A New Beach Boys Hit: Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran

No doubt you will hear a lot about Ron Paul as he edges into first place in the Iowa Caucasus. I expect him to be slandered. I even read an article that outlines how he will be slandered. They may not realize that they risk the Paul voters not voting for the Republican candidate in the fall. 

Here is one slander that I have been hearing:

The implication is that Rep. Paul is a 9/11 truther -- you'd think, reading that one sentence, that Paul stated or implied the U.S. government either orchestrated or had foreknowledge of the attacks. In fact, Rep. Paul responded to the September 11 attacks by voting to authorize an actual war against its perpetrators; and as anyone who is even passingly familiar with his worldview knows, his controversial opinion is that Islamist terrorists attack the United States partly because they are furious about the quasi-imperial role America plays in their countries. The blow-back theory is itself controversial, but it is obviously different from 9/11 Trutherism.  

What Paul is saying, and it is the exact same thing the 9/11 bipartisan commission said, is that the reason for the hatred toward America is the long standing intervention of America in the Middle East. This seems obvious to me. 

Has the GOP elite lost track of their own party? From the same Atlantic article: 

Dismissing the burgeoning number of Americans on the right who are suspicious of interventionism and hawkishness is intellectually suspect and unwise. A majority of Republicans now think that the Iraq War was a mistake. The general non-interventionist impulse on the right has never completely gone away. Paul is by no means the ideal vehicle for non-interventionism. But insofar as he plays a significant role in the GOP primary, it will be partly due to the fact that the legitimate concerns he articulates are taken up by no other viable candidate. One needn't be an ardent Paul supporter to suspect that National Review would rather that no viable GOP candidate spoke up to challenge the hawkish impulses on the elite right .

What then is the issue with regard to Iran? Here is a Youtube video of a section of a recent debate. 

Bachmann has been making these same claims on the campaign trail. She is completely wrong about her assertions. These quotes would normally appear on a Bachmann lies website. However she is not lying. I think she actually believes the #^*@ she is saying. This is worse. 

It seems to me that our policies increase the chances for a nuclear explosion. 

Here is what the American Conservative thinks:

On the substance, Paul is clearly in the right, and Bachmann repeated some fictions that she used during the CNN national security debate last month. For instance, Bachmann claimed that the Iranian government has pledged to use nuclear weapons to “wipe Israel off the map,” and she says that the Iranians have threatened to use such weapons against the U.S. Neither of these is true, but she keeps getting away with making these claims. The first claim is misleading in two ways. Ahmadinejad’s statement probably did not mean what American hawks routinely assume that it means, and there is no reason to believe that Iranian leaders are going to usher in the annihilation of their own country by launching a first strike nuclear attack on Israel. There is also no reason to believe that Iranian leaders are going to provoke massive retaliation from the United States by attacking the U.S. with a nuclear weapon. For that matter, all indications are that the Iranian government has not yet decided to build nuclear weapons.

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No less important, the official, public Iranian position on nuclear weapons is that their use is forbidden under Islamic law. Of course, hawks can continue to cherry-pick the evidence as they usually do. Meanwhile, Bachmann and the others provided a perfect argument for why Paul’s candidacy is more necessary than ever if the GOP’s ruinous habit of pushing for new foreign wars is going to be broken.

While one would expect this from the Non-Interventionist American Conservative, it represents a large segment of the Republican party—25 to 50% depending on how you ask the question. Whoever the candidate is, they cannot win without this part of the party. If it is claimed that 25 to 50% of the party are kooks, no Republican can win next fall. (Personally, I almost do not care anymore.) 

As I have been saying, ultimately it does not matter, we must cut spending so drastically that defense cannot be exempt.  

The Forever War: Four Trillion and Counting

In George Orwell's 1984, the world is divided into three countries which constantly war with each other. The countries will randomly switch alliances: Eurasia will end its alliance with Oceania, and become an ally of Eastasia. Of course, Oceania was never an ally of Eurasia, this is a lie of saboteurs. The point is that the war never ends because War empowers the rulers to deceive the ruled. It seems that we are in the same situation today. Of course we are not to mention the fact that America used to be an ally of Iraq, oh no. Do not forget that, "War Is Peace." 

It is not clear how much longer we can afford the warfare state-not and maintain the welfare state. Bloomberg gives us an estimate of the cost of just one of these wars, the war in Iraq:  

The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion.

This was not what we were told:

Near the start of the war, the U.S. Defense Department estimated it would cost $50 billion to $80 billion. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was dismissed in 2002 after suggesting the price of invading and occupying Iraq could reach $200 billion.

“The direct costs for the war were about $800 billion, but the indirect costs, the costs you can’t easily see, that payoff will outlast you and me,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at American Progress, a Washington, D.C. think tank, and a former assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan. 

What are these costs? 

Those costs include interest payments on the billions borrowed to fund the war; the cost of maintaining military bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain to defend Iraq or reoccupy the country if the Baghdad government unravels; and the expense of using private security contractors to protect U.S. property in the country and to train Iraqi forces.

Caring for veterans, more than 2 million of them, could alone reach $1 trillion, according to Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, in Congressional testimony in July.

Big SisterHow much will this cost? Ultimately we have no idea. My guess is that it will be less because we will not keep our commitment to the Veterans. I am not saying this is a good thing, but I am saying we do not have the money. 

Was the War worth 4 trillion and the eventual bankruptcy of the country? Was it worth 2 Trillion? Was it worth 1 trillion? Was it worth one dollar?

The reason I ask if it is worth one dollar is that what we do in the Middle East just makes things worse. The US government supported the "Arab Spring." In Egypt the result was an election where the Moslem Brotherhood with the even more conservative parties got 60% of the vote. In Libya the rebels fly the Al Qaida flag. What will happen if the US Government replaces the current Syrian government? We can assume that it will not be good. 

The CIA and the English MI-6 replaced the democratically elected government in Iran with the Shah. The people hated him. Now we have a different government in Iran. How is that working out for the US? 

Sunday I posted a video that supported Ron Paul. I suppose I endorsed him by my use of the video. Tomorrow I will talk about his foreign policy, which is not isolationism, but non-interventionism. But ultimately the arguments either way are moot. As I have been pointing out recently, we do not have the money. 

Do not forget that "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength." 

2+2=5: Let's Cut Spending

So if one cuts the budget by about 42% across the board the budget would be balanced. When we include the fact that we cannot cut interest on the debt, we must cut the budget by about 50% if we want to balance it. So that means that if a person right now is getting a Social Security check of $1,000 it becomes $500. If your doctor bill is $500 a month, paid by Medicare, you now have a bill of $250. This means that we will cut Medicaid by 50%. Cut our troop strength by 50%.  50% of FBI agents will be fired. Unemployment benefits will be slashed. This is what people are asking when they ask for a balanced budget.  

So let’s exempt the Military. That is 25% of the budget. So the rest of the budget will be cut then by 75%. Let's look at my previous examples. So that $1,000 Social Security check becomes $250. You heath care expenses are now $375 a month. 75% of FBI agents will be fired.  

So let’s exempt the Military, Social Security, and medical expenses of Government. That means we will need to cut the rest of Government by 200%. You do the math. When Republican Budget Guru Ryan says that current retirees will not be affected, he is lying. 

I ran across this interesting tidbit as I researched George Orwell's 1984 for tomorrow's post. 

The statement "2+2=5,” used to torment Winston Smith during his interrogation, was a Communist party slogan from the second five-year plan, which encouraged fulfillment of the five-year plan in four years. The slogan was seen in electric lights on Moscow house-fronts, billboards, etc.  

The Communist party seized the absurdity and made it into a slogan. I suggest the Republicans do the same. Here is my proposed slogan: "The Democrats think 2+2=6. We Republicans think 2+2=5. We are the better party." I am not comforted.  

While I have personal preferences as to who the next president will be, it may not really matter. A Republican president will raise taxes; a Democratic president will cut spending. Neither of the two major parties is willing to deal with the crisis. In fact one of my fondest hopes is that the candidates are liars. I hope the candidates understand the coming troubles and are saying what they need to say to get elected. My hope is in the dishonesty of the politician. 

Our difficulties which I have been outlining are very severe. We need to cut the budget in ways no one wants. We need to raise taxes, a lot—on everyone.  I wish we had some magical pixie dust to spread over the budget and make everything better. We have no choice. We do not have the money.

Let's Raise Taxes

This picture is making the rounds on Facebook. To balance the budget by raising taxes would require all taxes to go up by 80%. This is not going to happen. The corporate tax rate is already among the highest in the world at 35%. Such a large increase in taxes would mean a tax rate of 65%. The Social Security tax rate is 12.8%. An 80% increase would mean an increase to 23%. The highest marginal tax rate for the income tax is 35%. Such a large increase in taxes would increase the tax rate on that income bracket to 65%.  

What about a Value Added Tax (VAT)?

Canada, for example, gives up about a third of potential revenue by excusing food, drugs, and transportation from the [value added] tax. Even if the United States did the same, a 10 percent tax rate could raise $500 billion a year, according to Eric Toder, an analyst at the Tax Policy Center.  

So in order to raise 1.6 trillion a year, this would require a value added tax of 30%. This would mean that all prices would go up about 35%. Does anyone think this is going to happen? 

I have seen a few examples on the talking head programs of a "rich" person asking for higher taxes. A few percentage points is how one person put it. The ones suggesting this do not understand just how dire things are. When I see this talking point, I laugh. The increase, if it is to solve the problem, must be much, much larger. 

The tax increase that Obama is talking about is minimal. If the Republicans were smart—they are not called the stupid party for nothing—they would embrace the rather modest tax increase Obama is suggesting—maybe a bit more. And then cut the budget. This would destroy all Obama's talking points. 

While I support a rather large tax increase with the expiration of the Bush era tax cuts, this will only pay for about 20% of the next 10 years’ deficit.  

Tomorrow I will talk about budget cuts. 

Would You, Could You, Vote For Paul?