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.'
Mitch Daniels
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.
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 don't have a prayer of defeating the Red Threat of our generation without a long boom of almost unprecedented duration.
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.
My record is, far as I know, unimpeachable.
The president's grand experiment in trickle-down government has held back rather than sped economic recovery. He seems to sincerely believe we can build a middle class out of government jobs paid for with borrowed dollars.
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.
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.
I certainly believe in limited government but protecting children against injury abuse is certainly inside my sphere of things that the government should do.
The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.
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.
No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others.
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.
Our first thought is always for those on life's first rung, and how we might increase their chances of climbing.
The public is increasingly disgusted with a steady diet of defamation, and prepared to reward those who refrain from it.
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.
As Republicans, our first concern is for those waiting tonight to begin or resume the climb up life's ladder.
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.
Government does not create jobs, it only creates the conditions that make jobs more or less likely.
We must display a heart for every American, and a special passion for those still on the first rung of life's ladder.
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.
A one-time tax does not get figured into people's investment decisions.
Starting a new retirement plan for those below a certain age is something tens of millions of Americans have already been through at work.
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.
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.
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.'
The state of our state needs serious attention.
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.
We are taking challenges and turning them into opportunities by developing homegrown, local energy production to become independent from foreign sources.
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.
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.
Our morbidly obese federal government needs not just behavior modification but bariatric surgery.
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 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?
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.
We believe that government works for the benefit of private life, and not the other way around.
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.
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.'
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.'
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.
In fact, it works the other way: A government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the backs of the middle class and those who hope to join it.
We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots. We must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.
The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing.
Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids; why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb.
There is nothing inconsistent about having a conservative outlook and being vigorous.
Every successful enterprise has a very clear strategic purpose.
I believe that the Right to Work issue is a perfectly appropriate one for Indiana to look at.
The true enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who defend an imploding status quo.
We see government's mission as fostering and enabling the important realms - our businesses, service clubs, Little Leagues, churches - to flourish.
