Rick Perry - Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington

Copyright 2010 by Texas Public Policy Foundation

Afterword copyright 2012 by Texas Public Policy Foundation

Cover photograph by Jack Pitney/Corbis

Cover copyright 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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ISBN 978-0-316-18375-8

Campaign books are terrible. Any campaign book, that is, except Rick Perrys Fed Up!. This is not a boring book. More to the point, its not even a book about Rick Perry. Its a book about Rick Perrys ideas. Perrys book is a serious argument about what kind of country we should be. I recommend it highly.

Ezra Klein, Washington Post

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in state history, is a constitutional scholar, a defender of free enterprise, a champion of states rights and the Tenth Amendment, and a polemicist of the first orderall qualities evident in this strongly written and persuasively argued book.

John R. Coyne Jr., Washington Times

A new cowboy has entered the ring, toting his own political book. its big, bold, and, to borrow a word that was once associated with our current commander-in-chief, audacious.

Husna Haq, Christian Science Monitor

Perrys proposals provide the clearest preview to date of a Tea Party presidential platform.

Newsweek

Acutely grasping the political moment, Fed Up! is steeped in the reactionary language of movement conservatism and Tea Party revolution. Its a shrewd brew from a smart and shrewd politician.

Jody Seaborn, Austin American-Statesman

Aptly named This is radical stuff. He gets points for bravery.

Dana Milbank, Washington Post

Perry has made it clear he wants himself and Texas to be the model for the Tea Party revolution writ large.

John Willingham, San Antonio Express-News

A book that reads like a Tea Party manifesto, laying out the conservative case for dismantling much of the federal government and returning power to the states Mr. Perry takes on several sacred cows There are touches of humor.

James C. McKinley Jr., New York Times

This book is one of the best things to emerge from the Tea Party movement. In time, it could be that all of this, including Sarah Palins carrying the flag these two years, was just prepping and plowing the fields to prepare for Perrys arrival on the national scene.

Bernie Quigley, TheHill.com

Perry lays out solutions to get America back on track.

Paul Strand, CBN.com

At the core of Fed Up! is an argument that the states still matter and are keys to personal liberty and national solvency, and to making real progress on the issues that confront us. Any book that deals with states rights is bound to stir up controversy given the historic uses and misuses of the idea, but Perry fails to fall into any of the usual traps even on this dicey issue.

Bryan Preston, Texas Insider

After an era of government by Republicans during the early part of the 2000s that only saw the expansion of power in Washington, Fed Up! is a warning to the GOP to avoid straying from its rhetoric of federalism again.

Patrick Caldwell, American Independent

On My Honor

This book is dedicated to the great founders of this country and each generation of American patriots since who have understood that freedom is worth fighting for, and even dying for. To all the warriors who have poured out their blood on the altar of freedom, who have run to the sound of the guns because of devotion to country, I salute you. America is free because you were courageous.

I wish this book had never needed to be written.

It almost came too late.

America is recklessly accelerating toward economic disaster. Fed Up! may be the last warning sign to the danger that lies ahead.

Rick Perry, Texas governor for the past decade, is uniquely qualified to offer a firsthand perspective on why the United Statesthe most successful civilization in human historyis being threatened with economic collapse.

Faith, freedom, and free enterprise are the pillars of a strong, safe, prosperous society. Rick knows that when these principles are protected, America succeeds, and when they are undermined, America fails. But the Left has a different belief. The Left believes that most people are not capable of pursuing happiness and that a strong centralized government is best able to provide for them. While claiming compassion for humanity, the Lefts policies are destructive to the human beings subject to themas we have had to learn painfully again and again.

The Lefts self-serving solution to every crisis, economic or otherwise, and many of their own doing, is always the same: inflict higher taxes on Americans to create more government programs with more rules and regulations that result in less freedom, less innovation, less safety, and less prosperity.

The problem with the Lefts one solution, as Rick forcefully explains in the pages that follow, is that it doesnt work. Its never worked, and it never will work. The record shows it.

But what the record also shows is that when power and freedom are returned to the people, when people are rewarded for work, and when government holds the line on spending, individuals and opportunity thrive. We have seen that result most spectacularly recently in Texas, and in the mid-1990s with the Contract with America Congress, when I served as Speaker of the House.

Upon taking office, President Barack Obama repeatedly said that he was open to ideas on health care policy and on reversing the economic crisis. But he had to look no further than Texas to see ideas and policies that work.

Texas has no state income tax, no capital gains tax, and no tax on corporate dividends. In contrast, California taxes all three. It has the highest state income tax rates in the nation, with a top rate of 10.3 percent and with most income earners paying 9.3 percent. The California sales tax stands at 8.25 percent. In Texas, the state sales tax rate is 6.25 percent. With both the highest personal income tax and the highest state sales tax in the nation, California also has the largest budget deficit of any state.

Texas has economically outperformed California by any measure. Since 1998, economic growth in Texas has been nearly 20 percent higher than it is in California. Since the end of the tech boom, the rate of real economic growth in Texas has been 48.5 percent higher than in California. From 1998 to 2007, personal income in Texas grew 21 percent faster than in California. Since 2002, real personal income has grown 46 percent faster in Texas. From 2000 to 2007, California lost a net of 1.2 million residents. Texas, over the same period, gained more than half a million in interstate migration, the third highest in the country.