The first GOP debate of the 2016 presidential election cycle is now in our rear view mirrors. Well, it was actually two "debates" and not much debating went on. But the lack of debating in the "debate" is typical of these kinds of events. There has been a lot of coverage of who said what and who is up and down in the polls as a result of their performance. I am going to go in a different direction. I want to focus not on what was contentious but what was orthodox.
The debates took place on August 6. They consisted of an earlier "kids table" round featuring mainstream candidates who are lower in the polls (7 of them) and a later "main event" round featuring the ten candidates that were doing the best in the polls in the days immediately preceding the debate. To keep things simple I am going to focus on the main event. I found a transcript that is relatively ad free at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=110489.
This post is a variant on the "Ken Ham Creationism" post I did a year or so ago. It can be found at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/02/ken-ham-creationism.html. In that post I focused on Ham's beliefs on the theory that a lot of "creationists" would find that they actually disagreed with some of Ham's beliefs. This could drive a wedge into and eventually weaken the movement. In this case I want to focus not on differences but on commonalities. So, unlike with the Ham post where I refrained from challenging Ham's beliefs, here I intend to challenge them.
The debate was run by Fox News. They are the unofficial spokesmen for the conservative movement and for Republicans in general. So I looked for implicit beliefs of the Fox operation as manifested in the content of the questions the Fox anchors asked. And I looked for beliefs expressed by one or more participant that went unchallenged by the others. That constitutes GOP orthodoxy. Since I do not subscribe to that orthodoxy I will challenge it. Here goes.
Cutting taxes is always good.
The GOP contends that is the party of fiscal conservatism and that "liberals" are spendthrifts. Fiscal conservatives believe in balanced budgets or even surpluses. You can get there in two ways. You can have a "small" government (low tax revenue) and low spending or you can have "big" government (high tax revenue) and high spending. The only thing that is necessary is that tax revenue meet or exceed spending. A combination of low taxes and high spending is not being fiscally conservative. But that is what the GOP actually delivers. Currently the GOP wants to expand military spending and perhaps cut other programs. (There is disagreement on the latter.) That is anti-conservative fiscal policy. If you are unwilling to cut spending and, in fact, want to increase spending on the military, you need to raise taxes.
Balancing the budget is good
This sounds like a good argument. But most economists don't buy it. A "reasonable" continuous deficit is the best place to be for the long term. There is certainly a lot of discussion and disagreement about what constitutes reasonable. But I am going to leave that aside and just ask if the GOP actually does what it says. The answer is no. Back at almost the beginning of this blog I wrote a post entitled "There are no fiscally conservative Republicans" (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/10/there-are-no-fiscally-conservative.html). Nothing has changed since then.
Political Correctness is bad.
This is a diversion. The GOP is just as much in favor of political correctness as the Democrats. They just believe in enforcing different political correctness rules than the Democrats. In particular the GOP accuses the Democrats of enforcing political correctness rules when the Democrats effectively challenge GOP orthodoxy. To some extent the Democrats do the same thing to the GOP but not as loudly or as effectively.
Abortion is bad.
Actually everyone agrees with this one. No one thinks abortions are a good thing. The difference is what the various sides think ought to be done. Generally speaking liberals see abortion in some cases as a necessary evil. Republicans believe it is almost always unnecessary and therefore almost always evil. The debate on the GOP side had been reduced to asking whether abortion is ok in the cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother. There is some disagreement on this but the consensus is moving toward a "no exceptions" position. Conservatives also incorrectly characterize the position of their opponents as "pro abortion" (see "Political Correctness" above).
I think there is a reasoned and ethical anti-abortion position. I just don't see it as being held by many conservatives. If you are anti-abortion then you should be for policies that actually reduce the need for abortions. The GOP position is "no sex outside of marriage" and "abstinence only". Bristol Palin is the poster child for why these positions are idiotic. She is now pregnant with her second out of wedlock child and each child has been fathered by a different man. Whatever Sara Palin, her mother and a former GOP Vice Presidential Candidate did, it was ineffective.
The best thing to do is to reduce unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. This eliminates the need for most abortions. There are effective ways to do this. They are sex education and birth control. A very large multi-year study was just completed in Colorado. If provided very effective birth control (IUDs) to a large group of women. The abortion rate plunged. GOP legislators have now terminated this program. And in general, there is a nearly complete overlap between conservatives who oppose abortion and conservatives who oppose sex education and birth control.
Conservatives need to stop lying about the positions held by opponents and need to start aggressively supporting sex education and birth control. Until they do we should ignore what they have to say on abortion.
Defund Planned Parenthood
This goes hand and hand with the abortion discussion above. Planned Parenthood does provide abortion services in some states. But there are laws banning them from doing this with federal money and they abide by those laws. To the extent that abortions are subsidized they are subsidized with money that does not come from the federal government. And 97% of what Planned Parenthood does is not abortion related. What they do for the most part is basic women's health and it is mostly delivered to poor women. This is a vastly underserved market. Defunding Planned Parenthood defunds these programs. In other words it is an attack on women's health in general and poor women's health in particular.
So what is going on? Well, a lot of the non-abortion services Planned Parenthood provides are sex education, birth control, and "female issues" kinds of services. Lost in the abortion hubbub is the more important discussion about sex ed, birth control, and "female issues". Most conservatives fall into one of two categories: "we hate sex ed and birth control" or "we are ignorant of and/or grossed out by female issues". Defunding Planned Parenthood advances the agenda of conservatives in either category. Defunding Planned Parenthood is somewhat about abortion. But it is mostly about the other subjects. Our pea brained media can't separate this out from the abortion fight so these more important issues go completely unreported on.
Medicaid expansion is bad
Part of Obamacare is an effort to get medical insurance to poor people. The idea was to expand Medicaid. The Supreme Court partially blocked this by giving states the option to opt out of this part of Obamacare. The GOP argument is that this is some kind of evil intrusion of federal power. Medicaid programs are administered by the states and there are a lot of federal regulations that the state programs must follow. But, while the Obamacare expansion increased the scope of Medicaid programs it did not change the basic structure of the programs.
The Medicaid expansion has been wildly successful, where it has been implemented, in getting a lot of poor people out of emergency rooms and into the standard health care system. The program is also "private" as opposed to being government run because the federal subsidies go to reducing the cost of standard private health insurance plans. So the amount of "government expansion" or "government intrusion" involved is modest. And the GOP has not advanced any alternative that would get good medical coverage to these people. They don't say it but the actual policy of the GOP is to leave these people uninsured.
In spite of the state "opt out" provision many states have opted in and expanded Medicaid. But in many states where the GOP runs the state government the state has opted out. We see large drops in the number of uninsured poor in those states that have adopted the expansion and little to no drop in those states that have opted out. The emergency room is also the most expensive way to deliver medicine. Obamacare has been very successful in cutting emergency room costs. More improvement is expected as poor people get out of the emergency room channel and into regular channels that include preventative services.
The Obamacare $700 billion bonanza
GOP candidates railed in 2012 and are still railing about the $700 billion bonanza. Medicaid expansion and other Obamacare components cost money. Obama, as a good fiscal conservative, put taxes and other "revenue enhancers" into Obamacare to the tune of about $700 billion to cover these increased costs. So far the revenue is on track but the costs are coming in lower than the estimates. But there still needs to be sufficient revenue to offset the additional costs. Conservatives have teen trying to raid this piggy bank since it was enacted into law. No true fiscal conservative would do this but then the GOP is not the party of fiscal conservatism if you ignore their rhetoric and examine their actions. The current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls are continuing this tradition.
And it goes hand in hand with the "massive state costs" of the Medicare expansion. This argument is the foundational one the GOP uses to justify denying health care to millions. But that $700 billion went in part to cover 100% of the costs of the Medicaid expansion in the first three years and 90% of the cost afterwards. Sure the states are on the hook at some point for the last 10%. But the business the 90% part brings into the state is probably enough to boost state revenues enough to cover a good chunk of the 10% so the program is close to free to the states.
Illegal Immigration is bad
We have had restrictive immigration policies dating back to roughly 1900. The US has struggled for generations with the question of how to let "good" immigrants in and keep "bad" immigrants out. And a big problem has been that what constitutes "good" and what constitutes "bad" keeps changing. For a long time we liked blacks as long as they came in slave ships. Then we didn't. We have pretty much always liked immigrants from the UK. But they have been covered by quotas as long as we have had them. We liked the Chinese when they were building the Transcontinental Railroad (middle 1800s) until we didn't but now we do again if they are tech types or rich and powerful. We were hostile to Indians from India until very recently when we weren't (again tech types). We were hostile to the Irish until there were enough of them to constitute an important voting block. The same was true for Italians.
Currently we are hostile to Mexicans ("they are rapists") except that few Mexicans are crossing our borders. And we are hostile to other Central and South American peoples. But, except for the Indians (American Indians - not tech types from India) we are all the descendants of immigrants. The argument is basically a reflection of our prejudices. But we pretend that the problem is that they are an economic drag. The evidence for an over all drag as opposed to a drag in small areas like border towns is slim to non-existent.
I am pro immigration. Our population is aging. Immigrants tend to be young, working age people and their children. They boost the economy and contribute to Social Security. There is currently a shortage of jobs but that is because of the influence of the wealthy and powerful. They like low wages for all but the 1%. The best way to achieve this is to keep employment low.
The thing that started the current immigration cycle was the importation of low wage workers to work on farms in the mid 1900s. That primed the pump. Agriculture (generally GOP leaning) and other business interests (also generally GOP leaning) actually like the current mess because it gives them access to low wage workers. The people who are already here are already here. The cheapest thing to do would be to legalize them. But then they would agitate for better wages. So the actual GOP policy is to stir the pot and make sure nothing happens.
Sanctuary Cities
These too are seen as some kind of evil plot. The fact that most sanctuary cities were set up to deal with the public safety problems caused by the terrible way Immigration enforcement was implemented is never acknowledged. Cities found they had violent crime problems in their immigrant communities. The cops couldn't get anywhere because no one wanted to deal with the cops. This was because the cops were fronting for ICE, the federal Immigration people. Sanctuary programs eased tensions and resulted in more effective policing which reduced crime. And the current argument for why sanctuary cities are so bad rests on exactly one case. Applying the same logic to guns would have eliminated the right to sell or own a gun in this country.
Build/Fix the damn fence
I am old enough to remember the Cold War. At that time it was important to contrast ourselves with the "evil commies". And they had built the infamous Iron Curtain. So we had to draw the starkest contrast we could. So we touted the fact that we had the longest undefended border in the world. At that time conservatives were staunch anti-communists so they were all in favor of our "no fence" open borders policy. And it worked just fine. There wasn't any great problem in the hundreds of years of open borders. There was even little or no problem during the many decades when our restrictive immigration policies overlapped our open borders policy. Then a decade or so ago conservatives decided there was a big problem.
And by the way there is a much more effective solution to the illegal immigrant problem than trying to build an impenetrable fence thousands of miles long. It is called a government ID card. The Nazis were famous for this sort of thing. You could be asked at any time for your "papers". If you didn't have them or they were out of order you were in deep trouble. The same thing, only now applied to illegal aliens, would for better or worse work just fine.
This requirement to carry papers is also something the "dirty commies" liked. So to maintain the contrast between us and them we were the land of the "I don't need no stinking papers" people. I don't know if its true for new cards but my decades old Social Security card says "not to be used for identification". A consistent thread among the libertarians and many others is that citizens should not be required to carry government ID. But without the rank and file noticing this is changing within conservative circles. It is also effectively being changed in society at large.
Thanks to conservatives in many places you now need the right ID, the modern equivalent of "papers", to vote. We have an e-verify system to validate employment status. It's not fool proof but it works pretty well. You now need a social security number for anything financial (Income tax) or medical (Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid). To get a drink you need a driver's license. We are quickly heading toward a time when a government issued ID card will be a necessity. So the libertarian idea of no government issued ID cards (Social Security cards and driver's licenses are both issued by the government as are "concealed carry" permits for guns) seems to be on the way out. Libertarians should be complaining bitterly but they are mostly quiet.
I am leaning to the thought that a government ID card is inevitable. I already have an "enhanced ID" driver's license. The system we now have is a hodge podge that is looking worse every day. In the mean time somehow a super-fence is supposed to be the solution to all of our Immigration related problems. It is unlikely that a super-fence is even feasible. I think the actual motivation is that contractors will build it and they are good sources for campaign contributions. And the GOP strategy is "the fence MUST be completed before anything else can be done". This is complete nonsense.
NSA Data Collection
We now know that the government is collecting massive amounts of data on innocent citizens. This program was started under the "W" Bush administration in response to 9/11 but has been continued pretty much intact by the Obama administration. Senator Paul is an outlier in the GOP in arguing that something should be done to scale it back. In the debates Governor Christie stridently defended it. My reading is that Senator Paul is pretty much alone in his stand. Certainly nothing was heard from the Fox moderators or the other participants.
This program is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. Many conservatives style themselves as "strict constructionists", people who try to hew closely to the words of the Constitution. Any strict constructionist should be outraged by this program. They should be loudly joined by libertarians. But there is broad support among conservatives for vacuuming up all kinds of data by and about innocent American citizens.
This is made even worse by the fact that this extra data collection (and "enhanced interrogation", an idea implicitly supported by most panelists) has so far shown itself to be completely ineffective. The 9/11 commission report demonstrated that the hijackers could and should have been caught using the techniques and procedures in place before 9/11 and before the mass data collection programs were in place. Their conclusion was that the big problem was not a lack of data or staff or computers. Instead the problem was "silo"ing, various agencies keeping the data they had close and not sharing it with other agencies. Between them the CIA, FBI, and NSA had everything they needed. Its just that each agency was so busy defending its turf that none of them were in a position to pull it all together.
ISIS is bad and the Obama Administration is ineffective
As with abortion you will actually get no disagreement about the first one, although conservatives pretend that liberals/Obama are somehow pro or at least soft on ISIS (more GOP political correctness on display). And the Obama Administration has not been very effective in rolling ISIS up so far. But the primary problem is there are no options that are likely to be effective. The politics of the region are extremely complex. The result is that there are no completely dependable allies. This leaves us to depend on allies like Turkey that has its own agendas like wiping the Kurds out or the Saudis who see themselves as the defenders of all things Sunni (ISIS is and the areas they occupy are Sunni) or the Iraqis who see Sunnis and the Kurds as the enemy. It is no surprise that progress has been modest at best.
So the real question has to do with whether there is a better alternative. Senator Graham in the "kids" debate suggested putting American boots on the ground. This has been and would likely be bitterly resented. The Trump solution is to put Carly Fiorina (current GOP presidential candidate and ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard) in charge of negotiations. She bungled things at Hewlett Packard pretty badly. She has little or no foreign policy expertise and little or no expert knowledge of the region. That doesn't sound like a very good idea either. This "talk louder and threaten more" approach does not sound promising to me. For more on this consult "ISIS - Do Something Stupid Now" at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/09/isis-do-something-stupid-now.html.
Obamacare is a Complete Disaster
This is and has been the standard GOP line since it passed. But all the data suggests that it has generally worked. It has moved millions into the mainstream medical system. And cost estimates have turned out to be wrong. Costs so far seem to be lower than forecast and there is no indication yet of a reason to believe that this trend will not continue indefinitely. But everyone in the GOP fold always characterized it as a "complete disaster". They fail to acknowledge that its core concepts were developed by a conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, and that its implementation was based closely on a successful program implemented by a Republican Governor who went on to unsuccessfully run for President, Mitt Romney. The national experience has closely paralleled the Massachusetts experience.
Republicans have also failed to propose an alternative. Instead they proclaim "repeal and replace". Then there's the $700 billion. I discussed the actual situation with respect to this money above.
It's good to be born into modest circumstances
Some of the GOP candidates have risen up from modest circumstances. But so did Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barak Obama. Obama currently has no significant wealth and neither Clinton had any significant wealth until after Bill left office. And then there's Jeb Bush the pre-Trump favorite. He is the son of a President, the brother of a President, and the grandson of a US Senator. Or there's Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP standard bearer. He was the son of a CEO of a major American car company (and one time GOP candidate for the Presidency). Or, going back another 4 years, there's John McCain. He was the son of a US Navy Admiral and the grandson of another US Navy Admiral. Finally, consider the current GOP front runnier - Donald J. Trump. He claims to be worth TEN BILLION DOLLARS (the capitol letters are his). He is the son of a successful New York real estate developer. Being born into modest circumstances doesn't seem to be a recipe for success within the GOP.
Replace the current tax code with (insert quack system here)
The standard GOP line seems to be that the current tax code is completely broken and needs to be completely replaced. Then we get one quack idea or another as to what it should be replaced with. There was the Herman Can 9-9-9 system in the 2012 election cycle. Some variation on a "flat tax" has popped up several times. A recent example of this would be (as far as I can tell - the details are hard to find and harder to figure out) the Huckabee "tithe" 10% system. And on and on and on. No professional thinks any of them are workable or would be effective. But that doesn't stop the proposals from being floated.
There are too many of them to make it worth while to keep track of each one. So I just apply two tests. What does the proposal do to the overall amount of taxes corporations pay? For any GOP proposal the answer is guaranteed to be "corporations pay less". Aggregate corporate income tax revenue used to pretty much match aggregate revenue collected on the income of individuals. But that was a long time ago. Now corporations as a group pay far less than individuals as a group do. Most of the savings on the corporate side are the result of loopholes engineered to reduce the taxes of large corporations. Most large corporations pay income tax on only a small percentage of their total income. Many pay no income tax at all. Small businesses, without the same lobbying clout, get hit much harder.
The second thing I look at is how the burden shifts between low income individuals and high income individuals. All the GOP proposals I have seen lighten the burden on high income individuals and make it up by increasing the burden on low income individuals. It is important to note that wealthy individuals game the system the same way corporations do. They lobby for loopholes that reduce their taxes. That's as wrong as the shifting of the burden away from corporations and toward individuals. Looking at these two tests allows me to quickly analyze these proposals and discard them. I have yet to see a GOP tax proposal that moves things in the right direction.
There is an approach that does not involve a wholesale revision of the tax code. It also makes the current code more fair and shifts the burden in the right direction (toward large corporations and wealthy individuals). That's closing loopholes. There are dozens of loopholes any one of which amounts to more than a billion dollars in lost revenue. So loophole closing can make a real difference. On the individual side a good example is "carried interest". The details are complex but the effect is that hedge fund managers, some of whom make more than a billion dollars, get to use a low 15% Income tax rate rather than the standard 39.5% that would normally apply. This cuts a billionaire's tax bill by $250 million dollars.
Hedge fund managers claim they work hard for the money. But it is a nine-to-five office job in a very nice office with maybe some overtime thrown in. There are millions of people who work as hard or harder, often putting in more hours under much worse conditions, but earning a pittance for their hard work. Yet they pay a larger portion of their income to the Federal government in Social Security and Income tax withholding than the hedge fund manager does. And while this is going on we will be told that the government can't do this or that because it doesn't have enough money. And one of the GOP candidates is being funded by one of these hedge fund managers. It's a good investment for the hedge fund guy. Whose call do you think a politician takes - yours or the hedge fund guy's? And who does the politician want to take care of - you or the hedge fund guy?
On the corporate side we have a similar situation. The poster child for loopholes is the oil and gas industry. These are some of the most profitable companies in the world. They have enough money to pay their senior executives obscene salaries. But they need and deserve various loopholes, we are told. The one I like the best is the one that was introduced in about 1999 as the result of a typographic error in a tax bill. That typo saved oil and gas companies several billion dollars per year and it wasn't even put there on purpose. Yet that loophole has been renewed every time it was in danger of expiring.
And on and on and on. And the GOP has worked vigorously to preserve the carried interest loophole. They fight like the dickens to keep these kinds of loopholes in the code. And they also throw roadblock after roadblock in the way of closing corporate loopholes. Unfortunately, Democrats often do the same thing. But rich people and the executives who run large corporations are much cozier with GOP politicians. So GOP politicians get a lot more TLC from these people than Democrats do. And when it comes to the next loopy tax proposal from a GOP candidate, save yourself a lot of trouble and apply my two tests to it. As for the big bucks people, they know these crazy tax schemes are just red meat for the base that will never be implemented so they ignore them.
The Iran Nuclear deal is a bad one
Here the GOP has some Democratic fellow travelers like Chuck Schumer. But while most Democrats and pretty much all the experts (outside of the Israeli ones) are in favor of it the GOP is united in opposition. The general idea is similar to the Obamacare one: repeal and replace. Here the logic is just as bad. Generally two ideas are advanced. The first is that the Obama people did not negotiate hard enough. The fact that the negotiations dragged on and on is ignored. And the fact that the negotiations involved not just the US and Iran but other countries, specifically Russia and China, is also ignored.
The Bush administration had eight years to do something about the Iran nuclear program. They managed to achieve ineffective sanctions while the Obama administration managed to achieve sanctions that were extremely hard on the Iranians. The Bush administration allowed the Iranians to build out their nuclear program to the point that they had more than ten thousand centrifuges running. The Obama administration has managed to curtail Iranian centrifuges. If the deal goes into effect the number of centrifuges in use will plunge and Iran will be allowed to run only old inefficient centrifuges. The Obama administration was also able to get the Russians and the Chinese on board with the sanctions, with the negotiations, and with the final deal. The Bush administration was able to do none of this.
So during the entire Bush period the Iranians had a free hand which they used to massively expand their nuclear program. Yet nothing was said about this by conservatives, either at the time or since. The Obama administration managed to massively strengthen their hand by working with everyone to get stringent sanctions in place. They then turned those sanctions into an agreement that has been signed off on by Russia, China, apparently Iran, the Europeans, and most of the rest of the world. It hangs by a thread in the US because of united opposition by Republicans. If they weren't operating in lock step then a few Democratic defections by the likes of Schumer wouldn't matter.
The second argument is that the agreement can be fixed to make it better once it has been rejected, typically "on day one". This too is ridiculous. One of the most important parties to the current sanctions regime is Russia. Russia is a nuclear power and has a long border with Iran. And we are currently in a fight with Russia over Ukraine. And that fight has resulted in serious sanctions being imposed on Russia. Russia has a lot of reasons to want to bail on the Iranian sanctions. If the US rejects the deal they have no reason to stick with the sanctions and less than no reason to be interested in even tougher sanctions. To a lesser extent the same is true with China. We are not sanctioning them but they do a lot of business with Iran and would like to do more (i.e. buy Oil). A US rejection might cause China to dial back on their participation. And they too would have less than no interest in going along with even tougher sanctions. Without Russia and China the whole sanctions regime falls apart.
The GOP response to this is to suggest the US go it alone. We would impose even more draconian sanctions while the rest of the world would drop sanctions and normalize their relations with Iran. We tried what eventually turned into stand alone sanctions against Cuba for over 50 years. It didn't work. It would work even less effectively with Iran. They are farther away and have many more options for getting around unilateral US sanctions than Cuba has had.
Then there's the $150 billion we would be "giving Iran". Except it's not our money. It's Iran's money. And we don't have possession of it. It's in banks around the world. So as soon as the rest of the world decides that the sanctions can come down they will direct their banks to free up the money and it will revert to Iranian control.
This whole argument is just an example of a larger problem. The "W" Bush administration adopted a "go it alone" foreign policy. The results they had with the Iranian nuclear program were typical of their overall level of success. The Obama administration has used a cooperative approach that has resulted in strong sanctions against both Iran and Russia. The strength of these sanctions rests on the fact that they are international sanctions enforced by many countries instead of go it alone sanctions like the ones we unsuccessfully used against Cuba. The current crop of GOP candidates seems for the most part to follow the "W" camp. I expect they would have no more success with a "W" style approach than the actual "W" did.
The US military is weak and Cut Foreign Aid
I am lumping these two ideas together because they both flow from ignorance. The US spends more money on its military than any other country and it does so by a large margin. We have by far the most powerful military in the world and it is extremely expensive. Yet Republicans want to grow it. And by "grow" I mean spend more money. What's going on here? There is a legitimate argument that we don't have enough men and women in uniform. I think the argument is weak but assume it is correct for a moment. What's going on? The bulk of our military budget goes to contractors mostly to buy expensive equipment not to pay for soldiers. A lot of this is wasteful spending. But it is also pork. And pork is a great source of campaign contributions.
If we cut waste we could cut the military budget while increasing troop levels. But we aren't going to do that even though, like closing loopholes, it is the fiscally responsible thing to do. So we buy tanks we don't need. We buy jet planes we don't need. We buy all kinds of very expensive high tech gadgets we don't need because some defense contractor makes a pile of money on the contract. And some of that pile of money gets recycled as campaign contributions. The Pentagon budget is yet another place where conservatives talk small government and fiscal responsibility but do big government and fiscal irresponsibility.
Foreign Aid is another long standing GOP bugaboo. Most conservative voters think the foreign aid budget is about ten times larger than it actually is and they have a very distorted idea of what it is spent on. Very little of our "foreign aid" is actual general aid to the needy and deserving. Mostly it is some kind of payoff or another. We give lots of money to Israel just because. Then we give lots of money to Egypt to encourage them to not invade Israel. We give Pakistan lots of money as a bribe so that we can get military supplies into Afghanistan. We give lots of money to Afghanistan so they won't go Taliban. And so it goes. If you subtract these kinds of bribes and sweet heart deals out there is almost nothing left. So even if the rest is badly spent, which mostly it is not, then there's not much to fight over. But the GOP continues to tilt at the Foreign Aid windmill because they have convinced their base that big bad things are happening there.
Executive orders
Pretty much every candidate promised to rescind all of the Obama executive orders on day one. That is pretty idiotic. Are there absolutely no Obama executive orders that are a good idea? This is actually part of a larger conservative trope called "executive overreach". The idea is that Obama has wildly exceeded his authority and is an "imperial president". Other than rhetoric there is absolutely no evidence to support this.
And actually the concept of an imperial presidency was firmly rooted in the "W" Bush presidency. Cheney and his group came up with this wild theory. The President is "Commander in Chief" of the military. This is normally interpreted to mean that he is a super-general that outranks everyone else in the military. That means he can order any soldier around, regardless of the soldier's rank, because he outranks all of them. But this only applies to the military. The Cheney interpretation is that the President in his "Commander in Chief" role has unlimited power to protect the "national security" and, since there is always some kind of handy national security threat around, and since everything impacts national security sooner or later, he can do whatever he wants whenever he wants to.
So the Bush people did a lot of things that were clearly unconstitutional and the courts caught them out several times. But somehow it is not the Bush administration but the Obama administration that is out of control. So far the courts, including the conservatives on the Supreme Court, have blessed Obama administration executive orders. And the Bush administration issued a raft of executive orders without a peep from conservatives in the GOP. But, since the Obama administration has issued a number of executive orders that conservatives don't like, his must be examples of executive overreach.
And then there's the fact that most people don't understand executive orders. Congress passes laws. In this modern very complex world laws don't cover everything. So the laws direct the appropriate executive branches to issue regulations covering implementation details. These laws are the actual source of most federal regulations. If GOP legislators were serious about reining in regulations they should change laws and remove executive discretion. In any case, executive orders are just part of the implementation process. In fact they are often absolutely necessary. Vowing to repeal all executive orders in mindless stupidity.
And then there are the many promises GOP candidates have made to do this or that "on day one". Many of these things can not be achieved without passing laws. The legislative branch is the "passing laws" branch. So in many cases these promises, should an attempt be made to fulfill them, are classic examples of the very executive overreach that these same candidates claim to be so opposed to. And, should they be successful, their actions could be fairly characterized as the very same "imperial presidency" they claim to abhor. This is just another example of hypocrisy in action.
Enough
There's more I could go into. And then there are many subjects that were not touched in the debate. But I think all of us have had enough so I will leave it there.
Let me conclude by observing a common thread through all of this. Politicians striving to get their message out over-simplify. That's an important thing and not necessarily a bad thing. But in example after example I see simplification to the point where there is literally nothing left. Some problems are actually simple when you get down to their core. But many are not.
As I have laid out above, the Iran nuclear deal is an example of necessary complexity. And more generally, the middle east is an extremely complicated place right now. In conflict after conflict we find the players lining up in ways that are specific only to that conflict. We find ourselves on the opposite side from Iran in Syria but have common cause with them with respect to ISIS. We would like to support the Baghdad government in Iraq but we would also like to support the Kurds. But Baghdad hates the Kurds as do the Turks. Yet the Kurds are the most effective group, perhaps the only effective fighting group, that is actively opposing ISIS. I could keep going with Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., pointing out where they can be found on one side in one conflict and on the other side in a different one. Yet there is absolutely no acknowledgment of the necessary complexity this engenders by GOP candidates when they are talking about middle east issues.
The same is true with immigration, the budget, health care, abortion, you name it. Getting policies right in these areas involves acknowledging the complexities involved and accounting for them. The poster child for this kind of thinking is regulation. They are all against it all the time, or so they say. I devoted a post to the subject that you can find at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/05/regulations.html. I can summarize the argument in a sentence or so. There are good regulations and bad regulations. The trick is to keep the good (and maybe add some more where they are needed) and fix or eliminate the bad. And, of course, the devil is in the details.
Yet you will be hard pressed to find anyone on the GOP side articulating the idea that an issue is complex and that a complex solution is required. All issues are simple and mostly can be fixed by shouting simple slogans loudly and frequently. I recently devoted a post to The Donald (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-donald.html). But in a nutshell, The Donald embodies this "shout simple solutions backed up by absolutely nothing loudly and often" concept better than any of the others. And he's leading in the polls by a wide margin so he must be doing something right. The Donald also frequently articulates ideas that directly contradict others of his ideas but that doesn't detract from his popularity either. Given the kind of thinking that characterizes the modern Republican party he deserves his lead. He's just doing what the other guys are. Only he's doing it bigger and better.
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