The Reagan-Rush Red Herring

© 2010 Dan Litwin

July 16^th, 2010

Rush Limbaugh says over and over that cutting taxes will get the economy going. And while we certainly need to pursue lower taxes, this continued call, made by Rush and inspired by Ronald Reagan, fails to demand what we really need.

Rarely is the call made for what would unleash the real power of our economy.

Over and over, we hear the “tax cut” mantra, which at this point seems to have succeeded only in getting Republicans elected. It’s almost Orwellian.

So what would unleash our economy? What could save America from ruin?

Simple:

We need to close down most Federal agencies.

We have more than enough regulations at the state and local level.

Cutting taxes is not enough. We need to gut the Federal government.

Why should we have national rules, when we already have state and local ones?

Why three levels of control?

We need freedom at some level: the highest level.

The Effect of Federal Agencies

America has so many regulations that a healthy economy is, well, illegal.

You cannot move in America - you cannot breath - without a license.

You cannot compete with foreigners because of mandated costs.

On the other hand, you can be sure that if you build a successful small business, you’ll be surprised at the severity of your taxes (having to pay the employer’s part of Social Security and Medicare, for example; an extra 7.5 % from dollar one).

You can also be sure that if you build a successful large business, you will be sued time and again even if you did nothing wrong. And that it will cost you.

America is now a lousy place to do business (like much of the world).

This is the cause of unemployment.

The Red Herring

Republican Party leaders, as you may have noticed, are not interested in giving up their power. We should not be surprised. History has shown that those in power don’t seek to reduce that power.

But Republican Party leaders must be very grateful that for 30 years Reagan and Rush have given them something to promise you (those tax cuts) so that they can sweep their other legislative actions under the rug. Something to keep the focus off of their continuously increasing level of power.

Their single-minded rhetorical focus on tax cuts is what I have named The Reagan-Rush Red Herring.

And once again, don't get me wrong. I'm all for lowering taxes to more respectful levels. But that’s not even half of the picture.

Until we cut the spending, which Reagan gave up on, and about which Rush Limbaugh rarely speaks, we're finished.

Absolute Power, Absolute Corruption

During their decades of tax cuts, Reagan and most Republicans, for example, quietly ignored the Constitution’s 10^th Amendment, and helped “those other guys” load mountains of Federal rules on top of what the cities, counties and states already regulated.

We’re under way too many levels of authority.

In response, should we simplify things by repealing the state and local rules? And just have Federal rules?

No! That would ignore the fact that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We should never have allowed Federal involvement in our lives to begin with. Not in education, not in business, not in medicine, or land use, or crime control, or any other internal affair of the citizens of the US.

Where regulations make sense, they must be decentralized:

Unlimited Federal power is the clearest of excesses. (Don’t even get me started on the concept of world government. Humans are too seriously flawed. None are capable of handling such power. If you think corruption is bad now, realize that world government would be an order of magnitude worse.)

Just say “No”

If your city, county, and state governments all agree that something ought to be legal, then to heck with Washington, DC and the UN. Corrupt, far-away know-it-alls have no business pushing us around.

What is freedom, after all, if entities as large as the 50 US states are not allowed to differ from one another?

How destructive are Federal regulations?

I'd say that even without a tax cut, if all clearly unconstitutional Federal agencies were closed, this economy would soar because we'd be so much freer to hire, to manufacture, to buy, and to sell.

Actually, (just for fun) I'd bet that we could go so far as to keep paying the federal employees whose agencies had been closed, and the economy would still soar. The point is that their agencies would be closed, and we'd be free of the burden of complying with their extra layer of regulations.

“Let my people go."

Close the endless federal regulatory agencies. Give their former employees a year of pay while they look for another job in the rapidly expanding economy that would quickly result. Let them swim.

Let us breath.

And Rush...

Please stop talking of tax cuts as a serious, lone solution.