http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/ron-paul-plan-to-restore-america/
It’s not perfect. But I believe this plan to be the sanest proposal from a candidate of any party in recent memory. Implementing this plan would be the first step in the direction of getting government to where Dr. Paul believes it should be.
What are your qualms with this plan?
Spending: The programs he’s saying he’ll cut don’t come close to adding up to the trillion dollars he’s promising. I’d like to see where he’s getting that number.
Entitlements: What does “Block grants Medicaid and other welfare programs…” mean? I can’t figure out how to parse that.
Cutting government waste: He needs to be a lot clearer on which 10% of the federal workforce he’s going to lay off, and while he’s at it, he really ought to say something about why he’s so eager to contribute to the unemployment rate. The low salary he’s willing to take is a nice gesture, but it’s not anything more than a gesture, since pay for politicians is a drop in the bucket.
Taxes: Didn’t he say that he’s going to balance the budget? That means raising taxes, not lowering them. And the taxes he’s promising to lower are the worst ones possible to lower: Those are all taxes on folks who can afford to pay a lot more.
Regulations: I can’t see how repealing any of those could possibly be a good thing.
Monetary policy: “Conduct an audit” just means “I’ll look at the problem”. How about some actual details of a solution? Or even any evidence that there’s a problem to begin with? But at least he’s not pushing his plan to institute 1000% inflation overnight by nationalizing the precious metals industry, like he usually does.
I have two qualms. First, I don’t want Paul’s plan to succeed. Second, I don’t want Paul’s plan to fail.
If Paul was able to successfully implement his plans, he would dismantle government institutions which I feel are a net good. Yes, they have a cost. But the benefits outweigh the costs.
But I don’t think Paul would succeed. I think a lot of his support is coming from duplicitous interests. They want to use his movement as a smokescreen to dismantle government programs they oppose. And once that’s done, their support will evaporate and Paul’s movement will stall out. We’ll end up with a government that’s just as big and expensive as the one we have now but one which provides us less effective service in many important areas.
That.
Just a few passing thoughts, nothing major. Firing scores of thousands of Americans due to budget cuts when the economy is weak; privatizing the FAA; ending help for the poorest Americans to heat their houses in winter; slashing disease research; all but stopping research on the safety of new drugs; drastically cutting highway maintenence; forcing tens of thousands of college students to drop out; increasing reliance on foreign oil; cutting taxes by $5 trillion; and a few other things.
Just some vague concerns on the periphery of the main proposals… nothing to get worked up about.
This plan, like Cain’s, has 0 chance of getting through Congress.
I wish these guys would stop pretending like they can enact legislation by themselves.
I like his decrease in military spending though! But even that wouldn’t make it through Congress.
He wants to end legal tender laws and allow the market to develop competing currencies instead of continuing to allow the fed to devalue the dollar and send it to foreign banks.
It’s impossible to say the benefits outweigh the costs because government doesn’t operate on profits and losses. It’s only source of revenue is coercion. Therefore instead of money going towards things that undoubtedly benefit consumers it goes to the gov’t.
Idk about his duplicitous interests because I can’t read minds. Personally the main program u oppose is military aggression. I don’t see how cutting it now would be bad. Also I feel the Fed is a pernicious institution and opening up competing currencies is a possible transition from it.
If you get the people behind it how could it fail.
You say you like his military cuts. He is the only candidate that is on our side with that. If he doesn’t get the nomination defense spending won’t even be discussed in the general election. How sad is that? It’s like we’re devolving into a nation of war mongers. Obama campaigned to start scaling military involvement back and look at him.
Not sure where you got cutting taxes by $5T. Or increasing reliance on foreign oil considering we have our own and he is for exploiting that resource.
The jobs he is cutting are non-productive. He seeks to scale them back through attrition. When someone leaves you simply don’t rehire. I guess people from cut programs would be retrained.
I guess only the government can handle air travel?
The producers have an interest in testing their own drugs if they don’t want lawsuits. The FDA is not needed there.
You won’t though…that’s the point. It would take a sea change of monumental proportions to get enough support, coast to coast and in every state, to get enough senators and congresscritters elected to even be seriously considered. And that’s not gonna happen.
It won’t be discussed because, like attempting to make cuts in Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc, you are never going to get large spending cuts through the house and senate. It’s not going to happen. At most what you’ll get is some symbolic cuts as part of a compromise deal, and we’ll probably be worse off than if we’d have just left it alone, since compromise deals usually lead to a worst of both worlds scenario, instead of the best of both. You have two completely entrenched political philosophies vying for position in the US today, and both sides have enough support that neither can gain enough of a majority to make real, hard, meaningful change. That’s probably for the best since, IMHO, both of the sides (liberal verse conservative) are, at their core, fucking nutters who would drive the country over a cliff if they ever DID manage to gain enough support to get all of their way. Someone like Paul, not being part of either dominant political philosophy, has so small a chance of ever getting his proposals through as proposed that it might as well be zero. That’s political reality, American style.
-XT
The incredible naïveté of this sentence underscores how unrealistic the Paul “plan” is, and how the majority of his supporters’ ignorance borders on delusional.
Yeah, he wants to replace a mostly stable, regulated system with a poorly defined experiment. Count this as another item against him.
The markets have already developed competing currencies, plenty of them. Competition between those currencies and the federal one has shown that the people prefer the federal one, and so those competing currencies never really catch on. That’s how the free market works, isn’t it?
IIRC, doesn’t he also want to go back to a gold standard for gold backed currencies?
-XT
Wow. His plan isn’t one worthy of an aspiring Burkino Faso.
The US will never produce enough oil for its own needs and even if it could, oil is a global commodity and it really doesn’t matter where it’s pumped.
While I hardly support Congressman Paul’s plan (prefer monetarism and Chicago economics), America and Britain did well as laissez-faire countries with gold standards in the 19th Century and most of those African kleptocracies are (nominally) socialist not Randian utopias.
Not quite. The man himself on the issue:
Green energy will never be viable as long as fossil fuels are cheaper. As time goes by and these resources become more scarce and expensive, green energy will emerge as a legitimate industry without government subsidy. Until then you’re throwing money down a well.