T-Paw Promises Straight Talk

Politico reports:

Tim Pawlenty formally launched his campaign for president on Monday with a straight talk message explicitly geared to tackle sacred cows in Iowa, Florida, New York and Washington.

“Politicians are often afraid that if they’re too honest, they might lose an election,” the former Minnesota governor told a town hall here on a terrace of the State Historical Building. “I’m afraid that in 2012, if we’re not honest enough, we may lose our country.”

Pawlenty’s first bit of honesty was for the Iowans: The federal government must phase out ethanol subsidies — key in this corn-heavy state — in order to drive more investment and innovation in the industry.

“We need to get government out,” he said. “We also need the government out of the business of handing out favors and special deals. The free market, not freebies from politicians, should decide a company’s success. So, as part of a larger reform, we need to phase out subsidies across all sources of energy and all industries, including ethanol. We simply can’t afford them anymore.”

As governor of Minnesota, Pawlenty said, he had reduced ethanol subsidies, and he vowed that they could be drawn down “gradually” and “fairly.”

The next stop on Pawlenty’s straight talk tour will be on Tuesday in Florida, where he’ll tell young people and seniors that the country must “gradually raise” the Social Security retirement age. He called for means testing Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment, instituting pay-for-performance incentives in Medicare and block granting Medicaid to the states.

Pawlenty will go to Washington the next day, where he’ll “remind the federal bureaucracy that government exists to serve its citizens, not its employees.”

“The truth is, people getting paid by the taxpayers shouldn’t get a better deal than the taxpayers themselves,” he said. “That means freezing federal salaries, transitioning federal employee benefits, and downsizing the federal workforce as it retires. It means paying public employees for results, not just seniority.”