Like Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, I believe that the only real solution for poverty is a good paying job. That is why I have now officially entered the race for United States Senate in Maryland.
Baltimore used to be a town of blue collar workers with good paying, manufacturing jobs making steel, building ships, planes, and automobiles, and servicing a major international port. During World War II, the blue collar workers of Baltimore were part of the arsenal of democracy, building the Navy’s ships, the Air Force’s planes, and the Army’s tanks.
In 1950, Baltimore was the sixth largest city in the country, home to nearly 1 million residents. We had fantastic companies, where coming directly out of high school, young men and women could work at Bethlehem Steel, and all of the secondary companies it supplied, Sparrows Point Shipyard, the Broening Highway-General Motors Automobile Plant, the Maryland Shipyard and Drydock, Bendix Corporation, Martin Marietta Corporation.
We had Bata Shoes, the Crown Cork and Seal Plants, American Can, National Can, the F & M Schaeffer Brewing Plant, and the home of National Brewing. In 1971, the Bethlehem steel mill at Sparrows Point was the largest in the entire country, employing 55,000 hard working Americans.
Now all gone. Excessive taxes, overregulation, and intransigent union demands combined to start a long term decline, as the Baltimore industrial base steadily lost ground to lower cost imports. Just last week, Baltimore lost the Pepsi bottling warehouse, and over a year ago we lost the Pepsi bottling plant, all due to a bottling tax Pepsi said would force them to shut down.
By 1995, Baltimore had lost over 75 percent of its industrial employment. By 2004, only 6 percent of the city’s jobs were in manufacturing. Today, Baltimore has a population of just over 600,000, down about a third from its peak in 1950. The city has declined from the industrial powerhouse leading the way to victory in World War II to its current state of post-industrial poverty.
Baltimore today is not on a path to recovery. And it is not going to regain its footing on a steady diet of Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton/Bernie Sanders/Chris Van Hollen/Elijah Cummings/Donna Edwards socialism.
Cutting taxes for all Marylanders is key to job growth, and a good job for all Americans. We need to enact federal tax reform involving a flat tax of 10 percent, with that same rate applying to all forms of personal income – wages, profits, capital gains, dividends, rent, royalties, etc. So everyone would pay the same rate on everything. No one would be able to say that billionaires are paying lower tax rates than their secretaries.
And instead of the highest top corporate income tax rate in the industrialized world, corporations in America would pay a flat 16 percent business tax rate, with no loopholes favoring some businesses over others.
This is my economic program, which re-invents supply side economics into production manpower economics. Instead of corporations and capital investment fleeing America, as under today’s Democratic socialism, corporations, global capital investment, and good paying jobs would pour into America, as it did under the pro-capitalist policies of Reaganomics.
Reagan’s economic policies generated a 25 year economic boom, from 1982 to 2007, which Art Laffer and Steve Moore rightly called the greatest period of prosperity and wealth creation in the history of the planet. My policies would further promote good paying, blue collar, manufacturing jobs with deregulation to boost America’s energy boom, producing the low cost energy necessary to power an American manufacturing renaissance.
Maryland can directly contribute to that, by liberating the energy production of low cost oil and natural gas through modern breakthroughs in the process of fracking. Part of the Marcellus shale belt runs right through Western Maryland. That is prime territory for low cost, proven safe fracking to contribute to America’s economic and manufacturing recovery.
In a new study for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and Freedom Works, Steve Moore estimates that “the value of oil and gas under federal lands that can be recovered with existing technologies like horizontal drilling and fracking is at today’s prices roughly $50 trillion. This is arguably the greatest treasure chest in world history.”
If I’m elected, that treasure would belong to America and its working people, because I am the only candidate in this race that supports the liberation of fracking, and maximum, low cost energy production. Low energy costs and surging capital investment are the foundation for restoring booming manufacturing in America
That restoration would benefit working people of all races, colors and creeds. Black, brown, and white. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. But that will never be achieved by perpetuating the poverty-creating socialist machine of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Van Hollen.
Dave Wallace is a life-long Marylander, small businessman in Carroll County, Maryland, Member of the National Tax Limitation Committee Tax Cut Working Group, and a candidate for United States Senate in Maryland.