He’s 76 — the only one in the race who was born during the Great Depression.

He’s by far the most radically anti-government candidate in the running. He’d boil the federal government down to a few, skeletal functions. He’d end the welfare state, cut every dime of foreign aid, halt overseas military action and bring home all the troops. He’d return to the gold standard and abolish the Federal Reserve.

Paul opposes not only recent government shenanigans but also stuff that happened 50 or 70 or 90 years ago, such as the creation of Medicare (1965), Social Security (1935) and the federal income tax (1913). He’s against national banks, the first of which was the handiwork of Alexander Hamilton in 1791.

Paul believes that powerful and secretive forces (the Fed being the best example) have manipulated human events and bankrolled wars. He fears that the nation is turning into an Orwellian police state.

He’s a stalwart opponent of the USA Patriot Act and regularly condemns post-Sept. 11 security measures, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From modest ­beginnings he became a highly successful obstetrician/gynecologist, delivered about 4,000 babies, became the patriarch of a sprawling family and was elected to Congress 12 times.

He bemoans the decline of the dollar and blames the printing of money “out of thin air.”

He’s not a dealmaker and is not interested in forging bipartisan compromises.

When someone…asked him what he’d do to overcome the partisan divide in Congress, he said the gridlock was a blessing. [...] In his view, the moderates are the most dangerous people in Washington.

G.O.P. Monetary Madness — Paul Krugman

[Ron] Paul…fiercely [opposes] the kind of monetary expansion [Milton] Friedman claimed could have prevented the Great Depression — and which was actually carried out by Ben Bernanke this time around.

After Lehman Brothers fell,…the monetary base more than tripled in size.

[Ron Paul was] sure about what would happen as a result: There would be devastating inflation.

So here we are, three years later. How’s it going? Inflation has fluctuated, but, at the end of the day, consumer prices have risen just 4.5 percent, meaning an average annual inflation rate of only 1.5 percent. Who could have predicted that printing so much money would cause so little inflation? Well, I could. And did. And so did others who understood the Keynesian economics Mr. Paul reviles.

And what will happen if [Ron Paul's] doctrine actually ends up being put into action? Great Depression, here we come.

The Presidential Candidates on Taxes — Citizens for Tax Justice

A proposal that anti-tax radicals call a “Fair Tax” is basically a national sales tax that replaces all other federal taxes. …in order to maintain current revenue levels, this sales tax would have to be around 50 percent. It is also very regressive. Low-income households would pay more for everything they buy, while the wealthy would hit the jackpot with tax-free capital gains, dividends and interest. We are fairly confident that this proposal will go nowhere when people realize that a house that costs, say, $200,000 would cost $300,000 under this plan.

[Ron Paul has] expressed support for the “Fair Tax” proposal.

[Ron Paul is] in favor of abolishing the Internal Revenue Service. It’s not entirely clear who would administer the national sales tax [he supports] if there was no IRS.

Republican Debate Reality Check Shows Misfire — Bloomberg News

…Ron Paul saying he would close the Department of Interior in addition to [the Departments of Commerce, Education, and Energy.]

Why Libertarianism Fails in Health Care — Ezra Klein

…CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked whether an uninsured 30-year-old who had chosen to go without insurance should be left to die if he falls unexpectedly ill. Ron Paul dodged the question. “What he should do is whatever he wants to do and take responsibility for himself,” Paul said. “That’s what freedom is about.” Blitzer pressed the issue. “But, Congressman, are you saying the society should just let him die?” “Yeah!” whooped the crowd. But Paul stammered out a “no.”

House Conservatives Contradict Themselves on Tax Increases — Suzy Khimm

[In November, Ron Paul and 71 other Republicans] sent a letter to the debt-reduction supercommittee that urged them to rule out any tax increases whatsoever as part of the deal…

But just two weeks [earlier, he was] among the 100-plus House members who signed a “go-big” letter that asked the supercommittee to keep everything on the table, including revenues.

Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals — Matt Stoller

…while old newsletters bearing his name showcase obvious white supremacy, he is also the only prominent politician, let alone Presidential candidate, saying that the drug war has racist origins. You cannot honestly look at this figure without acknowledging both elements…

My perspective of Paul comes from working with his staff in 2009-2010 on issues of war and the Federal Reserve. Paul was one of my then-boss Alan Grayson’s key allies in Congress on these issues, though on most issues of course he and Paul were diametrically opposed. How Paul operated his office was different than most Republicans, and Democrats.

Paul’s office was dedicated, first and foremost, to his political principles, and his work with his grassroots base reflects that. Politics and procedure simply didn’t matter to him. My main contact in Paul’s office even had his voicemail set up with special instructions for those calling about HR 1207, which was the number of the House bill to audit the Federal Reserve. But it wasn’t just the Fed audit — any competent liberal Democratic staffer in Congress can tell you that Paul will work with anyone who seeks his ends of rolling back American Empire and its reach into foreign countries, auditing the Federal Reserve, and stopping the drug war.

…when considering questions about Ron Paul, you have to ask yourself whether you prefer a libertarian who will tell you upfront about his opposition to civil rights statutes, or authoritarian Democratic leaders who will expand healthcare to children and then aggressively enforce a racist war on drugs and shield multi-trillion dollar transactions from public scrutiny. I can see merits in both approaches, and of course, neither is ideal. Perhaps it’s worthy to argue that lives saved by presumed expanded health care coverage in 2013 are worth the lives lost in the drug war. It is potentially a tough calculation (depending on whether you think coverage will in fact expand in 2013). When I worked with Paul’s staff, they pursued our joint end goals with vigor and principle, and because of their work, we got to force central banking practices into a more public and democratic light.

Marginalizing Ron Paul — Robert Scheer

[Ron] Paul marshaled bipartisan support to pass a bill requiring the first-ever public audit of the Federal Reserve. That audit is how [Americans] first learned of the Fed’s trillions of dollars in secret loans and aid given to the banks as a reward for screwing over the public.

…his is a rare voice in challenging irrationally high military spending. At a time when the president has signed off on a cold war-level defense budget and his potential opponents in the Republican field want to waste even more on high-tech weapons to fight a sophisticated enemy that doesn’t exist, Paul has emerged as the only serious peace candidate. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Paul last week warned an Iowa audience, “Watch out for the military-industrial complex — they always have an enemy. Nobody is going to invade us. We don’t need any more [weapons systems].”

Paul said: “Little by little, in the name of fighting terrorism, our Bill of Rights is being repealed…. The Patriot Act, as bad as its violation of the 4th Amendment, was just one step down the slippery slope. The recently passed [National Defense Authorization Act, would allow the president to order indeterminate military imprisonment without trial of those accused of supporting terrorism,] continues that slip toward tyranny and in fact accelerates it significantly…. The Bill of Rights has no exemption for ‘really bad people’ or terrorists or even non-citizens. It is a key check on government power against any person. This is not a weakness in our legal system; it is the very strength of our legal system.”

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…the first stimulus bill in 2008, a $700 billion package geared toward government spending to stimulate the economy, and financed with borrowed money, has obviously failed to create new jobs.

He never offers any evidence to support this claim.

I’ve disproven this hypothesis before, but I’ll do so again — first by repeating what I said last time, then with even more evidence. If you’ve already read the first part, you might want to skip to the new stuff, though it can’t hurt to refresh your memory…  

President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) on February 17, 2009. Almost immediately, GDP growth turned around:

Private sector job growth also turned the corner immediately following the ARRA:

A few weeks after Congress passed the ARRA, the stock market unexpectedly began a strong, steady rise:

It’s true that GDP and job growth has been slower during this recovery than previous post-WWII recoveries, but recoveries following financial crises are almost always weaker than recoveries that follow traditional recessions. Compared to other debt-burdened recoveries, this recovery has been better than usual.

Another reason for the slow GDP and job growth is the lack of stimulus. No, that’s not a typo. The ARRA may have injected $787 billion into the economy, but state and local governmentscut their budgets by roughly the same amount. Overall, government spending hardly budged from its long-term trend:

A lot of economists have tried to measure the historical “government multiplier,” or “bang for your buck,” but only a few have studied periods that are comparable to today: deep recessions where interest rates can’t go any lower. Such responsible studies estimate that the multiplier ranges from 1.5 to 2, which means that $1 in government spending increases GDP by $1.50 to $2.

Stimulus critics predicted that interest rates would rise because the government borrowed too much, competing with private investors for scarce lending. Instead, the opposite happened:

In fact, interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in many decades:

Some stimulus critics also predicted that inflation would soar because the government would print money to pay for the stimulus. Actually, inflation is lower than it was before the recession, lower than it was in the 1980s and most of the 1990s, and out of dangerous deflation territory, thanks to the ARRA:

But if you want to measure the effects of the stimulus, says conservative economist Robert Barro,  you need “‘experiments,’ in which the government changes transfer in an unusual way — while other factors stay the same.” Fortunately, we have four such “econometric” research papers.* (We won’t discuss papers that use “models” because, as Barro says, they tend to assume what they’re trying to prove.) Here are their findings:

1. James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, both from Dartmouth, compared jobs growth in each state and county to the amount of stimulus funds spent in that state or county. They used the seniority of each state’s/county’s legislators to determine whether they received the funding because of economic need or political patronage. That allowed them to correct for any possible reverse causation, whereby the jobs growth determined how much stimulus funds were received (rather than the other way around, which is what we’re trying to measure). They found a multiplier of 1.96 to 2.31 for low-income spending, 1.85 for infrastructure spending, and 0.47 to 1.06 for the stimulus overall.
2. Gabriel Chodorow-Reich (Berkeley), Laura Feiveson (MIT), Zachary Liscow (Berkeley), and William Gui Woolston (Stanford) compared jobs growth in each state to the amount of federal Medicaid matching funds spent in that state. They only looked at aid that states received based on pre-recession Medicaid spending, not the aid distributed based on economic need during the recession, to avoid the reverse causation problem mentioned earlier. They found a multiplier of 2.
3. Daniel J. Wilson, of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, compared jobs growth in each state to the amount of stimulus funds spent in that state. He used pre-recession Medicaid spending, school-age population (a proxy for education need), and highway act (unrelated to unemployment) to determine whether they received the funding because they were hit harder during the recession or because of these non-cyclical needs. That allowed him to correct for any possible reverse causation. He found that the ARRA “created or saved about 2 million jobs in its first year and over 3 million by March 2011.”
4. John B. Taylor, of Stanford, measured the change in consumption at the time when the tax cuts boosted personal disposable income the most. He found no significant increase in consumption due to the tax cuts. He also measured the change in state and local government spending at the time when federal aid gave them the biggest boost. He found that the increase in federal spending was too small to significantly outweigh the decrease in state and local spending.

There you have it: All the evidence points to a stimulus that worked exactly as it was supposed to. If anything, it was too small and had too many tax cuts and not enough spending.

On the tax cuts, it’s worth mentioning, however, that this is not a regular recession. It’s a “balance-sheet recession,” where consumers won’t start spending again until they pay off the debt hanging over them. The tax cuts may not boost consumption immediately, but they help consumers pay off debt and thus speed up the recovery. Of course, this only works if the tax cuts are directed to low- and middle-income Americans with debt to pay off, not to the rich. This is why President Obama is advocating payroll tax cuts, not tax cuts for the rich that Prof. Mishra and Congressional Republicans are so fond of.

==========

* A hat tip to Ezra Klein for compiling these papers (and several more) in one handy blog post.

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– Ezra Klein, on why the White House should stand firm against Republicans’ attempts to cut entitlement programs (Washington Post)

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– Ezra Klein (Washington Post)

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So he doesn’t oppose cap-and-trade because global warming is a hoax, or the science is unsettled. He opposes it because a) any solution will have to be international and b) we need to be worried about the economy right now. He’s not against stimulus in theory, but he thought the specific stimulus Obama passed was poorly designed. He doesn’t defend the specifics of Ryan’s changes to Medicare, but supports them because the mounting national debt has forced us to consider “proposals that would’ve been laughed out of the room” at another time.

Romney Doesn’t Scare Obama. This Guy Does. — Chris Jones

He was hugely popular in his home state, pursuing an agenda of fiscal conservatism and social semimoderation — he supports civil unions for gay couples and believes climate change is an urgent issue but remains staunchly pro-gun and antiabortion.

He says that from China, he gained a different perspective on America and its place in the world. He saw two countries, one on the rise, ascendant, and the other on the brink of economic collapse, crushed by debt and overregulation and taxes. He talks about sparking a new “industrial revolution,” mostly through energy technology, reducing our reliance on oil.

He said he believed the United States should start a significant withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan immediately. He also would not have intervened in Libya — “We just can’t afford it.” And he would seek to make serious cuts to the military’s budget. “If you can’t find anything there to cut, you’re not looking hard enough.”

Polls Find Huntsman Unacceptable to Many in Republican Base — Nate Silver

About half of the views Republicans expressed about Mr. Huntsman were negative…

…they almost certainly reflect the fact that Mr. Huntsman has taken a number of positions that are bound to be unacceptable to large swaths of the Republican electorate. Among them are expressing support for Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, endorsing an individual mandate for health insurance, and securing Utah’s participation in a regional cap-and-trade program. Mr. Huntsman also holds a moderate position on gay marriage, having endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples. And he served as President Obama’s ambassador to China.

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