Issue Position: Conservative Reform Agenda

Issue Position

A New Reform Agenda

Today, the United States is beset by a crisis in inequality. It's not a crisis of unequal wealth or income, exactly -- it's a crisis of unequal opportunity. We see it up and down American society.

The underprivileged are trapped in poverty, sometimes for generations. The middle class is caught on a treadmill, running harder every year just to maintain the economic security and social cohesion that were once taken for granted.

At the top of our society, we find a political and economic elite increasingly exempted and insulated by law from the rigors of competition and the consequences of their own mistakes.

Many see this inequality and assume it must be a failure of the free market, or due to a lack of government regulation.

But in many ways, bigger government is not the solution to unequal opportunity -- it's the cause. It is government policies, after all, that trap poor children in rotten schools and poor families in substandard housing. It is government policies that inflate costs and limit access to quality schools and health care; that hamstring badly needed innovation in higher education. And it's government policies that give preferential treatment and subsidies to well-connected corporations and special interests at the expense of everyone else.

America's crisis of unequal opportunity is the greatest challenge facing the United States today. We need to start developing a new conservative reform agenda that restores equal opportunity to the families and communities from whom it has been unfairly taken.

To build this agenda, we first need everyone to participate in an open, rigorous, transparent debate about ideas. Too many in Washington seem to believe that on any issue, we should either have one plan -- one that everyone supports in lockstep -- or no plans. But unity cannot come at the expense of creativity.

Americans believe in the wisdom of markets. So let's trust the marketplace of ideas. If we want policy innovation, we need to innovate policy!

On certain issues, we have been. And we need more of that kind of innovation -- especially to meet the broader range of problems confronting the middle class.

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