Ron Paul told Morning Joe this morning that he is "heartened" to see that the Debt Commission embraced his and Barney Frank's call to at least look into spending cuts in the military but even that does not totally reassure him because you "need to change the policy, you can't quit one weapons system and think that's a solution if you still want to be policemen of the world."
Said Joe Scarborough: "Republicans who claim to be small deficit hawks want to stay in Afghanistan for another decade, want to continue everyone of these weapons systems. We can't balance this budget. We can't sustain ourselves fiscally if we keep spending money on these two wars."
Meanwhile, Paul thinks you could take $10 billion from building embassies and bases and but $5 billion of it into medical or unemployment benefits "to tide us over" and "put $5 billion against the deficit."
Paul went on to say that he no longer thinks it's true that we are dumping this debt on our children and our grandchildren: "I don' t think that's true anymore, it's here, we're in the midst of the crisis."
And this on raising the debt ceiling:
If the Fed couldn't monetize debt and the debt limit couldn't be increased, [Congress] would say oh my goodness, we're going to have to change policies, maybe we shouldn't be the policemen of the world, maybe we shouldn't be the endless welfare state. And it will come to an end. And when it ends with the dollar crisis everybody loses...and then there's political chaos. We're not immune to that. This idea that we won't suffer the same consequences of other nations...right now we bail out everybody!..But it all depends on trust in the dollar. One day people will wake up and say 'why are we trusting this counterfeit machine.' We're the biggest counterfeit machine in the history of the world.
At which point Mika's head exploded. Watch below. The segment started with Joe declaring the country may finally be coming around to Paul's way of thinking.
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