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Ron Paul’s economic remedies are in the spotlight as the recession becomes more evident. His constitutional stance in abolishing the federal income tax and returning to the gold standard - or to clarify, make gold and silver legal competing currencies and eliminate the sales tax, essentially legalizing the constitution - are drawing increased attention.

The Federal Reserve is also under the worlds microscope with the current economic crisis unfolding and it’s continual undermining of the dollar as the FED cut rates by 75 basis points.

On Dr. Paul’s Web site, he said the Fed has taken the United States “into a terrible crisis…the Fed has allowed the dollar to weaken, which in turn has hurt the middle class and led to inflation.”

“I would enjoy being the next president to get rid of our central bank,” he told elated supporters in Louisiana before the Wednesday caucus.

Paul says, and has consistently said for 30 years, that the economic policies of his opponents are based on ill-advised “print-and-spend” theories. He added that he would cure the economic crisis by ending the “hyper-expensive, hyper-dangerous empire all around the globe.”

Dr. Paul and the principles of prosperity he espouses will likely command increasing attention as the markets continue to implode and the fallout from the housing market awakens the public to the dire economic situation. It is said that Paul even got help in his candidacy by an unlikely source in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Paul, who has sponsored a bill to abolish the Fed — ripped into Bernanke at congressional hearings:

ROUND 1 (VIDEO): Ron Paul lets loose on Bernanke (YouTube)

ROUND 2 (VIDEO): Ron Paul lets loose on Bernanke (YouTube)

After the Feds quick move to slash rates again, Paul has called for an investigation into the Federal Reserve. And he’s not alone. Jim Cramer, host of Cramer’s Mad Money, is increasingly critical of the Federal Reserve. At about 2:22 into this video, he calls for an investigation of the Federal Reserve. Perhaps his interview of Dr. Paul influenced his reasoning.

“I actually want to call right here for an investigation of what the Fed did. An investigation of the institution, because I think the institution has been behind almost every boom and bust that we’ve had for many many years. And its really starting to [be the] time to look to see what this institution is all about” said Cramer.

“Few Americans give much thought to the Federal Reserve System or monetary policy in general. But even as they strive to earn a living, and hopefully save or invest for the future, Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank are working insidiously against them. Day by day, every dollar you have is being devalued.”
Ron Paul, Texas Straight Talk, April 9, 2007

Andrew Jackson, in his Farewell Address, warned of the dangers in a fiat currency and central bank:

March 4, 1837

In reviewing the conflicts which have taken place between different interests in the United States and the policy pursued since the adoption of our present form of Government, we find nothing that has produced such deep-seated evil as the course of legislation in relation to the currency. The Constitution of the United States unquestionably intended to secure to the people a circulating medium of gold and silver. But the establishment of a national bank by Congress, with the privilege of issuing paper money receivable in the payment of the public dues, and the unfortunate course of legislation in the several States upon the same subject, drove from general circulation the constitutional currency and substituted one of paper in its place…

… Honest and even enlightened men are sometimes misled by the specious and plausible statements of the designing. But experience has now proved the mischiefs and dangers of a paper currency, and it rests with you to determine whether the proper remedy shall be applied.

The paper system being founded on public confidence and having of itself no intrinsic value, it is liable to great and sudden fluctuations, thereby rendering property insecure and the wages of labor unsteady and uncertain. The corporations which create the paper money can not be relied upon to keep the circulating medium uniform in amount. In times of prosperity, when confidence is high, they are tempted by the prospect of gain or by the influence of those who hope to profit by it to extend their issues of paper beyond the bounds of discretion and the reasonable demands of business; and when these issues have been pushed on from day to day, until public confidence is at length shaken, then a reaction takes place, and they immediately withdraw the credits they have given, suddenly curtail their issues, and produce an unexpected and ruinous contraction of the circulating medium, which is felt by the whole community. The banks by this means save themselves, and the mischievous consequences of their imprudence or cupidity are visited upon the public.

Recent events have proved that the paper-money system of this country may be used as an engine to undermine your free institutions, and that those who desire to engross all power in the hands of the few and to govern by corruption or force are aware of its power and prepared to employ it…

But when the charter for the Bank of the United States was obtained from Congress it perfected the schemes of the paper system and gave to its advocates the position they have struggled to obtain from the commencement of the Federal Government to the present hour. The immense capital and peculiar privileges bestowed upon it enabled it to exercise despotic sway over the other banks in every part of the country. From its superior strength it could seriously injure, if not destroy, the business of any one of them which might incur its resentment; and it openly claimed for itself the power of regulating the currency throughout the United States. In other words, it asserted (and it undoubtedly possessed) the power to make money plenty or scarce at its pleasure, at any time and in any quarter of the Union, by controlling the issues of other banks and permitting an expansion or compelling a general contraction of the circulating medium, according to its own will. The other banking institutions were sensible of its strength, and they soon generally became its obedient instruments…

…No nation but the freemen of the United States could have come out victorious from such a contest; yet, if you had not conquered, the Government would have passed from the hands of the many to the hands of the few, and this organized money power from its secret conclave would have dictated the choice of your highest officers and compelled you to make peace or war, as best suited their own wishes. The forms of your Government might for a time have remained, but its living spirit would have departed from it.

The distress and sufferings inflicted on the people by the bank are some of the fruits of that system of policy which is continually striving to enlarge the authority of the Federal Government beyond the limits fixed by the Constitution. The powers enumerated in that instrument do not confer on Congress the right to establish such a corporation as the Bank of the United States, and the evil consequences which followed may warn us of the danger of departing from the true rule of construction and of permitting temporary circumstances or the hope of better promoting the public welfare to influence in any degree our decisions upon the extent of the authority of the General Government. Let us abide by the Constitution as it is written, or amend it in the constitutional mode if it is found to be defective.

The severe lessons of experience will, I doubt not, be sufficient to prevent Congress from again chartering such a monopoly, even if the Constitution did not present an insuperable objection to it. But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government. The power which the moneyed interest can exercise, when concentrated under a single head and with our present system of currency, was sufficiently demonstrated in the struggle made by the Bank of the United States…

But it will require steady and persevering exertions on your part to rid yourselves of the iniquities and mischiefs of the paper system …

…My humble efforts have not been spared during my administration of the Government to restore the constitutional currency of gold and silver, and something, I trust, has been done toward the accomplishment of this most desirable object; but enough yet remains to require all your energy and perseverance. The power, however, is in your hands, and the remedy must and will be applied if you determine upon it…

My own race is nearly run; advanced age and failing health warn me that before long I must pass beyond the reach of human events and cease to feet the vicissitudes of human affairs. I thank God that my life has been spent in a land of liberty and that He has given me a heart to love my country with the affection of a son. And filled with gratitude for your constant and unwavering kindness, I bid you a last and affectionate farewell. - Andrew Jackson

Glenn Beck interviewed Ron Paul today and asked questions about the economy. In an apparent endorsement and in response to the positive and productive interview with Dr. Paul, the Glenn Beck newsletter now states “Glenn disagrees with Paul on some major issues– like his foreign policy– but Paul is very good on most everything else, such as the economy.”

Below is the transcript from the interview on the Glenn Beck show in which Ron Paul was granted enough time to respond to questions about the economy.

January 23, 2008 - 12:54 ET
GLENN: I thought I would get Ron Paul on the phone and find out where he stands on the economy, what the problems are with the economy, what he thinks is coming in our future and how he would correct it if he was President of the United States, and he’s on with us now, hello, Ron Paul.

PAUL: Hello, nice to be with you.

GLENN: Nice to be with you, sir. First of all, tell me what’s happening with the economy.

PAUL: Well, it’s making the correction that was inevitable due to the malinvestment and the unbelievable debt accumulated due to a federal reserve policy. Once they create credit out of thin air, they cause business people, savers to do the wrong thing and you always have to have a correction. So dealing with the recession is very difficult because the cars with a few years ago and we have to work our way out of this, which means there has to be a correction.

GLENN: Okay. If you were President of the United States, what would you do?

PAUL: Well, the advice would be return to the market economy. First we would have to deregulate. We had a crisis a few years ago, at least a supposed crisis with Enron and they superregulated. So I would repeal certainly major portions of the Sarbanes-Oxley. So we would argue for deregulation. Then, of course, there should be major, major tax reform and –

GLENN: Hang on. Before we go into tax reform, let me just start with Sarbanes-Oxley. I don’t want to get all — that’s way deep. So let’s kind of surface skim here so we don’t make people’s heads spin off their shoulders. The deregulation, some people will say that part of the problems, for instance, with the bonds is that these insurance companies, they had no regulation. So they just kept insuring people even though they didn’t have the money.

PAUL: Yeah, but that was all government, you know. When you have the FDIC or the FHA or whatever ones. The main problem is that we don’t save money. That’s where capital’s supposed to come from. Instead we print money. We create money. We call it capital and then interest rates may be 1 or 2 or 3% and business people think, well, there’s a lot of savings going on out there. So they do the wrong things. If interest rates were very high, they would be more cautious but instead we create the bubbles. People start building houses to extreme and then they overbuild and then you have to rest in order for the markets to catch up. And that’s when the bubble collapses, and we’re in the midst of that. But government does it in both ways, excessive credit and also pushing money into certain areas such as housing or the financial markets and they overprice. Then the prices have to come down. So it’s a very difficult situation, but the main goal should be the restoration of the market economy.

GLENN: Okay. So now, you mentioned tax cuts. Congress, both sides of the aisle are talking now about $800 tax rebates to the poorest people in America. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a job created by a guy who’s at the bottom of the ladder. This seems just like a plan to get people to spend which to me is what got us here in the first place.

PAUL: Yeah, you are right. And all you do is you encourage consumption and we’re overdoing consumption right now. It’s not a tax rebate if you send somebody a check for $800 for not paying taxes. That’s a welfare check.

GLENN: Thank you.

PAUL: And that money really doesn’t go to producing jobs. What you have to do is restore the savings and encourage capital investment. You have to eliminate taxes on capital gains and we have to do whatever we can, get rid of the taxes, the death tax and eliminate taxes on dividends and savings. All these things would encourage savings and then have a market rate for interest rates to give us the signal on whether we should be investing or saving or spending. But that doesn’t exist anymore and that’s why we have these perpetual bubbles. I think this bubble right now that has been kept together for quite a few years is a major problem and the unwinding of this problem is very critical. The biggest bubble’s in the dollar bubble and now the dollar is coming under attack. And what are they proposing? Excessive spending, you know, deficit spending which, where are they going to get the money? They don’t have any money in Washington. They either have to borrow from China or print it, which means there’s more inflation. Or the Federal Reserve comes in and said, like yesterday, drastically lowering interest rates? How do they lower interest rates? They print a lot more money. Yesterday when they announced that, the dollar immediately reversed itself and sharply went down and it’s the weakening of the dollar that is the crisis that we face because everybody suffers from that. You and I suffer because all of a sudden the dollar in that wallet buys 80 cents worth of goods instead of a dollar’s worth. So we all get poor and we have to stop that cycle.

GLENN: Nobody understands that, well, they say let me give $800 to the poorest, they are really not doing that much because the dollar is worth so little. The poorest are being hit by inflation harder than anybody else.

PAUL: That is exactly right. The do-good liberal who said we have to take care of everybody — and they are well intentioned. The more debt they run up to give to the poor, the poorer the people get because they cannot keep up. Take, for instance, even Social Security recipients. Their inflation rate might be 10 or 12% and we give them a cost of living increase of 2%. So they’re losing. And you just can’t keep that cycle going. You have to balance the budget, you have to live within our means and then we have to restore confidence to the dollar. So it’s a major, major undertaking. But we have to reverse it.

I think the most immediate thing is to cut back on spending, not increase spending, and get the money back into the hands of the market of savers and investors and people who are spending. But government economic planning does not work and that’s what we’re coming to the realization.

GLENN: Well, when you say government economic planning, the Fed is not the government and the Fed just made the largest cut that they have made since 1984. It is the first emergency cut since right after September 11th. There’s talk now that they may cut another quarter, which is insanity. There’s just no more that you can cut unless you destroy the dollar. What are your thoughts on the Fed?

PAUL: Well, they are the culprit. They caused it. They caused it by keeping interest rates artificially low. How are they trying to solve the problem? Keeping interest rates low. For an hour or to the markets rebounded because they’re conditioned to listen to that and they figure, oh, the market’s going to go up because interest rates are coming down but today I predict the market’s going to go down again because that was only temporary. You cannot change the long-term trend of the market. You can temporarily tinker with it. You can artificially make them go up. But eventually the market is more powerful than the Fed and the government and the rejection of the dollar is the crisis that we face and we face that because we create too much money and we do that because we spend too much, both overseas and domestically and we have to deal with this. We have to live within our means. If we could just freeze all spending domestically and I know we disagree on the overseas expenditures but why do we pay for the defense of Europe and Japan and Korea? We could save hundreds of billions of dollars. So this is my argument and it’s well received. Yeah, why do we pay for defense of Europe?

GLENN: Right.

PAUL: If we could save that money, why don’t we spend that money here? Just think of all the money that would float back to this country if all those military personnel were stationed here spending the money in this country. We wouldn’t be less safe. I think we would be more safe.

GLENN: I’m not necessarily, I’m not necessarily opposed to pulling troops out of some parts of the world but I don’t want to get into that today.

PAUL: Yeah, with he don’t need to get into that today.

GLENN: We can get into that some other time. I really want to focus on the economy and the gold standard. You are one of the only people that is talking about the return of the gold standard. It was — I mean, honestly, I mean, Ron, you know, jeez. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist but you know what, at times I believe I am a conspiracy theorist because there’s a lot of stuff that just, if you read history and you go back all the way to Woodrow Wilson, you can see that the foundation was laid for one-world government, the foundation was laid for socialism, and I really, truly believe that these — you know, Hillary Clinton says she’s not a liberal, she’s, quote, a modern day Progressive. Anybody who knows what a Progressive is, that is a nightmare. It is the road to socialism.

Do you believe that there is any intentional intent to take us down these roads and bankrupt us because anybody with a clue would know what’s coming around the corner with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and I don’t know how you can say I want to do universal healthcare as well.

PAUL: You know, I guess there’s a lot of evidence for that. It’s awfully tempting. I always try to say, well, they are doing it out of ignorance and lack of understanding of how the market economy works rather than saying, oh, I’d like to bring on a Depression. I think they actually believe that they are good managers. Alan Greenspan once told me — because he used to be a gold standard person and he’s written very well about that in his early years. But he says, no, he says, we central bankers have learned to make paper money act as if it’s gold. You know, they come to believe in themselves that there is good and they can manage as well as the market, and I told him after that, I said, you know, if you do that, this will be the first time in all of history that anybody could do that, you know, to make paper money act like gold money.

You know, you should never be embarrassed about the gold standard because one of our most favorite Presidents, Ronald Reagan, told me personally once, he says, you know, he says, I’m interested in gold because, he says, if you study history, you find out any great nation that has gotten off the gold standard will no longer remain great. And we just got off the gold standard totally in 1971 and if you look at the statistics, in ‘71 when it comes to spending and deficits and inflation and the value of the dollar, I mean, they’re dramatic. And I just want to make sure we wake up before the dollar totally collapses because that is a real tragedy if we let that happen.

GLENN: How come Ronald Reagan didn’t put us on the gold standard? I mean, if anybody had the clout to do it, how come he didn’t do it? And if you were President, how would you propose we would do that?

PAUL: Well, it’s not easy but what I would do is not want to close down the Federal Reserve because that is dramatic and it wouldn’t happen. It would be chaotic, too. All I want to do is legalize the Constitution, let you and me use gold if we want, which means you have to remove sales taxes and capital gains tax off gold and let it circulate just like currency circulated around the world. So if you want to save for your kids’ education, you can put them in gold bonds and if the dollar, if you’ve got, the dollar’s going down more rapidly than the price of education goes up, you could save in gold. You could get paid in gold and if we –

GLENN: Hang on.

PAUL: Then paper will not be used anymore.

GLENN: Wait a minute. But what you’re proposing, you’re this close to being arrested if you — I mean, if you went and actually did that, they already have. The liberty dollar guys. They have tried to arrest the guy and say, you are trying to compete with the currency of the United States of America. What you’re talking about now, you can be arrested for.

PAUL: Yeah. So the Constitution is being violated by law and it’s supposed to be the other way around. And this is why I used to term this legalize the Constitution, this legalize gold and silver which is in the Constitution. So you would have to change the tax code. You’d have to persuade the congress to do this, but it would be less chaotic. This is exactly what I proposed in the early 1980s when I was on the gold commission, competing currencies. Economists think you can have competing currencies easier today than in the past because the world’s always have competing currencies. Just allow gold and silver to do the same thing.

GLENN: When you were on my program on television, you said something that I didn’t correct because I didn’t — I mean, it sounded so outlandish but I let it go because I didn’t have the facts and you sounded so convinced of it that I thought, hmmm, I’ve got to check into that and I’ll correct it the next time he’s on or I’ll correct it the next day. What you said was, if we got rid of the income tax, the Government would still take about the same amount of money in as they had ten years ago.

PAUL: Approximately.

GLENN: We looked into it and it’s accurate. Can you explain that and how do we get that message out to people?

PAUL: Well, it’s just that the growth of spending is so rapid that people don’t realize that freezing budgets would be a tremendous benefit and that’s one of my proposals in my economic reforms is just, freeze nondefense and nonentitlement spending which would go a long way to coming to the balance. I think $1 trillion less 10 years ago, I think government was adequate size 10 years ago. But we have this notion that everything that is to have perpetual growth. Just think of our friends in the Republican party that used to run against the Department of Education. What did we do when we finally got in charge? We doubled the size of the Department of Education. We create new departments. We never slow up. Do we do anything to unwind the dependency of the farmers on centralized planning for farmers which pushes cost of food up? You know, it just doesn’t make any sense. The people demand change, or they did in ‘94 and the year 2000, no wonder they’re aggravated with us.

GLENN: Wait, wait.

PAUL: We need to at least freeze things without cutting anything.

GLENN: Hang on just a second. The people demand change. Well, the people are demanding change now so much that the voice of the people is so clear that everybody has as their slogan or on their little yard signs either “Change” or in your case “Revolution.” And it is — I mean, it’s everywhere. Everybody knows we want change and yet the people are going to the polls and they are voting for Hillary Clinton or John McCain. How do you explain that?

PAUL: Well, it’s not easily explained but I think there’s a lot of information lacking from these people. A lot of people, you know, you and I and others talk about, you know, the issues and the politics of it but, you know, probably 80 or 90% of the people feel like it’s their patriotic duty to vote but they only think about voting about two or three days before the election. We think everybody’s interested. You know, we get on a stage and have a debate. We think, boy, everybody’s paying attention to us. 80 or 90% of the people are looking at football games but they still feel like they have to vote. It will be very vague information. But all I can see is the people that support me do a lot of reading and they know what’s going on and they know what they’re supporting and they know about the economic issues and they know about the gold standard and they know they don’t like the income tax. So that’s a little bit different. And the other thing is they always know I’ve voted the way I’ve talked and right now there’s a lot of disenchantment with people saying one thing and doing something else.

GLENN: Will you run as a third candidate if you done get the nomination?

PAUL: No, I don’t want to do that. I have no plans of doing that. This is a tough enough job right now.

GLENN: Really? Well, why is that? You don’t think — I mean, if it was McCain and Clinton, you don’t think there would be a lot of people going, well, jeez, I can’t vote for either of them?

PAUL: I think it’s the system that bothers me the most. You know, the job of getting on the ballot, I probably spend millions of dollars and half of my effort just wondering if I could even get on the ballot. Then the debates wouldn’t be available to me and you probably wouldn’t have me on your program or something.

GLENN: Yes, I would.

PAUL: I wouldn’t be a major party.

GLENN: Yes, I would. Yes, I would. You know what, I’m very offended by some of your supporters because they always say that, you know, I won’t listen to you or I won’t have you. I’m probably the guy on talk radio, mainstream talk radio that will at least say I agree with you on a lot of things. I just disagree with you vehemently on others.

PAUL: And I appreciate that.

GLENN: I mean, you know, we just — I just happen to disagree with you, but I respect you, sir, for your opinion. I have said this, you know, behind your back. So let me say it to your face. I think you are the closest we have running to a founding father. You seem to be the only guy who has actually read the federalist papers. So I appreciate your efforts, sir.

PAUL: Well, thank you very much.

GLENN: You bet. We will talk to you again.

PAUL: Thanks for having me.

GLENN: You bet. Bye-bye.

The following quote is from Alan Greenspan, the ex FED chairman. He purports the creation of the FED and the deviation from the gold standard as the cause of the great depression and other economic failures in Britain.

“When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. More disastrous, however, was the Federal Reserve’s attempt to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain’s gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates.

The “Fed” succeeded; it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market — triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed. Great Britain fared even worse, and rather than absorb the full consequences of her previous folly, she abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930’s.”

1. The Inflation Tax Ron Paul 2008 Web site

2. Ron Paul Questions Chairman Bernanke Ron Paul Speech to Congress, November 8, 2007

3. The Money Has to Come From Somewhere Ron Paul Newsletter, September 23, 2007

4. The Federal Reserve Monopoly over Money Ron Paul Newsletter, April 9, 2007

5. Inflation and War Finance Ron Paul Newsletter, January 29, 2007

6. The Declining Dollar Erodes Personal Savings Ron Paul Newsletter, May 15, 2006

7. Inflation- Alive and Well Ron Paul Newsletter, March 8, 2004

8. Does Government Run the Economy? Ron Paul Newsletter, August 19, 2002

9. Abolish the Federal Reserve Ron Paul Speech to Congress, September 10, 2002

10. Hard Questions for Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan Ron Paul Speech to Congress, July 17, 2002

11. Gold and the Dollar Ron Paul Speech to Congress, June 5, 2002

12. Selected Greenspan-Paul Congressional Exchanges Ron Paul Speech to Congress, 1997-2005

Update:

Ron Paul has introduced a comprehensive economic revitalization plan. It is available online at: http://www.RonPaul2008.com/Prosperity.

The link reads:

Introduction

America became the greatest, most prosperous nation in human history through low taxes, limited government, personal freedom and a belief in sound money. We need to return to these principles so our economy can thrive again. When enacted, my plan will provide both short-term stimulus and lay the groundwork for long-term prosperity.

Other candidates talk a lot about stimulus packages, but my record stands alone. I have fought for these measures for years as a member of Congress and will make them a top priority as president.

Ron Paul, a 10-term Republican congressman from Texas’s 14th District, is currently the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy, Trade, and Technology. He has been named “Taxpayers’ Best Friend” for 10 consecutive years by the National Taxpayers’ Union. Ron Paul is also the author of several books on monetary policy and economics.

The Four-Point Plan

1. Tax Reform: Reduce the tax burden and eliminate taxes that punish investment and savings, including job-killing corporate taxes.
2. Spending Reform: Eliminate wasteful spending. Reduce overseas commitments. Freeze all non-defense, non-entitlement spending at current levels.
3. Monetary Policy Reform: Expand openness with the Federal Reserve and require the Fed to televise its meetings. Return value to our money.
4. Regulatory Reform: Repeal Sarbanes/Oxley regulations that push companies to seek capital outside of US markets. Stop restricting community banks from fostering local economic growth.

1. Tax Reform

• Eliminate Taxes on Dividends and Savings. The basis of capitalism is savings, and Americans who do so should be rewarded.
  • Pass HJ Res. 23 to encourage savings over consumption.
• Repeal the Death Tax. Attacking small businesses and breaking up family farms smothers growth and kills jobs.
  • Pass H.R. 2734 to make the Bush tax cuts permanent.
• Cut Taxes for Working Seniors. Grandmothers and grandfathers working to make ends meet should keep all the fruits of their labor.
  • Pass H.R. 191 to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to repeal the inclusion in gross income of Social Security benefits.
• Eliminate Taxes on Social Security Benefits. That money belongs to seniors, not the government. They paid into the system for a lifetime, and they should be free to spend every penny as they see fit.
  • Pass H.R. 192 to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to repeal the 1993 increase in taxes on Social Security benefits.
• Accelerate Depreciation on Investment. We need to help companies grow and create jobs.
  • Pass H.R. 4995 and amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to reduce corporate marginal income tax rates.
• Eliminate Taxes on Capital Gains. Investment should be embraced and rewarded.
  • Pass H.J. Res 23 (The “Liberty Amendment”), proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relative to abolishing personal income, estate, and gift taxes and prohibiting the United States Government from engaging in business in competition with its citizens.
• Eliminate Taxes on Tips.The single parents and working students who earn their income chiefly through tips deserve to keep all of their money. This tax on “estimated income” is unfair and should be ended.
  • Pass H.R. 3664 to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide that tips shall not be subject to income or employment taxes.
• Support Mortgage Cancellation Relief Act. Working families who lost their homes should not be punished a second time with a big IRS bill.
  • Pass H.R. 1876 to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude from gross income of individual taxpayers discharges of indebtedness attributable to certain forgiven residential mortgage obligations.

2. Spending Reform

• Reduce Overseas Military Commitments. Our bases and troops should be on our soil.
  • It’s time to stop subsidizing our trading partners in Europe, Japan and South Korea.
• Freeze Non-Defense, Non-Entitlement Spending at Current Levels
  • I vote against all bloated, pork laden spending bills and will veto them as president.
    

3. Monetary Policy Reform

• Televise Federal Open Market Committee Meetings. An institution as powerful as the Federal Reserve deserves full public scrutiny.
• Expand Transparency and Accountability at the Federal Reserve
  • Pass H.R. 2754 to require the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to continue to make available to the public on a weekly basis information on the measure of the M3 monetary aggregate and its components.

• Return Value to Our Money. Legalize gold and silver as a competing currency.
  • Level the long-term boom and bust business cycle by passing H.R. 4683, which would repeal provisions of the federal criminal code relating to issuing coins of gold, silver, or other metal for use as current money and making or possessing likenesses of such coins.

4. Regulatory Reform

• Repeal Sarbanes/Oxley. It has seriously wounded our capital markets and helped make the UK the financial center at our expense.
  • Ending these misguided regulations would bring jobs flooding back to the United States
    
  • Pass H.R. 1049 to reform Sarbanes-Oxley and reduce the burden it places on small businesses.
• Repeal or Remove Costly and Unnecessary Federal Regulations. Neighbors know best how to help their neighbors.
  • We need to make it easier for community banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions to better serve their communities and to help people in these communities get access to credit and capital.
  • Pass H.R. 1869 to enhance the ability of community banks to foster economic growth and serve their communities, boost small businesses, increase individual savings, and for other purposes.

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