Rand Paul: “I rise today in support of the balanced budget amendment. In fact, it is beyond me to imagine how anybody in this body…”

“I rise today in support of the balanced budget amendment. In fact, it is beyond me to imagine how anybody in this body could oppose a balanced budget amendment. I ran my election last year primarily on this fact--that government spending was out of control and the debt was consuming our country and that we needed new and more serious rules to bring the budget under control. We have tried in the past. This body passed Gramm-Rudman-Hollings with bipartisan support in the 1990s and immediately began to evade it. This body passed pay as you go and then proceeded to disobey their own rules 700 times. And we wonder why 9 percent of the people approve of Congress? It is because we cannot even obey our own rules. So we need new rules. We need a balanced budget amendment that would be an amendment to the Constitution because we do not adhere to the rules we pass. This body is literally out of control. Now, the other side says: Trust us. Trust us. We can balance the budget. The other side hasn't passed a budget this year or last year-- not just a balanced budget, the other side can't pass any budget. So I think we need new and stronger rules to force us to do what is right, do what every American family has to do; that is, balance their family budget. A nation is no different. A nation has a printing press and can run deficits for longer, but there are ramifications. The enormous debt we are accumulating as a country--we are borrowing $40,000 every second.…”