By Robert Pembroke
Soccer fans idolize Ronaldo, Messi and Neymar. I idolize Friedman, Thatcher and Reagan. The three soccer superstars are still riding high but Friedman, Thatcher and Reagan have been betrayed.
The Republicans have cut taxes and are promising to achieve faster economic growth. But our economy and people’s net worth has been growing for years. Don’t let anybody tell you that Pres. Donald Trump is responsible for the recovery — it actually began in 2009 and is now in its ninth year.
Now, if Trump wants to go down in history, he needs to follow the teachings of Friedman, Thatcher and Reagan: Cut taxes dramatically for the middle class, reduce the cost of complying with regulations and shrink the size of the federal government. The tax cut that Congress passed and Trump signed in December was a gigantic flimflam. It is good for the 1 percent but not so good for the middle class.
Have you been watching the unemployment numbers put out by the Labor Department? If you had, you would have noticed that black unemployment is at an all-time low. Again, Trump had nothing to do with this significant happening.
In 1986, Pres. Ronald Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants. At the time, nine out of 10 Americans were against granting amnesty to the illegals. Reagan knew that granting amnesty to illegals was the humane thing to do and, more importantly, he knew it was economically a financial winner.
America now has $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities. The Social Security system is running out of money. The trustees for Social Security and Medicare, in their 2018 annual report, say they will run out of money by 2034. There are only a few options that the U.S. has to bring the Social Security and Medicare system back into balance — raise taxes, cut benefits or get more people employed so that they will pay FICA taxes.
It will take a combination of all three to solve the problem. If we only use one or two of these solutions it will inflict unnecessary harm on retirees. Raising taxes or cutting benefits are no-brainers. Increasing the number of worker bees is problematic. How can you get someone to want to work? ’Tis a puzzlement.
Milton Friedman was a 1976 Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences. One of Friedman’s more controversial theories is the Stakeholder Theory. It posits that “a company’s only social responsibility is to increase profits for the owners (stockholders) as long as it doesn’t engage in deception or fraud.” Or to put it another way, Friedman said, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years, there’d be a shortage of sand.”
Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the “Iron Lady.” She introduced a policy known as Thatcherism, which represented a systematic, decisive rejection and reversal of the post-war liberalism. The only welfare institution she retained was the National Health Program. Margaret Thatcher returned the U.K. to economic vitality.
Americans today are better off than they ever have been. They are healthier and thus living longer. They are wealthier and thus they are enjoying a better quality of life.
But Americans desperately need a statesman to restore our freedoms.
According to the 2017 Cato Institute’s “Freedom Report,” the U.S. ranked 17th while Switzerland ranked first among the globe’s free countries. “Now trust me,” as my grandson would say, the clown that is leading our country today is rapidly reducing our freedoms even further. His latest outrage is that he wants to rescind the licenses of MSNBC, CNN and the Public Broadcasting System.
America needs a reincarnation of either Reagan, Friedman or Thatcher to lead not only Americans, but the whole world forward.
Robert Pembroke is the former chairman and CEO of Pembroke’s Inc. of Salt Lake City.