Mudita Journal

Fred Thompson Releases Substantial Plan to Reduce Federal Spending

January 10, 2008 · Filed under: Politics
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Fred Thompson just became the first and only Republican candidate to produce a detailed and substantial plan to reduce federal spending.

If you’ve not already seen this Thompson interview with Charlie Rose, I recommend it highly. Scroll to 36:18, for example, to hear his sensible — yet all-too-rare — bottom-line analysis on the subject of torture:

And here’s a telling quote from 16:11, in the context of fixing the “No Child Left Behind” fiasco and moving towards voucher programs:

You can’t get away from what has worked for us, in so many different areas, in this country — and that is free people, free markets, and competition, and experimentation. It gets back to the federalism issue.

No pandering. He wants to scale back the federal government’s role in education — and tell states and communities that they need to start taking more responsibility for solving educational problems at the local level (where they’re more likely to actually get solved).

Listen at 41:49 to hear why John Adams is Thompson’s favorite Founding Father, and at 42:48 to hear Thompson explain what it means to be a conservative — and then school Rose on the difference between principles and issues.

I find Thompson’s intelligence and honesty highly refreshing.

Here’s hoping he can pull off a miracle in South Carolina.

UPDATE: No, Ron Paul’s statements that he’ll reduce federal taxes and eliminate most of the federal government — even though I agree about its desirability — don’t qualify as a detailed and substantial plan to reduce federal spending. Plans deal with reality. Paul is promoting what I could only call, today, an unrealizable fantasy.

Posted by Joshua Zader · Trackback URL · Link
  • http://kraorh.livejournal.com/ kraorh

    The “only” Republican? *cough* Ron Paul *cough* *cough*

    Still, he has a hell of a better chance than Paul, and this is encouraging. Of course, then we’d have a President Thompson, making this YouTube adaptation of Galt’s Speech even more prophetic.

  • http://www.zader.com Joshua Zader

    Kraorh,

    Point taken.

    Paul’s heart is in the right place when it comes to cutting government spending, but the only “plan” I see from him (in the Issues section of his site) that directly addresses this subject is this relatively brief statement that he would reduce taxes.

    Laudable as that is, it’s far from a detailed or substantial plan that identifies the specific areas where government spending can and should be trimmed.

    I find Fred’s approach to be much more savvy, more indicative of someone who understands and is willing to work within the system. In other words, it has some chance of actually being enacted.

    So — no, I don’t think Paul’s plan to cut government spending qualifies as both “detailed and substantial” like Fred’s does.

    Joshua

  • http://kraorh.livejournal.com/ kraorh

    Fair enough. Maybe I haven’t spent enough time at his website, but I think you may be right that he doesn’t have as detailed a plan as Thompson. I’m thinking that it may simply be because he’s a lot more “slash and burn” than Thompson. Whereas Thompson would carefully go, program by program, cutting here, eliminating here, scaling back there, etc., Paul would just tear entire departments down altogether, like the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, and so forth. I think there are virtues to both approaches. The latter is more ambitious, but Thompson’s would probably have a better chance of being passed, and even our goal was essentially the same as Paul’s, there’s wisdom in the old cliche that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

    I also seem to remember Paul saying that we could essentially eliminate the Income Tax, and replace it with nothing, if we only scaled back government spending to the levels it was at 10 or 15 years ago. Not as detailed, but we could make it as detailed as we’d like by just picking up the 1997-98 fiscal year budget.

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