Plenty of people are writing, blogging and talking about "why not to vote for" this candidate or that one. I've done my part (and I'll say it again, not Trump!). But, why should you vote for a candidate?
- Only Ted Cruz dared go into Iowa and stand on his conservative, free market conviction of eliminating all energy subsidies--including ethanol so dear to Iowa farmers and Big Oil so dear to southern states.
- In the N.H. debate only Cruz rejected the notion that we force young women to register to be drafted into military service.
- As uncomfortable as it sometimes is, Cruz stands by the simple rule-of-law approach to illegal immigration: if we have a law, the President's duty is to faithfully enforce it; it is Congress' job to change the law if it is such a bad law.
- What other candidate has the humility to say on the world's biggest stage, "I'm sorry" to a competitor...when all he had done was pass on CNN's reported information.
- Cruz aims to eliminate the federal estate tax; this would probably hurt my business, but it's the right thing to do!
- Cruz embodies the more rational, controlled, mentally stable version of Trump's "attributes" (his unwillingness to cow-toe to the MSM and his enthusiasm for sealing the border...that's about all Trump has) but with a proven history of character and principles.
- The stands Cruz has taken against even the RINOs in his own party demonstrate his willingness to do the right thing, no matter whether he will get invited to parties and weddings. There is so much talk about "getting things done" in Washington, or "making deals" or whatever. It is time we actually had a President who had the backbone to veto anything that doesn't take us toward the right road!
- Cruz
understands economics and what it will take to truly re-charge the
economic engine of America. His tax proposals are far more revolutionary
than the other candidates, and would get unemployed and underemployed
Americans back to work.
If we want to see America great again, an economic superpower raising the standards of living for everyone, we need a Ted Cruz Recovery. His stands on moral issues, the Second Amendment, illegal immigration and the like are pretty well known...and are right! But following is an overview of the economic substance for which Ted Cruz stands. I urge you to read and study it...and then to vote for Ted Cruz. He has advisers who know how the economy works, and he is consistently on the right track.
We need this kind of leadership in Washington...not only to restore the moral fabric of the Country, but also to lead back to the right economic road.
Curt
***************
The Case for Ted Cruz
January
24, 2016
Since Ted Cruz walked onto the
national stage, he has been consistent in leading the attack against the
corrupt Washington Establishments of both parties. Redolent of Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington. He has done that with a level of articulate
intelligence and perception virtually unprecedented in Washington.
I served President Reagan in the
White House Office of Policy Development, and I have studied his speeches and
writings for years. Cruz embraces the same three dimensional political and
policy framework as Reagan – fearless, consistent, free market economics, Peace
through Strength National Defense, and Traditional Values Cultural
Conservatism. On issue after issue, I can see no difference between Reagan and
Cruz in any of these dimensions.
Like Reagan, Cruz is a convictions
politician, in the words of former British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher. That means that Cruz, like Reagan, and Thatcher, is
transparently in politics to advance his conservative “convictions,”
philosophy, and ideology, not for personal aggrandizement, power, or riches.
Conservatives, from Christian
Evangelicals, to Tea Party fire brands, to Libertarian free market activists,
to low tax crusaders, to Second Amendment, gun rights advocates, to National
Defense, foreign policy conservatives, to traditional, family values, cultural
conservatives, are now coalescing around Cruz. I believe they will put him over
the top in Iowa, and carry that momentum to New Hampshire, South Carolina,
Nevada, and Super Tuesday states throughout the south. That run may resolve the
nomination contest much sooner than now expected. Below are the reasons why
this is happening.
Economics
On economics, Cruz thoroughly
supports the pro-growth “supply side” economics embraced and promoted by
Reagan, Jack Kemp, Art Laffer, Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, and Steve Moore.
Cruz has proposed a specific, detailed tax reform plan developed with the
assistance of Art Laffer and Steve Moore, which I think is the best tax reform
plan proposed by any of the Presidential candidates.
Tax Reform. The Cruz tax
reform proposal would scrap the current income tax code entirely, and replace
it with a Simple Flat Tax with the same 10% rate for all forms of individual
income. That same 10% rate would apply to wages, profits, capital gains,
dividends, rent, and interest income. No one would be able to claim that
billionaires are paying lower tax rates than their secretaries, or that the
system is rigged to favor the rich over the middle class.
The corporate income tax would be
abolished as well, replaced with a 16% Net Business Tax. That would
include immediate expensing, or deductions, for the costs of plant and
equipment, and all other capital investment. That promotes investment in
worker productivity, which is the foundation of rising wages, and in businesses
providing good paying, blue collar jobs, like heavy industry, mining, energy,
farming, ranching and manufacturing. But there would be no more corporate
welfare, special interest, credits and deductions, or crony socialism, as under
the current corporate income tax.
The 16% Business Flat Tax provides
sufficient revenue to abolish the payroll tax altogether, with Social Security
and Medicare financed in full from these two Cruz flat taxes, with no funding
shortfalls. The payroll tax is the biggest tax working people and the middle
class pay today, more than the income tax for the bottom 60% of income earners.
That provides major tax relief for business as well, particularly the small and
medium sized businesses that create most new jobs on net, since both the
employer and employee payroll taxes initially come out of the cash flow of
businesses.
Cruz’s 10% flat tax for families
includes a $10,000 standard deduction ($20,000 for couples filing jointly), and
a personal exemption of $4,000. That means that the first $36,000 for a
family of four is exempt from all significant federal taxes,
with no payroll tax any longer. The plan retains the current Child Tax Credit,
and increases the Earned Income Tax Credit by 20%, both favoring poor and lower
income workers. This new system is consequently rigged to favor the poor and
the middle class.
Each worker would also enjoy a
Universal Savings Account, where any adult could save $25,000 a year with taxes
deferred, like in an IRA, which could be used at any time for any purpose.
Cruz’s tax reform would also abolish the Death Tax and the Alternative Minimum
Tax, as well as the Net Investment Income Tax of 3.8 percent and the Medicare
surtax of 0.9 percent, both imposed by Obamacare.
Most families could file their
income taxes on a postcard under this Simple Flat Tax, saving taxpayers
hundreds of billions in tax compliance and collection costs each year.
That means that “we can abolish the Internal Revenue Service as we know it,”
Cruz rightly argues.
The Tax Foundation scored Cruz’s
tax reform plan dynamically as increasing capital investment by 43.9%.
That would create nearly 5 million new jobs, and grow wages by 12.2%.
That would increase real economic growth over the next decade by nearly 14%
more than under current tax policies. The after tax income of all workers
would increase, by 21.3% on average. Those in the bottom 20% of income
would also enjoy after tax income increases, gaining 15.3% on average.
Cruz’s business tax would tax
imports into the U.S., but exports would be tax free, just like a national
sales tax would. That is why such a tax system is permissible under the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which permits sales taxes. Most of
America’s trade partners have such a domestically favorable tax system. Cruz’s
business tax would especially favor American manufacturers, American exporters
(including agricultural exporters), and even 100% service companies would be no
worse off because the 16% business tax just replaces the 15.3% payroll tax,
which again would be abolished. Moreover, the proposal sharply reduces, rather
than grows government like a VAT, because it would abolish so many current
taxes – the corporate income tax, the payroll tax, the death tax, the
Alternative Minimum Tax, the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax, and the Obamacare
Medicare payroll tax increase add on of 0.9%.
Cruz’s tax reform plan is not
designed to be revenue neutral, because Cruz is running for President to make
government smaller, not to raise the same taxes to pay for the same spending.
The non-partisan Tax Foundation scores the reform dynamically as a tax cut of
$768 billion over the first decade, which is manageable.
Spending Cuts and Balancing the
Budget. Cruz has already proposed $500 billion in spending cuts over 10
years, with a plan abolishing four federal departments, plus the Internal
Revenue Service, and 25 more named federal agencies. Those include the
Departments of Energy, Commerce, Education (sent back to states in block
grants), and HUD.
Cruz’s budget plan includes
sweeping entitlement reform. Cruz has been the indomitable leader in advancing
the repeal and replacement of Obamacare. Gone would be the individual mandate,
the job killing employer mandate, and all the other unnecessary regulation
increasing the costs of health insurance and care. Costs would be further
reduced through the market incentives of Health Savings Accounts, consumer
choice, and competition. The poor would be better taken care of by block
granting Medicaid back to the states, ultimately involving more Health Savings
Accounts, consumer choice, and competition. So would coverage for pre-existing
conditions. This would save the economy at least another trillion dollars each
year.
The enormously successful 1996
welfare reforms can be expanded to all of the $1 trillion a year means tested
welfare programs through further block grants to the states. States would have
powerful new incentives to promote work for the able bodied particularly among
the bottom 20% in income. That would further promote booming economic growth
through tidal waves of new labor supply into the economy.
Cruz mentioned at the October
debate that he would propose the freedom of each worker to choose a personal
savings and investment account to finance future Social Security benefits. The
Chief Actuary of Social Security scored a similar plan introduced by Paul Ryan
in 2004 and 2005 as generating savings and investment by working people all
across America of nearly $8 trillion over the first 15
years, and $16 trillion over 25 years. That would do more to
reduce inequality of wealth than everything dreamed up by Hillary Clinton,
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren put together. All that capital investment
would create millions more jobs and higher wages, through increased economic
growth.
Through a lifetime of savings and
investment in those accounts, seniors would earn higher, not lower, benefits,
multiples of what Social Security even promises let alone what it could
pay. Each would be free to choose their own retirement age, with market
incentives to delay it for even higher benefits. This alone would involve the
largest reduction in government spending in world history, as Social Security
benefits would be financed through private financial markets, rather than the
federal budget through tax and spending redistribution.
Reform of Monetary Policy and
the Fed. Cruz raised in the October debate as well fundamental reform of
the Federal Reserve, to restrict its wild monetary policy discretion by firm
rules holding its course to maintaining a stable dollar. He suggested a
commission to determine whether that should include a link to gold. Such
guaranteed dollar stability would further draw investment from across the
entire globe, as investors would know they would be paid back in dollars as
good as the dollars they invested. Indeed, as good as gold.
Deregulation
The most important deregulatory
policy for creating another economic boom is to unleash the private sector to
produce plentiful supplies of low cost energy. That would provide a lower
cost foundation for the entire economy, effectively equivalent to another major
tax cut.
America enjoys the resources to be
the world’s number 1 producer of oil, natural gas, and coal. That would involve
thousands and thousands of high paying jobs in those industries alone, and
trillions over the years in revenues from those industries to federal, state
and local governments.
But the reliable low cost energy
supplies they produce would create millions of new jobs throughout the entire
economy, and ultimately trillions in new revenues due to the economic boom that
low cost energy would support. Such low cost energy is critical to
manufacturing in particular, which is critical to restoring good paying jobs
for blue collar workers.
Due to new breakthroughs in the
technology of “fracking” in oil and gas production, private producers have so
far overwhelmed Obama’s regulatory barriers intended to stop them. In April,
2014, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the American Energy Renaissance Act,
providing for comprehensive liberation of energy producers to maximize energy
production, job creation and prosperity for America, with a House companion
bill introduced by Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK).
The Climate Change narrative
supposedly justifying so much of Obama’s anti-energy regulation has been
thoroughly rebutted by Climate Change Reconsidered II, comprised
of three, one-thousand page volumes of objective, dispassionate, non-political,
peer reviewed science, published by the Heartland Institute. The climate has
changed since the Earth was born, and will continue until the Earth is gone. That
change is controlled by natural causes, not by mankind’s comparatively puny
effects.
Further powerfully pro-growth
deregulation would be achieved by Repealing and Replacing Obamacare, and
Dodd-Frank runaway overregulation. Cruz also favors the REINS (Regulations of
the Executive In Need of Scrutiny) Act, proposed by Senator Rand Paul. That
would require approval by both houses of Congress before any regulation from
the Executive Branch with an impact on the private sector of $100 million or
more could become effective. That would have stopped dead all of the runaway
EPA regulation we have seen under Obama.
Complete Pro-Growth Plan
These Cruz economic policies
include all the four components of the Reagan economic recovery plan:
--Reduced tax rates to promote
economically productive activity;
--Deregulation, to reduce
regulatory burdens and barriers on such activity.
--Reduced federal spending, to
reduce the federal drain on the private sector;
--Stable dollar monetary policy, to
maximize investment from across the globe.
Foreign Policy and National
Defense
In the December debate in Las
Vegas, Cruz embraced the original Reagan foreign and national defense policies,
focusing on advancing America’s security interests around the world, rejecting
Bush’s Neoconservative policies of sacrificing American lives and treasure
replacing foreign dictators with human rights, birthing new democracies, or
nation building jobs and prosperity in foreign lands.
Or, as Wall Street
Journal columnist Bret Stephens explained it on December 15, “[T]he
purpose of U.S. foreign policy cannot be to redeem the world’s crippled
societies through democracy building exercises. Foreign policy is not in the
business of making dreams come true—Arab-Israeli peace, Islamic liberalism,
climate nirvana, a Russian reset. It’s about keeping our nightmares at bay.
Today those nightmares are Russian revanchism, Iranian nuclearization, the rise
and reach of Islamic State and China’s quest to muscle the U.S. out of East
Asia.”
When Wolf Blitzer asked Cruz at the
debate whether his policy would be “to preserve dictatorships, rather than
promoting democracy in the Middle East?” Cruz answered by explaining, “I
believe in an America first foreign policy, that far too often
President Obama and Hillary Clinton – and unfortunately more than a few
Republicans – have gotten distracted from the central focus of keeping this
country safe….We need to focus on American interests, not on global
aspirations.”
Cruz later added, in supporting
Rand Paul’s well-articulated opposition to regime change, “The question of
whether we should be toppling dictatorships is asking the wrong question. The
focus should be on defeating our enemies. So, for example, a regime we should
change is Iran because Iran has declared war on us. But we shouldn’t be
toppling regimes that are fighting radical Islamic terrorists….” Cruz explained
the roots of his foreign and defense policies in Reagan, saying “We need a
Commander in Chief who does what Ronald Reagan did with communism, which is he
set out a global strategy to defeat Soviet communism. And he directed all of
his forces to defeating communism.”
Integrity Tests
Ethanol. Cruz in Iowa
bravely spoke out against the corporate welfare scandal of ethanol, which under
so-called “Renewable Fuel Standard” regulations, refiners are forced to mix
into gasoline, and consumers are consequently forced to buy. Tariffs protect
American ethanol producers from foreign competition. American ethanol producers
also receive billions in tax credits each year. That consistently reflects the
long standing opposition to government bailouts and handouts for private, for
profit businesses, by Cruz and his Tea Party base.
It takes almost as much energy to
produce a gallon of ethanol as the amount of energy in a gallon of ethanol.
About 40% of the U.S. corn crop is used for Ethanol. Hence its appeal in Iowa.
It can be produced from sugar cane, as in Brazil, and from other possible
foodstuffs.
But burning food for fuel is not
wise. The growing production of Ethanol is causing food prices to rise, which
quickly forces out of the market the poorest people who need food for food.
That effect is felt not only within America, but worldwide, as
environmentalists in the West promote so-called “alternative fuels,” from
America to Europe to South America, to Australia and the Far East. The effect
on food prices has caused riots, and even revolutions, in the Third World.
There couldn’t be a more crass
example of crony socialism. But Trump spoke out in favor of this policy
atrocity in Iowa, in an effective attack on Cruz. Now the Ethanol mafia in Iowa
is attacking Cruz, led by long time Iowa Governor Terry Bransted. Is the
economy of Iowa really dependent on such corporate welfare handouts?
This is a real test for Cruz, the
Tea Party, Republican primary voters, and the Evangelical base of those voters
in Iowa.
Natural Born Citizen. The
U.S. Constitution provides that to be eligible to hold the office of President,
a candidate must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. That language
simply means a citizen by birth, as opposed to a citizen by naturalization.
Cruz was born in Canada. But his mother at the time was a citizen of the United
States, born in America to U.S. citizen parents. So Cruz qualifies to hold the
office of President as a “natural born” citizen.
Note that the Immigration and
Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by the same Founding Founders who wrote the
Constitution in 1787, which was ratified in 1789, stated, “And the children of
citizens of the United States that may be born beyond Sea, or outside the
limits of the United States, shall be considered as Natural Born citizens.”
That settles the matter. Some conservative activists who are not even lawyers,
insist on playing amateur Supreme Court Justice, and reading the language
“natural born citizen” narrowly to require a natural born citizen to be born of
two parents who are citizens of the United States. Cruz, whose father at birth
was not a U.S. citizen, but a citizen of Cuba, would then not qualify.
But for a conservative activist to
read the Constitutional language narrowly, in a way that actual Supreme Court
Justices are unlikely to follow, to exclude the most consistently conservative,
viable candidate, is perverse. Requiring both parents to be citizens at birth
would also exclude Marco Rubio, and Trump himself, whose mother at his birth
was not an American citizen, but a citizen of the United Kingdom.
Why would any conservative vote for
the erratic Donald Trump, with no grounding in conservative policy or philosophy,
and no history of conservatism, when they can vote for one of the sharpest
minds ever elected to Congress, the proven political winner Ted Cruz, who has
been steeped in conservative policy and philosophy from an early age, and
raised with the training and development to be one of the most skilled
advocates for conservatism in history? You can’t tell where Trump is going to
come out on any issue. But you can be sure of where Cruz is going to stand,
based on his consistent public record of conservatism.
No one has ever been elected
President before who had never previously held public office, except for
Generals who led American troops to victory in major wars, such as Dwight
Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant. It is Donald Trump, a billionaire, career, real
estate developer, who would be a perfect foil for the Democrats, who is not
qualified to run for President of the United States.
*********************
Peter Ferrara is Senior
Fellow for Entitlement and Budget Policy at the Heartland Institute, and Senior
Policy Advisor to the National Tax Limitation Foundation. He served in the
White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as
Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George
H.W. Bush.
