By Liberty Report Staff
Ron Paul's segment begins at the 2min mark:
Senator Bernie Sanders wants to cap the amount of assets that big financial institutions hold. But how does Sanders, or government, or anyone know how big a company should be? Such laws would be totally arbitrary, would not prevent financial crises and bailouts, and would leave the root of our broken monetary system in place. Ron Paul discusses on today's Liberty Report.
The International Court of Justice, a UN body tasked with settling disputes, has ruled that parts of new US sanctions on Iran are illegal. Specifically, sanctions on humanitarian items, food, and spare parts for civil aviation. Washington has condemned the unanimous ruling and vows to ignore it.
By Liberty Report Staff
Annoyed that the Saudis refuse to increase oil production, President Trump yesterday threatened Saudi Arabia that US military protection could be withdrawn and that the Saudi regime wouldn't last without it. Is the US military a mercenary force? And what's really behind spiking oil prices?
By Ryan McMaken
Even before Trump was elected it was already clear that no one should expect him to cut spending and rein in annual budget deficits. Trump has always been about buying votes with more and more spending. Moreover, there is no evidence that Republicans are any more fiscally restrained than Democrats when in control of the federal government. After all, when the Republicans controlled both the White House and all of Congress, from 2003 to 2007, government spending grew at one of the fastest rates in decades. With the end of fiscal year 2018, and with Trump's support for a historically large spending hike for defense-related departments, we're getting a sense of Trump's fondness for spending as president. While true that, so far, Trump doesn't represent a sizable departure from the spending trends of the previous administration, he nevertheless is confirming for us that budget cutting is not part of his agenda. Moreover, the spending increases we're seeing now are coming in a boom period. As the huge spending increase of 2009 has shown — spending that can be blamed on both Bush and Obama — we should expect big spending increases in times of recession. 2018: A Big Year for Government Spending Fiscal year 2018 ended last month, and during that period, the US government added more than a trillion dollars to the national debt. As of October 1, 2018, the first day of the 2019 fiscal year, the Federal government's debt outstanding totaled $21,606,948,383,546.28. On year earlier, the total was $20,244,900,016,053.51. At 21 trillion dollars, the US national debt is, of course, at the highest level it's ever been.
Not surprisingly, given generally stable federal receipts, debt is being driven by federal spending which is continuing at a rapid pace.
In the 2018 fiscal year, the OMB estimates federal spending topped $4.17 trillion, which is an increase of 4.8 percent over fiscal year 2017. That's the second-highest growth rate in the past five years, and the third highest in the past decade. 2018's spending growth rate also was larger than the growth rate recorded for seven out of eight budgets signed by Democrat Bill Clinton. If the OMB's estimates for 2019 turn out to be true, spending growth will hit a ten-year high of 5.6 percent in 2019.
Read the rest of this article at The Mises Institute.
As often happens, the US trade war with China is heating up and spilling over to the military realm. Recent skirmishes in the South China Sea are just part of the increasing militarization of the dispute. How hot will the dispute get? Is there anyone in the Trump Administration who will cool it down?
By Ron Paul
This week we witnessed the horrible spectacle of Nikki Haley, President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, joining a protest outside the UN building and calling for the people of Venezuela to overthrow their government. “We are going to fight for Venezuela,” she shouted through a megaphone, “we are going to continue doing it until Maduro is gone.” This is the neocon mindset: that somehow the US has the authority to tell the rest of the world how to live and who may hold political power regardless of elections. After more than a year of Washington being crippled by evidence-free claims that the Russians have influenced our elections, we have a senior US Administration official openly calling for the overturning of elections overseas. Imagine if President Putin’s national security advisor had grabbed a megaphone in New York and called for the people of the United States to overthrow their government by force! At the UN, Venezuela’s President Maduro accused the Western media of hyping up the crisis in his country to push the cause for another “humanitarian intervention.” Some may laugh at such a claim, but recent history shows that interventionists lie to push regime change, and the media goes right along with the lies. Remember the lies about Gaddafi giving Viagra to his troops to help them rape their way through Libya? Remember the “babies thrown from incubators” and “mobile chemical labs” in Iraq? Judging from past practice, there is probably some truth in Maduro’s claims. We know socialism does not work. It is an economic system based on the use of force rather than economic freedom of choice. But while many Americans seem to be in a panic over the failures of socialism in Venezuela, they don’t seem all that concerned that right here at home President Trump just signed a massive $1.3 trillion dollar spending bill that delivers socialism on a scale that Venezuelans couldn’t even imagine. In fact this one spending bill is three times Venezuela’s entire gross domestic product! Did I miss all the Americans protesting this warfare-welfare state socialism? Why all the neocon and humanitarian-interventionist “concern” for the people of Venezuela? One clue might be the fact that Venezuela happens to be sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves. More even than Saudi Arabia. There are plenty of countries pursuing dumb economic policies that result in plenty of suffering, but Nikki and the neocons are nowhere to be found when it comes to “concern” for these people. Might it be a bit about this oil? Don’t believe this feigned interest in helping the Venezuelan people. If Washington really cared about Venezuelans they would not be plotting regime change for the country, considering that each such “liberation” elsewhere has ended with the people being worse off than before! No, if Washington – and the rest of us - really cared about Venezuelans we would demand an end to the terrible US economic sanctions on the country - which only make a bad situation worse - and would push for far more engagement and trade. And maybe we’d even lead by example, by opposing the real, existing socialism here at home before seeking socialist monsters to slay abroad.
The US Secretary of the Interior told an audience in Pennsylvania recently that one option open to the US to slow Russian energy exports is a naval blockade. The Russian senate replied by stating the obvious: such a move would be an act of war. Why the threats and bluster? What's the endgame?
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