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.