There is big news coming out of Kentucky. Sen. Jim Bunning has announced that he will not seek reelection, leaving the door wide open for my son Dr. Rand Paul to run, win and join me in Washington.
Rand is carefully weighing his options and tells me he will make a final decision very soon. We need Rand on Capitol Hill fighting for smaller government, and we need you to urge him to run. You can contact him through his exploratory website, www.randpaul2010.com. Your encouragement and generous contributions will help him make the right decision to get it “in it to win it.”
We need Rand to run in 2010! Please urge him to run, sign up to get news on his campaign and, if possible, send money so he can see that we stand behind him.
The grassroots both in Kentucky and around the country are getting excited and planning a money bomb for Rand on August 20th. Please visit www.runrandrun.com and pledge to participate.
Together, we can help Rand run and elect a true defender of Liberty to United States Senate.
Ron Paul explains why the “Cash for Clunkers” program hurts the poor and harms the economy.
Ron Paul: Well, it looks like the economic crisis is over. Last week it was discovered in Washington that the “Cash for Clunkers” campaign worked. The program is been heralded as a fantastic success. It was so successful that after we spent one billion dollars the House rushed to give two more billion dollars and everybody is delighted that it’s going to stimulate the car industry.
But when you stop and think for a minute, it’s pretty absurd what is going on here. “Print up a lot of money, give it to a few people to buy a car and the numbers look better and therefore this is the way the economy is going to be taken care of and recovered.” But there are lot fallacies in this, obviously. This program when it was first voted on was meant to help people who had old cars and they were in the low income bracket to help them buy a new car.
It didn’t do anything of the kind. The poor people, the people with poor credit did not come to buy a car, they didn’t go through this process. As a matter of fact, this program is being paid for by the poor people, because they’re taking the clunkers off the highway. They’re deliberately hauling these in if they do end up in these car lots, they’re purposely destroyed which undermines the very market that the poor people depend on.
Not only that, the poor end up paying a bigger price for this than anybody else. Because there really is no money in the bank. We know that. They can’t tax anymore and the borrowing is more difficult than ever. So what do we do? Back to the old story again: lets just print up the money. Printing up money gives you inflation. Who suffers the most? The poor people who didn’t get to buy a car. Just like the poor people who we thought we were going to give all these new houses to with all these affirmative action programs. Guess who lost all their houses, guess who are suffering the most? It’s the poor and the low-middle income people. They are the ones who lost their jobs and suffer from the consequences.
But the really disturbing part about all this is that most people in Washington, at least those who voted quickly to put in another two billion dollars into this program, actually believe these are good programs. And they think they help the poor, they think they stimulate the economy, and it’s total foolishness.
I mean, if you had someone to come and propose, say there is a new business in town, and he needed customers. But he has a good savings account, enough to buffer himself over for awhile, and he takes money out of the savings account and goes out on the street and the passes out money. He says, “You can have this money from me if you come and spend it in my store.” And they do that and then he brings out the cash register and he says, “Wow, today I made a lot of money.”
This whole notion that government can stimulate the economy by doing this is just as absurd as that. So, we obviously still have a long way to go. And for right now, the markets and others are starting to feel a little bit better. But, quite frankly, I think we’re just digging a bigger hole for ourselves. Debt is increasing, government intervention is increasing, and there is no end in sight.
We still have the basic problems. Government is too big, they spend up too much money, they interfere too much in all our personal activities, overseas activities, our economic activities and they’re dependent on deficits, they’re dependent on regulations, they’re dependent on the Federal Reserve to keep printing money.
But I’m working on the assumption that time is running out, we are doing well and trying to expose the Fed for what they are really up to. But time is running short and I would anticipate in the next year or two people aren’t going to be cheering and saying “The only thing we need now is another Cash for Clunkers program. If it worked for cars, why can’t it work for everything else?” But truth will win out in the end, and I think this absurdity of last week and this argument that we just pass out cash and they buy cars is a help to the economy, is a complete fallacy.
On Thursday, July 30, Ron Paul’s addressed the Young Americans for Liberty first annual convention on the terrace of the Leadership Institute in Arlington, VA.
Ron Paul: It is real nice to be here and I’m very pleased with what you’re doing, especially what Jeff Frazee has put together. Because I really believe this will make a difference and this is something that I have a lot of excitement about. Because if you know, and many of you know what happened in the campaign, you’ve been to some of the rallies, you know about it that it’s your age group that paid attention.
And I think that’s pretty important. And it doesn’t seem to stop. The official campaign for presidency stopped, but the campaign for liberty has not stopped at all. As a matter of fact, the momentum is building. I get people in my office of your age group; between 15 and 25. That’s the group that are very turned off with the Republican Party. The Republican Party members come in and ask, “How do you energize the young people?” and I suggest to them “Maybe you should believe in liberty.”
But they do come to the office and what is impressive now in the last few weeks has been that I’m seeing a lot of young people… you know time goes by so quickly, I said, “You got interested during the Presidential campaign.”
No… it’s been since then in the past 6 months or so, and of course, the official campaign ended over a year ago. So they weren’t even watching things back then. But still they’re hearing about it, they’re hearing about groups like that, they’re hearing about your enthusiasm, they’re still going to the internet and you know there are still some Youtube videos on the internet.
And they get hold of these things and I get the biggest kick out of the young people coming in and they are dragging their parents in. In the old days it used to be the parents dragged their fifteen and sixteen year old in and tell them “well, you got to meet your Congressman, you got to be involved in civics and know how the Congress works.” It’s different. This group is different, and that is very, very important, because if we’re going to change it around it is going to be you that makes the difference.
A lot of people wonder why our group is a lot different. One person that recognized this in public before a hearing and said “your group is so much different” was Hillary Clinton. In the midst of that hearing she said, “I’m going to break the rules and tell you, boy you have an energetic crowd.” Well, I honestly say it is not me, because I’ve read in the paper too many times, “[Ron Paul] has no charisma whatsoever, so therefore, why are they listening to him?” It’s the message. The message is so great that that is what people pay attention to.
There is another very special reason why people in the presidential campaign and the people in this campaign, whether it’s the Campaign for Liberty or YAL, and that is that you are a special category and you belong to it. And you don’t have any choice anymore.
I mean, once you get hooked you’re done. I was a little more cautious. I didn’t pay any attention in high school, and I had some kids in this week… I couldn’t believe they were reading Austrian economics and one guy had Human Action and he was 17 years old. Boy, I wasn’t even paying any attention [at that age]. But the difference is the reason of the enthusiasm is that revolutionary movements always have to be philosophic. There are times when the violent authoritarian comes in and he takes over, but essentially the world changes by ideas.
They ask me frequently, “Who is the one individual that caused this economic crisis?” and they wanted me to say Greenspan or Bush or something like that. I say, “One person: Keynes.”
And the one statement to be remembered about philosophical change is, I don’t think you’re quite old enough to remember this, but I heard them say it: “We’re all Keynesians now”. And I remember when that was. That was August 15th in 1971, and it was a very important moment in our monetary history and in my history as well, because it got me very interested in politics.
But movements and major changes in history occur by a small number of people. Some people say 3%, some people say 5%. It’s never 51% of the people who pop up and say “Oh, we’re all Keynesians now.” It was the people, the 3% or 4% or 5% who were the intellectuals in our university about to destroy our country teaching Keynesian economics and throwing out our constitution, hard money and free markets.
And that 3% were very, very successful. And what I’m witnessing now is that that 3%, people that were in the presidential campaign, Campaign for Liberty or YAL, were part of that 3%. That’s why it appeared that our campaign was the biggest campaign around, which Hillary already acknowledge. It was because of the enthusiasm, the true belief, the message, and it was something worth working for, something worth standing out on the street for.
Those of you who finally discover this and say, “This is important, I want to be part of it’ I’m serious about it” – your life can never be the same again. Because what happens is in the moral sense you have a greater obligation. You will know that the masses will never join. They don’t.
They may follow once you convince them it’s in their best interest to follow along. People do respond to what is in their best interest. But for so long they have been convinced that it’s in their best interest to be militarized forever and ever because of the cold war with the Soviets. To be taken care of; to receive medical care the government has to take of you. To have a good education you have to have the Department of Education, and no child left behind. And it’s always in their best interests that they endorse these ideas. Continue reading “Ron Paul: We Don’t Need 51% For Real Change”
In his latest column Ron Paul accuses the leadership in Washington of living in a fantasy world, employing unlimited money creation, reckless warmongering and endless spending to further increase their own control. The latest example is the creation of a new, expansive, public healthcare plan which will further bankrupt the nation.
Healthcare Plan Based on Economic Fantasy
by Ron Paul
As the healthcare debate rages on, there is one reality that even the proponents of this hostile takeover of healthcare by government cannot ignore – and that is money. The government simply does not have the money for a new, expansive, public healthcare plan. The country is in a deep recession that will deepen even further with the coming collapse of the commercial real estate market. The last thing we need is for government to increase and expand taxes to pay for another damaging, wasteful program. Foreigners are becoming less enthusiastic about buying our debt, and creating another open-ended welfare program when we cannot pay for what is already in place, will not help. Champions of socialized medicine want to tax the rich, tax businesses that already cannot afford to provide health plans to employees, and tax people who don’t want to participate in the government’s scheme by buying an approved healthcare plan. Presumably, all these taxes are to induce compliance. This is not freedom, nor will it improve healthcare.
There are limits to how much government can tax before it kills the host. Even worse, when government attempts to subsidize prices, it has the net effect of inflating them instead. The economic reality is that you cannot distort natural market pressures without unintended consequences. Market forces would drive prices down. Government meddling negates these pressures, adds regulatory compliance costs and layers of bureaucracy, and in the end, drives prices up.
The non-partisan CBO estimates that the healthcare plan will cost almost a trillion dollars over the next ten years. But government crystal balls always massively underestimate costs. It is not hard to imagine the final cost being two or three times the estimates, even though the estimates are bad enough.
It is still surreal that in a free country we are talking only about HOW government should fix healthcare, rather than WHY government should fix healthcare. This should be between doctors and patients. But this has been the discussion since the 1960s and the inception of Medicare and Medicaid, when government first began intervening to keep costs down and make sure everyone had access. The result of Medicaid/Medicare price controls and regulatory burden has been to drive more doctors out of the system – making it more difficult for the poor and the elderly to receive quality care! Seemingly, there are no failed government programs, only underfunded ones. If we refuse to acknowledge common sense economics, the prescription will always be the same: more government.
Make no mistake, government control and micromanagement of healthcare will hurt, not help healthcare in this country. However, if for a moment, we allowed the assumption that it really would accomplish all they claim, paying for it would still plunge the country into poverty. This solves nothing. The government, like any household struggling with bills to pay, should prioritize its budget. If the administration is serious about supporting healthcare without contributing to our skyrocketing deficits, they should fulfill promises to reduce our overseas commitments and use some of those savings to take care of Americans at home instead of killing foreigners abroad.
The leadership in Washington persists in a fantasy world of unlimited money to spend on unlimited programs and wars to garner unlimited control. But there is a fast-approaching limit to our ability to borrow, steal, and print. Acknowledging this reality is not mean-spirited or cruel. On the contrary, it could be the only thing that saves us from complete and total economic meltdown.
In this speech to Congress, Ron Paul refutes Ben Bernanke’s interpretation of HR 1207, the bill to audit the Federal Reserve, and explains why only an audit will protect the public’s interest.
Date: 7/30/2009
Ron Paul: Mr. Speaker, the big guns have lined up against HR 1207, the bill to audit the Federal Reserve. What is it that they are so concerned about? What information are they hiding from the American people? The screed is: transparency is okay except for those things they don’t want to be transparent.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, argues that HR 1207, the legislation to audit the Federal Reserve, would politicize monetary policy. He claims that monetary policy must remain independent, that is; secret. He ignores history because chairmen of the Federal Reserve in the past, especially when up for reappointment, do their best to accommodate the president with politically driven low interest rates and a bubble economy.
Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns, when asked about all the inflation he brought about in 1971 before Nixon’s reelection, said that the Fed has to do what the president wants it to do, or it would lose its independence. That about tells you everything.
Not by accident Chairman Burns strongly supported Nixon’s program of wage and price controls the same year, but I guess that’s not political. Is not making secret deals with the likes of Goldman Sachs, international financial institutions, foreign governments and foreign central banks politicizing monetary policy?
Bernanke argues that the knowledge that their discussions and decisions will one day be scrutinized will compromise the freedom of the Open Market Committee to pursue sound policy. If it is sound and honest and serves no special interest, what’s the problem?
He claims that HR 1207 would give power to Congress to affect monetary policy. He dreamt this up to instill fear, an old statist trick to justify government power. HR 1207 does nothing of the sort. He suggested that the day after an FOMC meeting, Congress could send in the GAO to demand an audit of everything said and done. This is hardly the case. The FOMC function under HR 1207 would not change.
The detailed transcripts of the FOMC meetings are released every 5 years, so why would this be so different and what is it that they don’t want the American people to know? Is there something about the transcripts that need to be kept secret, or are the transcripts actually not verbatim?
Fed sycophants argue that an audit would destroy the financial markets’ faith in the Fed. They say this in the midst of the greatest financial crisis in history brought on by none other than the Federal Reserve. In fact, Chairman Bernanke stated on November 14th 2007, “A considerable amount of evidence indicates that Central Bank transparency increases the effectiveness of monetary policy and enhances economic and financial performance”.
They also argue that an audit would hurt the value of the U.S. dollar. In fact, the Fed, in less than a 100 years of its existence, has reduced the value of the 1914 dollar by 96%.
They claim HR 1207 would raise interest rates. How could it? The Fed sets interest rates and the bill doesn’t interfere with monetary policy. Congress would have no say in the matter and besides, Congress likes low interest rates.
It is argued that the Fed wouldn’t be free to raise interest rates if they thought it necessary. But Bernanke has already assured the Congress that rates are going to stay low for the foreseeable future. And again, this bill does nothing to allow Congress to interfere with interest rate setting.
Fed supporters claim that they want to protect the public’s interest with their secrecy. But the banks and Wall Streets are the opponents of HR 1207, and the people are for it. Just who best represents the public’s interest?
The real question is: why are Wall Street and the Fed so hysterically opposed to HR 1207? Just what information are they so anxious to keep secret? Only an audit of the Federal Reserve will answer these questions.
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Ronald Reagan and Ron Paul
Ronald Reagan: "Ron Paul is one of the outstanding leaders fighting for a stronger national defense. As a former Air Force officer, he knows well the needs of our armed forces, and he always puts them first. We need to keep him fighting for our country."
Ron Paul in the Air Force
Ron Paul is a proud Air Force veteran. He served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force from 1963 to 1965 and then in the U.S. Air National Guard from 1965 to 1968. During his military service Ron Paul spent time on the ground in Iran, Pakistan, South Korea, Turkey, Ethiopia and other countries.
Ron Paul has been married to his wife Carol Wells since 1957. They have five children: Ronald, Lori, Rand, Robert, and Joy. Paul's son Rand is the junior senator from the state of Kentucky.
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