iJobs

On October 5 of last year, Steve Jobs died after a long bout with pancreatic cancer. He was 56 years old, still a young man by today’s standards, and yet in the years beyond his adolescence he managed to create the PC age, co-create a business that at his death had a market capitalization of $364 billion – a valuation at the time second only to Exxon, which it has since exceeded – he’d created a gaggle of products prefixed by the inscrutable letter “i”, he had lost and then regained control of Apple, the company he helped develop, he’d revolutionized computer animation in developing a new genre of film-making, and he had created a personal fortune of $8 billion. To have done any one of these things would have been breathtaking and yet he did them all – and more.

Seven years ago, confronted with his mortality after learning that he had a serious form of cancer, Jobs asked Walter Isaacson, a journalist-biographer, to write his story. Isaacson, unaware of Jobs’ cancer, initially turned him down because of Jobs’ relative young age and because his story hadn’t been fully lived out in the years Isaacson thought remained. But when Jobs’ lethal condition became known, Isaacson relented and in 2009 began to collect data and interviews from Jobs, his friends, enemies, and former colleagues. Other than requesting that he design the book’s cover, Jobs said he had no interest in reading the book and gave Isaacson complete editorial freedom. The result is a lengthy tome – almost 700 pages – which was on the book shelves a few weeks after Jobs’ death.

Almost 30 years ago I saw a curious looking box in a retail window with an odd, partly eaten, multi-colored apple for a logo. It was a “personal computer” I learned, in a time when the only computers I’d seen were quite impersonal and filled entire rooms despite a memory of only 256K. The one I used to perform the calculations for my doctoral dissertation had a memory of only 10k and the user interface was a teletypewriter with a punched paper tape reader.

As an engineer, I had a natural interest in the guy who created the curious box. And in the 30 years since I first saw it, I have followed his rise and fall, first through articles written about him and later through books that chronicled Jobs and the company known as Apple.

I was interested in how Walter Isaacson, the only person to write Jobs’ “authorized” story, would treat this American icon whose products have touched so many people living today. Every author asserts he is objective but how the objective facts are reported can tell many a different tale. I’ve listened to the audio book version and now I’m reading it. If you decide to do either, you won’t be disappointed. It is not a whitewash. Jobs is presented warts and all. Well, most of the warts, at least.

I am not going to review Isaacson’s book. There are ample reviews online. And there are many other “unauthorized” books – and in-depth articles – about Jobs and his company which I think are also worth reading. Most tell the biographical story of Steve Jobs – facts about his life and accomplishments. But there is the equally important back story – Steve Jobs the person – which is often glossed over and evidentially not understood by his admirers, judging by the worldwide candle lighted adoration the news of his death evoked. There is no disputing Jobs’ accomplishments. Arguably few people could do what he did. But Jobs did not descend from Olympus. He was an abrasive, belittling, manipulative, narcissistic, sociopath. He lived outside of the constraints that mere mortals are compelled to observe with a genius flawed by character. Apologists argue that his genius and flaws are related, as if one couldn’t happen without the other.  My experience indicates otherwise. I’ve personally known many entrepreneurs and read about others who accomplished great things without burning up the people who helped make them happen. Herb Kelleher, the creator of Southwest Airlines comes to mind.

Steve Jobs was conceived by an unmarried couple. Both were university students, although his father had a Ph.D. and was teaching when the child was born. He was put up for adoption, allegedly because his father was Syrian and his American mother’s family disapproved of their relationship. This didn’t prevent a later marriage which produced another child – a girl – before the marriage ended in divorce.

Steve’s mother wanted him adopted by college-educated parents who would assure that he would receive a college education. The prospective new parents were a lawyer and his wife. But when Steve was born, they changed their minds and decided they preferred a girl. Thus, Paul and Clara Jobs – the next names on the list that February in 1955 – were called and told there was a baby boy available for adoption; did they want him? They took him and later adopted a sister for him.

Clara Jobs had not graduated from college and Paul Jobs had not graduated from high school. When the biological mother learned this, she initially refused to sign the adoption papers and relented only with their promise that they would send Steve to college.

Notwithstanding his limited formal education, Paul Jobs could do almost anything – repair cars, rebuild household appliances, build almost anything with his hands – and whatever he did was done right. He was a craftsman and a precision machinist who was employed making housings for lasers, which were just becoming of age in the 1960s.

During one of Isaacson’s interviews with Jobs, the author was shown a 50-year old fence which still stands enclosing the backyard of the modest house where the Jobs lived. Young Steve helped his father (he always said his adoptive parents were his parents) to build it with the understanding that the craftsmanship on both sides of the fence had to be the same. Just because Steve couldn’t see the other side of the fence, his father said, was no excuse for cutting corners on its workmanship.

The Jobs family moved to Cupertino in 1960 where Steve would grow up, attend elementary and high school, and begin being Steve Jobs. Perhaps that story begins with Lisa McMoylar, a little girl who lived across the street from the Jobs house. One day Steve confided in her that he was adopted – something that Paul and Clara had been quite open about with both Steve and his adopted sister.  “Does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” Lisa asked. Struck by that thought, Steve ran into the house to the people he always acknowledged as his parents. They told him that they had specifically picked him. He was not abandoned. He had been chosen and was therefore someone special.

Jobs seems to have been anointed by that assurance rather than comforted by it. In later life he was non-conformist and anti-authoritarian. His car had no license tag despite the fact he was a billionaire. Told that the law required a license tag, he chose instead to lease a new car every six months and drive it without a tag, since six months was the limit to do so. He parked in handicapped spaces.  The fact that he was adopted because he was special allowed him to live his life independently of rules, he later confessed.

Paul and Clara Jobs were liberal, indulgent parents of a precocious child – the kind of parents that would have been influenced by the childrearing guru of the time, Dr. Benjamin Spock, a proponent of indulgence. Their permissiveness and lack of restraint may further explain a lot of Steve’s adult behavior.

Moreover, he grew up in California of the 1960s and 1970s, which largely rejected the influence of traditional religion or the restraints of traditional morality. Jobs called it a “magical time” and for him a spiritual time. “… taking LSD was one of the most important things in my life … not the most important … but right up there,” Jobs later recalled. Zen, yoga, meditation, the human potential movement, drugs, sex, and other pop psycho-cultural expressions became vehicles in the search for aimless youngsters and adults to find meaning in life.

It was also the dawn of the high-tech age, and technology companies were springing up in the pre-Silicon Valley era, competing with the area’s ubiquitous fruit orchards for real estate. The Cold War and Vietnam War were in full swing, spawning California’s electronic firms, chip makers, military contractors, not to mention the sub-culture of geeks, hobbyists, and non-conformist engineers unsuited to jobs in conventional businesses.

It was during this time that Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak, five years his senior and his future partner in Apple Computer. Other than the fact that both Steves were long-haired, bearded hippies who were interested in technology, they were almost polar opposites in every other respect. Jobs was cocksure and arrogant, Wozniak was shy, almost child-like. Jobs was assertive and outgoing, Wozniak was reclusive and preferred to work alone. Jobs was disingenuous and manipulative, Wozniak was ethical and sensitive to others. Wozniak was generous in virtually everything, Jobs wasn’t.

Woz had dropped out of UC Berkley and was working on mainframe computers at Hewlett Packard when the two hooked up. He was the technical genius of the duo with a natural talent for the arcana of technology solutions. He would have been happy to invent technologies and give them to the world in the belief that he was making it a better place.

Jobs understood almost nothing about engineering and science and was unable to write a line of programming code. Yet he had an uncanny grasp for esthetic detail, probably the legacy of his father’s love for craftsmanship and doing the little things well. He was as good at seeing the big picture as he was at hammering out its details – a rare combination. Jobs, unlike Woz, could see the future in a product by looking at its inert carcass on a workbench.

Jobs would spend hours admiring the design of high-end kitchen knives in a department store and certain kitchen appliances, like the Cuisinart food processor, whose ideas found their way into the exteriors of Apple computers. He bordered on pathological about the curvature of the corners on Apple computer cases. The iMac colors were supposedly inspired by a visit to a jelly bean factory. For years his house had no furniture because he couldn’t find any with a design he considered worthy of his home. And near the end of his life when he was being treated for cancer, he refused to wear a surgical mask because he hated its design.

Woz was the creative genius who labored out of the limelight while Jobs was the promoter and market maker.

Thinking of Jobs and Woz, I’m reminded of a scene in Schindler’s List in which Liam Neeson’s character, Oskar Schindler, has organized the Polish Ghetto Jews to put up the money and perform the unpaid jobs for Schindler’s pots and pans factory. He has asked Ben Kingsley’s character, Itzhak Stern, also a Ghetto Jew, to be the plant manager and its business accountant. The following dialog takes place between Stern and Schindler.

Itzhak Stern: Let me understand. They put up all the money. I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?

Oskar Schindler: I'd make sure it's known the company's in business. I'd see that it had a certain panache. That's what I'm good at. Not the work, not the work... the presentation!

The Jobs-Woz relationship was similar. Neither could have accomplished anything without the other, but Jobs had the flair, the intuitive understanding of the customer, and the obsessive focus on product detail down to the way it was packed in a box. The MacBook Air makes no keyboard sound as it’s used. Was the click of a keyboard so distracting that users complained? No. But noise in Steve Job’s world was a product negative so he insisted that the keyboard design make keystrokes silent.

Similarly, there is no fan, and therefore, no fan noise in the Apple II or Macs. Fans were installed in early PCs to get rid of heat. Preventing heat would eliminate fans which in turn would eliminate fan noise. So while Jobs didn’t know how to design or build a power supply that generated minimal heat, he found a power supply designer and told him that is what he wanted. The result was a low heat generating, pulsed power supply which is now the industry standard.

This drive to bend the realities of the natural world and bend the abilities of the people who inhabit that world became known as Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field. It’s believed that a co-worker borrowed the term from Star Trek. Jobs’ insistence that things be as he wanted them was not his force of will – it was his belief that reality existed as he saw it. For example, if he disbelieved the law of gravity, he simply acted as if it didn’t exist. Therefore, alternating between charisma and intimidation, Jobs bent the world and the people around him to match his Reality Distortion Field.

He used various methods to accomplish his ends. For example, Jobs practiced staring into the eyes of others without blinking, and if he asked someone a question, he expected that person to maintain eye contact and answer. It was like some weird form of mind control with him. One former employee of Apple said that after talking with Jobs he almost felt the need to be deprogrammed.

When the original Mac was created, Jobs announced to a work team that certain tasks had to be completed within a month. When the team protested that the volume of code required couldn’t be done in a month, Jobs answered, “Yes, you can do it.” Over the howls that he was asking the impossible, but knowing that the consequences would be unpleasant otherwise, the impossible task was completed – which only reinforced Jobs’ belief that he was right all along. Apple’s coding productivity (lines/hour) was no longer adequate if it met conventional industry standards; it now had to meet standards mandated by Jobs, who wasn’t a programmer.

Another by-product of Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field was his belief that a fruitarian diet consisting of no vegetables or protein was not only healthy but also eliminated the need for bathing and body odor control. As a result he smelled like a bum, which coupled with his long hair, beard, scruffy dress, and the fact that he was usually barefoot, completed an image of a solipsistic person living in his own reality. To deal with stress, he would often soak his feet in a toilet bowl. He thought nothing of meeting with someone he intended to impress – like an investor to sponsor a substantial amount of capital – and putting his filthy feet on the person’s desk. He was shocked because they were shocked.

People told Jobs that he smelled awful. Yet, he never considered that they might be right. Reality Distortion. He once decided that he would go to work with Atari. The person in charge of hiring took one look at him and turned him down. Jobs said he would stay in the lobby until he was hired. Nolan Bushnell, the owner of the company, came out, interviewed him, and decided he was a bright kid – so he hired him. His fellow workers complained so much about his body odor that he was assigned to the night shift – the only person on the night shift.

Meeting with the Chairman of Lotus Software for breakfast once, Jobs observed the amount of butter the man was spreading on his toast. “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Jobs volunteered. “Look,” said the Chairman, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I’ll stay away from the subject of your personality.”

The weirdness of Jobs’ persona was who he really was – not something he imitated – and it led to treatment of colleagues that was beyond cruel. His language at times was so profane that I cannot use it here. He could be (and was) so abusive to a waitress that she would flee the restaurant in tears. Once when interviewing a candidate for a job in Apple, he asked the young man when he had lost his virginity. Obviously flustered and embarrassed by the question, the candidate began shifting in his chair and flushed through several shades of red. “You mean you’re still a virgin?” Jobs asked. One Apple manager told herself before meetings with Jobs that she was already dead in order to dull her senses to the humiliation she knew awaited her.

A programming team might stay up all night to meet one of Jobs’ impossible deadlines and be told the performance of their software was s---. Subordinates were screamed at and told they – not their work – were (expletive), (expletive), (expletive) and then they were fired on the spot. Jobs could be equally brutal in hiring: “Everything you’ve done in your life is s---,” he told one prospective employee, “so why don’t you come and work for me?” He didn’t learn that in charm school.

Laurene Powell, his wife for 20 years, tried to put a pretty face on her husband’s bizarre behavior in interviews with Walter Isaacson. “Like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary,” she said, “he’s not extraordinary in every realm.…He doesn’t have social graces, such as putting himself in other people’s shoes, but he cares deeply about empowering humankind.” Co-workers who had learned to tolerate his abuse convinced themselves that it was just his perverted way of challenging them to higher levels. “We learned to accept ‘This is s---’ as a code that meant ‘Tell me why this is the best way to do it’.”

Jobs excused his behavior by saying that he wanted to work with people who demanded perfection; “that’s who I am,” he said. “If you’re an insanely great person, wouldn’t you want to work in an insanely great organization?” he once said. In Jobs’ Manichean world, people were either heroes or zeros – or “s---heads” as he called them – usually to their face.

In contrast, I recall the leadership methods of Vince Lombardi, no performance pushover in the world of professional football. In one practice session, things weren’t going well. There was a player, a hulking guard, who wasn't playing up to Lombardi's standards, and finally the coach had enough. "You're not putting out! In fact, I doubt whether you're going to make this team. Go to the locker room!"

About an hour and half later, Lombardi entered the locker room with the rest of the team, and the big guard was still there in his sweaty practice uniform with his head in his hands. Lombardi walked over to him, put his hand on the man’s shoulder, and said, "Son, you are a lousy football player. But inside of you is a great football player, and I'm going to stay by your side until that football player comes out." With that assurance, Jerry Kramer stripped off his uniform, and took a shower. Years later, he would be elected to the Football Hall of Fame.

Unlike Lombardi, Jobs apparently never believed leadership can be used to make great people as well as make great products.

(Continued next week...)

Render Unto Caesar …

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State. 

– James Madison, Federalist 45, January 1788

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …

– US Constitution, First Amendment

… generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you. It says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf …

– State Senator Barack Obama, Chicago Public Radio, 2001

Last month the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously – if you can believe that – in defense of religious freedom. It was a significant rebuke to Barack Obama’s growing disregard for the US Constitution – which assumes, of course, that at some point he held the Constitution with some regard.

The plaintiff in the case titled, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School vs. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was a former music and math teacher, who also taught religion classes, prayed with her students, and attended chapel with them. She had completed religious training and was considered a minister. After taking medical leave, the church-based school chose not to retire her due to her health. It later terminated her for violating church doctrine by litigating instead of resolving her dispute within the church (perhaps in accord with 1 Corinthians 6:5-7). She sued under the protection of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The case is discussed online for any who wish to learn more of its details. It is not the issue in this blog. The larger issue to me is the cavalier attitude Obama holds toward the Constitution he swore to uphold, which has now embroiled him, his administration, and ObamaCare in yet another religious freedom confrontation hard on the heels of Hosanna-Tabor, except this time it’s with the Catholic Church.

The First Amendment never sought to protect society from religion, but rather to protect religion and its unfettered practice from an ever-expanding intrusive government, which Madison’s Federalist 45 assured would not happen. The Free Exercise clause in the First Amendment means two things: (i) government cannot prevent a religious organization from doing what its faith compels, and (ii) government cannot require a religious organization to do what its faith abhors. It matters not one whit whether government or greater society agrees with commission or omission of religious practices. Both are protected under the Constitution.

Based on their religious faith, churches engage in many activities which, on the surface, appear to be secular. Examples are the operation of schools, food kitchens, hospitals and nursing homes, and other outreaches to disadvantaged groups in society. These activities make the church’s mission in the world operative – i.e. they are not pursued independently of the church’s mission.

The Obama administration, obviously with his approval, sees these extra-worship activities as unprotected by the First Amendment. As to religion, the First Amendment contains two parts. The Establishment clause forbids government from abetting a state-sponsored religion; the Free Exercise clause forbids government from interfering with various expressions of faith. More particularly, that clause says “… or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” It can’t get more clear than that.

Yet in past years, secularist organizations like the Planned Parenthood, ACLU, and other groups acting in collaboration with liberal courts and the government have attacked the meaning of the Free Exercise clause with Pharisaical hubris. They have attempted to narrow its protection to the actual worship services of a church while removing the protection when those worshipful activities extend to programs that fulfill the Biblical mandate for Christians to minister to the poor, the widows and orphans, the infirm, and the outcast.

Remarkably, the wrath of the Supreme Court was brought down hard on the representatives of Eric Holder’s laughably designated Department of “Justice” when it argued in the Hosanna-Tabor case that the Lutheran school and its activities were little different from a social club.

Now comes Kathleen Sebelius, an unelected official of the Obama administration who, under the authority granted to the HHS Secretary in the ObamaCare Act, has the untrammeled power of a modern-day Caesar. She is empowered to interpret and implement this legislative monstrosity because its elected lawmakers deferred to her Solomonic wisdom by repeated use of the default phrase: “The Secretary may determine …” when crafting the ObamaCare. In other words, they gave her a blank check – the ObamaCare Act is little more than a guideline which, as we are now seeing, can be used and abused. And since Sebelius is Obama’s deputy, it gives him the means to twist the application of ObamaCare however he wishes in order to impose his secularist-socialist agenda on one-sixth of the American economy.

Apparently unchastened by the spanking received in the Hosanna-Tabor case, Sebelius blundered ahead last week when she refused to exempt Catholic charities and hospitals from compliance with ObamaCare mandates requiring all employer-furnished insurance to cover contraception and abortion services. This is a direct affront to the teachings of the Catholic faith. Even celibates, regardless of their religious affiliation, who buy their own insurance rather than receive it through an employer, must purchase policies that provide contraception, sterilization, and abortion services! This is government gone mad!

And yet why would anyone have expected otherwise? ObamaCare was a hijacking from the outset under the gloss of “access” – Obama’s euphemism for control. The present system – so the lie went – denied “access” to healthcare to some Americans because they lacked insurance to pay for it. I call it a lie because healthcare has always been accessible. By law the uninsured cannot be denied care at an ER. Every state has a State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Indigent care is provided under Medicaid, and children get free immunizations from their county health departments – all of which is paid by state and local taxes, which is the equivalent of taxpayer-paid insurance for the truly needy. While there are people who are uninsured, they aren’t denied healthcare. Insurance is a method. Healthcare access is an outcome. There is a big difference.

About 15% of the population has been uninsured at any time in recent years. Upon hearing that, our brains begin to fill in the blanks. Wow! That’s still a large part of society … probably poor, chronically unemployed, always in need … solvable only with a political solution. Even if those “filled in blanks” were factually true, is it justification for overturning the 85% of society that is insured and satisfied with their healthcare arrangement? Certainly not. What happened to the assurance that if you liked your current health plan, you would keep it?

But as it turns out, the 15% aren’t the same people month after month, year after year. About a fourth of them are people who choose to be uninsured – mostly young, who spend their money on other things. As they get older, marry, have kids, they become insured and are replaced by another group who choose not to be insured and to spend their money otherwise. And so it goes.

About half of the 15% are moving between jobs and will become insured again when they are reemployed, only to be replaced by another group which is between jobs and therefore uninsured. And so it goes.

Thus when the truth is known, less than 4% of the population is without insurance because they cannot afford it, some of whom are employed. So for 4% of the people in America, Obama seized control of healthcare even though all who wanted access to healthcare got it in some form or program.

When Obama uses the word “access” as in “not having access to healthcare or contraception, sterilization, or abortion” he doesn’t mean it isn’t available to those wanting these services. He means the services aren’t free to them. So the refusal of the Catholic leadership to offer insurance to its (presumptively female) employees for services that defy the conscience of their church didn’t mean those women couldn’t access them if they wanted them. It means they would have to pay for them out of their own pocket. In Obama’s mind, that is a denial of access.

In 1976 the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed by a sizable margin a provision called the Hyde Amendment after the name of its sponsor, Henry Hyde (R-IL), which barred the use of federal funds for abortions. While it was not permanent law, it was a rider attached to every annual HHS appropriations bills since 1976. Federal employees, the military, and certain others who want abortions paid for them out of pocket.

When the ObamaCare bill was debated in the House in March 2010, Bart Stupak (D-MI) represented a “gang” of Representatives who were concerned that ObamaCare would provide federal funding in some form to pay for abortions. Stupak is Catholic. He agreed informally to be the “point man” for the Catholic Church in defense of its positions regarding contraception and abortion as they might be impacted by ObamaCare. The Stupak-Pitts Amendment to ObamaCare prohibited the use of federal funds "to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion" except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the life of the mother.

The House version of ObamaCare passed with the Stupak Amendment. The Senate version failed to include Hyde or Stupak limitations. Without Stupak and his “gang” of 15 to 20 fellow members also opposed to abortion, ObamaCare would never have passed the House because there wouldn’t have been the required 218 votes. The Catholic Church believed it had Stupak’s commitment to stand fast. But Stupak was put under tremendous pressure to moderate his stand. [Since I’ve blogged on this before (Bart Breaks, March 29, 2010) I won’t repeat the details.] Suffice it to say here that Obama gave Stupak the cover he needed to allow his politics to prevail over his principles and he and the “gang” voted for passage of ObamaCare. Stupak – like so many other Democrats – didn’t run for reelection in 2010 because after this vote he couldn’t win.

It should come as little surprise that, since about a fourth of voters are Catholic, Obama’s advisors warned him that he was dealing with a firestorm in an election year and suggested that he come up with some kind of compromise. (As you read the following, keep in mind that Obama is the smartest man who has ever been president.) His “compromise” was this. Catholic employers, some of which “self-insure,” would not have to pay for contraception and other services to prevent and terminate pregnancies and employers would not have to inform employees that the services are available. However, their insurance provider will have to tell employees that they have access to these services – for free. I’m not making this stuff up!

Now, I’m undoubtedly not as smart as Obama. Yet I know there is no such thing as free. The government isn’t going to pay for these services because it doesn’t have any money. Its money comes from taxpayers. The insurance companies aren’t going to pay for these services because they are for-profit businesses, not charities. They will do what they have always done – shift the costs to someone else. They will increase the premium cost to non-exempt (non-Catholic) organizations or they will increase the premiums of Catholic organizations – or both. Whatever the method, Obama’s “free” will drive up insurance premiums.  

So far the Catholic leadership is not falling for Obama’s “compromise” allowing them to provide these services in a roundabout way rather than directly. Conniving rather than solving is textbook Obama, and the Catholic compromise he has offered is no different from the cosmetic cover he provided Stupak. It makes no difference, which some have argued, that many Catholic women disregard church doctrine on the use of contraceptives and some also ignore church teachings on the sanctity of life concerning drug-induced or surgical abortion. The beliefs and behavior of a church’s adherents is irrelevant to the meaning of the First Amendment. Government can’t set aside church doctrine simply because there is internal disagreement about it.

But the larger issue in this confrontation is the utter failure of Obama and ObamaCare to comprehend that the First Amendment is not about religious organizations – the Catholic or the Baptist or the Presbyterian churches. It is about freedom … individual freedom … not institutional freedom. The freedom to believe and the freedom to exercise those beliefs, to speak, to write, and to meet about them, and anything else … and the freedom to demand that the government enforce the right to these freedoms – not wage war against them. Listen to what the First Amendments says.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It should not escape our notice that, just as ObamaCare violated the Constitution by compelling people to buy a product – the insurance mandate – Obama is once again violating the Constitution by telling insurance companies to sell a product …  for free …  to an exempt organization. The government has now usurped unto itself the power to control both buying and selling. Team Obama further violates the Constitution by requiring something of one type of organization (those that are non-exempt) that isn’t required of others (those that are exempt.) A Catholic ought not to be exempt from something that does not also exempt a Baptist or a Presbyterian or a Methodist. Nor should a church-based organization be exempt from something that does not exempt a religiously-minded business owner’s organization – it is unconstitutional to exempt the pew and not the work bench. Yet this is the diktat of ObamaCare in its full glory, the ObamaCare which Nancy Pelosi exhorted the House to pass “so we could see what is in it.” Now we’re seeing.

If Obama succeeds in forcing people to buy a product (insurance) … if he succeeds in forcing businesses to sell a product (free coverage) … where does it stop? What can’t government do? Could it force people to live in high-rise housing to prevent urban sprawl and thereby force the use of public transportation as Al Gore proposed? Could it force the use of government-specified “green” vehicles (electric, natural gas) by requiring low premium or free auto insurance to be issued to their owners? Can it outlaw incandescent lighting, dietary salt and fat, what can be taught in private and home schools? Can it prevent the parents of a child attending a failing public school from putting that child in a better school in a different school district without moving into that district? Government is doing these things – or nearly so.

As I recall, we fought a war and created a nation 236 years ago because of this kind of  tyranny.  

At its core, none of these machinations is really about insurance or healthcare. They are about an ideology in which government controls the very fabric of society. The ideology does that by making more of our everyday lives dependent on government. It does that by eroding the Constitutional protection afforded us against expansive government power, shifting more power to unelected officials and appointing more people through recess or to czar posts in order to by-pass the scrutiny of the Senate’s advise and consent role. It does that by having symbiotic relations with unions which fill campaign coffers in return for collective bargaining agreements with power to negate the decisions made by elected officials. It does that by relying on an ill-informed electorate which gets its news and comment – if any – from a media sympathetic to a liberal-left ideology.

This president is no servant of the people. He is an imperious Caesarian ruler with no respect of the Constitution he has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend …” He must not be reelected.

The ObamaCare law is unjust. It should not be reformed or revised. It should be fought against until it is undone.

Speak Softly and Carry a Small Stick

President Theodore Roosevelt’s international policies were shaped by his personal motto, "speak softly and carry a big stick,” which Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men updated to a modern version, “Walk softly and carry an armored tank division, I always say.”

Nicholson’s character, Col. Nathan R. Jessup, understood the threats of a modern world.

In his Omaha Beach speech for the 40th anniversary of D-Day, President Ronald Reagan said, “We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.” Then two months later, upon accepting the Republican presidential nomination for a second term, he said, “None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong. It's weakness that invites adventurous adversaries to make mistaken judgments.”

Weakness indeed.

In announcing last month his new strategy for the country’s military, Obama made it clear that America’s future military will be a much smaller stick, perhaps a switch. It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who coined the term “arsenal of democracy” when describing the United States in a speech given a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since FDR’s administration, the size of our arsenal has ebbed and flowed – flowing to fight wars and ebbing during the ensuing peace. The arsenal of democracy, which has gotten smaller every year of the Obama administration, will now get even smaller.

After summarizing his strategic review in a speech given in the Pentagon surrounded by all of the military’s top brass, Obama said “we can’t afford to repeat the mistakes that have been made in the past – after World War II, after Vietnam – when our military was left ill-prepared for the future. As Commander-in-Chief, I will not let that happen again. Not on my watch.”

I assume by “ill-prepared” in reference to World War II and Vietnam, Obama meant the deep draw-downs following those conflicts which left the American military so emasculated it was unsuited to deal with the next conflict. But that is precisely what Obama’s plan will do. His actions don’t comport with his rhetoric.

For decades military doctrine has been driven by the ability to fight two wars concurrently and have a two-ocean Navy. Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated a military that struggled to fight two wars – and they were in the same theater of operations! Obama’s proposed cuts will reduce not only military spending, but also military capability.

Last summer, military spending was cut by $487 billion over the next decade – about 8% of the Pentagon’s budget. When the so-called Congressional super-committee failed to agree on a $1.2 trillion reduction in government spending last fall, automatic cuts kicked in. Unless Congress intervenes, these cuts will include another $600 billion reduction in military spending. Hundreds of billions in additional reductions will also occur when the withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq are complete. So conceivably military spending will fall by more than 30% over the next decade. That’s the spending side.

On the capability side, boots on the ground will be replaced by drones and cyber-weapons. Troop levels will be reduced by 76,000 to 114,000 – about the level they were at the end of the Clinton administration and 600,000 fewer than at the end of the Cold War. The Navy will shrink to 238 vessels from its current 300, which will take two carrier groups out of action. Strategic bombers will be reduced from 153 to 101 and the number of fighter aircraft will be cut in half – from 3,600 planes to 1,500. Meanwhile the production of F-22 fighter, the heavy lifter C-17 transport aircraft, and the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer has already been shut down.

Of course bloated entitlement and domestic spending programs need not fear Obama’s budget-cutting knife.

If Congress fails to intervene and prevent the automatic $600 billion reduction in military spending, the Pentagon budget will be cut by a trillion dollars in the next decade, which Defense Secretary Panetta and defense hawks say will be ruinous to our national security. Yet Obama said he would veto any bill that prevented the $600 billion in defense cuts. You can be sure that the champagne corks are popping from Tehran to Beijing.

Obama may be the smartest President to hold the office, but he has learned little from the lessons of history. Harry Truman inherited the tail-end of World War II and an army of 12 million. He reduced it to less than a half million and tried to eliminate the Marine Corps altogether. Truman had hated the Marine Corps since his Army service in World War I, calling them nothing more than the Navy’s police force. Thankfully, Congress prevented him from shutting down the Marines, whose long history goes back to 1775. However, Truman slimmed down the military to the point that it was unable to contest the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, and at one point the only territory under American control was within a small perimeter around the Pusan harbor. Three years and a month after the war began, a truce was declared with the North-South Korean border about where it was before the war but at a cost of 37,000 Americans killed and 92,000 wounded. Perhaps it can be said that America didn’t lose that war; but it sure didn’t win it.

Under the Eisenhower administration, the Korean War wound down and the Cold War heated up. The American armed forces were cut in half by the former five-star general and defense spending was cut by 27%. Eisenhower’s national defense strategy, called the “New Look” (before it became the new “New Look”) consisted of deterrence based on nuclear weapons and long-range bombers. His defense policy of containment and keeping the Soviets out of Western Europe would have blown up the entire planet. It became apparent that neither the US nor the Soviet wanted to use nuclear weapons except for a direct homeland attack. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Eisenhower’s new “New Look” rejiggered the mutually assured destruction of strategic weaponry (the old “New Look”) to refocus on tactical nuclear weaponry. But Eisenhower’s reliance on nuclear weapons was still driven by the economics of supporting a nuclear arsenal versus the economics of supporting a large troop-based military. Both the old “New Look” and the new “New Look” military were totally unsuited for a conventional war.

Therefore, the next Cold War conflict – Vietnam – which President Kennedy blundered into and President Johnson accelerated, found the military unprepared once again. The North Vietnamese waged a guerilla war in jungle terrain that could hide a division from land and sky. Except fighting wasn’t done by divisions or behind battle lines. It was done by detached small forces. None of our super-weapons worked in this environment. Any plane that flew faster than about 350 knots was ineffective, and ultimately tactics shifted to napalm, carpet bombing, and orange (an herbicide that was only called Agent Orange after the war.) Over the course of the Vietnam war, 2.6 million Americans served in it in rotation assignments, 58,000 of whom were killed and 300,000 of whom were wounded.

President Nixon inherited the Vietnam War and decided to turn it over to the South Vietnamese army and get out of Dodge – which he did in 1973, helped by the fact that Congress cut off support for it that year. Left to its own resources, Saigon fell in 1975. Afterwards the American army became an all-volunteer organization and was reduced to 16 divisions – about 200,000 troops. This was accomplished by deactivating the reserves and National Guard and relying on a small regular army. Defense spending was cut by 29%. Fortunately, the world was without a major conflict for 25 years following Vietnam, so Nixon’s military downsizing was never tested.

Nixon left office in disgrace and the interregnum of President Ford was too brief to impact national defense. His defense budget documents, however, reveal a deep mistrust of the Soviets and a concern that our military capabilities were eroding through disinvestment, posing a serious security risk to the country. President Carter, in contrast, was untroubled by the Soviet march toward nuclear and military superiority. The tone of his administration was set in his inaugural aspiration for “the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth” – a hope similarly and naively held by Obama. Carter took a relaxed view of the Soviet threat and championed a left-leaning elitist view that the US and Soviet had morally equivalent claims in the world. Carter’s naiveté led to a defense posture based on the hope that Soviet accommodation would eliminate the need to improve the capability of the military – a naiveté writ large in his botched rescue of the Iranian hostages.

President Reagan refused to continue the failed legacy of his predecessors and ended the Cold War by outspending the Soviets. Exhausted by trying to keep up with US military superiority, the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the entire Soviet Union unraveled in 1991. America became the world’s only superpower. Although Reagan’s defense spending fell through most of his second term, the military buildup of his first term was sufficient to allow President George H. W. Bush to win the first Gulf War handily. Yet, throughout the Bush-Clinton administrations, defense spending as a percentage of GDP continued to decline and was less than 3.5% at the end of Clinton’s second term. President George W. Bush was set to continue this trend except for 9/11, which led to increased spending for the Iraq and Afghan wars – both of which were incompetently managed because politicians tried to win them on the cheap.

As the late Paul Harvey often said, freedom isn’t free. We must maintain global military superiority if for no other reason than to make other options to war possible. Reagan correctly observed that weakness – even the perception of weakness – invites aggression.

Cutting our military to pay for the fiscal excesses of entitlement spending, bailouts, and stimulus give-aways won’t solve the causes that have put our economy into a tailspin. During his confirmation hearing for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey said “National security didn’t cause the debt crisis, nor will it solve it.” Nor is stripping the military in order to increase domestic spending – which Obama wants to do – a proper use of the taxpayer’s money. If Obama has his way, then instead of being able to fight two wars concurrently, our military will be able to fight one war and – well, cross its fingers.

The purpose of our government is to do for us the things we are unable to do for ourselves. National defense is one of them. In fact national defense is the only mandated responsibility of the federal government under the Constitution. Everything else in the Constitution is either a restriction of government authority or a specifically enumerated authority without a requirement to use it. Six of the 17 enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8 deal with national defense – the largest category of governance in that list.

Under the Constitution only Congress is granted authority to declare war, raise and support an army, provide and maintain a navy, make rules to govern the military, mobilize militias to enforce laws in domestic unrest, and impress militias into national military service. The only authority granted to the President regarding national defense is to be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. Nothing more. He is certainly not empowered to weaken our defense.

I have no argument with those who claim there is waste in military spending. We’ve all heard of thousand dollar toilets and hundred dollar screwdrivers. Waste in government, whether in military or domestic programs, should be eliminated even if we were running a trillion dollar surplus instead of a trillion dollar deficit.

But as I said in last week’s blog, we live in a dangerous world. While our attention is currently focused on terrorism, we can’t ignore the threats of a near-nuclear Iran, a boy general in charge of Korea and its nuclear weapons, a resurgent Russia, and a China whose aim is to deny the American military a presence in the Pacific region. Despite the heat that the second President Bush took from the Left for saying it, these countries represent an axis of evil that could become allied in a war against America.

Moreover, there are second tier threats from countries like unstable Pakistan, Marxist-Communist Peru and Venezuela, Brazil’s tilt toward China, and unrest in Africa.

We can’t combat any of these threats with a video game military reliant on drones, cyber-weapons, missiles, and death rays. Nor can we rely on a military which attempts to fight a bloodless war with aircraft, ships, and submarines as the military’s critics want. Navies and air forces don’t win wars. They support troops on the ground that must always be the tip of the American spear.

We cannot afford to elect politicians who do not consider that an attack on Israel or Taiwan is a serious possibility – a possibility that will force our Commander-in-Chief to support our allies. But whether the next war involves one or both of these hot spots … whether it is started by a member of the axis of evil … or an alliance among them (most likely China and Iran) … whether it is a conventional or nuclear war … I believe there will be a serious war within the next four years, I’m sad to say.

My daily prayer is that Barack Obama will not be responsible for conducting it.

The SOTU Speech I Would Have Given

Delivering his last State of the Union (SOTU) speech as President, unless reelected, Obama predictably took credit for anything that justifies giving him another term and blamed the failures – notably high unemployment and a flagging economy – on the previous administration. Remarkably, after three years of his presidency, Bush remains Obama’s Moriarty.

The chest-thumping rhetoric delivered last Tuesday was plainly a campaign stump speech. Conspicuously absent, however, were the grandiloquent though vacuous references to hope and change with which the then-unknown Senator Obama hypnotized throngs of want-to-believers in 2008. But the 2012 campaign will now be dogged by a record which President Obama should have to explain to politically wizened voters who still poll in the majority against ObamaCare, stimulus spending, and bailouts – his major first-term achievements. Unable to explain them or blame them, Tuesday’s speech revealed a strategic switch to “equality” and “fairness” as the new “us versus them” lever for his reelection.

I sincerely hope that voters will see that Obama’s vision for America is one of trickle down government in which more and more of our wealth is confiscated in order to seize more and more control of our lives. I doubt that voters will see that. But do we really want more regulations; more government-directed spending; more power centralized in Washington; more dependency of citizens on government programs; more debt piled on our children and grandchildren and Americans yet unborn; more ill-thought-out programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid whose spending is engulfing our economy; more parenting by a president who believes he knows what’s best for us … even better than we know for ourselves? What happened to the vision of American Exceptionalism and the City Set Upon a Hill, neither of which Obama believes in? What happened to the expectation, which evidence showed to be true, that every generation would live more prosperously than its parent’s generation – until private-sector dynamism was hobbled by the excesses of the last two presidential administrations?

This week’s blog was initially planned to compare the main arguments of Obama’s 7,000-word, 65-minute speech against the facts – which are well-publicized on the Internet. Instead, I decided to write the SOTU speech I would have given – in a lot less words than Obama used.

So, here we go.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

I come before you this evening to speak on behalf of the state of our Union. I wish I could begin by assuring you and the American people listening by radio or television that the state of our Union is strong, as my predecessors have done in their State of the Union speeches. Unfortunately, I’m unable to do that.

The Federal budget is out of control. The most recent CBO estimates report the deficit – the amount by which federal expenditures exceed revenues (i.e. mostly individual and corporate tax receipts) – will be $1.2 trillion for the fiscal year that ends in September. The national debt – i.e. the accumulation of historic deficits – now stands at $15.3 trillion. To put that debt in perspective, every person in the American workforce would have to give up two years’ income to pay it off.

Just a decade ago, the debt was $3.3 trillion – about 20% of the current figure. It is obvious that we are spending at an unsustainable rate. How have we been able to continue this spending spree? By borrowing about 36 cents of each dollar we spend. We were borrowing 40 cents per dollar two years ago.

Would you conduct the affairs of your household that way? Certainly not. If you attempted it, the creditors would ultimately turn off your borrowing spigot. Your government should not conduct its affairs that way either, and it’s up to the voters to turn off the borrowing spigot. Your federal government lacks the discipline to do it.

If the US economy were a business, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) would be its sales revenues. Over the past 40 years, the cost of your federal government (i.e. what it spends) averaged 18% of the country’s “sales” revenues (GDP). During the last two administrations, however, that percentage has crept up to 25%. Why? Because of 9/11 and Homeland Security. Because of No Child Left Behind and an expensive Medicare Part D prescription benefit. Because of healthcare reform. Because of two wars and the care of veterans of those wars. Because of many other increases in government expenditures.

In order to avoid sinking further into a morass of debt, we would have to maintain the current ratio of national debt to GDP. This would require tax receipts to exceed federal expenditures by 1.5% in order to pay the current average interest. Otherwise we have to borrow more to pay the interest. Today the debt-to-GDP ratio is 101%. Two years ago it was 88%. We are losing ground and entering frightening, unknown territory in this ratio.

Current interest rates are low. But before the 2008 recession began, interest rates were around 5% – closer to the historic norm. If interest rates return to historic levels, the expense of continuing to spend at current levels on top of our current national debt could give our creditors pause. Our borrowing is already a national security concern because so much of our debt is held by countries that don’t see the world as we do.

The picture I’m painting should be clear. Government is involved in doing more and more for its citizens – some of it appropriate and unavoidable, and some of it unnecessary. And most of what government does “for us” is grossly intrusive, like the TSA “strip and pat,” like the IRS, which knows too much about our personal affairs, like ObamaCare that will have access to our medical records to learn what conditions we are being treated for and the outcomes of those treatments.

Take the TSA as an example. The Israeli airport security system is the best in the world. There have been no acts of terrorism passing through the Ben Gurion International airport since 1972. There are no pat-downs, no full body screens. Their system is based on profiling. Our system treats all travelers alike – like potential terrorists. The Israeli system is not only more effective than ours, it costs less.

The US federal government never implements any program for which costs versus benefits is a major concern. The government will spend a dollar to save a dime. Homeland security is an example.

Education is another.

Under the Constitution, the federal government has no role in education. Education is a state responsibility – indeed a local one supervised by local Boards of Education elected by the local community. Yet, the federal government has built up a massive federal educational bureaucracy which will cost taxpayers almost $80 billion to operate this year. That cost is in addition to $175 billion in stimulus spending that was given to states and school districts to bridge state budget shortfalls during the current recession, including paying existing and new teacher salaries. Why are teacher salaries in Fond du Lac, WI a federal concern? Why does a taxpayer living in Dade County FL have to pay for them?

What would have happened if the federal government were not involved in state education? The states would have figured out a solution to pay teachers on their own. It might not have been the best solution, but having the essence of a “rich uncle” to bail them out was clearly not the best solution either. States now must hire untold thousands of administrative employees to fill out federal paperwork to justify the monies they receive and the uses to which they are put. In the process, state and federal education officials and citizens themselves have lost the freedom to act on their own in education because they accept federal funds.

Let’s travel back in time about 45 years, to visit the 1965 centerpiece of The Great Society legislation – Medicare and Medicaid. What possible constitutional justification did the federal government have for getting into the insurance business? In 1965 the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that the hospital insurance portion of the program, Part A, would cost about $9 billion annually by 1990. Actual Part A spending in 1990 was $67 billion. When they were created, Medicare Part A and B were predicted to cost about $12 billion in 1990. Actual Part A and B spending in 1990 was $110 billion – off by nearly a factor of 10. Today, the unfunded liability for Medicare A and B is about $75 trillion. Who is going to pay that? Your grandchildren – and maybe their grandchildren!

The federal portion of Medicaid, which is a state-managed program, was estimated to cost $1 billion in 1992 and its actual cost was $17 billion in 1992.

MIT economist Amy Finkelstein is an expert in Medicare and Medicaid. Unlike commercial insurance, in which the insured must first pay a deductible before insurance kicks in, Medicare and Medicaid provide “first dollar” coverage – there is no deductible. Finkelstein’s research shows that, concerning these programs, supply created its own demand – i.e. the availability of first dollar Medicare drove healthcare costs higher than they would have been otherwise. The availability of Medicare to pay the bills for the over-65s accounted for more than half of the growth in healthcare spending between 1965 and 1970. Medicare increases caused new hospitals to be built and existing hospitals to expand their capacity. Increased capacity spilled over into commercial insurance plans and increased their costs also.

Before Medicare existed, 51% of the people over 65 bought their own health insurance. Those who didn’t buy insurance paid for care out of pocket. Those who couldn’t afford to pay received charity care – essentially the group now covered by Medicaid. These are examples of government “doing” for people what they could and were doing for themselves to solve their problems. Cheap, taxpayer-subsidized government insurance crowded out private insurance for the 51%, paid the bills for the “self-pay”, and took over what charity was providing.

What did society get for the money spent by the government to provide this health insurance? Essentially nothing. There was no impact on death rates. The only “benefit” Finkelstein found was that out of pocket spending by the heavy users of healthcare declined substantially because Uncle Sam paid it. If society had simply paid those out-of-pocket expenses directly, rather than having Medicare as an intermediary, total healthcare cost increases would have been significantly lower.

Finkelstein’s 2005 research showed that consumers will regulate their healthcare spending if they are required to pay more of the costs of routine chronic care, while protecting them against the catastrophically high expense of acute care episodes. High deductible plans are one way to let doctors and consumers – rather than government bureaucrats – negotiate and manage healthcare expenditures. A plan for doing that was introduced last year – six years after Finkelstein’s research – in the House by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI).

A similar argument can be made for the introduction of Social Security Insurance. For the first 160 years of the Republic, citizens provided for their own retirement. Virtually every citizen saved something for inevitable retirement. Some worked until they died or were no longer were able to work. Some received help from families. Some – a minority – asked for help from charities. Yet the government decided to solve a problem that wasn’t a problem. It introduced an ill-conceived Social Security program whose existence is doubtful for our grandchildren but whose expense will be paid by them nonetheless. [I discussed the flaws of Social Security in my August 21, 2010 blog and therefore won’t repeat them here.]

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and programs of that ilk have created a society that is dependent on the government for its day-to-day needs. Today half of the households have at least one person who is receiving government assistance on average, which means there are households with multiple recipients or multiple services. Starting in 2012 with the retirement of the first boomer, that percentage will grow until conceivably only a minority of the working population is truly independent and self-supporting. Today more than 45 million Americans receive food stamps. That’s one out of seven men, women, and children on food stamps in a free republic. Today there are more households receiving income support (unemployment benefits, Social Security, disability insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, education assistance, and other cash transfers of government funds to individuals) than they pay in taxes (income, payroll, and other taxes). This is an astonishing development when you consider that 75 years ago, none of these programs existed and none of this dependency existed. Are we more free or less free today?

How can someone receive more in benefits than they contribute to the commonweal? Because half the wage earners pay no income tax. Whereas, 40% of income earners pay 99% of taxes and the top 1% pays more in taxes than the bottom 95% combined.

The US is the most progressively taxed nation among the Western democracies. The concept of tax progressivity is based on the economic theory of diminishing marginal utility. That’s an academic concept which means the more you have of something, the less value there is in having more of it. So, if you have five cars, theoretically owning a sixth is less value to you than when you bought the second or third or fourth.

Car enthusiasts will probably argue with that logic as taxpayers also do … because the 40% who pay the 99% only make three times the money earned by the lower 60%. Get that? A group of high income earners makes three times as much money as another group but pays 75 times more in taxes. That is marginal utility taken to the point of absurdity. But it is the basis of the tax code.

The current tax code is a monstrosity. It is a crazy quilt of patches enacted over the years by Congress to give preference to one interest group over another. And it can be safely said that as soon as Congress passes a new law affecting income taxes, an army of dedicated accountants and tax lawyers go to work to figure out how to minimize or negate its impact. That may offend the delicate sensibilities of those who are equally dedicated to extracting more income from the “rich” (although no one has defined the income level at which “richness” begins) but it is not illegal to avoid taxes; it is only illegal to evade them. There is a big difference.

If the tax code is to work as planned, it will require reform that incents taxpayers to comply because they believe it is fair. That is not the case today. High income earners feel they are unfairly discriminated against – and the example given above is ample explanation why – whereas government leaders are more focused on increasing government tax revenue than they are in decreasing government expense.

Fairness means that an income earner is not discriminated against by the tax code based on how much income is earned. It also means that an income earner is not discriminated for by the tax code based on how little income is earned. Everyone – and I mean everyone – should pay taxes. That way, everyone pays attention to how much government costs them personally. When some people are exempted from taxpaying on the basis of their income – and exempting half of the income earners is an obscenity – they have no interest in the effectiveness and efficiency of their government. Moreover, exempting a group from paying taxes smacks of political bribery.

Thus, someone who makes three times more than another person should pay three times more tax dollars to the government. Businesses and people should pay the same rate because business profits, whether they are distributed or not, belong to people, not businesses. Business profits should be taxed once – not twice as they are as dividends or three times as they are as estates (the death tax).

What I am describing, of course, is a tax code with only one rate, which some have called the flat tax or fair tax. And before anyone says “It won’t work here,” let’s consider where it has worked. Consider Hong Kong, which has had a 15% flat tax since 1947. It is one of the most prosperous cities in the world. How about Ireland and its 12.5% flat tax? Historically Ireland was renowned for its poverty and lost a million people 160 years ago in its potato famine. Today’s low taxes have made the Celtic Tiger a haven for international companies looking for low tax locales to build manufacturing plants. The Economist magazine ranked Ireland the best place in the world to live based on a "quality of life.”

What would happen if the US went from the highest taxed country in the world for businesses to the lowest? Those who excoriate outsourcing would have to find something new to complain about because the capital and jobs which are driven off-shore by high taxes would return with low taxes.

Mr. Warren Buffett has been in the news of late, complaining that he doesn’t pay enough tax. I know of no restriction for him to pay more voluntarily. I also know of no attempt by him to do so.

Among his perennial complaints about the tax code is his criticism that the payroll tax is too regressive. I happen to agree with him. I happen to disagree with his solution that the wage base should be increased. Instead my tax reform would get rid of payroll taxes altogether. In doing so, my reform would simply be following the example of Congress, which years ago began spending the Social Security surplus, created by the payroll tax, on general government expenditures. Since Congress considers that surplus to be no different than personal incomes, I agree with them. A separate tax to pay money into Social Security so Congress can filch it for general expenditures is a charade. We don’t need two taxes – an income and a payroll tax – there should be one tax on income – period.

I would also abolish all of the loopholes and exemptions that are so hateful to the current White House resident – which includes those he has proposed like exemptions for green energy, exemptions for companies that hire vets, exemptions for companies that continue business in this country and penalties for those which don’t, exemptions for small businesses and college students and building owners who install conservation gadgets, and exemptions for hi-tech producers. I agree with him that everyone should pay their “fair share” and his loopholes are no different from those he hates.

I promised to be brief so I’ll have to leave my comments about government regulation reform, energy independence, housing, downsizing our military, banking reforms, illegal immigration, the Middle East and Israel, the war on terror, and America’s influence in the world for another SOTU speech.

I will say this in closing, however.

We live in a dangerous world and nobody chose us to police it. We can’t run around the world righting every wrong. There are too many of them. But we must be prepared if the bad guys ever try to do us harm. To them, I give this warning.

When I was a boy, my parents moved around a lot. Every time we moved I found myself in a new pecking order of toughness in the neighborhood. I wasn’t a big kid but I learned unless I wanted to be in a lot of fights – which I didn’t – I had to have a plan. Therefore, when my parents moved to another city or neighborhood, I checked around to learn who the biggest bully was. Then I would find that boy and pick a fight with him. I’d beat the daylights out of him and sometimes I’d get the daylights beat out of me in the process. I never lost a fight, though some were draws. But after that, I didn’t have to fight anymore. And, I had a lot of friends.

Bad guys of the world: you’ve been warned.

Thank you and good night. God bless all of you. And God bless America!