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| Newt's Speech to the ALEC Conference in Atlanta, GA |
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Watch the video here
June 17, 2009
I want to talk some about our future as a country, but I want to be very clear and very direct: I am talking to you today as a citizen of the United States. I am not a citizen of the world.
I don’t believe it is possible to be a citizen of the world. I am concerned about the world; I try to learn about the world, I actually have a PhD in European history. I am very much in favor of talented skilled entrepreneurial people coming to America from all over the world. But in the end, I want to invite them to come here to become Americans and I want us to renew and extend American civilization.
I think that is very important at this turning point because we are faced with substantial challenges - economic, financial, political, governmental - and its important to realize that from 1945, for the last 64 years more human beings have achieved more prosperity, lived in greater freedom, with greater security because America was strong enough and prosperous enough to lead.
Therefore, we have a huge interest in making sure that America is strong enough and prosperous enough for our children and our grandchildren so they can also live in that kind of world. I don’t believe that if the United States weakens economically, collapses educationally, decays in its capacity to be effective, that the world will be nearly as prosperous, or as safe, or as free. So, this issue of getting things back on track in America is a very profound issue.
Let me also say that I believe you can capture what our goals ought to be in three words: safety, prosperity, and freedom.
Safety matters because it’s the heart of every person. It is why 9/11 was so frightening, it is why violent crime is so frightening, and it is why hard drugs are so frightening. Because, if you lose your life, you have lost your freedom. If you live in fear, you have had your freedom dramatically curt tailed. So the first job of any government is to focus on safety and that means both strong national security and strong homeland security and that means controlling the border and that means effective policing. I think that has to be the first building block of where we are going.
But, the second goal, prosperity, also matters. It matters for national security. If we are not the most productive, most prosperous, most scientifically, and technologically advanced country in the world, we will not sustain our national security. So, we have a national security interest. We have national security interest in education, a national security interest in economy, a national security interest in our infrastructure, and a national security interest in making sure that our industrial base is the most dynamic and the most productive in the world. Frankly, we also have a practical interest in being prosperous, because we can’t possibly sustain the quality of our life and the number of services we want, the kind of retirements we desire, the health system we want, we can’t sustain any of those things if we don’t remain prosperous.
So, prosperity is central to our future and as we design programs of safety, programs of prosperity, we should design them to strengthen and expand freedom. The fact is, given a choice between a free market approach and a socialist approach, Americans should always favor the free market approach because it expands freedom. Given a choice between centralizing power in Washington, where a handful of bureaucrats, lobbyist, and politicians try to run an entire country of 105 million people, or decentralizing back to the people. So, that the people are controlling their own lives, controlling their own neighborhoods, taking their own risks, being inventive on their own. There is no question which expands freedom and which shrinks freedom.
So, we are a movement of safety, of prosperity, of freedom.
Now, I want to assert - and I will debate anybody anywhere in the country on this - our current political dialogue and our current government structure cannot achieve our goals of safety and prosperity and freedom. We need a new vision and new principles and policies. How many of you expect over the next year and a half to have significant budget problems in your state? Now this is very important. I want to come back to this because I don’t think that we have had an honest, straight forward discussion about where we are.
In 1960 General Motors had 60 percent market share and was the largest industrial corporation in the world. For 50 years they avoided reality. They became over priced, their work rules made no sense, they couldn’t carry the burden of their structure. Now they’ve gone broke and they hope to have 15 to 20 percent market share.
I think that’s a pretty good analogy for where we are as a country. We have too much government, too much bureaucracy, too much spending, too many expectations, that are unpaid for, and sooner or later, we have to have an honest dialogue about how we are going to get America back on track.
That dialogue can’t be just the president. There are 513,000 elected officials in America and we need every one of them to take their share of responsibility for getting America back on the right track, by being honest about what we can afford, honest about what we can achieve, and putting our shoulder to the wheel and getting the job done.
Now, I want to share with you what I believe is the most important single political, governmental phrase of the next decade, and you are going to hear me talk a lot about this over the next few years and I hope I can convince you that its as important as I really believe it is.
Let me start out by testing you. How many of you think you know what 2+2 equals? I know we’ve had problems with math education, but I want you to think about this.
Callista and I did a movie called Ronald Reagan Rendezvous with Destiny and we interviewed Lech Walesa in Gdansk Poland and Vaclav Havel in the Czeck Republic, two great leaders of their countries and the struggle for freedom from the Soviet Union. They both said that the decisive moment was when Pope John Paul II went to Poland in June of 1979; a year and a half before Reagan took office, and in nine days he outlined and communicated a vision of religious liberty and a vision of mans relationship to God that fundamentally shook the Soviet Empire. And, they said from that point on they were in constant struggle between the dictatorship and the people.
During that ten year struggle, ten years, they adopted the slogan 2+2=4. It came in part from the novel 1984, by George Orwell, in which the torturer for the state says to the innocent citizen that is being tortured, “if the state tells you 2+2=3, it equals 3. If the state tells you 2+2=5, it equals 5”. The citizen is thinking, but 2+2=4…. Albert Camus, in his novel, The Plague, in 1947 wrote there are times when a man can be killed for saying 2+2=4 because it threatens the authorities to be told the truth. I believe this model is the single most important insight to begin to get ourselves out of the trouble that we are in.
Let me give you an American version and see how many of you can come up with the answer. I’m going to give you the first half of the equation. “If you can’t afford to buy a house…” What’s the second half? How many of you’d agree the answer is, “Don’t buy the house?”
Well, we spent 20 years lying to ourselves about the possibility of putting people who can’t afford a house into a house they can’t afford and kidding ourselves about the consequences. I will tell you flatly, I don’t think the political class has learned one thing from this. The same people who lied to themselves the last 20 years are busy this month lying to themselves and the only improvement they’ve added is they now try to write the bills late enough and big enough that they don’t have to read them. And then they don’t have to lie to themselves because they actually don’t know anything in it so they can vote for it in total ignorance. That’s where we are.
Part of the reason we are there is because we have not had a direct enough and candid enough conversation at every level of government. Sacramento’s current $25 billion problem is a problem of 2+2. You have a capital city dominated by bureaucrats and lobbyists with politicians unwilling to tell the truth, trying to ram down on the state policies that are so unacceptable that a state the voted 61 percent for President Obama, turned around and in May voted 64 percent against spending more taxes and more money. Not a single county voted for the referendum. And, in fact, even in San Francisco, there was a majority of fiscal conservatives voting no. Now, when you have a state in bad enough shape that San Francisco begins to have fiscal conservatives, you have a state that has violated 2+2=4 about as far as you can.
I wrote a book called, Real Change, which just came out on paperback, and in it there’s a chapter on Detroit. Detroit is the most tragic example of bad politicians, bad government, bad regulations, and bad taxes in America. The result of these bad policies is that Detroit dropped from 1.8 million in 1950 to under 900,000. Half the housing stock is not needed; the price of housing has collapsed. I was out in Lancing speaking to the state Senate about six weeks ago and the day before they had sold 2,000 houses for under $10,000each. This is a man-made disaster because people wouldn’t be honest. Today, the Detroit school system is the 4th most expensive in the U.S. and graduates 27 percent of its entering freshman on time because no one is willing to add up 2+2 and get to 4. No one is willing to tell the truth about how bad it is. And, no one is willing to defend the children. So, you can go through item after item.
We are in the middle of a bad economy and we have a proposal for a massive energy tax increase. We have a proposal to have a massive health tax increase and we have a proposal next year to automatically raise taxes on every American already written into law. The worst possible policies at the time of economic challenge. Yet, the political machine lumbers onward because it’s not about success for the average American, it’s about power for the politicians.
I think you have to recognize, you cannot successfully balance the current budgets by just being cheap. The great challenge of Sacramento is that there has been no model that would enable them to understand how to fundamentally change the government of California. I believe this is one of the most important intellectual challenges we have. I want to suggest to you, a three step process. We are going to actually develop a course for elected officials because I think there are three steps and I think that we get them backwards. The first step is to develop the vision for a successful state, city county, school system, or federal government, but do it at the level of the community. Figure out ten years from now, if we were wildly successful, what would success be?
The second step is to ask what are the laws that would help us get there and what are the government structures we absolutely have to have? Notice, I am not advocating an anti-government policy, I’m advocating a policy of lean, effective, limited government as a positive, good that has to be thought through and developed and managed in a positive way.
We have two grandchildren, Maggie who is nine and Robert who is about to be eight and I really want America, when they are in their forties and fifties, to be most productive, most successful and therefore safest country in the world. I believe that if we are serious about competing with China and India over the next thirty years we have to reform litigation, regulation, taxation, education, health energy and infrastructure. I don’t believe you can possibly get there any other way. So, you are going to get up every day and your constituents are going to get up every day and you are either going to be for caving in, accepting second-class status and allowing America to decay, or you are going to be for fundamental reform. Well, you first have to build a popular consensus around the kind of state you want to live in, and then you have to build a popular consensus around the policies that would get you to that state. Only then do you write the budget.
So, the budget comes last in the process. I don’t say this as a theoretician, I say this as the only speaker of the house in eighty-five years, to have offered four consecutive balanced budgets. We kept spending at 2.9 percent a year and that included entitlements. We cut taxes for the first time in 16 years to create the economic growth. They created more revenue because they put people back to work. We reformed welfare so that 65 percent of Americans on welfare either went to school or went to work. This had a double effect. It took them off Medicaid, it took them off welfare, it reduced government spending and because they were now working, they were actually paying taxes. So, you have a double positive coming out of the whole experience. We reformed Medicare in the middle of a presidential election, while becoming the first re-elected Republican majority in 68 years. Not since 1928 had Republicans won re-election.
Now, I say that as background because what I’m about to describe to you is not theoretical. If you go back home and you get together and you say alright, what kind of state do we want? What would it take to get to that kind of state? Now, talk about the budget you would need. You will find yourself in a fundamentally different conversation than starting with the current government and the current budget and trying to cut it. If all you are doing is trying to cut things, you maximize the scream from every person who is losing money and you minimize the support from everybody who would have a better future. It is a fundamental question of how you approach governing.
Now, in that setting, I want to give you a handful of examples of how to think about the future, a couple of them are federal, most of them are state. Let me make a key point to all of you we are today, in the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve reported the day before yesterday, they believe unemployment will be higher than they thought it was going to be two months ago. They think that it will clearly be 10 percent or more. More sobering than that, they reported that they believe that when the recovery does come, there will be no new jobs. You will get more economic growth with people being more productive with no one being hired. And, they project five years with no new net jobs. That means we are saying to every young person graduating from high school and college, you are going into the worst unemployment environment since the 1930’s and your government is doing nothing to make it better.
Let me be clear about that, we did not pass a stimulus package in January. We passed a politicians bail out package. That money all went to the states and local governments so that they could avoid making tough choices. We actually slowed down the very reforms we need. And, in some states, they were so unwise that they took all the new money, cut nothing, and had a bigger budget than they did last year. Which means their 2010 budget session is going to be a nightmare. Some of you may be in those states. Well, 2+2=4 will tell you, if you are in this size economic problem, the earlier you are honest about it and the earlier you start fixing it, the less painful it is going to be. The more you lie to yourself, the more painful it is going to be. I’m tired of being told we have 73,012 priorities and, by the way one of them might be jobs. This government should can all the stuff that doesn’t create new jobs and should focus as its only major order of business for the next year, getting the American economy growing again and getting real jobs for Americans.
Now, we are going to propose four tax cuts, and I think that you need all four to work synergistically in order to get a dramatic increase in economic growth. The first we are going to propose is a two-year, 50 percent reduction in the Social Security and Medicare tax for both the employee and for employer match. There is a very practical reason for this. Most people in America are not going to get pay raises in the next coupe of years, but they could get a raise in take home pay. If you had a 50 percent reduction in the Social Security and Medicare tax, every working American would have more take home pay, be more able to pay off their debt, and would be more able to survive the current environment. If you are self employed, the combination of that and a reduction in the matching would give you a substantial increase in liquidity. And, for the small businesses, which are the key job creators in America, if they could keep 50 percent of their current match for their employees, their cash flow would be much better, their liquidity would be better, their requirement for credit - at a time when the credit system is almost totally paralyzed, would go down dramatically. They would both survive better, would grow faster, and you’d be back on the road to growth. So, we believe that is the first building block.
The second building block if you want to compete with China is very simple. Match China in capital gains tax, which is zero. If we had zero capital gains tax, we would be the most rapidly growing economy in the world, investment would pour into the United States, and we’d begin to be the best place on the planet to build the next factory.
Third, if you really want your business to grow, create jobs, and compete in the world market, match Ireland for the corporate tax rate, which is 12.5 percent. Craig Barrett first told me this when he was the head of Intel. He pointed out that the difference between the highest corporate tax rate in the world, when you combine state and federal taxes is the United States. The result is Microsoft puts all of its licenses in Ireland. They are not stupid. Do you want to pay 12.5 percent or do you want to pay something like 39 percent? Now again, 2+2=4. Even for most elected officials in Washington, you would think that you could get them to understand 12.5 percent or 39 percent. They don’t. Which is why they would like it to go to 46 percent and make us even less competitive and kill even more jobs.
Finally, if you really want capital investment, if you really want to create small business and you really want to encourage entrepreneurs, abolish the death tax, permanently. If you are trying to encourage the work ethic, if you are trying to encourage savings, if you are trying to encourage the kind of investment that creates jobs, if you are trying think about their families and their children and grandchildren, it is absolutely destructive to take away their life-time savings when they die. It is morally wrong and we should eliminate it permanently.
Those four changes would jump start the American economy in a matter of months, would dramatically increase the flow of savings in United States, and would lead to dramatic job creation. You could pay for them by a variety of steps which I outlined in my newsletter this week, which you can get at newt.org and which we’ll be outlining in detail next week at the National Press Club.
As somebody who actually did author four consecutive balanced budgets, I just want you to be comfortable that I am confident, given the size of the current budget in Washington, the current waste, the current bureaucracy, and the political interference, we can find more than enough money to offset pro-jobs and pro-growth tax cuts. You have to have people who really want America to grow again, as opposed to giving power to politicians. As part of that growth, we have to have an American energy policy that focuses on American sources of energy, the opposite of the government’s current policy. Let me say, many of you helped us last year with Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less, which actually changed the debate and for the first time in 27 years, it is currently legal to look offshore. I would urge all of you to help us gather up comments for the Department of the Interior, which through September 21st is accepting comments on whether or not and under what circumstances, for the next five years to allow drilling and regulation. This is a very important step for America. Those of you who are in states that have potential access to offshore ought to be looking at that as a significant source of revenue without raising taxes.
I find it doubly mystifying that California, given all its pain and the objective reality that there is so much oil in the Santa Barbara Basin, it leaks annually the amount of oil that was in the 1969 spill. It occurs naturally. It leaks every 5 years the amount of oil that was in the Exxon Valdez spill, which was a tanker, not a blow up. And, we know from the gulf, you can drill off shore, go though a whole series of hurricanes, and have zero leaks. We also know from the gulf that when you build the rigs, they become reefs and you actually have increased game fishing around the oil rigs, not decreased. Yet, we have an almost ideological commitment to weaken America.
I want to say bluntly, bowing to a Saudi King is not an energy policy. I may also say that anybody who talks about peak oil, ask them to go look at americansolutions.com. There was just an announcement at the end of May by the U.S. Geological Survey that they are having a 5,000 percent increase in the amount of natural gas that they believe exists in the Chukchi Sea just off of Alaska. They’ve announced just recently that they’ve had a 2,500 percent increase in the amount of oil they believe exists in North Dakota, in the Bakken Formation. And now this last week, they’ve announced that there is a second source of oil and gas near the Bakken Formation that may be as large or larger. The Brazilians have announced that they have discovered a 9,000 thousand percent increase in the amount of oil off the coast of Brazil in the Atlantic, where the Brazilians have not stopped themselves from finding energy. The domestic natural gas industry will tell you that there is new technology that lets them go down to 8,000 feet and reach out as much as 4 miles in every direction. They are now finding so much natural gas in shale that in the last 3 years, they have added 100 years reserve to the American supply of natural gas.
So, the next time somebody tells you about peak oil and we can’t find all these resources, you need to tell them to read what is at American Solutions. That proves as a factual 2+2=4,it is inconceivable that you can sustain the intellectual argument that we are inevitably going to run out of things. So, I think it is very important, we need American energy for American national security, for American jobs, and for the American economy and we need it now.
Let me also suggest, if we are going to compete in the world market, we have to fundamentally rethink our education system. I think that we have to rethink it, not only in k-12, we have to rethink it for our lifetime. Every American is going to have to learn their whole lifetime and those Americans who did not get a good education before they were eighteen have to have a chance to catch up in a practical and realistic way. I’d like to replace No Child Left Behind with Every American Gets Ahead. I would like us to innovate and develop new approaches until every single American has the opportunity to learn and the only question is will they put in the time and the discipline to learn.
I have to tell you with some very pleasant surprise, that President Obama has asked me to join Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Rev. Al Sharpton to go around the Country and ask states to adopt very strong charter school laws, in which there would be unlimited charter schools. There are many areas in which President Obama and I don’t agree, but I am delighted to work with the President when we do agree. This is an area where he is showing considerable courage in taking on one of the strongest interest groups of his Party. And, I hope all of you will go back home, get his speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and feel free to quote him to everyone else in your legislature until you pass very strong and very bold charter school legislation.
Now, there are a couple of clear steps. In 1983 we were warned schools were so bad, the country was literally in peril. In 2001, the Hart-Rudman commission warned that the second greatest threat to American national security was our failure in math and science education and our failure to invest in math and science. We need very bold changes.First, I think we have to measure those changes by results, we have to find out what works and we have to be prepared to change over and over until everything is working, so that everyone has a chance to learn. Next, we need transparency; we need to know students are learning and teachers are teaching? We have to have the courage to make that transparency real. And, parents have the right to know whether or not their child is learning and citizens have the right to know whether or not they are paying for education that is effective. Third, parents have to have the right to choose a school for their child that they believe is safe and effective and the choice should not be given to education bureaucrats, the choice should be with the parents. Fourth, we should adopt pay for performance. If a teacher is willing to go into a really difficult school and that teacher produces world-class results and saves the lives of 30 students who get to go to college or vo-tech school instead of go to prison, that teacher should earn more for having gotten the job done. We should be prepared to take on the fight of paying for performances and insisting on rewarding superb excellence.
Beyond that, I recommend all of you, if you have any doubt about how much change we need, get a copy of 2 million minutes, a movie made by Bob Compton. Bob is a health entrepreneur who went to China and India. 2 million minutes follows 2 Indian high school students, 2 Chinese high school students, and 2 American high school students through 4 years of high school. At the end of that movie, you will be convinced that we are a country aggressively preparing for the 1956 Olympics. We are that out of sequence with reality and it is very sobering. If you doubt it, go to 2mminutes.com, where Bob Compton has posted the Indian tenth grade exit exam, which is in English. All Indian academic education is in English and no American has been able to pass it. This is the thing - you have to pass this exam to go to the 11th grade in India. By the end of the tenth grade, Indian students have had 4 years of physics, taught by physics major. That is how big the gap is.
Now, some immediate small examples of change you can afford. First, adopt a law that says students that can graduate in three years, get the fourth year of high school cost as an automatic scholarship to either vo-tech or college. You will immediately incentivize learning and it doesn’t cost you a penny. It radically changes the environment of the school, starts to reward people who actually do their homework, study hard, and maybe get out early. I ask students all the time, “how many of you could have graduated in three years?” Every hand goes up. I ask, “How many of you could have graduated in two years”? Half the hands go up. I once asked, “How many of you could have gotten out in one year”? A kid in the back yells, “How big is the reward”? Americans love incentives and Americans respond to incentives.
My daughter Jackie Cushman led a program last year with the foundation. They paid seventh and eighth graders for doing their homework the equivalent of working at McDonalds in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Fulton County. And guess what? It turned out poor children liked getting paid. They were willing to do their homework if they got paid. They understood the model. Now, a lot of people in educatuion say how can you incentivize it? My question is, “How can you lose them for three generations in a row and not try something”? Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, like my daughter, had run an experiment in Chicago paying students and does believe it is a worth while project in the poorest neighborhoods to fundamentally change behavior.
Fourth, if you get a chance, visit the College of the Ozarks or one of the other five work study colleges in the United States. College of the Ozarks is in southern Missouri and was founded in 1906. You can only apply if you are poor enough to need student aid and the school has no student loan program. Every student works 15 hours a week and two forty-hour weeks during the school breaks and that pays for their tuition and books. Also, If they are willing to work 12 weeks during the summer, forty-hours a week, they receive free room and board. 92 percent of the students graduate with no debt. 8 percent of the students have an average of $5,000 in debt, which is almost always buying a car their senior year.
Here is my challenge to all of you, go back home and propose one work study college and one work study vocational technical school for the poorest place in your state. It will do two things. First of all, it allows you to say to every student in your state, “don’t tell me its about money”. It’s about desire, it’s about work, and it’s about ambition. But, if you’re willing to work, we are going to have a place for you to go to school that you will get through with no debt. Second, it will benchmark the cost of your current system and you will be staggered at how much money you are wasting propping up inefficient, bureaucratic, unnecessarily expensive institutions, whose primary power is their ability to get the alumni to tell you to send them more money. You will suddenly have a real challenge. The truth is, we could educate this country better, more rapidly, and more effectively for less money, not more money. But, it would change the system and the bureaucracies would scream to high heaven.
Scott Rials was right in talking to you about healthcare, which is obviously the biggest single growth center in every state budget. Insider Advantage just completed a pole and asked the question, do you trust the federal government to be able to run a health system? 26 percent of the American people said yes. When asked whether or not the American people believed that there is significant fraud and waste in Medicaid and Medicare, 73 percent said that there was either, “very significant” or “somewhat significant” fraud and waste. When asked, whether you thought the government should solve the problem of fraud and waste in the current federal programs before starting a new program, 61 percent said, “solve the fraud first”.
Jim Frogue, with the Center for Health Transformation, has a new book which we are publishing electronically today and will publish in hard copy next month. It’s called Stop Paying the Crooks. I want you to understand how big this is. This goes back to 2+2=4. Our estimate is that between $70 and $120 billion a year of Medicare and Medicaid is fraud and ’m not talking about marginal errors and technical mistakes. I’m talking about a dentist in New York State who filed 982 procedures in one day. I’m talking about a doctor who filed 4 colonoscopies on the same patient in one day, I’m talking about five pizza parlors in south Florida that had successfully filed as HIV/AIDS transfusion centers and recieved money from the federal government because it is so incompetent at managing Medicare and Medicaid. People tell you that the federal government is less expensive as an administrator than insurance companies. That’s right, It doesn’t administer anything. It just sends the checks. If you add in the fraud in the federal program it is the most expensive administration in American healthcare. The New York Times has estimated, 10% of Medicaid is pure fraud. That is $4.4 billion a year. So we think the idea we are going to raise $1,5 trillion in new revenue in order to pay for a program the federal government can’t run today is absolutely wrong.
In addition, Dave Merritt runs a project at American Solutions on health-based-health reform and we believe you could take as much as $5.5 trillion over the next decade out of the cost of Medicare by moving to better practices at lower costs. There are dramatic examples around the country of institutions doing brilliant jobs of solving health problems for dramatically less money, so people live longer live better, live more independently, and do so for less cost. That is the kind of continuous reform we ought to have, not building another federal bureaucracy.
Laura Lynn runs a project in Columbus Georgia working with Novo Nordisk and others in which we have a community based diabetes program. We believe that we are going to make major breakthroughs in helping manage diabetes, which is the largest single cost program in the federal government. It accounts for one out of every four dollars of Medicare.
In every one of your state budgets, Alzheimer’s is going to be a bigger and bigger factor in the cost of long term care. My sister-in-law’s mother has Alzheimer’s; it is very difficult, very painful and as many of you know, it lasts a long time. The current estimate for the federal government is that Alzheimer’s between now and 2050 will cost $20 trillion. That is going to cost a significant amount for every state.
We have an Alzheimer’s Solutions Project in which three Nobel Prize winning scientists and 125 neuroscientists have come together with us to develop a program in which they believe could lead to ending Alzheimer’s as a threat around 2020 or 2025. Not only would that be an enormous human blessing, but it would probably save the federal government between $8 and $10 trillion, an amount which makes even the Stimulus Act look tiny. But, that requires changing the Budget Act, to be able to actually invest in the research. It requires changing the way the statistics of health are run to actually have a program that is focused on finding a solution. Real changes to get a real solution that would save your states an enormous amount of money and I hope you’ll look at the Alzheimer’s Solutions Project and consider offering a resolution in your state supporting those concepts.
Finally in health, we have with a tremendous effort by Wayne Oliver and Dr. John Gill of Dallas, Texas on malpractice reform. One quick example, Texas passed a very dramatic malpractice reform and have had 4,000 doctors move into the state. They’ve had a drop in malpractice insurance and they’ve had a drop in defensive medicine cost. There are places in the Rio Grand Valley that had not had doctors for 20 years that now have doctors. A friend of mine in Okalahoma said they now have the worst of all worlds, they’re losing their doctors to Texas and the Texas trial lawyers are moving to Oklahoma.
Let me just wrap this up and thank you for this opportunity and go back and make the following very simple points. We have the worst economy since the Great Depression. We are too expensive of a country, with too great of a burden of government, incapable of competing with China and India over the next quarter century, unless we have very bold, very dramatic change. That change has to be positive. It has to be a better future, with better answers, and better solutions. You have to rally the American people so that you get a 70 or 80 percent majority willing to go through the change or you cannot get it done. Such a change has to occur at 513,000 elected offices, It cannot be done by the president, it cannot be done by the Congress, it cannot be a Washington centered process, and such a change has to be a tri-partisan. You have to bring together Democrats, Republicans and Independents to create a red white and blue future, not a red vs. blue future. You will never build a purely partisan majority big enough for this scale of change. I think the closest parallel is the rise of the progressive movement from 1896 to 1916 when Democrats and Republicans alike came to the conclusion that you had to modernize government to meet the modern world.
I hope each of you will look at what were doing on health issues. I hope you’ll go to www.healthtransformation.net and look at what we’ve done to try and to rethink the entire process. We are working for better system of a 21st century, intelligent, personal health system focusing on wellness, prevention, early testing, chronic disease management by the patient and a very sophisticated approach of continuous improvement to reduce cost and improve outcomes.
I hope on other issues you will go to www.americansolutions.com and consider signing up to stay in touch with us. We want to build with every person, of every background, and every community, a system capable of achieving safety, prosperity, and freedom for our children and our grandchildren. We want to successfully continue to lead the world through the next half century, in the hope that ultimately over time we will have a country like China become a democracy and we’ll have a chance to live in peace and freedom with all of out neighbors. In the interim, if the world is going to be dangerous, it is far better for our children and far better for our grandchildren if we are the most productive, most prosperous, and safest country in the world. I think that is the moral cause to which each of us has to reach in this kind of a difficult time. Thank you very, much.
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