Forum Post: Why do you continue to push Ron PauI?

I would be open to a public audit of the Fed, and if it shows significant dishonesty and irresponsibility I would be open to nationalizing it and handing its functions over to the US Treasury Department. As far as tariffs on imports go, that's the only way I can think of to begin the process of bringing jobs back to America and raising the wage of the average worker. If he's not going to work to address one of the major causes of long-term unemployment and wage losses then I fail to see how it's a good idea to vote for him.

I'd also like to see a great deal more clarification from Mr. Paul on which sets of regulations he considers outside the constitutional jurisdiction of the government and which ones he considers vital reforms that need to stay in place. Honestly, given his rhetoric on the matter I don't know what to believe and I don't want to believe he's one thing only to find out the hard way that he's another. I want the Patriot Act gone and the TSA dismantled, and I think he and I can agree on that. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley vote is a good sign but until I can square that with his rhetoric and get an actual platform from the man I'm not going to consider voting for him.

His comments on the EPA scare the shit out of me; Essentially most of eastern North Carolina stinks to high heaven because of hundreds of millions of gallons of pig crap from factory farms is being let to marinate in open-air lagoons and/or sprayed into the air as an aerosol. It's actually gotten to the point of ruining something like nine or ten waterways and causing China-esque air quality problems. What really takes the cake, though, is the leaky nuclear waste dump in Andrews County, Texas that happens to be sitting on the aquifer that provides drinking water to seven different states. This is the kind of crap the EPA belongs fighting, and eliminating the one agency that wants to clean up the environment is an enormous step in the wrong direction.

On top of that his talk of flat taxes and imposition of the gold standard makes me profoundly uncomfortable. A flat tax is by its very nature a regressive tax, and in order to bring in the same revenue as the current system it would have to take the difference out of the hides of the people who can afford it the least. He also wants to tax capital gains (essentially money created without any actual work being done to earn it) at a lower rate than regular income, which is just plain incentivization of laziness on the top end. As far as the gold standard is concerned, the first thing you learn in economics 101 is that credit needs to be relaxed rather than tightened to deal with a recession, and moving to a gold standard would pretty much strangle credit at the time when that would hurt us the most. Once again, bad policy.

Besides, the man's apparently a young-earth creationist. That pretty much tears it for me. I don't care what else he is, if he deliberately shuts his eyes to basic science (whether it's to pander to the religious right or, even worse, if that's an accurate reflection of where he stands) there's no way in hell I'm going to trust him with the country. If the man decides that continually verified truth doesn't matter because it conflicts with his beliefs then on some level something has gone very wrong.

Bringing the troops home is fine and dandy, but we're already well on our way to doing that; there's a very good chance that pretty much all troops will be out of Iraq by the end of December 2011, and we're going to have all of our combat people out of Afghanistan by sometime in 2014.

So far, I see a man who's gotten one, maybe two things right (his no votes on Gramm-Leach-Bliley and S.1867, and his desire to put the Fed under a microscope). However, those two things are pretty small when you consider the number of things he seems to be promising to get wrong as president.

Given all that, why do you still push us to vote for him? Do you disagree with the facts below, and if so where do you claim I've gone wrong? Do you want to see a chunk taken out of the Pentagon's budget so badly you're willing to do it at such a high cost to the rest of the country? Or do you believe that we should support him because neither establishment Democrats nor establishment Republicans can stand him and you want to make those two groups squirm?