Mitch Daniels

When they call the slightest spending reductions ‘painful’, we will say ‘If government spending prevents pain, why are we suffering so much of it?’ And ‘If you want to experience real pain, just stay on the track we are on.’

Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some.

We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.

We are tasked to rebuild not just a damaged economy, and a debt-ridden balance sheet, but to do so by drawing forth the best that is in our fellow citizens. If we would summon the best from Americans, we must assume the best about them. If we don’t believe in Americans, who will?

If we don’t believe in Americans, who will? I do believe. I’ve seen it in the people of our very typical corner of the nation.

Our educational results lag behind other states, and other nations, but worse still, behind the potential of the kids and the devoted teachers in our classrooms.

We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer.

And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you’re as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here’s a voucher, go sign up.

Finally, treat domestic energy production as the economic necessity it is and the job creator it can be. Drill, and frack, and lease, and license, unleash in every way the jobs potential in the enormous energy resources we have been denying ourselves.

We don’t have a prayer of defeating the Red Threat of our generation without a long boom of almost unprecedented duration.

Sure, things could always have been done better, but I just wish people would drop their political hammers for a few weeks, as happened in 2001, and work on the problem at hand.

The state of our state needs serious attention.

We say that anytime budgets are balanced and an ample savings account has been set aside, government should just stop collecting taxes. Better to leave that money in the pockets of those who earned it, than to let it burn a hole, as it always does, in the pockets of government.

Every citizen who stops smoking, or loses a few pounds, or starts managing his chronic disease with real diligence, is caulking a crack for the benefit of us all.

All great enterprises have a pearl of faith at their core, and this must be ours: that Americans are still a people born to liberty. That they retain the capacity for self-government. That, addressed as free-born, autonomous men and women of God-given dignity, they will rise yet again to drive back a mortal enemy.

But if our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won’t have much strength and, eventually, we won’t have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a ‘robust strategy.’

Government does not create jobs, it only creates the conditions that make jobs more or less likely.

We believe that government works for the benefit of private life, and not the other way around.

The perverse presumption that places the burden of proof on the challenger of spending must be inverted, back to the rule that applies elsewhere in life: ‘Prove to me why we should.’

We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions. Some might say we ‘cling’ to them, though not out of fear or ignorance. We believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual – we spend less money than we take in.

We are taking challenges and turning them into opportunities by developing homegrown, local energy production to become independent from foreign sources.

If our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won’t have much strength and, eventually, we won’t have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a ‘robust strategy.’

The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs; it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.

Our morbidly obese federal government needs not just behavior modification but bariatric surgery.

If freedom’s best friends cannot unify around a realistic, actionable program of fundamental change, one that attracts and persuades a broad majority of our fellow citizens, big change will not come.

I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.

No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.

So tonight I propose one more step that I would rather not propose. I ask the most fortunate among us, those citizens earning over $100,000 per year, for one year, to pay an additional one percent on the income they receive.

When business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I always reply: ‘Make money. Go make money. That’s the first act of corporate citizenship. If you do that, you’ll have to hire someone else, and you’ll have enough profit to help one of those non-profits we’re so proud of.’

Among the weeds choking out growth and good government are the hundreds of boards, commissions, and advisory committees that have sprouted over the years. They devour time, money, and energy far beyond any real contribution they make.