Sen. Rand Paul said Tuesday there's a good reason
Donald Trump is surging in the polls: It's all that publicity.
"It could be the $3 billion worth of publicity he's gotten by being on every channel," the Republican senator and presidential candidate told
Fox News' "America's Newsroom" host Bill Hemmer. "I think if I could get a billion dollars worth of free TV maybe we would get the same kind of surge."
But rather than talking about Trump, the Kentucky lawmaker was more interested in talking about his plan for simplifying the nation's immense tax code, which he says at 70,000-plus pages is "killing American jobs."
On Tuesday, Fox showed
Paul's new campaign ad, which shows the senator, an ophthalmologist by trade, cutting up stacks of pages with a chainsaw, after feeding even more pages into a wood chipper and burning another pile of them, with Jimi Hendrix's famed version of the national anthem playing in the background.
Story continues below video.
"We thought we would have a contest at randpaul.com to see how people would kill the tax code," Paul said about the advertisement, but in all seriousness, he wants to see a "single flat rate of 14.5 percent."
"People would want to move to America," he told Hemmer. "Right now, American companies are moving away from the U.S. to get away from the tax code … I want people to move to America because we have a tax code that entices people."
And while there are many candidates who support a flat tax, Paul said his plan is different because it eliminates the payroll tax for people making $40,000 a year or less.
"People have said a flat tax is only for rich people," said Paul, but his is different because "everybody will benefit, including the working class. Someone making $40,000 will get $2,000 more on their check every year."
Paul has also been tweeting about defunding Planned Parenthood in the wake of videos being released concerning the sale of body parts of aborted fetuses.
Earlier on Tuesday, a video was released showing
Mary Gatter, medical director of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, allegedly negotiating the sale price of aborted fetal specimens, as well as discussing the altering of abortion techniques to get intact specimens — an illegal practice.
The video, commissioned by The Center for Medical Progress, comes just a week after a similar one featuring Planned Parenthood's Deborah Nucatola, and one day after the organization told a congressional committee it expected several such videos to surface in coming weeks and months.
"I'm going to do everything I can to stop it," Paul said. "I think Americans have run away from the abortion issue. We are talking baby parts. They are crushing a baby's head and then using body parts to sell them. Even people who are pro-choice would be aghast. It's unconscionable."
He also refuted the argument that Planned Parenthood is needed to serve communities' needs for health screenings.
"Everything Planned Parenthood does other than abortion, is done by community health clinics," said Paul. "No taxpayer dollars should go to it because they are directly and indirectly paying for abortion."
But he thinks Americans are running away from the issue because "the public is squeamish."
"I'm for a small government," said the Libertarian-leaning lawmaker. "But the state has a function of protecting life. We can't rip apart babies and pass out different parts of the baby for sale.
"Even people who think they are pro-choice are not for taking out whole babies and distributing the parts to different people for money. I think this is ghastly. Maybe people will change their mind about whether the government ought to be involved in this."
Watch the video here.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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