[Tchocky]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

Where does Obama stand IYO?

Disappointing overall. A combination of believing that he could split the Congressional difference between a mostly cohesive Democratic Party and increasingly reactionary GOP that wasn't interested at all - and an overestimation of the power of the executive in such an ideologically divided government. I suppose that the ascendancy of the Tea Party in the House wasn't to be foreseen when he was campaigning, this combined with the heightened expectations (everybody's fault I guess) after inauguration made the 2010 House election results a real nasty surprise.

Obama has also kept some of the worst facets of the Bush Administration in practice. This one is interesting to me because of the difference between the cack-handed way the previous administration handled the so-called War On Terror, and the results that have been shown under this administration. Would there have been so much uproar about civil liberties etc had people like Bin-Laden and Awlaki been killed in May-October 2003? I'm not sure. Instead we had 6 years of politicised rubbish. I'd like to think I'd still be aghast at extralegal activities, but I can't deny that it was a lot easier to criticise Bush, the guy made it easy.

3 page bills sure beat 1900 page bills full of pork that no one reads but all vote on and pass.

I think Cain was trying to appeal to the sentiment in your post. Nobody likes pork* or legislators who rubberstamp bills, but Cain's remarks show that he either doesn't understand that governing a nation of 300+million prople can be complex, or that he does understand it but believes his prospective voters don't or don't wish to.

*Regarding the pork - look how many Representatives campaigned on no-earmarks etc, but end up pleading their case once their own districts come into play? I'm not saying they're wrong to try and get money into their district, after all many earmarks and supplementary requests can be very beneficial to strugglin economies, which is exactly one of the things that government can do to help. I just think that the pledges were ill-thought through at best, and abusive at worst.

What standard should we go instead of gold? Rice?

Stay on fiat money. Tying a currency to a precious metal only ensures that inflationary and deflationary dangers are now random products of commodities markets. Instead of having $50 bill that you know will buy $50 worth of goods adjusted for normal market-economy-based rates of inflatio/deflation, you have a $50 bill that will buy as many goods as the government mandated equivalent value of gold will buy. All you're doing is tying the value of your money to either the random value of a random metal, or what the government thinks you should be able to buy. And the second one runs into an awful lot of trouble with the first.

Currencies are volatile enough in their current stable state, if you get me.