Examining the Pledge...

The Pledge to America has been released, and it isn't dauntingly long (48 pages of .pdf), but its long enough (and vague enough) to not be what I would have hoped.

The thing I had most longed to see isn't there... a call for a General Accounting, as provided for by the US Constitution (Art I, Sect 9), in which the size and scope of government can be clearly seen for anyone interested.

Now, I understand that even in a "conservative" model, our government is damn BIG... but to get the scope of what has been done in the last 25 years, I think a detailed general analysis of government size and cost is called for. Imagine the data that document (bound in thousands upon thousands of pages) would provide for bean-counters and geeks across the country! The GOP provided a chart of just how bloated and over-grown HHS Department is at the unveiling of the Pledge... and it truly is amazing. Imagine the same for the whole bureaucracy!

Does anyone else suspect that THIS is why Paul Ryan wasn't at the unveiling? Was it because he wasn't happy with the Pledge (even though his name is prominent in it, as is his photo)? Could the GOP machine be too focused on simply limiting the rate of growth in government, and not focused enough on reduction of the size of government to less than it was in 2000? Are they following the Reagan model too closely? Reagan didn't reduce the size of government by even one iota, but he did reduce the speed at which it grew (something Bush Sr. tried very hard to carry on, too).

One quarter of our national economy is now dedicated to Federal spending, in one form or another. That is up from less than 12% in 1980 (the end of the Carter era). The scope of this is staggering... one in every four dollars moving through our national economy stems from Federal tax dollars, while only a bit more than 2 out of every four comes from domestic commercial spending (groceries, housing, business profits, local and State revenues, etc). The balance is foreign investment and spending (export revenue, trade allowances, etc). How did this happen? When did our economy become so "centrally" managed as to see 25% of its makeup stem from the government? We honestly can't blame ALL that on Obama... so Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr and Reagan must have something to do with it too... right? They are the ones that signed the spending into Law, right?

At it's height, New Deal constituted 14% of the national economy (prior to 1942, of course... when it went to 19%), and that was the biggest increase EVER from the pre-'29 level of 5.5%. When, over the course of the last 30 years, did we see the dependence of our national economy on the Federal dollars grow to 25%? And guess what? If left unchecked, that dependence will grow to nearly 40% by 2020! At which point, I think we can safely say, the US will have adopted the socialist platform that so much of Europe now utilizes. Our government will be the single greatest determining factor in the economic success or failure of the American economic machine.

I don't want that to be the case.