Ron Paul: No Debt Increase — Just Quit Spending

Presidential candidate Ron Paul has vowed never to vote for an increase in the debt limit during an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV.

The Texas Republican congressman says his fellow politicians cannot be trusted with the money they have at their disposal, so he will not agree to give them more.

When asked what it would take for him to agree to increase the limit, Paul responded, “I would never agree to up it. I just think they should quit spending.

“But how can you expect them to? Are they going to promise to cut in the next five years? They’ve tried that before many times, and they’re not trustworthy,” Paul said during an interview at the Faith and Freedom conference in Washington, D.C., last weekend.

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Despite talk of cuts, the obligations of the Federal Government will increase by $5 trillion this year alone when entitlements, deficits, and the money borrowed from Social Security are taken into account, he said.

“We’ve embarked on a horrible course. And they say, ‘not raising the debt limit, isn’t this a major crisis?’ Yeah, it’s a significant problem, but what is much worse is to continue to spend.

“If you raise the debt limit and you don’t really cut spending, then you get into a major crisis, which is a dollar crisis — and that’s a lot worse than biting the bullet and living within our means.”

Paul pointed out that he had lost congressional battles that would have ensured that money cannot be transferred between budgets. “Many, many years ago, I had a bill in that refused to allow the Congress ever to spend any of the money that’s allotted for Medicare or Social Security,” he said.

“But, no, they take it and they spend it and all the money is all gone.”

Now, he said, Medicare is “probably not salvageable,” adding, “It’ll go as our foreign policy will go once we have runaway inflation and the dollar doesn’t work.”

The eight-term congressman’s gloomy assessment even included fellow Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to rein in the budget. “I don’t think it does much” he said. “In the next 10 years, you cut some trillions of dollars, a little bit less. It’s a little bit more cutting than the Democrats.”

But he said the reaction to the Ryan plan proved that Washington is not serious about making cuts.

“He’s getting a bum rap. He trying to make an honest effort, and I have great sympathy for what he’s doing but it’s not that much.

“This tells me how bad things are because anybody making even a token effort, look at the anger that comes out and the bad-mouthing and the demagoguing. That’s why we’re not going to have cuts.

Paul insisted that failure to raise the debt ceiling and allowing the country to default on its debt are not necessarily bad things. “We’re defaulting continuously. We’ve defaulted many times in the past. All governments default,” he said.

“Right now, there’s a default going on because there’s inflation and the default is on the people because their cost of living is going up and they’re losing their jobs. So the default is there.”