Hennessy's View

A new poll shows American’s are stressed out.  Almost half of Americans say they’re under moderate to severe financial stress.

I feel it, too.  Financially, emotionally, and chronologically. 

While my book Zen Conservatism won’t fix all your problems, it will help you deal with what’s going on in America a little better. 

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Click here to order Zen Conservatism and enter discount code 38VBA6QR to save $4.95 today.

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I ran to Walgreen’s at lunch. I needed some medication—maybe for a cold? I don’t remember for sure.  While I was there, I picked up a Muscle Milk and a protein bar so I wouldn’t have to make another stop.  I had only about 20 minutes to complete the circuit before my next meeting.

Returning to work, I hit a traffic jam in an unusual place.  The outer road was backed up—something I’d never seen before.  I was furious as I crept along in the sea of of tail lights.

As I came to the top of a hill, I could see the cause of the hold-up. Numerous police cars and fire engines lined a bridge across I-44. 

I felt bad for having been angry, realizing there was probably a fatality or very serious injury up ahead.

As I got closer, though, I realized that there was no accident.  There were dozens of big motorcycles lining the bridge, along with the police officers and firemen. And there were many American flags. And men and women in uniform.  It looked like a backward parade in which the marchers lined the streets and the people marched.

And that’s sort of what it was.

Beneath the bridge, the remains of an American hero would soon pass. He was on his way to his home in Franklin County, Missouri, where he would be put to rest with a hero’s tribute.

To his family, though, “hero” seems strange.  Yes, he’s a hero, but he’s far more than that. He was a child who learned to ride a bicycle –only yesterday, it seems.  He was a kid who would forget to do his homework now and then, who had to be reminded to wash his hands and say his prayers.

He was a human being who stepped up to perform super-human things. He gave his own life for his family, his friends, his high school sweethearts, his town, and his country.

For my anger, I gave myself a penance of writing, one day, about my own selfishness.  I hope that Marine will forgive me. 

On this Memorial Day, God you bless those who died that our nation might live, and those who sent heroes into harms way on our behalf.  Neither this post nor any token can begin to repay the debt you’re owed. Only God can make you whole.

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A few weeks back, the Christian Science Monitor asked me to write an op-ed. The subject was, “If the Tea Party ran America, how would things change; and why do you think you’ll win?”

The call was my opportunity to break from the easy, unassailable position that things are bad and getting worse. It meant coming up with a solution or two.  And solutions already find disagreement somewhere.

For over a year I’ve said that the Tea Party movement, begun out of anger, must shift its energy over time from anger to solutions.  Now, I have no idea the exact shape of these slopes, but I’ve always pictured a graph something like this:

By November 2010, when our candidates accept the honor of serving in Congress or state capitols, we better have armed them with solutions to the problems developed over the past decades.

On May 23, the Washington Post carried an op-ed by Senator Bob Bennett. Bennett recently lost his bid to stand for re-election when Utah Tea Partyers targeted him for retirement.  In his op-ed, Senator Bennett correctly challenges Tea Partyers to move beyond negative slogans and to adopt positive reforms.

Their two strongest slogans are “Send a message to Washington” and “Take back America.” I know both very well because they were the main tools used to defeat me in Utah’s Republican convention two weeks ago. They also worked in Kentucky on Tuesday. They are more powerful than most pundits inside the Beltway realize.

More importantly, he points out that, by November or next year, Americans will be ready for sunny optimism again.

We can advance positive ideas, recognize today’s problems, and point to that brighter future all at the same time.  Honestly, that’s what leaders do every day.

No fool would believe that the incoming batch of legislators can solve all the problems generated over fifty years. But we must tackle a few.  I outlined some of the areas for consideration in the CS Monitor piece, but I’d propose just three reforms for the first term: Repeal the healthcare takeover, overhaul the tax code, and set an expiration date on one entitlement program.

Repeal Healthcare Takeover

The first step toward getting out of debt is to stop borrowing money. The easiest way for Washington to stop borrowing money is to stop creating new entitlement programs.

Now, Barack Obama will veto the repeal.  Do it anyway.  The left will claim we have no solution. Let them.  The American people have already decided this, and they came down on our side. The debate is over: ObamaCare lost everywhere except Washington, DC.

The replacement will be to unshackles states from crafting experiments to determine the best solution.  Other states will follow the successful models and shun the failures.  When done at the state level, experimentation works. When Washington experiments, the whole nation is in danger.

Overhaul the Tax Code

The income tax system in the United States is a sham designed to perpetuate itself by breeding succeeding generations of accountants, lawyers, and tax experts who will lobby to sustain an industry.

No more.

We need to begin this overhaul by implementing the system Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp wanted in the 1970s: A flat tax on earnings above a certain threshold.

I don’t know the exact numbers, but I see the new tax form looking like this:

As I said, the exempt amount and the percentage are probably not perfect, but the formula works. The exempted amount would be indexed to inflation to that the government has no incentive to allow inflation to raise your taxes.

This is a formula everyone can understand, with the exception of Washington bureaucrats and politicians.

I know many in the Tea Party movement are fans of the Fair Tax, but I am not, and I’ll explain why: the Fair Tax is impossible to explain and easy to attack.

In Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District race to fill Jack Murtha’s term, the Tea Party candidate, Tim Burns, was portrayed as supporting the Fair Tax.

Most voters didn’t  “get” the Fair Tax idea until Tim’s opponent, Mark Critz, and the DCCC explained it this way: “Tim Burns wants to impose a 25 percent national sales tax on everything you buy.”

Burns lost, and it wasn’t close.

The Fair Tax might represent a much better solution, both economically and Constitutionally, than the Flat Tax.  But if the Fair Tax gets our best candidates defeated and cannot get through Congress, what good is it?  At present, the Fair Tax is simply too complicated to win broad national support.  It involves too many formulas and rebates and repealing the 16th Amendment.

When we get the votes in Congress to repeal the 16th Amendment, I’ll jump onboard the Fair Tax. But let’s do this one step at a time, okay?  Let’s make things better now, then make them best later.  Let’s not make things worse by demanding perfection on day one.

Under the Flat Tax, taxes will go up for some, down for others.  No one will be punished for achieving more.  The deduction of your first $30,000 is more generous than most combined deductions today.

Additionally, there is not marriage penalty because there are no filing statuses other than “Me.”  You worked or didn’t.  You earned or you didn’t.  I don’t care how many kids you have or whether your home is also your office.

Expire One Entitlement

I don’t care which one, but set a formula for eliminating one of the three big entitlements.  I would start with Social Security, which has not only jeopardized our economic future, it encourages otherwise good people to whine and beg for government handouts.

Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that works only if the next generation is much larger than the current one.  When Americans stopped having 4.5 kids per couple, the cookie began to crumble.

There’s a formula for ending Social Security, but it requires we all pay taxes to fund it until its dead. That’s because Congresses have spent all of the Social Security trust fund—and then some.  The SSA hold numerous notes that must be paid out of general revenue.

That’s okay.  If you borrow money, you have to pay it back sometime. And we’re the ones who borrowed this money by refusing to face this monster earlier.  Fine. Let’s get on with it.

First, anyone drawing Social Security or who’s within 15 years of eligibility will receive payments according to the rules in place today.  So I don’t want to hear from Big Old People that I’m stealing their entitlement.  I am not.

Second, those who have already begun paying into Social Security will have a choice: they can receive a tax-free,  lump sum payment equal to their lifetime contribution without interest, or they can leave the money in the SSA until age 65, then receive a lump sum payment including interest equal to the rate of inflation.  Either way, the FICA withholding—the individual’s and the employer’s—stops.

Third, those fortunate souls who are too young to have opened an SSA account never will.  They simply pocket the 16 percent that currently goes to fund a failing system.

States may want to create their own voluntary or even mandatory retirement scheme.  Fine.  That’s how the federalist system works.  I wouldn’t support a mandated state system, but there’s nothing in the Constitution that would prevent a state from adopting such.  The people of the state could always vote out the legislators who created it.

Solutions

My solutions may not solve all of our problems.  But they will advance four goals of the Tea Party movement:  smaller government, lower taxes, fiscal responsibility, and federalism.

By adopting this list of goals, candidates will move to the right of my chart above, providing solutions instead of just pointing out problems.  Yes, our enemies will throw mud at these ideas: there’s no idea that won’t find critics.

In the end, our mission from day one has been to make America’s future brighter than its brilliant past. We can do that only by moving toward the future we want, not away from the unknowns we’re afraid of.

Please take this poll:

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Popularity: 2% [?]

It took almost three years of Jimmy Carter’s dangerously naive worldview before the world rushed in. By “rushed in,” I mean the Soviet Union rushed into Afghanistan, Iranian radicals rushed into the US Embassy in Tehran, and Cuban-backed communists rushed into every Central and South American country they could.

These aggressions resulted from a world perception that Jimmy Carter was unwilling to use America’s arsenal for good. Additionally, following Vietnam and observing American culture, the world surmised that:

a.  the US government could not be trusted to live up to defense commitments, and

b.  the American people had gone weak.

In 1980, the USA showed spine by electing Ronald Reagan and a Republican Senate. Reagan reversed Carter’s internationalist and conciliatory approach to the world, establishing America as the world’s law and order. That assertion ultimately ended the Cold War by ending the Soviet Union.

In 1991, the United States asserted its ability to turn back aggression by lesser powers when it drove Iraq out of Kuwait in a week. President Bush made the terrible mistake of backing down instead of wiping out Saddam, but the mission was otherwise successful.

For the remainder of the 1990s, Americans were too pre-occupied with making more (paper) profits and buying larger houses. We thought that the world would run itself.  When terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, the USS Cole, and US Embassies in Africa, we yawned.

Our ambivalence toward Islamic terrorism during this period emboldened al Qaeda to up the ante by using civilian airliners as weapons on September 11, 2001. The subsequent war on terror, though, exposed many American tendencies that earlier gave rise to the problems seen in the 1970s. We became tired of the war and of sacrifice. Many Americans—including many who began as full-throated champions of war in 2003—turned against it.  Barack Obama’s entire foreign policy platform of 2008 came down to three planks: 1) get out of Iraq, 2) finish up Afghanistan, and 3) close Gitmo.

Once in office, Obama tried to implement those policies. But reality made his task difficult.  His promise to close the terrorist detention camp in Guantanamo Bay has yet to be realized. His promise to be out of Iraq in 16 months may still be viable, but he hasn’t told us when those 16 months start.  In Afghanistan, he took almost a year to make what should have been a 5-minute decision.

But our President has kept his promise to submit to the will of almost every foreign leader.  He has bowed to kings and sheiks.  One imagines he would kiss Kim Jong Il’s ring were the two ever in the same room.  Barack Obama seems to enjoy shrinking before foreign leaders.

Obama has diminished American prestige, influence, and security.

Walter Russell Mead, writing in Foreign Policy earlier this year, asked a series of questions about the results of Obama’s policies:

It is not only Americans who will challenge the new American foreign policy. Will Russia and Iran respond to Obama’s conciliatory approach with reciprocal concessions — or, emboldened by what they interpret as American weakness and faltering willpower, will they keep pushing forward? Will the president’s outreach to the moderate majority of Muslims around the world open an era of better understanding, or will the violent minority launch new attacks that undercut the president’s standing at home? Will the president’s inability to deliver all the Israeli concessions Arabs would like erode his credibility and contribute to even deeper levels of cynicism and alienation across the Middle East? Can the president execute an orderly reduction in the U.S. military stake in Iraq and Afghanistan without having hostile forces fill the power vacuum? Will Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez be so impressed with American restraint under Obama that he moderates his own course and ceases to make anti Yanquismo a pillar of his domestic and international policy? Will other countries heed the president’s call to assume more international responsibility as the United States reduces its commitments — or will they fail to fulfill their obligations as stakeholders in the international system?

While only time will tell, indicators are starting to point to a Carteresque end to the Obama era.

Mead points out that Obama continued to bow to Iran even as Iran’s regime tortured and raped protesters who asked only for American-style liberty. Obama has tried, repeatedly, to close Gitmo, but he has no answer to the question, “then what?”

In fact, that question seems to be the one he can never answer.  Both his domestic and foreign policy lack a conclusion—at least one he’s willing to make public.  His Katrina-like response to the Gulf oil spill, his vascilation over the surge in Afghanistan, his love-hate relationships with North Korea and Iran, his odd behavior toward Israel, and even his war against state governments all point to a man who never knew why he wanted to be president.

The bad news for Obama is that, while people sometimes underestimate strengths, they never miss spotting American weakness. Three events demonstrate that the world perceives Obama—and, thus, the United States—as weak and devoid of a strategy.

North Korea

Kim Jong Il apparently ordered the North Korean Navy to open fire upon a South Korean warship. The theory goes that Kim needed to show some manliness to ensure his son gets the throne when the elder dies.

North Korea would not have committed an overt act of war against South Korea unless Kim Jong Il was 99 percent certain that Obama would constrain South Korea from retaliation.

Kim was right.

The US took weeks to make a statement. When the US government released its assessment, it do so through the Department of Defense, not State.  And our retaliation?  Joint naval exercise with South Korea—as if we don’t do that every summer, anyway.

North Korea now knows two things about Obama: 1) his response to provocation will be late, and 2) his response will be weak.

China has taken note, refusing to condemn North Korea. There reports that China will use its veto in the UN General Assembly to block any action against their fellow communists.

Iran

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has played Obama the way Zamfir plays the pan-flute.  After Obama famously announced he would happily sit down with Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions to talk like civilized men, Ahmadinejad ordered the rape and torture of political enemies, reiterated his intention to nuke Israel, double his country’s illegal uranium enrichment program, and cut the tags off of hundreds of mattresses.

Afghanistan

It now appears that the Taliban or al Qaeda has upped the ante to WMDs against US forces in Afghanistan. Gateway Pundit reports that four or five American soldiers are being treated for respiratory illnesses brought on by chemical warfare agents. Earlier this month, the Department of Defense released a report detailing use of white phosphorous by Taliban fighters.

The Risk to America

The Obama administration is unraveling faster than anyone could have expected, and in ways that place the United States and the world in a dangerous position.

The world economy is on the brink of total collapse after two years of a miserable economy. Massive government debt has replaced massive private debt and threatens to explode all over the globe.

With a weak and indecisive American president who seems willing to let dictators run roughshod over the planet, the world will begin to look elsewhere for the safety and protection of strength and leadership.

But more important than American prestige, is the safety of American people. Barack Obama’s international apology tours have sent a signal that his country is fair game.  By siding with illegal invaders over the state of Arizona, Obama has signaled that border defense is no longer Washington’s responsiblity.  By kowtowing to brutal dictators, Obama has signaled an end to linkage between foreign policy of the US and internal policies of other nations.

Like it or not, we are stuck with Barack Obama until January 20, 2013.  While we take satisfaction in defeating his domestic agenda of collectivizing the US economy and controlling the American people, we do not celebrate his collapse on the world stage.  Obama’s inarticulate foreign policy, his absent strategy, and his bewildering apologies for American exceptionalism leave us all in a dangerous place.

It is up to us, the people, now, to assert America’s place in the world.  We can to that best by insisting that Barack Obama set his socialistic domestic agenda aside and deal with the world that is about to crash his little, selfish party.

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Hillary Clinton opened her mouth this week—the same mouth that she insisted on opening during the campaign, resulting in our most corrupt and juvenile president ever.

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