Economics

Since the number one household issue in the United States right now is jobs–the need for a free and robust economy–I thought it would be helpful to share with you the best article I’ve seen on the subject this year.

Newt Gingrich is certainly one of the clearest political thinkers in America today. He has also undergone a spiritual transformation in his life which shows in his writing and speaking. I encourage you to watch his new documentary, Nine Days that Changed the World, that shares the moral and spiritual backdrop of the fall of the Iron Curtain. It’s liberation was not accomplished by men–but by the power of God through faith and prayer.

This Economics 101 lesson is the bottom line of the fall elections. It’s interesting to me that Speaker Gingrich uses the terms “Killers” vs. “Creators.” Isn’t the real battle in the world between Lucifer, a killer of men’s souls and livelihoods, and God, our magnificent Creator and Sustainer?  RB

July 21, 2010 – Job Killers vs. Job Creators

By Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House

The campaign this fall can be boiled down to a simple choice: job-killers versus job-creators.

With so many Americans out of work, candidates will win decisive victories if they can show their opponent’s policies will kill jobs and their policies will create jobs.

Governing is about having the right principles, policies, processes and people.

Successful leaders hold principles that work in the real world, and these principles lead them to the right policies. And because they are determined to measure results, they develop processes that work. Finally, with the right principles, policies, and processes, they look for people who are driven, practical, and experienced to get the right things done the right way.

Unfortunately, under the Pelosi-Reid Congress and the Obama presidency, government has become a job-killing system thanks to a set of principles, policies, processes and people that are completely disconnected from reality.
 
I describe this alien ideology in my book To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. It is a fundamentally anti-work, anti-investment, anti-entrepreneurial ideology that has led to economic stagnation and spiritual decay wherever it has been tried.

We can already see the results of this radical ideology in America.

The American work ethic is being replaced with a mindset that favors “gaming” the system to get away with working as little as possible.

American productivity is being replaced with a set of union work rules and bureaucracy that makes us too slow, too expensive and too cumbersome.

The historic American commitment to local representation and local control is being replaced by an emphasis on federal concentration of power and rule by bureaucrats and judges that is stripping Americans of their rights and responsibilities.

A commitment to religious freedom and God-given rights is being replaced by a secular oppression that increasingly resembles the government-imposed atheism of Soviet totalitarianism. (I encourage you to watch the documentary Nine Days that Changed the World, which Callista and I host and produced, to learn about the plight of the Polish people under Communism and the brave moral leadership of Pope John Paul II that helped topple the Soviet Union.)

The secular-socialist machine of the left has made the recession worse by suppressing the natural resiliency of the American economy and setting the stage for even worse economic challenges in the future.

For President Obama, the years he spent studying and teaching the radicalism of Saul Alinsky laid the foundation for a job-killing, anti-business attitude.

If you believe business is bad, you will convince it to go away.

If you are determined to tax small business owners, entrepreneurs, successful corporate leaders, investors, and innovators they will either avoid taxable behavior or leave the country entirely.

If you impose absurd regulatory controls totally out of touch with reality, you will kill jobs.

The Obama Administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling has already sent high-paying good jobs and tax-paying, profitable companies out of the United States. Obama has been good for jobs in Egypt and the Congo (where the first two oil rigs have gone) but he has killed jobs in Louisiana.

The President’s proposed energy taxes will kill jobs in America but they will create jobs in China (which this year passed America as the world’s largest user of energy).

The recently passed government control of the financial system will be good for jobs in London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Shanghai and other foreign financial centers but it will kill jobs and profits in the United States.

We have seen job killers implement job-killing policies before.

President Carter had a whole series of job-killing policies from 1977 to 1980 and they worked. They killed a lot of jobs.

Politicians in Detroit have been killing jobs for two decades. Only with Mayor Dave Bing’s new job-oriented approach has there been any hope of rebuilding Detroit’s economy.

We have all seen the state governments of New York and California adopt policies that kill jobs and drive businesses and successful individuals out of their states.

On the other side, we have seen a job creator like Gov. Rick Perry implement policies which in 2008 led Texas to create as many jobs as the other 49 states combined.

Governors Mitch Daniels in Indiana, Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota, Haley Barbour in Mississippi, Sonny Perdue in Georgia, and Bobby Jindal in Louisiana are all examples of principled job creators whose policies work.

We are in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

The only recent improvements in unemployment numbers have come about because people have quit looking for work and so are no longer counted as unemployed.

Under this model, if President Obama could convince every unemployed American to quit looking for work, we would have zero percent unemployment.

The number would be great but the reality would be horrible.

All politicians these days run on the theme that they will create jobs–even if they don’t have the foggiest idea how to do so.

There’s a state representative in my district who boasts with each newsletter and press announcement that his number one priority is creating jobs.  However, he’s a liberal progressive whose “day job” is to work on a governmental board that creates no wealth, just talks the talk.

Then there is Congressman Joe Sestak–yes, that Joe Sestak– who was offered a “job”  in the Obama administration if he would step out of the Pennsylvania primary to make room for Arlen Specter. When interviewed about his priorities, he remarked “I want to create jobs for working families.” However, he’s spent most of his life as an Admiral in the Navy and now as a Congressman. He knows very little about how to create private sector jobs. Besides, last time I checked “all families” work. (Am I missing something?)

Which brings me to President Obama and his administration. They spent 862 billion in their first few months on a “stimulus package” that was supposed to halt the recession and create millions of new jobs. Here’s what the Heritage Foundation says about that failed effort:

“Our nation’s unemployment rate is hovering near 10% not because of record job losses…but because of record job non-creation. Private sector employers have gone on strike. Contrary to what the President’s economic wizards and New York Times columnists believe, massive government deficit spending does not stimulate job creation. President Obama does not have a secret vault of money he can just throw at the American people. The resources the government spends come from the economy. When the government increases spending, it crowds out the resources that business owners could have invested in their enterprises.”

Then came along last week’s Department of Labor jobs report, which showed private sector job creation fell by 190,000 between April and May of this year. Again according to the Heritage Foundation, “this bad news jolted markets worldwide including the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which fell 3.2% Friday to its lowest level since early February. In total the U.S. economy has now lost a net of 2.2 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his stimulus bill, and his administration is now 7.2 million jobs short of what he promised his $862 billion stimulus would help create by 2010. This morning on MSNBC, former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-FL) pressed prominent Keynesian economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs on whether it was too early to declare President Obama’s stimulus a failure. Scarborough had to ask the question twice, but Sachs finally relented: “It did fail.”

Also keep in mind that the American economy needs to add 50,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. So the loss of 2.2 million jobs since the stimulus is abysmal indeed.

I think it’s time to be brutally honest about the leaders who are running the economy in our nation. This need for probing evaluation reminds me of a famous C.S. Lewis teaching in Mere Christianity where he shared the truth about Jesus Christ. He said that there are only three ways to look at the life of Jesus. Based on his life, words and works, he was either:

• A liar,
• A lunatic,
• Or Lord of heaven and earth.

All people must choose based on these three choices. There are no others.

Using similar logic, I believe there are only three rational choices we can make about the economic performance of our current national leaders. They are either:

• Ignorant when it comes to creating jobs,
• Incompetent in their governing skills,
• Or revolutionaries who don’t really want to create jobs but desire to fundamentally transform America into a different kind of nation.

Ignorance

It’s hard to believe that a group of people from Ivy League schools are ignorant about job creation, but wiser minds have been saying for decades that secular universities are educating people away from  common sense. Many of our government elite have been trained in a liberal environment that is anti-free enterprise and pro-Big Government. Their ignorance comes from a man-centered worldview that denies freedom and accountability before God and exalts human governments as instruments of social improvement. They do not understand that governments do not create wealth–they only confiscate it and re-distribute it to non-productive sectors.

Here’s the time-tested formula for economic advance: Faith in God produces human liberty and moral character. Character produces vision, initiative, creativity and hard work, that when combined with limited government and low taxation, produce jobs, wealth and prosperity.

The opposite is also true. Secularization diminishes moral character and human worth producing less initiative and drive creating more dependency on others. Higher taxes and increased social spending inhibit the free market from producing wealth and growing prosperity.

God. Morality. Freedom. Prosperity. These are the American (biblical) ingredients for success.

Are our present leaders simply ignorant of these principles? 

Incompetence

The Carter administration is often viewed as the most incompetent of the modern presidencies. Jimmy Carter also believed in Big Government solutions, higher taxes, and social re-distribution (it was his Community Re-Investment Act that sowed the original seeds of the mortgage meltdown of 2008). In foreign policy he was seen as a weak leader who dithered while American hostages were taken and multiplied “malaise” among the public. It took Ronald Reagan to point the nation back to God, morality, freedom, lower taxes, and peace through strength.

After eighteen months in office, it appears that Barack Obama is a gifted orator and campaigner, but a very incompetent leader. It’s no wonder. He’s never led anything in his life except a brief stint of community organizing. He has no executive experience, he’s painfully cerebral in reponding to needs and crises (four month delay in sending additional troops to Afghanistan, no response to Nashville flooding, and slow and inept response to protecting the shores of the Gulf States from the BP fiasco). And on foreign policy, he has emboldened both Iran and North Korea by his weakness and dissed America’s only democratic friend in the Middle East–the nation of Israel.

Is the Obama administration sincere, but just over its head in trying to lead our nation?

Revolutionaries

Most people believe that our president and those around him are really smart people. They just can’t be this ignorant about how to stimulate job creation! Not with all those Ph.Ds! They are also hard-working folks who can’t be guilty of gross incompetence!

That only leaves one honest choice: What they are doing to the American economy is deliberate. They know what they’re doing and they’re doing it fervently and incremently because at heart they are revolutionaries who want to fundamentally change America from a Christian-based, freedom loving nation to a secular-oriented social democracy like much of Europe. Many believe this is the major driving force behind the lack of job creation and massive growth of government. They don’t want to create more jobs–they truly want to create more dependency which increases their power and paternity.

The present Administration in the United States is not doing much for the nation. They are either ignorant of free enterprise, incompetent in governing skills, or revolutionary in outlook.

Maybe they are a little of all three. You make the call.

Today is a primary day in many states. I am praying that the American people take an honest look at their current leaders and pray fervently and vote wisely on June 8, in November, and in 2012.

Our future depends on what John Adams wrote on a plaque that hangs in the White House:

“May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof” (women too).”