Ron Paul on the Debt Ceiling

[Ethersync]

Step inside Ron Paul haters.

Read this:

Debt Ceiling Drama

The debt ceiling debate is providing plenty of opportunity for political theater in Washington. Proponents of raising the debt ceiling are throwing around the usual scare tactics and misinformation in order to intimidate opponents into accepting more debt and taxes. It is important to distinguish the truth from the propaganda.

First of all, politicians need to understand that without real change default is inevitable. In fact, default happens every day through monetary policy tricks. Every time the Federal Reserve engages in more quantitative easing and devalues the dollar, it is defaulting on the American people by eroding their purchasing power and inflating their savings away. The dollar has lost nearly 50% of its value against gold since 2008. The Fed claims inflation is 2% or less over the past few years; however economists who compile alternate data show a 9% inflation rate if calculated more traditionally. Alarmingly, the administration is talking about changing the methodology of the CPI calculation yet again to hide the damage of the government's policies. Changing the CPI will also enable the government to avoid giving seniors a COLA (cost of living adjustment) on their social security checks, and raise taxes via the hidden means of "bracket creep." This is a default. Just because it is a default on the people and not the banks and foreign holders of our debt does not mean it doesn't count.

Politicians also need to acknowledge that our debt is unsustainable. For decades our government has been spending and promising far more than it collects in taxes. But the problem is not that the people are not taxed enough. The government has managed to run up $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities, which works out to $528,000 per household. A tax policy that would aim to extract even half that amount of money from American families would be unimaginably draconian, and not unlike attempting to squeeze blood from a turnip. This is, unequivocally, a spending problem brought about by a dramatically inflated view of the proper role of government in a free society.

Perhaps the most abhorrent bit of chicanery has been the threat that if a deal is not reached to increase the debt by August 2nd, social security checks may not go out. In reality, the Chief Actuary of Social Security confirmed last week that current Social Security tax receipts are more than enough to cover current outlays. The only reason those checks would not go out would be if the administration decided to spend those designated funds elsewhere. It is very telling that the administration would rather frighten seniors dependent on social security checks than alarm their big banking friends, who have already received $5.3 trillion in bailouts, stimulus and quantitative easing. This instance of trying to blackmail Congress into tax increases by threatening social security demonstrates how scary it is to be completely dependent on government promises and why many young people today would jump at the chance to opt out of Social Security altogether.

We are headed for rough economic times either way, but the longer we put it off, the greater the pain will be when the system implodes. We need to stop adding more programs and entitlements to the problem. We need to stop expensive bombing campaigns against people on the other side of the globe and bring our troops home. We need to stop allowing secretive banking cartels to endlessly enslave us through monetary policy trickery. And we need to drastically rethink government's role in our lives so we can get it out of the way and get back to work.

http://paul.house.gov/index.php?opti...talk&Itemid=69

...and tell me which part makes him sound like a nut.

[Agent 488]

tl dr .........

[jimmy-3-way]

Originally Posted by Ethersync

Step inside Ron Paul haters.

...and tell me which part makes him sound like a nut.

All of it.

But he's describing a nutty system and he's right.

[Agent 488]

cool. what's his solution? his map for getting from a to b?

[marketsmart]

Originally Posted by Agent 488

cool. what's his solution? his map for getting from a to b?

bring in 7 busloads of people with ak-47's while congress is in session...





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[dyna mo]

Originally Posted by Ethersync

...and tell me which part makes him sound like a nut.

ok, i'll play!

Proponents of raising the debt ceiling are throwing around the usual scare tactics

We are headed for rough economic times either way, but the longer we put it off, the greater the pain will be when the system implodes.

it's not ok for people whom he disagrees with to use the *usual scare tactics* yet it is ok for him to do so.

classic ronnie!

[PR_Glen]

Originally Posted by Agent 488

cool. what's his solution? his map for getting from a to b?

acknowledging the problem accurately without large scale propaganda would be a pretty good step forward wouldn't it?

[mynameisjim]

Other than the small groups on the extremes of either side, everybody already knows what the real problems are.

The real trick is finding solutions that you can implement within the current system. That's why I could care less about Ron Paul, most of what he says, everybody already knows, but he doesn't risk his political career by doing anything bold and actually trying to implement any new ideas.

He runs for President, but he knows he'll never win, then he goes back to being a Senator and complaining but never does anything. It's a pretty nice system he has, he looks like an outsider, but he's a total insider who makes his money from the government and doesn't do anything to risk his cushy political gig.

We all know what the problem is, we need someone who can fix it.

[dyna mo]

and ftr- i'm a ethersync fan. we disagree on ronnie but so what!

[marketsmart]

Originally Posted by dyna mo

and ftr- i'm a ethersync fan. we disagree on ronnie but so what!

i dont blame you..

that justin timberlake is dreamy....





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[dyna mo]

Originally Posted by marketsmart

i dont blame you..

that justin timberlake is dreamy....





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+ he has street cred as he's from the streets.

[marketsmart]

Originally Posted by dyna mo

+ he has street cred as he's from the streets.

where the streets have no name from what i've heard...





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[u-Bob]

Originally Posted by Agent 488

cool. what's his solution? his map for getting from a to b?

Originally Posted by mynameisjim

The real trick is finding solutions that you can implement within the current system.
...
We all know what the problem is, we need someone who can fix it.

That's the whole problem. There is no way the government, a president, a senator, a congress man etc can fix the problem.

In economic therms, we currently have a problem of malinvestment.

http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Malinvestment :

Malinvestment is an investment in wrong lines of production, which inevitably lead to wasted capital and economic losses, subsequently requiring the reallocation of resources to more productive uses. "Wrong" in this sense means "incorrect" or "mistaken" from the point of view of the real long-term needs and demands of the economy, if those needs and demands were expressed with the correct price signals in the free market. Austrians believe systemic malinvestments occur because of unnecessary and counterproductive intervention in the free market, distorting price signals and misleading investors and entrepeneurs. For Austrians, prices are an essential information channel through which market participants communicate their demands and cause resources to be allocated to satisfy these demands appropriately. If the government or banks distort, confuse or mislead investors and market participants by not permitting the price mechanism to work, malinvestment will be the inevitable result.

John Mills:
Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

Ludwig von mises:
The popularity of inflation and credit expansion, the ultimate source of the repeated attempts to render people prosperous by credit expansion, and thus the cause of the cyclical fluctuations of business, manifests itself clearly in the customary terminology. The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression. People rebel against the insight that the disturbing element is to be seen in the malinvestment and the overconsumption of the boom period and that such an artificially induced boom is doomed. They are looking for the philosophers' stone to make it last.

Murray Rothbard in 'America's Great Depression':
A credit expansion may appear to render submarginal capital profitable once more, but this too will be malinvestment, and the now greater error will be exposed when this boom is over. Thus, credit expansion generates the business cycle regardless of the existence of unemployed factors. Credit expansion in the midst of unemployment will create more distortions and malinvestments, delay recovery from the preceding boom, and make a more grueling recovery necessary in the future. While it is true that the unemployed factors are not now diverted from more valuable uses as employed factors would be (since they were speculatively idle or malinvested instead of employed), the other complementary factors will be diverted into working with them, and these factors will be malinvested and wasted. Moreover, all the other distorting effects of credit expansion will still follow, and a depression will be necessary to correct the new distortion.


So in short: No politician is ever going to be able to fix things. By trying to fix things he will only make things worse. I respect Paul for not trying to fix things, but for trying to educate people on the underlying problems.

Does that mean we should just sit back and do nothing? No, we should stop hoping for politicians to come up with some deus ex machina kind of solution. What we should do as individuals is save money, prepare for a rainy day (lots of them), protect our savings against inflation and as entrepreneurs: look for holes in the market and start filling them.

[seeandsee]

i think border control must be better... for star not spend $$$ on something yuo can protect...

[acrylix]

Originally Posted by mynameisjim

then he goes back to being a Senator and complaining but never does anything

His son is a Senator. Ron Paul is not, and has never been one.