Bob Barr is nothing more than a hypocrite. He is the author of the "Defense of Marriage Act" despite having been divorced three times himself. He wants to make government small....so small that it fits inside your bedroom. (Props to Stephen Colbert for that!) He also voted for the Patriot Act, though he latter said that he regretted that.
The National Debt is expected to rise by $482 billion dollars next year, not counting $80 billion in war costs. (Forbes.) The debt is $9.5 trillion dollars. $9,500,000,000,000.00. Are you okay with that? You don't think that we need to increase taxes?
Which social programs will you cut? Welfare? I have a hard time talking about cuts in Aid to Dependent Children (the largest portion of the welfare budget) when we just allocated $25 billion to bail out the mortgage lenders. That is not counting the $29 billion that we gave JP Morgan to buy Bear Stearns.
In order to make these bailouts legal, we had to raise the ceiling on National Debt to $10.6 trilllion.
My point is that we, as Americans, have given billions to people whose need is at best unclear. And these handouts were done with the consent of both parties.
John McCain offers more of the same. He seems to think that the only way to curry favor is to out-Liberal Obama. At least Obama offers the hope of change.
Besides, I look at who is against him...and I want to be on the OTHER side.
I'm not saying that I agree with everything that Bob Barr has done in the past but I agree with him now more than I do McCain or Obama. And what is so wrong with a government so small that it could fit in a bedroom? That is the way the government is supposed to be if you go back and look at what the founding fathers wanted when they created our government. Our government is supposed to provide some basic services which include (but are not limited to) national security, infrastructure, immigration, law enforcement.
What programs would I cut? I would start with cutting back on all of the foreign aid that we send out while our national debt is ever increasing. Why are we sending billions of dollars worth of military aid to Israel, Saudia Arabia, etc while our roads and bridges are crumbling? It just doesn't make sense.
And yes we should cut back on many of our social programs as they are horribly bloated. We have become a nation that lacks personal responsibility. Granted you can't cut back too much too soon because that would be too much of a shock to the system but there needs to be serious reforms put in place to cut spending. We need to kill government funded education, it doesn't work, and instead go to privately funded institutions like charter schools. To start this could be done by providing government vouchers that parents could then choose which schools to send their children to. The better schools would get more money. Obviously I don't have enough space or time to put in all the details here but use your imagination.
The bottom line is that our government has become bloated and cumbersome, it really needs to be shrunk down to a more managable size.
And as for your comment on the government bailouts of the banking industry, I couldn't agree more. The bailouts were horrible ideas. The banks that took the risky loans on should have been allowed to collapse. They took the risk and they should pay the consequence not the American Taxpayer. Also to that end the borrowers who entered into loans that they couldn't afford should be foreclosed on. While I have some sympathy for the ones who were conned by the banks a little common sense should have told them not to enter into risky loans like that. Bailouts funded by the government are a horrible idea and should never have happened.
