Green Party to Tea Party: So what about military spending?

In the nailbiter Colorado U.S. Senate race watched by the nation this week, Green Party candidate Bob Kinsey came in third place, after Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet and Republican Ken Buck. Kinsey pulled down 2.1 percent of the vote, i.e., yays from roughly 36,300 voters. That’s a lot of people. There were four candidates on the ballot running for Senate who drew less votes than Kinsey did.

Blogger Jason Salzman writes that, given the closeness of the election, Kinsey could have acted as a Ralph Nader-style spoiler by drawing Democratic votes from Bennet. In the year of the Tea Party, however, Kinsey’s main platform position would have revolutionized federal spending and should have drawn the attention at least of self-proclaimed fiscal hawks on the right.

From Salzman’s blog:

“My major focus is foreign policy,” Kinsey said. “I want to cut the military budget by 75% and use that money to create jobs. If you include in military spending the drug war, Homeland Security, the CIA, and other agencies, that’s over a trillion dollars a year. The AFSC calculated that you could provide every unemployed person with a $50,000 job [out of the current defense budget] and [just spending what was left over] the U.S. would still spend more on the military than any other country in the world.”

Soon-to-be GOP House Speaker John Boehner is talking a lot about reining in government even though he has yet to mention a program he plans to cut. You can bet his small government plan will come nothing close to the budget-slashing that could stem from a Kinsey plan.

Kinsey told Salzman he was done with running for office but that he’s not done with politics.

“I am 73-years-old,” Kinsey told me when I asked if he’d run again. “Next time around for Senate, I’d be 77. What I plan on doing is trying to get the Green party to get some other good candidates and build a party. I don’t think so. I’ve done it three times, once in the 4th Congressional [2004] and twice for Senate, and I gave people the opportunity to vote against militarism, and I got 35,000 votes.

I don’t have the energy at 77 to do it again, but I will continue to speak out against militarism.”

You want change? Imagine the Tea Party joined with the Green Party in 2012. Of all the states in the Union, that kind of strange bedfellow revolution could happen in Colorado.

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