Good God, could this really be true?
| Ultimate 2008 Presidential Candidate Matcher
Your Result: Dennis Kucinich
The top priority of Dennis Kucinich is to end the war in Iraq. Kucinich also favors a repeal of the Patriot Act, would fund stem cell research, and create a universal healthcare program. He is liberal on social issues, and favors eliminating Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Kucinich is also concerned about global warming. |
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| Barack Obama |
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| John Edwards |
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| Hillary Clinton |
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| Rudy Guiliani |
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| Ron Paul |
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| John McCain |
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| Mitt Romney |
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According to this short quiz, I have become a dyed-in-the-wool liberal overnight. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. For one thing: socialized health care? The government fucks up everything else that it touches (and socialized health care systems in other countries across the globe are just as bad or worse than our current system…not exactly shining examples, no matter what Michael Moore might try and delude you into believing), why on earth would this be any different? Can someone please answer this for me? Seriously.
Yes, I suppose I have a somewhat liberal attitude towards the social policies o’ the moment (gay marriage — fine by me!; stem cell research — don’t really see what the problem is there; alternative fuels — are you stupid? of course we should be pursuing any and all alternatives to our current fuel source, seeing as how it’s (#1) not gonna last forever and (#2) mostly controlled by an evil, greedy cartel)…but overall I would place myself squarley in the libertarian camp and, therefore, with Ron Paul.
Ron Paul, he of the anti-war, anti-Patriot Act, anti-War-on-Drugs, and pro-complete-abolishion-of-federal-income-taxes-and-most-government-agencies agenda. This is who I align myself with. With only a few exceptions (I’m very pro-choice and he’s a bit too hard on illegal immigrants for my tastes), he is my choice for President. I realize that he’s got about as much chance of winning as Kucinich up there, but I’d rather support a candidate in whom I actually believe than take the easy road and vote for McCain or Clinton, both of whom are bad, bad, baaaaad news for our country in their own special, fucked-up ways.
Feel free to take the incredibly skewed quiz for yourself; just don’t base your political alignment on the results.
Ron Paul wants to get rid of every single federal department. If that isn’t insanity I don’t know what is. Smaller government is fine, but he wants no government at all!
I’ve done this before. I match John Edwards the most, which I find odd.
Right now, I don’t really like any of the candidates to be honest.
Ron Paul thinks anarchy is good.
I think he makes the mistake of believing everyone is as smart as him, responsible, etc.
THEY ARE NOT. If we did what he said, this society would fast become unlivable for a lot of reasons. He is as much a “dreamer” or “utopianist” as his polar opposite, a socialist who believes government can cure all things and save people from themselves.
Heh. I agree that our nation wouldn’t function very well as an anarchy, but Paul doesn’t want to dismantle every single federal department, just the ones that encourage further Nanny Stating and coddling of American citizens and the reckless, wasteful spending of our hard-earned dollars that the goverment doesn’t really have any right to in the first place:
In his own words:
“Working Americans like lower taxes. So do I. Lower taxes benefit all of us, creating jobs and allowing us to make more decisions for ourselves about our lives.
Whether a tax cut reduces a single mother’s payroll taxes by $40 a month or allows a business owner to save thousands in capital gains taxes and hire more employees, that tax cut is a good thing. Lower taxes allow more spending, saving, and investing which helps the economy — that means all of us.
Real conservatives have always supported low taxes and low spending.
But today, too many politicians and lobbyists are spending America into ruin. We are nine trillion dollars in debt as a nation. Our mounting government debt endangers the financial future of our children and grandchildren. If we don’t cut spending now, higher taxes and economic disaster will be in their future — and yours.
In addition, the Federal Reserve, our central bank, fosters runaway debt by increasing the money supply — making each dollar in your pocket worth less. The Fed is a private bank run by unelected officials who are not required to be open or accountable to “we the people.”
Worse, our economy and our very independence as a nation is increasingly in the hands of foreign governments such as China and Saudi Arabia, because their central banks also finance our runaway spending.
We cannot continue to allow private banks, wasteful agencies, lobbyists, corporations on welfare, and governments collecting foreign aid to dictate the size of our ballooning budget. We need a new method to prioritize our spending. It’s called the Constitution of the United States.”
It might be instructive to know what America spend money on?
Here it is:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/Fbs_us_fy2007.png
“Working Americans like lower taxes. So do I. Lower taxes benefit all of us, creating jobs and allowing us to make more decisions for ourselves about our lives.
This sounds great
Whether a tax cut reduces a single mother’s payroll taxes by $40 a month or allows a business owner to save thousands in capital gains taxes and hire more employees, that tax cut is a good thing. Lower taxes allow more spending, saving, and investing which helps the economy — that means all of us.
Real conservatives have always supported low taxes and low spending.
In general yes, but there is another side to this argument, that many economist make (and investors such as Warren Buffet) that our graduated tax system was also to help prevent something many of the founding father’s feared, an entrenched aristorcracy or oligarchy. Warren Buffet is currently lobbying congress right now to prevent a repeal of the “death tax”. The truth is that the average person will spend the extra $40, and the poorer the person the less disposable income they have so the most likely they are to spend. However, on the other side of that, most very wealthy people pay less actual tax than some people making $50K a year. I got a study on that if you want to read it and Warren Buffet is saying the same thing. In his testimony he said he pays a lower rate than his “executive assistant” and he has said most of that money is not “trickling down” the Regan way (the guy who cut taxes to such a low rate in the 1980’s) but it is going into tax shelters, overseas, etc. This is part of the reason we have had an ever increasing income inequality rate since the 1980’s. Alan Greenspan (as I stated on my own site) sees this as very bad for America. What you are looking at is a society slowly becoming more like Latin America. Smaller middle class, large amount of poor, and a tighly held elite of wealthy who have been that way due to generational wealth for centries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29tax.html?pagewanted=print
query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9505EFD9113AF933A15753C1A9649C8B63
very long article
But today, too many politicians and lobbyists are spending America into ruin. We are nine trillion dollars in debt as a nation. Our mounting government debt endangers the financial future of our children and grandchildren. If we don’t cut spending now, higher taxes and economic disaster will be in their future — and yours.
I agree with him and believe lobbyist should be made illegal. Good luck with that though. 9 trillion dollars in debt is very very complicated. It is not what most people think it is, as most people don’t seeem to know that government spending is not the only thing that increases or decreases the debt. A lot of it has to do with exchange rates, interest rates, etc.
In addition, the Federal Reserve, our central bank, fosters runaway debt by increasing the money supply — making each dollar in your pocket worth less. The Fed is a private bank run by unelected officials who are not required to be open or accountable to “we the people.”
Worse, our economy and our very independence as a nation is increasingly in the hands of foreign governments such as China and Saudi Arabia, because their central banks also finance our runaway spending.
We cannot continue to allow private banks, wasteful agencies, lobbyists, corporations on welfare, and governments collecting foreign aid to dictate the size of our ballooning budget. We need a new method to prioritize our spending. It’s called the Constitution of the United States.”
The Federal Reserve should be partially idependent. Do you really want something like interest rates and monitary policy up for “vote”? Think about that real caefully and realize that politicians (Congressmen, etc) are more concenred with the next election cycle than the long term good, tehrefore they are quite subject to popular preasure of their constituency (more than the Senate that has 6 year terms). Do you really want a body like Congress or a popular direct vote determining something? Most people are not trained economist and often think counterintuitive to what is really going on or what needs to be done, many economic measures have results over a period of months or years, not days or weeks, so the public response to something like recession might not be what needs to be done to releave it. For example, most people give the president credit for a good economy or blame them for a bad economy when reality is the president (besides spending from a budgets which have to be approved by congress) has little control over the actual economy and the Fed Chair has far more power. I would not be comfortable letting Johnny 6 Pack popularlly electing or determine these type of policies directly.
“Government spending can cause inflation and some economist do believe (and they have models) that deficits help to control future spending…no deficits will cause inflation…too much inflation (demand pull) this will slow down the economy even more (remember the economy was slowing at the time) which will in turn require a lowering of interest rates…which will cause people to disinvest in dollar debt and the value of the dollar drops internationally which (because we import more than we export) will increase the trade gap and put pressure on companies weakening profits at best causing lay offs and bankruptcies at worst…you get the picture.
This is all a delicate balancing act in the short term (although the market will correct in the long term)…”
The above was part of an arguement I was having with some guy over taxation a few months ago…it got complex.
Do you think Johnny Six Pack will understand the nuance? I’m sure that a lot of politicians don’t either. Hell I barely do.
The problem is not what Pau says, but the fact that he makes these vague statements and does not qualify them. He doesn’t because he knows that most people don’t even understand how much of this stuff works and have no intention of running it, but his populist recteric ressonates with this idea of “you are oppressed by the elite masses” blah blah…true or not the issues are for more complex.
I have other serious issues with him on some of his social policies but that is another issue. Repealing the Civil Rights Admendment of 1965 is a crock of bull$#1t..but another issue.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what Ron Paul thinks, he will not get the nomination and he is retiring from his current office.
I should say I do like some of Paul’s positions:
“Ron Paul, he of the anti-war, anti-Patriot Act, anti-War-on-Drugs”
I should say I agree with all his positions on this.
This is what hurts me about him. He’s cool on a lot of things and then he goes off the deep end into lala land.
That’s all.
Hee. “Lala land.” It’s funny you should say that, because I do feel the same way about him on several key issues, namely abortion rights.
I don’t understand how someone like Paul, who’s all for people’s privacy and personal liberties and less government interference, can veer so far off onto the right-hand side of the road into pro-life territory. Pro-life is almost the complete antithesis of the three principles I just described, yet he stands by those principles in every other situation.
I think that his pro-life attitude is just a vestige of the overly patriarchal, Puritanical attitude that older, WASP males have a very hard time ridding themselves of, no matter what their political leanings in any other category. It’s a shame.
I took this a few weeks ago and got Kucinich too, which just astounded me. I watched him on the debates, and all I could think about was how tiny he is. I believe he’s too reactionary, but I’m still not sure who I’m voting for. They all make me throw up a little. I’d love to see someone who seemed sincere, and not spewing answers that were generated by a spin committee.