Hawk wrote:Yes, you have infered that you have no problem with super pac money.undercoverjoe wrote:Do you have any indication that I like the current political situation?
THE POLITICAL ARENA!!! Political Gladiators Inside!!
LOL. I don't particularly care for Obama. My posts on this page(EDIT: page 90) have nothing to do with Obama but with my points of view.whitedevilone wrote:It's called Decaf Bill.Check it out.You get so hyper sensitive, like a little girl when anybody questions the greatness of your ManBoy lacky in the White House.Seriously bro it's kinda creepy.....well and super funny!!
The funny thing is how you want to attack without taking on any substance of my views. A visible weakness (as is typically expected form anyone but lonewolf) on your part for sure.
Last edited by Hawk on Sunday Jan 01, 2012, edited 2 times in total.
Try a post with an ideological principal or idea or try to respond to a leftist post that espouses an ideological principal with an intelligent response rather than an attack on one's person. If you can...
I think I might choose to not respond to personal attacks that come from Rockpagers who haven't the capacity to respond relative to the substance of a given principal.
I think I might choose to not respond to personal attacks that come from Rockpagers who haven't the capacity to respond relative to the substance of a given principal.
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onegunguitar
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Are you against super pac money ? Goven that I never read you are against it one would gather that you are for it.undercoverjoe wrote:Only Hawk can read a post "Do you have any indication that I like the current political situation?" and infer someone is for super pacs.
You are an idiot. You make up preposterous statements and then start an argument. Get a life Bill.
Can't add substance so add insults. Damn you guys make things easy.
Last edited by Hawk on Sunday Jan 01, 2012, edited 1 time in total.
I will say it again for idiots.....I am against everything going on politically today in Washington DC. I am interested to see how you twist that statement around.Hawk wrote:Are you against super pac money ?undercoverjoe wrote:Only Hawk can read a post "Do you have any indication that I like the current political situation?" and infer someone is for super pacs.
You are an idiot. You make up preposterous statements and then start an argument. Get a life Bill.
So you are against super pac money ? I still don't know.undercoverjoe wrote:I will say it again for idiots.....I am against everything going on politically today in Washington DC. I am interested to see how you twist that statement around.Hawk wrote:Are you against super pac money ?undercoverjoe wrote:Only Hawk can read a post "Do you have any indication that I like the current political situation?" and infer someone is for super pacs.
You are an idiot. You make up preposterous statements and then start an argument. Get a life Bill.
Any response to my views (Relative to Frum's quotes or my response to onegun) on page 90 ?
BTW Joe, I totally have and enjoy a life. I work for a living, a liberty to be enjoyed and a proud member of the middle class, a class the 1% want to take down via lower wages.
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onegunguitar
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onegunguitar
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Attacking you??Good lord dude grow a set of nuts.Hawk wrote:LOL. I don't particularly care for Obama. My posts on this page(EDIT: page 90) have nothing to do with Obama but with my points of view.whitedevilone wrote:It's called Decaf Bill.Check it out.You get so hyper sensitive, like a little girl when anybody questions the greatness of your ManBoy lacky in the White House.Seriously bro it's kinda creepy.....well and super funny!!
The funny thing is how you want to attack without taking on any substance of my views. A visible weakness (as is typically expected form anyone but lonewolf) on your part for sure.
NailDriver
Only fools stand up and lay down their arms.
Only fools stand up and lay down their arms.
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onegunguitar
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I read the article. It never mentions Obama, or even insinuates anything about the current president, assuming that's who you meant by "manboy lackey."whitedevilone wrote:It's called Decaf Bill.Check it out.You get so hyper sensitive, like a little girl when anybody questions the greatness of your ManBoy lacky in the White House.Seriously bro it's kinda creepy.....well and super funny!!
It's about how rightwing nimrods have painted the Founding Fathers as Libertarian prophets who are without sin, and how wrong that is. You can't be Libertarian and own slaves. Abolitionism existed before the United States, people have always known it's wrong to own another human being, but in their infinite wisdom, our Founding Fathers chose slavery because it made them money without having to toil in the fields themselves. They also didn't allow women to vote or do much of anything else. In fact, anyone who wasn't a rich white guy wasn't really invited to the party. The nation survived and grew, but not because of a few rich white guys. It was because of the work done by the workers, like it always is.
It's also about Calvinism, and how religious fundamentalism defines good and evil, then uses guilt over their definitions as a leash on the faithful, negating liberty, the goal of the Libertarian.
Good post, Bill.
Thanks John. Good Critique.songsmith wrote:I read the article. It never mentions Obama, or even insinuates anything about the current president, assuming that's who you meant by "manboy lackey."whitedevilone wrote:It's called Decaf Bill.Check it out.You get so hyper sensitive, like a little girl when anybody questions the greatness of your ManBoy lacky in the White House.Seriously bro it's kinda creepy.....well and super funny!!
It's about how rightwing nimrods have painted the Founding Fathers as Libertarian prophets who are without sin, and how wrong that is. You can't be Libertarian and own slaves. Abolitionism existed before the United States, people have always known it's wrong to own another human being, but in their infinite wisdom, our Founding Fathers chose slavery because it made them money without having to toil in the fields themselves. They also didn't allow women to vote or do much of anything else. In fact, anyone who wasn't a rich white guy wasn't really invited to the party. The nation survived and grew, but not because of a few rich white guys. It was because of the work done by the workers, like it always is.
It's also about Calvinism, and how religious fundamentalism defines good and evil, then uses guilt over their definitions as a leash on the faithful, negating liberty, the goal of the Libertarian.
Good post, Bill.
I suspect some libertarians / conservatives on RP didn't read any of it. Too closed minded or too many words.
A Krugman essay about debt, and why it's not as important as the joes of the world would have you believe. Unemployment, which is not controlled by govt, but by business, is a far bigger problem.
Nobody Understands Debt
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 1, 2012
In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.
This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.
Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!
And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.
But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.
But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.
It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.
Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.
And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.
Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.
So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way. (end article)
Nobody Understands Debt
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 1, 2012
In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.
This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.
Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!
And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.
But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.
But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.
It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.
Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.
And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.
Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.
So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way. (end article)
Why Ron Paul Is Attracting So Many Voters
Written by Sam Blumenfeld
Monday, 02 January 2012 11:22
One of the surprises of the campaign for the Republican nomination is the growing number of voters who approve of Ron Paul’s stand on the issues. The Texas Congressman is, of course, a known quantity. He has been preaching in favor of limited government and a non-interventionist foreign policy for decades. But the fact that so many Americans like what he stands for gives hope to this writer that the fundamental patriotic spirit of the American people has not completely vanished. In fact, it is alive and well.
Ron Paul fervently believes in the U.S. Constitution and the form of government it created. The Bill of Rights defends the freedom of the individual, and constitutional principles limit what the federal government can do. But it was the Wilson administration of 1912 to 1920 that gave our progressive politicians the notion that the Constitution was an unreasonable obstacle to desired federal expansion and put us on the road to incremental socialism.
Actually, it was Theodore Roosevelt who unleashed the incipient totalitarian beast, by adopting a philosophy of government very much like the one expounded by "Colonel" Edward Mandell House, a key advisor to Woodrow Wilson and FDR, in his novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, the story of a Mussolini-type strong man who manages to become a benign American dictator and gets things done.
Ron Paul rejects that progressive philosophy of government, which in the eyes of establishment Republicans makes him out to be an extremist. Their cry is that we can’t go back to the way things were before the liberal-progressive-socialists took over our government. It is also significant that President Wilson not only embarked on a vast expansion of the federal government with the income tax and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, but he also got us into World War I.
Ron Paul is a non-interventionist. If he had been President in 1917, he would have done everything in his power to avoid our involvement in that European conflict. A German victory would not have led to World War II. Yes, Britain and France might have suffered defeat, but to what extent that would have changed European or world history we have no way of knowing. Not only can we not predict the future, we can’t even predict the past!
While most pro-Paul voters wholeheartedly endorse his stand on domestic issues, it is taking them some time to adjust to his foreign policy of non-interventionism. Of course, students of American history know of George Washington’s famous Farewell Address in which he warned us not to get involved in entangling alliances with foreign powers which would prejudice our ability to deal with all nations on an equal, neutral footing.
But that has not prevented us from getting involved in a variety of wars, the first of which was the war against the Barbary Pirates in the Muslim states of North Africa who were interfering with our commercial vessels in the Mediterranean. Jefferson and Madison won that war with our warships and only seven American Marines on the landside.
In 1848 Mexico declared war against us when the independent nation of Texas joined the United States. We invaded Mexico and won that war, which added much new territory in the Southwest to the United States. But many New Englanders opposed that war.
In 1861 we had to deal with our own Civil War, which cost over a half-million lives. The Southern Confederacy surrendered, and the secessionist states once more became part and parcel of the Union.
In 1898, we declared war against Spain, a war that lasted about a year and gave us Puerto Rico and (for a time) Cuba and the Philippines. We had become a world military power. Nineteen years later we entered World War I on the side of the Allies. The end of that war led to the creation of the League of Nations. But President Harding rejected the League of Nations and signed separate peace treaties with Germany and Austria. Most Americans by then were opposed to any further involvement in the affairs of foreign nations. But the internationalists were determined to keep us involved, and they got their way after World War II with the creation of the United Nations.
By then America had become a world industrial power; our corporations had developed worldwide interests that were economically beneficial to American shareholders as well as American and foreign consumers. Those interests required the protection of our State Department and the military power of the United States. Our interest in the oil reserves of the Arabian Peninsula led to our involvement in the Middle East. A non-interventionist President would have had to deal with all of these delicate problems.
But our main concern after World War II was the attempt by the communists to achieve world domination. They had conquered Russia in 1918 and embarked on a policy of world revolution. Although we were allied with the Soviet Union in our efforts to defeat Germany, a Cold War against communism began at the end of that conflict with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.
The Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, only five years after the end of World War II, when the communist government of North Korea, supported by Red China and the Soviet Union, invaded democratic South Korea, supported by us and the United Nations. The United States responded to that communist aggression. The freedom and sovereignty of South Korea were restored in July 1953 at the cost of 33,686 American lives on the battlefield. Since then South Korea has become one of the world’s most advanced and productive nations. We still maintain troops in South Korea to serve notice on North Korea to keep that communist totalitarian state at bay.
Two years later, in November 1955, began the Vietnam War between communist North Vietnam and democratic South Vietnam. Our military intervention began in 1961 during the Kennedy administration and ended 10 years later in March 1971. But after an enormously mismanaged military effort by the United States to prevent the communists from taking over South Vietnam, the war finally ended with the fall of Saigon to the communists on April 30, 1975. The number of Americans killed in that war was 58,220, with 150,000 wounded.
The American defeat permitted the communists to take over Cambodia and inflict a genocidal campaign in that poor country resulting in the deaths of over a million Cambodians. Pundits are still arguing whether or not we should have gotten involved in Vietnam to begin with.
Then, in 1983, there was the invasion of the island of Grenada by the United States to prevent it from becoming a communist military base in the Caribbean. Also, in 1983, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, was bombed by Hezbollah Islamic terrorists. President Reagan then sent a contingent of U.S. Marines to Beirut to help separate warring Lebanese factions. The Marines were housed in a building at Beirut Airport. On October 23, 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber detonated a truck load of explosives at the barracks killing 241 Marines and wounding 100 others. President Reagan then ordered American forces to leave Lebanon.
Then, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush formed a coalition of nations to liberate Kuwait. Desert Storm, as the operation was called, was a great success with a minimum of American casualties. We then tried to save Somalia by sending in American troops. That ended with the bodies of dead Americans being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
On 9/11/2001, we were attacked by radical Islamists who managed to kill 3,000 Americans in just a few hours. That led to our involvement in Afghanistan where the terrorists had been trained. President George W. Bush then decided to invade Iraq even though Saddam Hussein was not involved in the attack on 9/11. We lost over 4,000 soldiers in that war in an attempt to bring democracy to an Islamic state. Obama brought that war to a close in December 2011.
It is obvious that we have been involved in an endless cycle of wars, much of it due to an interventionist foreign policy. Ron Paul offers Americans a new foreign policy that would reduce our involvement in the affairs of other countries. While the neo-conservatives believe that America has a duty to spread democracy around the world at the expense of American lives and treasure, Ron Paul would change that policy. American lives are not to be sacrificed for the benefit of others who generally despise America.
As for the threat that Iran poses against Israel, Paul believes that the Israelis are quite capable of taking care of themselves. They don’t need America telling them whether or not they can build apartments in Jerusalem or elsewhere. And they don’t need an American president telling them where they should locate their borders. And should a hostile Iran, armed with nuclear weapons, threaten us, there is no doubt that President Paul would know how to deal with that hypothetical situation. It will not be easy extricating ourselves from the complexity of our involvement in world affairs, but we must start somewhere, and Ron Paul would be the President to start the process.
Written by Sam Blumenfeld
Monday, 02 January 2012 11:22
One of the surprises of the campaign for the Republican nomination is the growing number of voters who approve of Ron Paul’s stand on the issues. The Texas Congressman is, of course, a known quantity. He has been preaching in favor of limited government and a non-interventionist foreign policy for decades. But the fact that so many Americans like what he stands for gives hope to this writer that the fundamental patriotic spirit of the American people has not completely vanished. In fact, it is alive and well.
Ron Paul fervently believes in the U.S. Constitution and the form of government it created. The Bill of Rights defends the freedom of the individual, and constitutional principles limit what the federal government can do. But it was the Wilson administration of 1912 to 1920 that gave our progressive politicians the notion that the Constitution was an unreasonable obstacle to desired federal expansion and put us on the road to incremental socialism.
Actually, it was Theodore Roosevelt who unleashed the incipient totalitarian beast, by adopting a philosophy of government very much like the one expounded by "Colonel" Edward Mandell House, a key advisor to Woodrow Wilson and FDR, in his novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, the story of a Mussolini-type strong man who manages to become a benign American dictator and gets things done.
Ron Paul rejects that progressive philosophy of government, which in the eyes of establishment Republicans makes him out to be an extremist. Their cry is that we can’t go back to the way things were before the liberal-progressive-socialists took over our government. It is also significant that President Wilson not only embarked on a vast expansion of the federal government with the income tax and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, but he also got us into World War I.
Ron Paul is a non-interventionist. If he had been President in 1917, he would have done everything in his power to avoid our involvement in that European conflict. A German victory would not have led to World War II. Yes, Britain and France might have suffered defeat, but to what extent that would have changed European or world history we have no way of knowing. Not only can we not predict the future, we can’t even predict the past!
While most pro-Paul voters wholeheartedly endorse his stand on domestic issues, it is taking them some time to adjust to his foreign policy of non-interventionism. Of course, students of American history know of George Washington’s famous Farewell Address in which he warned us not to get involved in entangling alliances with foreign powers which would prejudice our ability to deal with all nations on an equal, neutral footing.
But that has not prevented us from getting involved in a variety of wars, the first of which was the war against the Barbary Pirates in the Muslim states of North Africa who were interfering with our commercial vessels in the Mediterranean. Jefferson and Madison won that war with our warships and only seven American Marines on the landside.
In 1848 Mexico declared war against us when the independent nation of Texas joined the United States. We invaded Mexico and won that war, which added much new territory in the Southwest to the United States. But many New Englanders opposed that war.
In 1861 we had to deal with our own Civil War, which cost over a half-million lives. The Southern Confederacy surrendered, and the secessionist states once more became part and parcel of the Union.
In 1898, we declared war against Spain, a war that lasted about a year and gave us Puerto Rico and (for a time) Cuba and the Philippines. We had become a world military power. Nineteen years later we entered World War I on the side of the Allies. The end of that war led to the creation of the League of Nations. But President Harding rejected the League of Nations and signed separate peace treaties with Germany and Austria. Most Americans by then were opposed to any further involvement in the affairs of foreign nations. But the internationalists were determined to keep us involved, and they got their way after World War II with the creation of the United Nations.
By then America had become a world industrial power; our corporations had developed worldwide interests that were economically beneficial to American shareholders as well as American and foreign consumers. Those interests required the protection of our State Department and the military power of the United States. Our interest in the oil reserves of the Arabian Peninsula led to our involvement in the Middle East. A non-interventionist President would have had to deal with all of these delicate problems.
But our main concern after World War II was the attempt by the communists to achieve world domination. They had conquered Russia in 1918 and embarked on a policy of world revolution. Although we were allied with the Soviet Union in our efforts to defeat Germany, a Cold War against communism began at the end of that conflict with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.
The Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, only five years after the end of World War II, when the communist government of North Korea, supported by Red China and the Soviet Union, invaded democratic South Korea, supported by us and the United Nations. The United States responded to that communist aggression. The freedom and sovereignty of South Korea were restored in July 1953 at the cost of 33,686 American lives on the battlefield. Since then South Korea has become one of the world’s most advanced and productive nations. We still maintain troops in South Korea to serve notice on North Korea to keep that communist totalitarian state at bay.
Two years later, in November 1955, began the Vietnam War between communist North Vietnam and democratic South Vietnam. Our military intervention began in 1961 during the Kennedy administration and ended 10 years later in March 1971. But after an enormously mismanaged military effort by the United States to prevent the communists from taking over South Vietnam, the war finally ended with the fall of Saigon to the communists on April 30, 1975. The number of Americans killed in that war was 58,220, with 150,000 wounded.
The American defeat permitted the communists to take over Cambodia and inflict a genocidal campaign in that poor country resulting in the deaths of over a million Cambodians. Pundits are still arguing whether or not we should have gotten involved in Vietnam to begin with.
Then, in 1983, there was the invasion of the island of Grenada by the United States to prevent it from becoming a communist military base in the Caribbean. Also, in 1983, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, was bombed by Hezbollah Islamic terrorists. President Reagan then sent a contingent of U.S. Marines to Beirut to help separate warring Lebanese factions. The Marines were housed in a building at Beirut Airport. On October 23, 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber detonated a truck load of explosives at the barracks killing 241 Marines and wounding 100 others. President Reagan then ordered American forces to leave Lebanon.
Then, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush formed a coalition of nations to liberate Kuwait. Desert Storm, as the operation was called, was a great success with a minimum of American casualties. We then tried to save Somalia by sending in American troops. That ended with the bodies of dead Americans being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
On 9/11/2001, we were attacked by radical Islamists who managed to kill 3,000 Americans in just a few hours. That led to our involvement in Afghanistan where the terrorists had been trained. President George W. Bush then decided to invade Iraq even though Saddam Hussein was not involved in the attack on 9/11. We lost over 4,000 soldiers in that war in an attempt to bring democracy to an Islamic state. Obama brought that war to a close in December 2011.
It is obvious that we have been involved in an endless cycle of wars, much of it due to an interventionist foreign policy. Ron Paul offers Americans a new foreign policy that would reduce our involvement in the affairs of other countries. While the neo-conservatives believe that America has a duty to spread democracy around the world at the expense of American lives and treasure, Ron Paul would change that policy. American lives are not to be sacrificed for the benefit of others who generally despise America.
As for the threat that Iran poses against Israel, Paul believes that the Israelis are quite capable of taking care of themselves. They don’t need America telling them whether or not they can build apartments in Jerusalem or elsewhere. And they don’t need an American president telling them where they should locate their borders. And should a hostile Iran, armed with nuclear weapons, threaten us, there is no doubt that President Paul would know how to deal with that hypothetical situation. It will not be easy extricating ourselves from the complexity of our involvement in world affairs, but we must start somewhere, and Ron Paul would be the President to start the process.
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lonewolf
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Krugman? ROFLMAO! Whatever. Keynesian fool.
While he makes a few legitimate statements, he completely overlooks a few significant differences from WWII:
1) In WWII, we bombed our industrial competition practically into the stoneage. After the war, the USA had very little competition until the 1970s. You know, right about the time people started bitching about "Made In Japan."
Today, US industry not only has competition from the WWII industrialized nations, but also from the emerging BRICK countries (K is for Korea). Growth, and by extension, government revenue growth is not something that we can take for granted anymore--especially when you pile on excessive but ineffective regulation and other anti-growth policies.
2) WWII spending created a large modern industrial base that ran for several decades with no competition. Quality control was horrendous until Japan showed us how it works and it took us a few decades to learn that lesson. Once the war was over, the government ceased its excessive spending and allowed the debt to subside.
What do we have to show for our latest spending spree? A smaller industrial base and more people dependent on the government than ever before. Lots of crony bureaucrats with cushy pensions in DC and a continually rising interest payment that will mushroom once interest rates simply reach historical norms.
There is only a snowball's chance in hell that we can grow our way out of the present government spending levels. You can only raise taxes so much until you hit the brick wall of the Law Of Diminishing Returns.
Was that snowball's road to hell paved with good intentions or just programs to buy votes come election time?
While he makes a few legitimate statements, he completely overlooks a few significant differences from WWII:
1) In WWII, we bombed our industrial competition practically into the stoneage. After the war, the USA had very little competition until the 1970s. You know, right about the time people started bitching about "Made In Japan."
Today, US industry not only has competition from the WWII industrialized nations, but also from the emerging BRICK countries (K is for Korea). Growth, and by extension, government revenue growth is not something that we can take for granted anymore--especially when you pile on excessive but ineffective regulation and other anti-growth policies.
2) WWII spending created a large modern industrial base that ran for several decades with no competition. Quality control was horrendous until Japan showed us how it works and it took us a few decades to learn that lesson. Once the war was over, the government ceased its excessive spending and allowed the debt to subside.
What do we have to show for our latest spending spree? A smaller industrial base and more people dependent on the government than ever before. Lots of crony bureaucrats with cushy pensions in DC and a continually rising interest payment that will mushroom once interest rates simply reach historical norms.
There is only a snowball's chance in hell that we can grow our way out of the present government spending levels. You can only raise taxes so much until you hit the brick wall of the Law Of Diminishing Returns.
Was that snowball's road to hell paved with good intentions or just programs to buy votes come election time?
...Oh, the freedom of the day that yielded to no rule or time...
So let's raise those tax levels to what they were during the post-war years. Or during Reaganomics. Back during times of greatest growth. I bet no sale on that one, right?lonewolf wrote: You can only raise taxes so much until you hit the brick wall of the Law Of Diminishing Returns.
And how long was "acceptable" for the repay of WWII debt? Debt has only been "America's Great Problem" since early 2009, Obama has been charged with the entire amount due immediately.
It's time to quit fiddle-farting around on the debt, and work on creating jobs. It's all distraction.