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There is an Election Coming

"WATCH: Rand Paul Promises 

To Cut Federal Workforce, 

Salaries During Heated Debate" 


Aye, there's the rub!

Here we are, trying desperately to recover from 
a confluence of genuine problems and disasters!
Under the Bush administration, we were attacked 
by Muslim extremists, mostly from Saudi Arabia,
but whose leader--Osama bin Laden--apparently
was hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan.  Bin Laden
is one of the leaders of the movement that believes
that Saudi Arabia--Mecca--for instance, is a Holy Land.

We have heard that before, haven't we?
Jerusalem?  Der Vaterland?  The New Jerusalem
(right here, as it used to be called).  We declared
war on him and his followers, in Afghanistan.
That proved to be a very difficult job, so the Bush 
administration decided it could establish, in the region,
a democratic regime that would be such a shining 
example of democracy that it would divide the 
extremists from more moderate Muslims and, at the 
same time, give us access to an ocean of oil:  Iraq.

We blamed Saddam Hussein, who was a butcher,
but who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
He no longer had biological weapons (we had seen
to that, earlier), and he had no nuclear capabilities.
He huffed and puffed and said he did, but he didn't.

Worse, we did not propose to pay for our new war.
We charged it to some future generation of kids.
The cost was never calculated in our national budget.
The result:  an economic sump hole.  

Worser, the administration kept changing how evil taxes 
were, and how awful government was, but continued
to spend like drunken sailers.  The housing bubble burst.
Banks scammed like Ponzi artists.  They skimmed 
monstrous amounts of money to pay themselves as if
they were the finest economic minds of the millenia.

When Barack Obama came into office, unemployment
was nosediving.  We barely averted a complete depression.
Bush recognized the disaster, and started to pump money
into the economy to prevent a worldwide collapse.
Obama had to continue to invest public funds to save 
financial and industrial and housing meltdowns.
Our health care delivery system was not a health care
system, at all.  It was an insurance company system 
designed to collect lots of money from people and to 
deliver only as much health care as the leftover funds,
after massive skimoffs, could provide.  

Why?  Because if we did not immediately invest public
funds, it would all come down, and there would be even
fewer jobs left, and fewer people in houses, and less of
a car industry, and worse schools, and even more people
without health care, and millions of people without work
and without unemployment insurance.

So what does Rand Paul want to do now?
He wants to cut jobs, and cut salaries, and cut taxes,
and cut umemployment insurance, and cut regulatory
control of the pirates who have seized the ships of state,
and cut Social Security.  

There is the divide:  should we go back to doing what 
sent us diving into this morass, or do we have to reshape
the economy, recognize that we need to do new things,
repair our educational system, rebuild our infrastructure,
find ways to help millions of people who may never regain
their old jobs, insure that retirees will have enough to live on,
and get decent health care, and have places to live?

Ron Paul is a libertarian hardnose.
He has it made.  He doesn't have to worry.
He is not us, any more than Christine O'Donnell is.
He is chanting nonsense, and every economist knows it.

There is an election coming.


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