SOUND MIND
Where I’m Coming From
I am not a career politician. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I’m a working man with commonsense ideas and goals. I describe myself politically as fiscally conservative and socially moderate-to-liberal.
We need to keep a permanently tight rein on government spending. I believe working people should keep as much of their money as possible, and I believe they should have a more direct say in how it’s spent. But I don’t believe we need the government’s help as much as some think we do. That belief sets me apart from the Democrats, since their way of dealing with everything is to tax and spend.
I also believe that government has no business telling us how we should live our lives. I think our lifestyle choices should be left up to us. What we do in our private lives is none of the government’s business. That position rules out the Republican Party for me. As the cliché says, “I don’t want Democrats in the boardroom, and I don’t want Republicans in the bedroom.”
So I stand before you as an advocate of minimal government interference and of minimal public reliance on government, which in anybody’s book ought to spell lower taxes. And that pretty much keeps me out of both parties.
That’s the way I want it. Neither of the two parties is truly representing the people anymore. They’re at opposite extremes, with about 70 percent of us in the middle. That needs to change, and that’s why I’m a member of the Reform Party.
Right now, too much of the business of the government is focused on keeping itself in business. A lot of its programs are set up so that when they are working the way they’re supposed to, they spend more tax dollars and cause the government to bloat even further. Unless we do something, the cancer will just keep spreading. At this point, maybe all we can do is apply chemotherapy to keep it from growing any further. Our government’s growth is becoming harder and harder to control.
What’s worse, as time goes on, we’re getting more and more into the habit of looking to the government to solve our problems. I believe the American people are capable of getting along just fine with a whole lot less help from the government. Common sense, fiscally and socially, is more helpful than a dozen new laws. I think if the average person thought about it that way, he or she would tell you they’d rather keep more of their tax money and use it to solve their problems on their own!
Yet the cancer continues to spread. We have far more laws on the books, for example, than we really need to do the job. Just because you’re a legislator doesn’t mean your job is to create more laws for people to live by! During my transition period, I went into Secretary of State Joan Growe’s office. One entire wall of her office was filled with books—volume after volume of Minnesota’s laws. And the court decisions interpreting those laws fill an entire library. Now, you’ve heard that ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law. So every citizen has to know all those laws? It would take years!
There are professionals whose job it is to be experts in the law. They train for the same amount of time as medical doctors, and they still have to lug around these huge, ponderous law books, because even they can’t keep it all in their heads! If we’re going to hold average citizens responsible for knowing the laws, don’t you think we’d better make sure the laws are knowable?
I believe in the K.I.S.S. rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid. In many cases, the laws we already have on the books would work just fine; they’d do the job if we would just become more serious about enforcing them. A new law is not always a better law.
Government programs suffer from the same kind of unchecked, cancerous bloat. The number of special interests out there is constantly growing. Everybody has a wish list. Everybody has a cause. If we indulged everybody’s wish list, we’d be paying 60 to 70 percent of our income to the government! We need to set priorities. We have to learn when to say no. Nobody has a right to government money just because they have a cause. There are a lot of good causes out there, but they can’t possibly all be served by government. I think in their heart of hearts, most people understand that the government cannot function efficiently when it becomes a charity organization. The Constitution guarantees us our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s all. It doesn’t guarantee our right to charity.
The government is not a parent. We can’t expect the government to always be there, ready to bail us out. When we make decisions in life, we have to be willing to live with the consequences. We can’t expect the government to help us get back on our feet every time we make a bad decision. We have to accept responsibility for the decisions we make. That goes for education, career moves, family planning, the whole nine yards. Certainly, there should be some kind of government safety net; government has a role in helping us out in genuine crises, but a line has to be drawn somewhere. We can’t look to government every time we make a decision that causes us to tighten our belts a few notches.
We’ve gotten in a bad habit of overlegislating. I believe in the American people’s ability to govern themselves. I believe that if government would just get out of the way and allow them to lead their lives as they choose, they will succeed. Government only needs to be there to support them in their efforts.
Remember that government doesn’t earn one single dollar it spends. In order for you to get money from the government, that money must first be taken from somebody else. It’s amazing to me how often people lose sight of this. It’s not fair for a person who wanted to go to college but not work for it, or who decided to have kids when they weren’t financially ready, or who made a poor business decision, to take money from someone else. In many cases, the person they’re taking it from only has money to give because they made sounder decisions. Do we want to penalize people for leading their lives responsibly? Do we want to send people the message that it doesn’t matter if they are financially responsible, since the government will always be there to force other people to bail them out?
If public service is going to work as it should, public servants have to know who the public they’re serving really is. To do that they must first have spent time building a life the way we working people have, or our concerns will never be real to them. You can’t have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people if the people who operate the government spend the vast majority of their adult lives, or at least of their careers, inside an isolated and, in a sense, artificial world. They’re making decisions that profoundly affect the average American citizen, yet they have no idea what life for the average American citizen is like! They’ve never been there, or it’s been so long they can’t remember.
You’ve heard the old saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely? That’s what comes into play when public servants make a career out of what they do: They eventually have to shift their focus from serving the public to serving their careers. It’s not a career if you don’t get reelected! So that becomes your objective: winning the election, staying in the game. Raising money. To hell with the “public service”!
On the other hand, when somebody who isn’t a career politician takes office, everyone understands that it’s temporary. They’ll serve one or two terms, then they’ll be out. They have a life and a career somewhere else. Odds are, they themselves will be affected by the legislation they pass or the programs they implement during their term. They probably sought office because they felt strongly enough about one issue or several issues to want to do something about them. This is the mind-set we want in our public servants.
Where I Stand on the Issues
Government Reform
If you haven’t got my point yet, I’m saying that we need to take control of our government out of the hands of career politicians and special-interest groups and put it back into the hands of the people. As it now stands, we’re overly dependent on a system that seldom has our best interests at heart.
The two major political parties wield far too much power. Their control over the political process is deeply entrenched and em
bedded in the system, and it’s carefully orchestrated to keep nonparty candidates out and to keep the two parties in control. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Government is supposed to represent us, not the two parties.
We desperately need to reform government so that we can reclaim more of the decision-making power in our lives, as well as keep more of the money that we earn. We’re a capitalist society. Government’s role is not to baby-sit us. It’s to provide the basic infrastructure and essential public services that will best facilitate our individual and collective prosperity and freedom. Beyond that, it has no business interfering in our lives.
Term Limits
Term limits are the most effective means of keeping career politicians out of the system. After an individual serves the prescribed term, he or she gets a one-way ticket back to the private sector and makes way for someone else from the private sector to step forward. That dynamic link to the world of the common citizen is vital in keeping government on track.
Campaign Reform
Our campaign laws desperately need an overhaul. Do you know how difficult it is for anyone coming directly from the private sector to get into office? There are all kinds of roadblocks and catch-22s and technicalities set up to keep the two traditional parties in power. The will of the people can hardly even be heard through the current maze of regulation!
We need to set up our campaign system so that who gets to run is not a matter of how much money they have or whether they belong to a party. Campaigns have become far too expensive, and the average candidate ends up selling out to specialinterest groups in order to obtain the funding to run.
When candidates accept special-interest or political-action-committee money, they are indebted to the group that is funding them. In effect, they’ve been bought. It’s legalized bribery. Campaigns should be funded only by the people, from small, individual donations, so that only those individuals that the people truly want will participate.
Legal Reform
Our legal system has gotten sadly off track. Justice cannot be just if it’s swayed by wealth or celebrity status. There is hardly a more infamous event in our recent legal history than the O. J. Simpson trial. It was a travesty of justice that has left permanent scars on the judicial system, just as I have permanent scars on my forehead from wrestling.
All the evidence points to O.J.’s guilt. There’s not a shred of evidence that points to anyone else. Yet Judge Ito caused the prosecution’s case to be lost. He allowed testimony and evidence into that trial that should never be allowed. You can’t put the cops on trial when there is no evidence they did anything illegal in connection with an arrest or investigation; if we allow that, what criminal case could ever be successfully tried? Everyone has things in their background that they’re not proud of, and if you allow that background to be scrutinized closely enough, you can weaken anyone’s credibility.
What is worse, Johnnie Cochran cheated. It was reported that he went into O.J.’s house before the jurors toured it, took down pictures from the wall, and hung up pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King and other prominent black leaders, to make it appear as though O.J. was somehow still concerned about the black community. He wasn’t. I was invited to go on Cochran’s talk show, but I refused, because he willingly violated the law and manipulated his craft as a lawyer to let a double murderer walk free.
That trial taught me that if you have enough celebrity status in this country, you can get away with anything—including murder. We’re celebrity worshipers. Any average person would have been convicted within a week. The memory of that case has left a permanent stain on our country’s history. The only positive thing we could possibly do now is to let that memory stand as an example of what’s wrong with our judicial system as we look for ways to fix it.
Taxes
In a capitalist society, problems are best solved by lowering taxes, not by making government larger. The best-case scenario is for government to empower the people by letting them keep as much of their money as possible, then support them in the decisions they make. Government works less efficiently when it begins to grow out of control and takes on more and more of the responsibilities that belong to the citizens.
A case in point is the shortage of affordable housing we have in Minneapolis. We have two choices: We can create yet another government program, pass more laws, provide more subsidies, and enact more restrictions—with the result that we’ll end up raising taxes. Or we can lower taxes so that we make it more attractive for private-sector builders to build in those areas. It must be made profitable for the private sector. You can’t just keep flushing more and more money into more and more government programs. If we allow the government to swell and fatten and bloat, who is going to foot the bill for it all? Look in the mirror.
Consumption Tax Versus Income Tax
I’d like to see the income tax replaced by a national consumption tax. Instead of being taxed for making money, individuals would be taxed only when they make a purchase. They could control their taxation rate by controlling their spending habits. They would no longer be penalized for working and saving their money, and it would allow them to get their money before the government does.
With a national consumption tax, each person will decide how much of their money the government is going to get. And if the people are in control, government spending will then have to become sensitive to the economy. And because tax collections will not increase when times turn bad, it would force government to live within its means. After all, the rest of us have to.
Refunds for Budget Surpluses
As governor, I have to create the budget. And I believe that whenever we have a surplus of revenue above what is needed to run the government, that money should be returned to the taxpayer. The utility companies do that, why can’t government? The Democrats always argue that as long as there’s tax money left over, we can always find good, worthy programs to spend it on. That’s true. But there’s another way to handle that: It’s called “No!” If there are programs that the taxpayers want to give money to, then let’s put it in the budget. But we can’t be looking for excuses to spend money just because we have it to spend. The bottom line is, if there’s money left over on June 30, after the budget is balanced and the fiscal year is over, it should go back to the people who paid it. Plain and simple.
The K.I.S.S. rule applies to how we send it back, too. The citizens don’t have time to watchdog the government; they’re busy working and raising families and trying to survive. We have to set up a refund mechanism that runs itself smoothly and efficiently. People should be able to trust that every other June 30 (we have a biannual budget in Minnesota), when we balance the budget, anything that’s left over will automatically come back to them. We as a people shouldn’t expect anything less.
Property Tax Reform
You shouldn’t be taxed because your neighbor’s property goes up in value, and you shouldn’t be taxed for improving your own property. We’ve got to simplify it, make it fair, and make certain that people are not driven off their land whenever developers move into a neighborhood.
Education
I can understand why some parents are tempted to write off public schools as a loss and send their kids to private schools. But I think that the parents who do that are losing sight of the bigger picture. We can make our neighborhood schools places to be proud of only if we’re willing to invest ourselves in them. No amount of tax money can replace parental involvement.
I believe strongly that government should be encouraging parents to get involved in public schools, instead of giving them vouchers or tax credits so that they can send their kids to private schools. A recent study showed that about 72 percent of the parents surveyed would rather see their public schools improved than receive vouchers to send their kids to private schools.
I went to Minnesota public schools from kindergarten straight through to high-school graduation, and so did my son. My daughter will do the same. I think we should view our
public schools as a good system that’s in need of reform, rather than as a broken-down system that we should avoid. There’s still far more baby than bathwater here, and I would like to see the public schools succeed. What we need to do is examine the system closely, figure out where the problems are, see what solutions to those problems have worked elsewhere, and apply them. But we have abundant evidence that it doesn’t help public schools to simply throw more money at them or to keep endlessly lengthening the school year. Obviously, if something isn’t working, making it more costly and making more of it just makes for a bigger problem!
There are pragmatic, commonsense steps we can take to improve the quality of the education our kids receive in public schools. The following are the fifteen steps for improving public education that Lieutenant Governor Mae Schunk and I developed during the campaign and posted on our website:
IMPROVING PUBLIC EDUCATION
Improve student literacy by expecting all children to read by the end of first grade.
Help students develop a firm foundation of learning skills by reducing primary class sizes, grades K–3.
Improve math and science achievement through problem solving in real-life learning experiences.
Encourage and enlist greater parent participation in school-improvement efforts and in decision making.
Become a community of partners in learning: create a strong sense of responsibility and accountability for teachers, students, and parents; provide a variety of opportunities for parents to learn and be involved in their children’s education throughout the year.
Encourage more school-community partnerships to provide volunteer tutoring, mentorships, internships, and school-to-work programs.
Support and take part in school and community initiatives to prevent acts of violence.
Encourage all junior-high-school students to take a class about parenting and family responsibility.
I Ain't Got Time to Bleed Page 2
