I stand with Rand

[z0sa]

no really I don't and the GOP is honestly up creek as long as Hilary doesn't really, really in botch her campaign.

, I'll vote for her just to have Bill around again.

[boutons_deux]

Rand Paul Joins Crowded Field of People Who Will Never Be President

LOUISVILLE — With an official announcement on his campaign Web site, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has joined a crowded field of people who will never be elected President in their lifetimes.

While Paul and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are the only officially announced Republican candidates with a zero-per-cent chance of ever winning the Presidency,

a burgeoning roster of totally pointless candidacies is waiting in the wings.

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, and neurosurgeon Ben Carson are just a few of the men thought to be considering squandering time and money pursuing an office that they will never occupy in a billion years.

On the Democratic side, only former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley has stepped forward as someone who could only be elected to the White House in an alternate universe.

Minutes after his announcement, aides to Senator Paul said that they believed that he would emerge as the top choice of voters who are determined to waste their votes in 2016.

“There’s no one out there who has a more remote chance of being elected, unless Trump decides to run,” one aide said.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borow...NjYwNjM5NDc2S0

[The Reckoning]

sad that people poke fun at other's unelectability than their message. politics has dissolved into a homecoming compe ion rather than a serious discourse on what's best for us as a nation.

[Blake]

These dudes are getting poked pretty good for their messages and their message sending actions

[CosmicCowboy]

Rand's message would actually play better in a general election than the Republican primary. His laissez faire foreign policy position won't play well with the hardcores.

[ElNono]

I think Rand is a lot more politically savvy than his dad, which might not be good news for those looking for purity, but makes him a more well rounded candidate, IMO.

[The Reckoning]

i agree that isolationism is outdated and so is the message, but rand has demonstrated that he can be more flexible than poppa. maybe he'd be more like bill than ron.

[boutons_deux]

How Rand Paul's Policies Would Increase Inequality

So-called libertarian Rand Paul is running for president. As with Cruz, it's hard to see him being more than a sideshow. Nonetheless, he's a sideshow with a non-trivial amount of support, especially among young conservatives. For that reason, it's worth rehashing his wacky political views.

Redistribute from the Poor to the Rich

Like most conservatives, libertarians especially, Paul is of the mind that our country's current set of economic ins utions distribute too much to the poor and not enough to the rich. Nevermind that the poor in the US are among the poorest in the developed world (in both absolute and relative terms). Nevermind that the rich in the US are the richest in the developed world (in both absolute and relative terms). Nevermind that the US has one of the highest levels of inequality in the developed world. Things are still not quite inegalitarian enough for Paul's tastes.

Also like most conservatives, Paul supports the usual set of structural reforms to fix our problem by redistributing income up. Paul's budget proposal for 2014 provides a good blueprint of how he'd like to go about doing this:

• "Flat Tax." By increasing taxes on the bottom and middle while decreasing them on the top, Paul's "flat tax" plan redistributes the national income upwards. Of course, making tax burdens "flatter" as part of a project to increase the overall tax level can be justified provided surplus revenue is buried into transfers. But Paul has no intention of making the overall tax level higher. He intends to make it lower.
  
• Eliminating Capital Taxes. Paul also wants to clear out the entire slate of taxes that fall almost entirely on the super-rich, including taxes on capital gains, dividends, interest, estates, and enormous gifts. Such a reform would be a massive giveaway to the rich.

• Block Granting Benefit Programs. To balance the budget while reducing the overall tax level, outlays have to be cut somewhere. Given what the federal government does, that means either cuts in social insurance or cuts in the military.Last month, Rand Paul proposed increasing military spending. So, that leaves only social insurance cuts. To cut social insurance, the conventional Republican strategy, which Paul adopts, is to block grant a bunch of the benefit programs to the states while slowly suffocating their funding. This is what they did to TANF and the program is basically a zombie on a march towards eventual death. Block granting programs like SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid reduces benefits for the poor while also making the benefits less responsive (sometimes even entirely unresponsive) to cyclical downturns, which is when the benefits are most needed.

In total, Paul wants to give away huge sums of money to the rich via the elimination of capital income taxes and switching into his "flat tax." The "flat tax" also, all else equal, reduces the disposable incomes of the bottom and the middle. This tax reform would lower the overall tax level, necessitating social insurance and transfer cuts that will fall heavily on the poor, as well as on the elderly and sick. It doesn't take a genius to see how this plays out distributively and it's not pretty.

Like all the other advocates of upwards redistribution, Paul assures us this reform would generate crazy growth that would actually leave the bottom and middle better off even while it es inequality. The problem is that this growth game is not supported by cross-country studies on the determinants of growth. Not only do countries with high tax levels and high transfer levels (like the Nordic countries) grow as well as we do, but huge cross-country datasets tend to show inequality-reducing transfers leads to more growth.

The Federal Government Enslaves Doctors

Of course, Paul doesn't actually care whether his redistribution from the poor to the rich has dynamic second-order effects that greatly benefit those it takes from. Like his father, at the end of the day, Paul subscribes to this college-student-inflected libertarianism where he thinks things like taxes and social insurance are the forceful aggression of the government (but that somehow other government economic ins utions like property laws aren't).

If you don't believe me, please watch this bizarre spectacle where he argues that a public right to healthcare entails enslaving doctors (YouTube Link). Here is a partial transcript:

With regard to the idea of whether or not you have a right to healthcare, you have to realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I am a physician. That means you have a right to come into my house and conscript me. That means you believe in slavery.

He goes further than that, expanding it even to water and food. Statements to the effect that people should have a right to those things are, in his view, statements in support of slavery.

Civil Rights

Because Paul is ultimately and deep down a believer in the Rothbardian non-aggression brand of libertarianism most popular among college freshman, it should come as no surprise that he doesn't believe in the Civil Rights Act as applied to public accommodations. The "No Blacks" sign at the hotel is OK by him, not something of public concern. A company that systematically refuses to hire women in top positions, also OK.

To be fair, he has more recently dishonestly said he is for the Civil Rights Act. But this is political expediency, and doesn't even come accompanied with the more sophisticated libertarian pretend stuff where they now go "Oh well you know, non-discrimination laws just this once I guess was cool [because I would be laughed out of decent society and pushed into total irrelevance if I said otherwise]." Instead, he just sort of all of a sudden became alright with civil rights protections.

But make no mistake in all of this. As his comments on public rights to water and healthcare reveal, his deep down view is that anti-discrimination laws are tantamount to enslavement. Conscription of public accommodations providers! An aggressive intrusion into their absolute pre-political property rights!

Conclusion

This is just a tip of the iceberg of the circus that is Rand Paul's politics, but it should give you a sense of his angle. Rand Paul's libertarian fantasy is, like all libertarian fantasies, a reality-denying nightmare for nearly all but the rich, especially the white and male rich.

http://www.demos.org/blog/4/7/15/how...ase-inequality

[CosmicCowboy]

Military isolationism isn't necessarily outdated. I just see it as an alternative. IMHO in the Middle East and North Africa we should either play hard to win or get the out. I'm OK with getting the out with the "don't with Israel or we come back and kick your ass" condition.

[The Reckoning]

boots your article is ridiculous and i lost brain cells reading through it's bias.


anyway, happy i can urge some discussion of policies instead of "sideshows" and "unelectability". Rand actually puts thought into his votes and compromises btw. He's not like Ron in that he votes No for everything.

As for military, no reason for us to intervene in people killing each other unless it's to defend our own folks and interests...and give them no reason to hate us. That was Ron's revelation that I agree with.


also military spending really all isn't bad so long as they carrve all the waste (which there's billions of $ of waste). it's the best training in the world for those who can't afford an advanced education...and with all the benefits like the GI Bill, it's a great start for those who don't have a trust fund.

[Blizzardwizard]

As said above, the guy's more savvy than Ron Paul and frankly is seen as a little more sane and a little less senile. Individualistic Libertarian Laissez-Faire policies won't win elections these days though. Hillary surely can't screw this up. Even someone like Warren or Sanders would wipe the floor with Paul.

[ChumpDumper]

Military isolationism isn't necessarily outdated. I just see it as an alternative. IMHO in the Middle East and North Africa we should either play hard to win or get the out. I'm OK with getting the out with the "don't with Israel or we come back and kick your ass" condition.

Why would you go to war for Israel?

[CosmicCowboy]

Why would you go to war for Israel?

It's more of a deterrent to keep the war from ever starting and to prevent Israel from having use nukes for their survival.Too many enemies in that region have sworn to exterminate them. Israel naturally takes it seriously and for good reason.

Why would you want to stand by and watch Israel be exterminated? Do you not like Jews?

[ChumpDumper]

So why do they even have nukes if you're willing to fight their wars for them?

I'm fine with the billions we give them so they can buy our to fight their own wars.

[CosmicCowboy]

So why do they even have nukes if you're willing to fight their wars for them?

I'm fine with the billions we give them so they can buy our to fight their own wars.

A reasonable position as well, although the implied threat of unqualified US participation might actually prevent the war from ever starting.

[ChumpDumper]

That's what nukes are for.

Why is going to war for Israel in our interest?

[boutons_deux]

boots your article is ridiculous and i lost brain cells reading through it's bias.

Which RP policies did the article get wrong?

[The Reckoning]

Which RP policies did the article get wrong?

It makes logical assumptions that are way beyond reasonable cir stance.

[CosmicCowboy]

That's what nukes are for.

Why is going to war for Israel in our interest?

hmmm...why would preventing nukes from being used in the middle east as a last ditch defense effort be in our interest?

[ChumpDumper]

hmmm...why would preventing nukes from being used in the middle east as a last ditch defense effort be in our interest?

It's the deterrent.

So the only reason to go to war for Israel is so they won't use nukes?

We should take away their nukes then. They don't need them when they have the US as a satellite state anyway.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

It's more of a deterrent to keep the war from ever starting and to prevent Israel from having use nukes for their survival.Too many enemies in that region have sworn to exterminate them. Israel naturally takes it seriously and for good reason.

Why would you want to stand by and watch Israel be exterminated? Do you not like Jews?

Of course bluster and hope they don't call you on it is how you live your life, brokiller. Of course you are shortsighted enough to apply personal ethic to international policy. What a toolbag.

[boutons_deux]

Ayn Rand Paul AND his staff are ing incompetent politicians

Twitter Ignites Over Rand Paul's 'JEW For Rand' Banner On New Website



http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewir...+%28TPMNews%29

You avg Jew tends to be more educated, sophisticated than your avg gun fellatin, KY jelly brained libertarian

[boutons_deux]

where you RP suckers can waster your money:

Rand on a stick: The Salon guide to Rand Paul’s online campaign store

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/07/rand...ampaign_store/

Libertarianism!

[boutons_deux]

Ayn Rand Paul, aka Wombat Hair (Jon Stewart), using racist, xenophobic, LGBT-hating code phrase

Rand Paul promises to ‘take our country back’ in 2016 White House bid

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/04/r...e+Raw+Story%29

[CosmicCowboy]

Of course bluster and hope they don't call you on it is how you live your life, brokiller. Of course you are shortsighted enough to apply personal ethic to international policy. What a toolbag.

ankle biting got...