Competition:

Wednesday – December 15, 2010

Competition:

Last week, the president said that he “looks forward to doing battle on the field of competition.” There is no competition when liberals are involved. Liberals will tax and spend under the guise of giving out benefits. The debate today is centered on the extension of the Bush era Tax cuts. Instead of a simple up or down vote the outgoing Congress is attempting to pass along with the extension of the Bush era tax cuts another 1.1 trillion dollar spending bill, which includes 2,000 other ear marks.

The new incoming Congress wants to have a simple up or down vote on just the extension, without any other amendments attached. But the Democrats can’t stop making their holiday gift list a reality. This is why we have a new Congress, because they competed and won on ideas and not on spending our money to create new voting blocks. We must insist that this new Congress establish rules that will permit simple up and down votes so that our congressional members can compete and not be forced to vote for a list of other things in exchange for a vote on one item.

We cannot compete in the world when members of Congress want 55% of our incomes. We cannot compete in the world when the estate tax will take over 35% of someone’s estate just because they are dead. We cannot compete on a world scale when business leaders are afraid to invest and expand with penalties attached because of the profits they make. This nation was designed to compete and designed so that citizens could retain their wealth.

James Wolfensohn the former World Bank president has written in his new book “A Global Life” that by 2050, 80% of the world’s GDP will be in Asia. In 2000 80% of the world’s GDP was in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

I wrote this week about how Paul Revere was a visionary when it came to commerce. He knew the value of profit and investing profit for expansion and not for taxation.

The liberals will do their best to pass the last go around of their spending initiatives. We must ask the President one question: why not demand of Congress to have a simple up or down vote on the extension and then compete on the battle ground of ideas to support the spending initiatives they so desperately want.

There are two views of competition. One is for sports and the other one is strictly for politics. The president does not speak of fair play when he speaks of competition. Fair play in politics should encompass what is best not only our present generation, but the generation that follows. This is why up and down votes must be the norm going forward.

America is not a competitor, it is a consumer. America has given away its manufacturing capability and it is in the process of giving away its educational wealth. When this happens it will further erode our competitive ability.

American students once again performed poorly on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the global standardized exam that measures academic achievement around the world.

Meanwhile, students in Shanghai posted much higher scores. This is further evidence that a growing education gap exists between East and West.

PISA is administered every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is based in Paris. The exam evaluates fifteen-year-old students from dozens of different countries on their mastery of reading, mathematics and science – alternating its area of emphasis with each testing cycle.

In 2000, the test focused on reading. In 2003 and 2006, it focused on mathematics and science, respectively. This year’s test once again focused on reading – an area where U.S. students posted lower scores and lost ground compared to their international counterparts.
Of the 34 nations that participated in this year’s exam, America ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. America’s absolute score in reading actually fell by four points over the past nine years, from 504 to 500. By comparison, students in Shanghai posted a 556 score in reading.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the PISA results were a “wake-up call” that Americans needed to “get much more serious about investing in education.”

What Duncan neglected to mention is that the United States already spends more per student than any other country in the world except Luxembourg. In fact, the PISA report noted that countries like Estonia and Poland are achieving similar results while spending less than half the amount of money that America does.

When we fail to raise students that can read and that can add and that can think in creative terms we will fail at competition. When this happens our elected officials will win the competition and they will control and own us.

On this date, in 1791, two events occurred that should have guaranteed our competitiveness around the world. They were:
1. 1st U.S. law school established at University of Pennsylvania
2. Bill of Rights ratified when Virginia gave its approval

It takes smart people to teach the law and smarter people to fight for the law. It took smart people who were educated to draft the Bill of Rights, but it took smarter people to ratify it. In the period leading up to and during our Revolution smart people were competing and fighting to establish liberty and set in place freedoms that guaranteed those liberties.

We look at the law today in ways of bringing suit for profit. This destroys the ability to invest and the ability to expand. Today we forget about the Bill of Rights. This destroys the ability to promote freedoms, when others in our own government compete to take them away.

It took educated people to communicate the need for Independence, but it took smarter people to know the value of freedom and what it would mean for competition. It was competition that won the battles for Freedom and it was the competition of ideas to form a better Union.

Our history has shown that when America sleeps it fails, but when America wakes up, it competes to win. We will wake up in 2011 and we will compete in 2012.

Gregory C. Dildilian
Founder and Executive Director
Pinecone Conservatives

A footnote: In order to compete on the field of battle you will need to know who the other team is. The President still doesn’t know and this is why we cannot compe