FAITH: Platform Summaries - 8/28/92 PLATFORM SUMMARIES: FAITH IN INDIVIDUALS VERSUS FAITH IN GOVERNMENT August 28, 1992 FAMILY VALUES, EDUCATION, AND HEALTH CARE The 1992 Republican Party Platform reaffirms the central role of the family and the need for government policies that give families better choices in their daily lives. Government should promote flexibility, not dictate solutions. The American people should be trusted to raise their children and live their lives unfettered by intrusive regulation. In return, society should expect individuals to be responsible for their behavior and should hold them accountable. The Republican Platform: o Endorses policies that strengthen family finances and keep families together. o Supports child care tax credits. o Endorses the right of parents to chose their child's school, outlines reform to revitalize America's schools, and promotes measures to make higher education and training more affordable. o Outlines specific health care reforms to increase the affordability of care and help small businesses cover their employees without raising taxes or costing jobs. o Commits our Nation to finding a cure for AIDS, starting with an increase in research and treatment funds. The Democrats continue their reliance on bigger government to solve domestic problems--more taxes, more spending, more bureaucracy, and more regulations. They disdain "Big Government" in theory but plan massive new bureaucratic intrusions into Americans daily lives, distrusting parents and market forces. The Democratic Platform: o Routinely urges that family responsibilities be replaced by bureaucratic social services. o Endorses employer mandates to provide health care and job training, costing American jobs and substituting government regulations for good economic sense. o Maintains the power of status-quo education unions rather than empowering parents to hold schools accountable for results. o Gives a "commission of bureaucrats" (instead of individuals) power over basic health care decisions, which will lead inevitably to rationing of care. INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, GOOD HOMES, AND SAFE STREETS The Republican platform reiterates Republicans' faith in individuals and families, and emphasizes the need for personal responsibility. It describes specific measures to promote home ownership, including tax credits for young couples and low-income residents. It supports far-reaching welfare reforms, tough judges, and unrelenting prosecution of criminals. The rights of individuals, including those of unborn children, are supported. The Republican Platform endorses: o Stronger enforcement of child support laws. o Reforms to require welfare recipients to work and parents to be responsible for getting kids to school. o Elimination of legal loopholes that let criminals go free. o Sale of homes to tenants of federal housing and low- income housing tax credits. o A $5,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers. o Vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws, not quotas. o The fundamental right to life of unborn children. The Democrat platform continues to support their belief in government as the answer to all our county's problems and fails to hold individuals accountable for their actions. The Democrat Platform: o Devotes 6 lines of platitudes to housing. o Does not specify how welfare recipients should behave more responsibly. o Calls for more police but is ominously silent on the key to keeping criminals behind bars: tough judges and laws. o Supports affirmative action and quotas. o Supports abortion on demand. ECONOMY, TRADE, JOBS AND THE BUDGET The 1992 Republican Party Platform contains a sound economic program to create jobs and spur growth. The Republican Platform endorses: o Tax rate reductions as the deficit is reduced. o Cutting government spending to reduce the deficit. o Reliance on entrepreneurs, free enterprise, and deregulation (not government intervention) to achieve growth. o Expanded international trade through President Bush's North American Free Trade Agreement, and completion of a world trade agreement allowing American goods to compete on a level playing field. o Supports a monetary policy that maintains low inflation and interest rates. Republican and Democrats have fundamental differences. Republicans believe in lower taxes, spending and regulation. Democrats believe in higher taxes, spending, and regulation. Working Americans, whose jobs have been secured by lower taxes and increased exports, know who is really right. The Democrat Platform: o Attempts to shed the liberal, tax-and-spend, mandate-and- regulate, protectionist policies of the past, but in fact merely advocates more of the same. o The differences are not mere debating points. They would result in radically different economic performances in the 1990s and into the next century. The 1992 Republican Platform would make families more financially secure, giving them new help in the form of tax credits to choose child and health care, and their children's school. o Enactment of policies in the 1992 Democratic platform would bring a return to the high unemployment, high inflation, low productivity economy of the late 1970s. REFORMING GOVERNMENT AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM The Republican platform strongly advocates a diminution of the federal government's power to tax and spend, and far-reaching institutional reforms of the Congress and the legal system. The Republican Platform endorses: o A Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment and line-item veto authority for the President. o Term limits for members of Congress. o A 25% reduction in Congressional staff. o Privatization of government services and assets. o An end to Congress' self-serving exemption from the same civil rights land minimum wage laws that it imposes on everyone else. o Campaign finance reform that ends the corrupting influence of PAC's bank-rolled by unions and similar special interests. o Legal reform to stop the epidemic of lawsuits that threaten our Nations's competitiveness and drive up the cost of doing business. The Democrat Platform endorses: o Elimination of ill-defined "non-productive programs." o Campaign reform generally, though it does not specify needed accountability and disclosure measures. o Greater freedom for states and local governments in meeting Federal mandates, though their candidate would impose massive new health care, environmental and worker retraining mandates on job-creating businesses. WISE USE OF OUR LAND AND RESOURCES The Republican Platform outlines clear policies to conserve the environment, create new uses for agricultural products, and preserve sound market-based energy policies. The Republican Party continues to be the home of the farmer, rancher and forester. The Republican Platform: o Endorses the President's National Energy Strategy. o Promotes development of renewable energy sources. o Advocates the use of market incentives to further protect the environment. o Endorses compensation for the "taking" of property by regulatory fiat. o Rejects the notion that elected officials and bureaucrats make better farm managers than farmers themselves. o Urges that Congress -- not bureaucrats -- be accountable for approving endangered species recovery plans that cost jobs. The Democrat Platform revisits the tired litany of attacks on the President's environmental record. In the name of environmental protection, the Party of the job-costing carbon tax and radical hikes in auto efficiency standards would reverse the President's pro-jobs, pro-conservation policies. The Democrat Platform: o Dismisses the entire issue of energy -- the lifeblood of our economy -- with the phrase "energy efficiency and sustainable development". o Never mentions the word "growth" in the agriculture plank, and continues to rely, as Democrats historically have, on inefficient government programs. o Calls for a cap on carbon dioxide emissions without any recognition of the potential negative effect on jobs and the economy. o Devotes 7 sentences to agriculture. o Imperils exports by inviting retaliation to protectionist trade policies. FOREIGN POLICY AND NATIONAL DEFENSE The differences in how the two parties would protect America's interests abroad are stark. The Republican Party supports President Bush's steady, decisive leadership to protect America's interests in an uncertain world. The Republican Platform: o Offers a vision for America's future role in the world -- promotion of a commonwealth of freedom -- and an overarching strategy for how to redefine our leadership in the post-Cold War era: collective engagement. o Supports free trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement, the largest free trade zone in the world. o Pledges to oppose creation of an independent Palestinian state until the PLO abandons terrorism. o Supports deployment of effective global ballistic missile defenses to guard against dangers from proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. o Pledges to purge communism and Castro's regime from Cuba and support Radio and TV Marti. o Calls for the fullest possible accounting of the fate of POW/MIAs in Southeast Asia. Bill Clinton signed on to his party's long-standing policy of reacting to world events, rather than shaping them. The Democrat Platform: o Has neither a vision nor a strategy. o Fails to endorse "free trade" or NAFTA. o Says they support the use of force to protect our vital interests, but never mentions the Gulf War or Panama. o Does not oppose establishment of an independent Palestinian state and is silent on the issue of dialogue with the PLO. o Is silent on ballistic missile defense systems. o Proposes to cut nearly $60 billion more from defense, throwing as many as a million additional Americans out of work. o Is silent on the issue of POW/MIAs in Southeast Asia.