Ron Paul Drives the Republican Debate Agenda

Ron Paul stood alone in his positions on economic and foreign policy issues during the presidential election cycle of 2008. Many establishment candidates — and even debate moderators — openly mocked his views; many even laughed at him. But as national and world events have proven Ron Paul’s economic and foreign policy predictions correct, other GOP presidential aspirants are now echoing his statements.


Ignoring Ron Paul

In 2007 and 2008, all of the establishment candidates for the Republican nomination asserted that the economy was on a sound footing.

Asked about the status of the economy in an October 9, 2007 presidential debate by CNBC commentator Maria Bartiromo, Kentucky Senator Fred Thompson, a former movie actor who had just entered the presidential race as the presumed frontrunner, said: “I think there is no reason to believe that we’re headed for a recession. We’re enjoying 22 quarters of successive economic growth.... I think if you look at the short term, it’s rosy. I think if you look at a 10-year projection, it’s rosy.” Fellow frontrunner and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney followed, agreeing with Thompson. Although Romney acknowledged in a nod to the local audience that “Michigan is undergoing a one-state recession,” he added that “the rest of the country is growing and seeing low levels of unemployment.”

Only Ron Paul claimed during that debate that the recession was already emerging and would only get worse: “Today, this country is in the middle of a recession for a lot of people. Michigan knows about it. Poor people know about it. The middle class knows about it. Wall Street doesn’t know about it.

Washington, D.C., doesn’t know about it. But it’s because of the monetary system and the excessive spending. As long as we live beyond our means we are destined to live beneath our means.”

As of January 10, 2008, the Republican Party’s other frontrunner and eventual nominee, John McCain, was still denying the looming recession. John McCain, asked about the strength of the economy in a South Carolina debate, replied, “I don’t believe we’re headed into a recession. I believe the fundamentals of this economy are strong, and I believe they will remain strong.”

Again, Ron Paul replied to McCain in the same debate that the looming recession was a fait accompli. Paul said, “To solve this problem, you have to understand why we’re in a recession. I believe we’re in a recession. I think it’s going to get a lot worse if we continue to do the wrong things that we’ve done in the past, that it’s going to be delayed, just as what happened in the Depression. But you have to understand that over-stimulation in an economy by artificially low interest rates by the Federal Reserve is the source of the recession. The recession has been predictable.”

Ron Paul Dominates

History has demonstrated that Ron Paul was completely right in his economic analysis, based upon his study of the free-market, Austrian-school economics, while all the GOP frontrunners of 2008 were completely wrong. Indeed, as Ron Paul warned, the Federal Reserve has continued to suppress interest rates to zero up until this day (just as the Federal Reserve did to a lesser degree during the Great Depression), and the economy has not experienced the typical 3-5 percent annual GDP growth Americans have been accustomed to during most economic recoveries...
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