Rand Paul: “I admire political courage. I have been fascinated by the Members from the other side of the aisle who have been…”

“I admire political courage. I have been fascinated by the Members from the other side of the aisle who have been willing, in the light of day and before the American people, to stand up and tell us that they do like it to be easy to raise taxes, and they object to making it more difficult to raise taxes. So I admire them for that. But we must ask, why are taxes high? Taxes are high because government is big. We are dealing with only one-half of the equation. As long as the American people want big government, as long as they want a welfare state, and as long as they believe we should police the world, taxes will remain high. This is a token effort to move in the right direction of eliminating taxes. Big government is financed in three different ways. First, we borrow money. Borrowing is legal under the Constitution, although that was debated at the Constitutional Convention, and the Jeffersonians lost. Someday we should deal with that. We should not be able to borrow to finance big government. Something that we do here in Washington which is also unconstitutional is to inflate the currency to pay for debt. Last year the Federal Reserve bought Treasury debt to the tune of $43 billion. This helps finance big government. This is illegal, unconstitutional, and is damaging to our economy.”