This is not a very impressive interview Sen. Rand Paul conducted with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Josh Green.
For instance:
A recent article in the New Republic said your budget would eviscerate the departments of Energy, State, Commerce, EPA, FDA, Education, and many others. Would Americans support that?
My budget is similar to the Penny Plan, which cuts 1 percent a year for five or six years and balances the budget. Many Americans who have suffered during a recession have had to cut their spending 1 percent, and they didn't like doing it, but they were able to do it to get their family's finances back in order. I see no reason why government can't cut 1 percent of its spending.
So that’s not actually an answer. Paul’s budget eliminates the Department of Commerce. It also eliminates the Department of Education. And the Department for Housing and Urban Development. And the Department of Energy. The State Department gets cut by more than 50 percent.
Meanwhile, it increases spending on defense by $126 billion.
Perhaps these are good ideas! But Paul doesn’t defend them. He obscures them. He tries to make his cuts sound small even though, in the areas Green asked about, they’re huge. If Paul has thought these policies through and has a persuasive argument for why the United States would be better off if the Department of Education was eliminated so the Department of Defense can be expanded, he should make his case. That he’s instead hiding the reality of his budget’s cuts is telling.
But it’s possible that Paul himself is simply misinformed about his budget. He certainly seems to be misinformed about the deficit. “What I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year,” he tells Green when asked whether the public will accept such deep cuts.
But we’re not running trillion-dollar deficits every year — and nor are Paul’s political opponents claiming that we should. The Congressional Budget Office projects this year’s deficit will be $642 billion, and 2015's deficit will be only $378 billion — and though deficits will rise again as we close out the decade, they won’t reach a trillion dollars.
And that’s if we do nothing. President Obama’s budget is estimated to bring deficits down to $542 billion in 2023.
This isn’t just pedantry. The argument behind Ryan’s budget is that the cuts need to be so right now because the deficits are so mind-bogglingly large. You have to measure them in the trillions!
But the deficits Paul is estimating are vastly larger than the deficits we actually face. It’s almost like the deficits are just an excuse for policies Paul already supports, rather than the cause for policies Paul is only reluctantly embracing.
And then, of course, there’s Federal Reserve crankery:
Who would your ideal Fed chairman be? Hayek would be good, but he's deceased.Nondead Fed chairman.Friedman would probably be pretty good, too, and he's not an Austrian, but he would be better than what we have. Dead, too.Yeah. Let's just go with dead, because then you probably really wouldn't have much of a functioning Federal Reserve. Milton Friedman would be very close to what we have. As Jonathan Chait writes, Friedman’s “central academic insight was support for very active monetary policy. He called it ‘Monetarism.’ Look it up!”
If anything, there’s a good argument to be made that Ben Bernanke has been less activist than Milton Friedman would’ve recommended!
Paul is supposed to be one of the GOP’s great hopes, and part of the argument for his candidacy is that his philosophy is purer and so the policies that flow from it are more sensible and less compromised. But in this interview, he seemed confused on the state of both fiscal policy and monetary policy and unwilling to make a forthright argument for his policies. It wasn’t a very promising performance. |
