Rare News Desk
The economy is still sputtering and, while Americans hesitate to panic despite feeling the squeeze more intensely, confidence in the economy’s health has clearly dwindled.
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Take polls for what you will, but a recent Gallup poll shows general dissatisfaction with the state of affairs, as well as further decline in Americans’ confidence in the economy.
What is to be done about this?
We’ve been kicking and screaming about the ill — and I don’t mean that in the Urban Dictionary sense of the word — economy in this country for years, but we’ve been going about fixing that in all the wrong ways. The blame game is the least productive, constructive — anything that rhymes with -uctive — and yet it’s the most common solution.
The trending article of the day on the Huffington Post encapsulates that point well enough: “There are 85 people who are as wealthy as half of the world.” Talk about click bait. The argument:
This massive concentration of economic resources in the hands of fewer people presents a significant threat to inclusive political and economic systems. Instead of moving forward together, people are increasingly separated by economic and political power, inevitably heightening social tensions and increasing the risk of societal breakdown.
Translation: The rich are the problem with everything. Blame, blame, and more blame.
Please. The Occupy “movement” was so two years ago.
Instead of singling out individuals who, by the way, are absolutely essential for the economy’s health, we should be looking at America as a unified whole, rather than fracturing and dividing her under the banners of class-warfare belligerents who self-proclaim to have real solutions.
A Daily Caller piece explored more germane solutions, discussing Donald Trump’s book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1. In the book, Trump proffered a six-point plan to help effect economic recovery in America:
1) Push Tax Reform
Trump’s take: “cutting taxes spurs investment and consumer spending, which creates jobs that lead to more wealth and greater government revenue.”
2) Attack National Debt Through Entitlements Cuts
Trump’s take (on Social Security): ‘If we slowly increased the full retirement age to even just 70, one-third of the $5.3 trillion shortfall would be eliminated right away.’
3) Accelerate Energy Independence
Trump’s take: ‘The natural gas reserves we have in the United States could power America’s energy needs for the next 110 years.’
4) Get Tough on China
Trump’s take: “Washington needs to play hardball with Beijing by pushing for greater enforcement of international trade laws to crack down on China’s manipulation of its currency, which artificially lowers the price of its products relative to competitors, and countering industrial espionage targeted at stealing U.S. intellectual property at great cost to American industries. Mr.Trump recommends that the United States threaten Chinese products with a 25 percent import tax if they don’t start playing by the rules.”
5) Repeal Obamacare
Trump’s take: Repeal the law, then “help drive prices down in the private health care market by pushing tort reform to curtail lawsuit abuse and increasing competition by allowing consumers to purchase insurance policies across state lines, thus multiplying their options.”
6) Improve Immigration
Trump’s take: “[T]he immigration system should be reformed to increase the number of newcomers with skills that are in demand and decrease expensive ‘freeloaders who come here to live off our welfare system.'”
These are all legitimate ideas, and notice that they aren’t drones laser-targeting specific groups of Americans.
All of these ideas lean America further back to an idea of fairness as equality of opportunity rather than fairness as handout or dependence. Think of it this way: if the Founders intended for America to be a welfare state they might have a drafted a Declaration of Dependence instead.
Lawrence Kudlow expressed this idea particularly well in a recent column, saying that it is the likes of Bill De Blasio and Elizabeth Warren who are “spewing forth the socialist doctrine of equality of results, rather than the capitalist model of equality of opportunity. They want income leveling and redistribution — the opposite of growth.”
When it comes to fixing the problems with America it really does boil down to how people understand fairness, and we better do so before it’s too late.
