With all the distortions that fly through the media and the political class which pass for “wisdom”, it is worth putting forth a statement of principles to which the United States of America should adhere. I would hope that the candidates for president would consider subscribing to these points and then actually following them:
1) The government of the United States is not infallible. It makes mistakes, and when it does they need to be corrected, not covered up.
2) In the event that the government makes a mistake, it should not try to put the blame for the mistake on someone else. Responsible leadership includes taking responsibility for errors.
3) The officials of the United States, from the president and his cabinet down to the lowest ranking bureaucrat have an obligation to tell the truth to the American people at all times. Certainly, there can be differences of opinion, but the facts ought not to vary depending on who is talking.
4) Honesty and truth are more important than political correctness. A true statement may be offensive to some, but that is better than a lie which is disrespectful to all.
5) In conducting foreign affairs, the United States will stick to its principles and it will also stick to the truth. Phony diplomatic statements will no longer be tolerated.
6) Devices used by the government to mislead the public or to hide the true state of affairs from the public will be discontinued.
These six points are not hard to understand. They are not things about which most Americans would disagree. Nevertheless, at the moment none of these rules are being followed. Here are examples:
1) Clearly, the recent operations of the Department of Justice which forced gun stores to illegally sell assault rifles to Mexican drug cartels and had other folks laundering drug money for those same cartels were a major mistake. Nevertheless, nearly a year after these programs were uncovered, Attorney General Eric Holder is still telling Congress that no one knows who ordered them to proceed. It gets worse from there, but no one could question that a major cover up is under way.
2) We know that the stimulus program pushed through by president Obama was a failure. It was supposed to keep unemployment below 8% and reduce it to 6.3% by now. Instead, the unemployment rate is much, much higher and has not been below 8% at any time since the stimulus passed. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that the result of the stimulus is net slower economic growth for the American economy. Despite all of this, president Obama has blamed president Bush, the Japanese earthquake, the Arab Spring, and a whole host of other things for the slowing economy. He refuses to take responsibility for the failure of the stimulus.
3) The lack of honesty coming from Obama is overwhelming. Just last week, Obama condemned the Republicans in the senate for unanimously voting against an extension of the payroll tax holiday. In fact, about half of the Republicans (22 senators) voted for the extension. There is no point to listing all of the lies and half-truths coming from Obama. The list would just be too long.
4) Political correctness has triumphed both in statements from and actions by the government. The actions are more damaging than the statements, but both need to be corrected. The Head Start program was passed as part of the Great Society about 45 years ago. Since then, billions and billions of dollars have been spent to have poor, heavily minority children go to classes prior to kindergarten. The concept underlying the program is that by starting these children out in school earlier than most, they will get head start on the process of learning and will perform better as they move through the school system. Well, after 45 years, there have been quite a few studies done to determine the efficacy of the program. Every study to date has shown that children who go through the head start program perform no better than those of similar background who do not attend head start classes. That’s right, despite billions and billions of dollars of spending, there has been no appreciable benefit to the performance of these children. Studies, however, have shown that the performance of children is school is correlated to the type of curriculum and teaching methods used in the schools. Students at schools that emphasis self-esteem and ethnic or racial awareness do not perform as well as students from schools that promote a strong work ethic and concentration on reading and mathematics. Despite the facts, Head Start and ethnic/racial awareness curriculum continue to grow because junking these costly failures is deemed politically incorrect.
5) During the Obama years, the United States has moved so far from the truth in its foreign policy that nearly everything that has been done is a good example of this point. A good recent example of American policy diverging from both the basic principles of our democracy as well as the truth is the treatment by Obama of the uprising of the people of Syria to protest the government of Bashir al Assad. After six weeks of Assad’s troops slaughtering protesters in the streets of Syria, Hillary Clinton was still calling Assad a “reformer”. After three more months of slaughter with thousands dead, Obama was silent on the whole matter. His spokesman said that Syria was completely different than Libya where Obama called for the ouster of Gaddafi for using troops against protesters.
6) One of the biggest devices used to mislead the public is so-called baseline budgeting. Every year, the federal budget gets automatic increases of about 7%. If the Commerce Department spends 100 million dollars in 2010, it gets 107 million dollars for the same program the next year. Indeed, if Commerce only spends 105 million dollars, the public is told that there was a 2 million dollar cut in the budget. That’s right, the spending rises by 5 million dollars, but Congress and the president tell us that there was a 2 million dollar cut. This misleading practice is so huge that were it to be discontinued so that spending in the second year were budgeted to be the same as the first year, Congress would report this as a budget cut of $7 trillion for the next decade. That’s SEVEN TRILLION DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!!! Unless this practice ends, it is highly unlikely that America will ever get control of its spending.
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