Plenty of people want it.
It’s just that the federal government is like having an 800 pound obese teenager sitting in your home taking over your life.
And Dr. Paul is saying the obese teen needs to lose weight.
Gee thanks Ron! Would never have thought of that without ya!
People know though, that if the income tax is abolished, things that they like, like 700 military bases all over the world, will have to be closed. They want less government in the abstract, but when it comes to serious, concrete, cuts people will be less willing to make those cuts.
What Dr. Paul is saying is not that the obese teen needs to lose weight, Dr. Paul is saying that the obese teen needs to stop eating so much. The obese teen will need to feel hungry a lot.
“Needs to lose weight” and “You may never eat a twinkie ever again” are entirely different things.
The media knows this. And the Republicans know this. There is plenty that most would want to cut. But every specific thing that is cut has someone out there who wants that thing not to be cut. And when Republicans cut that thing that a person wants, that person very likely could be less inclined to vote for a Republican.
These military bases are very very expensive. Ron Paul knows this and knows that many of these bases would have to be closed in order to abolish the income tax. Most freepers would like to abolish the income tax. But most freepers also do not want to close any military bases.
The media is trying to pin the Republicans down on specifics. Trying to get them to say what exact cuts they would make. Because the people who would be “hurt” by the cuts would be more likely to vote for the Democrats, at least in theory. Most Republicans want to avoid saying which cuts because they know what has happened in the past.
Ron Paul has been pretty specific about what cuts he would make. Get rid of the Dept. of Education for one, and that’s a simple one, that many Republicans used to agree with, and may agree with today. In the 2007/8 Presidential debates, and during the campaign, he made it pretty clear that he was not in the same ballpark as the other candidates in terms of how much government he wanted to cut. He wanted to make massive cuts, and most of the other candidates didn’t really want to make cuts at all.
And then all that good Ron Paul stuff got buried by the middle east stuff, a whole bunch of antiwar Dems got on board, and Ron Paul became known to most people as the antiwar Republican instead of the “massive cuts in government” Republican.
He’s got a fair share of supporters now who don’t care as much about cutting government as being antiwar, and at least with Republicans here, antiwar is less popular than abolish the income tax.