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CONSERVATIVE POLICY AGENDAOPPORTUNITY FOR ALL BUT FAVORITISM TO NONE

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© 2014 Heritage Action for America214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE, Suite 400 Washington DC, 20002(202) 548-5280www.heritageaction.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS CONSERVATIVE POLICY AGENDA

Introduction ............................................................................................... 1

A STRONG ECONOMYControl Spending and Restrain Government ............................................ 3

Reform the Tax Code ................................................................................ 3

End Bailouts .............................................................................................. 4

Grow Jobs and Paychecks with Abundant Energy .................................... 5

Defend Internet Freedom .......................................................................... 6

Create Opportunity in the Workplace ........................................................ 7

A STRONG SOCIETYPromote Marriage, Family, and Opportunity .............................................. 8

Protect Religious Liberty ........................................................................... 9

Promote Patient-Centered Health Care ..................................................... 9

A STRONG AMERICAEnsure Military Strength .......................................................................... 11

Practice a Strong, Focused Foreign Policy ............................................. 12

Fix Immigration and Secure Borders ....................................................... 13

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1 CONSERVATIVE POLICY AGENDA

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CONSERVATIVE POLICY AGENDAOPPORTUNITY FOR ALL BUT FAVORITISM TO NONE

This August, Congress goes home to reconnect with constituents and begin to make a closing argument before the 2014 elections. Members return to their districts after

a year that has shown the extent to which our nation’s governing institutions have become detached from the demands of the people. Across the country, they will find that voters are tired of the status quo in Washington, eager for effective solutions to the problems they face, and skeptical of our political system’s ability to provide them.

Our times do not call for timid, poll-tested solutions. They call for a bold agenda that delivers opportunity for all but favoritism to none.

Conservatives are well-positioned to present this agenda. As conservatives, we believe in an America that is safe and secure; where family has the opportunity to flourish; where choices in education, health care, and other necessities are moved closer to home; where taxes are fair and flat; where all Americans have the opportunity to go as far as their talents and hard work will take them in pursuit of the American Dream; where government concentrates on its core functions, recognizes its limits, and treats everyone equally, showing favor to none.

Fifty years ago, Ronald Reagan gave his famous A Time for Choosing speech. While our times may be different, the choice Reagan perceived remains the central one. “This is the issue of this election,” Reagan believed then as we do now: “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

Today, those far-distant elites have more power than at any other point in our nation’s history. Bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services make too many health care decisions. Common Core opens the door for Washington to wield enormous power to impose its plans on education. Environmental radicals, out of touch with Americans’ need for reliable and affordable

energy, want to make electricity and gasoline prices higher in service to their agenda.

However, the problem is not merely that government bureaucrats have misguided policy priorities. Entrenched interests have recognized that they can use these planners to line their pockets by passing regulations conducive to their unique business models and placing barriers in the way of insurgent competitors. Policymakers in government have embraced this dynamic, realizing that they can use private-sector allies to enact their progressive agenda.

In our nation’s Crony Capital, there are mutual benefits to this relationship. Government may be too powerful and burdensome for most Americans, but it works well for the special interests that are treated as a protected class in return for doing its bidding.

There is nothing wrong with success that is achieved through merit, hard work, fair competition, and the creation of value in the free market. Yet increasingly, many of our nation’s major industries have come to be dominated by small handfuls of massive companies that are subsidized by taxpayer dollars and insulated from competition by onerous federal mandates too burdensome for small challengers to overcome. The very taxes, regulatory regimes, and trade policies that make this possible are all written by those same industries, which invest in an army of lobbyists to descend on Washington.

Americans recognize this. It’s the reason public polling shows such consistent disdain for Washington politicians and bureaucrats. Thanks to the actions of government and business, that sentiment has surged over the past several years. The nation is ready for leaders who will address concerns about the relationship between mobility, economic dynamism, concentrated power, and collusion between special interests and government.

In this environment, conservatives face a new urgency to address an old charge: that the policies of limited government benefit

OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL BUT FAVORITISM TO NONE 2

EMBARGOEDthe wealthy and the well-connected over everyone else. Left unanswered, this accusation will sink our coalition’s ability to advance our broader agenda by preventing us from building the trust among the public that is necessary to embark on ambitious but difficult policy reforms. Worse, this libel from the left has allowed proponents of big government to claim—ludicrously—the populist mantle themselves even as their own policies have helped to entrench the special interests they claim to oppose. It is for this reason that debates over issues such as the reauthorization of the Export–Import Bank are such crucial tests of the path forward for anybody claiming the mantle of Main Street.

It is incumbent on us as conservatives to advance a reform agenda that exposes the left’s hypocritical favoritism toward entrenched interests. The fundamentals of that agenda will be familiar to all who are acquainted with the principles of American conservatism: limited government, a healthy culture, and a strong defense. Each of those commitments is essential. Those who propose downplaying social issues or foreign policy advocate not a cease-fire with the left, but surrender. Given the stakes, such a stance is unacceptable.

But these long-standing policy priorities for our movement must be complemented by a renewed focus on ending the shortcuts to success that are available only to the well-connected. This focus on cronyism offers conservatives a new way to talk about the most important issues of the day and demonstrate that we are speaking to the concerns of the American people. One model for achieving broad consensus is the realm of K–12 education, where highlighting the pernicious role of teachers’ unions in setting education policy at the state level has opened up new possibilities for conservative solutions.

The approach is straightforward: Identify the interests enriching themselves at the expense of the public, highlight the conflict between the success of those interests and the principles of choice and competition within free markets, and turn the policy debate into a debate over fairness and justice.

Too many on the right see conservatives’ success in framing the K–12 reform debate as an aberration. On the contrary, it is the result of our movement having launched head-first into a debate, engaged the debate on terms set by conservatives year-after-year, and won the public argument. A strong conservative movement will treat every issue facing our nation as an opportunity to educate, debate, and persuade in a similar fashion.

Our best opportunity to win a constituency for higher education reform is to explain how the left’s effort to pump more student loan money into the existing system serves only to fill the bank accounts of colleges and their administrators. Our solutions unleash an unprecedented number of personally tailored options so that each student is armed with the education he or she needs to succeed in the 21st century without the need for massive government financing.

On health care, we can expose Obamacare for what it is: more out-of-touch, big-government interference in our personal health care decisions. We can persuade Americans that for all the benefits the law provides to insurance companies, it has done them little good. It is unfair, unworkable, and unaffordable, and it must be replaced with solutions that truly empower patients and their doctors with quality health care, affordability, and choice.

On energy, we can prove to the public that our policies of access and enterprise offer them the ability to balance concerns between development and the environment. Free energy markets can provide a better future—one with more jobs, lower bills, and higher take-home pay—than the left’s approach of subsidies to the well-connected.

We have the ability to transform our tax code and unleash growth while simplifying a process that many Americans rightly find impossibly complicated. All it takes to enact those solutions is a willingness to take on protected interests and jettison the loopholes that turn the code into Swiss cheese for those with the best tax lawyers, lobbyists, and accounting departments.

Conservatives have solutions for the challenges our nation faces in a complex, dangerous, and interconnected world. Do we have the will to explain them, fight for them, and persevere to see them through? Margaret Thatcher believed that “you win the argument, then you win the vote.” The only way to win an argument is to have one. And while many people think Washington, DC, is broken, the truth is that it’s broken only for the American people. For the wealthy and powerful, Washington is a finely tuned machine aimed at avoiding principled arguments and keeping the gravy train rolling for well-connected interests.

Conservative principles—free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense—produce a strong economy, a strong society, and a strong America. They make this country the greatest place in the world in which to live and produce a better quality of life now and for future generations.

America needs politicians who are willing to proclaim this. It would ruffle feathers, but that’s what leadership often requires.

For the wealthy and powerful, Washington is a finely tuned machine aimed at avoiding principled arguments and keeping the gravy train rolling for well-connected interests.


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A STRONG ECONOMY CONTROL SPENDING

AND RESTRAIN GOVERNMENT

America’s massive, ever-accumulating debts are the symptom of a problem we can—if we choose to do so—get under control: growth in government. Smart

budget cuts and reforms now will enable the economy to grow faster in the future than if Congress continues to procrastinate. But the window for making those decisions is closing quickly even as our national debt goes in only one direction: up.

Too many in positions of leadership willfully neglect the mounting danger. As President Obama said in 2012 of the debt, “we don’t have to worry about it short term.” Washington will worry about the cost of government only when it’s too late to do anything about it.

The nation is $17.6 trillion in debt and counting. If the average American family spent like the federal government, it would be over $300,000 in debt and still spending as if the credit card would never catch up. Just as a family’s high debt limits opportunities, excessive federal spending and high debt slow the economy and shrink opportunity for all Americans.

The federal government has taken on too many priorities that appeal to too many constituencies, making it extremely difficult for policymakers to muster the political will that is needed for reform.

The waste is obvious. According to the Government Accountability Office, approximately 80 education programs designed to help improve teacher quality are administered across 10 federal agencies. The federal government also funds about 80 programs in eight different agencies to provide transportation services to disadvantaged individuals. About 45 federal job training programs administered by nine different federal agencies have a questionable impact on preparing Americans for the workforce. By some estimates, the federal government is wasting hundreds of billions each year on these improper and duplicative payments. And yet, despite frequent bipartisan consensus on the need for reforms, these programs persist year after year.

Congress even fails to abide by its own laws to make and pass a budget every year. And when Congress and the Administration run into laws that impose inconvenient controls on their spending authority—like the debt limit—Members try to do away with them entirely. It is common sense that our nation should raise its debt limit only if that is tied to spending cuts that put us on a path to balancing our budget, but this is hardly conventional wisdom in Washington.

We can’t merely trim a few million or billion here or there on the margins in the discretionary budget if we want to keep our children from experiencing many of the hardships we’ve witnessed in Europe over the past several years. But rooting out waste wherever possible—even on a small scale—is essential. It gives us the moral high ground to address the main drivers of our debt: major government programs that are running on autopilot.

Congress overpromised for decades on popular programs like Social Security and Medicare that will soon devour nearly two-thirds of all tax dollars. Congress has procrastinated, avoiding the necessary reforms that will ensure that these programs are around for us and for our children’s generation. As it stands, they are on course to consume the entire federal budget, leaving our nation in even greater debt. If they are to survive and meet the needs of the truly vulnerable in society, we need to make common-sense reforms that modernize these outdated entitlement programs and enable people to exercise more choice with their own health care and retirement dollars.

It’s time for America to take control of its own destiny. This will require elected officials with the moral fortitude to do the hard but incredibly important work of paring down the size of our government and setting it on track to fiscal health. Doing this now will swing wide the doors of opportunity in the future—and avoiding it will only set us up for fiscal disaster.

REFORM THE TAX CODE

The tax code should exist only to collect the resources needed to fund the constitutionally appropriate functions of government, but that’s not what our sprawling tax code does today. Instead, our Internal Revenue Service sometimes seems to exist to

Rooting out waste wherever possible—even on a small scale—is essential. It gives us the moral high ground to address the main drivers of our debt: major government programs that are running on autopilot.


EMBARGOEDscrutinize and participate in practically every instance of economic activity under the sun, posing a significant impediment to growth in the process.

At 4 million words in length, the U.S. Tax code is longer than the King James Bible. Each year, it hits taxpayers with $225 billion in compliance costs alone. This complexity costs jobs on Main Street, but it is a form of protection for corporate lobbyists and their clients.

Despite the clear need for fundamental reform, policymakers demonstrate little sense of urgency about implementing wholesale change. Occasional tweaks in tax policy occur due to action-forcing mechanisms such as the recent “fiscal cliff” or intense lobbying for targeted loopholes. Aside from rate changes and carve-outs resulting from those unique circumstances, little progress has been made in reforming the tax code since the 1980s.

Several of the existing loopholes that shrink the tax base and drive rates higher—the employer-provided health insurance exclusion, for example—are accidents of history. Others are necessary to reduce government meddling in the lives of families and businesses. Many, however, are the hard-fought gains of various industries that recognize that preferential tax treatment by government can be a more effective pathway to success in the market than hard work or innovation.

Some of those loopholes are born through procedures such as the annual “tax extender” process, whereby a series of provisions are passed by Congress in a package despite the fact that few would generate sufficient support if proposed in isolation. Liberals have mastered the art of using such “must pass” bills to their advantage in seeking special breaks, and conservatives have struggled to muster the resolve to oppose such packages on principle. It will take substantial political resolve to stand up to the various industries that benefit, with the help of liberals, from treatment that no other Americans receive. It’s time to end such unfairness.

The tax code our nation deserves would unleash opportunity for all. The outlines of reform are clear: Lower rates and broaden the tax base. But the mentality behind it is deeper. Ronald Reagan once said, “There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination and wonder.” That is the America we should be striving for: one that leaves resources in the hands of our fellow citizens to pursue their ideas, exercise their imagination, and achieve their dreams.

America would do well to end the tax code’s bias against saving, instead taxing income only upon consumption. It is hardly fair to tax those who live frugally and responsibly, developing a personal safety net and a nest egg for their children, as much as we tax those who do little to insulate themselves from long-term financial distress.

Most important of all, a reformed code with a flat, fair rate would lighten the burdens on all Americans, both in compliance with the existing code’s complications and in the share of income sacrificed each year to the IRS. With a struggling economy and a weak job market, we need a code that unshackles the private sector and allows businesses and workers to operate in a predictable, low-burden environment.

END BAILOUTS

The financial crisis of 2008 led to a “Great Recession” from which the nation is still recovering. The left is already trying to rewrite the history of this era. They tell us the crisis is a vindication of government’s role in the economy: that the heroic application of federal power rescued the system with emergency bailouts and massive stimulus spending directed by government, preventing a depression and driving the economy from recession to recovery during the Obama years.

This narrative has distorted the causes of the economic crisis and distracted from the need for real reform to head off future disaster. Meanwhile, the very government institutions that helped to create the crisis have been left untouched or empowered with new responsibility. Conservatives hoping to project readiness to serve as responsible stewards of the economy have a duty to set the record straight on the nature of the collapse.

As with many other misadventures, the federal government’s jaunt into the private sector contributed to the crisis and is slowing the recovery. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates too low for too long, while government puppets Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac distorted the mortgage market. Lenders of all stripes faced pressure from regulators to lend to underqualified borrowers, while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played an outsized role in inflating the bubble, pumping the housing market full of junk mortgages ultimately backed by taxpayers.

When the mortgage lenders and their underwriters went underwater, society was forced to pay for their life support. Such is the privilege of institutions deemed “too big to fail.” The tragic corollary to this terrible slogan is that immunity from failure destroys the incentive for excellence and the creative energy unleashed by learning from failure and clearing away the deadwood. These institutions do not develop in a vacuum. A company that is too big to fail can’t exist without a government that is too big to stay out of the private market.

Now that bad actors know that bailouts, subsidies, and government partnerships are the price of failure, they have more incentive to place risk on taxpayers again. The prospect of another government-inflated bubble and taxpayer-financed


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bailout should be unacceptable. We can neither afford another such recession nor allow governmental interference to create a new financial calamity.

The measures that were taken to ensure a sound financial sector—the “Dodd–Frank” Act chief among them—stand as a grim monument to the consequences of panicked action by legislators. The government either regulated completely unrelated issues or created vast new powers for itself, generating new opportunities for incompetent administration and inviting corruption and unprecedented intrusion into the private affairs of American citizens. In the process, these regulations are tying down the private sector, preventing it from doing all it can to lift Americans out of the economic doldrums. Worse still, rather than ending “too big to fail,” Dodd–Frank’s provisions enshrined it in law. As for the Federal Reserve, despite the connection between its involvement in the economy and the panic in 2008, it has only stepped up its interference in financial markets, both through its expanded “assistance” to financial firms during the crisis and through its subsequent rounds of quantitative easing, which have increased the prospect of inflation and put taxpayers at further risk.

Congress can act to ensure that history does not repeat itself. Conservatives can and should ensure that taxpayers will never again bail out large institutions. Instead of bailouts, large financial institutions that fail should be allowed to wind down through an orderly bankruptcy process. Government corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated altogether and the housing market made more stable by relying more on private financial firms that are not backstopped by taxpayers. And the Fed’s regulatory actions, which go far beyond merely maintaining price stability, must be reported and accountable to Congress and, therefore, to the public.

If we are to root out corruption and irresponsible stewardship in the private sector, we must attack the government policies that encourage it. To occupy Wall Street is to stage sit-ins over symptoms; to occupy Washington is to kill the disease at its source.

GROW JOBS AND PAYCHECKS WITH ABUNDANT ENERGY

In 1748, the little town of Manakin saw the opening of Virginia’s first commercial coal mine. William Hart dug America’s first natural gas well in New York in 1821. Daniel Halladay manufactured the first viable windmill in a Connecticut machine shop in 1854. George Bissell and Edwin Drake were the first to drill for oil in 1859. A team of geniuses brought the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction critical right after Thanksgiving 1942.

Today, thanks to technological advances like fracking and horizontal drilling, the United States produces more oil and natural gas than any other country in the world. It is an energy boom as historic as any we have seen before in our nation’s history. The only obstacle standing in the way of this progress is not technology, resource constraints, or any inability of industry to capitalize on the moment; it is government regulation of these innovations and the free-market forces that can take advantage of them.

Over time, bureaucrats and radical environmental ideologues have eroded the energy market by promoting and implementing policies that pick winners and losers. President Obama’s EPA imposes high energy prices and destroys jobs for no discernable environmental impact. His Administration slow walks permitting for extraction on federal lands and offshore. And despite the dearth of evidence of environmental concerns, the Administration has delayed approval of the Keystone XL pipeline time and time again. Today in America, it seems that the only glide path through the regulatory process is to apply for a green energy subsidy.

To understand the problem only in terms of environmental concerns is to dismiss the capacity for greed and indulgence by the members of the ruling class in Washington, DC. For all the people who lose out under the existing regulatory regime, there are plenty of winners, and they are not small producers struggling to get by. They are the well-connected—big solar, big wind, big ethanol—that know all the ins and outs of the regulatory process and have the resources to pay off the politicians who write the rules. It’s no coincidence that big agribusiness aggressively lobbies politicians who control ethanol policy; that Solyndra investor George Kaiser was a top bundler to President Obama; that the list of other green energy grant beneficiaries reads like the attendance list at a Vanity Fair party: Elon Musk, Larry Page, Al Gore, and various high-profile progressive political donors.

We know that’s not how a successful market works. Bureaucrats aren’t investment bankers, and friends of bureaucrats are unlikely to be the savviest of entrepreneurs. But government malfeasance toward American energy has even more disastrous effects than wasted money. In subsidizing these companies—even the successful ones—Washington distorts the market, tilting the playing field toward

If we are to root out corruption and irresponsible stewardship in the private sector, we must attack the government policies that encourage it. To occupy Wall Street is to stage sit-ins over symptoms; to occupy Washington is to kill the disease at its source.


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politically favored individuals and companies and away from the solutions that will benefit most Americans.

These trends—subsidies for some technologies, ham-fisted regulation for others—are not merely unfair to investors in energy sources disliked by government. They directly harm our nation by destroying thousands of jobs, hampering economic growth, and raising energy prices for Americans who can least afford it.

This is no accident. The President and his Department of Energy have explicitly stated that their policies raise energy prices and that they consider this to be a good thing because it will force their fellow citizens to use morally superior technologies and “nudge” them toward conservation. In this case, conservation means paying more money to use less energy.

It is simply not the concern of the federal government to promote one energy source over another or to force people to use a certain type of fuel. It is the government’s job to preserve a free society where these decisions can be made by the people themselves.

DEFEND INTERNET FREEDOM

Over the past 20 years, the world has been changed immeasurably by the advent of the Internet and other communications technologies. For the first time in world history, information is available to individuals at the touch of a finger, letting them keep in touch with far-off friends and family, giving them access to goods and services from around the globe, and enabling them to participate in civic debates hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Today, broadband is one of the economy’s bright spots, with providers expected to invest some $30 billion per year in private capital in their networks. These advances have expanded the economy and improved the quality of life for billions of people around the globe and opened the doors of opportunity for the would-be entrepreneur, who is empowered to start a company from his garage.

This revolution in human affairs is a free-market success story. Although it was created as a Defense Department research project, the Internet long ago shed its government links and has thrived as a largely unregulated network, harnessing the energy and creativity of countless private individuals and firms. No central authority dictates what services are provided on the Web, what technologies are used, or what content will be available. The result is an innovative and competitive network of offerings—and the network is still expanding.

The long-term freedom of the Internet, however, is hardly assured. Some of the potential threats are obvious; others may appear small at first. But conservatives would be unfaithful to their commitment to limited government to allow even the smallest encroachments on Internet freedom given the probability that they will metastasize over time.

Many politicians and state tax collectors are pushing Congress to allow state governments to force retailers located in other states to collect sales taxes across lines of jurisdiction. They say they want to equalize the tax burdens between so-called brick-and-mortar retailers and their online counterparts, but rather than equalize, the proposal would create new disparities and impose new burdens as sellers struggle to deal with the tax laws of some 10,000 jurisdictions and 46 state tax authorities. Federal proposals to address this so-called problem should be resisted at every opportunity, allowing for deference to states to choose their own approaches to regulating e-commerce at the origin of sale.

So-called net neutrality regulations trade a free, competitive Internet for one where speed is monitored by five members of the Federal Communications Commission. The overall result would be bad news not just for web surfers, but also for the economy. While giving preference to some companies over others, these government officials would inevitably be drawn to censorship when picking and choosing the treatment of content.

Harm is also threatened from outside Washington as more foreign governments clamor to take control of the Internet. Many nations, such as China and Russia, have made no secret of their desire to limit online expression. Even some democratic nations have supported limiting freedoms online. The European Union, for example, recently required search engines, upon request, to remove links to categories of personal information, such as prior bankruptcies, that are considered no longer relevant or without a compelling public interest meriting disclosure—in effect, forcing search engines such as Google to censor content. With the U.S. government’s decision to end its oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the corporation that manages name and number assignments on the Internet, these countries see a chance to fill the vacuum and to use ICANN’s Internet governance role to limit expression on the web.

They are the well-connected—big solar, big wind, big ethanol—that know all the ins and outs of the regulatory process and have the resources to pay off the politicians who write the rules.


EMBARGOEDIt is dangerous to take the Internet’s open nature for granted. All governments naturally abhor regulatory vacuums, and ours is no different. If conservatives do not begin to take a stand on protecting the Internet as we know it, it may not remain a frontier for economic innovation for long.

CREATE OPPORTUNITY IN THE WORKPLACE

American workers often don’t seem to have a voice in Washington, as labor policy tends to serve the interests of unions more than workers. Congress crafted America’s labor laws for the industrial economy of the Great Depression—and has barely changed them since then. These increasingly out-of-touch 20th century laws often hold back workers who are trying to get ahead in a 21st century economy. Many of the left’s solutions would only make the challenges facing struggling workers worse. Congress and state governments should reduce legal barriers that prevent workers from starting careers and climbing the ladder and that prevent employers from offering compensation in ways that respond to the needs of today’s workers.

Congress passed America’s major labor laws generations ago. Men held most jobs then, and manufacturing and heavy industry dominated the economy. Most children grew up in one-income families in which one parent worked and the other stayed home to raise the kids.

That economy no longer exists. Women have entered the workforce en masse; most mothers now work outside the home. Computers have automated many of the routine manufacturing tasks that humans once performed. Technology also enables previously unthinkable workplace flexibility. Yet the law often punishes employers and employees who try to adapt to these changing opportunities and dynamics.

For example, the Fair Labor Standards Act requires most workers to collect overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours a week. It does not allow them to receive compensatory time off instead. Many workers—especially working parents—want more flexibility in their hours. They would like to bank extra hours in some weeks to spend with their families in later weeks. This 1930s law says employers cannot permit such flextime.

Similarly, companies must track the hours of salaried employees who are eligible for overtime—even if they work no overtime. Employers cannot track hours reliably when employees telecommute. As a result, many human resource managers forbid overtime-eligible salaried employees from working remotely. This flexibility would benefit workers and their families, yet a law written decades before personal computers were invented prevents it.

The National Labor Relations Board is rewriting union election rules to tilt the scales toward union organizers. Some workers may want a union, but the choice should be made fairly. Only 10 percent of today’s union workers have even had a chance to vote on whether they wanted a union in their workplace at all. Workers should get a chance to vote on their future every few years, deciding whether they want their same—or any—union. These reforms should be complemented with laws preventing union bosses from withholding performance pay from workers and with the promotion of other 21st century labor relations models like work councils and employee involvement programs.

At the state level, special-interest groups have walled off a third of the jobs in the economy from outside competition. One of every three jobs in the United States requires a license to perform. In some cases, these licenses protect public safety. We would not want just anyone performing brain surgery or filling a prescription. Unfortunately, in many cases, these licenses have little to do with protecting consumers. Every state in America requires barbers to get state permission to cut hair. Thirteen states license bartenders. Louisiana licenses florists. Maryland even licenses fortune-tellers.

The public does not need protection from bad haircuts or inaccurate fortunes. So why do these jobs require licenses? Trade associations lobby heavily for them. Licensing requirements make it more expensive for unemployed workers to enter a field. A prospective security guard in Michigan, for example, must study for three years. Reduced competition means higher wages for those in that field at the cost of fewer job opportunities and higher prices for those on the outside.

Licensing functions as another type of labor cartel that benefits insiders at the expense of competitors on the outside. States should exhaustively review their licensing requirements and eliminate all those not necessary to protect public safety. If Americans don’t like their haircut, they can go to a different barber. The government should remove barriers to job creation instead of erecting them.

These increasingly out-of-touch 20th century laws often hold back workers who are trying to get ahead in a 21st century economy. Many of the left’s solutions would only make the challenges facing struggling workers worse.


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A STRONG SOCIETY PROMOTE MARRIAGE, FAMILY,

AND OPPORTUNITY

While Washington focuses on policies that grant favoritism to the well-connected, the next generation of Americans faces an uphill struggle against social

breakdown, a welfare system with the wrong incentives, and poor educational opportunities.

The first of these factors is the most important. A strong future for the next generation begins with the recognition that strong marriages and intact families serve the ends of limited government more effectively, less intrusively, and at less cost than picking up the pieces of a shattered marriage culture. Married men and women tend to have better financial health, increased savings, and greater social mobility than unmarried individuals. Children raised in families headed by a married couple have a greater chance of experiencing economic stability, high academic performance, and emotional maturity.

Despite all the benefits of an intact marriage culture, more than four in 10 children are born outside of marriage today. That is a status quo that threatens individual well-being and hampers opportunity—and one that demands not merely policymaking, but cultural renewal. But rather than make an effort to reinvigorate a declining marriage culture, political and cultural elites are engaged in a campaign to redefine the institution of marriage to include same-sex relationships, undermining every child’s right to a mother and a father. Decades of social science point to households led by a married mom and dad as the best environment for a child’s well-being. We should not allow policy to place the desires of adults over the needs of children. Instead, we should uphold in policy the ideal that every child deserves a mother and a father.

The breakdown of marriage and family is one of the greatest drivers of poverty. Children born outside of marriage are more than five times more likely to experience poverty than those raised in married households. Yet government assistance programs like welfare often create disincentives toward marriage and independence, dampening human flourishing and impeding opportunity. The current welfare system is a web of over 80 different means-tested programs that too often discourage work. Few of these programs have work requirements, and under President Obama, even those that are on the books as a result of reforms in the 1990s have been put in peril. Eliminating marriage penalties and turning welfare into work activation will ensure that more low-income families

can achieve self-sufficiency and have the opportunity to enjoy the American dream more fully.

In addition to supporting marriage and reorienting welfare policy toward work, perhaps the most important area in need of reform is our education system, which is failing young people at all levels. Federal government intervention in elementary and secondary education has been growing for half a century, during which time education spending has skyrocketed and programs and regulations have ballooned. The government has also expanded its role in higher education through an open spigot of federal student aid, creating a cycle of lending and spending that has failed to address the college cost problem. These policies, sadly, have not produced results.

Every child deserves the chance for a good education that can prepare him or her for a good job and a bright future. What is sorely needed in K–12 education is not rigid government control but openness to choice and competition.

That means increased flexibility for parents sending their kids to public schools, allowing them to choose the best options for their children and forcing schools to earn their budgets by outperforming neighborhood competition. It means embracing the emerging model of education savings accounts at the state level. Most pressingly, it means that states should reject efforts at centralization like Common Core, allowing for the sort of innovation that occurs only in the laboratories of democracy.

The higher education sphere suffers from a crisis of cost and quality, worsened by an inflationary student loan structure and the domination of the higher education accreditation cartel. These factors have driven college costs to an all-time high at a time when access to knowledge is cheaper than at any other point in human history. Accreditation reform coupled with a major reform in federal student aid, which has exacerbated the college cost problem while saddling students with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, offers some hope of reining in these costs.

What is sorely needed in K–12 education is not rigid government control but openness to choice and competition.


EMBARGOED PROTECT RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

In a bare 16 words, our Constitution enshrines a principle of freedom that remains among the most vital to human dignity across the ages of written law:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

These words protect every American’s freedom to live and work according to the dictates of his or her conscience while respecting others who do the same. Religious liberty and the pluralism it sustains is a legacy of the Founding Fathers, who were intent on building a society in which no individual or family would fear for life or property because of creed or innermost conviction.

The Founders understood that vibrant faith communities are essential to ordered liberty, promoting well-being among individuals and families and motivating the care for others in civil society. Many of our nation’s best opportunities for education, social services, health care, and much more are provided by faith communities. This is why we should protect Americans’ freedom to live out their convictions not only in how they worship, but in how they work and serve others. Unfortunately, despite the many benefits of religious practice to society, religious expression in the public square faces increasing challenges.

That certain lawmakers have seen fit to water down protections for religious liberty in exchange for political gain is a stain upon the nation’s legacy of protecting fundamental freedoms. Today, liberal policymakers reduce the robust religious freedom understood by our Founders and enshrined in the Constitution to a mere “freedom to worship.” Faith, in their view, should remain a private affair—suitable for worship in homes and churches but left at the doors of the workplace or charitable endeavors.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected this narrow view of religious freedom, ruling that the government cannot force family businesses to violate their beliefs by providing coverage of drugs and devices that can end the life of a human embryo. This is a step in the right direction, but this recent decision neither protects all Americans’ religious freedom when it comes to health care nor ends the danger they face from the marshalled forces of intolerance. Hundreds of other individuals, family businesses, and charities are continuing litigation over the coercive health care mandate. The fight for freedom of conscience on this front remains active.

Threats to religious liberty are not confined to issues of health care. In many places, the effort to redefine marriage has turned into a direct assault on Americans’ freedom to speak and live out

the truth about marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Already, in Washington, D.C., Illinois, and Massachusetts, faith-based adoption and foster care organizations have been forced to shutter their agencies out of religious or moral objections to placing children with same-sex couples. Family businesses like photographers, bakers, florists, and many others involved in the wedding industry have been hauled into court because they declined to provide their services for a same-sex ceremony in violation of their religious beliefs.

Washington can act now to stem the tide. Policy should prohibit the federal government from discriminating against individuals or organizations—whether nonprofit or for-profit—that believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman or that sexual relations are reserved for marriage. Individuals and groups that hold those beliefs should be free from government discrimination in tax policy, employment, licensing, accreditation, or contracting.

American families should not be forced to disregard their deeply held beliefs simply because they go into business to provide for themselves and employees. We should be free to live and work in accordance with our deepest convictions. Protecting religious freedom preserves the pluralism and individual liberty upon which America was founded. Conservatives must strive to preserve a society in which, in the words of Hebrew scripture as quoted by George Washington, “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

PROMOTE PATIENT-CENTERED HEALTH CARE

Perhaps no issue reflects the need for market-based reform more than health care. A health care system focused on opportunity would empower each patient and his or her doctor and improve health care quality, access, and affordability. Instead, we have a system that centralizes more and more decision-making in Washington.

Health policy generally aims to improve health care quality, access, and affordability. Of these three, in America, cost is the central problem. Health care quality in the United States is second to none. To the extent that access remains a problem for some, solving the cost problem offers the best hope of addressing their needs.

The left and the right have competing approaches to health reform. The left’s vision is to put government in the driver’s seat of health care decisions through command and control. The pre-Obamacare system, the left posits, exemplified all of the worst excesses of capitalism: a messy competition for margins in which individual insurers’ uncoordinated efforts could generate healthy profits only through deception and gouging of consumers. Obamacare is built on the assumption that profit-seeking


EMBARGOEDcorporations can deliver affordable care to all Americans, but only if private motivations are subordinated to common interest through heavy regulation.

In effect, the government has turned insurance companies into public utilities, promising them a comfortable existence in exchange for eliminating competition. They cannot set their own prices; they cannot choose the services they provide; they cannot select their customers; they cannot create innovative business models or products that might “game” the system and undermine competitors.

The law provides massive incentives to insurers for cooperation. It offers them a steady stream of customers through its requirement that all Americans purchase their products. It provides bailouts for companies that cannot bear the costs imposed by its regulations. Most important, its regulatory hurdles eliminate the potential for disruptive business models that could threaten the standing of the strongest players in the market. Insurance executives, the left hopes, can be trusted to give consumers a fair deal and reduce costs—so long as they are guaranteed comfortable annual returns and insulated from threats in the marketplace.

A better alternative for health care reform would give individuals choice and control of their health care dollars and decisions. This vision stems from an alternative view of the state of the pre-Obamacare system. Properly understood, there was no patient-centered market for individuals. Rather, our health care system has long been among the most segmented and least market-driven sectors of our economy. A large portion of the country receives government-controlled health care from Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, market mechanisms have long been impeded in the private sector by the tax code’s arbitrary preference for employer-provided care, which serves to prevent consumers from choosing the plans best suited to their needs.

The result of all these distortions is unsurprising: an individual market that has long lacked an adequate consumer base on which to thrive. In such circumstances, it’s no wonder that the industry could not provide the market signals that exist in most other sectors of the economy and serve to drive prices to affordable levels.

Obamacare’s solution to the health care problem is to regulate “bad” plans in the individual and group markets out of existence and drive individuals toward government-approved and taxpayer-subsidized health plans. A conservative solution to health care would do the opposite: It would give individuals and families the freedom to choose the plan that best suits their needs from a marketplace in which insurers and providers have the flexibility to compete to provide better care at lower cost.

To get there, Congress should guarantee fair tax treatment that allows each individual to buy insurance with tax benefits that are similar to the tax benefits available for those with employer-based coverage. Individuals who like their company-provided insurance should not be forced out by government overreach like Obamacare, but by the same token, Americans should not feel locked into employer-provided insurance due to unfair tax treatment of individually purchased plans.

Furthermore, there is no reason why Americans in government-run health care—Medicaid and Medicare recipients—should be locked out of the benefits of choice and competition. Reform of these programs would introduce the same kinds of market mechanisms that can better address patient needs while driving down costs for consumers and taxpayers alike.

Health policy generally aims to improve health care quality, access, and affordability. Of these three, in America, cost is the central problem. Health care quality in the United States is second to none. To the extent that access remains a problem for some, solving the cost problem offers the best hope of addressing their needs.


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A STRONG AMERICA ENSURE MILITARY STRENGTH

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the world has become a more dynamic, dangerous, and destabilized place. While these dangers may be less apparent to some Americans

than they were in the months following 9/11, they are no less real. Indeed, the failure of President Obama’s foreign policy of weakness and disengagement from the world makes it urgent for conservatives to build the case for the alternative.

Leadership in security affairs is not a rhetorical exercise. It is a matter of action and real-world choices about our capabilities. American power projected globally undergirds and makes possible stability in diplomatic affairs; it facilitates free trade and commerce; it sustains a system that has done more good for more people than any other in history. Though others gain from our efforts, the United States has been the chief beneficiary.

Consequently, defense is not just a budget line item. It is the primary responsibility of our federal government and a responsibility that we are increasingly ill-prepared to meet.

Our defense establishment must always be held accountable as the most trusted stewards of taxpayer monies. Thus, every effort must be continually made in the areas of acquisition reform, the rooting out of waste and inefficient use of limited resources, and adherence to the highest standard of moral and ethical conduct. Our nation has come to expect no less from our military. In the same spirit, however, we must provide the resources necessary to secure the defense of our country and our geopolitical interests in all corners of the world. Our current defense budget trajectory is not merely inadequate to the task; it poses a fundamental threat to the long-term security interests of the United States.

No clearer indication of this can be found than in the decline of our military forces when it comes to modernized capability, their capacity for operations, and their daily readiness.

Under sequestration levels of funding mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act, our Army—already at 80 percent of the size necessary to meet national security needs—is on track to fall to 50 percent of strength. The Chief of Staff of the Army, General Raymond Odierno, has testified that under sequestration, only 20 percent of his operational forces will be ready to meet strategic requirements.

Similarly, the Marine Corps has dropped from a high of 202,000 Marines to 190,000 and is on its way to 175,000 or fewer by

2019. This comes at a time when our field commanders have registered a greater demand for such forces than at any time since Vietnam.

The Navy is no better off. It has consistently validated a requirement for 313 ships to meet security needs. Yet as China aggressively expands its fleet and intimidates its neighbors, our Navy is on track to be downsized to roughly 250 ships in the next five to 10 years.

As for the Air Force, it is being forced to sacrifice both capability and capacity in order to modernize: eliminating entire inventories of attack aircraft, platforms, and support vehicles to preserve enough funding for the next-generation fighter, bomber, tanker, and unmanned air systems essential to serving future needs.

Across the board, our commanders have been forced to choose between keeping a much smaller force combat-ready or sacrificing readiness to replace and modernize key equipment. That situation is dangerous and unacceptable.

The American people deserve a thorough, transparent defense appropriations process that supplies their sons and daughters with the tools they need to ensure our nation’s safety in the most cost-effective way possible. Defense spending should be set through an analysis of the threats our nation faces, the capabilities needed to meet those threats, and—only then—the programs needed to achieve those capabilities.

No such process would commit our military to the atrophy it is currently undergoing. Across the world, we face serious threats to American interests—threats for which our military prepares contingency plans every day. The Obama Administration’s defense policy can be defended only with shallow platitudes;

The American people deserve a thorough, transparent defense appropriations process that supplies their sons and daughters with the tools they need to ensure our nation’s safety in the most cost-effective way possible.


EMBARGOEDconservative defense policy should focus on creating and supporting the warfighting capacity needed to ensure that we have the force to defend America’s interests now and in the future.

PRACTICE A STRONG, FOCUSED FOREIGN POLICY

Six years after President Obama’s election, Americans have seen the damage that can be done when our foreign policy veers too far toward tentative retrenchment. All around the world, President Obama’s foreign policy ethos has been: We mean no harm to our enemies and lead from behind in defending our interests. Each year, that philosophy has generated new embarrassments, all culminating in the chaos we see around the world today.

This dynamic is clearest in the Middle East. In the Obama era, when enemy regimes have faced uprisings, we have held off from supporting resistance movements. Yet in moments requiring sober circumspection, as when allies have been overthrown by Islamists, the United States has instead offered encouragement to revolutionaries. We declare red lines we are unwilling to enforce against our enemies, as in Syria, sending mixed messages to all sides. When our friends face existential crisis, as is occurring now in Israel, we isolate them economically and preach the moral equivalence of their aggressors.

Worst of all, this occurs in the context of American withdrawal from the region despite the hard-fought gains achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving us increasingly irrelevant in the calculations of the players that are fomenting regional instability. Today, the situation is closer to regional war than it has been in many years. Our bad choices in the past have foreclosed good options in the present.

In every region of the world, President Obama’s foreign policy shortcomings have created similar turmoil.

President Obama began his Administration promising a reset with Russia underpinned by concessions on missile defense. Today, Russia is aligned with our enemies in Syria and Iran, and its aggression against Ukraine demonstrates the contempt in which it holds U.S. and Western interests. Years ago, the thought of a commercial airliner being downed by Russian-backed militants in European airspace would have been unthinkable. Today, it is yet another reminder that Westernization and progress are hardly assured when America fails to assert leadership.

The Obama Administration’s foreign policy in Latin America got off to a rocky start in 2009 when it tried to reinstate Honduras’s

legally deposed president—a man who had blatantly violated his country’s constitution. This action sent a clear message throughout the region that has echoed during subsequent events in other countries. For example, this year’s crisis in Venezuela—the murders, the expulsion of American diplomats, the repression of political opposition to the Maduro government—has been met by muted concern from the United States. Such a posture is hardly conducive to advancing American interests in the region.

The Administration has made much of its “pivot” to Asia, but that push has been marred by American acquiescence to Chinese impositions, leading regional partners to question existing security arrangements. China’s recent adventures in the South and East China Seas are great cause for concern, and our allies have less reason every day to believe that when China disputes their territorial boundaries, the United States will have their backs.

Indeed, it’s hard to find a single point on the map in which the President’s approach has produced results.

There is an alternative, and it doesn’t mean putting America on a perpetual war footing. It’s an approach familiar to Americans who remember the Reagan years: unashamed projection of American strength aimed at deterring threats before they materialize. Small steps—such as ensuring that the US only provides foreign aid that serves US interests efficaciously, for example—may have outsized influence. But more important will be the bold steps that will signal to the world that the United States does not ignore the transgressions of its enemies and is willing to provide the security guarantees needed to maintain peace.

Foreign policy is not one-size-fits-all. The consequences of any action can be unpredictable, and there is no such thing as a perfect prescription. Even so, it is no surprise that the policies

There is an alternative, and it doesn’t mean putting America on a perpetual war footing. It’s an approach familiar to Americans who remember the Reagan years: unashamed projection of American strength aimed at deterring threats before they materialize.


EMBARGOEDof the past six years have provoked crisis after crisis. Global security requires committed projection of power by responsible stakeholders like the United States, and it is long past time for U.S. policy to reflect that truth.

FIX IMMIGRATION AND SECURE BORDERS

The current immigration debate makes no sense to anyone except elites in business and government.

America welcomes one million legal immigrants every year. We are generous and ask merely that those who wish to settle here obey the law.

Yet those laws and the mechanisms meant to enforce them are clearly broken. Some who follow all the rules, like bright foreign students educated at American universities, are forced to take their talents back to their home countries due to a lack of high-skilled visas. The border has never before been so clearly porous, and our existing legal institutions have never before appeared so ill-equipped to address a flood of illegal migration.

The solution should be obvious: border security, targeted reforms to address pressing needs for high-skilled workers, and simplification of the process for legal immigration. Yet these common-sense solutions have all been held hostage by Washington to the provision that is both most controversial and most important to various electoral calculations and donor interests: amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Few Americans see amnesty as the solution to the problems they face making ends meet or providing opportunity to their families, but that matters little. Amnesty is the chief concern for those with the power to influence the policy debate: the operatives on both sides of the aisle who are convinced that amnesty alone is the political silver bullet of immigration reform. So long as the consultant class sets the terms of the immigration debate, real reform will be impossible.

Giving priority to those who come here in violation of our laws is a grave injustice to those who have waited in line and abided by them. The core problem with amnesty is clear: It just encourages more illegal immigrants in hopes of future amnesties. We’ve done this before, and it hasn’t solved the problem.

Moreover, it sends a clear signal to other migrants that the United States ignores its national security interests and the rule of law and will not hold them accountable for their actions. We know this from experience: The amnesty passed in 1986 only aggravated the problem it aimed to solve. Partial, informal amnesty by President Obama has provoked the current border

crisis. Legalization would impose high costs on taxpayers at both the federal and state levels. From a policy perspective, there is practically no justification for it. It is justifiable only by appeal to politics, emotion, or financial interest.

Conservatives are ready and willing to pass reforms to strengthen the integrity of our border. We must provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, and the Coast Guard with the targeted resources needed to enforce the law on the border. Given the nature of the current border crisis, it is also crucial that the hearing process for Central American migrants be revised to prevent immigrants from slipping into the shadows after release from official custody. More important, the central magnet for the new flood of immigrants—President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals memorandum—must be rescinded.

Conservatives are ready for a variety of reforms in the legal process: an increased H-1B visa cap to help attract and retain talent from across the globe; pilot programs for temporary workers to allow experimentation to meet other discrete labor market needs without causing a massive flood of low-skilled foreign labor or committing the United States to provision of unaffordable welfare assistance to foreigners engaging with our economy; a simplified visa process and a reformed Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Not a single one of these reforms necessitates amnesty, and all should be achievable in the next Congress, once the threat of conference with the Gang of Eight Senate amnesty bill is removed.

America has always been a land of opportunity, but American economic success must be undergirded by respect for the rule of law and a primary commitment to the interests of our own political community. Immigration reform that is done properly can be perfectly consistent both with our legacy and with that commitment.

Yet these common-sense solutions have all been held hostage by Washington to the provision that is both most controversial and most important to various electoral calculations and donor interests: amnesty for illegal immigrants.

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