Last month, I signed an open letter to President Bush, drafted by allies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, thanking the President for deciding not to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development and urging him to oppose anti-energy and anti-growth policies.
The letter may not have had much effect on the President, but it shook up some radical environmentalists. A group called Friends of the Earth released a statement, dutifully cited or reprinted by newspapers in the U.S. and even England, claiming the purpose of the letter was to “give George W. Bush his marching orders” by “demanding that he not attend the Earth Summit, and calling on him to ensure that his negotiators prevent any progress on climate change.”
This is not much more than left-wing paranoia, but it got me thinking: What would I tell President Bush to do if I could give him marching orders? One thought led to the next, and soon the following faux letter to the President was written.
DEAR GEORGE:
Thank you for following my last set of orders. Let’s quickly review what you’ve done for me since becoming President.
You cut taxes in 2001, my number one priority. You declared the Kyoto Protocol on “global warming” to be dead, my number two priority. You got some (admittedly weak) parental choice provisions included in your No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA). You worked successfully with Congress to prevent adoption of new health care regulations under the guise of a “patients’ bill of rights” and a budget-busting prescription drug benefit for seniors.
You also made the two appointments I requested – Rod Paige as education secretary, and John Graham as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in OMB. They are the best people in your administration, as I predicted they would be. Paige has done more to make the case for parental choice than the entire U.S. Congress, while Graham has resurrected risk-benefit analysis and is saving businesses and consumers hundreds of millions of dollars a year by blocking unnecessary regulations.
This is pretty good, but we have much more work to do. Here are your new marching orders.
Taxes
The tax cuts of 2001 are being phased in over 10 years and some of them are only temporary. I want you to press for immediate implementation of the remaining cuts and to make all the cuts permanent. The dramatic decline of stock prices last year generated public support for increasing the deduction for capital losses and eliminating the double taxation of dividends. Call for it. Finally, most countries we compete against now have lower corporate income taxes than we do, pushing corporations to relocate their headquarters to off-shore tax havens. Propose cutting or abolishing them.
While your record on taxes is good, your record on spending is terrible. Congress is acting like a room full of drunken sailors, and you’re acting like their favorite bartender. For Pete’s sake, George, start using your veto to balance the budget! Tell the American people there’s plenty of waste and no such thing as a free lunch. They’ll appreciate the honesty.
Environment
EPA secretary Christine Todd Whitman is implementing the Clinton administration’s most extreme measures (e.g., the arsenic standards for drinking water) and tried to undermine your stand on global warming by releasing a poorly thought-out report last June. She supports a “cap and trade” approach to greenhouse gas emissions that is nothing other than backdoor implementation of the job-killing Kyoto Protocol. Replace her (maybe with John Graham?) and get back to what we talked about: Environmental policies based on sound science and respect for private property rights.
Your energy plan, still dragging its way through Congress, has become a Christmas tree loaded with subsidies for every interest group . . . except consumers. It had a few good elements at the start, but they are not worth the huge expense and new regulations they would bring along. Dump the plan, along with subsidies for windmills and solar power and tradeable credits for greenhouse gas reductions, and focus on the few things that really need doing, such as removing regulatory roadblocks to the construction of new power generation and refineries.
Education
The No Child Left Behind Act produced a massive increase in the federal government’s role in K-12 education with very little institutional reform to show for it. (I told you not to trust Ted Kennedy.) Cities are ignoring the weak public school choice mandate contained in NCLBA and claiming they can’t find enough qualified teachers to meet the 2006 rules.
The Department of Education shouldn’t even exist. I want you to call for voucherizing Title 1 and the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act and then phasing out all other functions of the department. Endorse and lobby for the Education Freedom Act (HR 5192) and the Back to School Education Tax Relief Act (HR 5193). Tell the public “we’ve tried the top-down federal approach to school reform, and it didn’t work. It’s time to get out of the way and let parents do it.”
Then announce that Paige will be your running mate in 2004.
Health Care
We continue to play defense on health care, an arena where no proposal for government intervention is too extreme to be taken seriously. I want you to oppose any prescription drug benefit for seniors that involves price controls and isn’t market-driven. Oppose the Greater Access to Affordable Pharmaceuticals Act, which would undermine patent protections and discourage investment in new life-saving drugs.
Get some level-headed people assigned to the HHS to stop implementing Clinton-era regulations criminalizing mistakes by physicians and health plan administrators, to the FDA to speed up new drug approvals, and to the CDC to speak the truth about tobacco and health. Lend your public support to high-risk pools and expanding medical savings accounts, two promising market-driven reforms.
Legal Reform
The Rule of Law is the keystone of a free society, but it has been seriously eroded during the past 30 years. Members of your administration have done more to hasten than to slow that erosion. Whitman at EPA, Thompson at Health and Human Services, and Ashcroft at the Justice Department have repeatedly placed feeding government’s insatiable appetite for power above protecting individual freedom and property rights.
Your administration is suing a farmer in California under the Clean Water Act for plowing his land, voiding mining claims that courts have recognized for more than 60 years, and driving out homeowners near the Florida Everglades when the law says they ought to be protected from flooding . . . and this is only what is reported in the current issue of Environment & Climate News!
I want you to instruct federal agencies to stop attacking private property rights, starting with the three cases mentioned here and extending to scores, and probably hundreds, of similar cases. Then I want you to take aim at lawsuit abuse by pressuring Congress for a legislative remedy to the asbestos liability crisis, which has already bankrupted 55 businesses and is clogging courts with hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs who will never get sick. Endorse the Class Action Fairness Act, now stalled in the Senate, which would end “venue shopping” and limit some of the abuses that now characterize class-action lawsuits.
That’s all I want right now, George. Get to work on this right away and send regular updates to me at [email protected]. In six months or so, let’s talk about the changes I want you to make to Homeland Security and the War on Drugs.
Best regards to Laura and the twins.
