Concurrent Resolution on the Budget, Fiscal Year 2019--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, this year there will be no budget presented by the Republicans or the Democrats. I think that is a bad idea. I think the government should have a budget. There should be a document that says what we are for, what we are against, and how we are going to spend our money. I think it is particularly important because we are incurring so much debt.

We may remember when Republicans campaigned against enormous spending by President Obama and $1 trillion annual deficits. Now we are faced with enormous spending and $1 trillion annual deficits from Republicans. I think it is important that we have a discussion about this.

Do we have too much debt? Some will say: Well, I have debt for my house, and that is not bad. The country has a lot of debt that they borrow against capital expenditures--things that don't expire. I think there is some truth to that. You can have a manageable amount of debt, particularly if it is against something you are borrowing that doesn't go away. But if you are borrowing money for the grocery store or for your apartment, that might be a bad thing. It will not last very long. You will do it for a month or two, and pretty soon the bank will come calling. So there is a point at which debt is too cumbersome, and there is too much of it.

Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard did a study linking debt to economic growth. They concluded that when a country exceeds 90 percent of their GDP, when their debt is almost equal to their GDP, economic growth begins to slow, and you lose probably 1 to 2 points just because of the burden of the debt. This is all of the debt--what the government owes to the public at large and to themselves. They said that when it exceeds 90 percent, it is a problem. Currently, our debt is at 105 percent; our gross public debt is 105 percent of our GDP.

We now have a national debt of about $21 trillion. Historically, Congress had sort of a cover on this. Congress would try to rein in the debt. There would be a big debate every time we raised the debt ceiling. Congress would have to lift it each time, and there was some punishment out there for those who voted to raise the debt ceiling.

Now we don't raise the debt ceiling by a certain amount because that became embarrassing and limiting, making them come back each time to try to raise the debt ceiling. Now what we do is raise it for a period of time.

Currently, the debt ceiling has been raised, and you can spend as much as you want for a little over a year. We did it, I believe, back in December. For about 1\1/2\ years, the government can borrow as much as they can possibly borrow for that period of time. Basically, there is no limit. The debt ceiling vote has become a meaningless vote because we just raise it for a period of time.

Is the debt a problem? How much interest do we pay on the debt? We pay $300 billion in interest. You say: Well, is that a problem? Paying on the interest crowds out other things that you want from the government. So when people come to my office and say ``I want this from my government,'' I say ``Well, part of the problem is we are paying $300 billion in interest, and part of the problem is we don't have anything to give you because we are borrowing about 25 percent of every dollar we spend.''

Every time the government spends a dollar, 25 percent of that is borrowed. This is on current accounts of things people want. For example, if I were to ask you: Is it a good idea to borrow money to give to your church? People say: Well, my church is a good thing, and I want to give money to my church. But is it a good idea and will it last very long if you go to the bank to borrow 25 percent of every dollar you spend and tithe 25 percent to your church? You say: My church is a good thing. But is it a good thing to borrow that money, and will the bank keep loaning you that money, and are there repercussions to having so much debt?

We have a $300 billion interest payment at about a 2-percent interest rate. The interest rate is manipulated by the Federal Reserve, and there are those who report that the main reason the interest rates are kept low by the Federal Reserve is not necessarily to stimulate economic growth; it is to finance this enormous burden of debt.

What happens when interest rates normalize? Many are predicting they will. As economic growth begins to pick up, you are going to see an acceleration in interest rates. What happens at 5 percent? Can we even manage our debt at 5 percent?

People have looked at what the interest will be, even saying interest rates stay stable, and they say that within about a decade, interest rates will exceed all other payments of the government. The estimate is that within 10 years, interest payments alone will be about $761 billion--greater than national defense, greater than any other area of the budget. Even now, the second biggest item in the budget after defense is interest.

So some say: But we have to finance the military, and the military needs more money. That is why you hear Republicans now no longer caring about the debt. They got more money for the military, but they had to make an unholy alliance with Democrats and give them more for social welfare. So we have guns and butter. Everybody gets what they want-- except for the taxpayer and those of us who care about the debt.

So the debt has exploded now under Republican control. You say: Well, don't we need it for the military?

Well, I think there are some arguments we should probably engage in before we decide that. We have doubled the amount in nominal terms that we spend on the military since 9/11. In real terms, there is about a 36-percent increase in national defense. We spend more on the military than the next eight countries combined.

There is an argument that it isn't necessarily that the budget has not grown enough, but it is that maybe the military mission is too large. Maybe it is not that the budget is too small but that our military mission is too large, that we are at war in too many places around the globe and that we should reassess that.

Many Republicans will say: Well, that is all good and well, but really the culprit is entitlements.

Entitlements are growing at 6 percent--Social Security, Medicare, food stamps. There is truth to that, but watch closely the people who tell you that the problem is entitlements and ask yourself if they are doing anything to fix entitlements. Ask them whether they have put forward a bill on the floor of the Senate to rein in spending and entitlements. Ask them whether they have even cosponsored a bill or whether they are agitating for a bill to rein in entitlements. No. They are petrified of looking at entitlements. So everybody complains about it, and nobody does anything about it.

Everybody says they are for a balanced budget. Yet, when we have a vote in a few minutes on a budget that actually balances in 5 years, consistent with the balanced budget amendment, I think we will get a handful--maybe a dozen or maybe two dozen. But the majority of Republicans will say: Oh my goodness, we could never cut spending. So in the abstract, they are for a balanced budget. They are for a balanced budget amendment. They will all vote for it. They will all come down here. I think we had a unanimous vote a few years ago. Republicans all voted for the balanced budget amendment. Just a month ago in the House, all the people who voted to bust the budget caps, all the people who voted for the extra spending, all these Republicans then voted for the balanced budget amendment, which says you have to balance in 5 years. Typically, when they have brought forward a budget, they have tried to balance it in 10 years and struggled. So they vote for a balanced budget amendment that balances in 5 years, and yet they struggle to come up with a budget that is not fake to balance in 10 years.

We passed a budget last year. It was a Republican budget. I voted against it because I think it had fake cuts in it, and it had fake reporting, and they weren't serious about it. I will give an example. The budget last year that the Republicans passed had about $4 trillion in entitlement savings over 10 years. You say: Well, did they enact any of that? Zero. Do they have any bills to do any entitlement reform? Zero. Did we ever debate and vote on any bills that would have done anything to entitlement spending? No. In fact, in the first year of the Republican budget last year, there was $96 billion--that is a significant savings--all in entitlements, and yet nobody had a bill that even went to committee. There was never a committee vote. There was never a floor vote. No one lifted a finger to do anything about entitlement spending.

So it is a canard for those who say: Well, the real problem is not military; the real problem is not nonmilitary discretionary; the real problem is entitlements. Sure, entitlements are growing faster, but unless we are doing something about it, it is simply saying: Oh, we have to keep spending over here because the real problem is over here, but we are not going to do anything over here, which runs into really the hypocrisy that we face today.

I have often said that the Republican Party is an empty vessel unless we imbue it with value. We say we are against big spending. We say we are against big government. We say we are for devolving power, structure, and money back to the States. Yet the government grows under Democrats and it grows under Republicans.

Democrats are sometimes more honest about wanting to grow government. They will go home and say they are going to make government big enough to put a ham on every table, a chicken in every pot. They are a little bit more honest about it. Republicans go home and say they believe in the free market. They go to the Rotary Club and say: Well, I voted for the balanced budget amendment. But the question is, Why won't they vote for an actual budget that balances? Why won't they vote for a budget that actually is consistent with the balanced budget amendment?

So what I have done is put forward my own budget. It is something I have talked about for several years now. It wasn't originally my idea; others have talked about it. It is called the penny plan. It says that we would cut one penny out of every dollar the Federal Government spends--1 percent. Could we not get to a point where we could actually cut one penny out of every dollar? Isn't there enough waste going on in government that we could actually cut a penny out of every dollar?

Like everything else, people argue the numbers. There is a lot of fake math that goes on around here. Those on the left will say, oh, but this will be cutting $13 trillion, when, in fact, it might not cut any. For example, if we were to freeze government spending for 10 years, the left would say: You have cut spending by $15 trillion because we were going to increase spending by $15 trillion. So it is sort of fake accounting. If we spend $3.2 trillion and next year we spend $32 billion less, that is a 1-percent cut, but the left will say: Oh, no, we were going to increase spending by 6 percent, and so you are really cutting spending by 7 percent. This enormous number comes up, but in reality, we are taking last year's spending--3.2 trillion--and we are going to cut it by 1 percent, $30 billion. If we do that every year for 5 years, the budget balances.

You say: Well, some people might not get all their money. Yes, there would be some programs across government that would get less. I challenge any American to call up my office and present proof that there is not 1 percent waste and fraud in any program going on. I will give an example. The earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit are estimated to have 25 percent fraud. For years, you could get this credit without a Social Security number. You could simply say: My kids and I don't have one. The government would generate a taxpayer ID number for you and give you a refund. This is to the tune of billions of dollars. It is about $100 billion in the EITC, the earned-income tax credit, and the additional child credit--many of those going to people who were in our country illegally and had no Social Security number.

There is waste from top to bottom in government. How would you ever find it? See, many people in this body on both sides of the aisle will say: I am for rooting out waste. Yet you never find waste if you keep giving them more money. If you reward government agencies with more money, you are never going to get less waste.

The penny plan budget I am presenting would cut 1 percent. Does anybody in America think government couldn't do with 1 percent less? Many American families have had a bad year here and there and have to deal with more than 1 percent less. One percent of this enormous government, if it were cut each year, would go a long way toward making us a stronger nation.

People say: Well, what about the military? I think that if the government ran a balanced budget, we would have a stronger and more secure nation. Admiral Mullen said he thought the No. 1 threat to our national security was actually our debt. So there are many realistic people, even high-ranking people in the military, who are saying: You know what, if we want to secure our Nation, we have to make sure that we have a sound economy and that we have a sound government that is not borrowing so much money.

How rapidly do we borrow money? We borrow $1 million every minute--$1 million a minute. In fact, it is a little bit higher than that now. It is about $1.5 million, and the curve over the next 10 years gets to about $2 million a minute. Imagine how fast the money is flying out of here. How big is $1 million? People have said that if you put hundred- dollar bills in your hand, it is about 4 inches high to get to $1 million. We are borrowing $1 million or more every minute.

How would we get to $30 billion? How could we possibly cut $30 billion from the budget? I will give examples of where some of the money is.

Foreign aid is about $30 billion. You say: Well, I want to help the poor people in the world. I am all for you. If you want to give out of your savings to help poor people around the world, all the benefit and all the accolades for being generous, but if you want to borrow money, you won't be able to do it for very long.

Should the U.S. Government borrow? We are going to borrow $1 trillion this year. Should we borrow money to send it to poor countries, or should we borrow money to send armaments to countries? I think it is a big mistake. That is about $30 billion. So if you were to cut 1 percent next year, you could actually cut 1 percent by simply eliminating foreign aid.

How much do we spend in Afghanistan building their roads, building their bridges, building their schools before they blow them up again and then we rebuild them again? We have rebuilt some buildings in Afghanistan seven times. That is nearly $50 billion, which is about a year, year and a half, of the penny plan right there if we were to say: Guess what. We won the Afghan war, and we are not going to stay forever. We have some needs here at home that we are going to take care of and not send all that money to Afghanistan.

Corporate welfare. Rich corporations in our country--I am all for them. If they freely sell something to you and they make money because you like their product and buy it, more power to them, but if they want money from the Federal Government, that is ridiculous. I don't think private business should be getting any money from the Federal Government. It is estimated that corporate welfare is over $100 billion. I know for certain that we could find enough corporate welfare that we could actually, by eliminating corporate welfare, do 1 year of the penny plan.

Waste. Our office alone has found $3 billion in waste.

Interest. It is $300 billion, going up to $760 billion.

There are a lot of areas in our government that we could actually look at and actually adhere to the penny plan and balance our budget. I would like to go through a few items.

If there is anybody in America who believes their government is not wasting their money, I would like to show them a few areas where the government is wasting their money.

My staff recently went to Afghanistan. This is a picture of a luxury hotel that your taxpayer dollars went to build. Your first question might be why your taxpayer dollars would be going to a luxury hotel in some Third World country. It is about 400 feet from our Embassy, and this is what it looks like. They have been building it for 11 years, and it is unfinished. Nothing was done to code, it is falling down, and at this point, the hotel is so dangerous that we have to send our soldiers to patrol it to make sure snipers aren't using the hotel to shoot at our Embassy. So it is not only a waste of $90 million, never having been completed, but it is now a danger to our troops. The talk now is on how they are going to fix the problem.

Does anybody in Washington think we should spend less in Afghanistan? Virtually no one. Both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, can't spend money fast enough in Afghanistan. No one is making a stand and saying: Enough is enough. It is time to announce that we won, and it is time to come home. The money just keeps going, good money after bad--$90 million for a hotel that will never be built.

To add insult to injury, do you know what they are going to do now? They are talking about selling the unfinished hotel. Do you know who they are going to sell it to? Another branch of government. So government built this--U.S. taxpayer dollars built this--and now they are going to sell it to the State Department. Do you know what the State Department is going to do with this luxury hotel in Kabul? They are going to tear it down. So that is $90 million flushed down the toilet.

You can't tell me this waste isn't rotting in our government from top to bottom, and it is never rooted out. Why? Because we never give any agency less money; everybody gets more money. If you are running an agency or business and someone gives you more money, are you more likely to root out waste or less likely to root out waste? The only way they would ever root out waste is if they got a commandment--thou shalt do this--from Congress, from the Senate, to say: Enough is enough. Let's declare victory and come home.

This hotel--$90 million flushed down the toilet. It is now a danger to our troops, and they are going to tear it down. It was never completed.

Also, in Afghanistan, there is brandnew equipment that we send over there that is shredded. They have big, huge industrial shredders. My staff saw them. They found boxes of new equipment--electrical outlet boxes, all kinds of things--being shoved into the shredder. So we buy brandnew equipment, and it is shoved into the shredder. There is $50 million of brandnew, never-used equipment that has been destroyed. This doesn't even count the old stuff we are destroying. There are reports that $7 billion--7 with a ``b,'' billion dollars--of used equipment, such as tanks, humvees, et cetera, has been destroyed. Why? Our allies are so unreliable, we are afraid that if we leave a tank or a humvee there, it might be taken by the opposition and used against us. So we have destroyed $7 billion of it because it is cheaper to destroy it than to load it on planes and bring it over here. That is $7 billion.

The Department of Defense loses $29 million of heavy equipment. What does that mean? They can't find it. It can't be accounted for. They don't know where the equipment is. There is $29 million unaccounted for in heavy equipment.

They tried to establish an Afghan equivalent for the Army Corps of Engineers and lost $20 million of heavy equipment in the process.

There is $28 million worth of uniforms that are missing. Someone got paid. We can't find the uniforms. We can't prove that anyone ever got the uniforms.

Even more troubling than that, there was $700,000 worth of ammunition missing. You would think we could at least keep up with ammunition. Do you think that might be a danger and an insult to our young men and women we send to Afghanistan, that we can't account for where the ammunition is? I think if you can't account for it, there is a decent chance the enemy has your ammunition or rogue elements in the Afghan Government--which could be anyone--have sold it on the black market to make money.

Where does your money go? I want you to realize as Americans where your money is going. They spent $500,000 to study if selfies make you happier. You take selfies of yourself smiling, then you look at them to see if that makes you happier. Now, you may want to do this on your own time, but do you want to spend $500,000 of taxpayer money when we are a trillion dollars short?

This stuff has been going on with the National Science Foundation since the 1970s. William Proxmire was a Senator back in the 1970s--a conservative Democrat or a Democrat of some stripe. He used to do the Golden Fleece Award. Many of them went to the National Science Foundation around 1972. He complained about it for 10 years before he retired. I have been complaining about it for 6 years.

What do the Republicans and Democrats do? They say: Oh, it is science. You wouldn't know, sir, about science. We have to give them more money. You are not smart enough to know there is a lot of science in taking selfies. We could learn something really important, and it is so important for the future of mankind to learn whether selfies of people smiling will help the world in the end.

NIH. Everybody loves the NIH. They can do no wrong. NIH did a $2 million study to see whether, if you are following somebody in the cafeteria line and the guy or woman in front of you sneezes on the food, you are more or less likely to take the food. Really? I think we could have polled the audience on that. I mean, how ridiculous is that? Money like that--particularly when there are things the government needs to do. There is a trillion-dollar deficit, and we spend $2 million studying what your reaction is to people sneezing on the food?

Then $356,000 of your money was spent studying whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. These guys have some great studies. This is, once again, I believe, the National Science Foundation. Hurray for the National Science Foundation. I know I am going to get hate mail from them. They spent $356,000 to study whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. You can't make this stuff up.

The reform I have proposed is that we have a taxpayer advocate on the committee to determine who gets these grants. Do you know what they say? We can't have any nonscientists. They wouldn't understand the science. I want the scientist who did this to come forward and explain why we need this study. There is no point to us spending this money. There could have been something better.

I offered one thing to try to fix it. Put a taxpayer advocate on the committee approving grants, and I think we should have a scientist who isn't in that field. This is sort of behavioral science for Japanese quail, I guess. We need to have somebody who studies diabetes, heart disease, cancer, AIDS--some of the diseases that affect more people. They need to be on the committee because they need to be scratching their heads saying: We can spend it on Japanese quail and their sexual habits or we can spend it on diabetes. The taxpayer advocate could say: We can spend it on Japanese quail or maybe we can reduce the debt. Maybe both could happen. Maybe we could reduce the debt and try to do only better scientific projects.

This one looks like something you really want your government to spend money on. They spent $150,000 to investigate supernatural events in Alaska. They can look at unexplained lights, animals with transformative powers, all kinds of different mythological animals, landscape features that had special powers, and, of course, you wouldn't want to leave out sea monsters. People say: What is $150,000? That is the problem with government. Milton Friedman had it right when he said: ``Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as he spends his own.'' Why does nobody care about the $150,000? Because it wasn't their money to spend. This is the problem with government at-large and why the government is never good at anything they do. They are terribly ineffective because they are spending somebody else's money.

Government should be so small that they have less room to make errors like this. We should devolve most of the power of this place back to the States. That is what our Founding Fathers intended, and we should try to say we are not going to tolerate this kind of stuff.

This $250,000 was spent to send 24 kids from Pakistan to Space Camp and Dollywood. My first question would be: Is there anybody in America who didn't get to go to Dollywood or Space Camp last year? I think when everybody in America has gone, we might consider sending some Pakistani kids. Frankly, there is nothing in the Constitution that says we should be sending Pakistani kids to Dollywood. There is nothing wrong if you want to send your kids from Pakistan to Dollywood--by all means. You should not take taxpayer money to do things like this.

May I ask the Presiding Officer how much time I have remaining of my 45 minutes?

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Mr. PAUL. Thank you.

This is here in Washington, about a mile from here. We call it a ``Streetcar Named Waste.'' Spending $1.6 million to study the expansion of the DC streetcar--and this is a streetcar that nobody is actually riding on. It is a ghost car. Nobody is riding on it. It goes nowhere. It goes about a mile, from nowhere to nowhere, and is much slower than walking. I walked, and I can outwalk it. We thought about filming me in a race with the streetcar to see who wins, me walking or it driving; once again, going back to some technology from hundreds of years ago that still requires wires to be running down the street, and it is really not a useful expense of government money. DC gets a lot of Federal money.

Where else do they spend your money? This is one of my favorites. I just can't even imagine who spent this money. When I tell you, you will say: Certainly, that person was fired. No way. He works for the Federal Government. Nobody is ever fired in the Federal Government. They spent $700,000 to study what Neil Armstrong said when he landed on the Moon. Did he say, ``One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,'' or did he say, ``One small step for a man''? They wanted to study whether the preposition ``a'' was mentioned by Neil Armstrong or whether he said: ``One small step for man.'' Where did the money come from? The grant was originally supposed to be for autism. We can debate whether the Federal Government should be involved in that. It sounds like a much more just study if it had something to do with autism than studying Neil Armstrong's statement on the Moon.

You can't make this stuff up. This is incredibly ridiculous, but it should be insulting. There should not be a taxpayer at home in America who says: All right. Today they are going to vote on a budget to cut one penny out of every dollar. We spent $700,000 on what Neil Armstrong did or did not say on the Moon. You know what their conclusion at the end was? They don't know. It is inconclusive. They listened to the tape over and over again. Someone should be fired.

It also should be a message to our body that we should cut some spending. Instead, we have done the opposite. Under Republican control of the Senate and the House, we busted the budget caps by $300 billion just 2 months ago. Part of what my plan would do would be to restore the caps. They are put in place for a reason, to try to control our proclivity to spend too much money. We put the budget caps in place, then we cut 1 percent a year--about $30 billion every year for 5 years, and then the government would begin to grow again at about 1 percent.

I know we could live within our means. What would happen is this guy would be fired, and that kind of study would not happen when they have 1 percent less. Maybe a program like the National Science Foundation would get 50 percent less or 75 percent less to really put them on notice that we are tired, after 30 years of crazy research, of them continuing without reform.

This was also spent in Afghanistan. This is your money. They used $850,000 to set up a televised cricket league. The first problem is, most people don't have TVs in Afghanistan. Really, a televised cricket league? They don't even have TVs to watch it on. This is $850,000 to make them feel better about their National Cricket League. Boondoggle. It has nothing to do with national defense. It makes us weaker by putting us further into debt.

Will this get better if we continue to increase money? No, it only gets worse. If you give them more money, they will spend it. In fact, we have studied spending at the end of the year. When you get to the end of the year, the government spends money four to five times faster than any other month in the year. The last 30 days of the fiscal year spending increases every day. In fact, on the last day of the fiscal year, you can watch spending accelerate as the Sun sets in the West. As offices begin to close in the East, the spending shifts to the Midwest. As the Sun sets farther in the western sky and the offices are still open in California, they are spending money as fast as they can. If they don't spend it, they will not get it next year--use it or lose it.

It is a phenomenon of government that has been going on forever. This kind of stuff happens. As long as you give them more money, they will do it. As long as they are rewarded for doing the spending, we should study which agencies do it. We should study which agencies go to Las Vegas and have their conference there for a million dollars, sipping champagne in a hot tub. That agency should get less money. I think those people actually did get fired--one of the few people ever fired.

We could have a debate on another occasion about climate change, but we probably agree that a $450,000 app for your phone so you can play a climate change game that will, I guess, attempt to convince you and ensure that you are convinced that we are having climate change-- $450,000 for an app on a phone. Apps are everywhere. People are developing them all the time. Government doesn't need to be spending $450,000 for what somebody probably spends $1,000 in their garage to develop.

Remember ObamaCare, when they tried to set up the website with millions of dollars, and then it failed? Remember the IRS just 3 weeks ago failing? We need to be very careful about giving government more money.

The budget I am introducing is called the penny plan budget. It cuts one penny out of every dollar. This is important for the country to see we are having this vote. They are not that excited to have this vote. We are only having this vote because the Senate rules basically mandate it. It can't be avoided because Republicans didn't create a budget. Democrats didn't create a budget. So I decided, what the heck, I will create my own budget.

The penny plan budget has come forward. If we were to pass this, there are many good things. Through a simple majority, we could do many good things that conservative Republicans have wanted, like make the tax cuts permanent, and get rid of more regulations. We could do the REINS Act, which would say, new regulations that are very expensive have to be voted on by Congress. We should cut out more waste. There are all kinds of things we could do.

What we have chosen to do in our budget is actually give instructions to expand health savings accounts. One of the big problems we have in healthcare is rising costs. Costs are going up about 25 percent a year. The answer around here has been, I think, lame, uneducated, ill- informed, and counterproductive. Other than that, they are right on target. What they are trying to say is: Oh, your individual rates are going up 25 percent a year. Here is some money so you can pay for it. It does nothing to bring the curve down. It may accelerate the curve. If you subsidize something, it will become more expensive. You are subsidizing the demand for it. We ought to expand health savings accounts where people pay for their healthcare. People say: I don't want to pay for my healthcare. When you pay--when you have skin in the game--you ask the price of things. When the government pays or somebody else pays, you don't ask the price of things, and the price rises.

Competition is the fundamental aspect of capitalism, but you have to have freely fluctuating prices, which we don't in Medicare, Medicaid, and actually mostly private insurance. We have never really adjusted the fundamental problem of healthcare, which is that we don't have capitalism in healthcare.

What do we do? Because we don't have enough capitalism, we take more capitalism away and add more government, and it is more broken since we have done Obamacare. One of the answers--since many Republicans will not vote to repeal ObamaCare--is let us try to start expanding the marketplace.

My budget today could pass if every Republican voted for it. If it passes, we could move on to doing something like expanding the health savings accounts. This gets to an argument that is an inside baseball argument that happens in Washington. They will tell you: Young man, you must vote for our budget because the budget is simply a vehicle to do other good things. I look back at him and say: If it is a vehicle, and you don't care what is in it, why not put something good in it? We always put something crappy in it that never works, never balances, and does not represent who we are as a party. They shove it down our throat and say: Vote for it. You have to do it because that is the only way to get to a tax cut. That is the only way we get to repeal ObamaCare, although they are not really for that anymore. But the thing is, they can do it by voting for something they actually are for. Everyone in our caucus is for the balanced budget amendment. If we put it forward on the floor, they will all vote for it, but there will not be enough votes for it to be law, so it is a free vote. This would be the actual platform, the actual symbol of what we run on and what we do next year. Yet we will not have a chance to do that unless they are willing to do it.

They want the budget to be meaningless. They want it to be a vehicle, but then they want it to be their meaningless symbol, and I can't do that. I think there has to be someone left in the Republican Party who says enough is enough. We are not going to not tolerate the waste, spending, and debt, and we are going to say the same things we said to President Obama: Big government spending and debt are wrong.

I don't think we should change this because we are in power. When the Republican Party is out of power, they are the conservative party. But the problem is, when the Republican Party is in power, there is no conservative party. What I am arguing for today is that we should be who we say we are. I urge a ``yes'' vote on the penny plan budget.

Madam President, I will reserve the remainder of my time if I can get an update of what I have left.

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Mr. PAUL. Perfect. Thank you.

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, shortly, we will be voting on the penny plan budget. This is a budget that cuts one penny out of every dollar.

As we have gone through time and again, we have seen that there is so much waste in government, from $700,000 spent studying Neil Armstrong's statement on the Moon--did he say ``one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind,'' or did he say ``one small step for a man''? We spent $700,000 trying to discover whether Neil Armstrong said ``a man'' or just ``man.'' It is a complete boondoggle, a complete waste of money. But does it get better? No, because we keep giving people more money.

Some have come to the floor and said: Well, this is just an end- around attempt to cut military spending. We can't cut any military spending.

That is simply not true. The penny plan budget says nothing about cutting military spending. The penny plan budget says this: We cut 1 percent of the budgetary spending. Where it is cut in the budget is left up to the appropriations committees. It could be cut equally, or it could be cut more in some areas and less in other areas. We could cut some from military; we could cut zero from military. It is left up to the appropriators.

Some would argue: Well, it doesn't define where it would come from.

Well, that is the job of the appropriators and the job of the Senate to vote up or down on it.

To those who argue that unlimited spending for the military is good for our national security, they might want to think about whether there is a possible problem in that China has $1 trillion worth of our debt.

Let's say for some reason there was a conflict in the South China Sea and we were somehow involved militarily there. What if China were to say: We are going to dump your dollars. We are going to dump your Treasury bills.

Could they wreak havoc, dumping $1 trillion? Yes. Would it hurt their assets? Yes, but it could be used as a weapon against the United States.

Our insecurity is our enormous debt--$21 trillion.

In some ways, the budget vote is symbolism, but the question is whether that symbolism will be who we are as a Republican Party or whether that symbolism will be that we are simply the same as the Democrats, that we simply don't care about the debt, we don't care that interest on the debt is the second biggest item.

After the Defense Department--about $700 billion--the next biggest item is $300 billion in interest. What happens when interest rates rise? The Federal Reserve has artificially kept interest rates low. What about when interest rates go to 5 percent? Could that happen? Yes. Could it be precipitated by a foreign nation no longer buying our debt? Yes.

If interest rates were to go to 5 percent currently, I don't know that we would be able to manage our debt. That would probably be a doubling of our interest payment, or more--$600 billion. If we do nothing and the Federal Reserve is able to keep our interest rates in the 2 percent range, interest rates will still be about the same as the Department of Defense within 10 years. The Department of Defense is about $700 billion, and it will grow probably to $800-and-some-odd billion, but interest rates will be $761 billion within a decade. If that is not a threat to our national security, I don't know what is.

Really what we have is a threat to our honor as public servants who make promises to voters. We came to power in Washington because we said President Obama spent too much and borrowed too much. We said it over and over and over again until voters chose us. But what if, when we come into power, we forget who we are? When Republicans are in the minority, they are the conservative party. The problem is that when the Republicans become the majority, there is no conservative party.

What I am arguing for today is to cut one penny out of every dollar. There is waste from top to bottom in every department of government, including the military.

Defense Logistics--they build stuff. They have $800 million they say is missing.

Defense spending or military spending in Afghanistan--$700 million of ammunition missing. Do we think that might be a little bit worrisome given all the different characters in the Afghan civil war? There is $700 million in ammunition that cannot be accounted for and $28 million in uniforms that cannot be accounted for.

They built a $45 million gas station in Afghanistan, but it is for natural gas. The first problem is that they don't have cars in Afghanistan. The second problem is that none of them run on natural gas. So how did we fix that problem? We bought them cars. We bought them cars that run on natural gas, and they still couldn't afford the gas, so we gave them credit cards. How moronic are we as a people to keep flushing money down a rat hole in Afghanistan--nearly $50 billion.

What I am asking is that we cut 1 percent--1 penny out of every dollar.

Could we save some in the military? Absolutely. Is this done to punish the military? No. It is to make us stronger as a country. Could the military suffer a 1-percent cut and actually become more efficient? Absolutely. It is not a question of whether our military budget is too big or too small; it is a question of whether our military mission is too large. We are at war in half a dozen countries or more. We have 6,000 troops in Africa, and I would suspect that there is not one person in 1,000 in America who knows whom we are fighting or why we are fighting in Africa.

But that is not really what this is about. It is about spending in every department of government. It is about whether one penny out of every dollar is being wasted.

People say: I am against the waste. I am against all the waste. I am against the study on Japanese quail to see if they are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. I am against the Neal Armstrong study on whether he said one man on the Moon or just man on the Moon.

The thing is, we can't get rid of waste unless we actually reduce top-line spending because nobody has any incentive to do it.

When the sequester first came into place, even though people didn't like it, people throughout government began finding savings. You cannot get rid of waste in government if you keep giving people more money.

The National Science Foundation has wasted millions and millions of dollars over a 30-year history. William Proxmire first reported in the early 1970s, and he said that one of the first studies was $50,000-- back then, that was more money than it is now--to study why men like women. Really? That is a good use of taxpayer funds?

This year, we will spend $1 trillion we don't have. There will be nearly a $1 trillion deficit this year. That is what we complained about under President Obama, was big, annual $1 trillion deficits. Are we going to be the party that is actually true to what we say we are for, that we are fiscally conservative? Can we not cut one penny out of every dollar?

So I implore my colleagues to think long and hard about this vote. Think about how the people at home would want you to vote. You have gone home and said you were for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, which virtually all of my Republican colleagues voted for, says we will balance the budget in 5 years. Well, we are either honest and serious or we are not. So if you can vote for a balanced budget amendment that balances the budget, why would you not vote for a budget that balances in 5 years?

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Mr. PAUL. I will finish in a few minutes.

It is a canard to say that the cut is coming from the military. The cut is a 1-percent cut. It is $3.2 trillion spent, and it is $32 billion that would be cut. Every year, we send $30 billion to foreign countries that hate us. We spend nearly $50 billion in Afghanistan every year. If we were simply looking at the Department of Commerce-- $14 billion--and the Department of Education--$70 billion--I think we could find $30 billion that we would never know was gone.

The bottom line is whether the debt is threatening our national security, whether it is threatening the security of the economic foundation of our country, and I think without question it is.

This vote is a litmus test for conservatives. Are you a conservative? Do you think we could cut one penny out of every dollar? I think it is a conservative notion that we have long said we are for. Now it is time to step up to the plate and actually vote what you say you stand for.

With that, I yield back my time and ask for the yeas and nays.

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