Rockwell engages a bright reporter on the dollar and the gold standard:
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Ron Paul, however, who ran only 150 votes behind Bachmann and doubled the vote of Pawlenty, has not received the attention or credit his tremendous showing deserves.
Four years ago, Paul, a libertarian legend, was winning every telephone poll taken after a GOP debate but failing to win, place or show in the primaries. He seemed to be campaigning simply to make his case, realizing that he had no chance of being nominated.
His views on foreign policy were regarded as aberrational by fellow candidates, such as Rudy Giuliani, when they were not being ignored.
In last week’s debate, Paul denounced U.S. intervention in wars that are none of America’s business, called for closing U.S. bases abroad and bringing our troops home, and squared off against former Sen. Rick Santorum on whether Iran represents a threat.
Santorum and Pawlenty supported confrontation with Iran. Yet both together did not come close to matching Paul’s vote tally.
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Why Won’t They Just Get Rid of Ron Paul?
This is the question asked in a brilliant piece in the Washington Examiner.<>
Iraq and Freedom
Murtaza Hussain writing at Salon:
“Reparations payments” are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.
Iraq today is a shattered society still picking up the pieces after decades of war and crippling sanctions. Prior to its conflict with the United States, the Iraqi healthcare and education systems were the envy of the Middle East, and despite the brutalities and crimes of the Ba’ath regime there still managed to exist a thriving middle class of ordinary Iraqis, something conspicuously absent from today’s “free Iraq.” In light of the continued suffering of Iraqi civilians, the agreement by the al-Maliki government to pay enormous sums of money to the people who destroyed the country is unconscionable and further discredits the absurd claim that the invasion was fought to “liberate” the Iraqi people.
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Ron Paul’s Iran Policy
Cato’s Ted Carpenter summarizes well Iran’s policy:
It would be suicidal for a country with a tiny nuclear arsenal to attack a county with a large arsenal. One should not confuse repulsiveness with suicidal tendencies. The current government of Iran is certainly repulsive, but it has never given evidence that it is suicidal. In all likelihood, rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map is merely ideological blather. Israel has more than a sufficient capability to deter an Iranian nuclear attack.
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Ron Paul Leading Poll
Another poll talking about Paul’s lead in Texas:
Ron Paul Wins Texas Straw Poll
This is not good news for Rick Perry:
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex), a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, won a poll of 882 “highly active” Republican voters in Texas. Paul won the poll with 22 percent of the Republican vote. Texas Governor Rick Perry grabbed second with 17 percent of the Republican vote, while pizza magnate Herman Cain took third with 14 percent of the vote. Paul’s official campaign website and Facebook page reported on the poll first. Within a day of the poll being posted on Paul’s website, the article had over 6,000 shares on Facebook.
Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/capitol/ron-paul-wins-texas-gop-poll/#ixzz1RRXWhfQl<>
Brzezinski: Middle Class Unrest To Hit U.S.
Paul Watson summarizes this interesting piece on Prison Planet:
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who forty years ago wrote of a highly controlled future society where the population would be subjugated by a technocratic elite, appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joeyesterday to predict that middle class unrest caused by economic disenfranchisement would soon hit America.
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Is a U.S. Default Inevitable?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday – July 5, 2011
As President Bush prepared to invade Iraq in September 2002, the head of his economic policy council, Lawrence Lindsey publicly estimated such a war could cost $100 billion to $200 billion.
As President Bush prepared to invade Iraq in September 2002, the head of his economic policy council, Lawrence Lindsey publicly estimated such a war could cost $100 billion to $200 billion.
Lindsey had committed candor, and the stunned Bushites came down on him with both feet.
“Baloney,” said Donald Rumsfeld. The likely cost would be $60 billion, said Mitch Daniels of the Office of Management and Budget. We can finance the war with Iraqi oil, said Paul Wolfowitz.
By year’s end, Lindsey was gone, back, in Ronald Reagan’s phrase, “testing the magic of the marketplace.”
And the cost of the Iraq War? It has passed $1 trillion.
So Lindsey is worth listening to. And he is now saving that the Obamaites may be wildly underestimating the deficits America is going to run in this decade. Here is why.
The average rate of interest the Fed has had to pay to borrow for the last two decades has been 5.7 percent. However, President Obama is projecting the cost of money at only 2.5 percent.
A return to the normal Fed rate would, by 2020, add $4.9 trillion to the cumulative deficit, says Lindsey, more than twice the $2 trillion in savings being discussed in Joe Biden’s debt-ceiling deal.
Second, Obama is estimating growth in 2012, 2013 and 2014 at 4, 4.5 and 4.1 percent. But the normal rate for a mature economy recovering from recession is 2.5 percent.
Hence, if we return to a normal rate of growth, rather than rise to Obama’s projected rate, says Lindsey, that would add $700 billion to the deficit over the next three years and $4 trillion by 2020.
Taken together, a U.S. return to a normal rate of growth of 2.5 percent, higher than today, and a normal rate of interest for the Fed could add as much as $9 trillion to the deficits between now and 2020.
New taxes on millionaires and billionaires who ride around in corporate jets can’t cover a tenth of 1 percent of these deficits.
Writes Lindsey, “Only serious long-term spending reduction in the entitlement area can begin to address the nation’s deficit and debt problems.”
His conclusion is logical, but seems impossible to achieve when both parties are talking of taking Medicare and Social Security off the table. Which makes his final point all the more compelling:
“Under current government policies and economic projections, (bondholders) should be far more concerned about a return of their principal in 10 years than about any short-term delay in interest payments in August.”
Lindsey is saying that the probability of U.S. bonds losing face value through inflation or default is high, given the size of the deficits we will be running and the improbability that any deficit-reduction plan now out there can significantly reduce them.
Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s are already talking of downgrading U.S. debt if the debt ceiling is not raised by early August.
Is America then headed for an inevitable default?
One Chinese economist is already accusing us of defaulting, as the Fed’s flooding of the world with dollars has seen the dollar lose 10 percent of its value against other currencies in the last year.
Holding $1 trillion in U.S. debt, China has watched the purchasing power of that U.S. paper plummet. Understandably, Beijing fears that if we ever pay back all they have lent us, it will be in U.S. dollars of far lesser value.
What should House Republicans do?
Stick to their principles and convictions.
For the cause of the deficit-debt crisis has been the explosion in federal spending under Barack Obama to the largest share of the U.S. economy since the climactic years of World War II.
Administrations of both parties contributed to this rise in the federal share of gross domestic product. But the GOP committed itself in 2010 to rein it in, without raising taxes. On that pledge the GOP triumphed and should keep its commitment.
First, because it is a solemn undertaking with a nation disgusted with politicians who say one thing and do another. Second, because our fiscal crisis, like Europe’s, is a result of too much government, not too little revenue. Third, because there is no credible school of economic thought that says raising taxes on the productive sector when one in six workers is unemployed or underemployed is the way to prosperity.
Under Obama these past two years, the nation relied on the U.S. government to pull us out of the ditch. But Obama’s $787 billion stimulus, his three deficits of 10 percent of GDP, and Ben Bernanke’s tripling of Fed assets by buying the bad paper of big banks and $600 billion in U.S. debt all failed.
For Republicans to agree now to a tax increases that would violate their principles, their promises to the voters and their basic philosophy — and be icing on the cake of Obama’s debt-ceiling increase — would be politically suicidal.
Indeed, were the Republican Party to do this, it would raise the question of why we need a Republican Party.
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