With much fanfare including a photo op away from the nation’s capital, GOP congressional leaders rolled out their “Pledge to America,” which includes all the images (Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, small businesses, town hall meetings and of course the American flag) to invoke a warm and fuzzy feeling among the electorate who appear ready to vote overwhelming for Republicans in the midterm elections.
The Pledge invokes the stirring words in the Declaration of Independence and assures the American people that the GOP will abide by the limitations placed on the federal government by the Constitution.
With this document, we pledge to dedicate ourselves to the task of reconnecting our highest aspirations to the permanent truths of our founding by keeping faith with the values our nation was founded on, the principles we stand for, and the priorities of our people. This is our Pledge to America.
We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored – particularly the Tenth Amendment, which grants that all 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.
So far so good. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
The Pledge soon contains the following huge red flag that every fiscal conservative, limited government advocate should recoil against.
Instead of pushing off our long-term fiscal challenges, we will reform this budget process to ensure that Congress begins making the decisions that are necessary to protect our entitlement programs for today’ seniors and future generations (emphasis added.)
In other words, the GOP leadership wants to maintain the welfare state. The GOP wants to continue the federal government’s two gargantuan Ponzi schemes, Social Security and Medicare.
The Pledge does not acknowledge that the redistribution of income, especially the intergenerational transfer of income, is not one of our founding values. And The Pledge certainly fails to point out that the federal government is not authorized to create a retirement program or pay for the health care of seniors or any other demographic group.
Although The Pledge rightfully criticizes Obamacare as a gross intrusion by the federal government in the people’s health care decisions and calls for repeal of the government’s takeover of health care, the GOP is responsible for expanding Medicare with a drug prescription program. (There is no call in The Pledge to eliminate Bush’s entitlement scheme.) For the GOP leadership, only Republican welfare state initiatives are fiscally responsible while Democratic welfare programs are objectionable.
The Pledge makes perfunctory criticism of government regulation and bailouts, calls for the end of health care mandates on small businesses, and promises to end waste and fraud in the federal government. The Pledge also assures us it will rein in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two organizations that helped create the housing bubble.
However, The Pledge is unsurprisingly silent on how the Federal Reserve’s policies have contributed to the destabilization of our economy by manipulating interest rates and causing the cycle of boom and bust. In short, The Pledge sends a strong signal to the financial elite that it will not end the Fed’s irresponsible printing of money if the GOP takes control of one or both houses of Congress. Both the GOP and the Democrats want to continue the unconscionable easy money polices of the Fed. (That means the U.S. dollar will continue to decline in value against hard assets for the foreseeable future.)
Also troubling is The Pledge’s call for more war and open ended military expenditures. The GOP still supports preemptive war, ignoring the huge cost to the American people of the Bush and now Obama goal of nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The GOP leaders are refusing to admit what the American people have concluded, namely, that the invasion of Afghanistan was not worth it and that our nation’s foreign policy has caused and will continue to cause “blowback.”
In sum, the GOP embraces the welfare-warfare in spite of its rhetoric about liberty, free enterprise, limited government, individual responsibility, etc.
A Pledge to America that would incorporate the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the governing rules outlined in the Constitution would be short and to the point.
The federal government is committed to establishing only the departments and agencies that are authorized in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Consequently, we pledge to phase out the following cabinet departments: agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, housing and urban development, interior, transportation, and thousands of agencies and bureaus that regulate unnecessarily virtually every aspect of human activity.
We also pledge to replace the fiat dollar with money that can not be debased by the government or by a government agency that also has the power to manipulate interest rates.
We believe in freedom and liberty and self government. We also believe George Washington was correct when he stated in his Farwell Address that America should have friendship and commerce with all nations.
We believe in community solutions to human problems. To that end, we believe that nonprofit institutions are the best equipped to address the issues that local residents care about.
We pledge to the American people that our commitment to the ideals of this nation is real and not an election year gimmick. We will work tirelessly to return to the country to the Sprit of ’76. We will do so as quickly as possible without regard to the outcry in the media, the talking heads on television and the special interests who have used you, the taxpayers, as their personal piggy bank.
With your continued support for a free enterprise economy, a society based on individual liberty and a desire to live in a peaceful and prosperous global community, we pledge to cut your taxes, phase out unconstitutional spending and regulations, so the legacy of our Founding Fathers will be realized.