From pages 293-309

From the outset, the next Administration should: Denounce efforts to place ancillary issues like climate change ahead of food productivity and affordability when it comes to agriculture.

Too often, agricultural policy becomes synonymous with farm subsidy policy. This is unfortunate, because making them synonymous fails to recognize that agricultural policy covers a wide range of issues, including issues that are outside the proper scope of the USDA, such as environmental regulation.

Farmers eligible to participate in ARC or PLC are generally already able to purchase federal crop insurance, policies that protect against shortfalls in expected revenue whether caused by lower prices or smaller harvests. The ARC program is especially egregious because farmers are being protected from shallow losses, which is another way of saying minor dips in expected revenue. This is hardly consistent with the concept of providing a safety net to help farmers when they fall on hard times.

Even in a strong economy, work expectations are fairly limited: Individuals who are work-capable and without dependents are required to work or prepare for work for 20 hours per week. The work requirements are then implemented unless the state requests a waiver from the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Services. Waivers from statutory work requirements can be approved in two instances: an unemployment rate of more than 10 percent or a lack of sufficient jobs.

Federal meal programs for K–12 students were created to provide food to children from low-income families while at school. Today, however, federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective and represent an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations.

From pages 591-592

Overtime requirements may discourage employers from offering certain fringe benefits such as reimbursement for education, childcare, or even free meals because the benefits’ value may be included in the “regular rate” that must be paid at 150 percent for all overtime hours. And because some of these fringe benefits may be more valuable (and often come with tax preferences that benefit the worker), the goal should be to set a threshold to ensure lower-income workers have the protections of overtime pay without discouraging employers from offering these benefits.

Congress should provide flexibility to employers and employees to calculate the overtime period over a longer number of weeks. Specifically, employers and employees should be able to set a two or four week period over which to calculate overtime. This would give workers greater flexibility to work more hours in one week and fewer hours in the next and would not require the employer to pay them more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period.

From pages 457-459

Since its approval more than 20 years ago, mifepristone has been associated with 26 deaths of pregnant mothers, over a thousand hospitalizations, and thousands more adverse events, but that number does not account for all complications. Of course, this does not count the hundreds of thousands to millions of babies whose lives have been unjustly taken through chemical abortion.

From page 5

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

From pages 359-361

Congressional appropriations for the U.S. Department of Education have risen from $14 billion in 1980 to $95.5 billion in 2021, an astounding increase, especially in light of the lack of improvements in student outcomes.

Transferring most of the programs at the U.S. Department of Education to other agencies and eliminating duplicative and ineffective programs would yield significant taxpayer savings.

Competitive grant programs operated by the Department of Education should be eliminated [...]

As mentioned above, the PLUS loan program, which provides graduate student loans and loans to the parents of undergraduate students, should be eliminated.

End time-based and occupation-based student loan forgiveness.

It is not the responsibility of the federal government to provide taxpayer dollars to create a pipeline from high school to college.

From pages 695-698

The Treasury should work with Congress to simplify the tax code by enacting a simple two-rate individual tax system of 15 percent and 30 percent that eliminates most deductions, credits and exclusions. The 30 percent bracket should begin at or near the Social Security wage base to ensure the combined income and payroll tax structure acts as a nearly flat tax on wage income beyond the standard deduction. The corporate income tax rate should be reduced to 18 percent. The corporate income tax is the most damaging tax in the U.S. tax system, and its primary economic burden falls on workers because capital is more mobile than labor.

Extra layers of taxes on investment and capital should also be eliminated or reduced. The net investment income surtax and the base erosion anti-abuse tax should be eliminated. The estate and gift tax should be reduced to no higher than 20 percent, and the 2017 tax bill’s temporary increase in the exemption amount from $5.5 million to $12.9 million (adjusted for inflation) should be made permanent.

All non-business tax deductions and exemptions that were temporarily suspended by the 2017 tax bill should be permanently repealed, including the bicycle commuting expense exclusion, non-military moving expense deductions, and the miscellaneous itemized deductions.

Tax competition between states and countries is a positive force for liberty and limited government.

From pages 436, 674-677

NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures).

Together, [this organization's six offices] form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.

Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.

Appoint and empower a Science Adviser reporting directly to the Administrator in addition to a substantial investment (no fewer than six senior political appointees) charged with overseeing and reforming EPA research and science activities.

From page 5

In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.

The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.