Prosperity and Charity for America

COMMON SENSE
in 2012

Art Robinson, PhD

Liberty and Justice for All

Our nation has a bright future, but the politicians in Congress are doing a poor job, endangering our Jobs; the National Budget; Social Security; Education; the Environment; Medical Care; and Economic Prosperity. Lets replace them by electing citizens with common sense. Art Robinson has the abilities we need in Congress.
Dr. Robinson is one of the most gi ed scientists I have ever met. Martin Kamen Fermi Prize and Discoverer of Carbon 14 Dr. Robinson is known to me as a careful, competent, and wellinformed scientist Edward Teller Defense Scientist Arthur Robinson has the respect of a very signi cant portion of the scienti c community. Frederic Seitz Former President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences I strongly endorse Art Robinson for election to the U.S. Congress. In the 15 years I have known Art, I have found him to be an outstanding scientist, a man of uncompromising integrity. Arts depth of knowledge of the economic, scienti c, energy, and industrial challenges that face our nation is unparalleled. Men of his ability are urgently needed in Washington. Steve Forbes Publisher and Entrepreneur In my experience with space ight, I have come to know many men of excellence. Art Robinson is the best can-do guy I know. Hes what we need in Washington, and I think Oregon voters should elect Art Robinson. Hes a treasure. Scott Carpenter Mercury Astronaut Art Robinsons philosophy is that the government is far too intrusive in our lives. He understands we have to stop the spending in Washington, the growth of the national debt, and allow the Constitution to function. I strongly recommend the 4th congressional district of Oregon put Art Robinson in the Congress of the United States. Harrison Schmitt Apollo Astronaut and former U.S. Senator Robinson is a pathological nut-job. Peter DeFazio Career Politician and Arts Opponent

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15
BAILOUTS, STIMULUS SPENDING, AND DEFICITS
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow Money on the credit of the United States; . . . Article I, Section 8, Parts 1,2 Bailouts, stimulus spending, and deficit spending all involve congressional spending of money that Congress takes from those who earned it. This money is spent to subsidize enterprises chosen by Congress and its bureaucrats and friends. The taking and political spending of this money is ethically wrong. Moreover, this money has been spent so unwisely that it has actually hurt our economy and destroyed jobs. The earnings of the American people should remain in their hands, so they can spend in common sense ways that increase prosperity and create jobs.

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Congress is in charge of taxing, spending, and borrowing. It cannot escape this responsibility. But what about using public funds to bail out failed banks? And its not just banks. Many businesses want subsidies. After the subsidies prove to be too little, they want bailouts. Lobbyists are the primary facilitators of bailouts, subsidies, and special favors. Jack Abramoff s book Capital Punishment,56 written after he served time in prison for doing the same things that are still going on in Washington today, describes the system that lobbyists use to get favors from Congress. This is a pervasively corrupt culture in which congressional votes are bought and sold for personal perks, traded votes, and campaign cash. This culture results from careers in politics. It should end. Big Business Bailouts Bailouts work, if you are the person getting the bailout. The question is this: Do bailouts work for the taxpayers who have to come up with the money to pay for bailouts? In the debate over the $787 billion bailout package the public was overwhelmingly opposed. The public had no say in the matter. The politicians didnt care what the public thought was the right thing to do. The politicians took this approach: We are going to do exactly what we want to irrespective of what our constituents want us to do because we think this is the best thing for us personally right now. And so they did. After Obama took office, my opponent, Congressman DeFazio bragged about his support for stimulus programs and voted yes on five bailout, stimulus, and debt increase measures. On one of the measures, his only no vote, he

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voted yes once and then no once he voted no on that one because it gave less money than he wanted for the special interests that fund his campaigns and it lowered taxes.11 He now says that he voted no on stimulus. Who Is Responsible? So, the lobbyists ask Congress for things they should not receive, and Congress provides these things to them in exchange for campaign contributions and other perks. Who is the most to blame, Congress or the lobbyists and their clients? Lobbyists do not take an oath of office. Congress is, by far, the most to blame. It is Congress that has been entrusted by voters with the money and power of government. It is congressmen who misuse this trust to serve their self interests. There will always be people, institutions, corporations, banks, and others who ask for things they should not receive. It is the job of Congress to say, No. After I am elected to Congress and a lobbyist comes to my office to make an inappropriate request, I will just politely turn him away. After a few such sessions, the word will get around. Lobbyists will stop coming to my office. We will have more time for the peoples honest business. If you look over contributions to my campaign in 20105,6 and contributions to my opponents campaign,5,6 you will see that all of my support came from the contributions of private individuals and that the largest part of my opponents support came from lobbyists, corporations, and other special interest sources. DeFazio is a typical congressman in this regard (please see the earlier chapter

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on Campaign Finance). He improperly gives our money and governmental power to the clients of lobbyists, and they reward him with campaign contributions. His favors are to special interests that do most or all of their business outside Oregon. Now, DeFazio calls for higher taxes to pay for the stimulus, bailout, and deficit spending programs that he supported. He is certainly not independent as Oregon as he claims. He is up to his ears in debt to the lobbyists. I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. Winston Churchill Taxpayers Pay, Government Skims Bailout and stimulus programs are not fair and, moreover, do not work. Under these programs, government spends money that it takes now or later from the private sector. Private economic activity therefore shrinks by an amount equal to increased government funded activity plus the costs of government. Bailout and stimulus activities are like taking a lot of water out of a swimming pool at one end, spilling some, and pouring the rest in the other end. The level of the water does not rise. The level economic activity actually falls by the amount lost to government waste and inefficiency. Then there are the special-interest payments called earmarks. An earmark is a grant of money to some project in a congressmans district. It does not require a

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separate law of its own. It is attached to a bill that may have little or nothing to do with the project. Earmarks and requested earmarks are used by incumbent congressmen to buy votes by taking money from all of the people and giving it to a select few. Requested earmarks are especially interesting. Only a very small percentage of the requested earmarks are actually funded, but voters for whom a congressman makes such requests (requests that are easily granted, since they cost nothing) hoping that theirs will be among the funded give him their support at election time. Stimulus, bailout, pork barrel, and earmark appropriations are used to award taxpayer money to special interests in return for political favors. The current Congressman from Oregon District 4 receives large amounts of campaign cash from such businesses and special interests.5,6 Most people know little about this process. The recipients surely do. The recipients think, Its free money from Washington. How do people expect these projects to be financed? There are three principal ways: 1. Taxation, which destroys private jobs 2. Borrowing, which raises debt and destroys jobs 3. Money printing, which destroys savings and jobs Taxes on the Poor Politicians are insisting that any new taxes will fall only on the rich. They have been saying this for about a century. The income tax began in 1913, but a funny thing

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happened on the road to wealth redistribution since 1913. The rich are still rich. The great equality has not come to pass not in the United States, and not anywhere else, either. Here we are in 2012. If Congress could or wanted to really eliminate inequality, it would have done it in 1970 or 1930. It hasnt. In fact, the inequality has increased. The prosperity of all income groups has increased with technological advance, but not because of Congress. Taxing the rich to pay for the needs of the poor has been a popular promise for over 70 years. It is like Lyndon Johnsons war on poverty. Poverty is still around, isnt it? Yet in 1964, he promised to defeat poverty.29 Were still waiting. In order to pay higher taxes, taxpayers must sell shares of their ownership of productive capital. As a result of these sales, there is less capital than before taxes were imposed even on the rich. Actually, these taxes are imposed on just about everybody. No only do they destroy jobs, but they are passed on to the public in higher costs of the things they buy. The rich do not keep their money as piles of currency under their beds. Their wealth is invested in stocks, bonds, and other productive assets. The rich provide the capital necessary to build, maintain, and operate many of the businesses and industries that fund jobs for Americans. If there is less capital, then there are fewer jobs and businesses must raise their prices. Do we want able-bodied workers on welfare or working? I prefer the latter. So do they. Because politicians are generally unsuited to the wise use of money, a substantial part of government revenue is

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Property is the fruit of labor . . . property is desirable . . . is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring his own shall be safe from violence when built. Abraham Lincoln wasted, so there is a net loss of jobs especially jobs for poor and middle class workers. If left in private hands, that money would have supported more jobs. The government can still borrow from abroad, although foreign countries are increasingly surly about this. They suspect that the money borrowed already will never be repaid. Do we want the Chinese and other foreigners to own lots of our governments debt?30 Do we want Chinese officials to dictate policy to our leaders, on threat of dumping these U.S. government IOUs? Higher taxes, borrowing costs, and money printing all cause prices to rise. Price rises are far more harmful to the poor and middle class because their fewer dollars are more precious to them. The result is fewer jobs and higher prices, further impoverishing poor and middle class Americans.

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Big Spending, Big Deficits Deficit-spending in Washington is putting the national budget in the red by about $1.3 trillion dollars per year. American voters favor a balanced budget. Does congressman DeFazio vote to reduce expenditures and balance the budget? No. Instead, at taxpayer expense, he sends fliers to voters saying that he supports a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution 31 and then he votes for more deficit spending. He knows that, even if such an Amendment is passed, the amendment process will require many years until long after he has left Congress. He also knows that Congress already often ignores the Constitution. While a Balanced Budget Amendment, if carefully written, would be useful, it will surely not be passed in time to affect budgeting during the 2013-2014 congressional session. The federal budget must be balanced, but it should not be balanced by imposing additional burdens on the backs of American workers. And, it should not be further unbalanced by vast political slush funds represented as stimulus and bailout programs. Neither should the budget be balanced by lowering payments to those who depend upon Social Security and other critical programs. (Please see the Chapter on Balanced Budget and Taxation.) Government Grants We all have our stories about the ill effects of government grants. In my world of science, there are many stories. Since the federal government has taken over most academic research in the United States, even our best scientists are now forced to rely primarily on federal grants.

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This has followed a familiar pattern. Americans already had the finest scientific research system in the world. It was funded largely by private money. The government taxed away the private money and moved in to fund scientific research itself. Now government brags that, without its funding, scientific research would not take place. Government funding causes research to be influenced by bureaucrats and research trends to be directed politically instead of by the best efforts of independent scientists. Moreover, the scramble for grant funding resembles to a great extent the scramble for other funds from Congress, an increasingly dishonest and unethical activity that is not healthy for science, which must be based on truth. Scientists are better off if their work is funded by private enterprise and by private contributions, as was generally the case prior to World War II. At the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, my colleagues and I do not apply for government grants. We are entirely funded by individual private contributions. After the war, seeing the success of the Manhattan Project, many scientists thought more such funding might make possible great advances. This, with few exceptions, has not turned out to be the case. Surely, one can point to many scientific discoveries that have since been made with funding from government grants because government has coopted almost all nonindustrial research funding. Research is now so heavily dependent on government funding that changing back to private support would be a long process. So, any changes must be carefully done. The problem is that Congress has essentially bankrupted the federal government. This has plunged our nation

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into a series of financial crises, with no end in sight. So, one day soon, our scientists may wake up to find that they have no funds at all. When I was a young scientist in the 1960s, most academic scientists were very conservative. This is the common sense attitude of people in science. Now, however, academic science has been largely dependent on government money for 50 years. So, most academic scientists are now liberal and they are in a very precarious position. If the academics are wise, they will start voting for more conservative congressmen because, if the financial mess in Washington is not soon fixed, their checks from Washington may abruptly stop coming. Here is an example in which government grants almost improved your medical care, but then impeded it. Beginning in 1968 and extending through 1978, my colleagues and I, including Linus Pauling, invented a field of research called metabolic profiling which holds enormous potential to improve both preventive and diagnostic medicine. This work was ahead of its time, so we had to build almost all of our own apparatus and utilize methods that were very difficult. The immediate practical use of our discoveries in medicine was impeded by this difficulty. One day in 1971, a scientist from Stanford Research Institute, Dr. Bill Aberth, visited our laboratory at Stanford and told me that he and his colleagues had invented a new way to ionize molecular mixtures, which should make possible the first practical molecular ion mass spectrometer. He wondered if I knew of a use for such a machine that would justify funding to build it. A molecular ion mass spectrometer ionizes, separates, and measures the amounts of substances in a sample,

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without breaking the molecules. It is a very fast and economical means of measuring the amounts of substances in complicated mixtures. I suggested that we use Bills machine as a metabolic profiling device. It would be much faster, more economical, and perhaps far better than the methods we were then using. It might be so much better that our work could be of immediate use in practical medical applications. Unfortunately, Linus and I were then still funded primarily by government grants, so that was the only source we could turn to for this money. Fortunately, however, there was an excellent scientist at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Robert S. Melville, who arranged for us to receive the necessary government grant. All went well. Bill built a superb spectrometer. But then difficulties developed with Bills superior at Stanford Research Institute, Michael Anbar. Anbar wanted to dishonestly take credit for our medical project, so he ruled that we could not run samples on Bills device, which was located at SRI. Bob Melville intervened, however, so we were able to run 200 samples. These samples tested the mass spectrometers capability to diagnose breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and several other things. I designed the experiment with tasks that were so easy I knew it would succeed, but also with more difficult and more important examples. After the samples were run, Laurelee and I spent about two months calculating the results. It took this long because the experiment completely failed. We knew this couldnt be true, but there it was. Our 200,000 data points were no more valuable than random numbers. Although we worked very hard, there was just no

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Laurelee Robinson Works with Her PDP-11 Computer in the Linus Pauling Institute
information in the data. So, we abandoned the method. I was most surprised when Dr. Melville arranged generous funding for our later work on other research. The earlier failure had wasted a lot of money. Years passed; work on profiling at the Institute ended; and we were working in Oregon. Dr. Melville, who had now retired from government, invited me to dinner at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. After dinner, when we were in his car, he hesitated; did not start the engine; and then, on that dark street in Washington, he told me a remarkable story. He prefaced this by saying he considered it the only black mark against his career in Washington (where he had done excellent work). He told me that, a little while after our 200-sample

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experiment failed, he received a letter from Michael Anbar admitting that he had secretly entered the laboratory and scrambled the labels on our 200 samples, thus destroying the experiment. Further, Anbars letter contained a code for unscrambling the samples. At about that time, Anbar had submitted a research paper using the spectrometer for a medical profiling experiment. He apparently wanted to slow us down, so that his work (pirating ours) reached the literature first. Anbar acted very unethically. Scientists are people. There are more sad instances of their ethical failures than you might imagine. But he did write to Melville intending later to mitigate the damage. Neither of them, however, anticipated our government. Dr. Melville said that, since the event was highly unusual, Anbars letter was forwarded to his superiors, and, from there, it went to the very top of the National Institutes of Health bureaucracy. And, the bureaucrats ruled in their own self interests. Frightened that the incident might reflect poorly on them, they ordered Melville to destroy Anbars letter and not tell us why our experiment failed. Did you destroy the letter? I, of course, immediately asked. He replied that he might still have it. A year later, at his home, Bob Melville handed me a copy of Anbars letter, including the code to unscramble the samples. So, did we then unscramble the data and finally learn the results of the experiment? No, we couldnt. Therein lies another tale. An individual at the Pauling Institute had apparently intentionally destroyed all of the 250 magnetic tapes, many disk drive records, and 15 file cabinets of printed data from the entire 10 years of our work on metabolic profiling. Besides the mass spectrometry data,

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also destroyed were metabolic profiles of 1,000 newborn infants in which we discovered distinct types of individuals with potentially preventable health problems. Several efforts were made in later years to investigate this in the hopes that some data still remained, but an administrative employee, with the help of lawyers, thwarted those efforts. He still works at the Pauling Institute at OSU today. At present, in our research on metabolic profiling, we use exclusively a molecular ion mass spectrometer. This spectrometer is so advanced from the earlier model that I refer to it as a miracle in a box. I am certain this technology will eventually make a great contribution to medicine. The mass spectrometer we now use has a newer and better method of molecular ionization than the one that Bill Aberth and his colleagues invented. A Nobel Prize was given for its invention. Had Bills work not been lost in this remarkable series of events, Bill Aberth might have shared a Nobel Prize. There is no doubt that, had the experiment not failed, we would have devoted a major effort to improving Bills technique. Who knows how far we would have progressed? These events caused a great a setback for research on the use of molecular ion mass spectrometry in medicine. Actions have consequences. Had mass spectrometric metabolic profiling developed as it should, it could have saved Laurelees life in 1988, by getting her to surgery in time, and the lives of countless other people. She died of a sudden illness that profiling could easily have detected and immediate surgery mitigated. Motivations of those who carry out medical research range from profits and prestige to a simple desire to help

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people. However they are motivated, people make more progress when they are free to make their own decisions. Experts who risk their own time or capital are going to make better decisions than politicians, who generally know nothing about science and medicine, or politicized scientists who, rather than carry out actual work, join with politicians in rationing funds to better scientists. It is far less likely that a non-government funded medical scientist would have caused or tolerated the secret destruction of experimental research that Aberth and I and our colleagues suffered in this instance. Deficit spending, bailouts, and stimulus spending should not be authorized by Congress. Congress should confine its spending within its income and stay out of the private sector, except where constitutional authorization exists for it to intervene and common sense suggests that it should do so. There are many current government spending programs that are unwise. The most important of these should be phased out slowly enough to avoid unnecessary difficulties and to allow time for the development of alternative support.

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