Transcript

Neil Cavuto: With the threat rising almost as fast as the deficit itself: two guys in Boston accused of bombing the marathon, two guys in Canada accused of trying to bomb a train headed for New York, so those are two huge issues. The government is nearly 17 trillion dollars into collective debt hole, and there’s a new push to spend more to protect us despite that hole. So how do we deal with that? Former Texas Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul is on the phone. Congressman, they’re already saying we need to spend more to stop this, what do you say?

Ron Paul: Oh, keep doing it, bring it on, until we have to force ourselves into reality. It’s tragic, because we’re addicted. It is like a drug addiction, you can’t get off drugs, and the economy can’t get off spending. Just look at what they’re doing at the airports now with the pretending, they’re making little cuts, and then they emphasis it and amplify it by playing politics with it. So they’ll never cut spending, the Fed is there to monetize the debt, we’re going to continue to do this until there is a true economic crisis. So I don’t think what we had in 2008 and 2009 was very much, I think it’s going to get much worse, because we’re never lived in times quite like this when the whole world was inflating their currency and everybody had a paper currency and nobody is living within their means.

Neil Cavuto: That’s one thing, Congressman, if you think about it, for the Left to say, “If in doubt, spend more”. But now, for the Right to say we need to double our spending on security, sort of like we did during the Bush-years, because our lives are at risk”. Obviously you could scare anyone into thinking, “Well, I guess it’s well worth it”, just like these privacy invasions I was discussing with your son last night, Senator Rand Paul, are justified. Because we might get killed, but what’s the harm if they’re poking into our emails and taking heat images of us. I just think you got to draw the line somewhere.

Ron Paul: Well, I do too, and I think it should be to just follow the constitution, and we shouldn’t build up this fear. Either one side says there is fear from outside so we can’t ever cut a penny from the military, and we have to expand it when we run into trouble. And the other side says we have to have a safety net for everybody, and they compromise. They always complaint so often that we don’t have then compromise in Washington, but, quite frankly, I think there’s many a compromise. And it wasn’t so bad when we were a growing country and we were so wealthy. But we’re not as wealthy as we used to be. matter of fact, we’re a debtor nation, we’re not producing as much, so, therefore, the compromise is only to continue the spending which is the wrong thing to do. They should come to the other and say, “Maybe we don’t need to be the policeman of the world, maybe we don’t have to have food stamps for 48 million people, maybe our policies are wrong, maybe Keynesian economics doesn’t work, maybe the Fed is the culprit, maybe we ought to know what the Fed is doing.

Neil Cavuto: Congressman, you raise a lot of brilliant points, as you always do, but here’s my fear. We’re bitching (pardon my French), the way we are now at these lines at airports, and blaming it on what were the tiniest of cuts in the scheme of things, and that’s creating the rage right now, with even some Republican senators saying, “Enough, maybe we have to delay these layoffs”. We will never address a fraction of the issues you are talking about.

Neil Cavuto: Well, that’s my working assumption, that it’s not going to happen. And the next question will be, “Why do you even try to change people’s mind?”, because I think it is important, I think we will have a crisis. And I’m actually encouraged because I talk to a lot of young people, they know it’s coming, and they want to hear something different. And something will have to replace it, and for that reason, there are a lot of people now assuming that there’s going to be no easy way out. We’re not going to get enough members of Congress to all of a sudden vote against the military-industrial complex and domestic welfare. No, that is well entrenched. Conservatives are military-Keynesians, because they say, “If you don’t build the F-35s, it hurts jobs”.

Neil Cavuto: Having said that, though, your son, Senator Paul, did say that to use this type of high that technology to go after bad guys is fine. He obviously doesn’t want it used recklessly on individuals, but he seemed to draw the line that to the degree you can track down bad guys, and we have that technology … I think I got the gist of what he said. What do you make of that?

Ron Paul: When the courts approve, that will be fine, but it was never meant that we would have this gigantic police force from the federal government. We had martial law out there, the FBI and all these agencies come in closing things down and going into people’s houses. No, technology is fine, but it has to be guarded. And if there’s a question, you guard liberty before you say, “Well, if we catch a bad guy, that is good”. You don’t give up liberty for 9 people because you might find one person, so I’d be very, very cautious about that. The federal government is not supposed to be our police force, yet we have over a 100,000 federal officials who carry gun to enforce these laws, and they own Boston. It’s criminal that people tolerate this so much, that we tolerate this martial law and the total acceptance that they can come into our houses and we can’t even go out of the house. What if we want to go to the store and get a loaf of bread? Oh no, you can’t do that. And yes, it was serious, there was a crisis and there were three people killed. But we have 48 murders every single day, there are a lot of murderers out there. Do we close down cities because there’re 10 murders over the weekend in Chicago? We don’t do that. But here we close down a whole city, not even allow them to go to a baseball game. I mean, I think it’s very, very scary when I look at some of those pictures of what happened up at Boston.

Neil Cavuto: Ron Paul, you make people think, thank you very much, good hearing you.

Ron Paul: Good to talk to you.

by Ron Paul

Despite what the media and politicians would have us believe, the United States did not collapse last Friday when the package of spending reductions known as “sequestration” went into effect. The financial markets hardly blinked, as they have come to be more skeptical about these periodic government-hyped “crises.”

What had been portrayed as a drastic reduction in government spending was merely a decrease in the projected rate of increase in government spending over the next decade. Under sequestration, government spending increases by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years rather than $2.5 trillion without it.

So we are speeding toward collapse at only 100 miles per hour instead of 110 miles per hour.

Some in Congress are using the panic over sequestration to justify another surrender of legislative authority to the executive branch. These members want to “pass the buck” on prioritizing federal programs by giving the president, cabinet officials, and high-level bureaucrats authority to set spending priorities. However, it is Congress’s job to set priorities in federal spending.

The drafters of the Constitution give the legislature the authority over spending because they recognized it was a threat to liberty to allow this power to be concentrated in the executive branch. Congress’s willingness to cede more authority to the executive should be opposed by everyone who values liberty and limited government.

Some of the loudest objections to sequestration have come from the champions of the military-industrial complex. Yet under sequestration defense spending will still increase by 18 percent over 10 years as opposed to 20 percent without sequestration.

There are claims that the military will face a one-time real reduction back to 2007 levels of spending, before beginning to climb again next year. That remains to be seen. However, few claimed at the time that 2007 levels of military spending, occurring as they did during the huge post 9/11 build-up, were inadequate.

But despite the fact that the US spends more on military than the rest of the world combined, we are told that even this modest, short-term reduction would be, in the words of outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, “shameful” and “irresponsible.” A return to 1980’s levels of military spending in real dollars – a time of significant military build-up – is considered outrageous even though the US faces no Soviet Union or equivalent threat.

In fact, the entire $1.2 trillion dollars that the sequester is supposed to save could be realized by cutting one unneeded, wasteful boondoggle: the $1.5 trillion F-35 fighter program. The F-35, billed as the next generation all-purpose military fighter and bomber, has been an unmitigated disaster. Its performances in recent tests have been so bad that the Pentagon has been forced to dumb-down the criteria. It is overweight, overpriced, and unwieldy. It is also an anachronism: we no longer face the real prospect of air-to-air combat in this era of 4th generation warfare. The World War II mid-air dogfight era is long over.

As defense analyst Winslow Wheeler wrote last year:

“It’s time for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the U.S. military services, and Congress to face the facts: The F-35 is an unaffordable mediocrity, and the program will not be fixed by any combination of hardware tweaks or cost-control projects. There is only one thing to do with the F-35: Junk it.”

We should not look for cancellation of the F-35 program any time soon, however. The military industrial complex understands the political necessity of spreading its military Keynesianism as widely across Congressional districts as possible.

That is why F-35 manufacturer Lockheed-Martin can boast on its website that “the F-35 provides 127,000 direct and indirect jobs in 47 states and Puerto Rico.” What is unfortunately not understood is that these 127,000 workers would be far better utilized producing needed goods and services rather than treated as a jobs program disguised as national defense.

Despite the alarm over cuts that are not real cuts, it is clear that the US government is not serious at all about changing its ways. In a recent tour of the Middle East, newly-confirmed Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the US would be sending another $60 million to the rebels seeking to overthrow the Syrian government – in the midst of the sequester “crisis”!

Despite the rhetoric, there appears no intention on the part of the government to take our fiscal crisis seriously or abandon the idea that we should run the rest of the world.

by Ron Paul

As the year draws to an end, America faces yet another Congressionally-manufactured crisis which will likely end in yet another 11^th hour compromise, resulting in more government growth touted as “saving” the economy.  While cutting taxes is always a good idea, setting up a ticking time bomb with a sunset provision, as the Bush tax cuts did, is terrible policy.  Congress should have just cut taxes.  But instead, we have a crisis that is sure not to go to waste.

The hysteria surrounding the January 1 deadline for the Budget Control Act’s spending cuts and expiration of the Bush tax cuts seems all too familiar.  Even the language is predictably hysterical: if government reduces planned spending increases by even a tiny amount, the economy will go over a “fiscal cliff.”  This is nonsense.

This rhetoric is based on the belief that government spending sustains the economy, when in fact the opposite is true.  Every dollar the government spends is a dollar taken from consumers, businessmen, or investors. Reducing spending can only help the economy by putting money back in the hands of ordinary Americans.  Politicians who claim to support the free market and the lower and middle-class should take this to heart.

The reality is, however, that neither Republicans nor Democrats are serious about cutting spending. Even though U.S. military spending is exponentially larger than any other country and is notorious for its inefficiency and cost overruns, Republicans cannot seem to stomach even one penny of cuts to the Pentagon’s budget.  This is unfortunate because this is the easiest, most obvious place to start getting spending under control.  The military-industrial complex and unconstitutional overseas military interventions should be the first place we look for budget cuts.

Similarly, Democrats are digging in their heels on not cutting any welfare or entitlement spending and instead propose to fix the deficit by raising taxes on the rich, even though the U.S. Government already has a progressive tax code and the rich already pay more than their fair share. Furthermore, these higher taxes would fall on small business owners, investors, and entrepreneurs—in other words, the source of economic growth and new jobs!

The truth is that there is no excuse for government spending being as high as it is, nor for taxes being as high as they are.  Even the God of the Old Testament only asked for 10% as a tithe and offering, and Americans revolted against the King of England for taxes that amounted to less than five percent.  Yet so many people today complain about “loopholes” for the rich that lower their actual tax rate to “only” 13% in some instances.  Even that is a criminal amount to pay for a wasteful, abusive, unconstitutional government.

We are indeed headed to a fiscal cliff and have been long before this latest hysteria cropped up.  But it is not cuts to spending or reduced government “revenue” that will send us over the cliff, it is continued government spending that will.  Until the federal government limits itself to its Constitutionally-mandated role, spending and taxation will remain out of control.

Look for a “bipartisan” compromise in late December, with Republicans giving in to tax increases and settling for phony spending cuts that actually grow government, and Democrats caving on defense cuts in exchange for tax increases.  This is how the government has always grown: both sides will sacrifice their pro-liberty, small government stances in certain areas in order to grow the government where they prefer.

Liberty always loses in the 11^th hour.

by Ron Paul

Last week the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued its annual long-term budget outlook report, and the 2012 numbers are not promising. In fact, the CBO estimates that federal debt will rise to 70% of GDP by the end of the year– the highest percentage since World War II. The report also paints a stark picture of entitlement spending, as retiring Baby Boomers will cause government spending on health care, Social Security, and Medicare to explode as a percentage of GDP in coming years.

While the mainstream media correctly characterized the CBO report as highly pessimistic, they also ignored longstanding errors of methodology in CBO estimates. And those errors tend to support arguments for higher taxes and government spending, when in fact America needs exactly the opposite.

As Paul Roderick Gregory explained in a recent Forbes column, CBO has always applied wrongheaded assumptions inherent in Keynesian economics when forecasting future deficits – no matter how many times both history and economic theory have proven such assumptions incorrect. In particular, CBO seems wedded to two enduring Keynesian myths: First, that higher taxes necessarily increase federal revenue and have no negative effect on the economy; and second, that lower government spending hurts the economy. Neither is true, of course.

CBO also fails to factor in unexpected wars and expensive foreign entanglements, and we should not assign too much validity to predictive models based on peace. Judging from the actions and rhetoric coming from both parties in Washington, new military entanglements in Syria and Iran may well spike military spending in coming years.

Despite these sobering budget realities, the CBO report suggests that a solution is possible with merely a few minor adjustments in the way Congress handles economic issues. But what we need are not minor adjustments, but rather a fundamental shift in our philosophy of government. If we could come to our senses about the proper role of government in America, and what level of government interference is appropriate in a free economy, we would quickly find that there is no reason for government to spend so much, borrow so much, and tax so much.

If we simply allowed markets to work free of governmental or Federal Reserve interference, bad debt would be liquidated relatively quickly and malinvestment would be curtailed. Scaled-back regulations would encourage businesses to expand. Lower taxes would jump start investment and spur job creation.

This is not rocket science, it is Economics 101. All it would take is for government to get out of the way. There would be some short term pain, of course, but only by allowing the bubble to burst and bad debt to liquidate can we ever hope to begin building a real economy again.

The CBO report was alarming to most simply because they know neither party will take the steps necessary to avoid eventual fiscal calamity. Instead, despite their rhetoric, both parties want to maintain the fantasy that “deficits don’t matter.” But the CBO report, combined with what is happening in Greece and the European Union, should finally make the undeniable case that economic realities apply even to industrialized first world economies. We must take concrete steps today to avoid having America become the next Greece.

by Ron Paul

Politicians did not get much time to pat themselves on the back for supposedly rescuing the economy with the debt limit deal last week. The ink was barely dry when Standard & Poor’s downgraded the US debt ratings anyway, roiling world financial markets. Anyone who has taken an honest look at the government’s fiscal situation, taken into account how Washington works and the direction it is going would have a very difficult time arguing with S&P’s decision, although a strong case can be made that this was too incremental a downgrade and that it took far too long for S&P to admit the obvious.

Nonetheless, the administration nitpicked over a $2 trillion “mistake”. S&P rejoined with the fact that $2 trillion here or there hardly makes a difference in the time frame under discussion. That, if nothing else, should tell you the magnitude of the problem. $2 trillion has become a drop in the bucket.

S&P cited Congress’s inability to act like grownups and make necessary, meaningful cuts, which is true. I must take issue however, with their suggestion that tax increases are part of the answer. Taking capital out of the private sector, where it can create real value in the form of new jobs and products, and instead giving it to Washington to waste and squander is not the solution. Tax increases may seem penny-wise to some, but in reality they would be very pound-foolish. The government currently takes in $2.2 trillion in taxes per year, which is far too much already. It spends $3.7 trillion, which is ridiculous and criminal. The problem is runaway government spending, not the American people having too much money.

And yet we can’t even have a serious discussion about bringing our troops home and ending our expensive occupations around the world – things the president used to claim to favor!

Even without this downgrade, major investors are waking up to what lies down the road for the United States in fiscal terms. China is showing more signs of losing its taste for our debt. Others are following suit. What we are about to see is the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. When that happens, we will no longer be in a position to have pretend debates about things we probably should spend a little bit less on – we will be forced to implement serious spending cuts as our sources of credit dry up. Of course, we can try to postpone the day of reckoning by printing more money but the resulting “inflation tax” will be far worse than a reduction in government benefits.

Hyperinflation devastates the middle class. After Weimar Germany hyper-inflated their currency in the 1920s, an entire life savings couldn’t buy a postage stamp. The bank wouldn’t even send customers a check for all the money they had saved their whole lives. It wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on or the stamp to send it. This is what is meant when it is said that the middle class gets wiped out. The pieces for this to happen here are all falling into place, and have been since 1971. The only way to avoid that sort of chaos now is for Congress to immediately reduce federal spending and take the Constitution seriously again. The welfare/warfare state will end either way, but winding it down responsibly is a far better way to do it.

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex., and his son, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., both blasted Tea Party critics on Monday for suggesting that the conservative movement with which they’re both linked may have had something to do with America’s recent credit downgrade by the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s.

The elder Paul, a longtime lawmaker, staunch libertarian, and presidential candidate, decried the allegations as an “attempt to scapegoat” Tea Party lawmakers. He pinned the downgrade on the Washington establishment.

Transcript

The Fox News Channel special presentation… On the Brink, Answers From the Abyss, now Neil Cavuto.

Neil Cavuto: France is ahead of us, actually as of last night, more than a dozen countries are ahead of us, because for the first time in 70 years, the United States of America is no longer the top financial dog on earth. The investment ratings agency standard board is taking care of that yesterday, officially dinging our top notch AAA rating and kicking us out of the very elite club, that includes the likes of France, Germany, Switzerland, Australia but not us, not now. We are in with Belgium and New Zealand now and just getting our arms around that one not proving easy now, for years, top of the heap, now all but kicked to the curb, and growing fears my friends come Monday morning, we are going to get kicked in the markets, we just don’t know.

Here is what we do know, after all of the spending, the world is essentially telling us we are spent, and the jig is up and the pain could be severe, and we are all over the fallout that could be swift, with the likes of presidential candidates Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul and Herman Cain who say that the spending has got to stop. Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich who says that the spending has actually got to double, and Mark Zandi who says both Republicans and Democrats got to talk.

But before that, first this, the latest what’s happening right now. Georgia Republican Jack Kingston calling on Congress to reconvene immediately to pass a new deal with more cuts in the wake of the downgrade, the Congressman will be here later this hour. China taking a shot at us wasting no time saying and I quote “The good old days of borrowing are over.”

In Europe, G7 finance ministers will meet this weekend to discuss the impact of the downgrade and the Dow losing 700 points this week and that was before the S&P announcement. Saudi Arabia the first market on earth to trade since this news and it wasn’t pretty, stocks there down about 5.5%, banking issues in particular getting clobbered. The problem here is not the downgrade, it’s the debt that brought it on, a message it seems to getting lost in this drama, but now with my next guest Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul on the phone. Congressman you weren’t at all surprised, but what now?

Ron Paul: Well it looks like we’re in for big trouble because we haven’t dealt with the problem, you know I’m surprised it took them so long to downgrade, I didn’t think it should have had that rating for a long, long time, but people are coming around to reality. You wonder about S&P because they’re usually pretty slow, so I think it’s very, very bad and it’s interesting that when we were working on raising the debt limit over my objection, they can say “Well if you don’t raise the debt limit, we’re going to downgrade you” so we raised the debt limit so they downgrade which means that the spending is not under control. But the other thing that bothers me is I read where S&P said that one of the reasons they downgraded was that we weren’t accepting tax increases. So there’s a lot of confused economic ideas out there but I think we’re in for a lot of trouble which is what is what I’ve been saying for a long time.

Neil Cavuto: You know the administration is already pointing fingers at S&P that their math is a little specious and it could be a case of accusing the accused, but what do you make of that?

Ron Paul: You mean about the treasury saying well they’ve made a mistake…

Neil Cavuto: Right… in other words this is kind of S&P’s fault.

Ron Paul: Well, the Congress is making even bigger mistakes because they keep talking about slashing and cutting and all this, but there have been no suggestions of cutting anything. It’s always the cutting from the baseline which is a steady increase and finally the people who are looking at the bonds are realizing it. But to me it’s interesting that although they’re downgrading it, still the world are buying our treasury bills and our bonds and our interest rates [remain low]…

Neil Cavuto: For now, but Congressman, we got to be careful. I guess what I’m asking is, we are concerned about the downgrade and whether it’s going to cost us more just for people to buy our debt and our notes and our bonds and you’re quite right to point out that people have still been pouncing on our securities as good havens. But how long do you really think that will be the case, and are we really more benefiting because the rest of the world just stinks more than we do.

Ron Paul: Yeah, I think that though the market is more powerful than the agencies who grade the bonds and even Congress. Economic laws are powerful which means that if you follow free market economics, interest rates will go up regardless of bond ratings and this might be just the incentive to start the rates going up again. But there’s no way in the world that you can print money endlessly and bailout everybody and spend endlessly and not expect the dollar to be devalued as it is, and it’s a worldwide currency and that’s why this is so serious. Under those conditions, you depreciate the currency, interest rates are destined to go up, it’s just a matter of time.

Neil Cavuto: Alright, when I was in your fine city this past week and you guys cobbled together this deal of which you were very, very critical, as is your son the Senator Rand Paul, the issue came up that if you guys were to cut too much – not you and your son – but if you would have cut too much it would be onerous to the economy at this iffy stage, so is there even going to be an appetite for cutting more spending in this environment?

Ron Paul: No, there isn’t, there is always a special interest that comes up. If you even suggest freezing the budget, that is considered a cut. Freezing the budget is a cut and anybody who has their budget frozen yells and screams. Can you imagine what the military industrial complex would say if you suggested freezing? They’re getting a percentage increase and it’s not enough and that’s the way with every entitlement program there is, so we’re locked in on this course and until we revamp the system entirely, the monetary system, the entitlement notion, the definition of entitlements versus rights, our foreign policy, believe me, within the next year or two, we will be dealing with what kind of country we want in the future and what economic policies we’re going to follow.

Neil Cavuto: You know it’s interesting, I guess it is hard to gauge right now Congressman, but a downgrade could lead to a lot of messier things but we’ll have to watch extremely closely. Congressman, thank you very much, always good seeing you.

Ron Paul: Thank you.

Neil Cavuto: Again to outline that deal that was the source of some of this concern and maybe S&P jumping here. This $2.1 trillion debt deal you hear so much about, it’s $2.1 trillion over 10 years but 70% of those cuts come after the year 2017, $28 billion over the next year hence this criticism by the part of S&P that it really wasn’t much better than the paper it was printed on. Anyway, the stunner from the White House this morning is no word from the White House this morning.

Transcript

Ashley Martella: We’re pleased to have with us on the line now, Texas U.S. Representative and GOP presidential candidate, Ron Paul. He was one of 5 Republicans from the Texas congressional delegation to vote against the so-called Budget Control Act of 2011, which is the debt ceiling increase. Thanks for joining us, sir.

Ron Paul: Thank you, good to be with you.

Ashley Martella: You write on the Hill’s Congress Blog, that there were no real cuts in the legislation, only cuts in projected spending increases. Please explain briefly.

Ron Paul: This is one of the most annoying things about the reporting on what we’ve been trying to do in Washington and what we pretend to be doing. They’re always talking about cuts, cuts, cuts and everybody is screaming, “You can’t cut this, you can’t cut that”. But there are no cuts, there’s a baseline CBO projection that automatically goes up year after year after year. And what they’re talking about is just cutting some of these proposed increases. So it’s a real misleading definition when they talk about cuts. If you had a cut, you would actually have to cut this year. Because anything we do for future years doesn’t hold water anyway, because you can’t tell the next Congress what to do. So it’s basically a fraud.

If they were serious about it and wanted to do it and make a point of changing the way we operate, they could freeze the budget and give everybody the same amount of money they got last year, and that would be, according to the way they calculate, a big cut, because we would be cutting all the proposed increases for the next years to come.

Ashley Martella: Well, you say if we were to go back to 2004 spending levels, we would have a balanced budget right now. Please crunch the numbers for us a bit.

Ron Paul: That is, 2004 would give us enough money to balance the budget right now, that’s like 2.4 trillion dollars. And even now if you freeze the budget, within about 5 years it would be balanced again. But nobody’s quite willing to do that because they think they have to have steady increases. But there’s a strong appetite for government and that is where the problem is. People don’t want to cut back on the militarism and the people don’t want to cut back on anything that looks like it might cut into their check they’re getting from government, and you know a lot of people are getting checks from the government.

Ashley Martella: Our budget has doubled in 10 years, you ask why. Why do you think it has?

Ron Paul: The appetite for government never ends, there are more retired people because of the demographics, less people are coming into the workforce, unemployment rates go up, they can’t control that. So the benefits go up automatically. And it’s endless, there’s always new programs; this week, after we passed that budget, there was a new program, brand new program out of thin air to go around the world and tell other countries what they should do about their religious freedom. And it was a small program, but the first year was going to be a million dollars. And I thought, “Well, why are they starting a new program in the midst of this?” But that is only one little program, I mean there are hundreds and hundreds of programs that are brand new and they keep doing it. They just won’t stop, it’s like an addiction. And they don’t stop because I don’t think they even realize the seriousness of how big this problem is.

Ashley Martella: The Tea Party helped elect candidates it thought would vote to end reckless spending by Congress. Yet, most of the Tea Party backed Republicans voted yes on the bill. Where’s the disconnect here?

Ron Paul: Yea, that’s a tough one, because I think the Tea Party people have helped because it has changed the atmosphere and at least they’re talking about this. But then it has to be awfully discouraging for all of us if they’re not voting against these kinds of programs where we raise the national debt and increase this Super Congress. I mean, it’s a real mess. It represents the fact that there are no easy solutions and people realize that when you do cut, there’s a political liability there. The Tea Party people got there because there was political liability to continue the spending. So that has to be ironed out and it will be ironed out pretty soon because we cannot maintain what we’re doing.

Ashley Martella: You expect there to be a backlash by the Tea Party against the Congressmen they backed who voted yes on this deal?

Ron Paul: Yea, I think there will be, but I don’t think it will be quite the same thing that happened last year when so many were routed. And there are going to be so many people who will be disenchanted. They’ll say, “You mean we did it, we worked hard, we changed the Congress, but we didn’t change the votes?” And I don’t know whether you can keep the people up, I think the people are going to get pretty discouraged one way or the other. But I think if things don’t improve and we don’t get our house in order and get control of this budget, I think there will be a lot of people who are saying, “You know, we sent you over there, but you kept voting for more spending”.

Ashley Martella: If Republicans should win back the Senate next year, as many predict, will that change anything regarding reckless spending?

Ron Paul: Let’s hope so, but it’s no guarantee. Just like I was complaining about when George Bush was in charge and we had the Senate and the House, we didn’t do a very good job. Then the battle becomes between the two factions within the Republican Party; you know, the conservatives versus the big spenders in the Republican Party. So you don’t know, it just depends on who shows up into the Senate. But certainly, the way it’s formulated right now, there’s no way that the conservatives can win a fight and have the Senate support it and then have the President sign a bill.

Ashley Martella: You announced a while back that you were retiring from the House after your current term. Why?

Ron Paul: Well, I wanted to concentrate on the race for the presidency. Last time I ran, I did both and it was distracting and I wanted to make sure that people knew I was very, very serious about the presidential run and I was also content to know that I would be, and am ready to leave the Congress too.

Ashley Martella: The latest Gallup polling shows you with 8% ballot support among all Republicans. Now that compares to 17% for Mitt Romney, and 15% for your fellow Texan, Governor Rick Perry, who hasn’t even announced yet at the time we are recording this. How do you get your numbers up?

Ron Paul: Continue to do what I am doing and just more so, because the numbers depend on which poll you look at. They have been improving, but it is not easy. That means we have to continue to campaign, we have to continue to raise money. We have had some TV out, we hope to have a lot more TV out and the numbers certainly will go up if we do well at Ames next week.

Ashley Martella: Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul. Thanks so much and good luck on the campaign trail.

Ron Paul: Thank you, good to be with you.

Ashley Martella: And thank you for watching Newsmax TV.