Ron Paul craziness

It’s always been obvious that Ron Paul wants to gut government, but now he’s made it official. Let’s see:

Cuts $1 trillion in spending during the first year of Ron Paul’s presidency, eliminating five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education), abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels.

So, he wants the US to be isolationist, trust private companies with our security, gut all aid to the poor, and get rid of many/most regulations. How about entitlements:

Honors our promise to our seniors and veterans, while allowing young workers to opt out. Block grants Medicaid and other welfare programs to allow States the flexibility and ingenuity they need to solve their own unique problems without harming those currently relying on the programs.

So here he waits a bit and will then gut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting Medicaid immediately.

I love this:

Conducts a full audit of the Federal Reserve and implements competing currency legislation to strengthen the dollar and stabilize inflation.

Strengthening the dollar will hurt the US economy (making exports more expensive and imports cheaper) and will try to ‘stabilize’ non-existent inflation. He wants to get rid of the Fed, but I guess doesn’t want to say this explicitly.

Some details of his cuts for his budget in 2016 (his budget against CBOs forecast if things keep going as they are). Here are some of his cuts to the poor:

•  Medicaid: $181 against 404 billion –cut by more than 50%
• Schip: 5 against 10 billion –50% cut
• Food stamps: 30 against $72 billion–more than 60% cut
• Child nutrition: 14 against $23 billion–about 40% cut
• HUD: 0 against $49 billion
• Supplemental nutrition for women, children, etc.–eliminated

He also would cut the EPA by about 50% and wants to get rid of recent financial regulation (it’s not like the financial industry crashed the world economy, is it?), as well as many other regulations.

The reason these massive cuts don’t balance the budget quicker is he also wants to cut taxes:

Lowers the corporate tax rate to 15%, making America competitive in the global market. Allows American companies to repatriate capital without additional taxation, spurring trillions in new investment. Extends all Bush tax cuts. Abolishes the Death Tax. Ends taxes on personal savings, allowing families to build a nest egg.

Almost all of those new cuts go to the rich–so he really is cutting aid to the poor to help the rich. Any person who even thinks of voting for Paul is no liberal. In essence, he wants the US to be like it was in 1900.

Ron Paul and medicine

Ron Paul really is crazy and stupid (ok, really he thinks we are):

Ron Paul told TPM on Wednesday that even if there’s a “case or two” that makes Americans uncomfortable, the government should stay out of the health care business. Even if one of the cases in question is his former campaign manager, Kent Snyder, who died with $400,000 in unpaid medical bills after being unable to secure health insurance due to a pre-existing condition.

…

“Well first off, people do get care, even under this terrible situation we have in medicine today,” Paul told reporters when asked about his former aide. “Kent, my campaign manager, wasn’t denied any care at all.”

Umm, let’s see:

After accounting for age, education, income, and other factors, the researchers found that people without private insurance had a 40 percent higher risk of dying than people with private insurance.

The uninsured might get the emergency care, but they don’t get the routine care and they don’t get all the medications they need–so they ARE denied care. Also, notice that the reason people get care even though they can’t pay is a combination of government regulations and hospitals willingness to shift costs to others, neither of which are things Paul supports (in his Free Market world, a hospital that gave out free care wouldn’t survive long). Back to Paul:

According to Snyder’s friends, he was unable to obtain affordable health insurance — rendering moot Paul’s advice at the debate to find coverage in advance — because of a preexisting condition. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies will no longer be able to reject customers on these grounds starting in 2013. I asked Paul whether Snyder’s inability to secure health insurance, even if he wanted it, put him in an impossible situation without government support. He suggested that states and counties could take action to help the sick, but put the emphasis on charity.

“Why do we suddenly lose confidence, that everyone is going to be thrown out into the street?” he said. “It just doesn’t happen and usually there are people that will help. But this idea you throw away the principles of liberty because you have a case or two where you go ‘Oh, I’m nervous about it’ – it just doesn’t justify doing your own thing.”

Um, nervous isn’t the right word for cases where families go into deep debt and/or die because they don’t have insurance–unless you’re Ron Paul.

He also blamed the government for regulating medicine: “The federal government comes in and closes down shops that try to sell nutritional medicine and vitamins because the drug companies don’t want competition. That drives the prices up.”

They also close down these shops because much of that stuff either doesn’t work or is actually bad for your health, which drives up healthcare costs and kills people.

Of course, these days this type of opinion (not caring if people die) isn’t that unusual for a Republican:

“While Congress has an undeniable obligation to thoroughly address our nation’s disaster relief needs,’’ said Representative Robert B. Aderholt, Republican of Alabama and an architect of the House bill, “we can no longer afford to simply throw money at calamities and then ask the hard questions later on.’’

More Republican compassion

It isn’t just Rep. Cantor that has a problem helping people with a disaster, there’s also Fox News (via here):

Today the NWS justifies itself on public interest grounds. It issues severe  weather advisories and hijacks local radio and television stations to get the  message out. It presumes that citizens do not pay attention to the weather and  so it must force important, perhaps lifesaving, information upon them. A few  seconds’ thought reveals how silly this is. The weather might be the subject  people care most about on a daily basis. There is a very successful private  TV channel dedicated to it, 24 hours a day, as well as any number of phone and  PC apps. Americans need not be forced to turn over part of their earnings to  support weather reporting.

Can those private companies send out warnings to everybody such as tornado warnings)? It’s also interesting that it’s not noted in the article that the National Weather Service provides information (such as satellite imagery) to these private weather services free.

Ron Paul (via here), of course, tops them all:

After a lunch speech today, Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary.

“We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960,” Paul said. “I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.

Hmm, what happened in Galveston in 1900:

The Hurricane of 1900 made landfall on the city of Galveston in the U.S. state of Texas, on September 8, 1900.^[1] It had estimated winds of 145 miles per hour (233 km/h) at landfall, making it a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.^[2] It was the deadliest hurricane in US history, and the second costliest hurricane in US history based on the US dollar’s 2005 value (to compare costs with those of Hurricane Katrina and others).

Umm yeah, that’s how we should respond to hurricanes. Paul wasn’t finished though:

“It’s a system of bureaucratic central economic planning, which is a fallacy that is deeply flawed,” the Texas congressman said on “Fox News Sunday.” “FEMA has been around since 1978. It has one of the worst reputations for a bureaucracy ever.”

The libertarian-minded Paul acknowledged that FEMA can’t be replaced overnight, yet he claimed the agency is wasteful and funnels money to contractors instead of the victims of natural disasters.

Should FEMA need emergency funding, Paul told host Chris Wallace he would vote against additional appropriations.

Gov. Christie (New Jersey):

TAPPER:  Is there anything that the state of New Jersey needs from the federal government that you’re not getting?

CHRISTIE:  Not at this point, Jake.  We have FEMA representatives here at the — at the Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, been working with us.  I’m going to be calling Secretary Napolitano in an hour or two to make a further request of additional needs. But so far, FEMA has been very responsive.  I spoke to Secretary Napolitano in the last 24 hours.  She’s offered to do whatever she needs to do to help us out here in New Jersey.  She knows how hard we’re going to be hit.  So right now, the cooperation between New Jersey and FEMA has been great, and I’m going to be calling Secretary Napolitano shortly to ask for some more help.

Gov. O’Malley (Maryland):

“The good news is this: because of FEMA’s partnership, because people listened, we were able to avoid any big problems in terms of threats to the public, to lives and to public safety,” O’Malley told host David Gregory.

He returned to the subject later in the interview, praising the work of FEMA Director Craig Fugate, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and President Obama.

“They have been excellent,” O’Malley said. “They have been with us since day one, and actually, before the storm arrived, they were here, and it’s worked really, really well. This is a much better FEMA than the olden days.”

Now O’Malley is a Democrat, but Christie is not. Maybe it’s only when Republicans are President that FEMA has a bad reputation?

Arlo Guthrie and Ron Paul

My respect for Arlo Guthrie has gone down, as he has now endorsed Ron Paul. It doesn’t mean I will now not like his music, I can and do separate the art and the artist, but it does mean I will respect him less as a person. I’m not sure Woody would like it, since he was very far left politically.

An interesting bit, here’s Woody on the copright of ‘This Land is Your Land’:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

More Republican Fun

• Mike Huckabee, in explaining his remark about bringing the Constitution in line with God, says this (actually the interview is here):

And the same thing would be true of marriage. Marriage has historically, as long as there’s been human history, meant a man and a woman in a relationship for life. Once we change that definition, then where does it go from there?

Is it your goal to bring the Constitution into strict conformity with the Bible? Some people would consider that a kind of dangerous undertaking, particularly given the variety of biblical interpretations.

Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

So, first he states that marriage has always been one man and one woman (which is wrong, polygamy has been around since there have been marriages and some sort of marriage for same sex couples does seem to have been around before), then he says that if we do offer same sex marriage, marriage with animals is sure to follow (hmm, I wonder when MA will get to this?). Lovely guy.

• I might as well get into the Ron Paul problem with past pamphlets given out under his name. Like most of the others who have commented on this, I don’t assume that Paul is a racist but it still makes him look bad. I can understand that other people wrote articles for him (although as late as 1996, he was intimating that he did write them) and I can understand that he might not have been aware of it for awhile (but for 5 to 10 years?), but then why wasn’t he angry when he found out? If it was me, when I found out, I would have publicy and loudly denounced the person who was writing under the material and the editor. Shortly before or after this, I would have fired both of them. Paul still will not say who wrote the articles (even though he could have easily found out). It makes me think, he wasn’t that angry. If you look here, you’ll see that this isn’t an aberration. Another lovely guy.