Archive for the ‘Governor Mitch Daniels’ Category

MITCH DANIELS WAS RIGHT

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

 


NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

Mitch Daniels Was Right

By  The Editors

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MITCH DANIELS’S RESPONSE TO THE STATE OF THE UNION

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

Published on The Weekly Standard (www.weeklystandard.com)

Daniel Halper

January 24, 2012 10:29 PM

Here’s the full text of Mitch Daniels’s response to the State of the Union, as prepared for delivery:

“The status of ‘loyal opposition’ imposes on those out of power some serious responsibilities: to show respect for the Presidency and its occupant, to express agreement where it exists.  Republicans tonight salute our President, for instance, for his aggressive pursuit of the murderers of 9/11, and for bravely backing long overdue changes in public education.  I personally would add to that list admiration for the strong family commitment that he and the First Lady have displayed to a nation sorely needing such examples.

“On these evenings, Presidents naturally seek to find the sunny side of our national condition.  But when President Obama claims that the state of our union is anything but grave, he must know in his heart that this is not true.

“The President did not cause the economic and fiscal crises that continue in America tonight.  But he was elected on a promise to fix them, and he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse: the percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades.  One in five men of prime working age, and nearly half of all persons under 30, did not go to work today.

“In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt.  And yet, the President has put us on a course to make it radically worse in the years ahead.  The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy; it borrows one of every three dollars it spends.  No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours. (more…)

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THE PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS ARE THE NEW TAMMANY HALL

Monday, November 28th, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • NOVEMBER 26, 2011

‘The New Tammany Hall’

The historian of the American city on what Wall Street and the ‘Occupy’ movement have in common, and how government unions came to dominate state and local politics.

New York

‘What has the country so angry,” says Fred Siegel, “is the sense that crony capitalism has produced a population that lives off the rest of us without contributing. They’re right. It’s not paranoid.”

The economic historian of the American city has spent a lot of this autumn on Wall Street. He met many of the protesters who camped out at Zuccotti Park, before the city’s finest cleared them out last week. He also knows the bankers and finds the theater of the Occupy movement ironic.

“They’re on the same side of the street politically,” he says. “They’re both in favor of big government. The Wall Street people I talk to, they get it completely.” What he means is that the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the large banks, and that economic stimulus and near-zero interest rates kept them flush. “Obama’s crony capitalism has been very good for New York’s crony capitalism,” he says. Over at Zuccotti Park, “there are a few people there who do get it, but very little of their animosity follows from this.”

One can appreciate why the “we are the 99%” militants might resist Mr. Siegel’s logic. He links the liberalism of the 1960s, not any excess of the free market, to today’s crisis. The Great Society put the state on growth hormones. Less widely appreciated, the era gave birth to a powerful new political force, the public-sector union. For the first time in American history there was an interest dedicated wholly to lobbying for a larger government and the taxes and debt to pay for it. (more…)

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BOOK REVIEW: KEEPING THE REPUBLIC – MITCH DANIELS

Saturday, October 15th, 2011
a
  • 26 sep 2011
  • The Washington Times Weekly

Restoring an overtaxed state

Mitch Daniels, elected governor of Indiana in 2004 and re-elected in 2008 after previously serving as President George W. Bush’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and as a senior aide to President Ronald Reagan, has been called “America’s best governor” and “the most presidential man in America.”

And until he took himself out the current lineup in May for family reasons, he was the preferred presidential choice of many Republicans. But the presidential question is now moot (although just down the line there’ll be a vice presidential choice). This book, perhaps originally intended to buttress a presidential campaign, will be read primarily as an account of how one governor, through the application of basic conservative principles, restored an overregulated and overtaxed state running in the red to economic good health — and did so while surrounding states were sinking into recession. (more…)

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BOOK REVIEW – AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM – MARGARET HOOVER

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
WASHINGTON POST
Posted at 11:45 AM ET, 07/17/2011

Interview: Margaret Hoover, the

GOP’s and the millennials

Margaret Hoover, a great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover, is a regular figure on cable news and a veteran of the George W. Bush campaign. Her new book, American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party, hits the bookshelves on Tuesday. It’s likely to make some waves.

Far from being a defender of the status quo, she’s sending up a warning to the GOP. In a far-ranging interview she told me, “I wrote the book because I care about the state of the party.” That might seem odd, given the Republicans’ recent success in 2010, but she has her eye on the horizon or, more precisely, on the generation of Americans born between 1980 and 1990 (the “millennials”). If you vote for the same party in three successive presidential elections, she says, your political loyalties are pretty much set for life. The GOP lost the youth vote in 2004 and 2008, and may do so again in 2012 if it doesn’t break through with these voters.

At first blush she sounds like one of the batch of pundits (most exemplified by David Frum) who’d like the GOP to dump social conservatives, adopt new socially liberal views and trade a loyal, influential segment of the party for newer, hipper and less reliable voters. But her book is more nuanced and positive than that.

Her message is simple and not unlike that of the Tea Party movement, for which she has effusive praise. (“Personally I think it’s an incredible contribution to the Republican Party.”) To capture the most racially diverse, politically independent generation we have ever seen, Hoover says,”We need to shift the focus to fiscal issues.We have to talk specifically about their future.” Republicans have a convincing case to make against President Obama, she argues. “He’s taken a pass on their issues.” (more…)

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GOP GOVERNORS ARE SHOWING THE WAY

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • JUNE 25, 2011

State Republicans are tackling the issues voters want addressed. That will be a major asset for the party’s presidential nominee in 2012.

Democrats say otherwise, but Republican governors and their records will be a major asset to the GOP in 2012. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s monumental achievement this week in passing a bill to reform his state’s public-employee benefits is a prime example. As Gov. Christie said Friday, underfunded pension and health-care obligations are “the core problems of government spending in the country.”

This is the kind of leadership Americans want right now: straight talk about the fiscal mess we’re in and a plan to solve it. The good news is Gov. Christie is not alone among Republican governors.

When I became governor of Virginia in January 2010 we faced two historic budget shortfalls totaling $6 billion. The proposals to close these shortfalls spanned the philosophical spectrum. Shortly before leaving office, my predecessor, outgoing Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine, put forward a massive $1.8 billion income-tax hike as one of his solutions.

I knew that in an economy struggling to recover, raising taxes was a nonstarter. So we set forth on a different path. We balanced Virginia’s books by reducing state spending to 2006 levels, putting in place a hiring freeze in state government, making conservative revenue estimates and incentivizing state employees to save taxpayer dollars. The result was a budget surplus just a few months later.

Since February 2010, 67,400 new jobs have been created in Virginia and our unemployment rate has fallen to 6% from 7.2%. Virginia’s unemployment rate is more than a full three points below the national average and the third-lowest east of the Mississippi. It’s not surprising that a majority of Virginians surveyed now believe the state is headed in the right direction, compared to 31% who think the nation is moving in the right direction.

These results can and will be duplicated in other states. This year, 18 new Republican governors took office, and many confronted budget deficits similar to or worse than what we faced in Virginia last year.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie

mcdonnel

(more…)

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IN DEFENSE OF BORING MEN

Friday, April 29th, 2011

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

By on 4.28.11

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:

Daniels erased a $200 million dollar deficit and turned it into a surplus, reformed state government, and reduced the total number of state employees to their lowest number since Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was top of the charts. Daniels is currently taking on the teachers’ unions with education reform. On federal issues he warns the U.S. faces a new “Red Menace” as devastating as the former Soviet Army, only this time the menace is the red ink of debt. He defended Paul Ryan’s budget plan as “the first serious proposal” of either party to tackle the looming debt tsunami, and derided those who criticized it without offering a substantive alternative as “unserious” men.

The fact that young women frequently fall for bad boys is something that every good guy knows. It’s also something our society immortalizes in popular culture: Juliet fell for Romeo; Joanie fell for Chachi; Diane fell for Sam; Buffy fell for Angel; and Bella for Edward. In the movies and on television, it generally works out okay. In real life, it’s generally drugs, disease, despair, divorce and parental heartbreak, which is why, knowing what challenges lie ahead and the value of a solid partner, parents ask, “Why couldn’t you just fall for the nice guy?”

Right now, polls show many conservative voters, at least temporarily, falling for the bad boy in the form of billionaire celebrity Donald Trump. A main reason cited for this is the “bland” or “boring” slate of potential GOP candidates. They’re not dynamic, dangerous or sexy enough to attract their eye. But conservatives have long prided themselves as belonging to the party of reason and dismissed the Democrats as the party of emotion, so expect these feelings to subside. (more…)

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VIDEO – GROWING CAMPUS SUPPORT FOR MITCH DANIELS AND MITT ROMNEY

Sunday, April 17th, 2011

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UNIONS VS. THE RIGHT TO WORK

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
  • The Wall Street Journal
    • FEBRUARY 28, 2011

    Collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.

    How ironic that Wisconsin has become ground zero for the battle between taxpayers and public- employee labor unions. Wisconsin was the first state to allow collective bargaining for government workers (in 1959), following a tradition where it was the first to introduce a personal income tax (in 1911, before the introduction of the current form of individual income tax in 1913 by the federal government).

    Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state—or even across states—can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.

    In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

    Remarkably, labor unions are not only immune from antitrust laws but can also negotiate a “union shop,” which requires nonunion employees to join the union or pay nearly equivalent dues. Somehow, despite many attempts, organized labor has lacked the political power to repeal the key portion of the 1947 Taft Hartley Act that allowed states to pass right-to-work laws, which now prohibit the union shop in 22 states. From the standpoint of civil liberties, the individual right to work—without being forced to join a union or pay dues—has a much better claim than collective bargaining. (Not to mention that “right to work” has a much more pleasant, liberal sound than “collective bargaining.”) The push for right-to-work laws, which haven’t been enacted anywhere but Oklahoma over the last 20 years, seems about to take off.

    barro (more…)

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    MITCH DANIELS – THE GOVERNOR WHO CUT HIS STATE DOWN TO SIZE

    Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
    The Wall Street Journal

    • FEBRUARY 26, 2011
    Corrections & Amplifications
    Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels favors a dramatic reworking of Social Security benefits, but not for those who would enter the system in the next 10 or 15 years. This story doesn’t make clear that the changes wouldn’t apply to those receiving or about to receive benefits.

    [DANIELS_A1] Associated PressIndiana’s Mitch Daniels espouses radical cuts to Social Security; would Americans go along for the ride?

    CULVER, Indiana—Pundits say he’s too short, at 5-foot-7, and lacks the requisite pizzazz to be elected president.

    Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels believes he faces a taller challenge as he ponders a White House run: Could voters warm to his message that the country is doomed unless it slashes its debt and radically revamps the popular Social Security and Medicare programs?

    In any other year, a campaign platform that gloomy would render a politician toxic. Today, with concerns over the nation’s fiscal health on the rise, the Indiana Republican’s wonkish bravado is making some think he is a good fit for the moment.

    Gov. Mitch Daniels is tireless on the stump. But like many of his potential opponents, he’s keeping coy on whether he’ll make a run for the White House in 2012. WSJ’s Neil King reports. (more…)

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