Gary Johnson: slash the budget and bring the troops home
By Norman Leahy | Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 | PoliticsLast week, my colleague Scott Lee interviewed former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (R) on “The Score” radio show. They spoke the day before Johnson officially declared his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, so despite his best effort, Scott wasn’t able to get Johnson to break the news on the show. No matter. Over the course of the interview, Johnson’s goals became clear: push a strong fiscal message and aim it directly at those who backed Rep. Ron Paul (R-T3x.) in 2008’s presidential sweepstakes.
Johnson bolted out of the gate talking in broad strokes: liberty, freedom, personal responsibility. That last one is key, particularly for a libertarian-leaning audience that just wants the government nanny to leave it alone. (They can choose their own light bulbs, bathroom fixtures, car seats, snack foods, and so on just fine, thank you)
But it was on the fiscal issues where Johnson felt most comfortable. “We’re essentially bankrupt,” and “on the verge of a financial collapse,” and those who think we can pay back tens of trillions of old debt while racking up over a trillion in new debt each year are kidding themselves.
So, obviously, he’s for balancing the budget. But what of the competing plans out there from President Obama and House Budget Committe Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.)? Ryan’s plan “doesn’t put defense on the table.” “We can provide a strong national defense, but we can’t be building roads, bridges and hospitals in Iraq.” He’s also very much against the Libyan incursion, believing it, and the Iraq and Afghan wars, have bankrupted us. The president’s option got very little of his attention.
Johnson also said, “my Dad didn’t parachute into Normandy two days before the invasion for Medicare and Medicaid. The history of our country is that we’ve fought for people to have liberty, to have freedom, but we’ve gotten as far away from that as we possibly can.”
So Johnson has staked out ground where few, if any, of the other Republican presidential candidates will tread: radical spending cuts, complete devolution of Medicare and Medicaid to the states and, an old libertarian favorite, bringing the troops home.
They are the kinds of sentiments that send portions of the GOP base into tizzies. But Johnson isn’t talking to them. He’s aiming at Ron Paul’s voters, tea party voters, and those who believe that the American empire has robbed us of more than just blood and treasure.
It will be very interesting to see how his campaign evolves – and whether his message will find firmer traction than Paul’s did in 2008.
(Originally published in the Washington Examiner. Cross-posted at the Score Radio Network.)
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About the author
Norm Leahy has written about Virginia and national politics online since 2002, beginning with One Man's Trash (OMT), and continuing through Bacon's Rebellion (both the blog and the e-zine), Sic Semper Tyrannis, NBC12's Decision Virginia, Richmond.com and Tertium Quids. He is the chief blogger at "The Score" and a producer of "The Score" radio show as well as being a Washington Post contributor.
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8 Responses to "Gary Johnson: slash the budget and bring the troops home"
The Silly Season continues. Who’s next, Jesse Ventura?
Yep. Bring the troops home and end all foreign intervention. Fortress America. Does everyone recall how that worked out in the 1930′s? There was a good reason why we stayed forward-deployed in Germany, Japan, and Korea for the second half of the 20th Century.
BTW, has anyone broken the news to Johnson that Ron Paul has also announced?
Now that we are in the opening decades of the 21st century, it may be time to revisit the rationales used in the last century to keep troops deployed in countries where the threats they were sent to defend against have either changed drastically or disappeared.
And a Jesse Ventura candidacy would be grand — but only if he wears the feather boa and sequined jackets from his wrestling days.
Norman,
And we have been doing just that since the last decade of the 20th Century. The average American has no idea how much we have reduced our overseas forces since the end of the Cold War. US troop levels in Europe, for example, have been slashed from 425,000 in 1990 to approximately 70,000 today and more US reductions are presently being negotiated with NATO. Similar force reductions have also been completed in the Pacific and we have repatriated all forward-deployed nuclear and chemical weapons.
How far do we want to go until we just withdraw completely like we did after World War I?
Correction: that was from 325,000 in Europe in 1990. These figures include all services, not just the Army.
HisRoc
The silly season for sure. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lew Rockwell (Paul’s possible racist newsletter ghostwriter) himself isn’t next. If they thought they could dig Rothbard up, and stand him behind a debate podium, they would probably go for that as well.
I really don’t think Ron Paul will finally run for 2012. I think his exploratory committee announcement is only so that he can get on the debate stage, as that is one of the requirements. He needs to remind us once again that 9/11 was all our fault. Not that long ago Paul was asked about Gary Johnson, and Paul gave him a glowing approval. He said something to the effect that he couldn’t think of anyone he would support more. I think Paul is just trying to keep the libertarian message front and center, until Johnson can get up to snuff. Then Paul will back Johnson, and ask all his supporters to do the same. I don’t think we will see a candidate Blowback Paul, but we will see a candidate Blowback Johnson.
Gary Johnson = “Some Guy Announces GOP candidacy.”
Why would Ron Paul voters be attracted to Johnson when Paul himself is in the race?
Prediction: Gary Johnson is this year’s Jim Gilmore — don’t blink or you’ll miss his candidacy.”
It’s hard to see how you can balance the budget without also cutting defense spending. The U.S. spends as much on defense as every other country in the world combined, and about one out of every two dollars that the U.S. government spends goes to defense. It is a huge amount of money, over half a trillion dollars a year.
Democrats don’t want social programs cut, Republicans don’t want defense cut, but it’ll all have to be cut to balance the budget. That’s just how it is, and it is difficult to see how you can cut defense spending and still have high levels of involvement in three wars.
It’s a heavy burden on tax payers to the tune of $1750/year for every man, woman, and child, and the number is obviously much higher for the people who actually pay the taxes.
One of the few economic graphs that is almost a constant are federal taxes collected as a percentage of GDP (look it up), and that number has been approximately 15-20% of GDP since world war 2. Those numbers are now going up fast, and tax payers always demand cuts when those numbers approach 20% of GDP.
Republicans are obviously very happy that they are on the right side of the argument for cutting spending, and that’s great, but Republicans could be celebrated far and wide if they just took it a step further and stopped pushing their social agenda and stopped focusing all of their energy on just cutting things they don’t like. Listen to the words that TEA party people said concerning cuts to NPR and planned parenthood, the TEA party is happy to make cuts where they can get them, but that isn’t the same as the Republican desire to strike at NPR and planned parenthood on ideological grounds. The TEA party is just as happy to cut defense as NPR if it reduces the deficit.
These differences are the main reason for the friction between the Republican party and the TEA party. The Republican party is still being the Republican party, the same as it ever was, still wanting to use fiscal conservatives for its own ends, and the TEA party has been “TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY”.
The vote on the F-35 engine was something to pay attention to.
Temporary,
I have good news and I have bad news.
First the good news. I violently agree with you on the F-35 engine. In fact, I question why we need the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter at all, since we already have the Air Force F-22 and the Navy F/A-18E/F. There are many reductions that we have made and can continue to make in the Defense budget, starting with the $16B in earmarks added to the Defense budget every year. The Pentagon doesn’t have a spending problem; Congress has a spending problem, as the F-35 engine demonstrates.
Now the bad news. Even if we eliminated the entire Defense budget, that alone wouldn’t eliminate the budget deficit, much less pay down the $15T debt. The Defense budget is about 3% of GDP, the lowest it has been by that measure since before World War II. Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, ObamaCare, etc) are already 15% of GDP and are projected to rise to 25% of GDP between now and 2030. That is only 19 years away. 19 years ago, Bill Clinton was being elected President and the first Gulf War had been over for a year. Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it?
Entitlement spending cuts not only need to be on the table, but they need to be on the butcher block. But it will probably never happen. Democrats will use any proposed spending reductions to accuse the Republicans of trying to “kill off the elderly.” Meanwhile, the Libertarians will continue to beat the drum about balancing the budget with Defense cuts based on a foreign policy of isolationism.
As Oliver Hardy used to say to Stan Laurel, “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into!”
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