Identity Politics - Barack Obama Fails Black America With Liberalism

In 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president, much of America – including millions of white people – thought the election of a black man to the presidency would prove that America had finally overcome its racist past and truly become a colorblind nation. Alas, that was not to be.

Not surprisingly, after almost eight years of America’s first black president, America is still a racist place… maybe even more of one. At least in the eyes of the Black Lives Matter movement, Colin Kaepernick and thousands of “protesters” around the country and their millions of fans.

The reality is, the United States is fundamentally not a racist place. It does have some elements of a racist past, (as do most countries) and there indeed may be vestiges of racism that remain, but they are largely gone from the public square. Much of what passes for racism today is nothing of the sort. Constantly we hear community activists – including the one in the White House – tell us that high unemployment in the black community is indicative of racism, that higher incarceration rates among black men is indicative of racism, that poor inner city schools are indicative of racism.

None of those things are true. All of those things are problems, but they are not signs of racism. They are mostly signs of bad decisions by the people living in black communities… mostly in the form of voting for Democrats and liberals, who've long run most of the nation’s largest cities where a majority of black Americans live.

While slavery and Jim Crow most certainly are stains on American history, the problems bedeviling black America today are not the vestiges of some racist system stacked against it. No, a significant number of the problems disproportionately impacting black Americans are the result of liberalism. Union and Democrat control keep urban students stuck in expensive, failing schools. Increases in minimum wage rates keep unskilled and poorly educated black youth unemployed and without work experience. Welfare programs encouraging single motherhood have pushed the rate at which black babies are born to unwed mothers from 20% in 1960 to almost 75% today. The brilliant Thomas Sowell states: The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life. And with the breakdown of the family came an increase in crime and social unrest. Combined with the destruction of education and a regulatory leviathan that suffocates entrepreneurship, blacks in America face daunting challenges. But it is big government liberalism that keeps the deck stacked against them, not racism.

And Barack Obama has been nothing if not a paragon of liberalism. Not only has he dramatically increased both government spending and costly regulation, but he has also been a champion of identity politics. And divisive identity politics has not worked out well for black Americans under Barack Obama. By many objective measures black Americans are worse off today than they were before Barack Obama became president: Black incomes are down since 2008 and poverty rates are up. Black homeownership is down and while unemployment rates are ostensibly lower, factoring in the lower Labor Force Participation Rates makes it a wash. And most tragically of all, murders are up since Barack Obama became president, with 6,782 black Americans murdered in 2008 vs. 7,039 in 2015.

All of this on the backdrop of a presidency that has at its core race. By putting race and “racism” front and center of his presidency, Barack Obama failed the country, and most of all black Americans who looked for him to bring about positive change. His big government policies have dramatically slowed economic recovery and hindered growth, the two keys to prosperity for all Americans, black and white. His constant focus on race has divided the nation more than at any point since the 1960’s. His promises that to improve the lot of black Americans while simultaneously implementing programs that make their success that much more difficult has created a level of frustration not seen in decades. His constant embrace of the social justice perspective against that of law and order has brought back the riots on a scale not seen since the 1960s and a dramatic increase in lawlessness that disproportionately impacts communities of color around the country.

At the end of the day, Barack Obama’s presidency has been an abject failure, for the country in general and for black Americans in particular. Identity politics may play well in the media and in the streets, and sometimes at the ballot box. But alas, where it counts most, economic freedom and prosperity, it never works. Barack Obama was once heralded as the poster child for opportunity in a post racial nation. Now he is a poster child for the failure of identity politics. Economic freedom, opportunity and prosperity don’t care about your race, your sex your religion or your sexuality… they seek limited government and laws that apply to everyone equally. None of which applies to liberalism and identity politics. Let’s hope that history records the failed presidency of Barack Obama is the high point of those cancerous ideologies…

From the Charlie Hebdo attack to your local street corner: Multiculturalism as a fount of bloodshed

There has been much commentary about the events in France over the last week. One of the major causes for the motivation behind the home grown terrorists who struck the offices of Charlie Hebdo is the fact that in many places in France, France is something of a foreign country. There are hundreds of “no-go” zones in the country where French police won’t go and French law has been supplanted by Sharia law. It is from these areas of largely disaffected, often unemployed youth on the government dole where much of this homegrown hatred emanates. These young people feel disconnected from the larger society, have little or no vested interest in the success of the larger society and often times are vocally disdainful of it.

In a very similar way, the United States is covered with neighborhoods where youth unemployment is sky high, where families spend generations on the government dole, and where there is little allegiance to the nation as a whole or the larger society. In France many of the young Muslims call themselves Muslims or Algerians and they rarely call themselves French. In the United States the hyphenated American such as African-American or Hispanic-American has replaced the designation of American for many.

While in the United States there may not be a religious component of that separation, there certainly is one similarly powerful: the cry of racism. The rallying cry of racism as the cause of the problems in various black and Hispanic neighborhoods around the country function in exactly the same way that radical Islam ideology does in France and other European nations. It drives separation. It drives anger. It drives a devaluation of the lives of others.

The separation is no accident. From Oakland’s effort some years ago to allow Ebonics in schools to Cinco de Mayo celebrations where the American flag is prohibited to college admission standards that vary by race to schools that teach American history is nothing but a chronicle of hate, prejudice and thievery against minorities and the poor; it’s little surprise that many young minorities feel like disconnected from the American Dream and larger society as a whole.

The anger is palpable. From race riots of the 1960’s to the Rodney King riots in 1992 to the recent riots in Ferguson, MO that inspired demonstrations across the country, many minority communities seem to be built on a tinderbox just waiting for spark. Extraordinary unemployment rates act as the tinder filling those boxes. In each case the spark was provided by the killing or striking of a black person by white cops. The resulting anger and destruction not only destroyed the neighborhoods of the rioters, but exacerbated the feeling of separation from the larger community as a whole. In the most recent case that anger resulted in demonstrations around the country and in New York with protesters chanting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!” Soon thereafter they got their wish.

The devaluation of lives is heartbreaking. While Islamic terrorists killed 17 people in Paris last week, across the United States, in minority communities from Boston to San Diego young men are killing one another by the dozens every single week of the year. And those are only the thousands who die. Citizens of all sorts are assaulted, threatened and forced to try to live a normal lives in those struggling neighborhoods where drugs and crime and staggering unemployment are the norm rather than the exception.

Whether radical Islamic terrorists who seek to stifle free speech and murder infidels or a thug on an American street corner who is willing to shoot someone in cold blood because they wear a different color or have something coveted, both are products of a failed policy of multiculturalism. In France the left shut their eyes as Muslim communities separated from France and became isolated islands of radicalism. In the United States the left, through their destruction of America’s schools, their overregulation of job creating businesses, their demonizing of the police and through their distilling American history down to a chronicle of discrimination against blacks, Hispanics and Indians, have created a large swath of the population that has little comprehension of what the American Dream is, few tools with which to pursue it if they did, and most dishearteningly, little vested interest in the success of the country as a whole. In either case, liberalism and multiculturalism are the founts from which much bloodshed has been spilled. For anyone paying attention this should be no surprise.

What conservatives can to learn from Hollywood: Good stories told well can influence political perspective

Watching movies are one of my favorite pastimes. Our favorite movies say a lot about us… although I’m not exactly sure what. My top five (in no particular order) are Gladiator, Valley Girl, Galaxy Quest, Lost in Translation and probably Tombstone. Movies are a unique form of entertainment because they are touchstones, shared experiences which so many Americans have in common. Lines like “I’m walking here!” or “You had me at hello” or “Make my day, punk” have made it into the American lexicon and are often used in our everyday lives in order to call up certain shared understandings of situations between a speaker and their listeners.

Movies are unique in that most of the people watching them experience the same thing. Not that they always have the same reaction, which is obvious by the divergent reviews a single movie can get, but they are watching the same thing on the screen. The colors are the same, the actor’s faces are the same, the music is the same. Contrast that with reading a book. With a book the experience is yours as your brain takes the author’s words and creates its unique version of the characters, faces, colors, sounds, accents, landscapes, and basically everything in terms of bringing the author’s words to life. Contrast that with the way we experience movies. All of us instantly recognize the voice of James Earl Jones when we hear Darth Vader speak. All of us know exactly what Harry Potter looks like, and he’s the same for every one of us. We all have a vision of Jack and Rose flying at the bow of the Titanic, it’s exactly the same.

Movies have a unique place in American life because of that shared experience and its breadth. Your experience watching a movie is going to be essentially the same if you watch it on Miami Beach, in Brooklyn or Brownsville, Texas. And Hollywood has used that unique place to great advantage. From giant studios that produce hundred million dollar epics that earn billions around the world to art house films that gain critical praise consumer indifference, Hollywood almost has a monopoly on American storytelling. (And that includes its dominance of the small screen… “We were on a break” or “You’re Fired”.)

One of the most interesting aspects of this Hollywood dominance is the fact that it seeks to earn money while producing unabashedly leftist propaganda. Think An Inconvenient Truth, Erin Brockovich, or Gasland. The interesting thing is not that they are making money telling stories, but rather the impact that it has on viewers. Hollywood has learned what the GOP has never learned, that a good story told well can impact and perhaps change viewer’s political perspective. Researchers at Notre Dame found that “Hollywood movies are better able to change attitudes – in a left-wing direction – than advertising or news reports.” Essentially Hollywood has perfected the art of using movies to turn people into liberals. Whether it’s the Matt Damon character in Good Will Hunting or Sally Field’s character in Norma Rae, movies that grip us seem to impact us long after we leave the theaters. The fact that movies, particularly sob stories, impact us is definitely not news, but the fact that we keep the critical thinking switch turned off once we leave the theater is. We should know better, but we don’t… at least according to the research.

If conservatives hope to save the country from the liberal dystopia that the Democrats and the establishment Republicans are leading us into, they need to understand the lesson Hollywood learned so long ago… You have to touch people in order to impact them. You have to make them connect with something in order to understand it, appreciate it, take time out of their lives to focus on it. While it’s unrealistic to expect conservatives to take over Hollywood, they can at least begin to tell stories that reflect the conservative perspective.

The country is full of real life stories that are just as touching as anything Hollywood ever wrote. (see "Waiting for Superman" or "The Lottery")  As much of a boogieman Hollywood has created out of capitalism, big government is far scarier. As many lives as one company might have destroyed due to the duplicity of some employee or board of directors, government has destroyed far more families and communities simply by its catastrophic social policies. Kids stuck in failed schools in crime riddled neighborhoods are just as sympathetic as workers trying to form a union at some trucking company. An entrepreneur struggling to feed his family against the borg of government regulation is just as sympathetic as someone whose drinking water catches fire supposedly due to drilling. The difference is, Hollywood often has to use hyperbole, “artistic license” and sometimes outright lies in order to get its points across. In a world where the omnipresent tentacles of a dysfunctional government destroy jobs, gut education and undermine families, the stories of despair are legion, and very real.

If conservatives ever hope to win the battle of ideas, win over the hearts (and votes) of a majority of the American people, we have to figure out to do what came so naturally to Ronald Reagan… we have to connect with people through well told stories. We have to figure out how to talk about cold, sterile, opaque issues that are sometime counterintuitive, and do it in a way that really engage the viewer or the listener. Hollywood swayed the nation by selling liberalism wrapped in well told stories. If we want to bring it back we’re going to have to do the same. Maybe Dinesh D'Souza’s forthcoming “AMERICA” will be a first step in the right direction… although most of us won’t have two hour blocks in a darkened theaters to make our points... so we’d better get creative.

The Greek Tragedy of Obamacare

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where at some point you stop and ask yourself “how the hell did I end up here?” I have, and like a Greek tragedy, usually whatever predicament I found myself in was the result of a number of poor decisions that seemed to compound themselves until they finally reached a point where I had to stop and say “What the hell am I doing?” At that point I had to figure out if there was a way to extricate myself from the situation without hanging myself in the process…

That is exactly where the country is in reference to Obamacare.

Obamacare was passed in 2009 in reaction to anecdotal examples of Americans who couldn’t get healthcare. According to Gallop, in 2009 there were 50 million Americans who did not have health insurance. That represented approximately 16% of the population. Gallop also reported that of those without health insurance, fully 50% were satisfied with their healthcare. That means that fully 92% of the American population either had health insurance – 80% of whom were satisfied with that insurance – or were satisfied enough with their healthcare not to have insurance.

To give those numbers a bit of perspective, compare them the rest of the developed world. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development publishes the Better Life Index which ranks developed nations by a wide variety of criteria, one of which is health. According to the 2011 Better Life Index survey, in 2009 88% of Americans were satisfied with their health. Of the 34 countries covered in the data, in only two – New Zealand (89.7%) and Canada (88.1%) did citizens report a higher level of satisfaction with their health. Not the United Kingdom (76%). Not France (72.4%). Not Sweden (79.1%). Now, of course health is not healthcare, but the goal of healthcare is to improve or sustain a person’s health.

So, in 2009, when 92% of Americans had health insurance or were satisfied enough with their healthcare not to have it, and 88% of Americans were satisfied with their health, we got Obamacare, a 2,000 page bill that needed to be passed before it could be read.

None of that suggests that there were not people who had challenges, difficulties and, frankly, unfair situations. Those people and those difficult situations did indeed exist. But they exist in every endeavor of man in which human beings play a part. Nothing manmade is ever perfect. But 92% was pretty damn good for a country of 305 million widely diverse people. That doesn’t mean that things couldn’t have improved. From allowing a national marketplace to eliminating tax deductions to implementing tort reform, there were many proposals for improving the healthcare situation in America. No doubt those projects would not solve all of the problems. But then neither does Obamacare. By a long shot.

The problem is, Obamacare not only doesn’t do what it claimed it would do, which was to let everyone who was satisfied with their plans keep them while providing affordable insurance for all those who couldn’t get it, but it has failed in its most basic goals. Millions have lost their health insurance, millions more have seen their hours cut, if they can find a jobs in the first place, premiums are skyrocketing for tens of millions of people and the infrastructure upon which the program rests is a failure of epic proportions.

What’s worse, if that’s even possible, is that Obamacare inserts government bureaucracy and ineptitude and failure directly into the most personal lives of every American. Not only that, the regulations that Obamacare generated (fully 30 times longer than the legislation itself) are nothing but tools with which bureaucrats can provide favors for friends or punish enemies.

At the end of the day, we probably should ask ourselves: “How the hell did we get here?” The answer is actually pretty simple: It’s the 1-2-3 recipe of Liberalism. 1) Take an anecdotal problem that, while troubling, is limited in scope, and project it on the larger population. 2) Propose an overarching government solution that will solve said problem while not harming the rest of the population. 3) Implement a bureaucratic nightmare that not only fails to solve the problem but generally makes the situation exponentially worse.

Such is the history of progressive government. Welfare. Poverty. Mortgages. School bussing. Education – at all levels… Failed programs, over and over again. And now we have Obamacare, where a healthcare system that was meeting the needs of 90% of the American population will be transmogrified into something that meets the needs of far fewer, all while imposing financial and regulatory hardships on hundreds of millions of Americans.  

At what point will Americans figure out that these failures do not happen on their own but rather they are the scripted outcome of a Greek tragedy called Liberalism? By now the audience should know the outcome of the story… Big government doesn’t solve problems. It simply takes bad situations and makes them worse. Perhaps the spectacular failure of Obamacare and everything associated with it will be the wakeup call Americans need to see that for all of its beguiling charm and compassionate language, liberalism is nothing more than a siren’s song, promising an island paradise in a sea of human misery. Not only is there no island, nor paradise, but the waters are filled with jagged rocks which invariably destroy every ship whose folly brings it too close.  If we’re lucky Obamacare will be that rare Greek play where the protagonist learns from his mistakes and changes course before his ship is impaled on the rocks…

The Cult of Liberalism

Religions are largely kept together by the faith of the followers as opposed to proof. Whether it’s Christianity, Judaism, Islam or any other religion, it’s not science or empirical evidence that keeps millions or billions of people believing, it’s faith. Indeed, religions are full of claims that our current scientific knowledge would say are impossible, but nonetheless, faith persists. Given horrific events that seem to fly in the face of what one would expect from a compassionate or just God, faith still persists. Believers believe, and they interpret events in their lives and the world in a way that comports with their religion. At the end of the day, religion is about faith, period.

By the above measure, liberalism is a religion. How else would it be possible that in the face of a history of demonstrable failure that there are those who continue to believe? Liberalism, in the form of outright Communism failed miserably everywhere from the Soviet Union to Cuba and a multitude of places in between. Yet the faith remains. Liberalism in the form of socialism has failed miserably across Europe as practically the entire continent is floundering in mounting debt, double digit unemployment and depressingly low growth rates. Yet the faith remains. Liberalism in the form of Democrat party policies have destroyed wide swaths of America’s landscape, from cities like Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia to black families that suffer from unprecedented rates of unemployment, unwed motherhood and tragically high rates of crime. Yet the faith remains.

Add willfully blind faith to presence of an anointed one among us and you get a cult. Which is exactly what liberalism and the virtual worship of Barack Obama has become:

Obamacare: Every day seems to bring new information that only adds to the understanding that Obamacare is a disaster of epic proportions. Yet faith remains.

Economic Growth: Barack Obama’s “recovery” has been the worst since the Great Depression and incomes have fallen over $4,000 per household since he took office. Yet the faith remains.

Welfare: Welfare has become so generous that in 35 states, it’s actually more profitable to sit at home and collect welfare benefits than it is to go out and find a job. In Hawaii the pretax wage equivalent of welfare benefits is $60,590 per year. In Washington DC it’s $50,820 while in Massachusetts it’s $50,540. Those are dollars that have to be paid for by taxes on those working. Yet the faith remains.

Race: In less than 50 years from the day Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial the United States elected a black man as president, twice! Yet race relations in the United States are worse than they have been in decades. Yet the faith remains.

On virtually every single empirically measurable measure, from education to economic growth as well as simple observable measures such as regulation and freedom, liberalism has been a failure in general and particularly so under Barack Obama. Yet, despite the fact that the consequences of this failure hurts the very people it's supposed to help, the faith remains.  

While the 1st Amendment enshrines the notion of freedom of religion, today the United States is being governed by the cult of liberalism, which seems more like a religion than many of the mainstream religions in the world.

It demands subservience to its policies and is willing to use the police power of the state to impose them while nonbelieving infidels must be marginalized. Speak critically of the Messiah and you are a racist. Disagree with gay marriage you’re a homophobe. Suggest that its culture and unwed motherhood that are ravaging black families and again you’re a racist. Advocate for limited government or state’s rights and you’re an extremist. Promote school choice and you don’t care about children. Advocate for lower taxes and you’re greedy. Champion free markets and you’re a selfish capitalist. Question man made global warming and you’re anti-science. Disagree and you must be discredited and vilified.

Liberals often champion a wall of separation between church and state. This may be the one time they might actually be right about something. However it isn’t Christianity that the country needs to be saved from, it’s the secular religion of Liberalism with Barack Obama as its messiah.

Mitt Romney will have to do more than play Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama's Jimmy Carter

Sadly, this summer Andy Griffith died. Growing up in the 1970’s, watching the Andy Griffith show was simply part of our day. Between episodes of Howdy Doody, The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island, the Andy Griffith Show was just another show where life lessons played out on TV. Together these shows were “Americana” incarnate, where stories about honesty, hard work and community were on display daily.

My wife, who was born and raised in France, recently stumbled across Andy Griffith reruns and decided to record them. She finds them quite entertaining and I’m happy to watch them with her as I find great pleasure in explaining the subtleties of life in the United States that one might not pick up if they did not grow up here.

I often find myself thinking about the 1970’s in a very nostalgic way, which is probably not unusual for anyone who spent their early teens growing up then. Of course from the perspective of an adult the memories of the 1970’s are probably a bit less sanguine. New York City almost went bankrupt in 1975, went black in 1977 and its stories of the Son of Sam and the killing of John Lennon shocked the nation. And things weren’t much better in the rest of the country with lines at gas stations winding around city blocks, labor unrest rampant, and smokestack industries choking… the United States was an economic basket case. By the end of the decade the misery index was at a record high (inflation + unemployment) and interest rates were sitting at 15%. To put a bow on it, the decade ended with Love Canal, Three Mile Island, a coming Ice Age and 52 American hostages in Iran scaring Americans into thinking the world was coming apart at the seams. Things looked dark indeed.

Thankfully, in 1980 Americans threw out the dour and clueless Jimmy Carter after he scolded them the year before:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning....

I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel....

Carter was right about part of that… for most of the United States’ history Americans have indeed been proud of hard work, strong families and close-knit communities. And a belief in God too. Fundamentally they felt that, in America, anything and everything was possible. Anyone, regardless of their background, could be successful, or could at least work hard and set their children up for success. Why? Because America was, well… free.

In 1981 Ronald Reagan rode in on a white horse and saved the country. More than the tax cuts, more than his building up the military and the breaking the Soviet Union, more than shrinking the rest of government, Reagan made Americans believe again that they could succeed, that they could once again find prosperity and they could once again live in the Shining city on a hill to which he so often referred. Fast forward 30 years and the United States finds itself in a similarly dire situation where the economy is in the midst of an economic malaise, a befuddled president is clueless as to how to successfully direct the nation out of its storms, either domestic or foreign, and a wide swath of the nation feels like the country’s best days may indeed be behind it.

The question is, can Mitt Romney reprise the roll of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama’s Jimmy Carter? Maybe, but in all reality, Mitt Romney will have to do far more than was ever asked of Ronald Reagan.

Why? Because the borg of government has made success so much more difficult. In 1981 the world was a different place. The EPA had only been in existence for a decade and its budget was $3 billion. Today the EPA has metastasized into a $10 billion octopus that is far more aggressive as it seeks to extend its tentacles to virtually every aspect of the economy from spilled milk to broken light bulbs to the carbon dioxide we exhale. In 1981 our national debt was 35% of GDP and while today it approaches a staggering 110%. In 1981 the federal Department of Education was a mere two years old and played almost no role in education while today it’s a $150 billion a year leviathan that infects schools across the country.

In what is perhaps the most telling illustration of a government out of control, take a look at the laws themselves. In 1981, after 194 years of the Republic, the Code of Federal Regulations (the complete list of federal regulations) was approximately 80,000 pages long. Today, a mere 31 years later Code has more than doubled to 170,000 pages! Every one of those pages, be they focused on employment, school lunches, banking, TV advertising or toys, makes it far more difficult for the nation to pull itself up off of the ground, dust itself off and continue the march to prosperity.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the federal government. States and local governments have grown similarly oppressive, with their obscene union contracts, which land on the shoulders of taxpayers, their onerous regulatory environments, and their abject failure in education combining to handicap Americans in the fight to regain their economic footing. The tentacles of these local leviathans show themselves every day in stories about children’s lemonade stands being shut down, people being arrested for cutting hair illegally, or more painfully, in the students who leave schools poorly equipped to face the challenges ahead.

For most of the country’s history the United States has been one of the freest nations in the world. It was that freedom that helped the United States rescue the world from two world wars, win a Cold War, invent everything from the mechanical reaper to sliced bread to silicon chips, and revolutionize industries from automobiles to spaceships and everything in between. In short, the United States has been the economic engine driving the world’s prosperity for a century. For most of the 80’s the United States was generally considered the third freest country in the world, behind Singapore and Hong Kong. Today, the Frasier Institute ranks it 18, not only behind Hong Kong and Singapore, but also behind such bastions of freedom as Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Finland, Chile, Estonia and Denmark.

It was a different world indeed. In 1981 Americans were sufficiently free to shake off the body blows of progressivism and resume that march towards prosperity. By 1984 Ronald Reagan had the economy growing by 7% a year. Today? After experiencing a far less severe recession, Barack Obama has the US economy growing by less than 2% a year. To put that in perspective, growing at 7% a year, it would take you a little over 10 years to double your income. At 2% a year it would take you 36 years. Now expand that to the national economy and you see the difference freedom makes.

The country is certainly a different place than it was when Andy Griffith was keeping the streets of Mayberry safe from pick pockets or settling disputes between feuding clans. It’s also a different place from the one Ronald Reagan inherited in 1981. While Americans may no longer be tethered to a telephone hanging on the wall or stuck getting their news or entertainment from a newspaper or television, those new freedoms and choices pale in comparison to the freedoms and choices lost in terms of their own economic opportunities. At the end of the day it’s great that you can get the latest football scores or watch YouTube videos on your iPhone, but at the same time it’s far more difficult to start a business to pay for it or keep a job to pay for the house you live in.

In order to help lead the country out of the economic abyss that Barack Obama and a quarter century of progressivism has plunged us into, Mitt Romney will not only have to be Ronald Reagan, he will have to be something more as well. He will not only have to reawaken the American spirit of possibilities, he must play the role of Alexander in the face of the Gordian Knot of government regulations. If he can accomplish those twin tasks by the end of his first term, his reelection campaign should be a simple one: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” A successful Mitt Romney should be able to hear a resounding, enthusiastic, unambiguous yes from everywhere in the country, including the little town Andy Griffith based Mayberry on, Mount Airy, North Carolina.

The Prosperity Ratio: Why we should encourage tax cuts for the rich

One of the easiest ways to recognize a liberal is their refusal to accept that the universe is dynamic rather than static. The most obvious example of this is their perpetual inability (or unwillingness) to grasp the notion that increasing taxes and growing regulations impact taxpayer behavior. This can be seen in on a number of levels. On the state level it can be seen by companies and wage earners fleeing high tax locales for those with low taxes or no income taxes. Rush Limbaugh famously left New York two years ago for the zero income tax comfort of sunny Florida. Then Governor Paterson responded by demonstrating his state’s disdain for the people who actually fund New York’s nanny state spending: "If I knew that would be the result, I would’ve thought about (raising) the taxes earlier." And New York is not alone… New Jersey, Maryland and many others have also seen taxpayers flee their states in recent years.

California too is befuddled by the exodus of taxpayers from the progressive Nirvana Democrats have been creating there over the last 40 years. In 2010 an average of 3.9 companies a week moved their operations out of California due to high taxes and burdensome regulations. During the first four months of 2011 that number increased 25% to 4.7 companies leaving per week… and taking their jobs with them! What is the destination of choice for those companies? Not surprisingly, Texas, with its minimalist regulation mentality and no income or capital gains taxes. California officials were so flummoxed by the exodus that a delegation of (mostly Republican) legislators and Democrat Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom went to Texas to talk with erstwhile California companies about why they had left the not so Golden State.

Again, not surprisingly, the answer was obvious… High taxes and burdensome regulation. For decades California socialists in Democrat clothing assumed Golden State economics were static and that they could simply raise taxes or increase regulation and employers would simply suck it up. Of course they were wrong, but they (and California’s voters) have yet to figure that out.

At the federal level, Barack Obama is the lead siren singing the “Tax the rich” song, ostensibly to try and shore up Uncle Sam’s finances. Last week the President said: “I believe that we can't ask everybody to sacrifice and then tell the wealthiest among us, well, you can just relax and go count your money…”

In an environment where fully 47% of the people in the country pay either zero income taxes or actually get “rebates” for taxes they didn’t pay, Obama and the Democrats want to hike taxes on the people who actually choose to put their capital at risk and produce the jobs that fuel the economy. And like all good Democrats, they feel like they can simply raise taxes and the rich will automatically fall in line and fork over more money without making any adjustments in their behavior.

Strangely enough, that’s not quite how things work as human nature on the federal level is no different than on the state level… when taxes go up, people change their behavior. While most people are not going to move to another country if their federal taxes are raised, they will do what they can to reduce their tax burden, from investing in foreign markets, to parking their money to hiring high powered accounting firms to help them shelter their income.

Nearby is a table whose data is drawn from IRS numbers showing tax rates from 1986 to 2005. The table focuses in on the top 1% of tax filers and isolates the tax rate and the share of overall taxes paid. The third column is a ratio I created that I call the Prosperity Ratio. (My apologies if someone has used the ratio earlier, I’ve just not seen it.) Essentially it is the average income tax rate paid by the top 1% divided by the percent of the overall income tax burden paid by the persons in that same 1%. I’ve dubbed it Prosperity Ratio because the higher the ratio, the more people who are prosperous and happy… When taxes on the “rich” are lower they get to keep more of their money, which of course makes them happy. Simultaneously those same taxpayers pay a larger percentage of the overall income tax burden, which means that the remaining tax payers are happier as well because they are paying a smaller portion of the overall income taxes. Everybody wins.

To demonstrate how this Prosperity Ratio works, in 1986 when the average tax rate paid by the top 1% of taxpayers was 33.13%, they paid 25.75% of all federal income taxes resulting in a Prosperity Ratio of .78. By 2005 when the average rate paid by the top 1% had dropped to 23.13%, they were paying 39.38% of all federal income taxes, generating a Prosperity Ratio of 1.70. Everyone won as the rich, able to keep more of their money were motivated to create more wealth, generating more revenue for the tax collector. The other 99% of taxpayers were happier as well as they were able to keep more of their income too. It should be the goal of the government to generate the highest Prosperity Ratio by cutting taxes as until the ratio starts declining.

Don’t hold your breath of course. Liberals live in a fantasy world where they can raise taxes or increase red tape and the world magically bends to their will and everyone lives happily ever after. Unfortunately for the rest of us we have to live with the real world consequences of their static delusions. Maybe now is a good time to have a discussion about the difference between static and dynamic, or in the lexicon of a liberal, fantasy and reality. And maybe this time we should include the people who keep voting for them...