Rand Paul Quotes
If you refuse to acknowledge that there is any waste that can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative, and you cannot lay claim to balancing the budget.
Paul, Rand. "Foreign Policy Speech." Center for the National Interest, 23 Oct. 2014.
Jefferson was opposed to a standing army or a buildup of revenue even in case of war. He thought that a national surplus might tempt an administration to engage in war. This was one of the biggest differences between the Jeffersonians or Republican Democrats as they called themselves and the Federalists led by George Washington and John Adams. Washington was a strong advocate of military preparedness, while Jefferson believed that a nation which had a strong army and war chest would be too easily tempted to use it. That debate has raged in America since. However, at the beginning of the second world war, the then conservative party, the Republicans, had adopted the Jeffersonian view and it was FDR and the Democrats arguing for armament and preparedness. The United States was terribly unprepared for war, but mobilized rapidly and won the day. Since then both parties have supported military preparedness and the political argument has been over the degree, but there are few Jeffersonians left when it comes to military preparedness.
In 1964 the treasury secretary asked the president how to sell the proposed budget to Congress:
This quotation pithily summarizes a common problem in politics of describing budgets. In most years there has been a national inflation. If a new budget is, in actual dollars, the same as the previous years or a little more, but the increase is less than the inflation level, the agency will not be able to provide the same level of services as the previous year. Therefore services will be cut and those who are politically in favor of more money for the program legitimately describe this as a “budget cut”. Opponents of larger funding increases, also legitimately describe the funding as a “budget increase”. One side refers to what the money can buy and the other, to the absolute dollars spent. This is an example of the classical ambiguity of political oratory.
Randal Howard Paul is an American physician and politician serving as the junior United States Senator from Kentucky since 2011. He is the son of former three-time presidential candidate and twelve-term U.S. Representative of Texas, Ron Paul.
