"If conservatives got the vote of every job creator in the country, we'd still lose. We must earn a large portion of the votes of jobholders, because there are far more of them." – excerpt from Rick Santorum's 2014 book entitled Blue Collar Conservative. Santorum launched his 2016 presidential candidacy on Thursday spelling out his new strategy that called for raising the minimum wage, increasing the child tax credit, & reducing legal immigration.
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America has increasingly become plagued with the dangerous symptom that is always prevalent in the apathy to dependence stage of a country's deterioration – namely, the inability to talk about what matters. Santorum's above strategy for winning the presidency is a good example of not being able to talk about what matters – he would rather pander for votes with populistic giveaways that add no wealth to the country rather than present a solid plan for economic growth based on limited government, personal responsibility, & free enterprise.
The long list of other examples:
We have a Commander in Chief who will not call the people who have been regularly attacking America since February 26, 1993 by name – Islamic Fascists. This is an obvious inability to not even start to talk about what matters.
A few weeks ago Pam Geller ran an Islamic cartoon contest in Garland Texas & two would-be murderers showed up hoping to kill scores of people for participating in the contest – but the talk that mattered to most turned to Pam Geller being the person @ fault. Never mind that her exercise of freedom of speech turned into a death watch. Even after they thought about it people were more concerned with Geller's "poor judgment" in not exercising the proper self-censorship that would have cancelled the entire cartoon contest. Far too many Americans were more concerned about not offending people who believe in Sharia Law than they were about supporting our bedrock liberties specified in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Not having the cartoon contest would have avoided this confrontation but would not have solved the problem that is building under the surface – Geller helped bring it to the surface. Are Americans ready to accept death sentences or harsh penalties for offending Muslims, even if the offense is not purposely malicious in our society - like women driving cars or just the existence of homosexuals?
The recent riots in Baltimore resulted in distrust of the police rather than condemning the rampant crime on the street. The police provide a much more inviting target to criticize & talk about than calling out the breakdown of the family structure in the crime ridden zones where the high percentage of out of wedlock pregnancies & the large number of children who can not identify their father is the point that really matters.
Government schools are terrible & politicians tell us they need more money for education despite the enormous cost per student that has been spent for decades. The bulk of this money goes to the teachers' unions which are more dangerous to America's future than al Qaeda & yet parents will turn their backs to the lackluster results of government schools especially when some survey or another comes out to tell them that their particular town has a "good education system" that they accept simply because they live there.
The showing of the American Sniper movie has drawn protests @ the Universities of Michigan, Maryland, Eastern Michigan, & George Mason University to name a few. The protests are targeted to stifle debates on college campuses that air many differing viewpoints that can lead to changes in student's perceptions, awarenesses, understandings, beliefs, & judgments – in brief exactly what the enemies of America do not want. These protests go to the very heart of our First Amendment liberties that the country was founded on.
With regard to the University of Maryland: the school recently received notoriety when the student group Student Entertainment Events (SEE) banned the showing of the film American Sniper on the College Park campus because the 250 student Muslim Students Association (MSA) - out of 30,000 total students - felt showing the film created "a dangerous climate for Muslim students" calling the film "Islamophobic, racist, & nationalistic" – in short MSA members protested because they felt the film was offensive to Muslims around the world & dehumanized Muslim individuals.
In this regard I contacted Breyer Hillegas, President UMD College Republicans, who let me know that after the film's cancellation he successfully arranged for its showing to a packed student audience followed by a panel discussion (hosted by the College Republicans & College Democrats) in which a Muslim representative & two supportive professors on one side debated a combat Marine who also is a current Maryland State Delegate – i.e., a 3 against 1 debate. Following the debate the original problem was exacerbated because the school newspaper, the Diamondback, recognized & quoted only the pro Muslim panelists & completely ignored the delegate/marine when reporting about the panel discussion.
So this event turned into another episode of political correctness in that according to the Diamondback it quickly morphed into a panel discussion about the Baltimore riots in April, PTSD, & news coverage of war while the original complaint regarding the Muslim Student Association's safety concerns about the film being shown were non existent during the panel discussion.
But much more important than any of the above was the inability to talk about what matters – in this case the 18 to 22 year old students not hearing all sides of an issue in an unbiased atmosphere. Specifically, based on the above information, the majority of students may not realize that the First Amendment rights to free speech of the people who wanted to show the film were attempted to be suppressed. A terrible precedent for our Republic & the future of these students.
I have not seen the movie & don't know whether the MSA protesters have either. I am sensitive to things that have happened on other campuses such as the serious questions of political correctness and politicization raised by Duke in its treatment & prosecution of lacrosse players in 2006, the Brown University Pie Throwing incident, the Minutemen incident at Columbia University, & campuses with "Speech Codes".
In the UMD case one interested student who attended both the film showing & panel discussion said the discussion failed to achieve its main goal - "If it was going to be an effective discussion, they should have argued the point of why they were trying not to play it, & I think it failed there."
Take your pick of which poisons in the above examples are the more deadly for America - from not being able to name the enemy who is attacking us in the war on terror, to not defending liberty & our rule of law against the latest attempt to impose Sharia Law in Garland Texas, to not being able to state the reason for the rampant crime on the streets of Baltimore, to tricking ourselves into believing we have top notch government schools when many graduates can barely read @ a fourth grade level, or to the stifling of free speech rights & the expression of ideas on college campuses – we have consistently not been able to talk about what matters in any of these areas as the country descends the stages of the Death Of Democracy.
But getting back to Santorum & the other Republican candidates for president for that matter – economic reports have shown for years that there are not enough jobs for a healthy economy especially in old industrial cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, & Detroit – yet the problem is perceived as the greediness of the business owners & not the regulations & taxes that sent most of the businesses that were able to survive to the suburbs. More & more politicians, both Democrat & Republican, present raising the minimum wage as the solution to our problems – but there is an inability of politicians to talk about or the citizenry to understand that we don't need minimum wage jobs that will guarantee the continuance of mediocrity & poverty but rather we need an economy capable of producing jobs that pay several times the minimum wage.
The elephant in the room is that the country has not had the economic growth the last six plus years that would help people in their 50s & 60s find jobs after they had been laid off let alone offer any encouragement to recent college graduates who are seeing their futures pass them by before they even get out of the box – all per BO's design. Someone 25 years old, three years out of college, but unemployed or underemployed, has to compete with new 22 year old graduates & I don't know one personnel manager I ever worked with who would have recommended to me to hire the 25 year old meaning they become more entrenched as excessive baggage every passing month they can't find work they were educated to do.
The reason Santorum & others have not pressed the economic growth message – especially after the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported a revised GDP growth rate that was negative in the first quarter of calendar year 2015 on Friday - is because every Republican theory of economic growth centers around lower tax rates – whether it is the FairTax, the flat tax, or just tinkering around the edges of the income tax system by lowering marginal rates. Republicans know that this will quickly turn to claims of Republicans helping millionaires & billionaires with tax cuts for the wealthy which has been a winning class warfare message for Democrats but against America for several years. Santorum's new populist strategy clearly shows the corner Republicans have been painted in.
When we find a candidate who can unabashedly & clearly explain that lower tax principles result in more money being invested in profit generating businesses that produce good paying jobs we know we have the chance to turn the corner. Such a candidate will convince us of the improbability "that the wealth created by government spending will fully compensate for the wealth destroyed by the taxes imposed to pay for that spending."1
All of this gives Republicans an opening if they can develop an agenda they can clearly convey especially by showing they believe it themselves – an agenda based on the libertarian principles the country was founded upon & originally followed.
Step one is for them to simply talk about what really matters.
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1 – Economics In One Lesson – Henry Hazlitt – page 37
