We can solve the national debt and revenue crisis in America at both the State and Federal levels by simply following strategies of success utilized by many private sector employers and hundreds of thousands of small businesses. Government must reduce staff, lower salaries and wages, cut back on employee benefits, move toward a part time lower wage employee model as has private industry, restore the original U.S. tax code designed by our founding fathers, resurrect the concept of honest money and hold policy makers accountable, Which means ending sovereign immunity. Wow! I just solved our debt and deficit spending crisis, and ended government corruption in one sentence. I hope Donald Trump see's my brilliance and puts me in "The Apprentice" line up for next season. Other reforms needed to rein in big government; Stop forcing Americans to subsidize their neighbor's immoral behavior, get government out of family planning and discourage the state from interfering with parents who choose traditional parenting methods that demonstrate to children through love and discipline important life lessons like consequences for actions and reinforce the expectation that children must accept responsibility and show proper respect. These lessons can only be absorbed by children when parents have the lawful right and authority to implement historically relevant parenting tools, including corporal punishment. It's easy for me to recognize both the problem and explain the solution because I am someone who has made regular payrolls, guided a business through troubled times and raised some outstanding children. Friends often ask me what our secret is, simply put; we operate by relying on common sense and real world experience not an Ivy League pedigree. If anyone thinks that clubbing grandma over the head and stealing her social security check is the solution to our spending crisis, they would be dead wrong. Representative Paul Ryan has been in the news cycle a lot lately pushing a debt reduction concept that I guarantee will not work. He offers the same tired old mechanics of two party politics and wrongly concludes that we can grow our way out of debt by lowering selected tax rates, but only for a few secret handshake buddies in the back room, and even more ridiculous, he attempts to resolve deficits by cutting only the anticipated "GROWTH" of government, and it all happens in about ten years. What poppycock! Sorry Mr. Ryan, but President Reagan, Milton Freidman and the purist free market folks are still right. Unless government stops borrowing and spending, growing faster than the rate of inflation and micro-managing the private sector, there will be no recovery. Reagan and Freidman both believed you could grow your way out of debt, but only if government tightened it's purse strings and got out of the way of private enterprise. The Ryan plan doesn't rein in big government; it doesn't change the tax code, establish any solutions to failed monetary and fiscal policy or do anything to keep big government or the activist courts at bay. And, you can quote me, "His plan will do nothing to save Medicare". If they don't get serious.and soon, American business will take their ball, walk away and go play in someone else's sand box. It's already happening. In my opinion, the Ryan plan is DOA. President Reagan said it best when describing government as the problem. Nothing tangible has changed. The problem is still the same 30 years later, only a lot bigger. Ryan's economic plan makes no real cuts in the size or the cost of government, It primarily cuts "FUTURE" spending by robbing services from and breaking promises to hard working Americans who were forced by big government to pay-up in advance, for services they will never receive, Taking money under false pretences is a felony. Ask Bernie Madoff how it worked out for him. This is America and no man is above the law right? So who do we incarcerate over this economic and debt crisis? When government does this, I refer to it as a legal mugging. This notion of Sovereign Immunity, where folks who serve us in elected or appointed positions have legal immunity from lawsuits and are shielded from accountability, this legal cover, is in my view, pure lunacy. If people seek after power and then make poor decisions that harm innocent Americans, those who are damaged should have the right to sue the responsible parties. Sovereign Immunity protects undeserving officials from being held to account for their professional negligence and misconduct. The reason I call for this is because an individual can't seek a lawful remedy with only a single vote at the polls. Under the current system my neighbors may join in a conspiracy with a government body to take my hard earned money or property and divvy it up. I have no lawful remedy for that, It's just plain wrong. In a free country, I should have the right to sue anyone who harms me, regardless of their station or position, (excepting as penalty for criminal behavior of course). Today, Congress, legislators and assorted government goons conspire to rob you blind and force you to cough up your hard earned cash, and when their actions damage you, you can't do anything about it except sue yourself (Suing the government is the same as suing yourself). Eliminating Sovereign Immunity would mean that when elected or appointed government officials make a decision or vote in a manner that harms you, you could sue them PERSONALLY for the damages. Ending Sovereign Immunity would instantly eliminate 99% of government induced problems by forcing officials to put the people first, or else. And while they plot to further rob "We the People" of even more, take notice that they never address minimizing the burgeoning government bureaucracy which plays a major role in our current crisis. While Representative Ryan and his two party cohorts dream up schemes to steal our collective investment in that imaginary social security trust fund, (Rememberthe one they said was safe and secure in that lock box) Taxpayers are actually being thrown under the bus while government retirees and bailed out bankers run off to the tropics with our home equities, hard earned cash and our children's future. And try to contain your envy, as government bureaucrats enjoy humongous salaries, unprecedented benefits and youthful retirement (They often retire 20 or 30 years younger than the rest of us with 3 or 4 times the retirement income). Two issues surrounding the recovery effort seem to confound the experts: 1st, what happened to change the economic fundamentals that were once fairly predictable? 2nd, why hasn't anything the Federal Reserve and the government tried worked? Easy to answer really, If you put heavy taxes and regulatory burdens on business in the name of protecting the workers and the wee little critters, then you get what we have now, "outsourcing". If you cheapen the money supply and cause credit to tighten with loose fiscal policy and out of control monetary policy, business leaders will go find a new place to call home base. Millions of American jobs are gone and millions more are leaving, finding a warmer reception and a more eager, more positive work force in rapidly growing consumer economies in places like India, China, the Philippines, and in Central and South America as well. Government over-reach, activist Judges, weak fiscal and monetary policy, failed and fraudulent environmental policies, egregious energy policy, bad trade agreements like NAFTA (North American Free Trade agreement) a burdensome tax code combined with a plethora of punitive government mechanisms, these things combine to decimate the U.S. job market. If Congressman Ryan and the House, would truly partner with President Obama and the Senate to downsize big government payrolls, shifting the impetus away from robbing the people who pay taxes and create jobs and instead cut overhead and restore fiscal sanity at the human resources level of government, we just might have a fighting chance. But don't hold your breath. The concept of automating and streamlining government and moving the majority of government bureaucrats into part time positions or replacing some of them with technology and software, may seem extreme to some, but without extreme actions in the current fiscal environment we will see what's left of our fragile economy implode... We must reduce bloated, ostentatious government payrolls and benefits packages, cut way back on the number of full time bureaucrats and get real about cutting expenses. Folks can resist change if they want but they will lose in the end. Job sharing where 2 part timers take on a single full time job at less than half the wage might appear cruel and may even tick off a few government workers, but it's been a successful model for decades in the private sector, because it works. Returning America back to constitutional money and tax policy might seem radical, and maybe it is, but our founders were called radicals in their time, yet their bold and courageous contributions enabled us to achieve the highest standard of living on the planet. So I strongly suggest a little "radical" thinking might be the exact ingredient we need to revive our great nation. Breaking tradition in government hiring practices and subscribing to known models of success from the private sector would create millions of new part and full time jobs in government and the private sector, thus easing the unemployment problem virtually overnight. In the end the burden on taxpayers would be far less, a pool of new and talented bureaucrats would grow out of it and fresh eyes with new ideas would begin to permeate from within, and government could return to serving the people instead of groping us. The bottom line is that we must shift any lingering economic pain from budget cuts right back at the people who brought us the crisis to begin with. Whether through negligence, ignorance, selfishness, union excesses or government greed, the fact is, we need to let the "officials" and their bureaucratic minions take the financial hit, after all, they brought in on themselves, and they should accept the consequences for their actions. There is no need to cut benefits to those who were forced against their will to pay into a corrupt system fraught with lies and deceptions. Deliver as promised and take the money out of those fat government salaries and benefits plans. Roger Fredinburg is a national radio figure. He conducted a daily 3 hour syndicated radio talk show heard in hundreds of cities from coast to coast. He was syndicated by Talk Radio Network along side Art Bell and held on to more that 150 radio stations from 1993 until he left Radio America in 2004. He now owns an ad agency; www.hohumproductions.com and offers audio and video blogging at www.regularguy.com E-mail radioroger@aol.com |
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