There Ain't No Such Thing As A New Ron Paul: Incoming Freshman Thomas Massie (Endorsed by Paul) Soft on Military Cuts
Newly elected Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie says something a little disturbing to this Ron Paul fan about how he intends to handle the "fiscal cliff" issue as he enters Congress. He'll be in earlier than other incoming freshmen, since he also won a special election to replace a retired Rep. Geoff Davis.
From an article in Gannett's Cincinnati.com site, after Massie says he's for sequestration and against letting tax cuts expire, except for the "payroll tax holiday" for Social Security, since he argues that you can't keep promising the same Social Security benefits while putting less money into it:
Massie doesn't believe the sequestration cuts go far enough.
Congress needs to cut $1 trillion to cover the federal budget deficit. He supports U.S. Sen. Rand Paul's budget plan that cuts non-military spending back to 2008 levels, including cutting foreign aid from $25 billion to $5 billion.
"I'm for the automatic spending cuts," Massie said. "I support the Republican position that there should be more distributed toward the domestic spending–those cuts should be–instead of military spending, but if we can't come to some bipartisan agreement on redistributing these cuts, than we already have an agreement. Republicans and Democrats agreed to this as part of raising the debt ceiling. The only thing that's changed is that Jan. 2 is almost here, and now they're faced with actually doing what they said."
There is, of course, no good reason on fiscal conservative, Constitutionalist, small government grounds to privilege military spending over domestic spending, and Ron "blowback" Paul would never say such a thing.
The Paul movement has had to give its support and enthusiasm to politicians who are not Ron Paul as he retires; but as I noted in my book Ron Paul's Revolution, right now on the political scene there is, alas, no one as Ron Paul as Ron Paul.
Mike Riggs profiled Massie here back in March.
