Pic courtesy of DonkeyHotey
Today you’re going to hear a lot about never-to-be-president Rep. Ron Paul’s “Restore America Plan”. I guess that is a good name if the goal is to restore America to the 1880’s but that is all that can be said kindly about this plan.
The top line is that Ron Paul wants to cut a little more than 25% of the federal budget, $1 trillion, in his first year in office. How is he going to do this? Well let’s take a little look, shall we?
First off he is going to end five cabinet level departments; the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Commerce, Interior and Education. Think about what that means for a second.
The Department of Energy manages, among other things, the regulation of nuclear reactors. Just whacking this department is not a great idea.
HUD might seem like a good target if you are a Conservative/Libertarian who believes that it is just fine for people to live in the streets and that the government should, under any circumstances help.
The Commerce Department has the mission of:
"Promote job creation and improved living standards for all Americans by creating an infrastructure that promotes economic growth, technological competitiveness, and sustainable development."
So, of course that is right out. After all the invisible hand of the market should take care of that.
Ending the Department of the Interior seems to be another wish list pointed at deregulation. After it is Interior that regulates where people can drill or mine for uranium. If we whack this department we are right back to the good old days of the Gold Rush.
If you think this does not affect you, you might want to take a look at the title for your house ,chances are you don’t own the below ground rights. Without the negligent guidance of the Dept. of Interior some drilling company could show up to sink a well in your back yard and you’d be out of luck legally.
Ending the Department of Education is a criminally bad idea too. I know it is a hobbyhorse for those on the Right to ride that the federal government should not have anything to do with how the states deal with education but really there has to be some standards.
Abolishing this Department would make us the only industrialized nation in the world without an overarching policy organ for education. Given that we are nowhere close to the top of the world in education this is a recipe for disaster.
Of course this is just the first part of Rep. Paul’s nutty ideas. He wants to end the Transportation Security Administration. His view is that private businesses like airlines will do just fine in covering security. You know like they did in the early party of September 2001.
He also wants to end all foreign aid. This is just a mean step given that the sum total of our foreign aid is less than 1% of the total budget or around $38.5 billion a year. Thought I do give the old mean Doc from Texas full marks for consistency, he won’t help Americans, so why should he help foreigners?
Other items on his hit list are Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Though I do have to call Paul a coward on the last one, where he fails to mention it by name. What Rep. Paul proposes is to keep paying our current seniors but allow younger workers to opt out.
That sound fine as long as you fail to understand that it is younger workers who pay for the current crop of retirees and if they opt out there is not going to be enough money for them.
He wants to transform Medicare and Medicaid and VA benenfits to block grants to the States. Anyone really think that Texas or Mississippi or Arizona is going to do a better job with these programs if they are not required to follow some guidelines in return for the money? Me either.
The other big areas where Rep. Paul wants to roll back the hands of time in regulation. He wants to abolish the ACA (he calls it Obamacare), Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley. What a craptastic idea this is! Lets take all the regulations off of the bankers who nearly destroyed out economy. After all they are so rational they would never do it again….
He does have a few ideas that will probably get some traction from those on the Left. He wants to end our foreign wars, cut the presidential salary down to 39,336 (the average wage of the American worker) and to fully audit the Federal Reserve. They have some merit but mostly they are like the limp lettuce leaf added to a triple bacon cheeseburger in the name of “healthy eating”/
The one area you are probably not going to hear a lot about is one that made me laugh out loud. Tucked away at the end of the overview is this plan to legislate competing currency as a way to strengthen and stabilize our dollar.
If you’ve never heard that term what it means is allowing private entities to issue their own currency. So you could have Sony-dollars or Wal-mart-bucks. These would be backed by gold or silver. Basically it is a back door way of returning the US to the gold standard.
So there are the “ideas” from the Paul campaign. They are no more specific than I have described above, so I don’t think it is fair to call it a plan, it is more of a wish list disguised as a plan.
One thing is clear though. If these ideas were enacted it would not return prosperity to the United States, in fact it would do the exact opposite. If a trillion dollars was removed from the economy all a once it would sink us into a deep Depression. There is already not enough demand in our economy and removing money in one fell swoop would reduce it even further.
The point of this plan is balancing our budget without raising taxes. If you are willing to live without regulation, without Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, if you are willing to go back to the way health insurance was before the ACA, if you are willing to go back to the gold standard, and if you are willing to go back to letting the cost cutting airlines handle airport security, you can have all that.
He is trying to make a splash ahead of tonight’s debates but the Mad-Elf from Texas is only spinning a bunch late night college BS session policy prescriptions that would, in fact, in reality, make things much worse.
The floor is yours.