a public agenda.


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Republicans: It’s Not Hip To Be Square

Let’s continue our rebuilding the Republican Party series by answering a question asked by Scott. What can Republicans do to attract young, middle of the road, independent types. On the one hand, this a good question. On the other, this presents a bit of a false dilemma. Let’s explain why that’s the case first, then we’ll talk about how to make the party a little more hip.

Why The Youth Don’t Matter

The children are the future. . . yeah, but they don’t vote. It’s an undeniable fact that the youth don’t vote in nearly the numbers that older people do. Why does this matter? Because not all votes are created equal.

Politics is about getting enough votes to get your agenda into place. If a particular group isn’t large enough, like six-fingered soccer uncles, or they don’t vote in large enough numbers to help you, then there is no reason to risk losing other supporters just to attract that group. Because the youth don’t vote, there is little reason to pursue them. In other words, it would be unwise for Republicans to risk alienating their other constituents just to pick up additional youth voters.

But if we ignore them, won’t the youth turn into older liberal voters? No, not really. It is the nature of youth to be leftist, but it is the nature of aging to make them conservative. That’s why Francois Guizot once astutely said, “Not to be a [liberal] at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.” (A quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill.)

Here’s why this is true. Youth knows nothing of the real world and it lives in an affirming cocoon of friends, teachers and family. Moreover, it knows so little about the world and humanity, that it doesn’t even have a sense of how little it truly knows. That gives it a tremendous sense of certainty and idealism because it sounds so simple to solve the world’s problems when you don’t understand how complex they truly are. Idealism goes hand in hand with a sense of activity. . . a desire to change the world -- letting the world change itself is, in fact, anathema to idealism. Thus, youth is a sucker for utopian leftist thinking.

This means that it will be inherently difficult, if not impossible, for conservatives to make many in-roads with young voters, and the risk likely outweigh the rewards

But as people age, experience changes them. Youth soon learns that the world is not as black and white as it once seemed, that problems are more complex than it imagined, that people have different values, and that there are genuine disagreements. This slowly erodes the sense of certainty, and with it the messianic zeal to remake the world. Soon youth gets a job and learns the value of labor, and the value of property, and it starts to wonder why the government has the right to take its labor and give it to people who won’t help themselves, the very people it once saw as victims. Finally, youth builds a family. Suddenly, it learns the value of an ordered and safe society, and of the moral values it once disdained. But even more importantly, being responsible for others teaches youth to think in the long-term. Long term thinking leads to conservative principles and a conservative world view.

Each of these changes robs youth of its liberalism and pushes it down the road to conservatism. In other words, time and experience will make the young into conservatives (unless something interferes with this). Consequently, the whole “attract the youth” issue is a bit of a canard.

How To Get Hip: Clean Up The Image

That said, it is always worth trying to improve our image across the board. In this regard, the right (and the Republican Party in particular) has been its own worst enemy in recent years. Conservatism, in general, once stood for competent leadership, fiscal sanity, smaller government, a strong national defense, and support for civic organizations, i.e. organizations that glued society together, like churches and the Boy Scouts.

But conservatism became unbalanced, focusing almost to an exclusion on wedge social issues like abortions and gays. It became knee-jerk and intolerant. It became anti-culture, grumpy and nostalgic. Then it was beset by scandals as elected Republicans, unelected spokespeople and many who simply claimed to speak for conservatives immersed themselves in corrupt, criminal, immoral and unethical adventures. Finally, Bush blew a hole in the idea of competent leadership, of fiscal sanity, of smaller government and less interference. Now, some are trying to add an ugly strain of populism that has more to do with paranoia and 1930s leftism than anything seen before on the right.

So the first step in any conservative/Republican strategy needs to be to clean this up. Return to fiscal sanity. Support only competent leaders with a proven track record. Drop the corrupt, the crooked and the hypocritical. And most importantly, divorce the party from the interest groups.

Secondly, the party’s thinkers and pundits need to return to rational argument and abandon the knee-jerkism, the nasty simplistic bomb throwing, the paranoia, the professed hopelessness, and the self-righteousness that has become the hallmark of so many conservatives “thinkers.” Smug kills. And even more importantly, stop defining conservatism by claiming it stands against everything liberals want. No intellectual movement worth surviving can define itself as "not them." Start looking at the world as a conservative, not as an unliberal.

Those two steps alone would go a long way to cleaning up the party’s image across the board, including with the young. And, indeed, if we don't take these steps, little else will matter.

How To Get Hip: Targeting The Youth

With regard to specifically reaching the young, the Republican Party/conservatives need to first drop the sham marketing ideas like putting up a tent at CPAC for videogames. Young people see right through clichéd marketing gimmicks. What the party really needs to do is to change the attitude it projects.

First, stop sending out spokesmen who are (1) grumpy, (2) judgmental, (3) out of touch with the culture, (4) suffer from nostalgia, and (5) incapable of enunciating conservative ideas in ways that real people understand. Clever counts. That’s why people like Bugs Bunny, not Elmer Fudd.

Moreover, intentional or not, the right always seems to choose middle age/old white dudes as its spokesmen, except when its intentionally trying “outreach.” This plays into the caricature image of the party as the angry-white-male party, and it makes the outreach look like pandering. It’s time to make an effort to promote more competent women and minorities -- and I don’t mean affirmative action. They’re already out there. What I’m talking about is to stop automatically sending the old white dude to represent the movement at all events and to stop treating minorities like special occasion props.

And when you reach out to the youth of today, send young Republicans who actually have a foot in the culture. Stop sending the pale-white, home schooled kids in the suits and ties who quote Cicero like it’s cool, but have never seen a television and look intensely nervous sitting next to the minorities. You've seen these kids thrust into the light as "youth spokesmen" at conventions and on Fox News. They may be bright, but no one believes they represent youth.

Further, youth worships celebrity, as do many others. We do have celebrities, even if most aren’t in Hollywood. We should be recruiting athletes and country music singers en mass. The rest will follow.

Fifth, find a way to get involved with the youth. They are looking for something to do to let them make the world better. Offer it to them. Recreate community programs where kids help pick up litter, build homes for charity, clean up parks, participate in sports leagues. Sponsor music festivals and athletic camps -- which are a big thing now. Hip corporations do this, leftist groups do it, we should do it.

Sixth, kids love tech. Adopt it and use it. More importantly, learn to have fun with it, and stop whining when other conservatives have fun with it. If a conservative makes a rap song, let it be. . . don’t run out and condemn rap. If they poke a little fun at Obama, stop calling it undignified. Stop being uptight. And stop issuing Fatwa against everything in the culture you don’t like. Just accept that others do like it and change the channel. Why do a thousand conservatives need to whine about every stupid word that comes out of some actor's mouth? This only makes conservatives look hypersensitive. Have a little more faith that our beliefs can withstand the inane yammerings of Sean Penn without every conservative whipping out the cannons.

Finally, develop a sense of humor, and not one based just on taking cheap shots at the other side. That's the difference between the Onion, which mixes political and nonpolitical humor, and conservative imitation sites which do little more than sarcastic, angry anti-left humor. That's the difference between Bill Clinton, who seems like a fun guy to get a beer with, and Newt Gingrich who seems like a man who's never told a joke. Nobody likes uptight, grumpy, overly-critical as~holes, and we seem to be overstocked with them.

These are thing we can do to make the party more attractive to young independents without alienating the other people the party needs. Beyond this, it’s probably not worth trying much more.

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How Stimulating. . .

Let’s continue our rebuilding the Republican Party series by explaining how stimulus plans should be done. With GDP crashing, unemployment soaring, and a double dip recession knocking on the door, it’s time for the Republicans to suggest a plan to stimulate the economy. Not more spending, as Obama proposes, but a genuine stimulus plan. Here it is. . .

About a week ago, we explained why conventional stimulus plans never work, and why Obama’s was worse that most. We noted that most stimulus plans try to increase demand, either by getting consumers to spend more money or by having government spending replace falling consumer spending. But this is problematic.

Getting consumers to spend more simply shifts economic activity from the future to the present. This can stimulate the economy now, but it depresses the economy in the future. Government “stimulus spending” is even worse, because the money the government spends must first be taken from consumers. Thus, the government depresses the economy at the same time it tries to stimulate it. . . unless the government borrows the money, in which event it depresses the future.

Just thinking about this logically should be enough to give us pause. If stimulus spending really could increase the overall economic activity of a country, wouldn’t it make sense to start spending wildly and to keep spending until we were all rich. Yet, even the most wild-eyed proponents of stimulus spending don’t think that’s a good idea.

Moreover, by directing spending (e.g. cash for congressmen. . . er, clunkers), the government creates distortions in the market, where money is spent on projects that are less beneficial to society than those upon which the money would otherwise have been spent. This causes the economy to be less efficient and can lead to significant problems down the road (like housing bubbles).

The goal of a stimulus plan should be to encourage people to generate more wealth. More wealth means a greater capacity to spend without stealing from the future. Stimulus spending does not do that, it only shifts money around from savers to spenders or from the future to the present. So what would do this? Here are two proposals:

Proposal 1: Cut The Payroll Tax

Our first proposal is to cut the payroll tax. Why? Because that will encourage people to work more and it will encourage employers to hire more.

Human beings value leisure. It’s true. When the value of working exceeds the value of leisure, they will work. When it does not, they goof off. Want proof?

Ok, would you come work in the Commentarama file room on Sunday for one hour for free? Probably not. Why? Because you value your leisure time more than you value what you would get from working for us. . . a big old goose egg. But what if I offered a crisp fiver? Still nothing? Ok, what if I offered $500. Suddenly, you’re starting to think about it. Some of you will accept this, some won’t. If I offer $1,000, more of you will jump at the offer. At some point, each of you will jump. . . like lemmings. The point where you would jump is the value that you place on one hour of leisure.

To get you to work more, our stimulus plan needs to increase the value of working to the point that it exceeds the value you place on your leisure time. Fortunately, people don’t value all of their leisure hours at the same rate. Indeed, it takes a lot less to get someone to agree to work 41 hours instead of 40, than it does to get them to agree to work 70 hours instead of 40. So even minor changes to the value of work can get people wanting to work more.

The easiest way to increase the value of working is to cut the payroll tax. By decreasing the amount the government takes from your paycheck, the government makes each hour of work more profitable. This gives you an incentive to convert some of your leisure time into work time. As millions work more, they generate vast amounts of economic activity. They can then turn the extra money they earn into spending, i.e. stimulus, without the normal negative effects of stimulus spending because they generated that new wealth rather than merely shifting it from the future to the present. Basically, cutting the payroll tax encourages people to convert their leisure time into stuff.

But will the work they seek be available? Yes, especially if you cut the employer contribution as well. Cutting the payroll tax decreases the cost to the employer of employing you. Think about a company that employs 50 people at $20,000 per year each. That company has a payroll of one million dollars per year. A two percent reduction in the employer portion of the payroll tax results in cost savings to the company of $20,000 a year. That means the company can hand out more overtime, increase salaries, or hire one new employee without any increase in overall payroll costs.

This effect will be repeated across the economy as a whole (because all workers are affected by the payroll tax), leading to increased incomes and increased employment opportunities. And, best of all, nothing is stolen from the future to make this happen.

Interestingly, several European governments have experimented with this and found it to be highly effective in reducing unemployment. I have also see estimates that a 1% cut in payroll taxes would generate three million new jobs.

Proposal 2: Decrease The Capital Gains Tax

Wait, don’t hit that mouse button. I can explain this in a way that makes sense and that won’t have you trying to slice your wrists. Here’s why a capital gains tax rate cut will spur economic activity.

First, I’m not talking about stock sales when I say capital gains. What I’m talking about here are the gains that companies experience when they sell capital equipment, like bulldozers or computers. What gains you ask? Well, when you buy something like a bulldozer, each year you write off a portion of its value as depreciation. If you then sell it for more than the value at which it sits on your books, you have a gain. . . a capital gain.

If we reduce the capital gains tax, we will increase the incentive for companies to replace their capital equipment sooner. That means more jobs for the makers of the equipment, as more people are needed to make those computers or bulldozers.

With more companies trading up sooner, this also means that there will be more (better/newer) equipment available in the "used equipment" market. This will help smaller companies who can’t afford to buy new equipment. These companies can then replace their own bulldozers/computers and pass what they have into the used market quickly as well, which helps someone else down the line. This improves the efficiency of each of these companies, which usually means more money to expand.

The same effects will occur in any capital equipment market.

Interestingly, the Democrats hate this idea. This shows their inability to give up on class warfare. A capital gains cut generates jobs and stimulates the economy, there is little serious debate about that. BUT, it also benefits people with money, and that is intolerable to the left. They would rather that no one benefit, than run the risk that a rich person might benefit more than a poor person.

So far, the Republicans have been unable to explain to the public why the Democrats are wrong. Part of it lies in an inability to explain why this tax cut works. For example, it was obvious that McCain didn’t have a clue when the issue arose in the debates. But equally importantly, the Republicans usually focus on a generic capital gains cut, which includes the profits from the sale of stock. This allows the Democrats to paint this as a plan to let a thousand Scrooge McDucks sell their stock and use the gains to buy more gold for their money piles. To counter this, the Republicans should propose limiting the capital gains tax cut solely to the sale of capital equipment (or eliminating the capital gains on the recapture of depreciation). This would allow the Republicans to paint the Democrats as opposed to workers.

Conclusion

Cutting the payroll tax and the capital gains tax would truly stimulate the jobs market, would stimulate people to work more, and would result in overall increased economic activity. The effect from both would be immediate, so there’s no need to wait for the spending to kick in, and neither suffers from the problem of stealing from the future. With the economy in such a poor state today, and Obama out of answers, now is the time for the Republicans to put forward this plan.


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Conservatives: A Warning

This article is not an attack on conservatism. It is a warning.

Nor is this a suggestion that conservatives should moderate.

In fact, each of you knows that I’m solidly conservative in my views. I believe not only that conservative principles are the only political principles that will make the world a better place, but also that they are the only truly moral principles one can hold. Only conservatism respects the rights and dignity of man, while liberalism seeks to make us slaves of others’ charity. And while we occasionally make mistakes, it is usually more the result of poor execution or demagoguery from opportunists than it is the result of our principles.

Thus, take it in good faith when I warn you that conservatives are about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Good News

Obama is this generation’s Jimmy Carter. He is discrediting liberalism to an entire generation, and quickly demoralizing the left flank of his party. These should be good times for conservatives.

These should be good times for conservatives within the Republican Party as well. McCain the RINO King convinced everyone that we had to be moderate to succeed. His crushing defeat discredited the RINO cause. They still scream “moderation,” but no one is listening anymore. The RINO philosophy is dead and buried within the party. . . for now.

Indeed, while the Republicans are blowing the Democrats away in fund raising (with Blue Dogs having a particular problem), the RINOs are finding their easy support within the party vanishing. Remember McCaindidate Van Tran (Cal.)? He’s been out raised by another Republican Vietnamese challenger. Trey Grayson, a neocon who supported Clinton, is being blown out by Rand Paul (son of Ron Paul) in Kentucky. Even RINO Charlie Crist (Fla), another McCaindidate, who out raised his Democratic opponent 3-1, is suddenly facing a surging conservative Republican challenger in the primary who has raised more than one million dollars.

Now in New York 23, conservatives have forced the Democratic far left Republican to withdraw from the race so that an actual conservative can win the seat.

Sounds like good times for conservatives, right? Actually no. Conservatives are in danger of turning stunning victory into crashing defeat. Here’s why.

The Problem

Conservatives have the momentum. The Republican Party lies open, ready to be reshaped into the vehicle that brings the great rebirth of conservative America. But at the very moment conservatives should be streaming into the party, filling every empty chair, and seizing control of all levels of power, conservatives instead are throwing a tantrum. Rather than seizing the party, conservatives are talking vaguely of forming a new party. Rather than building and guiding the party, conservatives are destructively tearing it down. This must end lest we squander this victory.

Drop The Third Party Idea

Let’s start with something a lot of people don’t want to hear. Forget the idea of forming a conservative party. First, it can’t be done. Secondly, even if it could, it will only hurt conservatives.

The fact of the matter is that America is a two party system: Republicans and Democrats. Our electoral system and human nature mean that won’t change. A third party can briefly hurt one side or the other, but that’s about it. The only real power that a political movement can achieve is in using the threat of withholding its support to hurt one side or the other. If that threat is great enough, the movement can pull one party into the direction that the movement advocates.

Right now, conservatives have the attention (and fear) of the Republican Party. That is the path to conservative victory, to seize and shape the Republican Party. To fail to do this, because conservatives have utopian dreams of creating a new party, would irresponsibly squander our victory.

Moreover, let’s assume a conservative party of some size did appear. What do you think would be the effect on the country? Would the Republicans move to the right? No. Why should they? Everyone within the GOP who would advocate a turn to the right would have left. Would the Democrats move to the right? Hardly. With the right split in half, they’d be free to move as far left as they wished, knowing they no longer needed even the support of 50% of the population. Would the conservative party become the new majority party? No. If that were likely to happen, the Republican Party would represent 60% of the population today because they are closer to the right than the Democrats, but they don’t. If that were likely to happen, the Conservative Party in New York (where you can be a conservative without hurting the Republican Party because of fusion voting) could attract more than 155,000 registered members compared to 3.1 million Republicans.

Also, New York has had a Conservative Party since 1962, would you say that they have helped move New York politics to the right? Why should the result be different on a national level? And lest you think that New York is somehow just unique, keep in mind that the Libertarian Party has been a national party for decades, but hasn’t managed to move the Republicans or the Democrats one degree toward their cause.

The truth is that parties don’t listen to outsiders, and separating yourself from the inner workings of a party makes you an outsider. Outsiders are the people who refuse to join the committee that selects the location of a banquet and then wonders why they never choose their favorite restaurant. If you want the Republican Party to bend to your will, you must participate within its structures.

Stop Destructive Attacks

And that brings me to the second problem. Conservatives need to stop making destructive attacks on the GOP. Not only do you not want to damage the brand of something you are looking to own, but ill-informed, blanket attacks are not constructive. They do not help what we are trying to achieve.

Criticism that is not constructive is destructive. Criticism that overstates a problem, that falsely accuses, or that fails to give the accused an understanding of what you want changed, is not constructive. Conservatives right now are guilty of all of this. And since the Republican Party is the vehicle we must use, this must stop.

For starters, we need to stop making blanket attacks. Not all Republicans are bad and not everything they do is wrong. If you have a restaurant that you generally like, but you don’t like their hamburgers, does it make sense to categorically trash the restaurant? The same analogy holds for political parties.

People claim that the Republicans aren’t conservatives. But is this true? Do those people who complain know what the leadership believes? Do they even know who the leadership are? Did you know that the House leadership have all earned extremely high lifetime ratings from the American Conservative Union?

• House Minority Leader: John Boehner (ACU rating 93.89)

• Minority Whip: Eric Cantor (ACU rating 96.25)

• Republican Policy Committee Chairman: Thaddeus McCotter (ACU rating 84.5)

• Republican Policy Committee Vice-Chair: Dr. Michael Burgess (ACU 93.83)

The Senate leadership is less conservative, but still firmly conservative:

• Senate Minority Leader: Mitch McConnell (ACU rating 89.4)

• Minority Whip: John Kyl (ACU rating 96.96)

• Republican Conference Chairman: Lamar Alexander (ACU rating 80.83)

• Republican Conference Vice Chair: Lisa Murkowski (ACU rating 70.56)

• Republican Policy Committee Chairman: John Thune (ACU rating 86.77)

Compare these ratings to Olympia Snowe’s 47 rating and Susan Collins’ 49 rating, and Democrats in the teens. Do you still think it’s fair to say these aren’t conservatives?

Ok, you say, they may be conservatives, but they sure haven’t acted like it. Under Bush certainly, but let me point out what they’ve done since the election:

• Only eight House Republicans out of 178 voted for Cap and Trade.

• Only nine Senate Republicans out of 40 voted to confirm Sotomayor.

• Only one Republican in the Senate has voted for ObamaCare.

• No Republicans in the House voted for ObamaCare.

• No Republicans in the House voted to support Obama’s stimulus.

• No Republicans supported Obama’s budget in the House or the Senate.

• The Republicans in the Senate held up two of Obama’s State Department Appointments in protest over Honduras.

• And lastly, they announced last night that they will unveil, this week, their own health care plan. It’s not CommentaramaCare, but it’s not just handing out more money to insurance providers.

What part of that don’t you like? And if you don’t like it, what did you do to make it better?

When conservatives continue to whine that the leadership isn’t conservative and they haven’t acted like conservatives, you’ve unfairly failed to credit them with a fairly resurgent form of conservatism. You’ve also made it impossible for them to know how to please you because your feedback is nonsense.

And that’s a critical point. Conservatives must outline what they want from the party. Conservatism means different things to different people. Some see it as only a strong foreign policy. Some see it as purely an abortion issue. Some see it as a smaller government issue. Some see it about personal freedom, others about law and order. And these groups often disagree.

Thus, when you complain: “I want conservatism,” that doesn’t help because the term is largely ambiguous. In other words, if you want your criticism to mean anything, i.e. to be constructive, you need to go further and tell us exactly what conservative policies you want. Just demanding “conservatism” is like taking hostages and then demanding “stuff."

Look beyond the buzzwords and be wary of politicians who wrap themselves in them, and hide behind their ambiguity. Look at people's real records, not just their words (FYI, after the new year, we're going to start looking at the records of possible presidential candidates). Ask yourself, what does "traditional values" mean, what does "conservative" mean, what does "smaller government" mean?

In Conclusion

Conservatives stand on the crest of a dramatic victory. But to complete that victory, they need to recognize it for what it is (it is victory over the Republican Party, not the birth of a new party). They must act accordingly by seizing the Republican Party at all levels. . . participate. They must stop tearing down the party, they must build it up. And they must focus their criticism: aim it at the people and policies that deserve it, and tell us what specifically you want done differently.

Now is the time. We must stop complaining and start instructing. We must recognize the victory that lies before us, and seize it, lest we squander this moment and thereby allow the RINOs to continue on happily, ruling a minority party as Democratic majorities continue to strip away the America that we love.

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It’s Because Your Leadership Sucks. . .

There's a Politico article today that needs to be addressed. This article talks about the problem Republican leaders are having with “the flamboyant rhetoric and angry tone of conservative activists and media personalities.” Let’s diagnose the problem, point some fingers, and present the solution.

What The Article Said

Before we delve into the contents of the article, let me say that I dismiss the article itself. This is just another one of those typical articles written by a leftist who wants to “help” us by suggesting that the evil Republican Party is captive to the far right and blah blah blah move left to find voters. I neither care about the author nor their wrong advice.

But what I do want to talk about is what the Republican establishment says in this article. According to the article, many Republican officials and operatives are concerned (1) that the angry tone of conservative activists will turn off the middle-of-the-road voters that the party must attract to regain power, and (2) that radio personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are making life miserable for senators and House members by egging on the activists, so that the elected officials must pander to these activists at the expense of turning off moderate voters (particularly in moderate districts).

Here are some of the quotes and points from the article that you should note:

• House Whip Eric Cantor, described as “one of the party’s up-and-coming leaders” says: “We need more voices. Our party’s challenge has been that we need to be more inclusive -- we need to attract the middle again.” He then adds, “[Obama’s nastiness] gives us an opportunity now to try and harness the energy and point it in a positive direction, so that we can attract the middle of the country to the common-sense conservative views that we have been about as a party.”

• Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty implies (though he doesn’t quite say) that the activists are playing into the media’s hands by letting the media portray the party as narrow-minded. “The commentators are part of the coalition, not the whole coalition. The party needs to be about addition, not subtraction -- but not at the expense of watering down its principles.”

• Mitt Romney, apparently, is keeping a low profile and is sticking to speeches on specific policy issues to avoid (according to the author) “the trade off between placating party activists and appearing presidential.”

Diagnosing The Problem

Let me start off with a surprise. I agree with them about the problem. The Republican Party cannot win if it does not attract people beyond its hardcore base. Despite what you may see in the polls, both parties have a hardcore base of around 43% of the electorate. Beyond that, you get into the leaners and the self-described moderates. If you can’t attract more than half of the leaners and self-described moderates, you can’t win an election.

Yet, the activists, the bloggers, the callers, and the talk radio hosts are making it very hard for the Republican Party to attract those people. Like you, I have visited many other blogs, read many political journals, listened to talk radio and visited web boards. The truth is that right now, the right is not very appealing. So much of what you find is angry, ignorant, beset by paranoia and, frankly, whiny.

And this has many causes. Part of this stems from the fact that the people who are the most upset are the most likely to speak their minds. Part of this stems from the fact that to get noticed in a saturated world, you need to be more bombastic than the rest. Part of this stems from the collapse of journalism and the ease with which the internet allows opinion and rumor to be turned into fact and spread like wildfire -- hence, people no longer know what is true. Part of this stems from the fact that in times of great upheaval, many nuts come out of the woodwork to hide among the normal people, trying to lure them into their little cults.

That’s all true. But there is one more key ingredient: a vacuum.

If the Republican Party leadership had not been notably absent from the field, none of this would have mattered. A vibrant, trustworthy party that addresses issues as they arise, debunks rumors, and takes a clear stand that people can rely upon could have prevented this stew of anger, fear and resentment from ever coming into existence in the first place. But by remaining silent on issue after issue, and by failing to give people something to believe in -- the comfort that they would be represented, the party leadership let the noxious concoction boil away and the wounds it created fester. In other words, my dear Republican Party, your failure caused this.

So don’t whine about it, fix it.

But whine is what they are doing. Cantor is right that we need to attract the middle and that we can do it with conservative principles -- polls show over and over that “the middle” is actually rather far right. But read his quote again. He doesn’t know how to do this. He’s hoping that it all works itself out. Do you see any hint there that he could even enunciate what those principles are?

Look at Pawlenty. He seems to think we’re in a coalition rather than a party. Coalitions are a combination of divergent groups hoping to achieve their own interests through the support of others within the coalition. A party, on the other hand, is a group of like-minded individuals working toward certain goals that they all share. That may sound like nitpicking, but it’s not. This quote tells me that he doesn’t see the party as a collection of like-minded people who believe in conservative ideas, he sees us as a collection of interests.

Look at Romney. Now is the time Mr. President-wannabe to step up and lead. Difficult times forge leaders. Consider again Monday's quote from Abigail Adams:

"These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed."

A leader does not hide and hope not to get noticed.

The Solution

The solution is simple. Stop whining about it and do something. Lead. How do you do that? Easy:

First, come up with a conservative agenda. Outline the conservative principles for which you stand. Tell us what those are and show us that you intend to stick with them. If you need help, which apparently you do, read our on-going Rebuilding the Republican Party series. In fact, why not start with this:

I am a Republican because...

I believe in limited and accountable government. I believe in the Constitutional separation of powers between the branches of the government, between the federal government and the states, and between the government and its citizens. I believe in state’s rights. I believe in the protection of civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights. I reject judicial activism and the shift of power from the legislature to the executive. Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

I believe in fiscally responsible government. I reject deficit spending, unfair and excessive taxation, and unnecessary and irrational regulation.

I believe in free market economics and the protection of property rights. I reject government ownership of private business and the confiscation of private property. I believe in free and fair trade.

I believe in a strong national defense, and in promoting the values of democracy, freedom, and human rights around the world. I reject isolationism, but I also reject adventurism. Walk softly, but carry a big stick.

I am the Republican Party. I believe in freedom, liberty, and responsibility.

Then take those principles and apply them to the issues of the day. Show us how you plan to use conservative ideas to solve the nation’s problems -- and don’t just wait for the public to tell you something is a problem. It’s time to remake the country, issue by issue, along conservative lines.

Next, start introducing legislation to implement that agenda. If it passes, take the credit. If it fails, make an issue out of it.

At the same time, start taking a firm PUBLIC stand against the things Obama does wrong and supporting him openly on things he does right (if any). And don’t just criticize, tell the American people what you would have done differently and point to the legislation you’ve introduced to do that.

The American people want solutions to problems, not just finger pointing. And they hate cowards and they hate whiners.

Which brings us to the final point: stop whining about the activists and the guys on talk radio. Nobody trusts a “leader” who whines that his followers make things difficult. Gain our respect and this whole problem goes away.


** Update: Mike Pence (R- Indiana) calls the Politico story "hogwash."

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How To Fix Republican Party Dynamics

It’s time for a little controversy. The media loves to portray the Republican Party as a narrow group of extremists. They love to accuse the party of being all white, male, rich, ultra-religious and angry at everything. Of course, none of this true. What the media has done is to pick out the most extreme voices from the various wings of the party and filter them through their own preconceived view of the party as fascist, intolerant, racists, and theologically based.

Hence, idiots like Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, (D-Fla.) say asinine things like “Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick,” when in fact it will be the Democratic plan that causes people to die for lack of available treatment. And toads like Gore Vidal say:

“Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred -- religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word 'conservative,' you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They're not -- they're fascists.”

Never mind that Obama and the Democrats are the closest thing to fascism this country has seen. Never mind that Obama is the first President to try to make people into non-people for legal purposes, or that the Democrats want to send you to jail if you don’t buy health care. They are the party of speech codes, of thought crimes, and forced association. They support confiscating private property for the public good and forced volunteerism in schools. They believe in industrial policy, the doctrine of too big to fail, the bailout, and of government seizing control of private corporations. They declare protesting against the government to be unAmerican, and they are big on indoctrinating children. The Republicans opposed all of this. So who are the fascists?

Who Are The Republicans Really?

Nevertheless, I find myself dismayed at the current state of the party. The party seems incapable of coming up with a coherent set of principles and it seems incapable of making headway with the 60% of voters it should be grabbing. Why is that? It’s called party dynamics.

Let me by cynical for a moment. The Republican Party is made up of six or seven groups that hinder each other. You would think they would be bound together by some common principles, but that’s not entirely true. Let’s look at the various groups and then talk about how they fit together and what this means for the party.

Here are the groups. But before anybody gets upset, realize that I have defined these groups according to the behavior of their leaders, not necessarily their members. And I did this because it’s the leadership that matters, because that’s what people use to judge the party, that’s what drives the agenda, and that’s who the party looks to when trying to satisfy the members of that group.

• Big Business -- This group consists primarily of the representatives of large businesses. In sheer numbers, this group is infinitesimally small, but their ability to donate vast amounts of money to political campaigns has made them extraordinarily powerful. Unfortunately, they hold few, if any, Republican beliefs. Indeed, this group is concerned almost entirely with the issue of business regulation and trade, and they have little loyalty to the United States or the party. They will favor regulations that weaken their competitors and oppose regulations that weaken their own business, all without a thought to the effect on the rest of the country. This group also is notorious for giving equally to Democratic candidates.

• Religious Right -- The other group that dominates the party leadership is the religious right. This group has significant influence far beyond their numbers (polls tend to show 3-6% of the population) because they provide a large number of the volunteers that staff the campaigns. They are concerned primarily with abortion and the relationship between Christianity and the public sphere, though they have recently begun to advocate environmental causes as well. This group tends to advocate increased government involvement rather than decreased government involvement, and often displays a tin ear for politics.

• The Small Business Wing -- Usually standing in direct opposition to the Big Business group is the Small Business Wing. This is a good sized group within the Republican Party, though not nearly as influential as the Big Business group or the Religious Right. This group favors lower regulation and low taxes, though they are not above lobbying to preserve government subsidies.

• Libertarians -- In many ways, this group is the polar opposite of the Religious Right and the Big Business wing. However, this group has all but destroyed its own influence within the Republican Party by leaving to form its own party (where they typically get around 2% of the national vote). This group favors smaller government, isolationism, and limited (or no) government involvement in social matters. In the last few years, this group has been obsessed with drug legalization, Iraq, and fearing the creation of a world government.

• The Country Clubbers -- This is the group that dominated the Republican Party for decades. This group consists of people with no particular guiding philosophy and they were quite happy to be the minority party. They viewed the party largely as a social gathering rather than a political party, and these people tend to be rather moderate/left liberals. This group often expresses embarrassment at the other members of the party and is notorious for endorsing Democratic candidates.

• Foreign Policy Hawks -- This group first appeared under Reagan, after the Democrats went soft on communism, taking on the label of neocons. Their numbers increased again dramatically after 9/11 when the Democrats chose to surrender to the terrorists. Apart from supporting a strong, interventionist foreign policy however, this group typically shares few other Republican beliefs.

• Populists -- This group is relatively new to the Republican Party, and likely won’t stay within the party. This group is marked by a severe anti-intellectualism and is currently awash in all manner of conspiracy theories.

• The Middle Class Values Wing -- Finally, we come to the largest group within the Republican Party. This group easily dominates the party membership, but has little influence within the party because it has no leadership and its members don’t volunteer. This group generally favors smaller government, less regulation, a strong foreign policy and defense, and limited government involvement in social matters. However, this group is not doctrinaire and will go against each of these beliefs whenever it thinks that the particular cause is a good one. Thus, for example, it will favor regulations that it sees as protecting the public and it will support tax increases for pet projects. Moreover, this group cuts a middle ground between the Religious Right and the Libertarians on social issues. Thus, for example, this group generally dislikes abortion and will impose restrictions, but does not favor banning abortion.

This is the group that competes for power within the Republican Party, and therein lie several problems.

Why Is This A Problem And How Do We Fix It?

So let’s talk about the problems posed with this alignment. First, this is hardly a unified group. On almost every issue, there is direct disagreement within the party. You want lower taxes? Big Business doesn’t, the Middle Class Values Wing doesn’t if it means they don’t get a new highway, and the Religious Right doesn’t if it means we need to cut aid to the poor. Want a strong foreign policy? The Libertarians and the Big Business guys don’t. And so on.

Far be it for me to tell the Republican Party what to do, but let me suggest that sometimes less is more. And when some of your members are keeping you from developing your philosophy, particularly where those members have proven themselves not to be loyal to the party, you should cull them:

• Drop the Big Business Wing. They’re whores -- they don’t love you. Trust me on this, they will still give you vast amounts of money even if you stop acting like their lap dogs. And right now they oppose everything that every other Republican group supports.

• Drop the Country Clubbers. They’re in the wrong party, they don’t like you. There is always room for dissent within a party, but there is never room for treason, and these guys are treason personified. Anyone who ever endorses a Democrat should be banned from any representative position with the party.

Further, a party cannot let itself be associated with the crazies or the unacceptables. Just as the party had to force out the racists in the 1980s, i.e. David Duke, the party needs to disassociate itself now with the populists (and the crazier libertarians) before they become associated with the party brand. If the party does not do this, it will lose the middle class, the educated class, and the sane. The populists have discredited every single movement they’ve ever infiltrated, dating back to the 1890. This time won’t be any different.

At the same time, the party needs to bring back its natural allies. In this regard, the party should woo back the Libertarians. Don’t bring back the kooks, but bring back the rational ones. And how to do that is simple. The Republican Party needs to rethink its recent total disregard for civil liberties. The left has handed us a wonderful chance to become the party of free speech, free religion (all religions or even no religion), free association, and rule of law. We can become the sole protectors of private property rights, and the other rights delineated in the Constitution.

The party also needs to learn that because it does contain competing views, taking an all or nothing approach is unacceptable. The party has become unbalanced in its power structure and it must re-learn the art of coalition building and consensus if it hopes to build a stable party and to attract the full 60% of people who consider themselves conservatives. To choose the beliefs of one group over the rest as THE beliefs of the party will doom the Republicans to remaining a minority party.

Indeed, what we need right now more than anything is a leadership (not leader but leadership) (1) that can create a credible strategy for attracting the 60% of voters who fall into the conservative category and can explain the wisdom of that strategy to each of the groups identified above and get them to see that wisdom, and (2) that is not afraid to stand up to these groups when they overreach (and to throw out the ones mentioned above).

We don’t have that right now. In fact, we’re not even close. Most party leaders fall into these categories themselves and can’t see the bigger picture. If they can’t do this, then it’s time we auditioned some new leaders.

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Rebuilding The Republican Party: Minority Outreach

Today we return to our Rebuilding the Republican Party series. One of the issues that has befuddled the Republican Party is minority outreach. There is no inherent reason that half of all minorities should not be Republicans -- most racism occurs on the left (as it has historically), Republican policies are not anti-minority, and Republicans can hardly be called unwelcoming to minorities. Yet, Republican outreach doesn’t work. Here’s why and how to fix it.

Why Republicans Fail At Minority Outreach

The Republicans make three critical mistakes when it comes to minority outreach. First, they do it rarely and cynically. Secondly, and more importantly, they stupidly buy into the idea of identity politics and they play right into Democratic hands -- this is critical. Third, they are cowards when it comes to issues of race.

Rare And Cynical Effort Cannot Win You Friends

Every election cycle, the Republicans wring their hands about minority outreach. They talk about it. They appoint committees. They look for black people they can do photo-ops with. Sometimes they even find a candidate who can speak pigeon Spanish. Then the election comes and the outreach ends. Oooh, those minorities must be lining up to vote for us now! See the problem?

People aren’t stupid, even if they speak another language. They know when you’re pandering to them and when you’re genuinely interested. Showing up in a minority neighborhood once every couple of years for a photo-op not only does not convey the message that we are interested in you, it probably offends because it comes across as cynical.

For any effort to be worthwhile, it must be genuine, it must be constant, and it must be sustained. Otherwise, it is counter-productive even to try. So what do the Republicans need to do?

Stop Buying Into Identity Politics

The primary reason Republican outreach fails is that the Republicans have bought into the Democratic idea of identity politics and they are playing on Democratic terrain.

The Democrats want everyone to see minorities as monolithic communities. They want blacks to see themselves as black first and everything else second, and to associate themselves with the “black community.” They want Hispanics to associate themselves with the Hispanic community. And so on. In this way, they can influence the people within these communities, through peer pressure applied by community leaders, by getting these people to see the world through the filter of those communities and the community grievances -- again defined by the community leaders.

The Republicans buy into this hook, line and sinker. When they think about minority outreach, their first thought is “how do we attract members of the ____ community.” They then look for ways to satisfy the grievances laid out by the community leaders. And in so doing, they not only miss the mark -- because they are being misled by the leaders, but they confirm the view that individual minorities are nothing more than members of their collective and that their leaders have accurately defined the desires of the community.

This is horribly destructive thinking by the Republicans. They need to stop seeing minorities as clones. They aren’t. Take Hispanics, for example. Republicans see Hispanics as “Hispanics.” They don’t realize that these people come from two dozen countries. They have a variety of religions, or flavors of religions. They speak in different languages and different dialects, and they came here for different reasons. And most importantly, they have different goals.

Think about it this way. If I asked you to come up with an outreach plan to reach Europeans, could you come up with one plan? And even if you broke it down to different plans for the English and the Germans and the French, could one plan really reach out to an entire country full of people? Could a “white outreach” reach white America? No, it can’t, because we are all different with different beliefs, backgrounds, stations in life, and goals. Yet somehow, when the issue switches to Asians or Hispanics, those differences vanish and people start seeing them as monolithic. That’s the result of falling for the identity politics propaganda of the left, and it needs to stop.

So what do the Republicans need to do? Start looking at the people as individuals. If you want to reach Hispanics, don’t aim for “Hispanics,” aim for individuals who might be receptive to what you have to offer. For example, Republicans should make a push for minority small business people, because our policies are vastly superior for small businesses. We should reach out to their churches, to their middle class workers, to their property owners, their farmers, their home owners, and show them why the Republican Party suits them. Only by winning over the real community leaders, by showing them respect as individual human beings -- not by buying into the idea that they are clones -- can we make significant inroads into these communities.

Again, I’m not saying race can or should be ignored, but it should be a secondary concern, incidental to the reasons the Party is using to reach out to these people.

Further, this effort needs to be undertaken by Republicans everywhere, not just by some committee run by the party. Every Republican officer holder should do the exact same outreach they already do in their white communities in their minority communities as well. This means helping minorities get small business loans and resolving problems with social security and passport issues and other deeds that elected representatives normally do as “constituent services.” It may also mean getting bilingual or trilingual or tailoring specific services. But that’s no different than representatives do right now for other ethnic communities, like German-Americans or Polish-Americans.

That is what Republicans need to do. Stop playing the game created by the left to force these people into these communities. Start treating these people like friends, neighbors and partners, and not as just statistics or “communities.”

Stop Being Cowards On Race: Fight Back On Racism Charges

Finally, Republicans need to stop being cowards on race. The Democrats yell racism and every Republican in the room ducks for cover. It is time for Republicans to call this bluff. Republicans are not the racist ones, the Democrats are. Consider:

• The Democratic Party gave the country slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, segregation, violent opposition to the Civil Rights movement and opposition to civil rights legislation.

• Liberal labor unions worked for years to keep minorities out.

• Liberals dominate the biggest cities, which happen to be the most segregated parts of the country. Despite all their talk, liberal whites simply will not live in minority neighborhoods and they will not send their children to schools with large numbers of minority kids.

• Liberal policies related to race are premised on the racist idea that minorities are inferior to whites. Consider affirmative action. Take away all the flowery language and affirmative action is based on the idea that equality of opportunity is not enough, the law must enforce equality of result. Said differently, affirmative action is premised on the idea that minorities need government help to compete with whites even if they get the same opportunity. That’s racist thinking.

And let me add two other thoughts to this. First, having lived in liberal and conservative locations, I can say without hesitation that liberals are far more likely to use racists words, make racists statements, and tell racists jokes. But when this is pointed out to them, to a one, they respond that their racism isn’t racism because they (liberals) aren’t racists. That's delusional and hypocritical, and is an argument they would never accept from a conservative.

Secondly, liberals claim to see racism everywhere around them. But as we’ve all seen, liberals clump together. They live in communities of other liberals (look at big cities for proof of this), they select liberal friends (maybe with a token conservative now and then), and they insulate themselves with liberal media, liberal entertainment, and liberal news sources. So where are they hearing all this racism? Either it’s in all their heads or they hear it from other liberals.

Republicans need to stop being afraid of the racist label. They need to learn to turn it back on the Democrats. They need to start using it themselves. Don’t be afraid to speak the truth about race. Until we begin speaking the truth, the Democrats will keep using their web of lies to keep minorities on the Democratic plantation.

The emperor has no clothes and it’s getting time that someone called him on it.

Conclusion

The party needs to get serious about attracting minorities. And that's not going to happen if our outreach continues to consist of token appointments and sending stiff, terrified white guys into minority communities for a yearly photo-op. It's time to break the lock of identity politics.

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RTRP: CommentaramaCare Summarized and Priced

Last week we finalized the CommentaramaCare proposal. At the time, we posted both the final piece, reforming the way we pay for health care, and the conclusion. Several people have told us since then, that the conclusion got lost in being published on the same day. So today, we repost the conclusion to CommentaramaCare, which summarizes the proposal and puts a price tag on it.

The United States health care system is broken. It costs too much and achieves too little, its costs are out of control, not enough people have access to insurance, and it suffers from poor quality control. CommentaramaCare fixes each of these problems: it cuts costs dramatically, it expands coverage to 22 million people -- while still saving the taxpayer $245.7 billion, and it improves the quality of care.

Problem One: Cost Control

The primary problem with the American system is that it costs too much. The American system now eats up $2.26 trillion a year, and it is growing by the second. This problem is the result of (1) a payment system that has little incentive to control costs, (2) a regulatory scheme that generates excessive administrative costs, (3) the prescription of a vast number of medically unnecessary procedures/tests, and (4) an intrusive tort system. CommentaramaCare proposes the following solutions:

1. Fixing The Payment System

Under the current insurance system, buyers of health care (patients) do not negotiate the price of services directly with the sellers (doctors). This interferes with the parties’ incentives to keep costs under control. To solve this, CommentaramaCare proposes making health insurance more like car insurance or home owners insurance, where individuals make routine payments out of their own pockets and then use the insurance only as a form of quasi-catastrophic protection. This quasi-catastrophic coverage would kick in after a person had spent $5,000 on health care during the year, and would cover all remaining health care costs that person experiences during the year.

This change would give patients the incentive to keep costs down for most procedures, as they seek to avoid spending the first $5,000. At the same time, this system protects people from being bankrupted by serious illness. This system also should slightly reduce the insurance cost borne by the average American -- even before considering any specific cost savings that result under the plan.

To assist buyers in pricing their health care, CommentaramaCare requires providers to make available to any patient or potential patient, in advance, a price list for all procedures that they offer, so that potential patients can compare providers and seek competition. It also requires providers to use joint billing for individual procedures.

CommentaramaCare further proposes freeing providers to arrange their business and billing practices in more innovative ways, such as the fixed-price arrangement discussed previously.

Potential savings: Unknown

2. Eliminating Excessive Administrative Costs

According to Harvard Medical School, 31% of health care spending goes to pay administrative/overhead costs (this is nearly double the 16% percent spent in Canada). A reduction to even Canadian levels would save Americans $339 billion annually.

The primary reason administrative costs are so high in our system is that health care is regulated at the state level. Thus, every administrative function is repeated fifty or more times, often with different rules. Complicating this, the federal government provides health care through a half dozen agencies, each with their own bureaucracies, requirements, and rules -- many of which are enforced through state budgets.

To fix this, CommentaramaCare proposes:

• Removing states entirely from this process by replacing state regulation with one, consistent federal regulatory scheme to be organized under a Federal Medical Board (“FMB”). This will eliminate fifty state agencies.

• Allowing the FMB to issue licenses that are valid nationwide, so that providers can move freely and need only satisfy one regulator.

• Eliminating the half dozen agencies in Washington that control different (and overlapping) parts of the health care system and replacing them with one single agency and set of regulations, controlled by the Health Care Administration (“HCA”).

The potential cost savings from these changes could be as high as $339 billion.

Further, rather than trying to develop separate insurance plans for recipients of government-sponsored insurance (i.e. those currently on Medicare/Medicaid, etc.), the government would instead buy those persons the commercial catastrophic insurance, as discussed, and would subsidize some portion of the $5,000 deductible. Even assuming that the full $5,000 is provided for each recipient, this could save the government $3,700 for each of the 81 million current recipients, for a total potential cost savings to the taxpayer of $299.7 billion.

Potential savings: $339 billion
Potential savings to the taxpayer: $299.7 billion

3. Reducing Medically Unnecessary Procedures

It is estimated that $500-$700 billion is spent annually on treatments, tests, or hospitalizations that do nothing to improve health. Studies have shown the best ways to reduce these costs are to (1) change the billing method, (2) improve knowledge of the standards of care, and (3) establish effective tort control. Thus, CommentaramaCare proposes:

• Changing billing methods as outline above, which should reinvigorate the incentive for patients to control costs;

• Allowing the introduction of more fixed-price services (or other plans);

• Improving knowledge of the standards of care by having the FMB establish standards of care and disseminate them, and allowing doctors to use those as “legal safe harbors”;

• Reducing the filing of meritless lawsuits by (1) requiring all medical malpractice actions to be brought in federal court; (2) requiring plaintiffs to obtain certificates of merit before filing, and (3) shifting fees to the prevailing party; and

• Reducing outrageous jury awards by (1) eliminating punitive damage awards and (2) capping awards for non-economic harm at one million dollars.

Potential Savings: $500-700 billion

4. Tort Reform

It is estimated that an additional $11.3 billion can be saved in malpractice insurance premiums through the introduction of effective tort reform.

Potential Savings: $11.3 billion

** Certain problems are not addressed specifically at this time, including (1) medical innovation costs, (2) drug costs, and (3) long-term care costs. It is unclear to what extent the realignment of cost reduction incentives will influence those items. Thus, further reform may be needed after these effects can be evaluated.

Problem Two: Improving Access To Health Care Coverage

The second group of problems with our health care system are related to access to health insurance. Not only is there the issue of the “46 million” uninsured, but there are issues related to illegal aliens, uninsurable persons, and the problem that loss of employment currently also means loss of health care. CommentaramaCare proposes the following solutions:

1. The “46 Million Uninsured”

Of the 46 million uninsured, only 7.3 million persons fall into the category of those who cannot obtain insurance due to lack of income. Assuming the projected cost of $7,400 per person, providing these people with fully paid insurance and income subsidies (in other words -- no cost to them) would cost $54 billion dollars per year.

Projected Cost to Taxpayer: $54 billion
Additional People Covered: 7.3 million

2. Illegal Aliens

Another 9.7 million of the 46 million uninsured are non-citizens, whose health care expenses should be paid for by their country of origin. Only the federal government has the power to stem the flow of illegal immigration and to deal with foreign governments. Thus, CommentaramaCare proposes (1) that the federal government fully reimburse providers for the costs of providing such care, and (2) that the federal government seek to charge the home countries for the costs incurred.

Projected Savings: Unknown (should zero out)
Additional People Covered: 9.7 million

3. The Uninsurable

Another 5 million of those without insurance are considered uninsurable because of pre-existing conditions. CommentaramaCare solves this problem by requiring bidders on the HCA insurance contracts to accept all persons who apply, at the same fixed price, without regard to pre-existing conditions, and by prohibiting such insurers from terminating individuals who experience high medical costs.

Projected Cost to Taxpayer: $0
Additional People Covered: 5 million

4. The Link Between Loss Of Employment And Loss Of Health Care

Currently, 59.3% of Americans receive their health insurance coverage through an employer. The unemployment rate is 9.5% and growing. Moreover, the composition of the 9.5% changes every day. Thus, vast numbers of Americans are at risk of losing their insurance because they face the prospects of becoming unemployed. To solve this problem, CommentaramaCare proposes to break the link between employment and health care by:

• Making health care premiums tax deductible to the individual, but not the employer;

• Allowing the creation of HSAs wherein individuals can save unused deductible costs, which should eventually build up to cover future deductibles;

• Ensuring that the HCA plans are available to any person at any time, without regard to employment; and

• Continuing government subsidies for low-income and unemployed persons to obtain health insurance coverage.

This method should ensure that anyone can get access to such insurance, regardless of employment status.


Problem Three: Improving Quality Control

Finally, the current system exposes patients to an amazingly high risk of under-treatment and over-treatment, and results in an incredible number of preventable medical injuries. The existing mechanisms for monitoring quality control are simply inadequate.

According to a study by Dartmouth’s Institute for Health, patients had just a 50% chance of receiving the right treatment for common ailments. Other studies have shown that between $500-$700 billion in medically unnecessary tests or procedures were ordered in 2007, that nearly 200,000 avoidable hospital deaths occur each year, and that another 1.5 million preventable drug-related injuries occur each year. The costs of treating injuries resulting from preventable medical error could be as high as $520 billion per year.

At the core of each of these findings was the conclusion that the lack of clear national standards, and the fact that many doctors lack adequate information about the standards of care, were the direct cause of the majority of these failures.

CommentaramaCare proposes the following solution:

• Federalizing the oversight/regulation of the entire health care profession (doctors, nurses, psychologists, therapists, hospitals, etc.) under the FMB;

• Making the FMB responsible for licensing medical providers as well as investigating complaints against medical providers and disciplining those where necessary;

• Making the FMB responsible for issuing national standards of care, which the FMB would disseminate to doctors in the field -- the FMB also would issue best practices guidelines and would regulate continuing legal education requirements; and

• Reversing the legal changes that allowed hospitals to avoid liability for the actions of doctors who practice at the hospital, to encourage hospitals to conduct thorough oversight.

Projected Savings: Up to $520 billion


Conclusion

As outline above and as explained in greater detail in the prior posts on this topic, CommentaramaCare has the potential to dramatically improve each of the three main problem areas in the current health care system. Moreover, it does so without stripping patients, doctors or insurers of their freedoms -- in fact, each group is freed from considerable amounts of regulation.

Under CommentaramaCare, an additional 22 million people would be able to obtain health care. Yet, taxpayers should be able to save $245.7 billion, even as coverage is expanded.

The country as a whole should benefit as well. It is difficult to determine exactly what the potential savings would be, as many of the $1.3 trillion potential savings identified above likely involve duplicate costs. Still, it is clear that dramatic savings could be achieved. Also, a reduction on the order of one trillion dollars is not as outlandish as it sounds. That would reduce the amount Americans send on health care to between 9% and 10% of GNP, which would put us in line with the amounts spent by other Western countries.

If Washington wants a plan that works, here it is.

Thoughts?


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RTRP: CommentaramaCare Part III, The Coverage Plan

Today we finish the CommentaramaCare proposal. In this article, I will outline how the coverage system should be reformed to reduce health care costs, to save the government a fortune, and to improve coverage. In a second article, to be posted later today, I will summarize the entire CommentaramaCare proposal and outline its costs and cost savings.

The Coverage Plan

CommentaramaCare proposes making health insurance more like car insurance or home owners insurance, where individuals make routine payments out of their own pockets and then use the insurance only as a form of quasi-catastrophic protection. This quasi-catastrophic coverage would kick in after a person has spent $5,000 on health care during the year, and would cover all remaining health care costs that person experiences during that year.

Such a plan should:

• Reduce the cost of medical care by encouraging buyers of health care (patients) and sellers of health care (doctors) to deal directly with each other rather than through a middle man for most issues;

• Reduce the cost of insurance to the average person;

• Break the link between employment and insurance;

• Cover everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions;

• Dramatically cut what the government pays to provide health care to those on public programs (i.e. Medicare, etc.); and

• Allow the government to increase coverage to eliminate the uninsured problem.

Before we dig into the specifics, let us be clear. This proposal does NOT:

• Ban any form of private insurance -- you can continue to buy any type of insurance you want;

• Impose fines to force people to change their insurance plans; or

• Advocate that the government issue insurance -- not one penny is paid to the government by anyone under this plan.

Here are the details:

The Problem With The Current Scheme -- Runaway Costs

There are two broad complaints with the current system: (1) medical costs are out of control and (2) not everyone has coverage. Let's start with costs.

We have previously outlined several significant cost reduction measures, but we have not yet addressed the primary cause of out-of-control costs. There is significant evidence that the current insurance system is the main reason that health care costs are skyrocketing. Indeed, as the following graph from John Stossel shows, there is a dramatic and clear relationship between the increase in medical costs over the past fifty years and the increasing percentage of medical costs that are paid for by insurance:


Notice that as the percentage of health care costs paid directly by patients has declined, the cost of health care has increased. As Stossel states:

This interesting chart from the Goldwater Institute illustrates one of the main reasons health care costs have been skyrocketing: Americans have been paying less and less out of their own pocket. It's basic economics that the less you have to pay for something, the more of it you'll use. And yet the “reformers” keep pushing for MORE health insurance.

And this makes intuitive sense.

In a normal market, sellers want to charge as much as possible. But that instinct is held in check by the need to attract buyers, who want to pay as little as possible. When millions of willing buyers and sellers haggle over price, the resulting consensus tends to set the price most efficiently.

But under our current system, buyers (patients) don’t deal directly with sellers (doctors). Instead, buyers pay a small flat fee, and leave it up to a third party (the insurer) to handle the negotiations and the payments. Thus, the laws of supply and demand don’t work properly. Indeed, what you have is called a “moral hazard,” because the patient wants as much care as possible and doesn’t care what it costs, because they don’t pay for it.

Moreover, patients have no incentive to keep the costs of treatment down: why find a cheaper lab to run your lab work, or why run the MRI without contrast, or why engage in preventative care when it doesn't cost you anything not to bother? And that is the problem. No other field accepts such a pricing model.

The Solution -- Make Health Insurance Like Car/Home Owners Insurance

So do we ban insurance? Absolutely not. Not only does CommentaramaCare firmly believe in letting people satisfy their own consumer choices, but insurance is necessary to prevent serious medical conditions from bankrupting people.

Instead, we need to remake health insurance along the lines of car insurance or home owners insurance, so that people again begin to care what their treatment costs.

Thus, CommentaramaCare proposes encouraging Americans to abandon their current insurance in favor of obtaining a quasi-catastrophic policy that kicks in once a person has spent $5,000 on health care during the year, and which would cover all expenses thereafter through the end of the year.

Such a plan would give people an incentive to keep their costs down to reduce the amount of the $5,000 that they pay. But at the same time, it would also ensure that no one would be bankrupted by a sudden, serious illness.

What Would This Cost The Average American?

Right now, the average American spends $7,500 per year on health care. As just mentioned, we are proposing a deductible level of $5,000. Ergo, if the cost of the insurance works out to less than $2,500 a year, there will be no net cost increase to the average person.

My sampling of catastrophic plans has found that most plans currently run between around $100 per month to $200 per month, i.e. $1,200 a year to $2,400. Therefore, even if we take the high end estimate, the average American would save $100 a year under this plan.

And keep in mind, this assumes that you have more than $5,000 in medical bills during the year. Anything less than that will result in direct savings to the individual. Thus, a person who has no medical bills at all during the year, would save $5,100 over the current average. Likewise, a person who was on a flat rate plan (like the one discussed in the last article) and who had only routine medical issues, would have yearly medical expenses of only $3,600 ($200/month insurance + $100/month flat rate plan). This is less than half of the current average cost.

Further, it is more than likely that the cost of such insurance will fall significantly when the rest of the reforms kick in. As you will see in the summation, the savings under this plan could be vast. Presumably, some portion of that would be reflected in a reduction in the cost of insurance.

How To Encourage People To Switch Over

Now, it is easy to say, “encourage people to rethink”, but how do you actually get people to switch over to the new system? To encourage (NOT FORCE) people to make this switch, CommentaramaCare proposes:

• Making the premiums on the catastrophic policy tax deductible to the individual (I would suggest treating them like an HSA);

• Making medical debts non-dischargeable in bankruptcy; and

• Making the first year deductible limit $10,000 rather than $5,000 to discourage people from waiting until they are sick to sign up for the insurance. (This would be implemented in the future, after the plan is established and people had the chance to switch over.)

Moreover, to encourage (NOT FORCE) people to give up their current plans, which are distorting the pricing mechanism in the current system, we also recommend eliminating the tax deductions for any coverage that exceeds the catastrophic coverage. This would not prevent individuals from obtaining coverage that is superior to the catastrophic coverage, it simply won’t be tax deductible.

How Such Policies Would Be Created

Now comes the tricky part. To make this plan work, such insurance must exist. In fact, three things must be guaranteed:

• That such catastrophic plans, which cover all expenses after the $5,000 deductible, will exist and will be generally available to anyone who wants such a plan;

• That persons with pre-existing conditions can obtain such coverage, and at reasonable rates; and

• That providers cannot terminate individuals who experience high medical costs.

This could be achieved by imposing such mandates on the insurance industry. However, CommentaramaCare opposes mandates because people should be free to buy whatever insurance they want, on whatever terms they wish. Imposing coverage requirements violates that principle. It also could be achieved with a government-run option, but CommentaramaCare opposes that for obvious reasons.

So we favor a third alternative. Under this method, the federal government, through the Health Care Administration (“HCA”), will procure such insurance and make it available for the public. Here’s how this would work:

The HCA will divide the United States into geographic districts. For each district, HCA will open a series of $0 contracts for competitive bidding. A $0 contact is one under which the government promises no money. Any insurer in the country could bid on any of these contracts, without regard to state licensing requirements (subject only to obtaining HCA certification).

These contracts will require any insurer who submits a bid to agree to cover a certain number of people (specified by the insurer) at a fixed price (specified by the insurer). The contracts will specify the precise coverage terms, which would include the requirements detailed above, plus whatever other coverage requirements are deemed necessary by the HCA administrator to effect the coverage plan.

By bidding, insurers agree to accept any person who signs up for the plan (up to the number of persons specified in the insurer's bid) at the fixed price, without regard to age or medical condition or any other factor (although family plans should be allowed).

HCA would then accept all conforming bids, and would publicly list these providers and their fixed prices. After that, any member of the public can contact these providers directly and sign up at the fixed price bid by the insurer until that plan is full.

Here are the benefits of this plan:

• This method ensures that anyone can get access to such insurance, regardless of employment status or pre-existing condition;

• This method reduces insurance costs through the use of competitive bidding and large scale pooling;

• No money is given to the government under this plan; and

• Private insurance will continue to exist. Indeed, not only does this plan rely on private insurers, but it leaves private insurers free to offer superior or inferior (and presumably cheaper) coverage as they see fit. If you want more coverage than the minimum, you can buy it. If you want less coverage than the minimum (e.g. a $10,000 deductible or a plan with co-pays or limited coverage), you can buy that too. You can even continue under your current plan and ignore the new system entirely. And since there is no government-subsidized insurance to compete with, the government will not crowd out private insurers.

(** The government currently does something similar for its own employees.)

Saving The Government A Fortune AND Expanding Coverage

This biggest surprise in this program comes in the remake of government insurance, i.e. Medicare/Medicaid/Tricare, etc. CommentaramaCare proposes eliminating these programs entirely and replacing them with one program to be run by the HCA. This can save the Government a fortune, if done right. . .

Rather than trying to develop a separate insurance plan for these recipients, as is currently done with Medicare/Medicaid, etc., the HCA should use the money that would have been spent on such insurance to instead (1) buy these recipients commercial catastrophic insurance, as just discussed, and (2) provide some level of subsidy for the $5,000 deductible (depending on income-level, age, military status, etc.).

Consider this. . . if the cost of the new catastrophic insurance remains around $2,400 annually, and (for the sake of argument) the government chooses to pay the full $5,000 deductible for each of these recipients, and they all use the full $5,000 deductible, it would cost the government $7,400 per recipient to pay all of their medical expenses during that year. The government currently spends $11,093 per Medicare/Medicaid recipient. Thus, by switching to this plan, the government could save $3,700 per recipient. With 81 million recipients, that means a total saving of $299.7 billion dollars -- and this is an annual figure, not a fake 10 year projection.

Moreover, still assuming the projected cost of $7,400 per person, this means that the government could ADD another 40.5 million people to this program without spending a penny more than is currently spent. Since only 7.3 million Americans truly can’t afford insurance, this allows the government to extend coverage to those persons and still generate cost savings of $245.7 billion per year!

(** This assumes full 100% subsidies and full use of the program -- thus, the savings figure likely will be higher. It also does not include any cost savings from eliminating vast amounts of bureaucracy at the state and federal level.)

Finally, to make the deductible subsidy work, HCA would pay the insurers directly on behalf of those receiving subsidized policies, and HCA would issue a health insurance credit card directly to the covered individuals. Those cards would allow the holders to acquire only health care products and services (using product codes). And depending on the level of income subsidy desired, each card could contain any amount up to $5,000.

Illegal Aliens

Lastly, on the issue of illegal aliens, it is clear that these costs should not be borne by the states or by individual providers, as only the federal government has the power to stem the flow of illegal immigration and to deal with foreign governments. Thus, CommentaramaCare proposes (1) that the federal government fully reimburse providers for the costs of providing such care, and (2) that the federal government seek to charge the home countries of these aliens for the costs they have incurred.

CONCLUSION

Without forcing anyone to participate, without raising taxes, and without endangering anyone’s current plan or private insurance, this plan should reduce the cost of medical care within the country, reduce the cost of insurance to individuals, reduce the cost of providing care to persons on government assistance, and ensure that everyone in the country who wants coverage can get it at reasonable rates.

For further analysis, particularly related to costs, see the next post. . .

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