Last weekend Mitt Romney spoke to a friendly, Conservative audience at CPAC.  This was an opportunity for him to explain in detail his governing philosophy and Presidential agenda.  He would face no gotcha questions from the media, no debate jabs from adversaries, and no time limits imposed by the TV news demand for eight second soundbites.

So he should have been able to make a perfect speech, perfectly in line with Conservative principles.  Unfortunately he didn’t quite pull it off.

He began with stirring references to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.  Here’s a sample:

For three years we’ve suffered the pain not only of a weak leader but a bankrupt ideology…But it’s not enough to show how they failed.  we also have to prove how we will and deserve to lead…Now is the time to reaffirm what it means to be Conservative.  The very heart of American Conservatism is the conviction that the principles embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are uniquely powerful foundational and defining…

Good start.  While public education abandoned serious instruction in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence decades ago, millions of Americans have recently begun reading them and, inevitably, found themselves shocked by the gulf separating the limited government chartered by the Constitution and the government of nearly unlimited power wielded by Barack Obama.

Conservatives all agree that departing from these founding principles would represent a departure from the greatness of America, from our mission, from our freedom, from our prosperity, from our purpose.

What’s that?  “Departing would represent…”? Conservatives agree that the government began departing from the founding principles a century ago.  The rate of departure has only accelerated under the Obama Administration.  It’s too late to warn of a potential departure.  It’s time to turn the ship of state 180 degrees and set course on reconnecting with those principles.

My state was the leading indicator of what liberals were trying to do across the country and what they’re doing now.  And I fought against long odds in a deep blue state but I was a severely Conservative Republican governor.

Democrats and media commentators think Conservatives are “severe.”  But a genuinely Conservative candidate hoping for Conservative support ought to realize that it isn’t “severe” to limit the power of government.  It’s almost as if Romney were trying to play the part of a Conservative and and finding it  difficult to adjust to an alien culture, like a Hollywood liberal actor playing a military hero.

Eighteen minutes into a 26 minute speech Mr. Romney finally began to talk about his policy goals

Today we borrow 40 of every dollar we spend.  This is unconscionable, immoral, and it will end in my Presidency.  I will approach every spending decision, every budget item with these questions: Can we afford it and if not is it really worth borrowing money from China to pay for it.

Romney hopes to appeal to Conservatives’ emotions with what seems like…well… “severe” and decisive criteria for sorting worthy from unworthy spending.   Unfortunately it’s meaningless because each of the hundreds of federal programs has a lobbyist, a constituency of dependents, and friends in Congress who will summon up compelling, emotion-driven reasons why it simply can’t be cut or eliminated.  Thus, Romney’s criteria will not shrink government, and will not result in any significant change from Obama’s policies.

Since he began his speech referring to the The Founders vision, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he should end the speech by proposing a shift from continuously growing government to continuously shrinking government, with a goal to be reached over time of a federal government that no longer does anything not authorized by the Constitution.

The founders gave these matters a lot of thought and wrote a Constitution limiting the powers of government to a very few that were “enumerated” in Article I, Section 8.  After the Constitution was ratified by the states and became the law of the land many citizens expressed fear that the government would overreach and take on powers not enumerated.  So the founders followed up two years later with the Tenth Amendment to make sure there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that…

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The problem today is that over the past century the government has assumed upon itself myriad powers and functions not authorized by the Constitution.  That’s why it’s running trillion dollar deficits.  That’s why the current President is not popular.  That’s why the economy is not recovering.

The best campaign promise Romney or any candidate could make would be to start phasing out or canceling  Unconstitutional programs in an orderly fashion, shrinking government back to it’s core Constitutional functions within a specified number of years.

Operation Desert Storm, the Gulf War began January 17, 1991.  Ten days later Whitney Houston thrilled America with an incomparable performance of the Star Spangled Banner to open Super Bowl XXV

After the 9-11 terrorist attacks Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously said:

I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say: September 11th we are all Americans – in grief, as in defiance.

The Administration recently announced an ObamaCare commandment that every health plan, paid for by every employer, must provide sterilizations and contraception, including abortifacients, or drugs that induce abortion, without any co-payment, or as the naive media put it “free” to the insured employee.

America’s Catholic Bishops are defiant, insisting that the regulation violates Church doctrine and they will not accept this application of brute, government force.  They publicly refused to pay for these drugs and procedures through health plans provided to employees of Catholic hospitals, charities, schools, etc.

As Netanyahu and his people stood in defiance with Americans after 9-11, all Americans should stand in defiance with the Catholic Church against this government dictum, even if we are not Catholic or don’t agree with their positions on these drugs and procedures.

Progressives like Barack Obama are scornful of individual liberty.  They believe laws and regulations that enforce the opinions of “experts” can make us all better than we can be on our own.  The Constitution used to protect Americans from arbitrary and excessive application of force by an imperious President.  But after a century of adverse precedent, approved by corrupt Supreme Court Justices, modern Presidents and Congresses largely ignore the Constitution’s limits on their power.

The gradual degradation of the Constitution has culminated in ObamaCare which requires all employers to provide health plans or pay a fine, and requires all health plans to conform to the terms dictated by the government.   Employees exchange their labor for wages and benefits and thus pay for health insurance.  No matter who you are, regardless of your gender or religious beliefs, or lack of beliefs there will be something in that mandatory, government health plan you don’t need or don’t want and would not voluntarily pay for.  But, like the Catholics, you will be required to pay for it anyway.

Inevitably, there will be more requirements imposed by government because “experts” will determine them neecessary to “save health care dollars by keeping us healthier.”  There will be bans or restrictions on certain foods, perhaps even recreational activities, or high school sports where there is a risk of injury.

By protesting the Unconstitutional mandates in ObamaCare the Bishops serve the cause of liberty for all of us.  We will all benefit from their courageous defiance of authoritarian government mandates, implemented by using force against the people.

Today, the President showed some defiance of his own.  Accompanied by HHS Secretary and de facto ObamaCare Czar Kathleen Sebelius he stepped to the cameras to announce what White House officials had told reporters would be a “compromise” between the goal of the regulation and Catholic doctrines.

In his statement Obama displayed his contempt for the intelligence of all Americans.  He said that all women would still be guaranteed “free” contraceptives, but if a woman worked for a Catholic hospital, school or charity…

…the insurance company, not the hospital, not the charity will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge.

Obviously an insurance company can not provide anything “free of charge.”  The company pays for everything it provides out of premiums it collects from employers.  So this is just bunkum.  It’s political double-speak, or as a church spokesman called it, an accounting gimmick.

If Obama can be believed and the insurance company will indeed “reach out” it means that the only women in America who will be offered these drugs and procedures without formally requesting them, the only women who will instead be contacted by the company, will be those who work for the Catholics!

UPDATE

On Friday afternoon The US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a written statement in response to President Obama’s announcement.  The key word is “unacceptable.” You can read the full statement here.  Here’s an excerpt:

…we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected.

And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters.

The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

Political communication in America is largely an effort to influence the perceptions of those who pay little attention to politics by stripping complex concepts and issues down to easily understood  statistics and simplistic soundbites.  In each of his first 33 months in office President Obama suffered because the easily understood Unemployment Rate remained very high.   But over the past four months it fell from 9% to 8.3% and Obama and his media supporters are making the most of it.  They tell us the economy has improved so much it is no longer an election issue and the President is no longer at risk of losing.

But it turns out that the Unemployment Rate statistic is misleading.  It turns out that another statistic, the “Labor Force Participation Rate” has also declined. [Continued below the chart]

• The Labor Force is the sum of all persons who have jobs plus all who are officially classified as “unemployed.”
• The unemployment rate is computed by dividing the number of unemployed by the the labor force.
• The labor force participation rate is the percentage of all working age adults who are officially counted as “in the labor force.”

Today, there are millions of people who want jobs but don’t qualify as “unemployed” by meeting government criteria and are thus counted as “not in the labor force.”  We know this to be true because, as the chart shows, the participation rate has steadily declined for three years.  Excluding people from the labor force artificially lowers the unemployment rate.

The chart above shows that the decline in the unemployment rate coincides with a decline in the labor force participation rate.  The next chart shows what would have happened to the unemployment rate if the labor force participation rate had not not changed since the beginning of 2009.  [Continued below the chart]

The last chart below tracks labor force participation and unemployment during the Reagan Administration.  The labor force grew by 9% or 15.5 million people during the Reagan years.  Participation grew from 63.9% to 66.1%.   This chart is the picture of successful economic policies that increased liberty and decreased taxes and government intervention in the economy.  Millions of new people entered the labor force but after the severe Recession Reagan inherited the unemployment rate declined because employers were able to replace all the jobs lost in the recession and hire the millions of people who entered the labor force.  Reagan’s unemployment rate was not artificially reduced by excluding millions from of the labor force calculation and he was rewarded with reelection to a second term by the largest Electoral College landslide in American history.

In August 1984 Ronald Reagan spoke to an ecumenical prayer breakfast in Dallas, Texas.  Here’s an excerpt:

We’ve been hearing a lot about religion and it’s role in politics, its place in the political life of the nation.  I think it’s appropriate that this issue be addressed.  I don’t speak as a theologian or schollar, only as one who as lived a little more than his three score and ten, which has been an annoyance to some…

We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever.  We command no worship.  We mandate no belief.  But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings.  We court corruption when we leave it bereft of belief.  All are free to believe or not believe; all are free to practice a faith or not.  But those who believe must be free to speak of and act on their belief, to apply moral teaching to public questions.

I submit to you that the tolerant society is open to and encouraging of all religions.  And this does not weaken us; it strengthens us…

Without God, there is no virtue, because there’s no prompting of the conscience.  Without God, we’re mired in the material, that flat world that tells us only what the senses perceive.  Without God, there is a coarsening of the society.  And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.  If we ever forget that we’re One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

President Obama used the National Prayer Breakfast to attempt to persuade Christians and Jews that our beliefs obligate us to support his politics and the godless religion of progressivism with its irrational faith in the power of large, bureaucratic, administrative government to make the people better.

After briefly acknowledging the benefits of “turning to our Creator, listening to him” the President blessed the assembled Pastors, Priests, Rabbis and lay leaders with a snippet from his 2012 campaign script:

This is especially important right now, when we’re facing some big challenges as a nation. Our economy is making progress as we recover from the worst crisis in three generations, but far too many families are still struggling to find work or make the mortgage, pay for college, or, in some cases, even buy food…

Those who listen to the Creator do indeed hear that believers who are in a position to help the needy should do so, but at all times, not just when the economy is so weak an incumbent President’s reelection is at risk.  As Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” even when GDP is way up and unemployment is way down.

And when I talk about shared responsibility, it’s because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it’s hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone.  And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense.  But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’ teaching that “for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.”

When Obama speaks of  “tax breaks” in this context he means the current tax rate schedule with it’s 35% top bracket, enacted in 2003, during the hated Bush Administration.  For eight years Democrats have relentlessly demanded a return to the pre-Bush schedule with it’s 39.6% top bracket.  To support his demand for higher taxes Obama cited part of Jesus’ words from Luke 12, verse 48:

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

But Jesus was not talking about income tax rates.  This sentence is at the end of a lengthy discussion of the responsibilities of the disciples and other believers regarding not their income or wealth, (they had little) but their knowledge of the teachings of Jesus.  More would be required of those who had greater knowledge and understanding.  Indeed, After Jesus ascended into Heaven the disciples faithfully devoted the remainder of their lives to spreading the gospel.  At least four eventually died as martyrs, executed by stoning or crucifiction.

Jesus never once used the term “tax breaks.”  He never called for higher taxes on anyone.  He did not call for government to apply force to collect funds to help the needy.  He did exhort us all as individuals, regardless of income to personally help the poor and needy, voluntarily, with gifts and with our time and effort.

While government operates by segmenting the people into income brackets Christianity treats everyone, from richest to poorest  the same, by asking for a tithe, or 10% of income.   Those who can are encouraged -  not required – to give more and experience more of the joy of giving.

Christianity is a voluntary faith.  Jesus does not want any force or coercion used on his behalf.   In fact government undermines God’s plan for joyous giving and grateful receiving by applying it’s impersonal, administrative formulae to identify some as entitled by law to receive and others as required by law to provide.  The receiver feels no gratitude and the giver is deprived of the joy one should experience from voluntarily helping.

Do prominent politicians tithe?

At Liberty Works we’re reluctant to report data from the news media.  We try to draw from original sources to ensure accuracy.   We’ve done a good bit of Internet searching and so far have been able to find copies of actual tax returns only for Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingirch.  Here’s what we found:

• President Obama’s 2010 tax return shows charitable contributions at 6% of his $5.5 million in income.
• Vice President Biden’s 2010 tax return shows income of $337,370 including $28,000 in Social Security benefits.  His charitable contributions were 1.43%, or $3,920 in cash plus donations of “shoes, clothing, furniture and dishes” to Goodwill with a declared value of $900.
• Newt Gingrich’s 2011 tax return shows $3.2 million in income.  He did not collect Social Security even though he’s old enough to be eligible for benefits.  His charitable contributions were $81,233 or 2.57%.  However, Gingrich also has a charitable foundation and part of his book royalties and speaking fees were paid directly to the foundation, without passing through his personal taxes.  So, we can’t tell how much he gave in total.
• Mitt Romney’s return shows donations of $2.9 million or about 13% of his income.

From various media reports we found the following, which we can not confirm:

• In 2005 Vice President Dick Cheney gave 78% of his income to charity
• In 2007 George W. Bush gave 18%.
• In 2007 Bill and Hillary Clinton gave 9.34%
• In 2006 John McCain gave 25%

Facing voters who are anxious about the government’s unprecedented deficits and debt President Obama seeks to portray himself – falsely – as a spending cutter.  He and the Democrats have decided it’s time to focus on the military budget.  Their campaign rhetoric is familiar:

• “The growing deficits are caused by ever increasing cost of the military and two wars.”
• “The immense military, bigger than [fill in the blank] causes most of the deficit.”
• “Military spending crowds out ‘investments’ in our people.”
• “Over time, Military spending has grown and grown to the point that we can no longer afford it.”

The chart compares the cost, over time, of National Defense to the cost of entitlements.

Government accountants include veterans’ benefits in the entitlement category, but we believe they belong in the military category.

The chart demonstrates that Obama’s campaign slogans are simply false, that the major growth segment of the federal government over the past half-century has been social programs.  Most of the social programs that now consume more than 65% of federal spending were created after 1960.  As spending grew each year to pay for ever expanding benefit programs the fraction of the total spent on National Defense, the federal government’s most fundamental responsibility decreased sharply.

Congress has recently enacted two bills that together call for almost $1 trillion in cuts to defense spending over ten years.  Maybe that’s the right amount.  Maybe it isn’t.  The problem is they did not begin with a review of military budget line items to discover those that might be unnecessary.  They began with a dollar amount to be cut, based on political considerations.

Anyone who has served in the military probably remembers seeing some waste.  I certainly do.  But the current, politically inspired drive doesn’t even attempt to identify waste.  It begins with a reduction in the number of soldiers and Marines.  Apparently there will be layoffs.

The chart compares  GDP growth in recent quarters with the first ten quarters of the decade of strong economic growth, prosperity and job creation that began after President Reagan’s 1982 tax cuts and deregulation initiatives.

In the forth quarter (October, November, December) of 2011 Gross Domestic Product, the value of all the goods and services the economy produced, rose 2.8%, the Commerce Department reported on Friday. This was better than the previous three quarters, but compared to typical post recession recovery periods it was disappointing at best.

Over the past 50 years quarterly growth has averaged 3.2% but has always been above average during the initial quarters of recovery from recession.  This is the first post-recession period in 66 years, since the end of World War II, with such anemic growth.  The most visible result is the continuing tragedy of high unemployment.

The economy will not replace the millions of lost jobs until much more robust growth begins.

From the first day of his Administration President Obama and his advisers promised that the biggest Keynesian “stimulus” ever attempted, in the form of Trillions in deficit spending and massive government intervention in the private sector economy would somehow bring America back to prosperity.   If Keynesian stimulus worked as Obama and the progressives promised it would, America would now be enjoying prosperity with full employment and rising wages.  Instead this recovery from recession has significantly underperformed compared to previous recoveries, especially the Reagan recovery of the 1980s.  President Reagan’s strategy was to lower taxes, deregulate and allow liberty to work.

Presidents Reagan and Obama inherited recessions that were similar in their length and severity.  By objective measures, including the unemployment rate, Reagan inherited a worse crisis in the 1980s than Obama inherited in 2009.  The current recession has become worse and longer lasting than the 80s recession because of government’s massive deficits and destructive interventions into the private sector economy.

The Bottom Line

The urgent message in this GDP report  is clear.  Congress must put an immediate end to Obama’s Keynesian experiment.  As the chart shows, quarterly GDP growth is has been intolerable under the Obama-Keynesian approach.  There is no reason to believe that continuing to run massive deficits, threaten tax increases, hyper-regulate the health insurance business,  subsidize blue-sky “green” energy schemes and restrict the production of conventional energy will ever result in prosperity.

President Obama opened his angry campaign speech State of The Union message with a brief recap of events in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a prelude to cynically self-serving praise of the troops.

These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness, and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.

The troops don’t argue about their mission because the authors of the Constitution (largely scorned by Obama and the progressives) created a brilliant system of civilian control over the military so the arguments – and there are always passionate arguments about any war – take place in election campaigns and in Congress. (An exception was Obama’s Libyan operation, launched without seeking approval from Congress in order to silence dissent.)

The President skipped over the recent decade of acrimonious debates in Congress and on the campaign trail about the troops’ mission.  Indeed, Senator and Candidate Obama was one of the most bitter debaters of all, as he tried his best to bring about failure in Iraq because, as an Illinois State Senator, he had opposed the invasion.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.

Translation: Utopia is within reach if only those Obstinate Republicans (and even some Democrats) would follow orders like the troops do, and enact Obama’s sweeping agenda of government expansion and regulatory tyranny.  The speech continued:

We can do this. I know we can, because we’ve done it before. At the end of World War II, when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known.

Since the President brought it up, let’s review what happened at the end of World War II.  The American People – not the government – did indeed build the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known. [continued below the chart]

But Obama did not mention the most important fact: That economic success coincided with the most rapid downsizing of government in US history.

To pay for the war and hyper regulation of the civilian economy, federal spending had exploded from $9 billion to $91 billion in four years.  Thirteen million young men became soldiers, sailors and Marines.  Over 100,000 women also served in the military.  Millions of civilians were employed manufacturing guns, tanks, ships, aircraft, uniforms, boots, etc.

When the war was over in 1945 the government immediately ceased buying war material and quickly discharged more than ten million from military service within two years.  Federal spending dropped 68% in three years.

A 68% spending cut now would transform our trillion dollar deficits into trillion dollar surpluses!

If President Obama and today’s political-media “economists” had been there in 1945 they would have warned that any spending cuts would spell disaster for the economy, that unemployment would skyrocket.  They would have been wrong.  The number of jobs increased by 21% over the same three years.   Never before or since have job seekers enjoyed such a sudden increase in demand for their services.

A 21% increase today would be enough new jobs for:

• All of 13.1 million currently unemployed,

Plus

• All of the 6.4 million who want jobs but are not officially classified as unemployed,

Plus

• 8.2 million more!

Today’s chronic unemployment would turn into a labor shortage.  Employers would be competing for workers.

This historic surge in employment and prosperity happened before our wise overseers in Washington created any of the following to regulate our lives:

• Department of Energy
• Department of Education
• Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Department of Transportation
• Environmental Protection Agency
• New regulatory boards and commissions mandated by Dodd-Frank
• ObamaCare to dictate the coverages and terms of all health plans

Indeed, there was massive DEregulation as the wartime rationing and price controls were lifted. There was no government “investment” in politically selected energy technologies.  This was a decade before the beginning of the Interstate highway building program.

President Obama should learn from his own post World War II example that liberty, not authoritarian government intervention, brings about prosperity.

Since the beginning of his campaign in 2007 President Obama, always looking for an excuse for a tax increase, has blamed government deficits on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, claiming the were “not paid for.” But he apparently changed his position in his State of the Union address.

The government has run deficits every year since the wars began, but it has also collected some $22 trillion in revenue. This Report from the Congressional Research Service lists all the costs of the wars from 2002 through 2011, totaling $1.3 trillion.

Military operations are a core responsibility of government, specifically authorized by the Constitution.  On the other hand, the government pays for hundreds of other programs and functions that are not authorized by the Constitution.  Apparently Obama determines what is and is not “paid for” based on what is and is not consistent with his latest campaign themes.

With that criteria in mind he reversed his position on the wars in his State of the Union address:

In the next few weeks, I will sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects. But you [Congress] need to fund these projects. Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

How easy was that!  The wars weren’t paid for for ten years, but now that they’re almost over and Obama wants to pretend there is money available for a new construction initiative he acts as if the wars were  paid for.

This chart puts war spending in perspective. Assuming Constitutional functions should be paid for first, the wars were more than covered by tax revenue.

But, Obama’s deficits have been ten times as much as the annual cost of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Thus, winding down the wars can not generate funds for other purposes.  Indeed, the Administration’s own budget office projects deficits of nearly a trillion dollars every year for the next decade without any war spending.

Since his first day in office the Obama government has borrowed about 40¢ of every dollar it has spent.  We’re a very long way from a budget surplus that would generate money to pay for new spending.