If those questions are any indication, he just doesn’t seem very smart, at least not when it comes to thinking on his feet. Should there be a minimum wage? This is something where there’s pretty much a standard Conservative response that anyone who pays any attention to the news should already know. Just saying “blah blah minimum wage hikes kill jobs blah blah less regulation will lead to greater productivity blah blah” would be better than “I don’t have a well-crafted response.” I wouldn’t say “I want to get rid of the minimum wage” because that’s needlessly controversial, but that’s easily side-stepped with “Realistically the minimum wage isn’t going away, but I don’t think we should raise it because XYZ.”
As for Syria, something like “We need to proceed with caution to avoid weapons falling into the hands of terrorists” is a safe enough answer. Almost anything would be better than “I thought we were just going to chat about the celebratory aspects…”
What, you think it’s objectively unreasonable for a very conservative and religious candidate to believe in such things, especially in the Tea Party, especially these days?
All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t be surprised, and if he does, that I hope he has the chance to express those views freely, as is his First Amendment right.
Oops, I worded the above a little poorly. I meant to say, “you think it’s objectively unreasonable to believe that a very religious and conservative candidate…” etc etc.
That’s a plausible story. But apparently experts say otherwise. “Dave Wasserman, the U.S. House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, doubts that Cantor was derailed by Democratic meddling.” Apparently Brat’s largest margins were in heavily Republican districts. Article at TPM: Cantor’s Pollster Blames Democratic Meddling For Loss - TPM – Talking Points Memo
Philosophy of economics might be closer to that than you think.
PS: I pulled his publication list. It’s comprehensive, but edited down.
TI: Milton Friedman’s Positivism and the Method of Economics
TI: Economic Growth and Institutions: The Rise and Fall of the Protestant Ethic?
TI: Adam Smith’s God: The End of Economics
PY: 2005
AB: This paper examines the philosophical system that encompasses and supports all the works of Adam Smith. Many academics fail to see the full system which Smith had in mind as they only look at the economic system he constructed. Economics is only a subsystem. To see Smith’s full system requires a start where Smith ends. The ends or aims of Smith’s philosophical system are not hard to find. Smith’s philosophical system involves final explanations, couched in terms of a purposeful nature or God, and this variety of theism is an integral part of his approach to social phenomena. Smith argues that efficient causation produces beneficial results intended by the utilitarian “Author of Nature.” Beneficial results follow from the Author of Nature. Who is this Author of Nature in Smith’s works? And how does this final cause affect his entire system of thought as it surely must? How is God linked to Economics in the mind and world of Adam Smith? This paper attempts to answer that question.
TI: Cross-Country R
AU: Park, Walter G.; Brat, David A.
AF: American U; Randolph-Macon College
SO: Eastern Economic Journal, 22(3), Summer 1996, pp. 345-54
IS: 0094-5056
AV: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/archive/
DT: Journal Article
PY: 1996
TI: Essays on Human Capital, Religion, and Growth
AU: Brat, David
SO: Ph.D. American University 1995
PY: 1995
TI: NAEP Scores, Human Capital, and State Growth
AU: Brat, David A.; Sands, Kenneth; Dungan, Evan
AF: Randolph-Macon College; Randolph-Macon College; Randolph-Macon College
SO: Virginia Economic Journal, 14(0), 2009, pp. 21-43
IS: 1085-1046
AV: http://www.vaecon.org/vae-journal.html
DT: Journal Article
PY: 2009
AB: This paper seeks to explain the factors which have caused some states to grow more quickly than others. As our baseline for research, we use a widely circulated paper by Bauer, et al. (2006) from the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank. Most of the cross-state literature uses high school and college graduation rates as a measure of human capital. NAEP test scores, however, are intuitively much better proxies as measures of human capital as they actually measure student knowledge/performance across various subjects. We do in fact find that our NAEP human capital variable better explains cross-state growth performance than the typical high school variables in the literature. The results of this research confirm that education, measured here by NAEP scores, is linked to a growth environment.
The man is a candidate for national office. He’s supposed to have, at least a passing familiarity with the issues of the day. He’s shown himself to be ignorant and unprepared.
Although, the GOP is the party who thinks, “What do you read?” is a gotcha question.
Yeah, it was just really unsporting of them to ask a candidate for national office who makes his living teaching economics about the minimum wage. They should have stuck to the script and just asked “How awesome is it that you won?” over and over again.
Not nearly a done decision per that cite. They probably ought to wait for some solid post-surprise-factor polls before they decide there’s no chance, that the district’s sanes can’t be coaxed to vote for the sane guy.
Please. I know it’s real tough to tell people what newspapers you read when you don’t read any. So your fearless candidate was a one-issue candidate and that issue was immigration. Is he unaware that there are other issues that people care about?
Exactly where we were before except without Cantor as majority leader. Its not like this guys is going to get two votes or be more influential than Cantor.
In what way has Obama’s enforecement been deficient? Hasn’t his enforcement been much more effective than any other president before him?
Texas is still fairly red. It will be a generation before Texas turns blue and anything can happen in 20 years.
There aren’t very many black or Asian Republican members of congress either.
The only ethnic minority group that has significant Republican participation are Hispanics and Republicans seem to be doing their damnedest to piss them off.
This guy sounds pretty liberal. Too liberal for his district.
He worked hard and took his primary seriously. Cantor spent his pirmary season helping out beseiged Republicans in other districts in an effort to shore up his support for speakership.
I don’t think it was Democrats either but the turnout was significantly larger this year than last election cycle and Brat isn’t that much of a draw.
It doesn’t really matter if he is or isn’t. Congressmen don’t run anything and Congress is full of people who do nothing but vote on bills. For most of these warm bodies, they just vote how they are told by whatever leadership they trust. Brat will probably take his cues from the Tea Party caucus. Or he might surprise us. Some Congressmen really work hard when they get there. Brat can be forgiven because he is a political novice who did not expect to get as far as he has.
Both Brat and Trammell are obviously really smart guys. Frankly, I think they are both more qualified to be a Congressman than Eric Cantor was when he took office, and just as qualified as Barack Obama was when he first ran for State Senate.
It’s better than it was under previous Presidents, but that’s not the point. Enforcement is still crappy. We have 12 million illegals to attest to that. Many of the enforcement promises in the Senate bill are already law, such as a biometric entry/exit system at all US airports. It’s required by law, and yet it’s nowhere near completed. Passing it again doesn’t tell us anything. Thus the need to actually do it before an amnesty. The voters favor amnesty, but only if we aren’t revisiting this 20 years from now when another 12 million illegals have moved in. We got fooled once. We won’t be fooled a second time. Enforcement first, amnesty after. Even the Senate bill makes gestures in this direction, but the loopholes make it too easy for a President to get around them. Same goes for the “tough” path to citizenship.