The Stump Speech I'd Give if I Were Running for President

I'm not delusional enough to run for president, but drafting what would be my stump speech helps me refine and articulate my ideas on how to improve America. HERE is the text of that speech.

HERE is the link to my delivering that speech on my NPR-San Francisco radio show. Scroll down to the 05/08 show, labeled "stump speech." The speech is the first 20 minutes. Then I invited callers, the first one was supportive, then some assaults, and last, a good question.

The Government Is Wasting Ever More Of Your Money

We get so little for our tax dollars. And ever less.

Our government has long made us pay so much in taxes, fees, fines ($300 for walking my dog off-leash in an empty park?), etc for labyrinthine, wildly overlapping and redundant government bureaucracies, billion-dollar non-responses to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, wildly bloated space programs, and boondoggles like bridges to nowhere, $85 hammers, billions in Medicare and other fraud, government "businesses" that despite massive spending, go bankrupt (e.g., Amtrak, the Post Office, Medicare, and Social Security). And don't get me started on the endless pork-barrel spending: for example, The Big Dig, which cost you and me $14.6 billion to move a 3.5-mile road underground. (Tip O' Neill got it funded while he was House Speaker.)

Incomprehensibly, the waste of our money is accelerating, which can only mean higher taxes and/or printing more money, which endangers our future. We're broke and if China calls in our debt, we're finished). Especially at risk will be our children and grandchildren. And lest this sound like catastrophizing, a bond rating agency in China has already lowered the U.S.'s credit rating!

If you had control of your tax dollars, would you spend on these current mammoth-ticket items that the people you've elected are now spending your money on:

• A trillion dollars to invade and try to prop up a developing nation,Iraq.
• Enormous sums to do the same in Afghanistan.
• "Investing" in alternative energy schemes that have been rejected by every energy country in America. If such investments had a reasonable chance of paying off, even if it took a decade, at least one leading company would invest in it. Yet, with our tax dollars, the government chooses to invest in these "sloppy seconds," which the working and middle class, which pays the most painful share of taxes, wonders how they'll find the money to pay the rent. Examples: solar energy, without tax subsidies would die because they're simply never going to be cost effective. Another example: ethanol. The government gives huge taxpayer-paid subsidies to corporations like Archer Daniels Midland to grow more corn for ethanol, which lowers our gas mileage, gums up our engines, and, net, saves no energy. (Not to mention drives up food costs worldwide--which most affects the poor and starving.)
  
• Extending unemployment checks to 99 weeks, almost two years. Nearly every one of my career counseling clients who are on unemployment admit that each extension demotivates them from looking for work.
  
• The $814 billion "stimulus" package. President Obama promised that the unemployment rate would not exceed 8 percent. Well, 18 months later, it's 9.5%, and at least double that if you count the people who have become so discouraged that they're not even looking for work. And the percentage of people who are underemployed is additionally enormous. And liberals speak of the need of yet more tax dollars for Son of Stimulus?! That stimulus would, yes, rebuild some roads. But again, with so many people un- and underemployed, worrying about how they'll pay the rent, the government wants to take their money and repave a road, or as one Midwesterner said, "Replace an old traffic light with a new one?"
  

We desperately need legislators who would be as prudent with your money as they'd be with their own.

We Are All So Damn Fallible

If something's excellent, there's nothing to fix. So I tend to look for problems.

In recent years, I've trained my sights on the U.S. government's failings:

• Going into such great debt that we've mortgaged our children's future, with China the main bank that will decide whether to modify our loan or leave us hanging.
• How despite repeatedly being told, the government let Bernie Madoff rip off billions of dollars from people. How despite being repeatedly told of dangerous conditions in a peanut processing plant, the warnings were ignored. How despite the Christmas bombers' father credibly warning the CIA about his son, he was allowed to fly--while the government spends a fortune to screen all of us at airports. The most recent report said that despite spending billions, we are utterly vulnerable to terrorist attacks, especially biological.
• The major federal "entitlement" programs: Social Security and Medicare teeter on the brink of bankruptcy despite ever increasing funding from us.
• Since the Korean War more than a half century ago, the big mighty U.S. military has a poor won-loss record let alone cost-benefit record: Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan. We can't even capture the person we say is our highest priority: Osama Bin Ladin.
• Our public schools, despite our spending ever more, near the world's top in per capita spending, are near the bottom in international comparisons of student achievement. The main way we seem to be able to reduce the racial achievement gap is by stunting Whites' and Asians' achievement rather than by improving Blacks' and Latinos'.

Yet my friend Warren Farrell made an on-point criticism of me: He urged me to come to grips with the fallibility of the human condition--that there is ample fallibility not just in government but in nonprofits and for-profits, as well as, of course, in individuals. I also need to remind myself that the world simply hasn't been around long enough for us to solve many problems: for example, cancer, slow learners, and getting the warrior to resolve conflict peacefully.

I'm trying to be more accepting of the human condition.

The New Ideas the Republicans Need

It's widely agreed that to avoid becoming irrelevant, the Republican Party needs new ideas, better ones than the Democrats'.

If I were drafting the Republican Party's platform, these would be its central planks:

Schools and colleges must issue a report card on themselves. Today, schools and especially colleges get away with terrible-quality teaching and have essentially no accountability to students. Every school and college should be required to prominently issue a report card on itself (spot-checked by government) to prospective students and their parents. The School Report Card would report (on an A to F scale):

• How much growth in reading, math, thinking, etc. its students make--broken out by initial achievement level.

• Graduation rate. The report released two days ago by the American Enterprise Institute shows the shockingly low percentage of college freshmen who graduate if even given six(!) years--it averages only 53% across so-called four-year colleges, but even that is misleadingly high because the most selective 100 of the nation's 1600 "four-year" colleges have extraordinarily high graduation rates--because they accept mainly superstar students.
  

• The results of a customer satisfaction survey, in which students (and in the case of K-12 students, parents) rate the quality of the school's teachers, curriculum, campus climate, and extracurricular activities.
  

That Report Card would end up doing more to improve American education's quality than all the blue-ribbon panels and massive spending we currently force onto the taxpayer. For example, a school or college knowing that its poor results will be prominently posted on its website, will feel greater pressure to improve. Another example: The government continues increasing the amount of taxpayer-paid grants and loans to college students. That merely allows colleges to raise tuition more. They colleges correctly calculate, "Now the students have more money. We can raise tuition." We give the colleges all of that taxpayer money while requiring less accountability from them than we require of tire manufacturers, which must mold into each tire's sidewall, its tread life, traction, and temperature rating.

The New Republicans will create a nation of entrepreneurs. If we're being honest, American manufacturing and even most services will never be able to compete with low-cost countries such as China and India. And businesses need ever fewer and fewer locally based knowledge workers, creatives, and leaders, in part because ever more work product can be transmitted over the Internet and because services such as GotoMeeting, WebEx, and Skype are making worldwide virtual corporations ever more viable. Sure, short-term, our tax dollars can create government jobs for such workers but with other countries successfully competing with us, there will be fewer tax dollars to pay those government workers.

The only way to create sustainable, good jobs is to create new, important products and services. And key to that is entrepreneurship: a nation of people trained to keep their antennae out for unmet needs and with the skills to convert those unmet needs into viable businesses, those that can make money without cutting ethical corners and which can afford to pay their workers a decent wage

The plan to create a nation of entrepreneurs has two components: 1. Make entrepreneurship a required subject in school and college. It's far more important that every high school graduate have entrepreneurial skills than that they know the use of the doppelganger, quadratic equations, stoichiometry, and the causes of the Peloponnesian Wars. 2. Increase the quantity and quality of Small Business Administration- and private-sector-offerings: business-plan and business-operations courses, and the use of current and retired successful entrepreneurs as mentors for aspiring and ongoing entrepreneurs.

True Freedom. Republicans like to paint their party as the party of freedom yet many want to restrict women's rights to choose if and when to have a baby and whether gay people have the right to marry. Internationally, the Republicans (as well as many Democrats) tend to meddle in countries that choose to have a government it doesn't like--whether Latin American countries on the left or right-wing regimes in the Middle East. The New Republicans must respect that it is not their way or the highway. They need to honor the libertarian wing of its party so that it is not hypocritical when it calls itself the party of freedom.

Health care is a right but the same level of health care is not a right. I believe that, by virtue of being human, everyone is entitled to basic health care: preventive and routine diagnosis and treatment by a nurse or nurse practitioner not of one's choice, expensive specialist-physicians and treatments only when clearly cost-effective, etc. If you pay--whether fee-for-service or into a new single-payer government-run system--you're entitled to choose a physician, more readily get to see specialists, and have access to a fuller range of treatments, even those which, from a population-wide perspective, may not be cost-effective.

The New Republicans will treat taxpayer money as carefully as their personal money. The government, Republicans and Democrats alike, spend taxpayer dollars as though it can always print more. (Whoops, it can.) The problem is that when you print more money, each of our dollars are worth less, so we have less buying power, our savings are worth less, and our children's future is mortgaged. And if we keep diving deeper into debt, America's credit-worthiness withers, which means that the mammoth cost of servicing our debt will continue to grow and eventually no one (read, China) will lend to us.

The New Republican Party must treat taxpayer money as if it were its personal money. That means fewer and more tightly-budgeted projects, and importantly, requiring good evidence of cost-benefit before spending. For example, the Democrats are massively funding efforts to control global climate with little regard to cost-effectiveness. So many respected climate scientists remain uncertain that even the unimaginably expensive efforts and painful restrictions being enacted and contemplated will make much difference. Too little attention is being paid to cost-benefit and risk-reward. You and I don't go into great debt on wildly expensive, risky schemes. Neither should the government with our tax dollars.

What do you think? If you were drafting the planks of a new Republican platform, would you include the aforementioned? What changes would you make in them?