Rand Paul: We are rapidly approaching a milestone in our country and it’s not a good one. We’re rapidly approaching thirty trillion dollars in debt. We’re accumulating debt like we never have at any time in our history. We’re actually accumulating debt at the rate of over two million dollars per minute. Now, some say that deficits don’t matter. Some on the left say they have this new monetary theory where we can just print it all up. You can all have free stuff. There’ll be manna from heaven and nothing could go wrong. We’re just going to give you money. If not $1,400 checks a month or a year, why don’t we give you monthly checks. And that’s part of the new plans, the new plans of the three and a half trillion dollars that, you know, we’re facing down at this point that will all be borrowed, is to give people free money to give people free this, free that. But I think people are smarter than that. I think people know that ultimately you don’t get anything in life without hard work. You don’t get anything in life really for free.
Isn’t there some kind of ramification to so much borrowed money. When someone comes to you and says or they call you on the phone and they say here’s a thousand dollars, all you got to do is sign up for this. Most people immediately recoil and they say will that might be a scam. Somebody is going to be ripping me off to say that.
It’s sort of the bait-and-switch of the politics we face now. People are saying, “we’re going to give you free college, free cars, free cell phones, free this, free that. Everything in life will be free, you won’t have to work anymore”. The problem is there are ramifications. Money doesn’t grow on trees. The money’s got to come from somewhere. So either we borrow it. We become more indebted to foreign countries. We tax people for. Or ultimately the way we fix a lot of our deficit problems as we simply print the money. And so when the federal reserve prints the money, as we increase the money supply, the money that we have becomes worth less and less. It loses its purchasing power. This is the insidious tax of inflation. And the interesting thing about it is, is inflation is a regressive tax, it doesn’t affect everyone the same. In fact, the tax of inflation actually affects the working-class, the people of lower incomes, and those on fixed incomes and pension, retirees. It affects them much worse, because they don’t have the ability for their income to go up.
So right now, we’re facing 5% inflation, because of the massive borrowing that really both parties instituted in the last year. They decided that the results of the pandemic would be to close everything down, destroy the economy and then give everyone free money. And to a large extent, both parties actually did this last year. Now, this year the decision been made by Republicans just say wooh, this is so much, we got to stop, we got to get people back to work and let the economy recover. So it’s primarily been Democrats this year, but both parties have a certain responsibility to this, at least some members of both parties. But as the inflation occurs and this effect is being transmitted to the economy, you find that those who suffer those who cannot raise their income, those who have fixed income or low income.
One of the things you see here is that if we have 5% inflation, what does that mean? You say, well, I don’t know, it means I lose my purchasing power by 5% next year. What if it happens year in and year out for a decade and you lost 50% of your purchasing power. It means to make up for that, that you really have to have a 50% increase in your wages. So will wages keep up with inflation? The dirty little secret is, is that, in some ways wages will rise, but maybe they rise an equivalent amount or a little bit less and you say a decade later, I’m not any better off. And there become people mired and more dependent on government as government gets larger and larger, and they think they’re getting free stuff, but it’s not really free, the allure of something for nothing. This is the allure of socialism. This is, this is a false allure, something that you can, are you going to be to get something you’re not going to have to pay for it.
