I watched the first half of last night’s Democratic debate.  I have the balance TiVo-ed and I’ll watch it in the next day or two, but I thought I would go ahead and report on what I’ve seen thus far.  Let’s just say that aside from discussion on Iraq, there were two things that stood out: the Dems are going to make everything mandatory and I didn’t hear one person even suggest lowering taxes.

A good bit of time was spent on Iraq.  I’ll be up front - I don’t think there are any good solutions going forward.  All proposals are simply varying degrees of bad.  There was heaping criticism of Bush - much of it warranted - but some on stage who voted to authorize the war got hammered by others when they tried too hard to say the war was Bush’s alone.  Edwards in particular called out Obama and Clinton for not being vocal about their votes against the recent troop funding bill.  I paused the debate at that point and told my wife that he just stepped in “it” because Obama was going to rip him for voting for the war.  And sure enough, Obama complied and told Edwards he was four and a half years too late in his opinion of the war.

Bill Richardson is one person who I thought I was going to like before I heard him campaign.  But his performance during the debate was only slightly better than his disastrous performance on Meet the Press.  Richardson favors a total pull out of Iraq by year’s end.  Wolf Blitzer asked Richardson what he would do if his plan resulted in genocide like what is happening in Darfur.  Richardson either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer because, despite repeated prodding, he simply talked around the question.  I find that particularly damning because it gives the impression that he hasn’t thought through the consequences of what would be a major decision.

There were quite a few questions about health care.  All on stage (at least all who were permitted to speak - more on that later) favor some form of government run health care.  At least Edwards is honest that his plan will require higher taxes.  Any politician who claims that a program that will be as expensive as a government health care plan can be funded off of cost savings is selling you snake oil.  The savings will never be as large as predicted and costs will never be as low.  I kept getting this feeling that our country will start looking more like communist Russia with the government running our lives.

One of the measures that more than one candidate suggested to “lower” health care costs was to either restrict profits that drug companies can make or have the government take over that process.  Look folks, the reason that the U.S. is the leader in the pharmaceutical industry is that those companies can profit from their work.  Those companies put ridiculous amounts of money at risk and they expect and deserve some reward when their research pans out.  Pfizer, for example, invested $1 billion into the drug Torcetrapib.  The drug did not work as expected and they had to abandon it.  That is $1 billion down the drain.  If companies like Pfizer can’t make some money on the drugs that work then they will simply quit investing in new drug development because there is no potential reward.  The plans proffered by the Dems might or might not lower short term drug costs, but they would most definitely hurt long term improvements in that field.

The economic foolishness didn’t end with health care.  The candidates were asked what they should do to lower gas prices.  Only one person on stage gave an accurate, honest answer.  Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel flatly said that the price of gas is far lower than its true cost because there is another $4 per gallon that is spent by the government through military and other means to keep the end cost to consumers low.  Other gave answers that left much to be desired.  One popular response was to end subsidies to oil companies.  I couldn’t agree more, but let’s see what effect that would have.  The price that consumers paid at the pump would increase because the oil companies would have to make up for that lost revenue through higher prices.  That would be fine if the government lowered taxes by the amount of the subsidy, but I highly doubt any on stage last night would do just that and certainly none of the mentioned it.  There were other silly ideas mentioned, most of which would not lower the price of gas, but would play to the economic naivete of many Americans.

Thus far the debate has been an eye opening experience.  I knew that based on the policies of the Democratic candidates that I would not be able to bring myself to vote for one of them, but actually watching them articulate their plans scared the hell out of me.  The amount that they want to expand the role of the federal government in our lives is shocking.

I know that Obama, Clinton, and Edwards are the front runners, but the moderator focused WAY too much on those candidates.  It gives me the impression that the news networks (CNN in this case) are picking the nominees of each party for us because they give the other candidates very little time to express their views.  How are viewers supposed to choose the best of who’s on stage if we only get to hear from the ones who’ve raised the most cash so far?

More on the second half later…

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This entry was posted by Brian on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 5:25 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.