He is way off base on life before Social Security. His pro-life, anti-abortion views are upsetting as well. I wonder how many people see his anti-war stance and fail to look at the rest of what he is about.
As for Social Security, "we didn't have it until 1935," Paul says. "I mean, do you read stories about how many people were laying in the streets and dying and didn't have medical treatment? . . . Prices were low and the country was productive and families took care of themselves and churches built hospitals and there was no starvation."
Actually there were such things happening, and most people did not have access to doctors. That is a very idealized picture he paints. I remember the tales of my grandparents about after the depression hit in 1929. Not only could they not afford medical care, many could not afford food on the table.
I have seen article after article this week comparing Ron Paul to Howard Dean...there just is no comparison.
Ron Paul is not the "Howard Dean of 08". Their views on our taking care of each other are drastically different. Dean on Social Security:
"Social Security is a moral value for people who have worked all their life. They deserve to retire with dignity. We ought not to turn our retirement programs over to the same people who gave us Enron."
...."You know the Social Security debate is not just about money. It's about whether we have responsibility for each other as a community, or not."
Ron Paul did not believe we should send aid to Katrina victims. This is why I am so angry when I see all the comparisons of him to people like Howard Dean...who said we are our brother's keeper.
Voted NO on sending aid to Katrina victims.
"Last year, Congress decided to send billions of dollars to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Guess how Ron Paul voted.
"Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?" he asks. "Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?"He'd rather say notI do believe we must "bail out" each other. It is a terrifying thought that he is one who wants us to be on our own. Neighbor can not always help neighbor. When 3 hurricanes hit us, we were all shown our helpless side. When neighbors are down and out and struggling, they can not do much for each other. We were all so busy after the 3 storms in 6 weeks just getting ourselves off the floor emotionally, that a neighbor in great stress died alone before we knew to help him.
There must be a government program to help "bail" us out.
I am troubled also by Ron Paul's views on abortion.
"Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the "right" of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the "property rights" of slave masters in their slaves. Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other, so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State. Unlike Nazi Germany, which forcibly sent millions to the gas chambers (as well as forcing abortion and sterilization upon many more), the new regime has enlisted the assistance of millions of people to act as its agents in carrying out a program of mass murder.
He authored a bill that declared that life begins at conception, a view which is NOT conducive to some forms of birth control nor with stem cell research. His views disturb me.
Apparently it was dramatic enough to cause Paul to
author H.R. 1094, a bill that declares that "human life shall be deemed to exist from conception," a standard Christian Right viewpoint. While Paul has written, "I have never been one who is comfortable talking about my faith in the political arena," this faith, in conjunction with his traumatic residency experience, seems to have left him deeply troubled by abortion in a way organizations like Focus on the Family would no doubt find familiar. "Many talk about being pro-life," Paul continued. "I have taken and will continue to advocate direct action to restore protection for the unborn."
Ron Paul's pro life rhetoricHere is more about his view on stem-cell research. While he says he opposes it because it is a funding issue....it seems his staunch pro-life stance would cause him to be against it. Most who view life as beginning at conception do oppose stem cell research.
Stem Cell Research
Paul backed President Bush's veto of congressional legislation to expand federal funding for non-embryonic stem cell research, saying he doesn't oppose such research but objects to federal funding for it. The founding fathers, Paul also wrote, "intended to keep issues such as embryonic stem cell research entirely out of Washington's hands."
His views on health care go along with what he said about Social Security above. Every man for himself. That philosophy scares the hell out of me. That is a bare bones hands off approach that I find appalling.
Health Care
In 2006, Paul wrote that "the problems with our health care system are not the result of too little government intervention but, rather, too much."
The solutions, he argued, lie in allowing individuals to deduct from their taxes all of their health care costs, as businesses do, and in promoting "true competition" in the market for health care provisions. Paul has also supported legislation permitting individuals to buy "negative outcome" insurance before major medical treatments in order to reduce "the burden of costly malpractice litigation."
Ron Paul on the issuesHow does one have tax deductions when one is not working? That happens a lot to the best of people....being out of work.
I truly was alarmed at his statement about Social Security....I believe that really is the worst.
Here is a little bit about life after the 1929 depression and before FDR's formation of Social Security...Ron Paul is way off base on this .
The trauma for the elderly of that era can hardly be overstated. As W. Andrew Achenbaum, a historian at the University of Houston, put it,
''The Depression destroyed every mechanism that had existed for covering the vicissitudes of old-age dependency.""Before the creation of Social Security, some Americans had private or state pensions, but most supported themselves into old age by working.
The 1930 census, for example, found 58 percent of men over 65 still in the workforce; in contrast, by 2002, the figure was 18 percent.
The elderly also relied heavily on their families. ''Children, friends and relatives have borne and still carry the major cost of supporting the aged,'' the Committee on Economic Security, the Roosevelt administration panel that developed Social Security, reported in 1935. ''Several of the state surveys have disclosed that from 30 to 50 percent of the people over 65 years of age were being supported in this way.''
The Depression swept this world away. Many of the elderly could no longer find work. Those who had been lucky enough to have a pension or some savings saw them disappear. And many who relied on their children saw them buckle under the strain. ''I am in no position to do the right thing for my mother,'' one woman wrote to Roosevelt. "I thought as long as I lived there was no need to worry about her being taken care of, but I never dreamed of a depression like we have had."
The World: Life Before Social Security; 'A Great Calamity Has Come Upon Us'And Michael Katz in the WP has some things to say about that.
"Where to begin with this one?" asks Michael Katz, a historian of poverty at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied charity case records from the early 20th century. "The stories just break your heart, the kind of suffering that people endured. . . .
Stories of families that had literally no cash and had to kind of beg to get the most minimal forms of food, who lived in tiny, little rooms that were ill-heated and ill-ventilated, who were sick all the time, who had meager clothing . . ."Congressman Paul's Legislative Strategy? He'd Rather Say Not.His anti-war views are good, but I wonder if all the people making those huge donations this week are truly aware of the rest of his philosophy.
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