PLATFORM SUMMARIES: FAITH IN INDIVIDUALS VERSUS FAITH IN GOVERNMENT August 28, 1992 FAMILY
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.
E-Mail Fredric L. Rice / The Skeptic Tank