Newt Gingrich — The Victory NH Interview
Part I

What can we say… Who better to kick off the next phase of Victory NH then the man who led one of the great grassroots revolutions in history. We are proud to offer you the first part of a two part interview with the one and only Newt Gingrich…

VNH: First of all, welcome, Mr. Speaker. We are thrilled to have you. In fact, Ambassador Petrone said he could not think of a better way to kick off our new website.

Gingrich: Well, the Petrones are among the people who changed America—first by their very strong support for Ronald Reagan when people thought that was hopeless, and then by their very strong support for us at GOPAC and with the House Republicans, and people thought that was hopeless. So twice they’ve really, dramatically helped change American history.

VNH: Amazing what can happen when the right people come together for the right cause. What I’d like to do is talk a bit about your new book, Winning the Future, and then specifically how the members of the Victory NH Network can use it as a tool to drive the kind of change that you believe is really needed in this country.

Gingrich: I wrote Winning the Future as a handbook for 21st Century Conservatives, to help them win the arguments. There are 3 keys: you’ve got to have a message, a messenger, and an organization—a mechanism, if you will. And if you don’t have the message and the messenger (with Reagan we had both message and messenger), sometimes you get the right message, but no messenger because nobody will run, or they don’t understand the issues. And sometimes you get the message and the messenger, but you don’t have a mechanism, so you don’t have everybody registered, you don’t have them turning out, and the 3 have to come together.

My job in Winning the Future was to work on the message side. I wanted to help us, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “win the argument first, so we could then win the vote.” But, I think if you look at the book in that sense, as a real handbook for 21st Century Conservatism, you’ll see how much I was influenced, both by Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, and by Ronald Reagan’s series of speeches, starting with October of 1964. This book lays out a set of arguments about the nature of America, about the challenges we’re going to face, and about the requirements for our future that I hope will become sort of a base of the GOP platform in 2008.

VNH: Let’s take a look at a couple of issues. As you know, Victory NH is focused on 3 common areas of agreement: lower taxes, smaller government, and a strong national defense. Let’s start with the last one first, as that’s what led Ambassador Petrone to launch this effort—he was concerned that too many people seemed to have forgotten 9/11, incredibly quickly. So my first question is: what are the steps you think we need to take for not just a strong defense, but what we must do proactively to see to it that 9/11 doesn’t happen again?

Gingrich: Well, we have to start with an understanding that the danger of terrorists with weapons of mass destruction—mostly nuclear, or weapons of mass murder, or mostly biological—could literally be life and death for us as a country. If we had a terrorist who smuggled in 2 or 3 nuclear weapons and set them off, America would never be quite the same again. And if you look at the loss of what 3,100 Americans on 9/11 did to us, imagine what the loss of 300,000 or 3,000,000 Americans would do. Similarly, the right kind of engineered biological weapons, that could kill literally millions of people and could create a sense of insecurity, would threaten the whole survival of our system. So, I take this to be as great a threat as the Cold War at it’s very peak, if not a greater threat. And I think there are basically 4 big areas you have to think about:

First, you have to think about sealing off and controlling the borders—the Canadian border as much as the Mexican border.

Second, you’ve got to talk about homeland security and what are we going to do to be prepared at home if something bad does happen—whether it’s biological, nuclear, or otherwise.

Third, you’ve got to talk about intelligence, where I think you’ve got to triple the size of the intelligence budget, because if you want to say no sanctuary around the world, that’s a big demand. There are a lot of places that could be sanctuaries, and we’re not today prepared to have the level of intelligence we need to be tracking these guys everywhere they could go.

And then fourth, I think you’ve got to look at the total National Security budget, including the State Department, Foreign Aid, the National Security Council, the Defense Department, etc.—and it’s not big enough and it’s not organized well enough today to protect us.

So I am very concerned about national security and I think every American who really studies this has to be very concerned about national security.

VNH: There’s something that you just touched on that I think ties in with a lot of what I took away from the book: that we have to change the way we look at government overall. And like you, we believe that in the 21st Century, 20th Century Government programs have to be reformed so that they perform in a more efficient and cost effective way. We see select Governors across the country taking business-oriented solutions and applying them to government problems. Is that the sort of approach going forward that you think we should be focused on with issues like Social Security Reform?

Gingrich: I would draw a distinction because there are 3 or 4 different things at issue here:

One is what happens to us in terms of the priority setting. When I look at a 290 billion dollar Omnibus Bill, I see an opportunity for us to do a lot in just saying “no.” That to me is not just a question of better government, that’s a question of less pork and fewer politicians using your money to buy re-election.

Second, in places like Social Security, the real question is whether we’re going to allow young Americans to use the power of the marketplace to have a dramatically greater retirement because of the power of savings over time, or whether we’re going to keep them trapped in an obsolete system that may have been fine in 1935.

The first year they paid Social Security checks, there were 42 workers for every recipient. Now we're down to about 3 workers, and when my grandchildren are working, we’re going to be down to about 2 workers. That’s just not going to give them the same deal, they’re not going to have the same opportunities. And I think we have to be fairly clear about that.

I want our movement to be in favor of young people having the right to choose if they think they can get a better deal. And we believe they can get 3 to 4 times as much money in retirement income, which is also why we believe in Health Savings Accounts because it gives you a chance if you’re young and healthy to build up a fairly tremendous amount of savings. So when you do get ill, you have the resources that help you take care of yourself. It doesn’t throw you on the government.

VNH: Now, this might sound like a little New Hampshire nepotism, but we are very proud that Senator Sununu is out in front on this issue with the President, “taking the arrows” on this thing. Is there a reason that of all the proposals on the table, you singled out the Ryan-Sununu bill to focus on in Winning the Future?

Gingrich: Look, the Ryan-Sununu bill is the most intelligent, the most effective, and I think the most likely to succeed proposal I’ve seen on Social Security. That’s true, for 2 reasons: first, because it creates large individual savings accounts, and second, it pays for the transition in part by capping government spending.

And the difference between a lot of these other programs, which I’m frankly very opposed to, is that the other programs say let’s hurt the working American, let’s hurt the retired American, let’s either raise the amount they’re going to be taxed or let’s raise the amount we’re going take out of their benefits.

With John Sununu—I think this is brilliant—he said, why don’t we just cap the increase in government spending (at about the rate, by the way, we achieved under President Clinton because of the Republican Congress). Under Clinton, the Republican Congress held spending down to about 1% less than the growth of the economy. And if you do that for about 8 years and just keep that trend line there on out, you actually pay most of the transition costs by putting government on a diet, rather than by causing the American families to have to give things up.

VNH: For people who don’t do this every day, the minute the numbers start getting thrown around, it seems impossible to remember it all. So one of our goals is to help people find ways to win the “water cooler wars,” to make it easier for them to not just get the facts out, but explain them in a persuasive way. So the question is, how can we simplify this? Is there one idea that you think folks could just hammer home when they get into that argument, one simple concept they could just hammer home at the water cooler that could help more people see the truth?

Gingrich: What I say is very straight forward: if you knew that your son or your daughter or your grandson or granddaughter could have 3 or 4 times as big a savings account, at no cost to you, why would you cheat them of the money?

Every day that we fail to give them the right to choose this—now, I didn’t say make them do it—the right to choose this, we are cheating them of interest on that day’s money for the entire rest of their lives. And that’s why I feel a sense of urgency.

VNH: Now most folks are going to be reading this on tax day, and I’m sure many of them will be glad to know that we’re at a point in the system where it seems like you’re saying it’s time for truly systemic change. What kind of tax reforms do you believe our necessary to secure not just America’s economic security, but our economic sovereignty?

Gingrich: Well, I think first of all, there’s no excuse for raising taxes because government is bloated and government is so big that we have every reason to force the government to be in a position where it has to go through re-thinking what it’s doing, saving money, finding ways not to waste money, etc. So I’m against raising taxes on the families of America, as long as government is as wasteful as it is today.

Second, I think you want a tax code that is very pro-savings and very pro-investment because you want American workers to have the finest equipment and the finest machinery to compete with China and India. And the only way to get that is to have a system that absolutely encourages people to save and invest.

Third, you want to shift more towards consumption and away from income. You want to shift towards investment and savings. You want to abolish the death tax permanently, immediately. I’d make that one of the highest priorities this year. I really think the White House would be better off to insist on having a big fight to make the tax cuts permanent. And I think on the death tax alone, they’d have the political energy to do it, if they focused it narrowly.

I think in the long run, you may want to consider totally replacing the corporate income tax with some kind of business transfer tax, so you could rebate at the border for exports and you could impose on imports, so that foreign workers began paying part of the tax burden. Because today, we’re virtually the only country in the world market where we don’t have any advantages for our workers if we’re exporting, and we have huge disadvantages in competing with other counties.

VNH: Expand on that a little bit.

Gingrich: If you import something into Europe, you pay their consumption tax, and if they export to the US they get all of that money back. So the Europeans and the Japanese have a system where American goods get more expensive paying for local taxes, while locally produced goods get less expensive because they get the money back if they ship it out of the country. So they have incentivized their countries to compete in the world market and to focus on exporting. We on the other hand, don’t do that at all. If you build something and ship it overseas, you don’t get any incentive back from your government. And if the Japanese or the Europeans or the Chinese ship something into the US, they don’t have to pay the cost of Social Security or the cost of Medicare at all, but if we ship stuff into their country, we’re helping pay the cost of their local government. They’ve been much more clever than we have at thinking through the rules of the World Trade Organization, and making sure that they have a tax code that maximizes local jobs and minimizes imports.

VNH: Again, since the class warfare rhetoric around tax cuts gets so hot, and the numbers get so heavy, let’s go back to the “water cooler war.” If there was one idea that folks should hammer home over and over again, what would it be?

Gingrich: If I had one idea right now it would be to abolish the death tax permanently, so people aren’t taxed twice and you don’t have to go to the IRS before you go to the undertaker.

VNH: Earlier, you talked about young people having the right to choose their own retirement plan. On the face of it, you’d think young people would want to fight for that right, yet we hear all the time how difficult it is to get young people into the political process, and those that do get involved get discouraged when things don’t change immediately. Maybe it’s because they grew up in the age of “instant gratification,” but there needs to be a way to help them understand that not only does change take time, but as you’ve said, “change comes in waves.” In fact, could you talk a bit about how far we’ve come since the beginning of the modern Conservative movement, when Mr. Buckley founded National Review 50 year ago?

Gingrich: Well, we used to live in a world where people assumed you had to raise taxes, they assumed the bureaucrats knew best, they assumed the Soviet Union was the wave of the future, and they assumed that the average citizen was too dumb to have an opinion that mattered.

Young people have to realize that we’re in a long term fight; this fight is going to go on, maybe for another 50 or 100 years. But we’ve had a remarkable recovery back towards a citizen-based, individual-based sense of classic American values from where we were in the 50’s and 60’s, when it really was the Harvard elite and there really was the sense that if only the rest of us would just pay our taxes and shut up, that really smart bureaucrats would solve everything. And that was sort of the heart of The Great Society model, captured brilliantly by Marvin Olasky in The Tragedy of American Compassion.

You see some examples of it still, but you don’t see many. It’s still there as a power structure. It’s still there in terms of lobbyists, and labor unions, and bureaucracies. But the moral force for the last 50 years has steadily moved towards a more Conservative, more entreprenurial, more pro-freedom, more work ethic value set which I think is both good for Americans who happen to believe in it, but it’s also historically necessary. It’s certainly not what anybody could have predicted back in that period.

When people like Bill Buckley first got involved, Whittaker Chambers said (when he first left the Communist Party) that he was leaving the winning side to join the losing side because he really thought it was inevitable that the Soviet’s would beat us. Now take that level of pessimism and that level of despair, and look at the world you now live in.

So this is what I say to young people when I see them: if you watch Baghdad and you watch Beirut, and you don’t want your neighborhood to look like that—you had better get involved. Because you are all that stands between civilization and barbarism.

VNH: Obviously, we have just scratched the surface of what is in this book, but before we talk about how citizen activists can use Winning the Future, is there anything else you’d like to touch on?

Gingrich: Well, I think the most important long term things in there are the concepts of patriotic immigration and the idea of reestablishing that the citizenship test should be on American history and it should be in English; and then, the concept of re-centering our society around the notion that our political rights come from our creator. That we meant what we said in the Declaration of Independence: that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, and that we should not allow the Supreme Court or the classroom to drive those ideas out of American public life because they change permanently what America is. America is the only country in the world that says, “your rights come to you from God,” and you as a sovereign citizen loan power to your government. That’s why the Constitution says, “We the people.” And if we end up drifting into the European model, where power goes to the government and the government loans it to us, we’ve just permanently changed the nature of America.

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