On radio this morning, Glenn welcomed several of the presidential hopefuls from the GOP to the show from Iowa where they are preparing for the first primary voting. Glenn first welcomed the current governor of his new home state of Texas – Rick Perry.
Perry cast himself and his campaign as Washington outsiders who were looking to overhaul the bureaucracy in Washington. “The essence of this campaign is that we've got to have an outsider who will come into Washington D.C. and overhaul it, dismantle these agencies. I mean, the idea that we even have a Department of Education that is taking our money and then skimming off billions plus dollars to administer are the place and then pick winners and choose winners and losers and send it back to the states that they want to send it to is just absolutely insane.”
“Why would you want a bureaucrat in Washington D.C. telling you how to run your state, whether it's environmental laws, whether it's education, whether it's delivery of healthcare or transportation infrastructure?” Perry added.
Perry said that states should be able to determine their own regulations and standards and that claims like “It’s everyone’s air” shouldn’t mean that a national federal agency should interfere.
“The issue is this: It's our water, it's our air, and if you think that we care less about our children's health, the next generation's health, I beg to differ with you. As a matter of fact, Texas using our own program cleaned up the air more than any other state in the nation during the decade of the 2000s. We reduced ozone levels by 27%, nitrogen oxide levels by 58% with our own flexible permitting program because we didn't kill jobs. We were creating jobs but we were using a flexible permitting process which I won't go into the details, but it worked.”
Perry also promised to severely limit the role of The Fed.
“I'd move the Fed back to a single purpose agency and its single job would be to make sure that inflation stays under control. And that's it. And I would make it incredibly transparent,” he said.
Perry also emphasized the importance of faith and Judeo-Christian values.
“I tell pastors all across the country: Do not fall into that trap that you cannot talk about the values and the principles that are biblically based and that it is our responsibility as Americans to take our values that are taught biblically and allow them to be discussed and to put them in place in the public arena. That is the principles that this country was based upon, the Judeo Christian values that the vast majority of our Founding Fathers believed in, they put them in place.”
“As President, one of my most important jobs is going to be to create an environment where you don't overtax, you don't overregulate, the government becomes less consequential in people's lives and they have the freedom to take care and their family, the dignity of a job,” Perry added.
