Thomas A. Shakely

Newt Gingrich’s latest public policy book Real Change is a superb, practical roadmap for achieving positive transformation in American government. The book was published in January and, though finished prior to “change” becoming the buzzword of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is now perhaps particularly apropos.

I cannot begin to do justice to Real Change and the masterful way in which Gingrich lays out a sweeping call for fundamental transformation of American government while explaining how such change is both precedented and necessary for the future prosperity of the country. Real Change is filled neither with political sloganeering nor cliched hyperbole.

I have been a fan of Newt Gingrich since picking up Winning The Future two years ago, wherein Newt articulated his idea of a “21st Century Contract with America.” Real Change is, in many ways, the culmination of his previous work in that Gingrich offers further justification for change and outlines an impressively comprehensive plan to bypass “partisan gridlock” in Washington.

Real Change is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about their government and why some things work and why so much fails. In it, Gingrich offers common sense, “tripartisan” solutions on everything from education to immigration to federal spending to health care and does so in easily understandable language backed by empirical evidence that betrays his background as a professor of history.

My only major disapointment was the lack of detailed footnoting rather than sourcing in the text itself, but I can understand this may have resulted in a book that read more like a college term paper than a public policy manifesto.

As I read, I kept a highlighter close at hand. Here are a few excerpts from the book which I wanted to remember and hopefully demonstrate a bit of its scope. It should go without saying, but many of these excerpts won’t make full sense until read in context of the complete book.

• Albert Einstein had a firm rule for thinking about new solutions. He asserted the following: thinking that doing more of the same will lead to a different outcome is a sign of insanity.
• Any academic environment [during Einstein's youth] would have socialized him into limiting his thoughts to conform with his colleagues’.
• [General Dwight] Eisenhower learned one lesson that strikes many people as counterintuitive: “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger,” he asserted. “I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”
• Peter Drucker had a variation on this theme [Eisenhower's] when he wrote The Effective Executive that effective leaders always consider the visible problem to be a symptom of a deeper underlying problem.
• To do something serious and new means overcoming frustration, confusion, opposition, and indifference. It means being a leader.
• The keys [to implementing real change] are iron will, enormous discipline, and cheerful persistence. Those traits can change history.
• In the bureaucratic model, failure is simply a reason to raise taxes and give even more money to those who are failing.
• Together, [Mayor] Giuliani and [Police Chief] Bratton acted on insights about lowering crime, known as the broken-window theory, developed by two political scientists, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. This theory contends that disorder, such as broken windows that go unrepaired, lowers the psychological-cultural barrier to crime and that a police force focused on creating order would actually reduce crime.
• Traditionally, bureaucracies replace the original mission for which they were founded with a new mission of protecting the structure, the budget, the habits, and the culture of the bureaucracy as it has current evolved.
• Following the law of unintended consequences, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act effectively drives businesses to be less accountable than they were before and has done vastly more damage to the American economy than the corporate accounting scandals it was supposed to reform. … It is a wound inflicted by the Congress on the American economy.”
• To remain competitive we need to massively expand the freedom for high-value workers to come to the United States and contribute to the growth of our economy.
• For the past forty years, capital gains tax increases have been associated with a decline in tax revenues. … One reason is that higher taxes give investors an incentive to hold their assets to avoid paying the tax.
• The free choice flat tax option would apply one single tax rate of 17 percent to all individual and corporate taxpayers. … [It] would mean no federal income tax on the first $46,165 in income for a family of four. … The free choice flat tax would eliminate the death tax, the capital gains tax, and the alternative minimum tax. There would be no tax on retirement benefits or on Social Security benefits. There would be no tax on dividends because corporations would have already paid taxes on that income at the corporate level.
• It should surprise no one that Social Security modernization is inevitable. In 1935, when Social Security was adopted, the average American lived to be sixty-three and would not draw a Social Security pension until age sixty-five.
• What we learned in 1995, and what we must recognize today, is that there are four key principles to achieving a balanced budget: 1. Cut taxes to increase economic growth and therefore increase revenues. 2. Set priorities and increase spending in key areas while reducing it in non-essential areas. 3. Eliminate pork-barrel spending. 4. Shift from expensive, wasteful systems to smarter spending.
• We should return NASA to funding space science and basic research into fundamental new capabilities and focus on encouraging private sector space entreprenuership.
• The environment, biodiversity, and energy reform are among the most important challenges facing America. … It is vitally important that we develop a positive, solution-driven approach within a market-oriented, non-bureacratic model.
• America needs an energy strategy that will pass this three-part test: marginalize the oil dictators, reduce the amount of carbon discharged into the atmosphere, and create an even more productive economy for the future.
• The great stength of markets over bureacracies is that they empower two people who are controlled and limited by bureaucrats: the consumer and the creative entreprenuer.
• Bureaucracies are inherently anti-innovation and anti-change.
• It is a simple fact that all our hopes and dreams ultimately depend on our ability to defend and protect ourselves. … Countries can die. Civilizations can collapse.