Peter Ferrara on 21st Century Contract with America

Peter Ferrara, who was in the Reagan White House, wrote a terrific article about Newt's 21st Century Contract with America. Some excerpts:

In the 1994 Congressional campaigns, Republicans not only rode Newt's Contract with America proposals to Republican majorities in Congress. They maintained their House majority for 12 years, after Republicans had only held a House majority for 2 of the previous 74 years.

Newt's 21st century contract is similarly a document on which the entire Republican Party can campaign next year, and win a generation of governing majorities.

Gingrich's economic recovery plan would also abolish the capital gains tax, because "At a zero percent rate, hundreds of billions of dollars in new investments would pour into the United States to create new firms and build new factories." By effectively double-taxing capital income, the capital gains levy discourages the venture capital that feeds start-ups and creates jobs. That is why 14 out of 30 OECD countries, plus China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and others, already enjoy zero capital gains taxes. Gingrich's Contract would further eliminate double taxation by abolishing the death tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Art Laffer, a central architect of Reaganomics, says regarding Gingrich's economic recovery plan, "The combination of pro-growth tax reform, spending restraint, and sound money will restore robust economic growth with low unemployment and low inflation," and praises "the powerful effect it will have on the future growth path of the United States economy." Indeed, Gingrich has the formula for another generation long economic boom achieved by freeing a dynamic economy that is straining to break out of the bonds of Obamanomics.

Ferrara quotes from Newt what the former will push for after repealing Obamacare:

I will advocate for specific replacement health policies that will create a free market framework for health care, provide affordable, portable, and reliable healthcare coverage, and establish a health care safety net focused on those in need. This system will assure health care for all with no individual mandate or employer mandate of any kind. This alternative to Obamacare begins with patient power and localism and the many common sense ideas developed over the past eight years at the Center for Health Transformation.

Back to Ferrara:

The specific Contract proposals implementing this vision include "a voluntary option for younger Americans to put a portion of their Social Security contribution into personal Social Security savings accounts.

On Medicare, Ferrara again quotes from Newt:

My proposed legislation will offer seniors new choices in Medicare, as well. It will give them the option to choose, on a voluntary basis, either to remain in the existing program, or to transition to a more personalized system in the private sector with greater options for better care. If they select the personalized system, beneficiaries would receive support to cover their private sector premiums. Giving all seniors the option to choose their insurance provider will improve price competition and help lower costs for the program.

More Newt:

There are 184 other means-tested entitlement programs that can be block granted in a similar manner to our reform in 1996. One program alone -- Medicaid -- could save the federal government over $700 billion in the next decade, according to Congressman Paul Ryan's 2012 Republican Budget. Not only would these programs be more responsive and dynamic on a state level, but Americans would save hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars every year.

Ferrara concludes the piece:

Gingrich's Contract advances other path-breaking ideas, such as using Congress's powers to reorganize the federal judiciary and regulate the jurisdiction of the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to rein in judicial activism, enforcing the Tenth Amendment, and unleashing the private sector to produce the maximum in American energy. Most exciting, Newt's Contract launches all of these ideas into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

While it probably seems like I quoted the whole article, there is a ton I didn't. I encourage you to read the entire article here.

Ferrara has wrote other pieces praising Newt's ideas -- here, here, and here.