The political season is way to early. It is over 13 months left, and already, people are flocking to one cadidate or another.
My biggest gripe is fawning idiots spamming Freerepublic with threads honoring an anti-war kook more in tune with Al Qaeda than with the near unanimous views of the Freerepublic community which shows it's support for our troops and mission in Iraq.
Ron Paul is the candidate of movon.org, not Freerepublic.
“My biggest gripe is fawning idiots spamming Freerepublic with threads honoring an anti-war kook more in tune with Al Qaeda than with the near unanimous views of the Freerepublic community which shows it’s support for our troops and mission in Iraq.”
“Ron Paul is the candidate of movon.org, not Freerepublic.”
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As I said, he was hopeless from the start, and thus the great antipathy of most FR stalwarts is a bit puzzling, but also puzzling is the serious mislabeling of his position. My sense of the “Moveon” crowd is that they secretly (or even not-so-secretly) hope for an al Qaeda victory to vindicate their Bush-phobic mindset, where-as Paul’s position is a disagreement over the appropriateness and prudence of defeating al Qaeda in the way “most FR types” seem to prefer.
“The political season is way to early. It is over 13 months left, and already, people are flocking to one cadidate or another.”
Indeed, and the struggle with the “khalifate revivalist” strain of Islam which is so fundamental to the ideology of al Qaeda is in its early decades, and not going very well in Europe. Have you noticed?
We are in a marathon, not a sprint, and the need to take a measured view of the struggle, and husband our resources accordingly seems obvious to many observers, who wonder how long it will be before the US fiscal situation makes these global military operations in 100 countries and maintenance of a baker’s dozen of nuclear carrier task forces impossible to maintain, as ‘entitlement spending’ is projected to push the Federal budget bite out of the annual GDP from 20+% to over 40% during the next few decades.
I will be interested to see if any of the ‘plausibly electable’ candidates have as much useful insights to offer concerning these considerations as the politically hopeless Paul. So far, the field doesn’t look very promising but, as you say, the election is over a year away.
In the meantime, you might want to check out this article in the issue of Barrons on sale this weekend:
Monday, October 8, 2007
Slimming Entitlement Costs
By PETER J. FERRARA
FEDERAL SPENDING HAS HOVERED around 20% of gross domestic product for more than 50 years now, ever since it settled down after World War II. Despite all the battles over taxes and spending in that time, the federal share of our economy has remained fairly stable.
That will change quite dramatically without fundamental reform of our nation’s entitlement programs. The latest long-term projections of the Congressional Budget Office estimate that federal spending will soar, reaching close to 40% of GDP over the next 40 years, primarily owing to exploding costs for Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Add in costs for state and local government, and total government spending in America will be well over 50% of GDP.
If anything even close to this happens, the fundamental nature of our economy and our government will have changed. Our capitalist free-market system, the source of America’s historic prosperity, will constitute less than half of our economy. Something like Swedish-style socialism will dominate.
etc. etc.