Timothy Lawton

I am tired of liberals and the mainstream press saying that conservatives have no solutions to the problems that face us. We have plenty of ideas, they just happen to be ideas that the left doesn’t like. They also falsely try to portray that the Bush administration has tried these solutions during his eight years in office. Contrary to what is believed by many George W. Bush was NOT a conservative. His policies only adopted a small portion of the ideas that the right would have wanted to put forth to solve the crises that face America. The profligate spending of the Republicans during the six years that they controlled the White House and Capitol Hill could not have been more antithetical to the fundamental beliefs of conservatism.

The economy tanked in late 2008 due to the banking crisis. The banks had saddled themselves with toxic assets and all lending was on the verge of freezing up at the time. Rather than debate the specifics of what lead to this problem, because both sides have played a role in concocting this mess, I ‘d rather look at what should have been done at the time. Only one major issue stands in the way of doing this thoroughly and that is the fact that much of the specifics about how the books of the banks looked at the time is still shrouded in mystery. Let us suppose that some action of the Federal government may have been necessary. Yet, we can conclude that it was certainly not the role of the government to buy stakes in the banks and get involved in their day to day business. This is why we now have a pay Czar appointed by Obama. We also can relate this to the debacles of bailing out AIG and most of the American motor industry and the White House control over the executive compensations of those companies. We, the taxpayers, spent 80 billion of our money under Obama to hold off the bankruptcies of those motor corporations for six months and a 180 billion on AIG which is still teetering on the brink of collapse.  With Chrysler and GM we also saw the federal involvement lead to the violation of our laws when it came to bankruptcy restructuring. Primary debtors were given less money than the UAW union. If the laws of the U.S. can be so readily violated who would want to invest in companies based in this country? We should have let these corporations fail and allowed the banks to restucture the bad loans that they made that were still salvageable and set up a system similar to the one that bought up the bad debt from the Savings and Loan scandal two decades ago. Mortgages could have been increased in their terms and this could have made many delinquent loans more manageable and kept the banks liquid and able to continue making loans.

On top of these solutions a reduction of the capital gains tax could have spurred investment. We also should have lowered the tax rates on ALL citizens. This could have been done by reducing income taxes for those who pay, a reduction in the social security tax, reducing the payroll tax, and finally a reduction in state sales taxes. Many think that the Bush tax cuts were too deep. Contrary to that opinion I feel that they did not go far enough. We still have a 35% corporate tax rate in this country. It is one of the highest in the world. If we were to drop it to 20% or lower could you imagine how that would spur economic development in this country? Ronald Reagan inherited an economy that was in many ways worse than the one we have now and many of my proposals were part of the package that he put forth which brought us out of that severe recession.

On a number of other issues the conservative ideology also has the plans to help solve our problems. Health care is one of the most complex issues that we face domestically. Yet, all ideas proposed from the right are simply ignored by Congressional Democrats and the President. One idea that has the most potential to reduce costs is Tort reform, but the Democrats won’t touch this because they are the party of the trial lawyers. One of the greatest, if not the single most, contributors to high health care costs in this country is malpractice insurance. Reducing outrageous and unnecessary lawsuits would do wonders in reducing the amount of money that we spend in the medical system. Allowing personal health insurance to be bought accross state lines and piecemeal rather than being covered for every possibility would also help. As it stands now people are being covered for all cases from the very first moment that they buy insurance. We also have to consider how the reduced rates for medicine and machinery paid for in already socialized nations affects our prices here. Essentially we are subsidizing the costs in foreign countries because the health care corporations have to raise their prices here to make up the difference. Once these issues are addressed we can then look at the potential to deal with those who are still not covered, Yet, this number is not the 47 million we so often hear bandied about. That number includes approximately 12 million illegal aliens, those who are uninsured due to job transition, and those who have chosen not to be insured despite the fact that they can afford it. Even in the worse case scenario we do not have to nationalize health care in order to get those who are citizens of this country insured. I have heard some sort of a federally funded voucher program similar to food stamps proposed as a remedy for this situation. Nationalized health care is bankrupting every nation in which it has been implemented.

Not that I believe climate change is necessarily a problem that we can control, but I do believe that we can control what we do that may be exacerbating it. As one who studies climate and weather I do believe that there is some change occurring in our climate. The weather has grown more extreme over the last several decades and it is definetly affecting our environment. That said, the insanity over human induced climate change has taken on almost cultic tones.  Programs like the cash for clunkers, legislation like Cap and Trade, and the mandated change to using light bulbs that contain mercury (one of the most poisonous substances on earth) to avoid ordinary light bulbs which emit a bit more carbon dioxide are all ideas based on the faith that mankind is causing climate change. Since this concept ignores that there appears to be warming on other planets we may need to find another source. I think it could be the Sun. That big yellow ball of light that heats and lights our planet. I’m sure most of you have seen it. So, instead of conciously approaching the ways in which we can get and save energy better than we do now we have plans that toss perfectly good cars into landfills, a tax on energy which could be the largest single tax increase in mankind’s history, and light bulbs that will eventually poison our homes and pollute our ground water with a substance that is widely known to cause birth defects.

If we are going to be wasting trillions of dollars what we should be spending it on is improving our national infrastructure and finding alternative fuels that make sense. Some of this can be spent on research, which I would support the government investing money, and other efforts can be induced by tax incentives for already proven methods such as wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal energy production. Individuals and businesses that invest in these renewable resources can be rewarded for their reduction of fossil fuel use with tax rebates. We need to be cautious when implementing such programs, because we can see what the ethanol subsidy did when it was tried. Not only did ethanol made by corn not reduce our energy consumption, but it actually raised the price of all grain and rice commodities around the world increasing the price of food for those already at the margins of starvation. Such a replication would be a crime. How many went hungry or died around the world so American politicians could pander to farmers in the corn belt?

We need real solutions for real problems. Trying government control of the economy, healthcare, and energy production has repeatedly failed in the past. Why would we expect it to work now? Nothing is black and white. Are there areas in which the government can assist in solving these problems? Yes, but we do it to our detriment when we take out of the equation good old common sense and self-determination. Conservatives propose solutions that involve the people and allow them to make their own decisions based on what is best for them as an individual. Whenever this philosophy has been tried in the past it has yielded good results. Our nation was founded on the concept of individual liberty and the freedom to live as one chooses. Conservative solutions allow for the ingenuity and talent of every citizen to be applied to the challenges that face us as a society.