The visit was one of a series of town-hall-style meetings held over the course of about a week in 20 cities across the state. Paul said the national debt needs to be reduced and he argued against a top-down approach to government, where government taxes more and redistributes money to communities that need it. Paul said he is in favor of “keeping government small and at the local level.”

As a preface to his prepared speech, Paul said his office has “returned over $2.4 million to the treasury” by being frugal with taxpayer dollars.

“If there’s too much money being spent, let’s try to give some of it back to the treasury,” said Paul. “So over the past several years, we’ve given back $2.4 million.”

Paul said he hopes to inspire others to do the same and is pushing a bill called the “bonuses for cost-cutters” bill, which would encourage savings through a government-employee incentive program.

“It would give a bonus to any government employee that can return money to the treasury,” Paul said. He added that he believes over-spending has become a national problem because of the notion of “use it or lose it.”

Paul said each year, government employees engage in last-minute spending in the last month of the fiscal year, in order to use up the money in their coffers and justify getting the same amount of money the following year.

“If you’re in charge of $12 million at the department of energy and you know that if you don’t spend that $12 million this year, you won’t get it next year … you’re going to spend it,” he said.

Instead, Paul said giving employees a personal reason to save money would solve some of the over-spending.

“Trust me, no one in Washington loses sleep over losing $1 million. They don’t lose sleep over losing $10 million,” he said. “What if we were to give the employee who only spends $11 million a bonus to turn that $1 million back in. Waste accumulates because we don’t have any incentive to give it back.”

Paul said the national debt has essentially doubled from the approximately $10 trillion it was when Obama took office. He suggested a complete overhaul of “how we run government.”

“We have accumulated more debt in the past eight years than with all of the previous presidents combined,” said Paul, adding that it’s not a party issue.

“We had a president from a different party the previous eight years that went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion,” he said. “So we’ve doubled the debt with a Republican and now we’ve doubled the debt under a Democrat. Wonder whose fault it is? Maybe it’s both parties’ fault.”

Emphasizing that “government shouldn’t spend what government does not have,” Paul said the government receives over $3 trillion in taxes each year.

“This is not a small amount of money and couldn’t we just spend $3 trillion?” said Paul. “The argument isn’t a big government or a little government. The argument should be — ‘can you have a government that just exists on what comes in?’”

Paul said the biggest ramification to the national debt is a loss of jobs due to a stagnant economy.

According to Paul, the recent unemployment figure of 5 percent “may sound good, but it is misleading.”

“Once people start looking for work or once they are on assistance, they’re not counted as unemployed,” said Paul. “I don’t know why, but they are no longer counted.”

Paul said a more relevant statistic is the labor force participation rate, which looks at the number of people actually working.

“It’s not that good right now,” said Paul. “It’s about what it was in 1979 — in the low 60s. That’s not a robust number.”

Paul said the way to get this statistic up and strengthen the economy is to “put more money into the private sector,” which means “less money in government.”

“It’s an argument for keeping government small,” said Paul. “It’s also an argument for keeping government at the local level. So having government in Danville or government in Frankfort is preferable to Washington.”

The reason, said Paul, is because local government can prioritize spending for relevant local needs.

He also stressed that it is the local sector that can help eliminate debt and boost the economy.

“It is my opinion that the private sector creates jobs, so you want government to be small,” said Paul. “You want government to be minimum and the private sector to be at a maximum.”

Paul also spoke on bi-partisan “misplaced sympathy.”

“If you want to give everything — like free college tuition or free health care — for free, where does that money come from?” asked Paul. “Well, we could borrow more, but we already owe $20 trillion. We could tax you more. Sure, let’s tax you more so I can get free tuition — that sounds good.’”

Paul said a more sound solution would be to send that money to the local marketplace and allow “personal freedom” and “efficiency” in spending.

As an example of wasteful spending, Paul said the government “wasted” $2.5 million studying online dating to confirm that people are most attracted to others by their physical appearance; $43 million out of the defense budget to build a natural-gas gas station in Afghanistan; $800,000 to develop a televised cricket league for Afghanistan; and $15 million for free community college tuition for foreign students.

“Why should we be spending money on any of that?” he asked. “We don’t have enough money to take care of our own students. What kind of logic is that? We spent $250,000 to bring 24 Afghanistan children to send them to space camp in Alabama. We don’t have that kind of money.”

Paul said it should be up to the individual to decide if they want to donate money to studies and programs such as these, rather than the money flowing through federal grants. Paul said federal systems for distributing money are often prioritized through the “who-you-know, old-crony” system.

“We’re out of money and borrowing money at a rate of $1 million per minute,” said Paul. “We don’t have time for this kind of stuff. We spent a couple hundred thousand dollars last year studying whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. You can’t make this stuff up. I think we could have just stipulated — probably.”

Rand said one simple solution to reduce spending is by eliminating the thousands of duplicated “welfare” programs that exist in government.

“The problem is misplaced sympathy,” said Rand. “We want to help people, but if the goal is always to help people by making the country poor, we’re not any better. And this truly is a bi-partisan problem. The loudest voices in Washington right now for increased spending are the Republican voices saying we need more military spending.”

Rand said he believes the United States spends more money on the military than is needed.

“We shouldn’t just give a blank check to the military,” he said. “I don’t think we’re stronger if we’re projecting from bankruptcy court.”

Rand said the problem is further compounded by the give-and-take approach by the two-party system.

“When Republicans clamor for more military spending, how do they get it? They have to give the Democrats something. So they give the Democrats more domestic spending, more welfare spending — so both go up,” he said.

Paul also argued against too much power residing with the president.

“Our form of government — based on the Constitution — is supposed to have three branches of government,” he said. “One of the problems we have in Washington, particularly with all the spending and regulation, is it’s no longer being voted on by Congress. Most of it is being done by our own elected bureaucrats. If I were to estimate who had more power, the Congress or the president, I would say the president has 1000-fold more power.”

Paul also took questions from the audience, including a question on the war on poverty.

“We need to have a fundamental reassessment on how to best help people in poverty,” said Rand, noting that history has dictated that tax dollars go to Washington, and “then someone has to decide who to give it to.”

Paul argues that tax dollars should remain local and be used for local needs.

“I have a bill called ‘economic freedom zones’ that would create over $1 billion for eastern Kentucky through a reduction in taxes,” said Paul, adding that the money that would stay in impoverished communities would allow employers to create more jobs.

Rand said the bill he proposes would lower taxes dramatically in poverty-stricken areas for a period of 10 years.

“The people of east Louisville need this too. So we have a rural population that is very poor and we have an urban population that is poor,” said Paul. “Kentucky would be a great place to do an experiment like this — dramatically lower taxes in places that have high poverty and high unemployment.”

Link : http://www.centralkynews.com/amnews/news/local/boyle/paul-rails-against-big-government-debt-at-centre-town-hall/article_7220637f-daa0-5184-bb08-cb0ecc51ea00.html