Partly from Jack Kemp’s work, and partly from his own experience, Ronald Reagan believed the same thing. He knew that growth is the single best solution for our economic ailments. And neither Reagan nor Kemp saw the world in terms of specific income classes or categories. They looked at the whole economy and realized that everyone is tied together. Dragging down the top earners will not help the middle class. And providing an ever larger safety net will not solve poverty. Reagan believed in the safety net, and maintained it. But he knew it was a stop-gap, not a solution.

Does Mitt Romney understand this?

The worry stems from Romney’s ill-advised statement this week. He said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” That raises doubts as to whether he understands the Reagan-Kemp model. Perhaps he does. But he will have to tell us more.

Incidentally, the safety net has been expanding at an alarming pace. Transfer-program spending has been soaring. It’s up $600 billion, or about 35 percent, in the last three years. Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment insurance have seen benefit levels rise and eligibility expand. This is a huge drag on the economy. We are paying too much to not work, and rewarding too little to work.

Welfarism is not compassionate. Opportunity is.

But now it’s up to Romney to propose moving the very poor out of the poverty trap by making it pay more after tax to work rather than not work. And he must persuade the electorate with a clear and detailed prescriptive agenda.

Part of the solution is tax reform, especially getting rid of the 10 percent bottom tax rate. Another part of the solution is education reform: Revive real choice and competition; spread merit pay and performance to judge the schools; and insist on high-school diplomas or associate degrees or streamlined training programs to bring the unemployed into the high tech age.

In his Florida victory speech, Romney said, “If this election is a bidding war for who can promise more benefits, then I’m not your president.” Good. But he must build on that. He has to make it clear that when the unemployed return to work they will not face huge marginal tax rates. In other words, there must be an incentive to leave government dependency and move into the productive economy.

That’s why a bold tax-reform plan is so important. The unemployed face a 10 percent bottom tax rate. But the middle class faces 25, 28, and 33 percent tax rates. That’s way too much. Why not flatten the code to just two rates, say 15 and 25 percent, and then simplify by getting rid of the other brackets and wiping out the unnecessary deductions, credits, and carve-outs?

Such tax reform will not only provide growth incentives, it will provide anti-poverty incentives as well. Job creation for everyone.

People know Romney is a successful business man. And I suspect most folks think he understands the free-enterprise economy better than Obama. But they’re not sure he has a specific plan that will translate his experience into real economic improvement for the whole country.

The same is true for the budget mess. Back in November, Romney put out an excellent statement on reforming entitlements, cutting $500 billion out of the budget by 2015, and getting spending down to 20 percent of GDP. It’s time he hit the reset button and started selling that plan all over again.

Railing against the Obama economy will not be enough to win. The latest jobs report shows a quickening pace of recovery: 243,000 nonfarm payrolls, 847,000 new jobs in the small-business household survey, and an 8.3 percent unemployment rate. Combine that with other strong readings on the manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors (the ISM reports), car sales, chain-store sales, and jobless claims, and you have a 3 percent economy with good momentum.

Of course, coming from a very deep recession, growth and jobs should be better. The Reagan recovery was far stronger. But there’s no double-dip out there, and unemployment is not going back to 10 percent. So the trick for Mitt Romney is to show folks he has a detailed plan to make the economy and the budget better.

He needs to prove to people that he knows what to do and how to do it.

“A Nation of Moochers: America’s Addiction to Getting Something for Nothing” (St. Martin’s Press) was just released, and the fact that I’m writing this at the very moment President Barack Obama is announcing yet another government plan (his fourth, I think) to “bail out” those “victims” who bought homes they couldn’t afford, makes this informative and engaging page-turner feel about as urgent and timely as any author could hope for.

What you need to know up front is that “Moochers” isn’t an attack on the poor or needy or, for that matter, a specific political party. In fact, from beginning to end, Sykes makes clear that as a country we have an obligation to feed the hungry and offer shelter to the homeless. Moreover, he isn’t even targeting a particular group, which would be impossible without a sawed-off shotgun anyway, because America’s moochers come from every level of our society.

What Sykes is targeting is a mentality, a dangerous and un-American mentality that infects almost every aspect of our culture, and one that is currently being bred into our children by those on both the left and right who are empowered by fomenting and excusing the dependence, greed, and selfishness of others. From corporate welfare to school lunches for the well-to-do to Wall Street bailouts to paying millionaires not to grow crops to tax breaks for Hollywood gajillionires to unending unemployment benefits to disaster relief for those who haven’t suffered disasters to TARP, and finally, to the shameless who walk away from mortgages they can afford to pay — what Sykes is exposing is that we are on the march to becoming Greece. Not just a European welfare state, but the kind of welfare state where the populace has been engineered by a nanny state to riot at the very thought of not being able to mooch the life to which they have become accustomed.

A large part of the problem is that thanks to those who control the levers of our media and culture, the only thing we’re taught to be ashamed of anymore is the act of attempting to shame someone. As a result, those who “want” instead of “need,” are openly and proudly grabbing all the goodies they can get their shameless hands on, and doing so  at the expense of others. Worse still, those others have even been born yet.

Sykes’ examples are not only legion, they’re also dispiriting. There have always been moochers,  grifters, and leeches willing to live off of the productive, but they used to creep in the shadows knowing that if their behavior was exposed they would be shunned and shamed. Today, those who live off the productive have no reason to hide. Self-respect isn’t something you earn anymore. It’s all about self-esteem now. Everyone gets a trophy, so why not brag about how you’re getting something for nothing. It’s not a sin, it’s an accomplishment!

Today, public schools in upper-middle-class neighborhoods openly push to increase their free breakfast and lunch programs; graduate students take food stamps to Whole Foods; 25 year-old boys no longer want to be men and choose instead to live with their parents for as long as they can; and then there’s those truly awful public employees who somehow think it’s a virtue to make public spectacles of themselves when faced with the prospect of having to share a standard of living closer to those of us who pay for their exorbitant pensions and benefits.

Sykes also points out that what’s happening is just the opposite of compassion, that there’s nothing moral or virtuous about creating spoiled, dependant crybabies with no self-respect. It’s bad enough Republicans and Democrats alike are bankrupting the country with addictive drugs labeled tax  loopholes, subsidies, and freebies — but as a nation we’re losing that all-American pride that used to make the very thought of accepting a handout unbearable — even if we truly needed it. There will always be awful politicians trying to buy votes. But what Sykes sees (and meticulously documents) is a growing market of those willing to be purchased, and that’s something a country simply cannot survive.

Included in this must-read are some common sense solutions that include Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap.” It’s also going to take politicians from both parties who care more about their country than their personal power and parents willing to lead by example.

But the very best place to start at curing this cancer, is by educating yourself with Skyes’ excellent primer on the subject.

And I don’t understand that concern. It is the theory of most Democrats that giving money to people stimulates the economy. It should be of no concern to anyone whether that money is used to stimulate patrons of a strip club, liquor store owners, or casino magnates (who BTW are often HUGE political contributors).

The bill is almost completely futile. It won’t insure that welfare money is not spent at a strip club; it only means that the ATM at the gas station across the street from the strip club is going to see a lot more traffic.

This is just the kind of government bias, that gives legitimate business a bad name. Certainly those girls are working as hard as any SEIU employee; whose pensions were paid out of stimulus funds, while they protested in Wisconsin. Money spent on bikini wax, cover stick, and glittery lingerie will trickle down through the economy just like any other stimulus package.

If that money was earmarked for scientific research on the anthropological roots of exotic dancing and its impact on global warming; or if it were an NEA grant to promote the American Folk legacy of lap dancing, there would be no question whether taxpayer money should eventually find its way into a g-string. The welfare recipient should not be punished, since he is actually a victim of a public education system, that did not teach him how to write a proper grant proposal.

Meanwhile, spending money at a casino is no less risky than “investing” in green energy. At the rate subsidized industries like Solyndra and Ener1 have been flying down tubes, a crap shot seems like a much more conservative measure than putting half a billion on Solyndra to win.

And what is wrong with using an EBT card at a liquor store? What the bill effectively does, is limit the amount of ATMs in poor neighborhoods. Many ATMs are privately owned, and grocery stores in poor neighborhoods won’t want to file the paperwork (and campaign contributions) necessary to prove they’re not a “liquor store.” Even if they are a liquor store, there are plenty of legitimate State Approved® items available in liquor stores, like tomato juice, citrus, and Lotto tickets. I might add that most grocery stores not only sell cigarettes and liquor, they sell all the ingredients necessary to make meth. There are a lot of things more intoxicating than liquor, one of them being congressional power

Because, ultimately, what business is it of the government to decide which decisions are made? In this country, we’ve decided that poor people should get free money. There is no way the government can absolutely ensure it isn’t spent on stupid things. (In many cases, it is those same stupid things that caused recipients to be on welfare on the first place.) And does the government have any moral authority in the first place? They can’t even prevent themselves from spending it on stupid things. Which is why we’re 16 trillion dollars in debt.

I think we need a Congressional Budget Integrity Now for Children and Families Act of 2012.

• Using food stamps to buy luxury coffee at Starbucks.
• Buying steaks and lobster with food stamps.
• The Obama Administration rewarding states that sign up more food stamp recipients.
• Proposals to make it easier to use food stamps at fast food restaurants.
• College kids scamming the program for handouts.
• New York City giving food stamps to newly released prisoners and running foreign-language ads encouraging more people to sign up for the program.

As a taxpayer, I get upset about these examples. But as a public policy economist, I’m much more worried about the fiscal and economic impact of the program.

As a human being, though, my primary concern is the way redistribution saps the spirit of self reliance and traps people into lives of dependency. That’s the very first point I make in this debate on CNBC.

By the way, my opponent in the debate is Jared Bernstein, who is infamous for being the co-author of the Obama Administration claim that enacting the s0-called stimulus would keep the unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent.

I’ve had lots of fun mocking that claim. Every couple of months I post Jared’s predictions and compare them to the real-world results.

But it’s important to understand that I’m not blaming him for making bad predictions. After all, economists are lousy forecasters. I blame him for peddling the silly Keynesian theory that bigger government boosts economic performance.

In a FOX News interview on Monday, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) defended former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s contention that President Barack Obama is the best “food stamp president” America has ever seen, a charge that some Democrats have argued is laced with racial undertones.

There is no race code. It’s a fact. Since President Obama has been in the Oval Office, you’ve seen a 41 percent increase in the food stamp recipients in the United States of America.  We have a president that’s making more American victims rather than victors.

Rep. West also pointed out that Mr. Obama’s failed economic policies have driven many more Americans into poverty:

We also have a 16 percent increase in Americans on the poverty roll — 6.4 million more Americans are on poverty since President Obama took office.

The Florida congressman’s comments come as Republican efforts led by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) are underway to increase oversight of the food stamp program (officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program–or SNAP) amid concerns that there may be what the Wall Street Journal has dubbed a “food stamp crime wave” emerging in the United States.

Indeed, under Mr. Obama, the number of Americans now on food stamps has jumped two-thirds since Mr. Obama was elected.  That means one out of every seven people in the United States now receive taxpayer-funded food stamps.

Rep. West added that he believes the Republican presidential candidates must articulate their commitment to protecting taxpayers from wasteful spending.

They’ve got to understand that the message has to be about how they’re going to defend hard-working American taxpayers and families.

In 2012, taxpayers will spend a projected $89 billion on the program. Today, a record 46 million Americans now receive food stamp.  Indeed, since welfare’s creation, taxpayers have spent a staggering $16 trillion–more than the equivalent of America’s entire national debt–on public-assistance programs.

But this new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, narrated by an Italian student and former Cato Institute intern, may be the best explanation of what went wrong in Europe and what should happen in the United States to avoid a similar meltdown.

I particularly like the five lessons she identifies.

1. Higher taxes lead to higher spending, not lower deficits. Miss Morandotti looks at the evidence from Europe and shows that politicians almost always claim that higher taxes will be used to reduce red ink, but the inevitable result is bigger government. This is a lesson that gullible Republicans need to learn – especially since some of them want to acquiesce to a tax hike as part of the “Supercommitee” negotiations.

2. A value-added tax would be a disaster. This was music to my ears since I have repeatedly warned that the statists won’t be able to impose a European-style welfare state in the United States without first imposing this European-style money machine for big government.

3. A welfare state cripples the human spirit. This was the point eloquently made by Hadley Heath of the Independent Women’s Forum in a recent video.

4. Nations reach a point of no return when the number of people mooching off government exceeds the number of people producing. Indeed, Miss Morandotti drew these two cartoons showing how the welfare state inevitably leads to fiscal collapse.

5. Bailouts don’t work. This also was a powerful lesson. Imagine how much better things would be in Europe if Greece never received an initial bailout. Much less money would have been flushed down the toilet and this tough-love approach would have sent a very positive message to nations such as Portugal, Italy, and Spain about the danger of continued excessive spending.

If I were doing this video, I would have added one more message. If nations want a return to fiscal sanity, they need to follow “Mitchell’s Golden Rule,” which simply states that the private sector should grow faster than the government.

This rule is not overly demanding (spending actually should be substantially cut, including elimination of departments such as HUD, Transportation, Education, Agriculture, etc), but if maintained over a lengthy period will eliminate all red ink. More importantly, it will reduce the burden of government spending relative to the productive sector of the economy.

Unfortunately, the politicians have done precisely the wrong thing during the Bush-Obama spending binge. Government has grown faster than the private sector. This is why this new video is so timely. Europe is collapsing before our eyes, yet the political elite in Washington think it’s okay to maintain business-as-usual policies.

Please share widely…before it’s too late.

And while it is widely acknowledged that the top 5% of earners pay over 50 percent of federal taxes, there has been a growing concentration of wealth within that top 5% of income earners during the last 20 years. Politicians love to define issues in a debate to gain popular advantage. The country is in desperate need of economic growth, which the Obama Administration has failed effectively to address. So, the White House has made increased taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” the cornerstone of their 2012 election strategy. Excessive spending, the growth of the federal deficit and the accumulated debt of the country threaten to snuff out economic growth in America just as it surely is doing in Europe. When Barack Obama became President, the federal debt was slightly over $10 trillion dollars. It has grown to more than $14 trillion dollars under his watch. If spending is not reined in, and/or revenues do not increase, servicing the nation’s debt will crowd out vital resources for private investment (where new jobs are created).

Elected officials are not leading; they talk past one another. The way out of this mess might be in changing the vocabulary of the debate so both sides can claim a victory. The Democrats could hoist the GOP on their own petard by shifting the debate away from tax increases, to cutting corporate entitlements and benefits. Note that the right complains about spending only when the beneficiaries are those who rely on government to help with retirement payments, medical benefits, or to finance their children’s education. Cutting specified corporate entitlements that really provide no economic benefit to the country would be easier for conservatives to swallow than increasing tax rates, which would retard economic growth.

Business Entitlements, or what the left likes to call “corporate welfare”, runs in excess of $100 billion a year according to the libertarian CATO Institute. These so-called incentives are often misallocations of federal spending on programs that simply do not work, or otherwise distort free enterprise competition. Let’s eliminate these wasteful programs and deflate, once and for all, leftist arguments that the rich are opposed to raising tax revenues. These misguided corporate taxpayer handouts are spread throughout the federal budget. The actual total expenditures are hard to quantify, but are larger than the entire annual budgets of many countries. Even conservatives have trouble agreeing on which programs constitute proper government spending or which amount, figuratively, to flushing government revenue down the drain.

Businesses that are darlings of both the left and the right happily feed at the taxpayer-subsidized trough. While the United States boasts the second highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, a variety of tax breaks assure that few corporations pay at the full 35% corporate tax rate. One study published by the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice found only 25% of companies paying more than 30%, while 35% were paying at an effective tax rate of 17.5% to 30% and 40% were paying less than 17.5%. And, of course, many profitable fortune 500 companies manage to pay no federal income taxes at all. Among those corporate luminaries paying no federal income taxes for the last three tax years were General Electric, PG&E, Baxter International, Verizon, Boeing, Mattel and Corning (to name a few).

Until this year, the nation had spent over $50 billion to subsidize the production of ethanol to produce fuel from corn (at a taxpayer subsidy of about $1.50 a gallon). The rationale for this program was to reduce the nation’s reliance on imported oil. Of course, it has done no such thing. Instead, it is nothing more than a subsidy to farmers (mostly corporate owned) and ethanol refiners. The real result has been that corn available for human and animal consumption has dropped precipitously, and food prices have shot up dramatically. According to a 2006 USDA report, the indirect subsidy to ethanol on the 4.9 billion gallons produced in 2006 came to $3.9 billion. Together with the direct subsidies of $0.9 billion for corn and $2.5 billion for ethanol the grand total was $7.3 billion. That’s $1.50 per gallon of ethanol, or $2.28 per gallon of gasoline replaced. These subsidies have produced an enormous boom in ethanol. Between August 2006 and January 2007, the capacity of existing plants and plants under construction grew from 7.4 billion gallons to 11.4 billion gallons — a 54% increase in six months. One USDA official described the state of the market as ethanol euphoria. What did this do for the American taxpayer? Nothing other than increase the cost of living.

In June of this year the Senate voted to end this subsidy, it is not yet clear whether it will really end. As Yogi Berra famously put it, “It’s not over until it’s over”. Moreover, it has always been unnecessary since Congress already had required automobile manufacturers to reduce fuel usage under the 2007 renewable fuel standards. Another favorite of the left (and those businesses who are recipients of federal money) are high-speed rail projects. George Will (not exactly known as a leftist) in his February 28 column succinctly put it this way:

Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency’s importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind.

Remarkably widespread derision has greeted the Obama administration’s “damn-the-arithmetic-full-speed-ahead proposal to spend $53 billion more (after the $8 billion in stimulus money and $2.4 billion in enticements to 23 states) in the next six years pursuant to the president’s loopy goal of giving “80 percent of Americans access to high speed rail.”

Criticism of this optional and irrational spending — meaning: borrowing — during a deficit crisis has been withering. Only an administration blinkered by ideology would persist.

Perhaps the biggest objective of the left is the cap-and-trade requirement of the Kyoto treaty (which liberals loved). The “treaty” had as its rationale a reduction in carbon emissions in the atmosphere. The effect on our economy if we joined the treaty would have been disastrous. EU nations signed on to the treaty, which is soon slated to expire. It has become so unpopular and costly that early indications are that the EU will not agree to a renewal.

Now let us return to the central point of this essay. Billions of dollars are spent every year by the government to subsidize corporations. Not all corporations benefit from every subsidy. What most conservatives and corporations do agree upon, to the point that it has become doctrine, is that they absolutely oppose any tax increase that would retard economic growth. Therefore, why don’t we reach a compromise by not raising tax rates (which is what the President’s own Deficit and Debt Reduction Commission recommended) and, instead, eliminate most or all of these subsidies? The result is likely to be the same: Much more revenue being contributed by “the wealthy”.

People with a central planner’s mentality have what renowned Austrian economist F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit.” As he stated the case:

I’d have thought the fall of the Soviet Union would have taught us that central planning is destructive, but the conceit of the central planners lives on. Maybe the problem isn’t merely economic ignorance. Maybe it’s something more sinister: a wish to keep the freeloading system going. After all, if politicians and business leaders admit that government cannot play a constructive role in the economy, what grounds would there be for subsidies, shelter from competitors and other privileges at the people’s expense? The anti-free-market ideology is a vast rationalization for favoritism.

Hayek’s celebrated 1947 prescient book predicted with great clarity what becomes of nations that worship at the alter of central planning. The book was titled “The Road to Serfdom.”

By Hal Gershowitz and Stephen Porter