It's the economics, stupid
Why was a vote for John McCain most unthinkable? Because he was essentially running on a pledge to plunge America into a depression.
What would be most ruinous about a Ron Paul presidency? He follows the Austrian economic school.
Nothing is like the economy. Think of the set of utterly unthinkable policies it would take to mirror effects of a seriously down economy. "Colleges shall enroll 20% fewer students from the working class." "The retirement savings of 10% of people in thier 50s, chosen by national lottery, shall be confiscated." "5% percent of all currently employed persons shall be fired." A 25% federal home-sales tax might have had less negative effect on housing than what the economy rolled off.
So when a candidate runs on policies that would devastate the economy I hear it roughly as if they announced an intention to bomb California from space.
So, about Rick Santorum...
His stances on sodomy and contraception and such are dreadful but familiar political ground. I saw him interviewed on CNN and all the interviewer wanted to talk about was religious right social issue stuff. You would never guess that Santorum was also running on essentially bombing California from space!
Santorum is running on:
1) Cutting 5 trillion dollars from the budget over 5 years. (Some mix of discretionary spending and entitlement costs) This really is the same as a program to just shoot people in the streets at random. We would get for-real deflation. Economic collapse.
But this is treated as just something to talk about. Reporters don't even seem to recognize that Santorum is saying anything extraordinary.
2) This one is a peach... a constitutional amendment limiting the federal budget to 18% of GDP. First, as determined by whom? And how? Do we use last year's GDP? That would mean the government would cut back automatically every time the economy was trying to recover from a recession. Is the idea a ratchet that would make the government and America both eventually vanish? And does Santorum recognize that even if you discard all of Keynsian economics that demand on federal spending stills goes up when the economy goes down? (Even without any attempt to stimulate the economy the costs of medicaid, food stamps and unemployment insurance go up when poverty goes up.)
These proposals are as crazy as if a candidate announced that he was going to force everyone in the country to wear clown wigs and walk backward.
But reporters are agnostic. They treat economics as if it were a candidate's personal religion and it would be somehow rude to press them on it.
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