On Friday Ron Paul was one of 4 Republicans to break from what was otherwise a party line vote and voted against Paul Ryan’s budget plan for 2012. When asked by Caffeinated Thoughts for an official statement, Jesse Benton a Ron Paul spokesperson states:
“The Ryan Budget was a step in the right direction, but it still adds trillions of dollars to the national debt and would run deficits for years to come. America faces a crisis and we have to balance our budget now, not ten or 20 years down the road. Dr. Paul is fighting to elect members of Congress and a President who will cut spending immediately before over-spending causes a catastrophic crash of the Dollar.”
An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office — Congress’s non-partisan arbiter of budgetary figures — doesn’t list the exact year that surpluses first occur under Ryan’s plan, but it agrees that it will happen sometime between 2060 and 2080.
But I’m sure you have heard that Paul Ryan’s budget is full of drastic even draconian cuts, well those are not really cuts at all, but simply less than the proposed spending under Obama. Maybe a little illustration will help:
If each day I spend $5 on lunch, and my wife says, ‘tomorrow we should spend $10’, and I say, ‘no we should spend $8’, did I just cut our budget by $2? If you have any common sense you would say of course not! Then why is Paul Ryan’s budget considered draconian CUTS, when he plans to raise spending, but just less than Obama plans to raise spending?
Maybe we should be looking more seriously at the budget proposed by yet another Paul, Senator Rand Paul, whose proposed budget would be balanced in 5 years. Rand Paul’s detailed budget can be found here.