Some Thoughts on the Debate

Since I’m in blog mode lately here are some things I was thinking to myself last night during the Republican primary debate.

1.  Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.  I just heard Mitt Romney say on television that social security isn’t a Ponzi scheme for the people who have been getting it for the past forty years, the problem is that it doesn’t work for future generations…….!  That’s exactly the definition of a Ponzi scheme!  The people who get in at the start benefit but eventually it falls apart and someone gets screwed.  Calling it a Ponzi scheme doesn’t mean that nobody has ever benefitted from it, it means that they have/and are benefitting at the expense of some future generation.  Can we please just call it what it is?  If you still like it then fine, say that.  But this guy is jumping all over someone else for saying something that is factually accurate because he knows most people don’t know what it means and will react negatively based on some general threatening feeling that they he might stop the checks from coming in.  Furthermore he says that it was not forced on the people.  This is proof that Romney is a progressive I think.  He sees us as “the people,” a collective.  Somehow in his mind we collectively wanted this so it wasn’t forced upon us.  But I don’t want it!  And yet the money comes out of my paycheck every month anyway.  Anyone who looked at the people as a collection of individuals would find it quite obvious that it is in fact forced upon me.

2.  People don’t understand what education does.  Newt Gingrich says 99 weeks–the amount of time some Americans have been unemployed–is enough time to get an associate degree in medicine (or something like that).  So he wants to make them get trained while on unemployment and thinks this would fix our unemployment problem.  The difference between a doctor and a non-doctor isn’t just that one happened to go to medical school.  There is an interesting economic theory about education that says it might actually have very little to do with increasing someone’s productivity and a lot to do with identifying their underlying ability.  As someone with some experience in education I can tell you it’s some of both but the idea that you can just take the unemployed and train them to be doctors and lawyers and solve the problem is misguided.  This is without even addressing the more obvious argument that this would misallocate the labor in the first place anyway.  Interestingly this is usually the sort of thing that comes from the left.

3.  Ron Paul is awesome.  This is not news but Hannity was actually pretty decent to him afterward which I was a little surprised by.  Paul did dodge an abortion question though.

4. Rick Santorum made Rick Perry look like a chump on immigration.  Unfortunately he (Santorum) lacks poise.

5.  There seems to be a lot of support for ditching the department of education.  This is fantastic, although I bet nothing comes of it.  But it even won the online poll of departments to cut.  I would love to see that issue come up in a general and see if the public is capable of standing up to Democrats saying Republicans don’t care about the children (and no doubt especially minority children).  Interestingly Perry made this argument with regard to immigrants but it didn’t go that well for him (see above).

6.  I feel sorry for Gary Johnson.  If you think Ron Paul has it bad you should talk to “the other libertarian.”  He was asked a question about Cuba and completely ignored it and talked about balancing the budget.  Normally I hate it when they do this but he’s go a point.  He gets like two questions and one is about flights to Cuba?  Come on.  By the way, our Cuba policy is ridiculous.

7. I can’t shake the feeling that we are going to end up with a Douche and a Turd Sandwich again.