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Rand’s Reforms: The Ricochet Survey
Here’s a protip for the approaching presidential campaign season: when the candidates take to the stump, always read the transcript rather than watching the speech. I adopted this technique during the 2008 presidential campaign, when it simply became too arduous to sit through 75 minutes of mass hysteria (and at least one audience member fainting) to get through 15 minutes worth of Barack Obama’s cotton candy remarks.
The transcripts are clarifying. You’re not distracted by the delivery or the audience dynamics. You’re essentially alone with the candidate and his thoughts. And, nine times out of ten, you’re going to be disappointed — because the vast majority of these guys don’t have much to say.
Now, I don’t especially blame them for this. Running for the presidency in the modern era often dictates hiding the ball (the 2008 Obama campaign is a textbook example of this). But it does make mining the transcripts an interesting exercise. You’ll often discover that dozens of paragraphs worth of rhetoric only yield two or three concrete proposals.
There was a little more meat than that to the speech Rand Paul gave in Louisville earlier today kicking off his presidential campaign—although not much. The speech was clearly focused a lot more on constructing Paul’s personal narrative than delivering a coherent policy manifesto. That said, there were several specific proposals embedded in the remarks. For your edification, I’ve included them below. Let us know what you think in the comments.
Balanced Budget Amendment
Congress will never balance the budget unless you force them to do so. Congress has an abysmal record with balancing anything. Our only recourse is to force Congress to balance the budget with a constitutional amendment.
Term Limits
I have been to Washington, and let me tell you, there is no monopoly on knowledge there.
I ran for office because we have too many career politicians. I believe it now more than ever.
We limit the President to two terms. It’s about time we limit the terms of Congress!
Reading Legislation
I want to reform Washington. I want common sense rules that will break the logjam in Congress.
That’s why I introduced a Read the Bills Act.
The bills are thousands of pages long. And no one reads them. They are often plopped on our desks only a few hours before a vote.
I’ve proposed something truly extraordinary — Let’s read the bills, every page!
The bills are 1,000 pages long and no one reads them. They are often plopped on our desk with only a few hours before a vote, so I propose something truly extraordinary. Let’s read the bills every day.
Economic Freedom Zones
Politically connected crones get taxpayer dollars by the hundreds of millions and poor families across America continue to suffer. I have a different vision, an ambitious vision, an ambitious vision, a vision that will offer opportunity to all Americans, especially those who have been left behind.
My plan includes economic freedom zones to allow impoverished areas like Detroit, West Louisville, Eastern Kentucky to prosper by leaving more money in the pockets of the people who live there.
Repatriation Tax and Infrastructure
I want to see millions of Americans back at work. In my vision for America, we’ll bring back manufacturing jobs that pay well. How? We’ll dramatically lower the tax on American companies that wish to bring their profits home.
More than $2 trillion in American profit currently sits overseas. In my vision for America, new highways and bridges will be built across the country, not by raising your taxes, but by lowering the tax to bring this American profit home.
School Choice (This is not a selective excerpt — this is all Senator Paul said on the matter)
Those of us who have enjoyed the American dream must break down the wall that separates us from the other America. I want all our children to have the same opportunities that I had. We need to stop limiting kids in poor neighborhoods to failing public schools and offer them school choice.
Iran Negotiations
We’ve brought Iran to the table through sanctions that I voted for. Now we must stay strong. That’s why I’ve cosponsored legislation that ensures that any deal between the U.S. and Iran must be approved by Congress.
Not — not only is that good policy, it’s the law.
It concerns me that the Iranians have a different interpretation of the agreement. They’re putting out statement that say completely the opposite of what we’re saying. It concerns me that we may attempt, or the president may attempt, to unilaterally and prematurely halt sanctions.
I will oppose any deal that does not end Iran’s nuclear ambitions and have strong verification measures.
And I will insist that the final version be brought before Congress.
Foreign Aid
It angers me to see mobs burning our flag and chanting “Death to America” in countries that receive millions of dollars in our foreign aid.
I say it must end. I say not one penny more to these haters of America.
Domestic Surveillance
To defend our country, we do need to gather intelligence on the enemy. But when the intelligence director is not punished for lying under oath, how are we to trust our government agencies?
Warrantless searches of Americans’ phones and computer records are un-American and a threat to our civil liberties.
I say that your phone records are yours. I say the phone records of law-abiding citizens are none of their damn business.
Is this where we light up the phones?
The president created this vast dragnet by executive order. And as president on day one, I will immediately end this unconstitutional surveillance.
In addition, Paul also closed the speech with passing references to envisioning “an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed” and “an America with a restrained IRS that cannot target, cannot harass American citizens for their political or religious beliefs.”
How about it, Ricochet? What do you think? Quibbles? Critiques? Suggestions? Unbridled adulation?
Published in Politics
I agree that they are harder to read. On the other hand, there are some bills that are simply too minor to be passed in any other way, particularly spending cuts, and there are many omnibus bills that are overwhelmingly worthwhile. Taking the dot com boom and such as a given and just looking at the public sector side of things, the balanced budgets of the 1990s were chiefly brought about by the 1990 OBRA, which cut spending over a ten year window. It is not a pretty or clear piece of legislation, it is very long, and it has all sorts of things good government advocates loathe (mountains of earmarks, lots of punting of issues, etc.). Still, we really needed to cut spending, it was probably the only way to achieve that, and causing a few headaches to people like Sisyphus who have to implement the law seems like a reasonable cost.
Obviously, when the law is bad in its aims, it being bad in its delivery adds insult to injury, and I’m completely on board with claims that we should do more to improve the delivery, but our status quo is not okay, so I wouldn’t support reforms that removed the possibility of passing omnibus bills.
Passing the Ryan Plan, for instance, would take that, as would any other plausible path to fiscal improvement. The cost of getting by on current law would be very high.
For what it’s worth, Lexis and Westlaw are pretty solid for that stuff. Lawyers who pay subscriptions don’t have to sweat quite as much as laypeople who don’t when it comes to researching statutes and amendments.
Not to sound too much like a progressive, but I’d also support more government spending to buy some of the legal databases so that the public could have access to the law that governs them (I think that would be cheaper and less error filled than typing it up themselves).
More charitable spending would be even better, but there should be some kind of change, as the current system locks out the citizenry in a pretty regrettable manner.
There are a lot of Democrats who have had careers outside Congress as well as a lot who haven’t. Those who did, including those who worked as doctors and in finance, don’t seem to have displayed any better judgment on those votes than those who lacked real world experience. Likewise, there are a lot of Republicans who worked only in political careers, and their judgment on those issues was as sound as their more informed brethren.
I’m not saying that experience doesn’t help, just that it’s not quite as helpful as this made it sound.
Nicely put.
Not responsive to Sisyphus, but somehow I failed to spot the hilarity of “well connected cronies get rich off the government; to combat this, we should have a massive new system of targeted subsidies that will make people investing in those areas much richer at the expense of other, presumably less connected people.” Now that I’ve noticed that, I think it’s the funniest part of the speech.
JoE/ Sisyphus/ Paul agreement all round, really.
I think that supporting this sort of stuff through the DofEd is a great way to build bipartisan support for ending the DofEd. I imagine Paul’s mechanism would be the Romney approach of cutting other mandates and replacing them with pro-school choice mandates. This seems positive to me, although I respect other positions.
Man, I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I’m agreeing with you, including on quite controversial points. In five years, you and I have found ourselves on the same side of arguments, but this is the first time I recall agreeing with so much of your detailed analysis.
This is only a two way agreement. Paul will hopefully grow in office, though, and see the wisdom of the Sisyphean struggle for peace. With time we’ve worn down that boulder so it’s a little lighter to push, but we need to maintain the struggle if we’re going to avoid the catastrophe of a permanently bottom of the hill scenario (Manhattan nuked?).
Ack, not total agreement, but still, pretty good!
If he was just euphemizing because “legalize it!” would have seemed sophomoric, does that help?
I didn’t comment on this above, but I do approve of this language.
I also think we could do worse than Paul, and also prefer Walker and Perry. I’m not sure where I stand on Paul v. Bush.
Still, thank you for getting to experience the joy of riding with you on an extended comment! Hopefully I’ll improve my level of insight and agree with you more often in the future, because that was definitely fun.
When I began an extended response on an older post I assumed that Troy would cheerfully enjoy and collate the data and the assembled Ricos would sensibly roll their eyes and say to themselves: “There he goes with his rock again!” and move on.
Imagine my shock and surprise, nay, trepidation, at discovering a blow by blow response.
Back in the days when my “Ricochet” was my BBS, a friend defended me to a disgruntled correspondent explaining: “He replies chiefly and at longer length to what he disagrees with, the trick is to wrap yourself in the warmth of all the posts and comments he never called you on because he agreed.” Okay, it’s a paraphrase I admit but the sense is there.
We are both experienced and engaged enough where we could probably find an argument in the details of any policy proposition. If the national debate were between your positions and my positions, I think the country would be far better off.