Читать книгу A U-Turn on the Road to Serfdom - Grover Norquist Glenn - Страница 13

So that’s the national level; that’s the future in the United States. We are on the road to serfdom. We do the U-turn when we have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a Republican Senate – where we need just 51 votes to cut spending, not 60 – and a Republican president to sign the bills.

When and how do we do that? There are 25 red states with a Republican governor, Republican House and Republican Senate: 165 million Americans live in states with complete Republican control of the state government. This, by the way, is after the 2012 election, when, if you read The New York Times, the modern Republican Party ceased to exist. Then there are 13 states where the Democrats have complete control: California, Illinois and Vermont, for example. They have 81 million people.

So a quarter of the country lives in Democrat states; more than half in Republican states, and the rest have split governance between the governorship, House and Senate at state level. These are the people who redistricted congress between 2010 and 2012. So every 10 years, we redraw the lines both at the state legislative level and in Congress. When you look at who controls state legislatures, the states which have Republican legislatures voted to write the rules for the next ten years to keep themselves in power and the Democrat states did the same thing there. So these states are going to be pretty much the same for around ten years.

You have got 25 basically Republican states and 13 Democrat states, and they are moving in dramatically different directions. Just in the last two years, you see the Democrat states raising taxes so as to not have to reform state pensions. On the other hand, you are seeing Republican states such as Utah reform their state pension system. In Utah, starting a year ago, everybody who is hired as a teacher, policeman, state worker, county, local government worker and so on will have a 401(k) pension plan – an individual retirement account rather than the promise of an unfunded state pension from the government. Utah says: ‘Here is your pay; here is 10 per cent of your pay that goes into your individual savings account. That is our full contribution to your pension.’ This is how we end the creation of unfunded liabilities. Other red states are following Utah in moving to a defined contribution model and away from a defined benefit system that leads to politically driven overpromising. In Democrat Illinois and California they decided to raise taxes instead of undertake reforms.