I like Ron Paul. Who Knew?
Since I know you are all at least aware of Ron Paul, I wanted to share with you this December 16th, anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. And, just like last Tea Party, a bunch of crazy Americans have gotten together in (near) anonymity to throw away millions of dollars.
These links lead to (near) real-time graph sites which suck data directly from the same data feed as the ticker at RonPaul2008.com. If you're not interested in the man with two first names, then go simply for the graphs. They can be used for studies in sociology or something, I don't know. If you are interested in the man with two names, then donate some of your Federal Reserve Notes while they still have value.
The first link has more graphs comparing today (16th December) to the last money bomb day (5th November). The second link has prettier graphs.
These links lead to (near) real-time graph sites which suck data directly from the same data feed as the ticker at RonPaul2008.com. If you're not interested in the man with two first names, then go simply for the graphs. They can be used for studies in sociology or something, I don't know. If you are interested in the man with two names, then donate some of your Federal Reserve Notes while they still have value.
The first link has more graphs comparing today (16th December) to the last money bomb day (5th November). The second link has prettier graphs.
Comments
Vote Obama!
These donations should be going to worthwhile charities, not wasteful political wrangling.
I have some Ron Paul questions I was hoping you could answer. I already stated my opinions about free trade before, and I want to know more about the basis behind Ron Paul's stance against free trade. I hate being one of those people who takes a strong stance on one side of an issue without really bothering to understand the other side, so I'm trying to correct that.
I went to his website and clicked the issue American Independence and Sovereignty. I'll just quote what he says on his site.
Basically, he makes all these statements about how America is getting bitch slapped around for free trade, which I bolded.
These all sound interesting, because I haven't heard about them. You've said before that you like his economic policy. Do you know anything about these statements? A lot of them are Google-able, and I'm doing that now, but I was wondering if you had anything to add?
I'm legitimately curious on this. Of course, anyone else who knows anything is free to comment too.
Seriously though, EU bad? Good? I can't tell if that's sarcasm or sincerity after the ellipses.
Also Carter, I once heard that if you're a Republican before 35 you have no heart, if you're a Democrat after 35 you have no brain.
Let’s not forget the UN. It wants to impose a direct tax on us. I successfully fought this move in Congress last year
So I started out by going to [url=htt[://www.govtrack.us]GovTrack[/url] and finding out exactly where THEY get their information from. Turns out their main source is Thomas, the section of the Library of Congress' website dealing with transparency of the Congress. There I searched for things like "United Nations Tax", and...well...I think that's all I searched for. That yielded a long and imposing list of incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo so I did what felt comfortable to me and searched for Ron Paul's home page on the House website. There it was a simple matter of searching through the list of his press releases (specifically the ones in 2006) until I found the one with the right terminology. "Congress Passes Paul Provision to Reject UN Taxes" seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. A quick perusal of that article expanded on exactly what that meant. Dr. Paul reiterated that he's against the United Nations encroaching on our national sovereignty and gave me access to new terms like "Tobin Tax" and "airline tax".
Well, I was afraid that a Google search for those terms would yield conspiracy theories and Wikipedia articles, and according to Ron Paul in the above press release the United Nations actually had information about this stuff on their own website, so I went right to the source. A very quick search on the UN Website for Tobin Tax yielded this excerpt from Africa Recovery (now known as Africa Renewal), the magazine produced by the Africa Renewal UN Programme. That particular page is about proposed methods to give more aid to poorer African countries, mostly taxes that member countries would collect and then pay to the UN (including Tobin Taxes - taxes paid on currency exchanges and Carbon Taxes - proposed to be paid at the pump (yet another tax to increase the price of gasoline (I love embedded parenthesis))). This general distribution by the 59th session titled "Innovative sources of financing for development" in fact makes mention of more than just Tobin and Carbon taxes, but things as varied as Internet Taxes, Brain Drain Taxes, and Fishing Taxes as possible sources of revenue.
So, these things exist. Ron Paul's not swinging at monsters that aren't there. Which brings me to the meat of this post (the above wasn't meaty?). I know, I know, cries of "TL;DR" resound. Please, I'm almost done. The press release I linked to more than a paragraph ago was released itself on June 15th 2006 and said that the Bill itself passed the House "last week". Having an aversion to any form of mathematics less complicated than trigonometry I just searched http://thomas.loc.gov for anything that went through the House in June of 2006 called "Foreign Actions". It came up with House Resolution 5522 (109th Congress) (link leads to govtrack, because the files fetched by a search on the Thomas website are stored in some temp folder and deleted after a few minutes.) What did Ron Paul have to do with this? Scroll down to SEC. 502. That's his contribution. It's a tiny line, just a sentence, but it does what he says. So what happened to the entire Foreign Actions Appropriations Bill of the 109th Congress? Well it passed the House and was moved on to the Senate where it was never voted on. Every two years Congress turns over and they remove from their books any unfinished business. This was one of those bills. So yeah, that's it. Ron Paul doesn't like the UN collecting taxes.
The WTO has forced Congress to change our laws
It seems that the WTO says the US is giving some unfair trade advantages to chemical and drug manufacturers under some law called the Byrd amendment. Some foreign companies are required to pay duties before bringing their chemicals into the US, for fear of dumping techniques (dumping in the economic sense means selling mass numbers of a product in an economy well below market price). However, US chemical manufacturers are allowed to collect parts of these duties. The WTO doesn't like this, and they've also been pressuring the US to change its tax laws accordingly, under threats of imposing heavy duties on US exports to the EU.
I'm not sure if this is specifically what he's referencing, but it could be part of it. We Americans can be dicks at times, so we're probably pissing off the WTO in other areas as well.
I'm working on the NAFTA one, but as you said John, it's hard to find stuff that's not conspiracy-oriented.
*wonders if anyone will get the reference*
We kinda tried that over here. FAILED.