“A contrived phony mess.” Perry’s got that right. I guess Newt has forgotten he wrote the forward to the book when he rushed to agree with Nancy and get cosy on the couch with her.
He did write the forward to the book, did he not? Or one of Perry’s books.
Newt is as flighty and grandiose as ever.
I wish this book had never needed to be written.
It almost came too late.
America is recklessly accelerating toward economic disaster. Fed Up! may be the last warning sign to the danger that lies ahead.
Rick Perry, Texas governor for the past decade, is uniquely qualified to offer a firsthand perspective on why the United States—the most successful civilization in human history—is being threatened with economic collapse.
First Principles
Faith, freedom, and free enterprise are the pillars of a strong, safe, prosperous society. Rick knows that when these principles are protected, America succeeds, and when they are undermined, America fails. But the Left has a different belief. The Left believes that most people are not capable of pursuing happiness and that a strong centralized government is best able to provide for them. While claiming compassion for humanity, the Left's policies are destructive to the human beings subject to them—as we have had to learn painfully again and again.
The Left's self-serving solution to every crisis, economic or otherwise, and many of their own doing, is always the same: inflict higher taxes on Americans to create more government programs with more rules and regulations that result in less freedom, less innovation, less safety, and less prosperity.
The problem with the Left’s one solution, as Rick forcefully explains in the pages that follow, is that it doesn't work. It's never worked, and it never will work. The record shows it.
But what the record also shows is that when power and freedom are returned to the people, when people are rewarded for work, and when government holds the line on spending, individuals and opportunity thrive. We have seen that result most spectacularly recently in Texas, and in the mid-1990s with the Contract with America Congress, when I served as Speaker of the House.
The Texas Record
Upon taking office, President Barack Obama repeatedly said that he was open to ideas on health care policy and on reversing the economic crisis. But he had to look no further than Texas to see ideas and policies that work.
Texas has no state income tax, no capital gains tax, and no tax on corporate dividends. In contrast, California taxes all three. It has the highest state income tax rates in the nation, with a top rate of 10.3 percent and with most income earners paying 9.3 percent. The California sales tax stands at 8.25 percent. In Texas, the state sales tax rate is 6.25 percent. With both the highest personal income tax and the highest state sales tax in the nation, California also has the largest budget deficit of any state.
Texas has economically outperformed California by any measure. Since 1998, economic growth in Texas has been nearly 20 percent higher than it is in California. Since the end of the tech boom, the rate of real economic growth in Texas has been 48.5 percent higher than in California. From 1998 to 2007, personal income in Texas grew 21 percent faster than in California. Since 2002, real personal income has grown 46 percent faster in Texas. From 2000 to 2007, California lost a net of 1.2 million residents. Texas, over the same period, gained more than half a million in interstate migration, the third highest in the country.
Prior to 2003, Texas was losing doctors at an alarming rate due to predatory practices of trial lawyers who were driving up the cost of malpractice insurance. In 2003, the Texas legislature passed a measure to limit medical liability. In that same year, a state constitutional amendment was approved by voters to cap noneconomic damages awarded by juries. These two provisions reversed the trend and improved care, accessibility, and the overall economy by making Texas a more attractive place to live, work, and own a business. Malpractice claims dropped, and physician recruitment and retention went up. Doctors saved more than $50 million on insurance premiums, and hospitals' insurance rates went down.
People in Texas, like anyone living in any state, have a choice. They can vote with their feet. Many living in California simply became fed up with their state's high taxes and regulations. Many who moved out moved to Texas, where on average they are safer, freer, and more prosperous. Competition among the states is a powerful incentive for states to keep taxes and the cost of doing business low. And as this California versus Texas example shows, conservative economic policies work and socialist policies don't.
Yet both the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress continue to ignore success stories like Texas. They are going in the opposite direction, passing a massive government takeover of health care while planning similarly massive tax increases to pay for it and for the rest of their job-killing agenda.
Now, it may not be surprising that a politician from Chicago would not naturally look to the Lone Star State for solutions. And you wouldn't expect a Texas governor to look in Illinois for answers (thankfully).
And that is precisely the point of this book. States have been called laboratories in democracy precisely because every problem potentially has fifty different approaches to solving it. Some solutions work in some states and not in others. Some states prefer some solutions over others. Some solutions may work in every state, and some just don't work at all. But the best way to find the best solutions is to allow the states to discover what works best for them, without the federal government interfering.
In today' s global economy, each state is competing not only with other states for businesses, workers, and investors but also on a global level. The fact is, with the right principles and policies, you can make any place rich, as happened in Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, the opposite applies as well. With the wrong principles and the wrong policies, you can make any place poor, as happened in Detroit. In 1950, 1.8 million people called Detroit home. It ranked first in median income of all major cities in America. But after Detroit's political leaders, ignoring the principles of freedom and free markets, governed with runaway government spending and taxes, Detroit shrank by more than half. Today, the Motor City is number 66 in median household income in a list of 68 major American cities. One-third of its residents are living below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate is the highest of any major metropolitan area in the country.