November’s unenviable choices

Both candidates bad on spending

By Andrew P. Napolitano

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We are in terrible straits this presidential election. We have a choice between a president who has posed more of a danger to personal freedom than any in the past 150 years and a Republican team that wants to return to Bush-style big government.
President Barack Obama has begun to show his hand at private fundraisers and in unscripted comments during his campaign. The essence of his revelations is dark. His vision of a shared prosperity should frighten everyone who believes in freedom because it is obvious that the president doesn’t. He believes the federal government somehow possesses power from some source other than the Constitution that enables it to take from the rich and give to the poor. He calls this “a new vision of an America in which prosperity is shared,” and he declared, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Ryan vs. Romney on Pentagon Spending

 by Christopher Preble

A Politico article on Paul Ryan’s views on the Pentagon’s budget concludes:

A key question for the coming weeks will be how Ryan, one of Washington’s biggest budget wonks, interprets and explains the Romney campaign’s positions on defense spending. That could be a clue as to how realistic he actually believes they are.

I certainly hope so.
I was among the first to comment on Romney’s plan to spend at least four percent of GDP on the Pentagon’s base budget (war costs would be extra), and have revisited the question several times since. I have separately looked at Paul Ryan’s budget (here and here), and pointed out how military spending increased under his plan, just not as much as Romney.