MACKINAC ISLAND – For Michigan and the nation to survive and thrive, policymakers and the public have to dare to confront truth, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday, and with that be willing to embark on radical policies that will assure future prosperity.

And the key goal of those changes has to be to make America better able to compete against China, Gingrich said to a packed theater at the Grand Hotel, during the headline event of the first day of the 2010 Detroit Regional Chamber’s annual Mackinac Island meeting.

“We cannot afford to have anyone not be productive,” Gingrich said as he wandered back and forth across the stage. “Your benchmark is China, and it is a much more formidable competitor than Toyota.” To be able to compete with China, Americans “have to be the most productive, most efficient people in the world,” he said.

And it critical for Michigan to rebound for America to achieve that level of competition, he said. Saying the industrial power of the state was essential for the allies to be victorious in World War II, it is no less true now that “it is incredibly important to the country that this state recover its buoyancy,” Gingrich said.

To drive his point that policymakers need to deal with radical ideas by confronting the obvious, Gingrich referred to a slogan used in Poland and other Eastern bloc countries during the last years of the Soviet Union: 2+2=4. The idea behind it was that Soviet officials could not censor the slogan because to do so would seem stupid, but it was also radical because it focused thought on the reality of the Soviet system, Gingrich said.

It is actually applicable to use anti-Soviet strategies here, Gingrich said, because many parts of the U.S. had become Soviet-like enclaves. Systems were now in place that encouraged public dishonesty because there were no consequences for being dishonest, he said, and one result was a massive buildup of debt that threatened to overwhelm the economy.

To employ the same kind of thinking in Michigan and the country would mean to engage in simple ideas that would also challenge the political and economic status quo. For example, he said, allowing experts to teach subjects in public schools for just a few hours a day, he said, or paying students to read books.

Some of the concepts he outlined were similar to concepts Gingrich outlined to the Senate Health Policy Committee several years ago, and followed the idea of engaging in both greater personal responsibility and making certain practices more rewarding to follow.

Making Detroit a citywide enterprise zone where all businesses operating in Detroit, and all persons working in the city, would do so tax-free could a major spur to jobs development, Gingrich said. Doing so would probably require congressional action, but Gingrich argued that the tax revenue coming from Detroit now was probably so small it would not hurt state and federal revenues to allow for the tax free zone.

But to employ and enact those changes will likely take voter initiatives, Gingrich said, because politicians will not be willing to enact many of these changes.

While most the crowd greeted Gingrich’s comments enthusiastically, one who did not was Michigan Democratic Party chair Mark Brewer. The Detroit chamber ought to ask for its money back from Gingrich, he said, since he had spouted “platitudes” and “right-wing fantasies.”

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