A salient example of this trend, in my home state of Maryland, is the ongoing debate occurring within the counties as to whether to submit county-wide planning maps in accordance with the recently passed Sustainable Growth and Agricultural Preservation Act of 2012. Without delving into the finer points of the legislation, it orders the counties to submit land use maps which will restrict the development options of the rightful land owners under the guise of the always nebulous term “sustainability.”

In the classic Hobson’s choice, Maryland’s counties are told that if they “choose” to refrain from submitting a map, or submit a map that the state does not approve of, then the state will penalize them by not allowing residential development outside of currently sewered areas. The counties now must determine whether to submit a map and cede to the state enormous swaths of hard-to-reclaim liberty, or to refuse to submit a map, and have state planners force one upon them also ceding liberty and violating any semblance of subsidiary.

The left has expertly crafted the use of the language to suit their ideological needs with flowery sounding terms such as “sustainability” and its use in this piece of legislation is no coincidence. Legislation of this type is part of an agenda, on behalf of the believers in big government solutions to small-community problems, to disarm communities and their residents of the ability to manage their own households and communities in favor of ceding this authority to a class of pseudo-intellectual politicos who, according to their thinking, understand how to utilize and care for your land better than you do. This rather dangerous proposition opens a Pandora’s Box of government-caused inequity, enforced under the penalty of law, and enacted under the guise of environmental “management” and “sustainability”.

Enforcing legislation such as this is only possible by treating different groups of people, such as the landowners and farmers who will have their land values destroyed with the snap of a legislative finger, differently from other group of people, such as real estate investors invested in city-centric development projects, who will see the values of their projects increase if growth is forced into congested cities.

If you believe, as I do, that the Constitution is a document of negative liberties, dictating how the government cannot indiscriminately legislate away your liberties, then you cannot believe this legislation is in keeping with the Constitutional principles our elected officials swore to uphold and protect.

In addition to the multitude of problems this legislation legally creates, it also creates a conflict in logic. If the government officials who dreamed up this legislation believe that land owners and farmers will destroy their land and the surrounding environment if allowed to manage it, then why should we believe that a class of bureaucrats, some of which have never stepped foot on a farm in their lives, would not magnify the errors by making decisions which benefit them or an interest group supporting them? As the late Milton Friedman once stated with respect to government officials, “Where are these angels you speak of?”

Taking a larger macro-view, this disturbing philosophy also conveniently leaves out the clear historical evidence of abysmal failure of big government to manage the environment. The most damaging and longest-lasting environmental disasters in human history all have one thing in common: big government planners. Chernobyl, the Aral Sea, and the Three Gorges Dam are but a few of the legions of environmental disasters resulting from government “planners” and their perverse agendas.

You may write this off as a leap too far but when the trend line for ceding personal economic, healthcare, public-safety, educational and now private property liberties all trend in the direction of you losing and government gaining, I think you’ll better understand my concerns. After all, liberty is a zero-sum game; it cannot belong to you and your government at the same time.

(Dan Bongino is a former Secret Service agent and current entrepreneur who ran for US Senate from Maryland in 2012)

The current fight to hike tax rates flies in the face of logic and in the interests of keeping the argument simple I want to address it from three fronts, tax rates and their effects on behavior, what the study of economics tells us about tax rates and the morality of increasing tax rates.

Human behavior is difficult to predict with certainty but when viewed collectively very specific patterns emerge. The laws of psychology and operant conditioning tell us that a response that is rewarded will generally increase in frequency while a response which is punished will decrease in frequency. An increase in tax rates will follow the same pattern. When people view a tax rate hike as detrimental to their financial situation, they will avoid it. A growing, international economy presents a number of ways to do just that. Investing money in low-tax regions, declaring your income as capital gains, investing in tax free-assets, or, the most pernicious, liquidating your assets to avoid the penalty. If you worship at the altar of a bigger government this may make you uncomfortable and you may not approve but I regret to inform you that the people avoiding paying rates, which they view as detrimental to them, don’t care. They are not going to ask you for your opinion on the matter and will allow you to continue to bluster while they move their money and wait you out. Don’t fret, the money will return when the rates are cut and tax revenue will increase, just not on your watch. To further drive home the point, the largest amount of revenue ever collected by the U.S. government, in inflation-adjusted dollars, was in 2007 under the current tax rates which some now clamor to raise.

Tax rates are one of the few areas where liberals appear to abandon the economic principle of marginality. Heat is good, to a point, water is helpful, to a point, and food is a necessity but only to a degree. When the current crop of liberals speak about tax rates and new and creative taxes they seem to think every increase in rates on a growing number of products and services are benevolent regardless of the degree. No one claims that food is benevolent regardless of the degree to which we consume it. Food at a sustenance level is a life or death necessity but can cause death when consumed in abundance. Like food, taxes follow similar rules. When we find that tax “sweet spot”, that rate which generates government revenue and allows for prosperous economic growth, shouldn’t that make partisans on both sides happy? Sadly it does not. Despite mounds of evidence that increasing tax rates beyond that “sweet spot” stifles economic growth and may actually decrease revenue, liberals continue to defy logic and move “forward”.

Economics and a degree of common sense also tells us that we will always be more cautious in spending our money than a third party will be. Milton Friedman used this brief explanation to drive home the point. There are four ways to spend money. You can spend your money on yourself, and when you do both the cost of the product and the quality matters. You can spend your money on someone else, in this case cost matters but quality is not as important. Other people can spend other people’s money on themselves, in this case cost doesn’t matter, as it is not your money, but quality does as you are buying the product or service for yourself. Finally, the most inefficient method to spend money of the four is other people, spending other people’s money, on other people. Cost doesn’t matter because it is not your money and quality doesn’t matter because it is not your product or service either. In the final case, I just described to you government spending. And, to be clear, government spending is taxation, while deficit spending is future taxation plus interest. It cannot be any other way. Arguing that accumulating debt on your personal credit card is not going to require you to take money from your account in the future to pay the debt is foolish, therefore, why would you think that the national credit card would obey a different set of economic rules?

Finally, we are frequently rhetorically assaulted by the “fair share” moralists on the left. This is an argument where they are correct on principle and completely devoid of substance regarding evidence. We are, and should remain, a just and moral country and should always strive for a system which levels the field of play. The problem with a tax code loaded with loopholes and with rates which increase for one group of businesses and people only, in the name of class warfare, is that the revenue eventually falls as the rates increase and paradoxically, the increased burden falls on the middle-class taxpayer. The wealthy are able to exploit loopholes on higher rates because hypocritical politicians on the left must vote for the loopholes or the businesses, and the wealthy, simply move their money, and the revenue to finance their big government projects disappears (i.e. Gov Quinn in Illinois). Ironically, it is JFK who once stated, “The paradoxical truth is that the tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.” What is moral about promising a box of gifts and delivering a box of air-popcorn as liberal ideology typically does? In addition, these same “fair share” moralists rarely, if ever, voluntarily pay more in income taxes. I met a liberal gentlemen at a wedding about a year ago and he impressed me quickly with his incredible dedication to a charity he was running. As we began to converse about the role of government I asked him a simple question as he passionately defended a bigger government and fewer individual liberties, I asked “why is it that you voluntarily give large sums of your own hard-earned money to your charity which you clearly are passionate about but when it comes to a government you claim to be equally passionate about, you claim every tax deduction you can to avoid giving it one extra dime?” He seemed perplexed and did not have an answer. We became friends and he eventually donated to my campaign.

Dan Bongino, served in the United States Secret Service for more than a decade and was assigned to the elite Presidential Protective Division. He represented the U.S. as a lead government security official in over 25 countries. Holding graduate degrees in Business Administration and Psychology, Dan has also developed several successful businesses in Maryland. He was the 2012 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from the state of Maryland. You can follow Dan on Twitter at @dbongino and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/dan.bongino

Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards once stated during his campaign that there were “two Americas.” His “two Americas” theme was designed to stoke the flames of a class warfare script being resurrected in 2012 for use in the Democratic Party platform. This class warfare, “two Americas” theme has been given a focus-group tested makeover and will now be presented to voters in the November election as a means to achieve what they now call “shared prosperity.”

I think we can all agree that the fundamental principle of a degree of prosperity, shared among us, is a goal to strive for. Where my opponent Ben Cardin and I disagree is simply regarding the means to which this can be accomplished. When politicians use this phrase to manufacture a class warfare struggle, it is done in an effort to make more palatable the idea that sharing your prosperity, not theirs, is a path to prosperity. Now, to be crystal clear, this is not an argument against paying taxes or against societal benevolence. To the contrary, it is an argument for responsible taxation and benevolence based on choice, not force.

To contrast the two approaches to shared prosperity, I will briefly highlight the disparate approaches my opponent and I have with regard to government spending, the tax code, energy policy and education. The current administration, and to be fair, the last administration, opened the government spigots with your tax dollars. Government spending as a percentage of our GDP is at historically high levels and cannot mathematically be supported even if we taxed the wealthiest among us at rates of nearly 100%.

Although the deep recession played a significant role in the dramatic spending increases, there have been no serious efforts made to curtail this spending despite mounds of economic data conclusively showing the catastrophic results of these levels of debt. How one can make an effective argument that prosperity should be “shared” while voting to spend away the future earnings of our children and grandchildren, is a lesson in hypocrisy. It is our duty to provide our children the opportunity at a better, more prosperous life than the one we had. Spending their future income before they have even had the chance to earn it, in order to provide a short-term band-aid for us, is neither responsible nor benevolent. I fully support and will vote to implement a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It may not be the perfect answer, but it is certainly a starting point to control spendthrift, career politicians.

Our tax code has become so riddled with cronyism that it only results in “sharing prosperity” from those who work hard each and every day to those who have developed the necessary “insider” connections to get their very own tax loophole built into the code. These loopholes are designed to give tax breaks to politically favored elites who spent more of their time cultivating political relationships rather than producing quality products and services.

In business school I learned that one of the primary means by which you can wound potential business competitors is to ensure that there are “barriers to entry.” This is exactly what a tax code laden with cronyism does. It creates significant “barriers to entry” for average, working-class Marylanders who, through the sweat of their brows, have created products or services that they wish to bring to market. Without the same “insider” deductions, they are placed at a cost disadvantage. I fully support a streamlined, simplified tax code with no more than three brackets, and lower overall rates in exchange for a streamlining of deductions. This will level the playing field and ensure we all have a fighting chance at becoming the next business success story.

The United States’ energy policy is really not an energy policy at all. It is a disjointed, myopic collection of the remnants of past policy prescriptions combined with a few select sound-bites. Here in Maryland and throughout the United States, we have abundant energy resources that we must develop responsibly. It is fundamentally unfair to ask middle-class Marylanders to pay more than four dollars a gallon to fuel their vehicles while we sit on decades of supplies of both oil and natural gas. Prohibitively expensive energy prices disparately impact the middle and low-income citizens among us and only serve to share the prosperity of working-class Americans to the Solyndras of the world. I support an “all hands on deck” national energy policy which focuses on responsible development of our hydro-carbon resources in the short-term and an ironclad commitment to basic research in new-energy technologies in the long-term.

Finally, we must reform our education policy. We will never be a more fair and equitable society as long as we have a public school system where a zip-code lottery determines one’s level of access to the American Dream.  How any politician can justify a speech on “shared prosperity” while at the same time denying parents in struggling school districts the opportunity to give their child a better education through school choice initiatives is a national disgrace. Just think of how many iPads, how many new-energy technologies, or life-saving medical devices could have been created in Baltimore if the children living there simply had access to world-class schools. This is not simply a political outrage but a moral one as well.

Delivering speeches about “shared prosperity” and “two Americas” does not require political guts or an iron will, but for delivering real-world results, under extreme political pressure, they are mandatory qualities I promise to demonstrate.

Dan Bongino, a devoted husband and father, served in the United States Secret Service for more than a decade and was assigned to the elite Presidential Protective Division. He represented the U.S. as a lead government security official in over 25 countries. Holding graduate degrees in Business Administration and Psychology, Dan has developed several successful businesses in Maryland. As an entrepreneur, he understands the role small businesses play in establishing a framework for continued prosperity and economic growth. He is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from the state of Maryland, running to unseat Senator Ben Cardin.

I awoke this morning at 5am to the sound of my six month old daughter Amelia crying. When I entered her dark room I saw my wife, struggling to stay awake, holding Amelia in one arm as she was attempting to work on her barely lit computer screen with her other arm. My wife Paula is an entrepreneur and a business owner, she also happens to be a first generation immigrant, who suffered through much chasing her American dream–all of her hard work culminating in her pledging allegiance to our flag as part of her citizenship ceremony, still one of the proudest days of our lives.

I am writing of this incident because it succinctly describes a scenario repeating itself all over America today. Small business owners are making incredible sacrifices in the struggle to keep their businesses afloat. This is the reason the President’s “you didn’t build that” comment has infuriated Americans across the political spectrum. The simple fact is that my wife did build “that.” She built her business, through countless hours of hard work and a commitment to a quality work product. I marvel daily at the countless hours she spends at her home office designing and repairing small business websites. She is the very epitome of the American dream, collectively enhanced but most importantly, self-made and personally driven.

The President’s statements are equally infuriating because he is attempting to create a fissure between Americans where there isn’t one. No Republican I am aware of is running for office on a platform of no taxes, no roads, no teachers and no military. I cite these examples because the President chose to mention the use of roads, the work of good teachers and the development of the backbone of the modern internet, through a military research initiative, as examples of how government should be the primary recipient of accolades for individual success. This is absurd and displays a backward logic which is hard to justify. It is the very success of people, such as my wife, willing to put their names behind a business endeavor, with no guarantee of success, that finance the government’s spending and projects the President speaks of. It is my wife’s–along with millions of others struggling for a better tomorrow–sweat, toil and willingness to take a risk that has made America exceptional amongst nations, not its roads.

The economy is clearly struggling, Americans are hurting and they are scared. Scared, that for the first time, yesterday may have been the best it was ever going to be. This has never been a part of our national psyche. The President’s statements will haunt him in this election as they echo all over our vast country. As my wife and I struggle through this wretched recovery, I feel the pain of Americans hoping and praying that there is a better tomorrow and I ask the President to stop creating division by asking who built what, and to focus on getting our growing legion of unemployed Americans, just asking for a chance to build anything, back to work.

Dan Bongino is a Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from the state of Maryland. He is a decorated Secret Service Agent who served under three presidential administrations, and was the lead security representative for the United States for foreign presidential visits.  Dan is a small business entrepreneur who has obtained graduate degrees in both Psychology and Business Administration. His wife Paula is a first generation immigrant and a successful business owner. Dan and Paula have two children, 8 year old Isabel and newborn Amelia. Follow Dan on his Facebook page and on Twitter. His campaign website is www.BONGINO.com.

The Dems’ new campaign slogan  – “Results are irrelevant, it’s all about good speeches”.

There is an old saying which states “liberal policies care about the poor in theory- it’s the real poor they have a problem with”. Never has this adage been so evident. Having spent many years in poverty as a child, I am intimately familiar with the pain of hunger and the burning desire for a better tomorrow. I will not be lectured by elites about their intentionally cryptic notions of “fairness”. It is my personal relationship with a past filled with painful memories of waking up hungry and the realization that it wasn’t just a bad dream that motivates my desire to confront this ideology that has imprisoned generations in an endless state of poverty. This sentence, imposed by decades of failed ideology, is marketed to the disadvantaged among us as a “gift” from self-anointed political philanthropists.

I refuse to accept the misguided notion, blindly propagated by institutional elites, that the political party best representing the interests of struggling lower income communities is the Democratic Party. Unlike those who believe intentions trump results, I will present some simple data showing that we, as Republicans, should actively court lower income communities who are looking for real solutions. When I look at the issues I encounter most on the campaign trail, the economy and healthcare, I am deeply troubled by the status of the lower income community in my home state of Maryland’s prize city of Baltimore.

The Baltimore City economy has been struggling to attract new businesses for decades. An exodus of tens of thousands of its citizens has not helped, as those leaving have taken their intellectual capital with them. A litany of new taxes and a “bureaucracy first, people second” approach to governing has led to an environment where the remaining citizens are viewed simply as tools to support the bureaucracy rather than the inverse. A well written op-ed piece by Steve Hanke and Stephen Walters in the Wall Street Journal on this very subject uses this stunning statistic which sums up the utter failure of Baltimore’s reliance on liberal economic ideology, “in 1950, the city’s median income was 7% above the national average. Today it is 22% below it.”

To add to the economic absurdity, the Mayor of Baltimore has now proposed raising the “temporary” bottle tax from two cents to five cents, as if the chimerical dreams of a flourishing economy and streams of tax revenue were simply being subdued by the tax rate and not the underlying economic principles. We as Republicans must walk proudly into these communities, as I regularly do, and loudly profess our ideas for growth, which are blind to socioeconomic class. I refuse to accept that a proud city, with infrastructure, public transit, access to the northeast corridor, a world class port and proximity to a major metropolitan area (Washington D.C.), should be relegated to a second class economy. I will not stand idle, while the good citizens of this great city are subjected to another minute of this “ignore the results” ideology.

With thousands of struggling lower income citizens utilizing Medicaid as a primary means of seeking access to healthcare, and the liberal wing of the Democratic party pushing for ever increasing enrollment into the program, one would think, absent the facts, that the party is a champion for the poor. With their numerous speeches about “fairness” and “equality” it is easy to see why so many are misled, however, when we look again at the actual results of their “generosity” with other people’s hard earned money, rather than focusing on their wonderful oratory skills, the story changes dramatically. An oft quoted University of Virginia study has shed light on the results on this program. The statistic that should ring alarm bells reads, a Medicaid recipient is 97% more likely to die after surgery than a person with private insurance. Wait, it gets much worse, a Medicaid recipient is 13% more likely to die after surgery than a person with no insurance at all. In what dictionary does this suffice as a definition of “help”?

With this piece I ask, rather I implore those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale; please vote for change in 2012. Please allow us a shot at repairing decades of damage to your economy, your education system and your access to quality healthcare. Vote for change and hold us accountable. The worst possible outcome would be more of the same and you have a subsequent election to change it back if dissatisfied. Please stop going on blind dates in the voting booth. I will not stop sounding the siren and will fight for every vote in these communities. And for those who continue to tell me I am wasting my time I ask you, “what are you doing to fight for those who need us most?”

Dan Bongino is the Republican nominee for United States Senate in Maryland

His campaign can be reached at campaign@Bongino.com 

Follow Dan on Twitter and Facebook.

Politicians who reference the term “inequality” typically use it in a generic fashion intended to intentionally deceive their audience. It is far easier to sell failed economic policies with a basis in intentions, not results, to an audience eager to find a cause for our economic maladies when the target is non-specific. These same politicians speak as if the most successful members of our American family are the problem and not the solution. Can we all agree that the problem to be solved is not impoverishing those who have found prosperity, but improving the lives of those who continue to seek it?

I propose that persistent economic inequality is a problem that Republicans should acknowledge and not run from. If we were to take the President’s words at face value, when he places blame at the feet of the successful members of our American family for not paying their “fair share”, than clearly higher tax rates would be the answer. This is a gross oversimplification of the issue. A rudimentary historical analysis of national economies with heavy progressive taxation and economic redistribution would show a litany of failure. This is not an ideological position based on a vested interest as I am not, nor have I ever been, wealthy. I was raised in poverty and proudly live a middle-class life in a middle-class town. I have felt both the pain of hunger and the exhilaration of a healthy paycheck.

We could dramatically improve the lives of the members of our American Family seeking prosperity if we were to change course in the following areas: interest rate policies, the insider tax code, and parent choice in education. The direction the President has pursued in each of these areas has done more to damage the American dreams of our inner-city youth, small business owners and struggling seniors than Warren Buffett’s tax rates ever have.

Our current tax and spend agenda has forced upon us an incessant need to borrow money to fund our profligate bureaucracy. Enabling this process has been a Federal Reserve intent on keeping interest rates artificially low through various devices such as rounds of quantitative easing and purchases of mortgage instruments. These processes have destroyed the collective value of our savings. American seniors currently living on fixed incomes and a lifetime of savings receive a financial return on their money barely keeping pace with inflation. When the inflation rate inevitably begins to tick upwards our seniors will find their money buys less, pushing them further down the economic ladder. This is the direct result of a government which cannot control its profligacy.

Our overly complicated and insider driven tax-code is another instrument by which the boot of government keeps those struggling for prosperity from attaining it. The small business owner who gets up at 5am, hops into his work van and delivers the products of his labor to his customers hardly benefits from a tax code designed to benefit those with access to power brokers. We all agree that the tax code, at nearly 70,000 pages, is overly complicated and a drag on productivity. Why not simplify it? Career politicians do not want to simplify the tax code because it takes away their power to enable their politically favored friends and industries, through tax breaks, at the expense of those businesses just asking for a fair shot.

The most important part of the prosperity equation is access to a quality education through parent choice. Escaping my poverty due to a high quality education, I have a vested interest in this topic. According to a noted education publication, Maryland has the nation’s top public schools. But conveniently hidden in this ranking is the fact that we rank near the bottom in educational disparity. This is our fight. The color of your skin, the birthplace of your parents, or the zip code of your address should not be a factor in your ability to access the same American dream I have lived. These children are entitled to a shot too. When the President, and my opponent Senator Cardin, voted against the DC opportunity scholarship program, they clearly stated their priorities. Special interest insiders won out over families just looking for a fair shot at our collective American dream.

The current crop of change minded Republicans, pushing a bold agenda, should not run from this fight. Persistent income inequality is a subject I relish the opportunity to debate my political opponent on. It is time to stop blaming straw men, and start fixing the problem. Making the successful suffer by confiscating more of the fruits of their labor will only lead to shared misery. We as Republicans must embrace this mission. This is our fight, our moment, our time to show the American people the real face of a new Republican party.

Dan Bongino is the Republican nominee for United States Senate in Maryland

His campaign can be reached at campaign@Bongino.com

More often than not, they will provide an abstract answer tailored to placate the audience currently in front of them. Nothing is more disingenuous than a politician with manicured hands standing in a duck blind trying to prove that he believes in the right to bear arms.

I believe that an honest man will never have to worry about remembering what he has said or who he said it to. I believe that the Second Amendment is crystal clear, “The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The Second Amendment is a fail-safe woven into the fabric of our Constitution that ensures the God given rights and freedoms upon which this country was built. The Second Amendment isn’t just about preserving gun ownership, hunting rights, or target sports.

It is about each and every law abiding citizen having the right to play a role in ensuring our collective freedoms. It is the manifestation of our resolve to exercise our right of self-determination. It is a means to protect the lives and liberties of our families and to ensure that our Republic will endure.

Our government goes to great lengths to protect the freedoms of speech, of religion, to peaceably assemble, and frequently does so in situations that bear great public opposition. It defies logic for our government not to protect our right to keep and bear arms with the same zeal as our other Constitutional freedoms.

Sadly, we find ourselves in a society today where The Second Amendment is restricted by over thousands of state and federal regulations. America’s greatness is founded in personal accountability and community awareness. Unnecessary over-regulation does nothing to strengthen our communities, decrease crime, or to ensure our safety.  Overreaching firearms laws do however increase the chance that an otherwise law abiding citizen may overlook an obfuscated regulation and unwittingly become a criminal.

Imagine if the same standards applied to the rights protected by the First Amendment. What if the federal government required a permit to publish a newspaper? Would you pay a fee, and then endure a waiting period to go to the church of your choice? What if your state decided that it was simply going to outlaw public assembly?

To me, the words “keep and bear arms” means that every law abiding citizen is a vehicle through which we collectively preserve the means to protect ourselves.

Concealed carry permits should be issued without any unreasonable hurdles, exorbitant fees, or arbitrary justification. In my home state of Maryland, in order to obtain a concealed carry permit, I need to provide a lengthy application with a non-refundable fee and “documented proof” of threats against my life. A judge will then arbitrarily decide if I deserve the privilege to protect myself.

The years of street experience that I accrued as a law enforcement officer with both the NYPD and the Secret Service imparts a personal perspective regarding the responsibility that carrying a firearm implies. I was raised in the inner city. I didn’t grow up hunting and I had never fired a gun until I was on the police force.

While serving in law enforcement, I shot regularly to maintain a high level of proficiency. I carried a gun every day for 17 years while working. Although I may not be what you would call an avid gun enthusiast, I am a lover of freedom and I do cherish our civil liberties.

The arguments for restricting our Second Amendment rights on the grounds of public safety seem fraudulent at best. Perhaps the goal isn’t to eliminate guns, but is instead a pathway by which to silence the voices of freedom. Either way, the Second Amendment is the only one designed to ensure all of our freedoms and any encroachment upon them are unacceptable.

(Originally published in HumanEvents.com, February 24, 2012)

Dan Bongino is a Republican Candidate for U.S. Senate from the state of Maryland. He is a decorated Secret Service Agent who served under three presidential administrations, and was the lead security representative for the United States for foreign presidential visits.  Dan is a small business entrepreneur who has obtained graduate degrees in both Psychology and Business Administration. His wife Paula is a first generation immigrant and a successful business owner. Dan and Paula have two children, 8 year old Isabel and newborn Amelia.

The time for real change and big ideas in the education arena is now. We can no longer afford to sit idle while a generation of Americans receive a second class education from a first class country. It is unfathomable that in the wealthiest country in the world our minority and low income communities have limited educational opportunities. There are some statistics that are hard to ignore and one that bleeds each time is this; of the nation’s 20,000 high schools, 2,000 are responsible for nearly half of the dropouts. If you are one of our nation’s black families you have a 50% chance of sending one of your children to one of these schools. This is not a partisan issue or a political issue but an issue which centers on the fundamental American belief that opportunity is not relegated to those winning the zip code lottery.

We can all agree that improvements can and should be made in our education system. Our system has been progressively moving towards a top-down, overly bureaucratic model which allocates funds based on models divorced from student results. We have doubled per-student funding over the past five decades and have seen virtually no noticeable improvement in test scores. These sad numbers belie the fact that bureaucratic top-down models have a sad history of failure and those who defend them are typically the very bureaucrats whose power is enhanced as a result of them.

I propose that the answers are in front of us if we are bold enough to accept them and put down our rhetorical arms in this ideological battle. We can make bold changes now by moving to a system where the parent and child, rather than a zip code, becomes the center of our education universe. Choice in educational facilities has enabled our university system to become the envy of the world, regardless of the zip code the facility is located in. Choice has the potential to rewrite our education future and redefine educational excellence. It is unfortunate that the arguments used to refute this simple proposition strain credulity. Stating that taxpayers should fund public education and yet be ordered where to send their children to school, regardless of the school’s record of success or their personal choice, is un-American at its core.

Local implementation of means-tested voucher based programs would revolutionize our education system with the real winners being American children. Successful schools and excellent teachers would be rewarded with increased demand for their services. Funding would follow as it would be attached to the child and not to the zip code. Schools which fail to attract students due to their inability to produce results would then be subjected to charter takeover. This process will ensure that competition creates a vibrant educational environment for all of our children and failure is no longer sugar coated. From a federal perspective, we can set an example by fully supporting these initiatives in Washington DC.

While engaging in a healthy debate about education change, I want to emphasize that I owe my success to caring, dedicated teachers who rescued me from poverty. Teachers are not now, and have never been, the problem. They are the bedrock of our society and I refuse to believe that any teacher arrives at their schools in the morning without sincerely trying to better the lives of the students they serve. The fault lies with the system we have cornered them into and that should be the focus of our change initiatives. As world economic growth and productivity enhancements transition global economies to ideas-based models, it is imperative that we implement bold changes. It is time to leave behind partisan politics, ideological agendas, and vested interests and put our children, and their futures first.

In conclusion, we can no longer forfeit our minority and low income communities in the world-wide education race for ideas. These children are entitled to a chance at the American dream. We will never know how many transformational ideas could have been launched from communities left out of our collective American dream as a result of educational disparities. The reservoir of ideas being left behind in these communities is a travesty from both a moral and economic perspective and I will make it a centerpiece of my pro-growth plan for economic revitalization.

(Originally published in USATodayEducation.com, January 12, 2012)

Dan Bongino is a Republican Candidate for U.S. Senate from the state of Maryland. He is a decorated Secret Service Agent who served under three presidential administrations, and was the lead security representative for the United States for foreign presidential visits.  Dan is a small business entrepreneur who has obtained graduate degrees in both Psychology and Business Administration. His wife Paula is a first generation immigrant and a successful business owner. Dan and Paula have two children, 8 year old Isabel and newborn Amelia.