Big Government Socialism is a rejection of classic American exceptionalism.
At its core, American exceptionalism is based on the belief that regardless of background, gender, status, class, or race, your only limits to success and advancement are your own self-doubt and effort.
This is as true today as it was at America’s Founding. Take Alexander Hamilton, for example. Hamilton was born out of wedlock in the 1750s on Nevis, an island in the Caribbean. His father abandoned him, and his mother died when he was still in his youth. In 1772, orphaned Hamilton came to New York after locals helped raise money for his education in America. He studied at King’s College in New York and while there, at approximately seventeen years old, he took up the colonial cause and wrote anonymous pamphlets that were so discerning they were thought to be written by John Jay. During the Revolutionary War, Hamilton rose through the ranks and became Washington’s aide-de-camp. After America’s victory over the British, Hamilton studied law and passed the New York bar.
Hamilton was later selected as a delegate from New York to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and played an important role in ratifying the Constitution by authoring more than fifty of the eighty-five Federalist Papers. He became the first secretary of the Treasury and established the first Bank of the United States.
Although the story of Hamilton ended in tragedy in a duel with former vice president Aaron Burr (as brilliantly recounted in the musical Hamilton), his rise from humble beginnings to become one of our nation’s most consequential historic figures embodies the spirit, drive, and achievement that define Americanism. Our nation’s history has been shaped by opportunity and hope. Americans across generations have blazed new trails to unexplored lands in the West, taken flight in the world’s first airplane, and landed on the moon.
For centuries America has been the shining city on a hill, the place where millions from around the world have flocked in search of their own American dreams. It is a country that got its start as an underdog but, through the grit, intelligence, vision, and courage of the American people, emerged as the world’s leading technological, economic, and military power.
The achievement of the American experiment has been remarkable. But despite our nation’s success in its youth (America is still a young nation compared to other countries), continued prosperity, freedom, and security is by no means guaranteed. As President Ronald Reagan warned, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”1
For America to successfully face the threat from Communist China, Russia, and any other challenge that may emerge in the future, Americans must first be free, empowered, and encouraged to succeed in their own lives and on their own merit.
Work is at the heart of a healthy life and healthy society. As Reagan also said, “The best social program is a job.” Benjamin Franklin asserted, “It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.” Again Franklin: “Work while it is called today, for you know not how much you may be hindered tomorrow.”
Every government program must be rethought to return to the principle that people must work—except for the severely disadvantaged—and that dependence, passivity, and avoiding work are destructive of the individual and society.
In early America, the European settlers found themselves in a wilderness that required hard work and constant effort to survive. For example, winters in the North required serious vigilance and preparedness. Because virtually everyone worked, there was little sympathy for anyone who was able-bodied and did not work. Because farming often took the entire family to succeed, everyone had to work for the entire family to survive and possibly flourish.
This bias in favor of work continued despite the best efforts of intellectuals to disparage middle-class behavior and undermine the work ethic. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, happiness “does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.”2 Even in the middle of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted on the importance of work. Consider his emphasis on work in his 1935 State of the Union address:
The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole our relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers.
The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.
I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves, or picking up papers in the public parks. We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage and determination.3
Consider the extraordinary work FDR put into recovering from polio and living a full life. He could have gone along with his relatives’ and friends’ efforts to have him slow down and accept a limited life as an invalid—but he didn’t. It is little wonder FDR continued to advocate for work to build character and as an essential aspect to a satisfying life. The idealized attitude of the Depression era was exhibited when world heavyweight champion James J. Braddock used part of his championship winnings to pay back the relief money he had accepted when he broke his hand and was out of work.4
While Presidents Roosevelt, Harry Truman (whose store had once gone bankrupt), and Dwight Eisenhower all personified the work ethic, the intellectual left was increasingly anti-work. Beginning in 1965, the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson began to develop a structure of income without effort, indolence without guilt, and the passive accepting of money and goods from others.
If you work for what you have, you appreciate its value and you respect that others have also worked for what they have. If you are given money and goods without effort, they lose their value. There is no natural limit to unearned incomes. The result is a rise of crime as a source of revenue. The $20 billion stolen from the California unemployment compensation fund since the start of the pandemic is an example of the degree to which casual criminality has penetrated and distorted American society.5 When 10 percent of our national health care spending for Medicare and Medicaid may be stolen every year (or more than $300 billion), the same question of corrupt citizenship becomes vital.6
For nearly sixty years, we have been growing a dependency class that receives money for the act of existing. It makes no effort and imputes no value to getting the money. A significant share of that dependency class is now becoming a criminal class as they apply the same absence of earned value to getting whatever they can get. Reasserting the work ethic, the value of money, and the importance of honesty are essential if America is to become a healthy, productive, safe society again. President Reagan said in a 1983 radio address, “you must earn the rewards of the future with plain hard work. The harder you work today, the greater your rewards will be tomorrow.”7
One year after Reagan’s radio address, Peter Cove founded America Works. This innovative program was sponsored by New York governor Mario Cuomo and brought a whole new model of helping people get off welfare. As Cove outlined in his book, Poor No More: Rethinking Dependency and the War on Poverty, he was convinced that performance-based contracting in social services provides better results for the poor and yields greater value to the local community.8 I visited America Works in the early 1990s. President Bill Clinton and I relied on them for advice on how to help the hard-core unemployed learn the skills and habits of work. Cove and CEO Dr. Lee Bowes advised us on the design of the 1996 welfare reform bill, which became extraordinarily successful because it encouraged the right changes and the right behaviors at a practical level.
The team at America Works believes that a work-based system fostering independence should replace virtually all the dependency-based models. Few people should get any aid without effort, because of the negative and destructive effects that FDR warned about in 1935.
Every government program and government policy should be evaluated to ensure that they are pro-work, pro-ownership of property, pro-achievement, and pro-advancement through honest effort. Every effort should be made to help the widest possible range of Americans lead productive, energetic, fulfilling, and independent lives. Since the ability to acquire property (both real and financial) increases the reward for the work ethic, every effort should be made to change the rules so people can work their way up from the bottom despite difficulties and—at the earliest opportunity—begin to acquire property. This will further increase their commitment to their work.
If we are serious about tackling the homelessness crisis, we need an approach that prioritizes work alongside affordable housing, treatment for substance and alcohol abuse, mental health and trauma-informed care, and reentry programs. We need to focus on outcomes. And the ultimate desired outcome should be that every able-bodied American is able to hold down a job with a sufficient paycheck. If you can keep a good-paying job, odds are you are able to pay your rent, you are not in jail, and any challenges with addiction or mental health have been resolved—or are being handled.
This is why work is so important to the prosperity of American society and the success and satisfaction of each individual.
Americans must acquire the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the workplace, at home, and in their communities. This is why education is at the heart of a free society. Education is also at the heart of a safe society. Education is essential for people to learn to become good citizens. Education is essential for American workers to compete successfully with other countries in a time of rapid scientific and technological change.
For the last five decades, the American educational system has steadily declined. Now we are not capable of fully educating young citizens and preparing enough people with the tools to win the worldwide competition for new science and technology. Creating an effective education system for citizenship and economic competition is the most important single challenge on which America’s future will rest.
This commitment to education has deep roots in the American experience. The colonists had a deep passion for learning. In 1635, the first public high school in America, the Boston Latin School, was founded. A year later—and only sixteen years after the Pilgrims arrived in the New World—Harvard College was founded by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In colony after colony, schools were established, and learning was valued.
America’s Founding Fathers emphasized the importance of learning. Benjamin Franklin, who knew from his career as a printer the value of literacy and was a passionate supporter of libraries and schools, said, “The good Education of Youth has been esteemed by wise Men in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happiness both of private Families and of Commonwealths. Almost all Governments have therefore made it a principal Object of their Attention, to establish and endow with proper Revenues, such Seminaries of Learning, as might supply the succeeding Age.”9
Thomas Jefferson also understood the significance of education and was fascinated by the challenge of extending access to education to everyone. According to Jefferson in 1785, “the ultimate result of the whole scheme of education would be the teaching all the children of the State reading, writing, and common arithmetic; turning out [several] annually, of superior genius, well taught in Greek, Latin, Geography, and the higher branches of arithmetic; turning out… others annually, of still superior parts, who, to those branches of learning, shall have added such of the sciences as their genius shall have led them to.”10
The Founding Fathers’ commitment to education was turned into a practical investment with the passage of the Land Ordinance of 1785 (one of the Northwest Ordinances). This was two years before the Constitutional Convention and was the most important act of the Confederation Congress after the end of the Revolutionary War and before its replacement by the new government. In the Land Ordinance of 1785, the government dedicated one square mile of land in each township to be used for the maintenance of public schools.11
Over the years, the American commitment to education grew stronger and more widespread. Ray’s Arithmetic series (first volume published in 1834) and the McGuffey’s Reader (first volume published in 1836) sold in enormous numbers. For three generations they were the benchmark for American education and were much more difficult than any texts used in the same grades today.
But beginning in the 1960s, the American education system began decaying. Part of it was a desire by the World War II generation to have an easier life for their children. Another part of it was the rise of an educational philosophy that emphasized feelings and processes over hard work and substance. Yet another part of it was the combination of education bureaucrats and the teachers’ unions dumbing down the learning requirements and dramatically lowering the incentive to learn.
By 1983, the decay in American education had become such a crisis that President Reagan created a blue-ribbon commission of prestigious educators to propose reforms. The commission, led by David P. Gardner, wrote A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform. The report concluded:
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them.12
In a national radio address on April 30, 1983, President Reagan responded to the report’s alarming findings:
Yet today, we’re told in a tough report card on our commitment that the educational skills of today’s students will not match those of their parents. About 13 percent of our 17-year-olds are functional illiterates and, among minority youth, the rate is closer to 40 percent. More than two-thirds of our high schoolers can’t write a decent essay.…
The study indicates the quality of learning in our classrooms has been declining for the last two decades—a fact which won’t surprise many parents or the students educated during that period. Those were years when the Federal presence in education grew and grew. Parental control over local schools shrank. Bureaucracy ballooned until accountability seemed lost. Parents were frustrated and didn’t know where to turn.
Well, government seemed to forget that education begins in the home, where it’s a parental right and responsibility. Both our private and our public schools exist to aid your families in the instruction of your children. For too many years, people here in Washington acted like your families’ wishes were only getting in the way. We’ve seen what that “Washington knows best” attitude has wrought.
Our high standards of literacy and educational diversity have been slipping. Well-intentioned but misguided policymakers have stamped a uniform mediocrity on the rich variety and excellence that had been our heritage.…
Federal spending increased seventeenfold during the same 20 years that marked such a dramatic decline in quality. We will continue our firm commitment to support the education efforts of State and local governments, but the focus of our agenda is, as it must be, to restore parental choice and influence and to increase competition between schools.13
This report and Reagan’s national address began the ongoing struggle between the education establishment and the demands of parents and reformers for better outcomes.
In Wisconsin, a breakthrough occurred when the former state chair of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, state legislator Annette Polly Williams (known as the “mother of school choice”), teamed up with Governor Tommy Thompson to pass the nation’s first school voucher program in 1990.14
We see this fight play out today between teachers’ unions, who are universally opposed to parents having the right to choose which schools their children attend—or even to know what is being taught to their children—and a steadily growing movement of parents and interested citizens insisting on the right to know and to choose. The struggle between educational attainment adequate to prepare for citizenship and to compete successfully with Communist China, and the education bureaucracy and teachers’ unions efforts to keep and grow power, continues to rage. There is growing popular support for accountability, parental involvement, and choice, but there is still massive power, strength, and resources defending the failures of the old order.
Rebuilding the effectiveness of America’s schools is the key project for America’s long-term survival. Students must acquire the knowledge and attain the skill levels necessary to be informed citizens and to undertake jobs as competent and sophisticated as the Chinese Communists who would like to replace our freedoms with a totalitarian system. Parents must be involved in their children’s educations and have a right to know what is being taught in the classroom. In the Reagan tradition, American history must be taught accurately. The models being developed by 1776 Action are a good starting point for replacing the Marxist woke indoctrination that has become the norm in too many schools.
Whenever possible, students must be encouraged and challenged to do their best. Schools of excellence (magnet schools) and other centers of achievement must be nurtured. Parents should have the right to send their children to the schools that they think are best for them. Taxpayers’ money should follow students, not the unions or the bureaucracies.
Continued reckless federal spending is a recipe for disaster for the American people. As I described in the preceding chapter, inflation has hit record highs and the supply chain has been significantly disrupted. Government spending was already high due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Biden administration and Big Government Socialists have prioritized spending even more of Americans’ money. With the American Rescue Plan and the infrastructure bill, the Biden administration has already signed into law a combined total of $3.1 trillion.15 Had the Build Back Better Act passed, this total would have climbed much higher.
President Biden has said that this multi-trillion-dollar new spending “will reduce inflation.”16 But with fewer goods to absorb the flagrant government spending, we have a textbook definition of what will make the already skyrocketing inflation worse. The size of the U.S. economy has not kept pace with the amount of government spending. Today the national debt is more than $30 trillion, while the gross domestic product of the United States is $20.95 trillion.17, 18 In 1980 (during the Jimmy Carter administration, the last high-inflation Democrat president), the U.S. economy was three times larger than the national debt. But today the roles have reversed. Now the debt is bigger than the economy.
This means today’s Federal Reserve has much less room to raise interest rates to cool off the economy. Because the debt is so large, a high interest rate would eat into federal, state, and local budgets due to the crushing costs of servicing the debt. When the Carter administration raised interest rates, a recession ensued. But at the time of this writing, the Wall Street Journal reported that Americans should anticipate an oncoming hike in interest rates. According to the newspaper on February 10, 2022:
The question facing Federal Reserve officials ahead of their policy meeting next month is no longer whether they will raise interest rates but rather by how much.… The debate still has weeks to play out but could lead officials to begin lifting interest rates from near zero next month, with a larger half-percentage-point increase rather than the standard quarter-percentage-point move. The Fed hasn’t raised rates by a half percentage point since 2000.19
The American people are the ones who bear the brunt of this poor and irresponsible federal fiscal policy. Regardless of the result of the March meeting, the case for balancing the budget is urgent—and the American people agree. According to a recent poll we sponsored at the American Majority Project and conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, 70 percent of Americans support passing a constitutional amendment that would require that Congress pass a balanced federal budget annually.
Diving into this further during focus groups, we found: “Support for balancing the budget is driven by a belief that it will force Congress to set priorities, solve the root causes of problems, and that it is something that every family and business must do, therefore Congress should do it as well.”20
Passing a balanced federal budget is challenging, but it’s not impossible. When I was Speaker of the House, congressional Republicans passed the only four years of balanced budgets in our lifetime. As a team, we made balancing the budget a priority by finding savings and passing reforms. Our approach in the 1990s was not to be stingy with Americans’ money, but to be smarter. We didn’t carelessly slash budgets or mindlessly continue to do “what had always been done.” We invested in Americans and the future of our country. This approach requires discipline and focusing on returns, outcomes, and metrics of success.
For example, we saw the benefit of the National Institutes of Health, so we set out to double its budget. This budgetary increase led to more lives saved, as well as more money earned in the world market, and secured American global leadership in a high salaried industry. We reformed welfare and the telecommunications industry, which resulted in more people working, more jobs, and more savings for taxpayers and consumers.21 The results we saw from a collective and determined focus on balancing the budget were remarkable. In 1995, when the congressional Republican majority took office, the Congressional Budget Office’s projection for the cumulative federal budget deficit over the next ten years was $2.7 trillion in total. But in January 1999, just four years later, the CBO projected a $2.3 trillion federal surplus over the next ten years. In just four years, we had turned around the financial outlook of the United States to the tune of $5 trillion.
While it is true that a lot has changed since the turn of the century, there is no reason why Congress cannot and should not balance the budget using the same approach congressional Republicans implemented when I was Speaker. We informed Americans in our American Majority Project and McLaughlin & Associates poll, “The successful formula in the 1990s was to control government spending, cut regulations, reform welfare so people had incentives to work, and cut taxes in order to increase economic growth and increase revenues as the economy got bigger.” We then asked, “Would you approve or disapprove of Congress using the same economic policies now?”
An overwhelming, bipartisan majority supported this approach; a total of 73 percent of people approve of these economic policies, including 65 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of independents, and 83 percent of Republicans.22 There is a strong moral case and political incentive for members of Congress to prioritize smarter spending. It’s time Congress listens to its constituents and balances the federal budget.
Energy is the backbone of the American economy and oil is the lifeblood. Yet, in an attempt to appease radical climate activists, since day one of his administration, President Biden has been attacking U.S. energy security. As I mentioned previously, in 2019, under President Donald Trump, the United States was energy independent for the first time since 1952—meaning America produced more energy than it consumed. During the Trump administration, oil production increased by 28 percent and natural gas production increased by 26 percent—reaching record highs in 2020.23
President Trump’s approach, which largely hinged on cutting red tape and supporting American energy suppliers, has been reversed by President Biden. To be fair, I must note that high gas prices are due in large part to the fact that three million barrels per day of oil production was lost in the spring of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though production has not fully recovered, demand has.24 According to the International Energy Agency, around the world, the supply shortfall is still at least one million barrels per day.25 Despite this grim reality of the American energy sector, President Biden’s strategy of prioritizing climate apologists over struggling Americans has failed to lower prices for consumers or encourage the resurrection of U.S. energy independence. This is especially concerning since rapidly rising oil prices have been a factor leading up to every recession since World War II.26
Canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and reversing America’s support of the EastMed natural gas pipeline from Israel to Europe—while effectively green-lighting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline (which has since been halted after the invasion of Ukraine)—is not smart policy from an energy, climate, or security perspective.27 Indeed, by effectively pulling the United States out of the global oil and natural gas market, Russia is now a principal supplier. In a real way, Biden’s anti-petroleum stance is funding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Further, pausing new federal oil, gas, and coal leases, when federal lands supply 22 percent of U.S. oil and 13 percent of natural gas, could destroy a million jobs, raise costs for consumers, and force America to increase energy imports.28 Big Government Socialists have tried to disguise Green New Deal policies within the disastrous COMPETES Act. They laugh when asked about rising gas prices and tell Americans to simply buy an electric car or get a new job. They are astonishingly out of touch with the American people.29, 30
This is evident in a recent Gallup poll that found that “of all the issues and societal aspects measured in the survey, satisfaction with energy policies has fallen the most this year.” In 2021, 42 percent of Americans were very or somewhat satisfied with the nation’s energy policies. But in 2022, that number dropped down to 27 percent.31
The choice between boosting support for American oil and gas and protecting the environment is not binary—though Big Government Socialists will have you believe the two are foils of one another to score political points. As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “Here’s the answer to [Biden’s] energy crisis: let America produce what we have and need.”32 Republicans in Congress have set up a task force to develop an agenda that prioritizes American innovation, utilizes American resources, and promotes American competitiveness. Through this approach, based upon proven conservative principles, the agenda will reduce energy costs for consumers, lower global emissions, and protect American families’ economic security.
It’s easy to blame the United States—as Big Government Socialists often do—for the world’s environmental challenges. But this would be wrong. In 2019, Dr. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said, “In the last 10 years, the emissions reduction in the United States has been the largest in the history of energy.”33 This was achieved, however, through a focus on American resources and innovation and the power of the free market. We need to embrace these same principles as we chart the course forward.
Ultimately, by implementing these approaches and changes, we can reinvigorate the promises of opportunity and hope for the future that have made America successful since our Founding and that will continue to ensure prosperity for generations.