Rand Paul - Defense Spending Bill

surf said:
i'm (probably) done with this. if he doesn't become more like his father, i'm going back to my libertarian roots.

it's only the wife that's keeping me from dumping my party position right now. I battled for Ron for 5 years. have lost that desire.
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Be patient. Rand is playing chess with every other politician right now.
 
surf said:
i'm (probably) done with this. if he doesn't become more like his father, i'm going back to my libertarian roots.

it's only the wife that's keeping me from dumping my party position right now. I battled for Ron for 5 years. have lost that desire.
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What he needs right now is exactly what we gave his father, and in spades. A huge ideological push of both support and education. The more people we reach for liberty, the less Rand has to bend.

The more libertarians who give up and go back to their holes, the more he will have to bend to get anything done.
 
I think it's hilarious how people just knee jerk react to everything, I thought people here were supposed to be smarter than average joe but it just goes to show that it's the same everywhere.
 
All of Rand's budget proposals that I have seen have called for increases in military spending. I think we should give Rand the benefit of doubt that his positions are what he says they are. Rand wants to increase military spending and pay for it with cuts to welfare programs and Cruz and Rubio want to increase military spending and pay for it with more debt, it is that easy I think.
 
Reminds me of when Ron introduced a bill declaring war on Iraq, even though he voted against it. It made House Republicans look really stupid.
 
jmdrake said:
*Sigh*

The republican gambit is always to say they're going to increase defense spending and offset it by crippling cuts in the welfare state.

The democratic gambit is always to say they're going to increase welfare spending and offset it by crippling cuts in the warfare state.
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Exactly what I as thinking. Rand Paul should be offering to CUT military spending in exchange for cuts in social spending. He's lost me as a supporter. I believe in a strong defense but we're WAY past that. Plus the fact that our greatest threat is our debt not foreign enemies.
 
P3ter_Griffin said:
All of Rand's budget proposals that I have seen have called for increases in military spending. I think we should give Rand the benefit of doubt that his positions are what he says they are. Rand wants to increase military spending and pay for it with cuts to welfare programs and Cruz and Rubio want to increase military spending and pay for it with more debt, it is that easy I think.
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We've got over 18 trillion in debt. We're still borrowing a trillion a year and that's going to go WAY up if we go back in recession or interest rates rise or both. We need massive spending cuts, we can't keep our spending flat. Our spending is by far the biggest threat to our freedom.
 
Madison320 said:
Exactly what I as thinking. Rand Paul should be offering to CUT military spending in exchange for cuts in social spending. He's lost me as a supporter. I believe in a strong defense but we're WAY past that. Plus the fact that our greatest threat is our debt not foreign enemies.
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How would that expose the neocons as big government deficit spenders who don't want to cut anything? Which is what he did.

Good God, he just put the lie to the claim made by hundreds of Congressional RINOs that they're somehow the least bit conservative by bribing them by offering Christmas for the Pentagon in exchange for dumping the Department of Education and watching them refuse on the public record! Given that if what he offered was rejected, your offer would go down in flames twice as fast, how would your 'plan' be an improvement over that?!

If you can't understand what he did, even after it was explained a couple of dozen times in three threads, and you don't have a better plan, why should we listen to you bitch about this?
 
acptulsa said:
You act like it was his idea. It wasn't.

This was an alternative to a spending bill someone else introduced. I think it was an amendment to an existing Christmas for the Pentagon bill. He said, here's a different way to give the Military Industrial Complex a fat present. End these four things, a couple of which are whole bureaucracies, and give their budgets to the military. That way your pets get more but we don't have to raise the spending cap again.

That's why he offered them even more. He was lampooning these bastards. If you check, I feel sure you'll find that dollar amount is exactly the budgets of those four things he named. And since he probably didn't know how much Christmas these characters had in mind for the arms merchants in advance, he had to prepare and go with that number.
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I see no evidence of him "lampooning" anyone. More than anything that seems like a blind hope the Randians here have base don little to no evidence whatsoever. Even if he were it is stupid because he is still funding the war machine. You don't make fun of a murderer by handing him a loaded gun. You get killed that way. If his proposal were adopted he would still be handing Obombya a bigger, badder, shinier military to slaughter innocents with. So if it is joke it is a terrible one.

And as for him proposing this alternate, I should feel better because he doesn't want to raise spending caps? Why? If anything this is a naked neocon agenda-forget even the pretense of the welfare state and lets just blow everyone up! He could have easily done better. That he didn't, that his solution is funding the death machine, well that is telling all on its own. And the story it is telling is not a good one.
 
idiom said:
What he needs right now is exactly what we gave his father, and in spades. A huge ideological push of both support and education. The more people we reach for liberty, the less Rand has to bend.

The more libertarians who give up and go back to their holes, the more he will have to bend to get anything done.
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If you have to give up liberty ideals to get Rand over then he is not worthy of supporting since his ideas are in opposition to the ideas of liberty.
 
PierzStyx said:
I see no evidence of him "lampooning" anyone.
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The reason he introduced the amendment was purely messaging. It isn't even a debatable point.

He knew it had no chance of passing. It was to get Rubio and Cruz on the record. He was one of only two Republicans to vote against the budget. If you don't believe me, here is a former high level person on his staff, who is very familiar with how Rand thinks about these things, explaining it. https://twitter.com/BrianHDarling/status/581598765578121216
 
P3ter_Griffin said:
All of Rand's budget proposals that I have seen have called for increases in military spending. I think we should give Rand the benefit of doubt that his positions are what he says they are. Rand wants to increase military spending and pay for it with cuts to welfare programs and Cruz and Rubio want to increase military spending and pay for it with more debt, it is that easy I think.
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I don't mind Rand casting a non-deciding vote to increase military spending for a few years if it means helping the possibility of getting Rand in the white house and also helping the possibility of getting a total audit of the Pentagon which could save hundreds of billions later.
 
PierzStyx said:
If you have to give up liberty ideals to get Rand over then he is not worthy of supporting since his ideas are in opposition to the ideas of liberty.
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Rand's amendment made the government smaller.

Last time I checked, that was the Liberty ideal.
 
I cannot understand how people here defended Ron's pork barrel spending, AUMF, DOMA, etc but are so outraged and offended by what Rand is doing. He knew his amendment would not pass. Anybody with a brain knew it would not pass. Just look at the vote. He made other Republicans admit that they are deficit spenders no matter what.

I don't think Freud theorized this but I have a theory that some people subconsciously wish so badly Ron were their father that they seek every chance to find a fault with Rand. Ever since Rand started his 2010 campaign people have been holding him to a higher standard than his father. They don't even care about voting records. They care more about showing how liberty they are through talk rather than results.
 
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