General Paul knows whats best
He votes against General Petraeus' plan to fight it out in Bagdhad.
We have seen Paul's type before. They wanted to give up to the Confederates and wanted to let the soviets march over asia and western europe.
He should just switch parties.
It seems like there will be more votes.
We have seen Paul's type before. They wanted to give up to the Confederates and wanted to let the soviets march over asia and western europe.
He should just switch parties.
It seems like there will be more votes.
posted by Sloanasaurus | 2/16/2007 12:26:00 PM
He did run for President as a Libertarian once. To which party should he belong, the party which has traditionally opposed interventionist actions (GOP), or the party which now only opposes intervention for political expediency, aka the party which supported illegal action in Kosovo and Somalia last decade?
On the other hand, Ramstad also voted against upping the ante, and I've long argued he's a Democrat. Paul and Ramstad agree on little else, however. And we know Ramstad's just voting in the direction of the political winds, as always.
I could have been more efficient by saying that Paul has not left the GOP; the GOP has left him (and many others of us).
Do we not see that we have fallen into the same trap we set for the Soviet Union decades ago, forcing their collapse through excessive military spending? Our spending is even less productive than that of the USSR: we're attempting to nominally fight a ragtag band of cavemen, but aren't even close to the target. We don't even know what our target is anymore and are fighting blind, throwing money even more haphazardly. Paul partially alluded to this in his comments yesterday.
Sorry to be rude scribbler, but this last comment about us killing ourselves through excessive military spending is just absurd. We are spending less now on military expenditures as a percentage of GDP than we've historically spent during peacetime! The Soviets were spending over 20% of their GDP on the military. We spend three percent. Numbers matter.
That's a fair criticism, Pencil. But most of the Iraq spending is off-budget. In fact, Bush didn't even ask for any Iraq money in his 2006 budget, and the money has been coming from emergency supplemental appropriations. Iraq/Afghanistan spending will actually run over $120 billion this year WITHOUT the surge, all off-budget. That's on top of the military budget of over $400 billion, and not mentioning the Department of Energy military spending, military research, etc. That's not peanuts to the average guy.
US GDP is 13 trillion dollars. 400 billion is 3% of that. The extra 120 billion is .9 % of that, bringing us to 3.9%. In WWII, military spending was 55% of GDP.
Steb, did you really intend to defend Paul by a comparison with RAMSTAD? I'm gonna chalk this up to temporary insanity on your part.
Military budget for 2007 will be $470 billion or 3.6% of GDP. Tack on the $120 b for $590 billion per year and that's almost $2k per year per capita. Of course, you and I don't pay $2k times the number in our household. The "rich" (probably any of us on the blog, believe it or not) pay a disproportionately higher rate, so figure we're each paying a good $10 grand each year. I can double $10,000 every 7.2 years, so we're essentially talking about everyone's retirement, or nearly a million each over 20 years. Not peanuts.
Festi, I did qualify my comparison, but you have a good point: perhaps that was not the best way to showcase Paul.
Ramstad really blew it on this one. Who will be left supprting him in the end...democrats?
I hope an Iraq war veteran runs against him who was sickened by Ramstads vote for the enemy.
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