Rand Paul: “I thank the gentleman for yielding. Madam Speaker, we are here today to try to prevent the national debt from going up…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Madam Speaker, we are here today to try to prevent the national debt from going up another $1.2 trillion, but in a way, it's a formality because most everybody knows the national debt is going up $1.2 trillion. This is sad because this process is a very mixed effort to try to curtail spending. And this power of the President to ask for a debt increase, and then we have to get two-thirds of the Congress to prevent this from going up, this is a creature of Congress. It's also a creature of a mental status here in the Congress of overspending on just everything. It would be nice if we could blame everything on the current administration or even the previous administration. But the crisis that we're in has been building over a long period of time, and it's very bipartisan. There's been way too much cooperation in this Congress because those who like spending cooperate, and they keep spending. And for a long time, we were able to get away with this because we were a very wealthy country. Now we're nonproductive. The good jobs are overseas, and yet the spending is escalating exponentially. We're really not facing up to the reality that the problem is spending. Yes, we have to deal with the debt. But the debt is a consequence of too much spending. Where do we spend too much money? In two places: overseas and domestically. And we need to stop the spending.…”