Ron Paul: Man of Integrity

I agree.

It still doesn't change your false equivalency of "I would rather my tax dollars save a life here, than take a life in the middle east." The war is funded by debt. We have more than $10 trillion of debt on top of the debt we accumulated in Iraq. People get desensitized to those numbers. $10 trillion is a lot to have spent without being able to pay for it, and none of it has anything to do with Iraq.

As I said, your tax dollars are not paying for the Iraq war. And your tax dollars wouldn't pay for universal health care, because we aren't paying for everything we already spend on--led by the entitlement programs (SS, Medicare, Medicaid), which are accelerating our debt load at a growing pace. What you just said you'd rather, is another entitlement program that would be a growing debt load, as well.

The reality is, add on what you want, and we are adding more debt, not reapportioning your tax dollars, even if you subtract our war spending. So it was a false choice.

 

That has nothing to do with what you said. You are shape-shifting all over the place. Your tax dollars, combined will all the other tax revenues collected are putting us into more than a trillion dollars more of debt each year, at the pace we are going. That is all I said. And it was in response to your statement about where you want your tax dollars spent. At the CURRENT level of taxation, your taxes are not covering the set of choices you laid out.

If you want to make that credit card analogy, it is a separate discussion--and it deals with the debt we have already accumulated and how much more ability we have to put ourselves further into debt and keep rolling it over. While I like those analogies, it is only somewhat correct -- the U.S. is on the hook for it's debt, just like a consumer in debt, so it is similar in that regard.

But as a sovereign nation with the highest GDP in the world, the U.S. isn't close to being maxed out on its credit cards, as you put. We have the ability to keep issuing more bonds (i.e. -- just keep taking out more credit cards to accumulate more debt) that you as a consumer don't have. And we can roll over our current level of debt infinitely without the accumulated interest drowning us, the way it would a consumer.

Our debt is at $14.3 trillion. The rest of the world sees us as credit worthy enough to accumulate a lot more debt than that before they will stop buying our bonds, as evidenced by sales of our treasuries at low interest rates (as a consumer, when you get in debt trouble, your credit card companies will increase your interest rates to reflect the risk), and even the credit rating agencies, which rate us as investment grade.

If you max out your credit cards at your income, do you think lenders will increase your spending limits or give you more credit cards to the point where you can double or triple or quadruple your debt and just keep on spending? The U.S. can keep borrowing for a long time before people stop trusting our ability to repay, and as a result stop buying our bonds.