Glenn Beck interviews Ron Paul on economics

D-Dogg · January 23rd, 2008, 01:03 PM

Fantastic read. I'm sorry, but none of the other candidates understand the economy like this guy. If nothing else, at least his message is getting heard. Paul was on CNN, Fox and MSNBC today, as well as this interview on Glenn Beck's radio show:

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/art...icle/196/4897/

There is a ton more in there that I am not pasting...

Tax rebate

Quote:

GLENN: Okay. So now, you mentioned tax cuts. Congress, both sides of the aisle are talking now about $800 tax rebates to the poorest people in America. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a job created by a guy who's at the bottom of the ladder. This seems just like a plan to get people to spend which to me is what got us here in the first place.

PAUL: Yeah, you are right. And all you do is you encourage consumption and we're overdoing consumption right now. It's not a tax rebate if you send somebody a check for $800 for not paying taxes. That's a welfare check.

GLENN: Thank you.

PAUL: And that money really doesn't go to producing jobs. What you have to do is restore the savings and encourage capital investment. You have to eliminate taxes on capital gains and we have to do whatever we can, get rid of the taxes, the death tax and eliminate taxes on dividends and savings. All these things would encourage savings and then have a market rate for interest rates to give us the signal on whether we should be investing or saving or spending. But that doesn't exist anymore and that's why we have these perpetual bubbles. I think this bubble right now that has been kept together for quite a few years is a major problem and the unwinding of this problem is very critical. The biggest bubble's in the dollar bubble and now the dollar is coming under attack. And what are they proposing? Excessive spending, you know, deficit spending which, where are they going to get the money? They don't have any money in Washington. They either have to borrow from China or print it, which means there's more inflation. Or the Federal Reserve comes in and said, like yesterday, drastically lowering interest rates? How do they lower interest rates? They print a lot more money. Yesterday when they announced that, the dollar immediately reversed itself and sharply went down and it's the weakening of the dollar that is the crisis that we face because everybody suffers from that. You and I suffer because all of a sudden the dollar in that wallet buys 80 cents worth of goods instead of a dollar's worth. So we all get poor and we have to stop that cycle.

GLENN: Nobody understands that, well, they say let me give $800 to the poorest, they are really not doing that much because the dollar is worth so little. The poorest are being hit by inflation harder than anybody else.

PAUL: That is exactly right. The do-good liberal who said we have to take care of everybody -- and they are well intentioned. The more debt they run up to give to the poor, the poorer the people get because they cannot keep up. Take, for instance, even Social Security recipients. Their inflation rate might be 10 or 12% and we give them a cost of living increase of 2%. So they're losing. And you just can't keep that cycle going. You have to balance the budget, you have to live within our means and then we have to restore confidence to the dollar. So it's a major, major undertaking. But we have to reverse it.

I think the most immediate thing is to cut back on spending, not increase spending, and get the money back into the hands of the market of savers and investors and people who are spending. But government economic planning does not work and that's what we're coming to the realization.

GLENN: Well, when you say government economic planning, the Fed is not the government and the Fed just made the largest cut that they have made since 1984. It is the first emergency cut since right after September 11th. There's talk now that they may cut another quarter, which is insanity. There's just no more that you can cut unless you destroy the dollar. What are your thoughts on the Fed?

PAUL: Well, they are the culprit. They caused it. They caused it by keeping interest rates artificially low. How are they trying to solve the problem? Keeping interest rates low. For an hour or to the markets rebounded because they're conditioned to listen to that and they figure, oh, the market's going to go up because interest rates are coming down but today I predict the market's going to go down again because that was only temporary. You cannot change the long-term trend of the market. You can temporarily tinker with it. You can artificially make them go up. But eventually the market is more powerful than the Fed and the government and the rejection of the dollar is the crisis that we face and we face that because we create too much money and we do that because we spend too much, both overseas and domestically and we have to deal with this. We have to live within our means. If we could just freeze all spending domestically and I know we disagree on the overseas expenditures but why do we pay for the defense of Europe and Japan and Korea? We could save hundreds of billions of dollars. So this is my argument and it's well received. Yeah, why do we pay for defense of Europe?

gold standard:

Quote:

PAUL: You know, I guess there's a lot of evidence for that. It's awfully tempting. I always try to say, well, they are doing it out of ignorance and lack of understanding of how the market economy works rather than saying, oh, I'd like to bring on a Depression. I think they actually believe that they are good managers. Alan Greenspan once told me -- because he used to be a gold standard person and he's written very well about that in his early years. But he says, no, he says, we central bankers have learned to make paper money act as if it's gold. You know, they come to believe in themselves that there is good and they can manage as well as the market, and I told him after that, I said, you know, if you do that, this will be the first time in all of history that anybody could do that, you know, to make paper money act like gold money.

You know, you should never be embarrassed about the gold standard because one of our most favorite Presidents, Ronald Reagan, told me personally once, he says, you know, he says, I'm interested in gold because, he says, if you study history, you find out any great nation that has gotten off the gold standard will no longer remain great. And we just got off the gold standard totally in 1971 and if you look at the statistics, in '71 when it comes to spending and deficits and inflation and the value of the dollar, I mean, they're dramatic. And I just want to make sure we wake up before the dollar totally collapses because that is a real tragedy if we let that happen.

GLENN: How come Ronald Reagan didn't put us on the gold standard? I mean, if anybody had the clout to do it, how come he didn't do it? And if you were President, how would you propose we would do that?

PAUL: Well, it's not easy but what I would do is not want to close down the Federal Reserve because that is dramatic and it wouldn't happen. It would be chaotic, too. All I want to do is legalize the Constitution, let you and me use gold if we want, which means you have to remove sales taxes and capital gains tax off gold and let it circulate just like currency circulated around the world. So if you want to save for your kids' education, you can put them in gold bonds and if the dollar, if you've got, the dollar's going down more rapidly than the price of education goes up, you could save in gold. You could get paid in gold and if we --

GLENN: Hang on.

PAUL: Then paper will not be used anymore.

GLENN: Wait a minute. But what you're proposing, you're this close to being arrested if you -- I mean, if you went and actually did that, they already have. The liberty dollar guys. They have tried to arrest the guy and say, you are trying to compete with the currency of the United States of America. What you're talking about now, you can be arrested for.

PAUL: Yeah. So the Constitution is being violated by law and it's supposed to be the other way around. And this is why I used to term this legalize the Constitution, this legalize gold and silver which is in the Constitution. So you would have to change the tax code. You'd have to persuade the congress to do this, but it would be less chaotic. This is exactly what I proposed in the early 1980s when I was on the gold commission, competing currencies. Economists think you can have competing currencies easier today than in the past because the world's always have competing currencies. Just allow gold and silver to do the same thing.

"Change"

Quote:

GLENN: When you were on my program on television, you said something that I didn't correct because I didn't -- I mean, it sounded so outlandish but I let it go because I didn't have the facts and you sounded so convinced of it that I thought, hmmm, I've got to check into that and I'll correct it the next time he's on or I'll correct it the next day. What you said was, if we got rid of the income tax, the Government would still take about the same amount of money in as they had ten years ago.

PAUL: Approximately.

GLENN: We looked into it and it's accurate. Can you explain that and how do we get that message out to people?

PAUL: Well, it's just that the growth of spending is so rapid that people don't realize that freezing budgets would be a tremendous benefit and that's one of my proposals in my economic reforms is just, freeze nondefense and nonentitlement spending which would go a long way to coming to the balance. I think $1 trillion less 10 years ago, I think government was adequate size 10 years ago. But we have this notion that everything that is to have perpetual growth. Just think of our friends in the Republican party that used to run against the Department of Education. What did we do when we finally got in charge? We doubled the size of the Department of Education. We create new departments. We never slow up. Do we do anything to unwind the dependency of the farmers on centralized planning for farmers which pushes cost of food up? You know, it just doesn't make any sense. The people demand change, or they did in '94 and the year 2000, no wonder they're aggravated with us.

GLENN: Wait, wait.

PAUL: We need to at least freeze things without cutting anything.

And I just really liked this portion:

Quote:

GLENN: Yes, I would. Yes, I would. You know what, I'm very offended by some of your supporters because they always say that, you know, I won't listen to you or I won't have you. I'm probably the guy on talk radio, mainstream talk radio that will at least say I agree with you on a lot of things. I just disagree with you vehemently on others.

PAUL: And I appreciate that.

GLENN: I mean, you know, we just -- I just happen to disagree with you, but I respect you, sir, for your opinion. I have said this, you know, behind your back. So let me say it to your face. I think you are the closest we have running to a founding father. You seem to be the only guy who has actually read the federalist papers. So I appreciate your efforts, sir.

That's some good stuff right there.

abomb · January 23rd, 2008, 01:16 PM

That is a great read.

It is pretty crazy to think that a person could benefit more financially by having a huge second-mortgage and no equity in a house, than trading stocks and building wealth.

Pariah · January 23rd, 2008, 02:08 PM

I certainly think the economic scare tis week is going to put paul in more of a spotlight then he's been in so far....at least, he should be.

After I finish his foreiogn policy book, I'm startig on his book (essay/thesis length) about Austrian Economics.

D-Dogg · January 23rd, 2008, 02:47 PM

MP3 of the interview:

http://www.giveproductions.com/RonPa...eck1-23-08.mp3

arthurracoon · January 23rd, 2008, 02:58 PM

I hope Paul gets a good chunk of time to talk about economics tommorow night in the debate

carrrnuttt · January 23rd, 2008, 05:28 PM

He needs to teach an Econ class to the rest of the candidates.

Like I said before, even if this man does not get chosen as a candidate, he's getting written into my ballot.

D-Dogg · January 23rd, 2008, 06:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by carrrnuttt

He needs to teach an Econ class to the rest of the candidates.

Like I said before, even if this man does not get chosen as a candidate, he's getting written into my ballot.

Quote:

At a recent meeting with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Republican presidential candidate John McCain admitted he “doesn’t really understand economics” and then pointed to his adviser and former Senate colleague, Phil Gramm - whom he had brought with him to the meeting - as the expert he turns to on the subject, The Huffington Post has learned.

http://www.digg.com/2008_us_election...tand_economics