The majority of the United States’ elected officials seem to be out of touch with the country’s needs. I think it is time to “throw the bums out”! We need fresh representatives in this nation’s congress who have yet to become thoroughly corrupted by self-interest, and the specials interests of campaign contributors. What we need is new Republicans to replace both Republican and Democratic representatives. In 1994, Newt Gingrich put together a very successful “Contract with America”, in which new Republican House members pledged certain changes. It is time for the voters to make a Contract with Congress of their own. We the People, will elect you if…

I propose five simple requests for the Congress and the next President:

1. End Ethanol Subsidies. Our government has been giving away tax dollars to subsidize the production of corn to be used as a fuel additive to replace gasoline. It was mostly a way of buying votes in rural areas, though it promised to slightly reduce dependence on Arab oil. The unintended consequence has been a reduction in wheat production. Also, the type of corn used for Ethanol production is not the same type of corn eaten by people and animals. It cannot be diverted from the Ethanol plant to the grocery store or the feed lot. Because farmers have been paid an artificially high price for their Ethanol corn by the government, they have grown less wheat and food crop. This has contributed substantially to higher food prices in the United States, and to food shortages around the world. Congress could end these foolish subsidies in one day.
2. Encourage and Permit the Liquification of Coal. Coal is one of the United States most abundant resources, and it can be converted into synthetic oil and gas for about forty dollars per barrel. Oil recently priced in at about one hundred and twenty dollars a barrel.
   Coal liquification was experimented with in the early 1980’s, but abandoned as gasoline prices fell. The Germans successfully pioneered the technology towards the end of WWII when they desperately needed gasoline. South Africa has been doing it for years. Now that oil prices are sky high, and an industrializing China promises increasingly high demand for oil, it is time for us to immediately begin liquefying coal. The hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on foreign oil will stay in the American economy if we liquefy coal. The U.S. sits on 27 percent of the world’s known coal reserves- enough to sustain our oil needs for the foreseeable future.
3. Stop U.S. Companies from Hiring Illegal Immigrants. Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars are sent home to Mexico by Mexican workers who are in the U.S. illegally. The money that is earned here in the U.S., and then sent home to foreign countries siphons wealth out of the U.S. economy. I do not dislike immigrants, or even illegal immigrants. I welcome legal immigrants. Most Mexicans and other South Americans who come to the U.S. for work are good people who are looking for a better life. They are all children of God, and we need to respect them and treat them with dignity no matter what their legal status is. The government has an obligation to crack down on employers of illegal immigrants by imposing stiff fines. This will quickly dry up our country’s foreign labor market, and illegal immigrants will go home. Meanwhile, we should increase legal immigration for qualified foreigners, and perhaps institute a guest worker program to support western agriculture. As a good start, Congress should act now to crack down on U.S. companies employing illegal immigrants.
4. End Pork Barrel Spending or “Earmarks”. Voters everywhere have been consistently angered by wasteful “pork barrel” spending by congress- such as the famous Alaskan bridge to nowhere. Also known as “earmarks”, congress often includes special spending projects into otherwise unrelated bills in order to bribe an individual congressman’s support. For example: A bill to fund medicare reform is a few votes short. Yet uncommitted lawmakers will offer their support in exchange for attaching the passage of a wasteful and indulgent federal project which injects money into their home state and buys them votes for re-election. Wanting to pass the medicare reform, the other lawmakers agree to the wasteful spending in order to garner enough support to pass their bill. The favors are returned when other bills come up for a vote, and the federal governments’ spending of our tax dollars becomes downright irresponsible. Twice over the last year, democrats have voted down a bill to prohibit earmarks altogether. Republicans earmark too, but democrats earmark much more, and Republicans are leading the charge to end it. Earmarks need to end now. We need to make that message loud and clear in the November election.
5. Keep Healthcare Private. Good healthcare is important to everyone. It is always good when you make a profit, so why is it not good for your Doctor to make a profit? The free market system of profit making is what has driven our healthcare system in America to be the best and most advanced in the world. But costs have gotten a little out of control. Socialized healthcare that is run by the government would retard new advances in medicine, hurt the economy, and damage the high level of care most Americans receive. Healthcare costs money. It is not an inalienable right for citizens of the United States to have the world’s finest healthcare for free. If taxes are used to pay healthcare, we will all pay a lot more in extra taxes than we currently do on health insurance. Government inefficiencies in Canada, England, and France have created extremely expensive systems of care which include long waiting lines for routine surgeries. We can reduce healthcare costs through capping lawsuit liabilities. This will cut doctor and hospital costs, as well as the costs of excessive and unnecessary preventative testing procedures doctors routinely engage in to protect themselves from unreasonable levels of law suit liability. We can reduce healthcare costs by requiring uninsured Americans to get private insurance, which would eliminate costly emergency room care for the non-emergency treatment of those who are uninsured. The costs of these services are passed on to you and I through higher insurance premiums to cover hospital impacts, and higher taxes to cover ballooning medicaid costs. Tax incentives could defray the cost of new private policies for the poor. We can reduce healthcare costs by allowing small businesses to band together in order to get the benefits and bargaining powers of large corporate employer insurance programs. The sum of these savings would be substantial, and we would all feel the relief.

    

   You can email all your elected representatives at once by visiting Congress.org. Demand they institute these five simple requests:
   

   1) End Ethanol subsidies
   

   2) Begin the liquification of coal
   

   3) Stop U.S companies from hiring illegal immigrants
   

   4) End wasteful “earmarks”
   

   5) Keep healthcare private