Renewing the American Neighborhood: “Houston Strong” writ large

For several years now, Steve Parkhurst and I have been trying to introduce a working model of how the classical concepts of “liberty” and self-government could be re-kindled in the 21stCentury—not just as an effective alternative to large, centralized and intrusive governments, and as an antidote to identity politics and political correctness, but also as a way to promote effective government through local action.  Today, we launch Renewing the American Neighborhood as an ongoing project for Big Jolly Times.

On this site, you will find the first foundational effort, our manifesto if you will, of the intellectual arguments supporting our effort.  This manifesto will be followed by articles, interviews and podcasts over the next year that introduce people and organizations that are living the “liberty” we espouse, as well as living the self-governance and localism needed to turn true “liberty” into effective action.  Eventually, we will begin to interview political candidates and elected officials, and will evaluate their campaigns and actions based on the principles underlying our effort.

We hope that you will visit this site often over the next few months, and interact with us over on Big Jolly Times.  We don’t expect you to immediately embrace all of our ideas, but through interaction I hope we can convince enough of you that what we are promoting is a true direction for American conservatism in the 21st Century that will enrich the lives of you and your families, your neighbors, and your communities, while making government smaller and more effective.

For now, please take a look at our special report, Renewing the American Neighborhood: A Houston Case Study, which looks at the local response in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in and around Houston. We look forward to hearing your feedback and we hope you will share the work with others.

Open Memo about Health-Care

This post originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

July 26, 2017

I am sending this memo to each of you, not as a local party official or conservative activist, but as a concerned constituent who has been following the current health-care debate as closely as any other citizen. It appears that the seven-year long effort to address the Democrat’s ill-conceived health-care albatross is finally reaching a climax and the very complexity of Obamacare is making it difficult for you all to find a consensus as to how to fix the mess the Democrats made.

With all due humility, I ask that you consider a simple approach now: repeal of Obamacare, effective two years from enactment; and a commitment to create a two-tiered system of private, employer-provided insurance for the employed (with certain basic requirements, such as coverage for pre-existing conditions and continued coverage for dependents), and Medicare for everyone else. If this system is coupled with fundamental corporate and middle-class tax reform, it could provide the certainty that our private economy needs to sustain the level of economic growth needed to address so many other issues we now face, while making our public health system more efficient and sustainable.

Everyone has discussed and debated how we got to this point, but let’s remember this—too many Americans have structured their lives based on the existence of private insurance when employed, and a social safety net when they are not employed, to create a totally free-market based system now. However, unlike European countries and other nation-states, the existence of a vast private insurance system has allowed our country to meet defense and security commitments that it could not otherwise afford if it had to underwrite a national single-payer system, while providing the capital for the research, development and delivery of medical practices and medicines that has lead the way to the greatest extension of life-expectancy in human history. Moreover, the existence of a thriving private-insurance industry provides our private economy with a vast source of capital from premium income for investment and growth, which a single-payer system would extinguish. In the meantime, though, state budgets have become overburdened by the under-funded Medicaid mandates, and our federal bureaucracy has shown itself to be too incompetent to meet our national commitment to provide even the most basic medical care for veterans, Native Americans and other specific groups. Simply put, the idea of a single-payer or provider system does not fit the United States, and the United States needs its private insurance industry.

The simple reform plan would be consistent with the institutional competence of our limited federal government, and would provide the framework for a more efficient and effective delivery system for medical care. This plan would have three basic parts:

• an employer-provided private insurance market protected by the federal tax code for everyone who is employed, including a pooled market for the self-employed;
• a means-tested reimbursement structure for the unemployed, the disabled, the poor, the retired, veterans, and Native Americans; and
• a re-insurance trust fund to underwrite treatment expenses catastrophic illnesses or traumas, that our beyond the ability of the private insurance market to cover.

Both the Medicare and re-insurance trust would be funded through a revised Medicare tax program. Committing to such a system should be coupled with repeal of Medicaid in its entirety, and closure of the federal VA and Native American hospitals and clinics (though the Defense Department should still maintain a network of hospitals for the treatment of our soldiers), and with the lowering of the corporate tax rate to a flat 15% (or lower) rate to provide businesses of all sizes the ability to pay for private insurance plans and remain competitive. Moreover, state and local governments could still supplement this system through their own re-imbursement or direct-care alternatives, but they would be relieved of the immense financial burden that is sapping their resources to provide for education and other programs within their sphere of responsibility.

I know this is not an ideologically pure free-market system, but we haven’t had that type of system at any time during our lifetimes, and it is too late to change our whole country’s expectations to fit our ideology. And, of course, the devil would still be in the details of such a system, but at least it would provide a certain plan to debate and implement over the next two years while Obamacare is unwound—and parts of it should draw some bipartisan support, which any program of such reach should have had from the beginning.

Again, this is one citizen’s recommendation—but, if one lonely conservative can describe and recommend such a simple and comprehensive idea, I have to believe you all can get together and finally address the health-care issue.

My Radio Appearance This Week

A few days ago I was a guest on Raging Elephants Radio where I discussed issues taking place in and around the Texas GOP. Listen to the interview here:

My new sounds: RERhotclip HUBBARD Rumblings That TxGOP Establishment Unhappy With Straus 052317 https://t.co/5I26WeAtOI on #SoundCloud

— RagingElephantsRadio (@RERadioTexas) May 27, 2017

John Kasich Video During RNC Convention Is Great

Governor John Kasich has irked a lot of people, and you don't have to agree with him or his approach. But he leads a key state where he was easily re-elected two years ago. This video is quite good.

The greatness of America is in us, when we come together, lift one another, with our eyes on the horizon. #RNCinCLEhttps://t.co/5pjmHKVOLT

— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) July 18, 2016

Paul Ryan For Speaker

Steve Parkhurst and I have written an editorial in support of Congressman Paul Ryan for Speaker of the House. Please visit Big Jolly Politics to read it.

My editorial in the Dallas Morning News

My editorial, which first appeared at Big Jolly Politics, was printed in today's Dallas Morning News.

“And Now, the Real Work Begins” (…and some words about Steve Munisteri and the RPT)

This post originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics.

It is still a little overwhelming when I think about the gains Republicans made in last week’s mid-term elections.

With control of both houses of Congress, 67 state legislative chambers, at least 31 governorships, and a majority of Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, we have the best chance in many years of producing real governmental reform that restores the constitutional allocation of federal responsibility and competence between the state and federal governments in a way that creates a solid foundation for growth, opportunity and liberty for the rest of this century. 

That restoration must move along two tracks simultaneously: one at the state and local level, which restores trust, effectiveness, and responsibility for most domestic governmental functions; and one at the federal level, which restores

• the proper functioning of the legislative branch;
• the constitutional checks and balances among the three branches;
• the proper limits of federal responsibility;
• the effectiveness of the federal government when exercising its proper responsibilities;
• a pro-growth and opportunity national and international economic policy that had been embraced by administrations of both parties for more than a generation;
• a modern interstate infrastructure of roads, bridges, rail-lines, waterways and canals, dams, nuclear power plants, electricity grids, and pipelines to meet the foreseeable needs of the nation for the next several generations;
• the proper limits of the size and responsibility of the administrative agencies that have evolved into a de facto fourth branch of government outside of the constitutional structure; and
• (through the proper exercise of the Senate’s advice-and-consent and oversight responsibilities) the focus of our foreign and military policy toward a more realistic acceptance and exercise of our post-World War II global responsibilities.

In my last posts in August of this year, I provided a philosophic foundation for these reforms, and I will not restate them here. Instead, I’ll just ask you to re-read them: Mercy, Trust, and the Future of the Republican Party; and Mercy, Trust, and the Future of the Republican Party – Part 2.

Although my list of reforms at the federal level is longer, the actual action that we should expect at the federal level will be slower and more limited over the next two years because the task at hand is to reverse the growth of the federal government that has occurred over the last 100 years, and that has exploded over the last 6 years, while we still have a President who is committed to its expansion by any means (constitutional or not) that he chooses.

 

While our Representatives and Senators fight with patient persistence to hold the line in Washington and proceed with the incremental reforms that are needed, the opportunity for the most far-reaching and effective reforms are at the state and local levels. Following the courage shown by Governors Walker, Snyder and Daniels in the Midwest over the last few years, we must commit ourselves to reform state and local governments so that they can accept the larger responsibilities they must exercise if we are to restore limited government at the federal level. This will require a commitment to govern effectively, efficiently and wisely—but to govern. It will require fundamentally reforming and re-building

• educational systems from the classrooms and the professionalization of teaching, through the school districts and state agencies;
• state budgeting processes;
• the relationship of government employees to the government, including their compensation systems;
• opportunities for education and employment in every neighborhood, including the assimilation of every citizen into our society;
• law enforcement systems that continue no tolerance for “broken windows” while providing meaningful opportunities for first-time offenders (and their families and neighborhoods) to avoid a life of under-education, under-employment caused by over-incarceration;
• a network of public and private agencies to provide health and safety-net systems for the addicted, the poor and the unemployed with the goal of helping them to become (to the extent possible) self-sufficient members of our communities;
• tax policies and systems that raise sufficient revenue to fund the government while promoting growth, but without creating subsidies that pick winners and losers or reward cronies;
• a physical infrastructure of roads, rail-lines, ports, airports, and utilities—and adequate public transportation alternatives in urban areas—to meet the expected growth over the next several generations; and
• most importantly, the trust of our neighbors that state and local governments will function fairly and justly, as well as effectively and efficiently.

I am still an optimist—I believe all of this is doable if we commit to the long struggle it will take to persuade our neighbors of the correctness of our goals, and to the patience it will take to formulate and implement these goals. This election gave us the opportunity to start this process, but we must seize that opportunity—now, the real work begins.

P.S.

Steve Munisteri publicly confirmed yesterday at the Greater Houston Pachyderm Club what he has been saying privately for several months: he will not serve his entire two-year term until the RPT Convention in 2016. Although he did not say when he would step down, his confirmation means that the SREC will soon choose a new Chair to serve the remainder of Steve’s term.

For me, this is a bitter-sweet moment. Sweet, because the efforts that were started by a handful of us in 2009 to improve the financial and organizational management of the Republican Party at the county and state levels were first realized under the Steve’s leadership at the RPT, and those efforts have now started to bear fruit here in Harris County since the election of Paul Simpson. I am proud to say I supported Steve’s quixotic campaign against the incumbent Chair in 2010, and I am even prouder of his accomplishments—he did what he said he would do, and then some. How rare is that in public life?

Bitter, because I know that his work is not done, and he leaves big shoes to fill. All I can do for now is hope that the candidates who come forward to run for Chair will pledge to continue Steve’s approach to the financial and operational management of the RPT and the Victory campaigns, including his ongoing efforts to grow the party in every community and demographic group in this state. We don’t need to return to the days when we confused cheerleading for leadership—we need to continue the hard work of real leadership that Steve started.

Steve, thank you. I wish you all the best in whatever you choose to do next. You’ve earned my unswerving admiration for all you’ve done.