The Second American Revolution

“This is the real second American Revolution,” Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal announced to the applauding audience at the Americans for Prosperity (AFP) Defending the American Dream Summit on October 3, 2009.

Moore began by addressing the economic troubles America faces today. “It was really very depressing to me to see that we now have an unemployment rate that’s just below ten percent, the highest it’s been in twenty-six years,” Moore said. “It is one of the great tragedies of the past fifty years that we have allowed politicians to destroy so many jobs and so many businesses in America.”

Moore noted that President Obama promised Americans when he passed the stimulus bill that unemployment would not pass the 8% mark. “Since we passed [the stimulus bill], we have lost over three million jobs,” Moore said. “If you want to know how delusional Washington, D. C. is, just listen to your Vice President. Joe Biden said last week that ‘the economic stimulus bill is working beyond my wildest dreams.’ This man must be taking hallucinogenic drugs.”

Moore continued by cautioning attendees not to focus so much on health care that they “lose sight of the other great danger that is confronting us in the next eight weeks,” cap and trade. The cap-and trade-bill floating through Congress today “may be more dangerous than the health care bill,” Moore warned. “A cap-and-trade bill will not have any effect [on] global temperatures,” he said, adding that he believes global warming to be “the greatest hoax of the last century.”

Moore called the cap-and-trade bill the “China and India Full Employment Bill,” because of its likely effects on the export of American jobs. He argued that it is “unpatriotic” for Congress to even consider passing a bill that would so hurt American jobs and the economy.

The presentation continued with Moore discussing the national debt, which is now so huge that he fears that typical Americans may not be able to fathom its size. He used a basketball analogy to make his point: getting paid $40 million a year, LeBron James would have to play 25,000 seasons of basketball to get a trillion dollars. This is an enormous sum of money.

“Chinese people are focused like a laser beam on economic competitiveness,” Moore said, warning that China is looking at President Obama with the hopes that he will make it possible for China to become the world’s leading economic superpower. To solve this problem, and to prevent China from taking America’s place at the top of the economic food chain, Moore argues that “we need to have a flat or ‘fair’ tax in America.” He took a moment to ask the audience if they preferred the Dick Armey flat tax or the FairTax. The FairTax garnered much more applause. “I’ll take either one,” Moore laughed, asking the audience if they could imagine what kind of effect either tax system would have on America. “This would be like rocket fuel to our economy,” Moore said.

Allie Winegar Duzett is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.