Cutting to the quick
In response to Muppet Pants’ colorful but reasonably good analysis of what will happen in the Republican Primary post-Iowa, jasencomstock writes:
This makes me wonder why most people don’t think Paul is electable. I know why I don’t like him, and I thought I knew why most people don’t like him. but your reason is different.
I don’t think Paul is electable because he wants to cut things that people want their tax dollars to pay for. Everybody is against waste, fraud, and abuse, though identifying sufficiently sizeable pockets of waste, fraud, or abuse to make a dent in a trillion dollar budget is awfully difficult. Everybody is worried about “entitlement spending,” until we think about what exactly constitutes an “entitlement.” The big ones, Social Security and Medicare, are so popular that it’s hard to tweak them—let alone cut them. People want reasonable restrictions on the kind of entitlements designed to help low-income families—but when they discuss details of the types of restrictions they want, they generally learn that those restrictions (or most stringent restrictions) are already in place.
The Republicans don’t want to let anybody paint them as soft on big government during the race. And, generally, we don’t like our government to be that big. But if you go around talking about cutting the things that Ron Paul wants to cut, it’s going to be hard to lift your support above about 10%.
