I was watching parts of the Republican and Democratic debates last night, and found it quite interesting at one point. At one point, the question was, "If we can afford a trillion dollar war, why can't we provide healthcare...?" After going around the candidates hearing their points about healthcare and why it costs so much, etc. McCain made a point about healthcare inflation being about 10%. Ron Paul took up that point and explained how our monetary policy is creating the inflation in the economy. He tried to explain how the printing of more and more money by the Fed is debasing the value of the dollar, which then leads to price inflation for the assets we own, the food we eat, and the services we purchase. He stated that we need to "stop printing money..." which was laughed at by the other Republicans, especially Fred Thompson. Although it was probably missed by many watching, his comments, which were intended to make Ron Paul look bad, showed that he really didn't understand the concept. There was an amusing side-exchange between the two where Thompson said something like "let me get this straight, we stop printing money and inflation will go down..." and Ron Paul answered "... keep trying, you'll get it."
Amazing... Can't we expect a little more? Or do we really have to accept that anyone who has more than surface knowledge or talking points on a subject should be cut out of the debate? They really ought to do some reading - such as any week's issue of The Economist, or The Daily Reckoning.
Perhaps most interesting in all of the debate was the way in which all of the candidates twisted each question they were given into something quite different. Even when asking a "yes or no" question, they simply can't give a straight answer. Ms. Clinton, is the sky blue? "Well, based on my 35 years of experience and my ability to get things to change and in view of my plan on healthcare, I'd like to be able to have the children whose eyesight was saved by the program I will implement answer that question." Mr. Romney? "I'd just like to say that being governor of Massachusetts has shown me that there are days with blue skies and days with clouds and days with rain. We knew that, and we created a universal sky plan that let the citizens choose for themselves what kind of sky they wanted to see each day."
Overall, this simply shows how difficult it is to get people to change. Only one candidate that I heard talked at all about "sacrifice". Energy use is one area where everyone has the ability to make better choices, and if we don't the $100 barrels of oil will only go higher and higher. Or water use... living in Georgia where there is currently a drought of historic proportions, I wonder what it will take to establish the sense of urgency required to make people change their behavior. Even though it is widely reported that we could run out of water in Atlanta sometime next year, I wonder how many people have done anything at all to change the amount of water they use? Shorter showers, wash only full loads of dishes or laundry, not cheating and watering the lawn, fixing leaking faucets, etc. I whatever kind of deficit we have, we'll only deal with it when the crisis is staring us in the face.
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