Fred Thompson has released part of the text of the speech have delivered at the Lincoln Club dinner in Orange County, California last night. It's worth reading. It sounds very, very much like a campaign speech and it is, I suspect, why the character assassins are so busy in advance of him announcing whether he will enter the contest for the nomination.
These are challenges. But how we react to them is more important than the challenges themselves. Some want us, to the extent possible, to withdraw from the world that presents us with so many problems, in the hope they will go away. Some would push us towards protectionist trade policies. Others see a solution in raising taxes and redistributing the income among our citizens.
Wrong on all counts. These are defensive, defeatist policies that have consistently been proven wrong. They are not what America is all about.
Let's talk about the issues here at home, first. A lot of folks in Washington suffer from a big misconception about our economy. They confuse the well-being of our government with the wealth of our nation. Adam Smith pointed out the same problem in his day, when many governments mixed up how much money the king had with how well-off the country was.
Taxes are necessary. But they don't make the country any better off. At best they simply move money from the private sector to the government. But taxes are also a burden on production, because they discourage people from working, saving, investing, and taking risks. Some economists have calculated that today each additional dollar collected by the government, by raising income-tax rates, makes the private sector as much as two dollars worse off.
To me this means one simple thing: tax rates should be as low as possible. This isn't anything ideological, and it really isn't some great insight. It's common sense arithmetic.
That's why the economy booms when taxes are cut. When the Kennedy tax cuts were passed in the 1960s, the economy boomed. When Reagan cut taxes in 1981, we went from economic malaise to a new morning in America. And when George Bush cut taxes in 2001, he took a declining economy he inherited to an economic expansion — despite 9-11, the NASDAQ bubble and corporate scandals.
The Democrats, of course, want to raise taxes. They only want to target the rich, they say. A word of advice to anyone in the middle class — don't stand anywhere near that target. Wouldn't it be great if, instead of worrying so much about how to divide the pie, we could work together on how to make the pie bigger?
Read the whole thing. One thing for sure, he is either himself a great speech writer or has someone who is. (I rather suspect that a lot of this is his own work, just because that is actually part of what he is doing for a living these days at ABC Radio. The speech is also consistent with other work he has written that I have read.) I would have loved to hear this live. (Here's the Lincoln Club's website with their review of Thompson's speech.) This is the kind of speech that can make a career. No wonder they're so desperate to go after Thompson by trying to smear him with characters he's played in the past.
