Looking for leadership

February 21, 2010
By Herman Cain

When we look past the political rhetoric, this nation’s severe deficiency of leadership is blatantly obvious. The signs of this deficiency start in the White House and cascade all through Congress, and down through all levels of state and local governments.

The appointment of dozens of czars by President Obama has added to the bureaucratic mess in trying to get the right things done in Washington. And appointing a Deficit Reduction Commission a year after being in office is not a sign of good leadership, especially when the president said in December 2008 that “deficits don’t matter”.

When both chambers of Congress spent a year addressing a manufactured health care crisis to end up deadlocked with two terrible proposals is a sure sign of leadership deficiency. Many members are still in denial that they are working on the wrong problem despite a majority of the voters trying to tell them otherwise.

State governments are so addicted to federal assistance and crippled by unfunded mandates that they suffer from economic pneumonia when the federal government catches an economic cold. Now that Uncle Sam has economic pneumonia, some states may be forced into bankruptcy.

But we are not going to be able to repair the deficiency of leadership in this country with an instant leadership pill. Nor are we going to be able to fix this mess with most of the members already in Congress or the White House. This is because, by the time they get elected, they do not have time to learn how to lead, or worse, they believe the title of “great leader” comes with the office. Right now, even good leaders are missing in action.

Our next best option is to look for signs of good leadership in those that aspire to gain our votes in the upcoming November 2010 elections.

After three books on leadership, 40 years of leading businesses and organizations, and hundreds of keynote speeches on leadership, here are some signs I can offer of good leadership to look for in prospective candidates:

• They talk about solutions to problems, rather than just the problems.
• They talk about major strategic issues (national security, the economy, tsunami spending, energy independence and constitutional liberties) instead of petty pandering and partisan party politics.
• They state clearly what they stand for, and what they will not fall for.

Solving any problem starts with working on the right problem (part 1 of 3). This did not happen with the Cap & Trade & Tax & Kill bill, the Health Care Deform legislation or the $787 billion “stimulus” bill, to name just a few examples.

The Cap & Trade bill was an attempt to achieve a political agenda of more government control over businesses, using what has now been exposed as dishonest scientific analysis. Even worse, the United States was going to be the biggest victim of this international scam, and this administration and Congress were vigorously promoting the scam to pander to the environmentalists.

The Health Care Deform bills started with a faulty premise – namely, that we have a health care crisis. No, we have a health care cost crisis. And those two sick Democratic proposals in Congress do not come close to attacking the cost problem, even though the president and the Democrats continue to claim otherwise. Oh yeah, that might be a good pre-condition for leaders. Tell the truth.

The president, the vice president, members of the administration and Democrats in Congress continue to declare that the $787 billion stimulus bill is working. The growing unemployment numbers do not suggest that it is working, and according to the Glenn Beck Show only 6 percent of the American people believe it is working. That’s less than the 7 percent who believe Elvis is still alive.

Looking for leaders must now be our top priority. Otherwise, national problems will continue to have no real solutions, a problem we must solve.

We need job creation policy, not gimmicks

February 14, 2010
By Herman Cain

The president, his administration and most members of Congress still don’t get it! So let’s try to explain job creation another way. You stimulate the creation of jobs by reducing an employer’s cost to keep people employed (less taxes), and then by reducing the cost of a business to grow their business (less regulations). If these two things happen then jobs will be created.

Job creation is not a complicated phenomenon, but the president and the Democrats have been convinced that less taxes is bad, and more regulations are good. It’s just the opposite and there is plenty of historical evidence to prove it.

The Economic Report of the President was released last week by his Council of Economic Advisers. According to the Wall Street Journal (February 11, 2010), “the report offers few new policy prescriptions or economic forecasts.” In fact, the administration still believes it can rebuild the economy through health care legislation, clean-energy initiatives, infrastructure projects, and small-business tax breaks.

Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) gave the most laser-like description of the report. “The Obama Administration’s report is full of blame for the policies of years past, praise for its own failed policies of the past year, and promises about their ideological agenda to grow government.”

Translation, the report is 400-plus pages of repackaged propaganda.

Of course the president restated his commitment to job creation, but most of the chatter from his administration and Congress about a new jobs bill is just another bunch of gimmicks that will do nothing to stimulate new job creation.

Just as “cash for clunkers” was a gimmick that did not work, the current offering of a $5000 tax credit to employers who hire an unemployed worker, plus a limited-time suspension of part of their payroll taxes are just propaganda gimmicks.

Here, again, are some of the real job creation policy suggestions that the president and Congress are not listening to:

Make the current tax rates permanent. The uncertainty of what will happen to tax rates at the end of this year has put businesses in a state of stop. Raising taxes will only make things worse.

Suspend the payroll tax for all workers for a year. This will be an instantaneous stimulus for all employers and all workers. The cost would be approximately the cost of the first stimulus, which did not work, but this one would generate increased tax revenues. And yes, it means the Social Security and Medicare train wrecks will come a year earlier, so start restructuring them now.

Stop the expansion of government and the expansion of federal spending! This would help to create some confidence with the public that the policy makers are finally hearing the people. Confidence is an economic additive to growth.

It is really not any more complicated than that. Stated another way, if government gets out of the way and remove tax uncertainty and regulatory uncertainty, a real economic recovery could get underway.

The president, his advisors and the Democrats in Congress can’t seem to get past their Washington beltway bubble, their insatiable quest for power, or their desperate desire to get re-elected. Even worse, they can’t let go of their political agenda to make government bigger and bigger, and tax us to death.

The citizen activist movement that is growing across this country is no gimmick. It is getting bigger and bigger, and promises to produce even more election surprises in November of 2010 similar to what happened recently in New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Maybe then they will get it.

Frustrate Obama: Keep watching TV!

February 7, 2010
By Herman Cain

Most of us know better than to believe everything we see on TV. We also don’t believe everything we hear on talk radio, and we certainly do not believe many of the claims made by many of the blogs on the Internet. But there are some things I have learned from some of the TV news programs that have inspired me to investigate further.

In an age of information on steroids, the TV is often a starting point for many people who want to delve into headlines and sound bites more deeply. So for the president to tell the Democratic senators gathered at a conference to just “turn off the TV” is further evidence that the White House does not want to be challenged, criticized or corrected.

Early on in the Obama administration, they tried to target talk radio, specifically Rush Limbaugh, who has the largest talk radio audience on the planet. Next, it tried to single out the Fox News Channel because they dared to question the potential effectiveness of the $787 billion stimulus bill, and they dared to challenge claims made by the administration about a manufactured measurement called “jobs saved” when the administration was trying to say that the stimulus bill was working.

The administration even barred Fox from White House press briefings and would not schedule members of the administration to appear on Fox for a period of time, until the competing news channels saw this as wrong, and recognized that it could happen to them. They then would not participate unless all major channels could participate.

And now, for the president to tell Democratic senators at a conference to turn off the TV and go listen to their constituency, when they did not want to listen to them last August during the Congressional August recess, is a tipping point of arrogance.

Are the members of Congress who were elected by the people supposed to only listen to the president and his administration for accurate information and analysis?

The answer is no!

What part of the First Amendment to the Constitution about freedom of speech and freedom of the press don’t they understand? Obviously, they choose not to understand any of it.

Had it not been for a TV news report, I would not have heard about the Internal Revenue Service being given expanded powers to become the “health care police”. I looked it up and verified that it was true in the House version of the health care deform legislation.

When the president was trying to sell his health care proposal by claiming that 46 to 50 million people were without health insurance, it was the TV news programs that started to peel back the numbers and report the truth about the makeup of those numbers. Not all of the news programs challenged those numbers, but the president finally started to claim a more conservative number of over 30 million, which is still a misleading number.

There are numerous examples, but most recently, as the House was voting to raise the statutory debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion following the actions already taken by the Senate, the Treasury Department released a statement that the pending new legal debt limit would be used up by the end of February 2010. The original expectation was that it would last until sometime during 2011. I first heard about this on a TV news program and verified that it is true.

The president said in his State of the Union address that maybe he has not explained things well enough regarding some of his proposals. No Mr. President, we do understand your proposals. You just can’t seem to get the message that the majority of Americans do not like them.

And your response is that our Members of Congress and the public should just turn off the TV and stay stupid. I don’t think so.

We will continue to challenge, criticize and correct if necessary. It is our constitutional right.