Newt Gingrich: Rick Perry's book "almost came too late" [Foreward to "Fed Up!"]

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.

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.

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.

The Left's willful ignorance of the historical record concerning principles and policies that work is not limited to Texas. The Left also ignores the success of the Contract with America Congress from just fifteen years ago.

Beginning in 1995, after the Republicans gained the majority in both Houses of Congress, the policies generated by the Contract with America set out to put America back on the road to prosperity and keep it there.

Among the historic accomplishments of this Congress were congressional accountability, welfare reform, fewer regulations, the lowest increase in federal spending since the 1920s, the first tax cuts in sixteen years, and the first four consecutive balanced budgets (reducing the public debt by over $400 billion) since the 1920s.

The federal deficit went from $107.4 billion in 1996 to a $125.6 billion surplus in 1999. During that time, unemployment dropped 1.4 percent, from 5.6 to 4.2 percent, with the creation of 8.4 million new jobs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) rose 140 percent, from 3,834 to 9,213, between January 1995 and January 1999.

By comparison, since 2008, the Democrat-controlled Congress has added an astonishing $4.6 trillion to the public debt, including $1.6 trillion in 2010 alone. Nearly 7 million jobs have been destroyed under the Pelosi-Reid Congresses between January 2007 and June 2010. Unemployment has risen 4.9 percent, from 4.6 to 9.5 percent. And would be 10.4 percent if it included discouraged workers, those individuals who are unemployed but are not actively seeking employment, usually because they have had no success finding a job after searching for a long time. The total number of unemployed and underemployed workers in July 2010 stood at an astonishing 26 million. Between January 2007 and August 2010, the DJIA dropped 1,823 points.

During the 1990s, at the same time that the Republicans were cutting taxes, we were also cutting spending. As a share of the gross domestic product (GDP), federal spending fell from 20.2 percent in fiscal year 1996 to 18.5 percent in FY 1999. But even as the economy grew dramatically from 1994 to 1999, federal revenue as a percentage of GDP actually increased. That is, even with lower taxes and a higher GDP, more money came into the federal treasury.

The Pelosi-Reid Congresses have increased spending as a share of the GDP from 20.7 percent in FY 2008 to 25.4 percent in FY 2010, the highest since it spiked in FY 1945, at the end of World War II. Between FY 2007 (the last Republican budget) and FY 2011 Congress has increased spending by a total of $1.105 trillion.

Since World War II, the average duration of a recession had been ten months, with the longest lasting sixteen months. July 2010 marked thirty-one months since the current recession began, and we're still losing jobs. Yet despite this fact, the Pelosi-Reid Congress has set in motion comprehensive, across-the-board tax-rate increases for next year on both businesses and investors that will extend the downturn indefinitely.

The evidence of what works and what doesn't is empirically irrefutable, yet the ideologically stubborn Keynesians in the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress refuse to acknowledge it. They ignore both the Texas success under Governor Perry's leadership and the Contract with America success in the 1990s.

Instead of pursuing the policies that have time and again demonstrated success, the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress insist on following job-killing economic policies rather than the job-creating policies that we know work. Chief among these job-killing policies are a failed trillion-dollar stimulus package and the bound-to-fail “Obamacare.”

Unfortunately for America, the Obama administration is creating a job-killing economic system based on an ideology of centralizing power, which most people considered a failure after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These failed policies have brought us to the edge of the cliff. This gets us back to the importance of moving power away from Washington and back to the states and the local level.

For most of our history, Washington was a far-off place that had little inf1uence on the daily lives of most Americans. More recently, the federal government has usurped or seduced enormous power away from local and state governments. There are in the United States today 513,000 elected local, state, and federal officials, but only 537 are elected on the federal level, or about one-tenth of 1 percent. Yet so much power has been consolidated in the hands of federally elected officials, as well as in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and federal judges. We need to reverse this trend or we will suffer lasting consequences.

Rick has done a great service by explaining how we got here and what we can do about it. His position as governor of Texas gives him a tremendous platform for helping us change course and return to sound conservative fiscal policies. But he can't do it alone. Every American has a duty to rein in the out-of-control federal government. Fed Up! is your handbook. It will arm you with the facts so that you can inform your family, friends, and neighbors. An informed citizenry is the best tool we have in the arsenal to defend our Republic.

There are so many errors in your post regarding mechanism, effectivity, and medicine itself that you prove to FReepers that much of what you post is a pathetic joke defending pathetic losers.

There was NOTHING in my post regarding mechanism or effectivity of the medicine itself. Nor was there any defense of anybody; It's pretty amazing that you can find "errors" in stuff that is only in your own imagination. Maybe you should try imagining truthful things -- I know that would be a stretch for you, but it would save you some time.

Of course you won’t get into RISK BENEFIT issues

I never said I wouldn't get into anything; it never came up, and you certainly aren't going to talk about it.

However, HERE is the lead post of mine to a thread from 2009 where I attack Gardasil and argue Risk/Benefit in a way that might be helpful to you.

Of course you won’t get into INFORMED CONSENT issues.

Again, I never said I wouldn't get into anything; that was the one thing of everything you posted for which you made a modicum of sense, so I didn't feel it was necessary to correct you.

However, Here is an FR thread post of mine where I come closest to defending Perry, noting that his proposal allowed parents to opt out without cause; in another post in that thread, I quote from a source which specifically discusses informed consent.

Unlike you, I actually have researched this issue, and published opinion pieces opposing mandatory Gardasil vaccinations, a fact you would know if you did even the tiniest bit of research rather than just spouting off ignorantly.

I'll close with this FR post from 2009, giving my reason why I wouldn't have my kids vaccinated:: "Because the “risk” can be almost entirely controlled, while the risk of the vaccine cannot be."

I think trying to use the Gardasil argument as a disqualifying one against Perry is stupid, given the actual facts of the matter. But I'm not going to defend him against these stupid attacks. I'm simply correcting your factually inaccurate, misleading, and incomplete statements. Which itself could be a full-time job.

BTW, do you feel that way about all vaccinations, or just this one?

A good libertarian position is that the state has no right to force people to get vaccinated against their will.

However, a counter “commons” argument is that vaccination against deadly and highly communicable diseases is a way to protect the public from harm by others (while the harm would be inadvertent, it is harm one person would cause another in any case).

My argument against Gardasil wasn’t that the state has no right to make people get vaccinated, because I believe the state has some authority to maintain the “commons”, to protect each person’s life and property from harm caused by other people, in this case the spread of the disease.

Instead, my argument was that, whether Gardasil worked or not, the disease being protected against was not commonly communicable, being spread only by intimate and controllable contact.

One reason some states moved to put Gardasil on the “must-vaccinate” list was to make it available for reimbusrsement by insurance. This is a side effect of government overregulation — the government defines what things insurance “has” to cover, and one of those things is “mandatory child vaccinations”, so in order to get Gardasil covered, it had to be added to the “mandatory” list.

So it was government interference compounded by more government interference. In Virginia, some legislators felt that Gardasil was a good vaccine, and they wanted to make it available to families who desired it, and make sure it was covered by the insurance, so in what they thought was good-intentioned interference, they almost forced Gardasil on our children. Wiser heads prevailed.

During the Gardasil arguments in 2007-2009, some freepers argued against all mandatory vaccinations, which as I said is a different, more libertarian argument.

You are a RomneyBOT who works for FASCIST STATISM
and control of children and adults by Romney and Perry.

The NET Benefit of a medical treatment is

NET BENEFIT = (Risk with NO treatment)*(the net benefit of the treatment) - (The risk of harm).
Now the total incidence of cervical cancer was
given above (post #5), and the risk of harm is
still ongoing and increasing.

Bottom line: You care as little for the people afflicted by
Perry's RINO-Gardasilism as you do for those afflicted
by YOUR Master's RomneyCARE.

Go change the subject all you want
just the way that you always defend Romney and Obama.

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