I have a great plan for “saving” Social Security.

Today’s average U.S. life expectancy is 78 years. Let’s make the retirement age to collect Social Security 79.

Presto. The “system” is saved (or until life expectancy increases, at which point we can raise the retirement age again).

Pretty dumb? Sure. But if the goal is “saving” the system, nothing would work better.

Wait a minute you say. It’s not about the “system” but about saving me, my children, my grandchildren, my neighbors. It’s about making individuals better off.

But if the point is making individuals better off, why do we only hear assurances from most politicians that they will “save the system?”

The “solution” that I have proposed here is one extreme example how Social Security, if we insist on keeping it as it is today, can be “saved.”

How about raising your taxes to get the same amount of payout at retirement?

How about leaving your taxes the same but requiring that you pay them for a longer period of time, raising the retirement age to collect?

Can you imagine getting a call from your bank that they have run out of money so in order to save your CD they have to cut the interest rate on it in half? Or that you can’t cash in your one year CD for another two years?

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Two names loom large in this week’s news. Two names that ordinarily we wouldn’t think about together.

But, in the great struggle now unfolding before us for our nation’s future, it seems to me these two quintessential Americans are worth thinking about in light of each other.

One is Steve Jobs.

The other is Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jobs, of course, is in the headlines because of his decision to step down and retire from Apple Computer, the company he co-founded, from which he later got fired, and to which he subsequently returned and resurrected.

Dr. King is in the news because of the opening of the King monument in Washington, D.C.

Other than being in the news at the same time, why might we think of these two very different Americans together?

I think they are icons of two essential but different and opposing aspects of American life. One is the individual and the other is our social reality.

It’s these two aspects of American life, the dignity and potential of individuals living free, and the social reality, the rules by which we all agree to live and to which we all submit, that has always caused tension in American life. And this tension is becoming particularly acute today.

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The question on the table today is whether revolutionary Tea Party sentiments that unseated 25 percent of the Democrats in Congress in 2010 have now vanished into a whimper.

Supporters of the current administration would have us believe that this is the case. And at first glance, it seems they may have a point. If it is the case, then in all likelihood, we have a second term of President Barack Obama to look forward to.

The latest “proof” of the fizzling of the Tea Party is the special election just held in New York’s 26th district in which a Democrat captured a congressional seat held by Republicans since 1970. Yes, the same seat held by legendary Republican tax cutter and reformer Jack Kemp.

The Republican proposal to reform Medicare was a key issue in the campaign, so Democrats are interpreting this as a generic Republican, and Tea Party, repudiation.

A Gallup poll of just a few weeks ago reported that 47 percent now have a negative view of the Tea Party, the highest negative reported since Gallup began tracking the movement.

And, along with this, President Obama’s approval ratings have now pushed again over 50 percent, ten points higher than his unfavorable ratings.

Fox commentator and Tea Party icon Glenn Beck, who attracted hundreds of thousands to the National Mall in Washington last summer with his “Restoring Honor” rally, will soon be packing his bags and leaving Fox.

Is it all over?

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Next month the Republican National Committee will elect a chairman to lead their party into the 2012 presidential election.

Current chairman Michael Steele, who has been a source of controversy throughout his two year tenure, is being challenged by a number of candidates.

Many Republicans are unhappy with Steele’s leadership style and management. But despite the relevance of these concerns, they should not be the central issue.

Of central concern should be crystallizing the Republican Party’s vision for our nation and electing a chairman in tune with this vision, committed to it, and capable of rallying the party and the nation around it.

Despite the sweeping Republican victory in the 2010 congressional elections, there’s little evidence that the election reflected a new love affair between voters and the Republican Party. Much work remains to be done to restore party credibility.

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Charlie Rangel, convicted of eleven ethics violations – the most ever found against any member of Congress – was resoundingly re-elected, getting 80% of his district’s vote.

After 40 years representing these folks, you can’t conclude he was an unknown commodity.  Granted, the conviction occurred after the election, but the charges were well publicized.

Has Charlie Rangel’s leadership produced life so grand in Harlem that flagrant and persistent unethical behavior by their Congressman means nothing to its residents?

The national poverty rate is around 14%.  In the 15^th district of New York, Charlie Rangel’s district, it’s 24.3%.  The child poverty rate is 30.9%.

Whatever it is that Harlem voters find so attractive about Mr. Rangel, it’s hard to conclude that quality of life is something they feel they owe to him.

But let’s think about this in a broader context.

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Will the NAACP be celebrating the arrival of two new black faces to the U.S. House of Representatives?

Don’t hold your breath. They certainly will not. These two new black congressmen are Republicans.

There’s a powerful message here that should and must be digested.

We have arrived in post-racial America but establishment blacks – lodged in the political left – refuse to accept it and are doing all they can to get black citizens to refuse to accept it.

The sobering reality is that the black political establishment doesn’t want Dr. King’s dream. They don’t want an America where people are judged by the content of their character. They want an America that is Democrat and left wing and this is what they promote today under the banner of civil rights.

The campaign by the NAACP and leading black journalists – all liberals – to paint the Tea Party movement, the push back against government growth and intrusiveness over the last two years, as motivated by racism is shameful.

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Ginni Thomas’s call to Anita Hill has, not surprisingly, provoked columns and blogging speculating what motivated the call, some wanting to relive those hearings of 20 years ago.

But how about considering the simplest and most straightforward scenario?

Mrs. Thomas knows that her husband was slandered. That his name and reputation remain tarnished as result of the sleaziest kinds of lies and character assassination delivered by Anita Hill. She knows, better than anyone other than Clarence Thomas himself, the pain her husband endures as result of these lies.

The alleged point of those Senate hearings was to examine a man’s qualifications and confirm his nomination as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Thomas’s performance on the Court over these twenty years has been exemplary. One might not agree with his conservative views, but his scholarship, professionalism, and original contributions are well established.

So is it inconceivable that Ginni Thomas might consider reaching out to Anita Hill to consider, after all this time, extinguishing, as only she can, the sordid cloud of innuendo that she created?

But it’s more than just how Clarence Thomas feels.

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Keeping government limited is a practical approach to governing that opens the door to growth and prosperity.

Why?

Consider a fundamental difference between business and government. Any businessman operating successfully is in touch with reality, with change, and acts with speed to make adjustments necessary to survive.

Businesses are not democracies, so a CEO can execute what needs to be done on the spot.

Government is the opposite. It is allergic to change. They say government programs are like headless nails. Once in they’re impossible to get out. Programs produce interests who then fight change.

So it should be obvious that if we want a nation that is vibrant, in touch with reality, changing as it needs to in a timely way, the reach of government must be limited.

Consider Social Security.

With annual expenditures almost 5% of US GDP, it’s the single largest government spending program.

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The banter continues about the Republican Party being pushed to the right by “ideologues.”

Working Americans interest in politics is motivated by how to make our lives better. They don’t care about how one set of intellectuals or pundits think the world should be against some other set of ideas of ideology. They care about the facts. How the world really is and acting accordingly.

Two principles often labeled as “right wing ideology” are that as a society we are better off with limited government and individual freedom and that as individuals we are better off being married. Is this wishful thinking of ideologues or is this reality?

Two publications just out provide factual substantiation backing up both these principles.

Economic Freedom of the World, now in its 16th edition, is an annual index published co-operatively by 70 think tanks from around the world. This team has developed measures of economic freedom and then correlates these measures with economic performance in every country in the world.

What, according to this publication, is economic freedom? The core principles are “personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, and security of privately owned property.”

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Putting more and more wolves in charge of guarding the henhouse might characterize the big problems we’ve now created for ourselves.

Government is growing.  The private economy is shrinking. Those wielding political power see fewer and fewer problems they believe private citizens can solve on our own.   Soon, each one of us will have our own personal guardian bureaucrat.

The real difference between us and the hens is that the hens are not paying for the wolves’ salaries and benefits.

This past week new rules governing our credit cards kicked in, following passage of the Credit Card Accountability and Responsibility Act, signed into law last year.

The point of the CARD Act is to protect us consumers from the scheming bankers from whom we get our credit cards.

As result of these new protections, consumers can be grateful that credit card interest rates are the only interest rates that are not now dropping.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the average card interest rate is now 1.6% higher than last year and the gap between credit card rates and the prime lending interest rate is the highest it’s been in 22 years.

More good news for consumers is that there is less credit available.  The average credit limit on new cards being issued is down 11% from last year.

And, because the CARD Act implements new rules limiting the flexibility that banks have, for example, in changing rates on balances of overdue accounts or on exceeding credit limits, banks are simply finding new ways to raise revenue.

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August 28 marks the 47^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream speech.”

On that steamy summer day in 1963, hundreds of thousands of Americans, black and white, converged on the mall in Washington and heard this black pastor deliver what was essentially a sermon for freedom.

Compared to the unrest then on university campuses, violent outbreaks in urban areas, and the protests of the civil rights movement, today’s turmoil seems relatively sedate.

Nevertheless, we do live today in a deeply troubled nation and it’s instructive to think about what has changed since the sixties and what hasn’t.

One constant is the turmoil. It’s tempting to think that normal is times when things smoothly buzz along – but this is an illusion. The beauty of freedom is openness for dissent and discussion of life’s endless problems and ambiguities.

What changes is what we argue about and how we define our problems.  And one notable contrast between today and the sixties is our sense of religion and its relationship to the freedom we so cherish.

To appreciate this, we need look no further than Dr. King’s famous speech.

Today we commonly view freedom as exclusively in the arena of politics, separate and apart from – for some the antithesis of – religion.

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Washington’s latest bailout of bleeding state governments, $26 billion worth, has gotten attention because, among other things, almost half the bailout is financed by cutting $12 billion from food stamps.

But isn’t food stamps a signature program for the liberal Democrats who passed this spending bill? Isn’t government money for the poor what Democrats are supposed to be about?

How, in these tough times, do Democrats who control congress decide who’ll get funded and who not?

This is the latest example, particularly illustrative, showing that Washington is less and less about ideas and values, and more and more about interests, power, and money.

In this case, we’re talking about unions. Of the $26 billion the bill appropriates, $16 billion goes to state Medicaid programs and the other $10 billion to unionized state and local government employees.

Of the top twenty PACs in the country, eleven are union PACs. Number eight on the list is the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers ($1.8 million dollars in campaign contributions in the current election cycle). Number seventeen on the list is the American Federation of Teachers ($1.5 million in contributions).

Needless to say, around 100% of these union political contributions go to Democrats.

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The “Ground Zero” Mosque project should not go forward and let’s hope that Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf that is behind this $100 million project gets this message and backs off.

But given what he is hearing from the liberals in New York, including the city’s Mayor, the congressman in whose district Ground Zero sits, and the New York Times, it’s hard to be optimistic that he will change his mind.

Opposition to the Mosque is being portrayed, as the New York Times editorial page put it, as abandoning “the principles of freedom and tolerance.”  But the Times makes its own tenuous grasp of reality clear as it goes on in its editorial embracing the Mosque and Islamic Center to say that “The attacks of September 11 were not a religious event.”

We can only wonder what those at the Times think was motivating the young Muslims who, while embracing their Korans and chanting to Allah, committed suicide, taking 3000 innocent Americans to their deaths along with them.

The website for the project, the Cordoba Initiative, advertises itself as “Improving Muslim-West Relations”, and “steering the world back to the course of mutual recognition and respect and away from heightened tensions.”

But if Feisel Abdul Rauf is primarily motivated to “reduce heightened tensions,” why would he do something as obviously provocative as building a Mosque and Islamic Center a few feet away from 9/11 Ground Zero?

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Pollsters Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell, both Democrats, took on President Obama in a column in the Wall Street Journal last week, criticizing him for not being true to his campaign promise to unify the country.

“Rather than being a unifier,” they say, “Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class, and partisanship.”

They don’t see Republicans as any better. They claim that Republicans have just followed the administration in trying to exploit hot buttons of race and class.

“….the Republican leadership has failed to put forth an agenda that is more positive, unifying, and inclusive.”

Although it seems so warm and cuddly to consider the idea of national “unity”, what does this really mean? Particularly, what does it mean in a free country?

Isn’t the whole point and beauty of freedom that we recognize differences among us as natural and that we view debate, differences of viewpoint, and dissent as healthy? Doesn’t the idea of “unity” – of uniformity – conjure up images of exactly what this country is not about?

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Can anyone tell me why suddenly race is the hot topic of national discourse?

According to Gallup polling of last week, the issues most on the minds of Americans are the economy and jobs followed by dissatisfaction with all aspects of government.

I didn’t notice racism on the list anywhere.

The NAACP says it was “snookered” by Fox News on the Shirley Sherrod story. I say we’ve all been snookered by the NAACP.

The NAACP has shown that those who have written this organization off as irrelevant are wrong.   It demonstrated this past week that if it so chooses it can dominate the national discussion with its racial agenda, regardless of what the real pressing issues of national concern may be.

The accusation about Tea Party racism is ridiculous.  But even if you don’t think it’s ridiculous, is this the discussion we need to be having when national unemployment hovers at ten percent, and when black unemployment is closer to 15%, double that of whites?

Now, of course, we should be talking about racism if this is what is driving black unemployment.  But is it?

I don’t think so.  Nor do most blacks.

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In August of 2005, Houston investment banker Matt Simmons predicted in a New York Times feature article that the price of oil, then $65/barrel, would soar.

Simmons, who had written a book arguing that the world is running out of oil, was predicting oil prices “in the high triple digits.”

After reading Simmons’ prediction, John Tierney, a libertarian, who was then an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, telephoned Simmons and called him on it.  He asked him if he’d be willing to put money on his prediction.

The two made a $10,000 bet.  If the average oil price five years hence in 2010, adjusted for inflation, exceeded $200, Simmons would win. If not, Tierney would pocket the ten grand.

We’re now into the second half of 2010, and the average oil price, in 2005 dollars, is $70.  Unless there is a remarkable explosion in the oil price for the remainder of 2010, driving it well above $300, Matt Simmons loses this bet.  It was not even close.

The point here is to try and learn something from this that is relevant to what is going on today.

Simmons is an energy specialist.  The company he founded advertises itself as “the only investment bank specializing in the entire spectrum of energy.”

It’s reasonable to assume that he knows a zillion times more about exploring for and producing oil than John Tierney.   But Tierney didn’t make the bet because he felt he knew more about drilling for oil.  He made the bet because he knows something about markets and change.

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New Census data shows the continued trend that the United States is becoming a nation increasingly less white.

According to this latest report, 48.6% of children born in the U.S. between July 2008 and July 2009 were “non-white minorities.” That’s up two percentage points from two years earlier, and soon the figure will cross the 50% mark.

The largest growth demographic is Hispanics, who accounted for almost 55% of our population growth. And, most of this growth – two thirds – came from births, not from immigration.

Aside from the knowledge that the country is becoming more colorful, an obvious thing we’ve got to be thinking about is what this means politically. Given that Democrats have been getting the majority of Hispanic and black votes – the two largest minorities – the straightforward conclusion appears to be that demographic trends favor the Democrat Party.

In the 2008 elections, white voters, for the first time ever, accounted for less than 75% of the total vote. It’s been noted that if each ethnic group voted as it did in 2008, but made of up the same percentage of the electorate as it did 20 years ago, John McCain would be our president today.

Clearly, demographic realities present real challenges to the Republican Party and the values that it is supposed to be championing – limited government and free markets.

Most recent polling from Gallup shows Hispanics generically favoring Democrats over Republicans by 2 to 1.

Republicans have got to make headway with this population.

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The race issue refuses to disappear from American politics because problems tied to race persist.

Just as children are often the best witnesses to the shortcomings of parents, so the ill treated are often testimony to a nation’s shortcomings.

Sen. James Meeks (left)

The civil rights movement showed that in a nation which is free, civil, and moral, a few can create a non-violent revolution and change the world when their claims are just and moral, and when they are willing to fight and persist.

Just as that movement, starting with a few black leaders in the 1960’s, showed that our nation was sick and needed to be healed, the same thing is happening today.

A superb example is the remarkable leadership of Rev. James Meeks in Chicago.

Pastor Meeks, the spiritual leader of one of Chicago’s largest black churches, is also a Democrat senator in the state legislature.  Working with both Democrats and Republicans, and with the help of a free market think tank in Illinois, Meeks put together legislation to provide vouchers for kids in Chicago’s worst public schools to escape and attend a private school.

Increasingly, school choice initiatives around the country are being championed at the grass roots by local black leaders, often Democrats, for whom the truth is too straightforward to deny.

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Attorney General Eric Holder testified the other day before the House Judiciary Committee.   Republican congressman Lamar Smith asked him what seemed to be a pretty simple question.

Regarding the perpetrators in the last three terror attacks (two, thank God, unsuccessful) on our homeland (Fort Hood, the Christmas day bomber, and the Times Square bomber), Smith asked our Attorney General “Do you feel these individuals…might have been incited to take the actions they did because of radical Islam?”

Holder feigned to not understand.   “ Because of…?”

Smith:  “Because of radical Islam.”

Holder: “There are a variety of reasons people do these things.”

Smith re-worded the same question and re-asked it six times, with Holder refusing to acknowledge what is as obvious as the fact that I am typing these words and you are reading them.  That every major incident of terror of recent years has been performed by Muslims and that all of them associate their particular theology with their acts of terror.

The real question today is who is governing America and what exactly is the agenda of those who sit in the seat of power of our own country?

It is no wonder that most Americans are squirming around with the most profound sense of uneasiness.  When the chief law enforcement officer of the United States refuses to acknowledge what is clear and true – that those perpetrating terror today are uniformly Muslim and motivated by Islamic theology of one form or another – how in the world can we possibly feel safe?

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