SSGRichDAVWhat Qualities Do I Want In a Conservative Leader???
Lately the Republican Party has been trying to sell conservatives on a new deal, a new conservative message. The only problem is they still don’t get it. This is an effort to get the word out on what conservatives want in their new leaders. Please pass this on to as many people, news outlets, blogs, email addresses, etc. I am asking that you not revise or change this as it is how I really feel about the issue. You are welcome to add your own comments at the end.
If I went to the “Leader Store” to get a new leader, what ingredients would I want in that leader?
First and foremost is Honesty! I am so tired of being lied to by politicians. I want my leader to be honest to a fault. I want him (or her-please don’t hit me up on the sex of the leader-my leader can be any sex, any race, as long as they have the attributes I am looking for) to say what he means and mean what he says. I want honesty not just of word, but of deed as well.
Forthright-I want my leader to tell it to me straight. Political correctness and political double-speak just make me want to scream.
Respect—My leader needs to respect me the same way any employee respects their employer. The way a son should respect his parents.
Equality—Talk to me as an academic equal. I graduated from high school along with about 95% of the other voters.
Courage—I want a leader who has the moral courage to not bend with political wind. He also needs to have the courage to stand up for America and its interests in the world and not make America look weak in the eyes of our enemies.
I want a leader who knows that there are many in this world that would like nothing better than to kill us and that they can’t always be negotiated with. Sometimes you just have to kill them because they will never give in, never stop trying to kill us.
Where do I want my conservative leader to stand on the issues? I want him to BE A CONSERVATIVE! I don’t want him to talk like a conservative and then act like a liberal (McCain, Spector, Snowe, Collins).
Other issues and where my leader should stand:
The Constitution—The Constitution is the supreme law of the land and is not a “living” document. It means what it says. Don’t try to use legal jargon to twist what it says. The Constitution is only applicable to citizens of the United States of America. All non-citizens are only to be awarded the basic human right to life and any other rights agreed to as part of any ratified treaties or human rights agreements made with foreign countries or world organizations. Illegal aliens have the right to be treated humanely while we deport them back where they came from. That means we provide them with a bottle of water on the air-conditioned bus ride to the border. I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH THOSE WHO SEEK A BETTER LIFE IN AMERICA. I just have a problem with the ones that don’t want to follow our laws and come here illegally. “Enemy combatants” are just that, nothing more and only fall under the Geneva Convention if they are operating as part of an organized nation’s military.
First Amendment—Freedom of Religion allows you to worship whatever God you want, or none at all. It does not give anyone, especially the government, the right to interfere with how, where or who I worship. The freedom of religion ends when religion is used to justify violating the rights of others. Religion has played an important role in establishing what America considers to be right and wrong and should be encouraged as a means of ensuring that America continues to have a society that respects the rights of others and that it continue to provide the moral compass any great society needs to long endure.
Freedom of Speech—means all speech, printed, spoken or transmitted. There is no right to “not be offended”. One person’s freedom of speech ends where the next person’s right to not be libeled or defamed begins.
Second Amendment—It’s my gun…leave it alone. My right to keep and bear arms should not be infringed or regulated in any way. I do feel that this should be limited to arms I can actually carry, sorry, no tanks allowed.
Taxes—the Constitution outlines the powers of the federal government. In order for the government to fulfill those obligations, it needs funds. How it collects those funds and just what duties or powers the government has is apparently open to interpretation. Liberals feel the government should do more and have more power and more taxes collected to pay for it all while Conservatives think differently.
Taxes should be kept as low as possible and still meet the needs of the country. Deficit spending should be outlawed except in a time of war or national emergency. The way to reduce taxes is to reduce spending. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? What has made it complicated are years and years of deficit spending and spending on things the United States government should not be paying for. Don’t get me wrong, the government pays for a lot of good programs, it is just that some of them should not fall under the auspices of the government. However, now that these programs are in place, they will never be repealed so we must learn to work them into the budget. I speak of programs such as Social Security, Medicare and the like.
There are, however, other areas where an impact on the budget can be made. To increase revenues, increase the number of payers. If the Government reduces the tax on businesses, they can hire more workers. More workers, more taxes collected. More workers, more products produced, more sales, more income for the business, more taxes collected. Lower business taxes, more businesses start up here instead of taking those jobs overseas. My leader would understand this principle.
Another area to effect the budget is in the area of spending. Every dollar saved is one you do not have to raise in taxes. The United States spends an inordinate amount of money in foreign aid. While I agree that money can help to secure America’s interests in the world, we should be careful to spend only what we can afford. A good example would be if your neighbor needed a new car. If you cannot afford to give him a car, should you go out and borrow money from your other neighbor to pay for it? Should you borrow money from your other neighbor to loan it to him so he can buy his own car? Or, should you simply empathize with him and keep making payments on your own car, while you teach him how to repair his old car?
These arguments get even harder when spending or not spending affects people’s lives. My leader would have the courage to say no and to spend what we can afford. A man who goes into debt to help another is not a saint; he is a debtor who may have jeopardized his own life and livelihood or that of his family for the sake of feeling good about himself. While a man can get away with this, a country should not jeopardize the welfare of its citizens to help citizens of other countries. If we have a surplus, share, if not, don’t.
This same principle needs to apply to domestic spending. If we have the funds to provide a benefit to the citizenry, then do so. If you have to borrow to provide this benefit, well, then it is not much of a benefit is it. A Conservative Leader understands this and follows it.
The Declaration of Independence tells us that every person has the inalienable right to life. This applies to even the smallest life. Life begins when the sperm cell enters the egg. No one has a “right” to end that life. Contrary to what the liberals would lead you to believe this has nothing to do with making a choice about what happens to the woman’s body. A woman needs to make that choice before she takes her pants off. Once the deed is done, she and her beloved need to face the consequences together. If everyone knew this up front, maybe there would be less casual sex taking place, which would be a good thing as sex should not be seen as recreation but as the accepting of responsibility for creating life that it is. My candidate would stand up for this view unapologetically.
Every country has secrets. It is the way of this world. And, if those secrets were revealed, there are those in this world who would use them to cause our country and our people harm. Anyone who knowingly reveals any information that his country has deemed to be classified is guilty of treason and should be tried, and if found guilty, should be publicly hung. This goes for news reporters especially as they should be the ones who tell their countries officials about the individuals they are getting their information from. The editor of any news organization that knowingly allows information that he believes to be classified to be printed or transmitted in any way should also be tried as an accomplice.
I have said a lot here and I hope that many will see it, read it, and, hopefully, find a leader who can support these conservative values and principles and stands on the issues. I will close with the quote “all that is needed for tyranny to flourish is for good men to do nothing” (sorry, I cannot remember who said it).
Edward Richardson, The Vocal Conservative (www.vocalconservative.mojo4m.com)
SSGRichDAV
Edward Richardson - March 30, 2000
President Obama has proposed his new budget for America, along with his new vision of larger government and higher taxes. This caused me to think about what a budget really is and how it is supposed to work.
A budget generally contains two categories of expenses. Those things which must be funded and those items which you would like to fund. In the federal budget these are divided up with the terms “mandatory” and “discretionary”. While I have big problems with what the government considers mandatory and what it considers discretionary, I won’t go into that aspect of the budget in this article as it would require a much closer examination of the budget.
So, with the aforementioned in mind, how would one put together a budget in these tough economic times? What does the government need to do to not only balance the federal budget, but, make an allowance within the budget to repay the principle of the national debt?
There are basically two ways to effect the balance of a budget, increase income or decrease expenses. How the government goes about increasing income and decreasing expenses is where President Obama and the Congress need to go back to school.
Assuming that the governments “mandatory” spending is really mandatory, that leaves us with only one part of the budget where we can reduce expenses, “discretionary spending”. One thing that must always be kept in mind when considering discretionary funding is that you do not want to create new mandatory spending by creating a program that requires future spending.
What are some of the things that the government considers to be discretionary spending? How about the entire Department of Defense budget and Veterans Administration spending. While you might argue that these should be included as mandatory, there are things included in discretionary funding that everyone would agree are not required for the United States to survive such as foreign aid, federal education funding and funding for our national parks. You may argue that these are areas of funding that should not be cut, but, we are in tough times and tough decisions need to be made. If your household budget were tight, would you give your neighbor $5000.00 to help him pave his driveway, send his children to private school or buy playground equipment for his back yard? I think not.
President Obama and Congress need to make these hard decisions. The United States should not be borrowing money from China to help Africa fight AIDS. While I agree it is a noble cause, we cannot afford to help right now. We should also not be giving away money to other countries to help them build infrastructure when we can’t afford to repair our own. Perhaps we should be lending them the money instead or just hold-off until we have a budget surplus. While I agree that setting aside land as national parks is a good thing, we should not be spending money to add new facilities at this time. Again, we can’t afford it. As far as education spending, how long do we keep throwing money at the problem before we realize that the only way we are going to improve education is to hold teachers accountable through results based merit pay and returning discipline to the classrooms. Schools need to be able to hire and fire teachers based on performance without the union getting in the way and we need to give the teachers a classroom environment where they can succeed.
One area where we could actually see a net decrease in federal spending is through immigration enforcement. If we can enforce current laws and drive out a majority of the ILLEGAL immigrants, the federal government as well as state governments would see a decrease in spending for social programs that were originally designed to help Americans but have since been expanded either on purpose or by accident to include supporting illegal immigrants such as Food Stamps and Medicaid. It could also help education funding by requiring proof of citizenship or legal immigration status to attend public schools.
Taking a brief look at the possibility of increasing income to the federal government, I have some ideas. If we reduce the corporate tax rate for companies with less than $5 million in gross receipts from the current 35% to 25%, while we would see a temporary reduction of income, it would allow these businesses to improve operations and employ more workers. The increased production would increase the company’s profitability giving it a higher income to tax as well as giving the government more employee paychecks to deduct taxes from and would result in a net increase to federal revenues as well as providing a needed boost to the nation’s economy all without giving those large, evil corporations a tax cut.
A budget is a tool used to manage finances. One of the biggest rules surrounding a budget is, that in order to remain financially viable, you must not budget more expenses than you have income. If you have to borrow money to meet your budget needs, then you need to cut costs. When income is limited, you don’t start ambitious and expensive policy changes such as President Obama’s Health Care Reform or his Alternative Energy plan. While the plans may or may not be good plans, we cannot afford them at this time.
The bottom line is that our country needs to learn to live within its means. We need to prioritize our expenses to ensure that we are helping Americans first and then, if we have money left over, we can talk about helping citizens of other countries. I am not being naive. I realize that some foreign aid must continue due to our commitments around the world such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean that there are not other areas where we could eliminate or at least drastically reduce programs. Perhaps we could just put those programs on hold until we get our financial house in order.