The Way Forward

After the serious trouncing the Trump camp received in Wisconsin, the Donald lashed out in a disgusting and worse-than-childish statement posted to his website and disseminated by all of the major media outlets. His language was crude and the statement was poorly written, leading me to believe that he wrote it himself. Contrast his poor behavior to the speech that Ted Cruz gave after his Wisconsin win. It was concise and positive. Ted struck a tone of unity. The party is coming to him, albeit begrudgingly. I find this to be quite satisfying.

The way that this country can move forward is to look to our founding principles and apply them. Ted Cruz is the only candidate actually proposing to roll back the size and scope of the federal government. Implementation of the Cruz tax plan would result in economic growth the likes of which this country hasn't seen in years. The Cruz tax plan would also take away the majority of the K Street lobbyists' power. Without an ability to carve out tax loopholes, they would be made useless, for all intents and purposes. The Cruz flat tax would also effectively eliminate the need for the IRS.

Obamacare will only be abolished and replaced with free market solutions under a Cruz administration. By decoupling health insurance from employers, thereby making it portable, and then tearing down mandates and onerous state by state insurance rules, the cost would drop because competition would explode. These fat cat insurance companies would actually have to work for your business. Novel concept. Another reform being proposed is increased availability of Healthcare Savings Accounts(HSAs). This would allow a person to carry a catastrophic policy and then shop around for the best deal on normal, everyday medical procedures like office visits and simple tests. Empower the actual end user and costs would drop dramatically.

The Cruz plan for border security is an actual plan. You can read the whole thing by clicking here to go to the website, tedcruz.org . Ted has been working on this issue for years. He is not a newcomer to fighting illegal immigration and he won't be flexible like one New York lefty running on the Republican side this year. He actually knows that border security IS national security.

Ted Cruz's plan to fix our military is just as impressive. The Navy and Air Force need to be streamlined and strengthened. The Army needs more soldiers and the Marine Corps just needs to be unleashed when called upon. Ted's ideas for restructuring the rules of engagement are also a needed change. No longer should Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen or Marines have to call a superior officer to be able to defend themselves or terminate the enemy. The whole purpose of the military is to kill the bad guys and break their stuff. It's high time they be allowed to do that when force is needed. Once the objective is completed, we need to go home. No more nation building where there aren't nations to be built.

All of the above pales in comparison to the restoration of Constitutional liberty that would happen under a Cruz presidency. People of peaceful faiths would no longer walk on egg shells when exercising their inherent rights. Abolition of the federal department of Education would be a monumental step toward allowing states the ability to determine their own paths on education. School choice will be, nay, must be the central civil rights issue of the coming century. Leftist schools are resulting in dumbed down automatons that can't think or reason or live independently. I truly believe that homeschool and parochial school parents shouldn't be made to pay taxes to support schools they don't use. This practice is the epitome of taxation without representation and it needs to stop. Without federal mandates, these battles could be more easily waged at the state and local level. Below, you will find an excerpt from tedcruz.org detailing his plans on eliminating the federal department of education and I've linked it to his Five for Freedom page for more info.

"Educational opportunity thrives on choice, ingenuity, and diversity; the Department of Education squelches all three. Largely created as an outgrowth of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the Department of Education has existed in its current form since 1980. Despite its stated aim to bring equal access to all, it has failed to close the gap between low-income communities and other communities, and instead has led to one-size-fits-all solutions imposed on millions of students with differing educational needs. Eliminating the Department of Education not only restores the states’ constitutional power and saves taxpayers billions of dollars, it returns decision-making to parents and local communities, and liberates students and teachers from a failed top-down approach. The growing federal role in education spurred by the Education Department has led to perverse mandates such as Common Core and counterproductive laws such as No Child Left Behind.

We should repeal every word of Common Core. And, as President, I will direct the Secretary of Education to immediately end the federal government’s mandates that seek to force states to adopt this failed attempt at a universal curriculum.

Even more broadly, we need to get the federal government out of education altogether. The Department of Education has the third largest discretionary budget in the federal government, and it provides 10 percent of funding for K-12 education. Yet, with that 10 percent share, it imposes significant requirements on states and schools, forcing them to submit to federal bureaucrats. Education has traditionally been a state matter; the people closest to students know them best – parents and teachers know far more than Washington bureaucrats – and we are already witnessing remarkable reforms by state and local governments to increase school choice and resist Common Core standards. We need to restore parent and student choice and remove federal barriers to children’s success.

A Cruz Administration will eliminate the programs in the Department of Education that are wasteful, ineffective, and fail to achieve better student outcomes. We will perform a careful review of remaining programs to assess how best to return those responsibilities to state and local communities.

The lion’s share of K-12 funding will be block granted to the states, including Title I funding and the Individuals with Disabilities Education program, while the Indian Education program and Federal Impact Aid will be transferred to existing departments. Pell Grants will also remain intact and can be transferred to the Treasury Department. This will result in higher quality education, more tailored to local needs, at a lower cost.

The D.C. Public School Funding and the Opportunity Scholarship Program will persist because Washington D.C. is under the federal purview of Congress and it is constitutionally appropriate for those programs to continue to be overseen at a federal level. But those programs can be run by another department, and the Education Department can be shut down.

Ineffective Spending:

Since the Department’s inception in 1980, the federal government has spent nearly $1.5 trillion on education.
It cost the U.S. $151,000 per student to put the graduating class of 2009 through public school; adjusted for inflation, that is nearly three times the amount we spent on the graduating class of 1970.
Despite this outrageous spending, education outcomes have either stagnated or declined. The nation’s report card, first administered in 1992, shows that the disparity between white and black 12th grade reading scores has increased – showing African American students half a grade further behind their peers, and totaling a nearly three grade-level difference."

We know the way forward. We know that this way will work. We must put stupid party politics to the side and move toward a better and more free future. Ted Cruz is the only candidate in this race that has the correct plans, the temperament, the knowledge and the lack of fear to expend political capital to make good on his campaign promises. We must stand together and be heard. America is too valuable to entrust her leadership to unprincipled progressive nationalism or socialism.

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Below, you'll find the video of the Rally for Religious Liberty in Des Moines, Iowa. That event launched my foray into political activism and no other event has changed my life as much as that evening did. For more on how that day changed my life, click here.