Ron Paul: The World Will Give Up on the Dollar

Ron Paul: Hello, good to talk to you again.

News Anchor: Alright, so you’re convinced that regardless of what kind of deal they work out, in the long term you think the spending cuts aren’t going to come, why not?

Ron Paul: Because the problem is too big, I don’t question their good intentions, I think a lot of members of Congress on both sides would like to get this behind them, but the problem is too big, there’s too much momentum, big government is there, nobody wants to cut the military, nobody wants to cut the entitlement. So they make this pretense but I don’t think the cuts will come, they talked about this in 1980s, they said if we raise taxes we’ll do the cuts, but the cuts never came. So and I work on the assumption that only this year’s budget is what counts. If you promise to cut in the next 10 years $4 trillion, I mean why should that reassure the public or why should that reassure the marketplace, it’ just putting things on. We have to decide as a country on whether or not we should be the policeman of the world and whether we can afford this entitlement system, and those are the two questions that they do not ask.

News Anchor: Well, Congressman, that sounds pretty pessimistic that we’re not going to turn this around, that the appetite for big government is insatiable at this point, so what’s the long-term bid of hope, is here any in your view?

Ron Paul: Yeah, I’m very hopeful, I’m very positive on the long run but I think we’re going to go through a bankruptcy first because everything we’ve done so far is just spend more and run up the deficit and print more money, and eventually the world will give up on the dollar and then we’ll go through the ringer through the bankruptcy and every reason in the world we’ll come back to our senses, maybe we’ll just follow the constitution, do only those things that are authorized, have sound money, don’t allow the Fed to print money and have a sensible foreign policy. But they’re not on the verge of this, but the people I talked to around the country, many of them young people are ready for it because they know they’re getting a bad deal, and they can’t afford, they can’t even get a job let alone pay for all this, all the wars and all the entitlements. So the whole process is coming to an end, that’s why I’m predicting in the next week or two or a month or two, they’re not going to come up with a solution that’s going to satisfy hardly anybody.

News Anchor: OK, so Congressman you’re looking past just the idea of possibly defaulting August 2nd or in the neighborhood there as we’ve been warned by the treasury department treasury secretary Geithner, you’re predicting an all out collapse of the U.S. Dollar and bankruptcy for the United States?

Ron Paul: Well yes, I mean we literally declared that already, one time we promised we’d pay in gold for our dollars and we declared we didn’t have that, but now we default all the time because we print money just to pay our bills and the dollar goes down in value. So if somebody pays you $10,000 they owed you a year ago, you’re only getting probably $900 and the government wants to pay their debt with cheap money. So they want inflation, they want devaluation, it’s the only way they can politically liquidate the debt. The other way you liquidate debt is you just stiff everybody and you don’t pay your bills. But we’re going to pay our bills, everybody is going to get paid but the money is not going to have any money.

They’re talking about changing the CPI right now so that they don’t raise the benefits to people under social security and they’re going to say it with a straight face and say “Oh the cost of living isn’t going up,” so there’s all kinds of way governments manipulate and worst manipulation is the depreciation of the currency and I don’t see how they can stop it. Because there’s no serious attempt to cut back, if they did, if everybody was worried as I am, they would get together and cut everybody’s budget 10% and save a lot of money right off the back. But there’s no suggestion, no attempt to do that, no attempt to bring our troops home and no attempt to say, “Maybe we’ve overextended ourselves with the entitle system” and it has nothing to do with what we’ve been authorized to do in the constitution, so this is why it is big, it is significant and what happens here in the next week or two and some type of agreement I project they’ll probably raise the debt limit but they won’t be coming any closer to the solution.

News Anchor: Alright Congressman I want to mention that at another important straw poll last night out of New Hampshire you came out on top again, you have great success in the straw poll arena, how are you feeling about your chances in New Hampshire come primary time?

Ron Paul: Well better all the time, so I was very pleased to hear that and we’re going to keep working very hard in the various states especially the early states, we were glad to hear what happened in New Hampshire.

News Anchor: Alright Congressman, we thank you very much for your time today, we know there’s a lot of work ahead on these very important issues and we wish you the best of luck.

Ron Paul: Thank you very much.