https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2020/01/rand-paul-explains-to-john-stossel.html
In conjunction with the release of Rand Paul’s new book, The Case Against Socialism, John Stossel interviewed Rand.
Rand’s book is excellent. I reviewed it here.
Posts Tagged ‘Rand Paul’
David Stockman on What an Audit of the Federal Reserve Could Reveal
Posted by M. C. on January 4, 2020
The point is, inflation targeting is one of the greatest efforts at misdirection that a government agency has ever concocted. This gives them a license to constantly intervene and meddle in the financial markets—pointlessly fiddling with the whole price structure of debt and equity assets.
There’s about $1.5 trillion of excess reserves in the banking system.
So, they’re paying out to the banks upwards of $23 billion a year in order to keep excess funds on deposit at the Fed, rather than putting it to work in the macroeconomy.
How stupid is that?
International Man: Trump is calling for a weaker dollar and negative interest rates. What does this tell you about Trump’s understanding of economics?
David Stockman: It tells you that he has no understanding of economics at all!
I think Trump is not even a primitive when it comes to economic comprehension. His views are just plain stupid when it comes to exchange rates. He seems to think it’s some grand game of global golf, where the strongest player gets the lowest score.
What sense does it make tweeting as he did recently in attacking the Fed?
According to Trump, the US economy is so much better than the rest of the world’s economies, and therefore we should have the lowest interest rate as a result. It has nothing to do with economic logic or with principles related to sound money. I think he’s just thrashing about trying to create a warning that if things go badly, it’s the Fed’s fault.
The whole narrative on the economy is wrong…
Even John Maynard Keynes himself said that you ought to try to balance the budget and even generate a surplus at the top of the cycle.
We’re right in the middle of the worst kind of economic policy in my lifetime, anyway—going back to the 1960s.
Trump is completely clueless about how we got here, how he got here, and where we’re going…
International Man: The Fed recently said it could increase its tolerance for inflation before it considers raising interest rates. It would be a major policy shift. What’s really going on here?
David Stockman: I think what’s going on is that they’re looking for another excuse to capitulate to Wall Street next time it has a hissy fit because it believes the Fed owes them another shot of stimulus and more liquidity.
Let’s address the underlying issue now. The 2% inflation target is absurd to begin with. There is no historical or theoretical evidence to suggest that inflation at 2% is better for growth and prosperity than inflation at 1.5%, 1%, or even -1%.
This is just made up, just like the money they created that’s been snatched from thin air, adopted as official policy in January 2012.
It becomes a rolling excuse for running the printing press and accommodating both the politicians in Washington, D.C., who want low interest rates so that debts are cheap to finance and the gamblers on Wall Street who want low interest rates because they result in higher asset values and cheaper costs for carry trade speculators.
The idea that we haven’t had enough inflation as it’s measured by one indicator—the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator—is kind of crazy for two reasons.
First, there’s a lot of other inflation measures that say we easily achieved 2% inflation.
The 16% trimmed-mean CPI is a very handy tool. It has the same CPI data at the product code level as that in the regular CPI, but in order to smooth out the monthly figure, it takes out the lowest and highest 16% of individual prices.
It’s probably more accurate than CPI because it removes the outliers but puts them back in as soon as they reach the center of the distribution.
The trimmed-mean CPI has averaged 2% since January 2012. During the last 12 months, it’s reached 2.34%, way over the Fed’s 2% target.
There are lots of issues here…
International Man: There are increasing calls for central banks to combat climate change. The IMF, the European Central Bank, and several others have chimed in. What does this mean, and why are central bankers suddenly so keen on this topic?
David Stockman: This is beyond stupid. What could the central banks possibly do to help the global economies adjust to climate change? Climate change may or may not be happening, and if it is, it’s due to planetary forces that central banks have absolutely no power to impact or counteract…
International Man: If Rand Paul finally gets his audit of the Federal Reserve, what do you think they’ll find?
David Stockman: What he’s going to find is just more detail on the absurdities of what they’re doing already.
I think one that you would look into is this policy called Interest on Excess Reserves (IOER). They targeted that number at 1.55% right now. There’s about $1.5 trillion of excess reserves in the banking system.
So, they’re paying out to the banks upwards of $23 billion a year in order to keep excess funds on deposit at the Fed, rather than putting it to work in the macroeconomy.
How stupid is that?…
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: audit the Fed, end the Fed, excess reserves, John Maynard Keynes, macroeconomy, negative interest, Rand Paul, weaker dollar | 1 Comment »
How Bad Are Congressional Republicans?
Posted by M. C. on December 5, 2019
Economic liberty is the utopia that they keep promising to bring us, pending the higher priority of blowing up foreign peoples, jailing political dissidents, crushing the left wing on campus, and routing the Democrats. Once all of this is done, they say, then they will get to the instituting of a free-market economic system. Of course, that day never arrives, and it is not supposed to.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/12/laurence-m-vance/how-bad-are-congressional-republicans/
The only conservative magazine that I regularly and religiously read is The New American, where I am a contributing columnist.
The New American does all Americans a great service by publishing “The Freedom Index: A Congressional Scorecard Based on the U.S. Constitution.” The Freedom Index “rates congressmen based on their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements.”
The new edition of the Freedom Index is the first for the 116th Congress, and looks at ten key measures. Scores are derived by dividing a congressman’s constitutional votes by the total number of votes cast and multiplying by 100. So, the higher the score the better.
This edition of the Freedom Index tracks congressional votes in the House on a consolidated appropriations bill, public lands, firearms background checks, Yemen, the Paris Agreement, the Equality Act, a disaster supplemental appropriations bill, indefinite military detention, the budget deal, and a short-term appropriations bill.
It tracks votes in the Senate on abortion funding, public lands, a consolidated appropriations bill, Yemen, a disaster supplemental appropriations bill, an amendment to a supplemental border appropriations bill, war authorization, the budget deal, a spending-cut amendment, and a short-term appropriations bill.
The average House score is 36 percent. The average Senate score is 28 percent. Only two representatives, Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Justin Amash (I-MI), and two senators, Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT), earned a perfect score of 100 percent.
We know that Democrats are worse than horrible. The socialist and statist policies of the Democratic Party are well known. It is the party of liberalism, socialism, progressivism, paternalism, collectivism, abortion, transgender mania, feminism, social justice, economic egalitarianism, big government, organized labor, government regulation, public education, government-mandated employee benefits, environmentalism, an ever-increasing minimum wage, anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, welfare, higher taxes on “the rich,” income-transfer programs, and wealth-redistribution schemes.
But how bad are congressional Republicans?
Really bad.
There are 197 Republicans in the House, plus Independent Justin Amash, who was a Republican until July. Two Republicans included in the Freedom Index recently resigned (Reps. Duffy of New York and Collins of Wisconsin). Three Republicans have no score on the Freedom Index because they only recently entered the House after winning special elections (Reps. Murphy and Bishop of North Carolina and Rep. Keller of Pennsylvania). This leaves 197 Republicans with a score on the Freedom Index, including Rep. Amash. The average Republican score is 54.35 percent. Forty Republican Representatives scored 30 percent or lower, including one who received a zero.
There are fifty-three Republicans in the Senate. The average Republican score is only 31.75 percent. Twenty-three Republicans senators scored 20 percent or lower, including three who received a zero. Aside from the two Republican senators who scored a perfect 100 percent, only 5 of them scored above 50 percent…
What Lew Rockwell wrote about the Republicans ten years ago is still the gospel truth:
Free-market capitalism serves no more than a symbolic purpose for the Republican Party and for conservatives. Economic liberty is the utopia that they keep promising to bring us, pending the higher priority of blowing up foreign peoples, jailing political dissidents, crushing the left wing on campus, and routing the Democrats. Once all of this is done, they say, then they will get to the instituting of a free-market economic system. Of course, that day never arrives, and it is not supposed to. Capitalism serves the Republicans the way Communism served Stalin: a symbolic distraction to keep you hoping, voting, and coughing up money.
The only limited government that Republicans seek is a government limited to control by Republicans.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Congressional Republicans, Free-market capitalism, Freedom Index, Justin Amash, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Thomas Massie | Leave a Comment »
Senate rejects Paul effort to cut spending
Posted by M. C. on October 29, 2019
The 2% solution.
This is the same government that requests a 5% increase for next year, gets 2% and calls it a budget cut.
The Senate on Monday rejected an effort by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to place an across-the-board spending cut in a domestic funding package being debated by lawmakers.
Senators voted 24-67 on the amendment from Paul, which would reduce spending by 2 percent compared to fiscal 2019 levels.
The amendment, had Paul been successful, would have been added to a spending package that includes commerce, science and justice; transportation and housing and urban development; agriculture; and interior.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, urged senators to oppose Paul’s amendment.
“His amendment will slash spending below the bipartisan budget act that we all negotiated,” Leahy said from the Senate floor ahead of the vote…
“Our commanders need funding. Our men and women in military need support. Congress needs to do its job. So later this week, the Senate is going to vote again to advance defense funding,” McConnell said on Monday…
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Mitch McConnell, Patrick Leahy, Rand Paul, spending cut | Leave a Comment »
The Senate basically just voted to arm ISIS with your tax dollars
Posted by M. C. on June 15, 2019
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-senate-basically-just-voted-to-arm-isis-with-your-tax-dollarsh
by Jack Hunter
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said on the senate floor Thursday, before a vote that would bar U.S. arm sales with three Arab states: “The facts are not contested. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain have allowed U.S. arms to be funneled to radical Islamist groups throughout the Middle East.”
Paul is right. No one really contests this.
President Trump, who supports the arms sale, agrees that these countries have supported extremists. If Hillary Clinton had been elected president, apparently she knew too. President Barack Obama knew.
Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state made clear the U.S. was backing countries that aided our enemies. As Paul observed in his floor speech Thursday, “Even Hillary Clinton admitted in an email to John Podesta: ‘We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region'” (emphasis added).
Paul also noted that in 2009 — a decade ago, because, yes, this is how long this has been going on — Hillary Clinton sent the State Department a cable that read, “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda [and] the Taliban.”
Al Qaeda. The very group that attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11 and who most Americans probably think we are still trying to fight. Also, the Taliban, the entire reason we went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 — apparently U.S. foreign policy had indirectly bolstered both?
Again, these are not secrets. These leaders knew.
Congress knows. But that didn’t stop them Thursday from voting 43-56 to proceed with these arms sales.
The only Republicans who voted to stop this were Sens. Paul, Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Jerry Moran, R-Kan. Every other Republican voted to give arms and aid to countries that have histories of coddling terrorists.
Every Democrat voted to stop arms sales, except for seven: Sens. Doug Jones, D-Ala., Angus King, I-Maine, Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Mark Warner, D-Va.
These seven Democrats apparently agree with the overwhelming majority of Republicans that allowing U.S. weapons to end up in the hands of ISIS and al Qaeda is worth whatever security benefit the United States allegedly gets from these exchanges.
The senators who support this insist it is to guard against Iranian influence in the region, which is a lazy rationale at best. “Maybe we should consider a peace plan that doesn’t include dumping more arms into a region aflame in civil unrest, civil war, and anarchy,” Paul said on the floor. “The argument goes that we must arm anyone who is not Iran. We are told that because of Iran’s threat, the U.S. must accept selling arms to anyone who opposes Iran, even bone-saw-wielding countries brazen enough to kill a dissident in a foreign consulate.”
“What would happen if we just said no?” Paul asked. “What would happen if we simply conditioned arms sales on behavior?”
Great question. In addition to arming ISIS and Saudi Arabia murdering a U.S.-based journalist last year, the American-backed Saudi war in Yemen continues to yield a civilian death toll so high we don’t exactly know what that number is…
Be seeing you
Government’s favorite sport-War
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bahrain, Qatar, Rand Paul, Saudi Arabia, U.S. arm sales | Leave a Comment »
Pentagon Spent $4.6 Million on Lobster Tail and Crab in One Month – Hit & Run : Reason.com
Posted by M. C. on March 15, 2019
Bureaucrats with lemonade stand mentalities spending your money.
Is anyone other than “Libertarian nut” Rand Paul squawking?
https://reason.com/blog/2019/03/08/pentagon-spent-46-million-on-lobster-tai
The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it’s too late. Among the more noteworthy expenditures in 2018, according to the watchdog group Open the Books, was $4.6 million for lobster tail and crab.
Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.
Or as The Office‘s Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in “The Surplus”: “Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar,” he explains. “So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they’re going to give you $9 because that’s what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand.”…
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War Is A Racket
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Crab, Lobster Tail, Pentagon, Rand Paul | 1 Comment »
Media Accuses Rand Paul of Hypocrisy for Visiting Canadian Hospital: Turns Out It’s a Private Hospital | Mises Institute
Posted by M. C. on January 16, 2019
Never let facts get in the way of a good story.
USA Today’s concern for Rand’s health is truly touching.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul recently announced he was receiving hernia surgery as a result of being blindsided in an attack from his neighbor. While a senator undergoing common surgery is of questionable newsworthiness, one may expect that the reminder that the Senator is still suffering from the 2017 incident as cause for sympathy. Instead, major media outlets decided to try to use the news as an example of hypocrisy on the part of Paul due to the fact he is receiving treatment at a Canadian hospital.
As published in USA Today: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Canadian Hospital, Hypocrisy, Rand Paul, Shouldice Hernia Hospital | Leave a Comment »
The Russia Investigation – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2018
Putin and other rival powers are watching the same strategy that bankrupted the Soviet Union: allow a debt-crippled economy, deeply hampered by crony corporatism, to destroy its currency by creating too much of it to finance foreign adventures.
“For those who long wondered why throughout the presidential campaign Trump could not bring himself to say a critical word about Russian President Vladimir Putin, we now know the answer: Trump was hoping to do business in Russia, and doing so would require the approval of Putin.” – USA Today Opinion
Make no mistake, the mainstream left and state serving-media voices are trying to gaslight an entire generation into believing any candidate that wants peace with Russia may be a foreign conspirator worthy of prison, shame, and family persecution.
Former congressman Ron Paul, as a peace presidential candidate, did not regurgitate war propaganda against Russia either. Neither did Senator Rand Paul when he ran. What, is there supposed to be a Paul hotel in Moscow or something? Yet for future generations, many in the media want to ensure no such anti-war candidate ever runs again without baked-in misgivings of treason and criminality… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Russia Investigation, Ukrainian | Leave a Comment »
Sen. Rand Paul Pushes to Halt Saudi Arms Sales Over Journalist’s Disappearance – News From Antiwar.com
Posted by M. C. on October 11, 2018
Lindsay Graham says this could be a game changer in our relationship with SA.
I guess tens of thousands of dying. diseased children in Yemen, due to SA, doesn’t count.
I don’t believe warmonger Graham for a second.
The latest fallout from the disappearance and presumptive murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi could see the Saudis losing their main source of arms. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says he intends to force a vote on blocking further US arms sales to the Saudi kingdom.
Sen. Paul announced the plan on a local radio show, saying he hopes to force a vote in the Senate by the end of the week which would force a full halt to US arms shipments if there is “any indication” the Saudis are behind killing Khashoggi.
The fate of the journalist, who has been critical of the Saudi crown prince, has been a subject of speculation over the past week, after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and was never seen again. His body has not been found, and Turkey has been pressing the Saudis on the investigation.
Saudi warcrimes in Yemen have led to previous votes on cutting Saudi arms sales. Though President Trump has previously opposed such cuts, the fate of the high-profile reporter may be shifting administration attitude on the matter.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Jamal Khashoggi, Rand Paul, Saudi Arms Sales, Yemen | Leave a Comment »
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