Congressman Paul Ryan, Chair of the House Budget Committee, has become the GOP’s go-to guy for everything economical, and there are two reasons why: first, he is courageous enough to jump into the water and get the pool party started. As with his Path to Prosperity, his budget, and his plan for Medicare, Mr. Ryan is clear that Americans need to talk about big changes in the amount of money we spend and ways we can grow our economy, increase productivity, and, of course, employment- none of which have been even remotely addressed by the current administration. His willingness to get out on the road and talk to Americans about his ideas, have conversations with them, and take on the darts and arrows demonstrates a strength of character that the president and his party might only dream of possessing.

Second, Congressman Ryan’s brilliant ability to explain aspects of the budget and economic data to Americans who may not be economists and budget analysts is on display in his new video, in which he describes the three necessary features of a new tax code: fairness, competitiveness, and simplicity.

Mr. Ryan told Tina Korbe of Hot Air, “If you tax something more, you get less of it. If you tax something less, you get more of it. If you tax work, savings, investment more, you’re going to get less of those things. If you lower tax rates across the board, we always see stronger economic growth result across the board.”

How simple is that? No jobs saved and created here. No double-counting Medicare in Obamacare. No tax increases to pay for investment, i.e., spending, in infrastructure.

In the same interview, the chairman made an important distinction between being “pro-market,” versus “pro-business.” He explained that Republicans need to be advocates for the former, a term which invokes the concepts of entrepreneurism, American creativity, and competitiveness in world markets.

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Anytime I see a video show up on Facebook three times, there’s a pretty good chance I better write an article about it because more often than not they contain a lot of misinformation or oversimplification. In the case of the Robert Reich video, “What’s Wrong With The Economy”, it contains both.  This should not come as a surprise.  He makes a big deal about explaining how simple it all is and doing it in two and quarter minutes.

Folks, the economy cannot be explained in two and a quarter minutes.

However, the good people at the George-Soros funded MoveOn.Org, which commissioned the video, sure would like you to believe it can.  They specialize in spoon-feeding pabulum to Liberals who don’t know what they don’t know, all the better to keep them ignorant.  If you think George Soros and MoveOn don’t have an agenda, then you’ve been living under a rock.

This is not to say that Mr. Reich is 100% wrong.  He may have a few things right.  The problem is he oversimplifies things and deliberately misleads his audience.  (How do I know it’s deliberate?  It’s for MoveOn.org).  The key is to examine each statement made — but not only the text.  You must look at the subtext, context, and omissions to get a complete understanding.

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The economy is suffering from something like a summer swoon. In the words of business columnist Jimmy Pethokoukis, the recovery summer has gone bust. We all know this from the sloppy statistics coming in for jobs, retail sales, and most recently manufacturing. But market-based indicators are telling the same story.

Let’s start with the Treasury bond market. Yields have fallen to 2.6 percent today from 4.1 percent last April. Decomposing this Treasury rally shows that real yields have dropped 79 basis points, which is a signal of lower economic expectations.

Meanwhile, inflation break-even TIPS (Treasury inflation-protected securities) have fallen 64 basis points, showing that price expectations also have dropped. The consumer price index is only rising 1 percent over the past year. And long-term inflation fears have fallen all the way to 1.7 percent. It’s not deflation. It’s disinflation.

The corporate-bond market shows a similar decline of economic-growth and profits expectations. Credit-risk spreads are widening. The spread between investment-grade corporate bonds and risk-free Treasuries have widened 62 basis points, while higher-yielding junk-bond spreads have increased 138 basis points.

Now, all these bond-market indicators don’t tell us a whole lot about the future. But they are corroborating the summer slump in the present. Lower inflation is a good thing, but lower growth is not.

And here’s another hitch in the story. Using the break-even TIPS, the Federal Reserve’s zero target rate is really minus-1.7 percent, which is the same sort of negative real interest rate we had in the early and mid-2000s. This is undoubtedly why Kansas City Fed president Thomas Hoenig is worried about a new boom-bust cycle.

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In The Capitalist Welfare State, Lund University economist Andreas Bergh explains how Sweden has managed to increase economic productivity despite its large public sector.

Bergh says that despite popular mythology, Sweden is not a socialist success story but instead owes its economic growth to the lowered tax rates and deregulation of the early 1990s, which allowed innovation and investment to flourish. Bergh also discusses how Sweden’s national voucher program revitalized the country’s educational system and warns that Americans who are hoping to emulate Swedish success by growing the public sector are learning the wrong lessons from Sweden.

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In 1831, a French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville’s recognized how different America’s infant democracy was from other democratic republics. He issued warnings to our young republic, “One also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom”. De Tocqueville continued, “…when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power”.

The agenda driven by President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Reid is aggressively targeted toward our becoming an all powerful central government. Since the 2008 election we have seen unprecedented expansion of government. History has shown us that as government expands individual liberty contracts.

In January of 2010, during the waning days of my primary campaign for Illinois Governor, former Polish President Lech Walesa came to Chicago to endorsed my effort. Known as the great anti-communist, founder of Solidarity, best-friend of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, Walesa continues to inspire and encourage strong leadership. During the luncheon, Walesa issued an ominous warning for America, “America is sliding toward socialism; America is no longer the shining city on the hill.” In the videotaped interview, Walesa saw a hint of socialism creeping into America’s domestic policies. He spoke of “the issue with the banks” and how “the government wastes all the money … building a bureaucracy — just for itself.”

Walesa said that the strongest candidates are committed to principles. The framers of our Constitution based out government on strong principles, sometimes referred to as the first principles. The “first principles” that will Ensure Liberty and the American Promise for future generations are:

1. Smaller Government,
2. Fiscal Responsibility,
3. Lower Taxes,
4. National Security,
5. Federalism.

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So much is being written in the mainstream media about who the tea partiers are, but very little is being recorded about what these folks are actually saying.

We know that this is a decentralized grassroots movement, with many different voices hailing from many different towns across the country. But the tea-party message comes together in the “Contract from America,” the product of an online vote orchestrated by Ryan Hecker, aHouston tea-party activist and national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots.

With nearly 500,000 votes recorded in less than two months, this Contract forms a blueprint of tea-party policy goals and beliefs.

Of the top-ten planks in the Contract, the number-one issue is protect the Constitution. That’s followed by reject cap-and-trade, demand a balanced budget, and enact fundamental tax reform. And then comes number five: Restore fiscal responsibility and constitutionally limited government in Washington.

Note that two of the top-five priorities of the tea partiers mention the Constitution.

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After reading Warner Todd Huston’s article, Tea Parties: The Biggest Mistake We Could Make in 2010, I was incredulous.  It seems misguided to suggest top down management in a time when big companies, big organizations, and big government have received bailouts after spending like drunken thieves or failing in the marketplace. Under what premise can anyone make the case that the solution to our nation’s dilemma is a big organization, especially a Big Tea Party? In all cases big leadership has resulted in big corruption, which is at the root of almost every issue before us.

Since the onset of ‘change we can all believe in’, politicians at all levels seem to constantly point to small businesses as our hope for economic recovery. In an era of “too big to fail,” it would seem obvious that people, regardless of party affiliation, could agree that bigger is not better. I haven’t heard anyone speak of the positive impact that CEO-led mega-banks, automakers, or the Fannies and Freddies will have on economic recovery.

The idea that the grassroots tea party movement should become a third political party is counter productive and borders on the ludicrous. Tea Parties are about government accountability, not joining partisan politics in the corruption and incompetence that threatens American liberty. Our City Councils, State Legislatures, and Congress work for us, and it is high time that we reminded them of this and brought them into the fold.

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I did not make the decision to run for Congress lightly. I have never aspired to be a politician, but seeing the direction our country was heading, I had to act. I believe in the bedrock principles that have made our nation great; limited government, individual liberty and personal responsibility.  I also think the public is more receptive to that message than ever before. The tea party and townhall movements have awakened the public and reconnected Independents, Democrats and Republicans to the ideals that made our nation, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “the shining city on the hill.”

Unfortunately, some individuals in the GOP leadership forgot their principles and misread the public sentiment. They orchestrated the nomination of a far-left candidate as the Republican nominee. Rather than compromise the principles I believe, I proudly threw my hat in the ring as the Conservative Party candidate.

The GOP candidate, Dede Scozzafava, has voted for taxpayer funded abortions, higher taxes, more government spending and has regularly sought the support of ACORN’s Working Families Party.  She loudly voiced support for the stimulus bill that has increased our national debt but has failed to improve the economy. She is a vocal supporter of legislation that would force many workers into unions. She is an Olympia Snowe Republican willing to sell out her party and GOP principles of limited government, lower taxes, and more individual liberty.  These are principles I hold strongly.

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