The Budget
Floor Speech
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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, it is amazing to me to be lectured to and hear about how awful the tea party is from folks who have never been to a tea party to hear what the tea party represents. Come on down. Bring your Huey Long rhetoric that there will be a chicken in every pot and a windmill in every backyard. Bring it down to the tea party and let's have a discussion. Bring it out to the public.
We hear from those who want to lecture the tea party about cutting spending. Who among these folks has voted against an appropriations bill? We haven't even seen one this year. We didn't see a budget. We are spending $2 trillion that we don't have, and they are here blaming it on the tea party.
Who is in charge here? It is not the tea party. Blame it on us. Give us an appropriations bill. Give us a budget. Do something constructive to fix the fiscal problems we have up here.
They say compromise is the ideal. They tell the tea party: You need to compromise. But do you know what the compromise is? They want to raise taxes. The debt commission wants to raise taxes. The President wants to raise taxes. That is what they are talking about.
Yesterday, the President said he is going to cut $4 trillion. Well, try to read what is going on here. He said he was going to spend $46 trillion a month ago in his budget. Before we even discuss his budget, he is going to cut $4 trillion off the $46 trillion he is going to spend. These are no cuts. We will spend more this year than we spent last year. Forget about all the numbers, all the baselines, and forget about 6, 60, 30, 78, or 0, which is what the CBO scored this yesterday--zero in cuts. Forget about it and ask your Representatives: Are we going to spend more this year than last? If we are, that is not a cut. Ask your Representatives, ask your Senators: Will the deficit be more this year than last year?
The deficit will be bigger this year. We threaten to shut down government over nothing because we are not cutting spending in any serious way. They want to blame it on the tea party because in their secret caucus meetings they have done a poll that says the tea party could be the villain. Call them ``extreme,'' call them all ``tea partiers,'' say the tea party has ``taken over'' the Republican Party.
Do you know what the tea party believes in? Good government. We believe in balancing the budget, in reducing spending. We have plans to fix Social Security. We introduced a plan yesterday. If the other side is serious about fixing entitlements, we have a plan. Come to us and work with us, but don't just come down here and call us names.
Before you send any more money to Washington, ask your representatives whether they are spending your money wisely. Mr. President, $100 billion in the budget last year is unaccounted for. We don't know where it was spent or we think it was improperly spent--$100 billion. In our senatorial offices we get several million dollars. Some of us want to be frugal with that and send some back to the Treasury. We plan on sending several hundred thousand dollars back. We want to know where the money goes. We are still not certain. We have been asking for months.
Some people say that money is kept in some fund for 3 years and may go back. Other people told us that the leadership spends that money. We don't have a definitive answer for even trying to save a couple hundred thousand dollars of your money that we have control of.
The Pentagon spends a lot of money. Are they spending the money wisely? You don't know because we cannot audit them. Why? Because the Pentagon tells us that they are too big to audit. You heard about the companies saying they are too big to fail. The government now tells you they are too big to be audited. We got a partial audit of the Federal Reserve, and we got some information from that.
We are now fighting the war against Qadhafi. Last month, we were giving him money. We gave him some foreign aid, and we helped to bail out his national bank. The national banks in those countries are the leaders' piggy bank. Half of it is probably spirited off to secret accounts in Switzerland. The U.S. taxpayer bailed out Qadhafi's bank, and now we are bombing it.
The budget bill that we are talking about has now been scored by the CBO and will cut almost nothing--maybe a couple hundred million dollars. It will increase defense spending by $8 billion and cut spending by $8 billion. The net is about zero. Our deficit this year will be bigger than last year. Our overall spending will be bigger this year than last year.
We are not yet serious in Washington. We have not yet recognized the severity, the enormity, and the significance of how big this deficit is. This deficit is going to have serious repercussions. The Chinese have bought over $1 trillion of our debt, and the Japanese, nearly a trillion.
The Japanese have suffered an enormous national disaster. The question is, Will they continue to buy our debt or can they?
The other question is, How long can a government continue to exist that spends more than it brings in? On the other side, they want to blame the tea party or the Republicans or the rich people. Do you know what. Both parties are responsible--Republicans, Democrats, Senators, Congressmen, the President--everybody up here is responsible. It is not one party or the other.
When Republicans were in charge, they ran up the deficit. Now the Democrats are in charge, and the main difference is that they are doing it faster. The Republicans weren't doing a good job either during our time in power.
We have to understand that the people can do things; not everything has to be done up here. The States can do things. We have to believe once again in the American dream. Believing in the American dream is not standing on the floor and castigating rich people. What is great about our country is that any among us--any of our kids--can become rich people if they work hard, go to school, and achieve. We live in a mobile society, and that is what the American dream is about. We got away from Europe because all the land was owned and stifled by the nobility. We came here where there was plenty of land and opportunity, and the American dream is believing in that.
The interesting thing is, when they try to soak the rich--this old Huey Long stuff--it is actually failing with the American people because many of us believe that our kids could gain great wealth or great success. We still believe in the American dream. If they want to castigate that and say forget about it and say what we need is just more government, they need to explain to people why they don't believe in capitalism, in the American dream, and why they don't believe in the greatness of America.
I still believe in America. I want to get government out of the way. I think we cannot have an America that succeeds until we are able to do something about our debt crisis. I fear that no one up here--or very few here--on either side recognizes the severity and imminence of this problem. My hope is that before a crisis occurs in our country we will begin to seriously discuss balancing our budget and have plans to do so and seriously cut spending.
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