Billy Cunningham, the Great America, of course, the junior Senator soon the senior Senator from the state of Kentucky. My home state is Ran Paul. And Ran Paul welcome again to the Bill Cunningham Show. And first of all, I love your comments on Squakbox and elsewhere about the deficits. The most predictable financial crisis ever hit any country. It's going to be America in the next few years, before we get to the Rains Act, before we get to
the crisis sixpenny plan. Tell me your reaction. The news of the day, of course, is the great debate between Kamala and Donald Trump.
Who won, who lost? And where do we go from here?
Their presidential debates are a unique bear. They are targeted mostly towards the people in the middle. You know, about forty forty five percent of America are Republicans forty forty five percent or Democrats, and there's ten or fifteen, maybe twenty percent in the middle. And so when you're doing these debates, you got to try to attract those people in the middle. And you kind of wonder who these
people are. And I tell people to imagine going to a dinner party and somebody comes to your dinner party and they say out come, but only if you don't talk about religion or politics, and nobody raises their voice. And that's who the Independence are. And so Donald Trump has to struggle a little bit because of his larger than life personality that sometimes the Independence think he's too pombastic. If they hear his policies, I think he can win.
I think in some ways it was a draw. You know, last night, I think sometimes he took debate too much. But I do think that when you compare the policies between what Trump is presenting. You know, Trump passed, along with our health Republican Congress, a large tax cut which caused a booming economy and some of the lowest unemployment ever recorded. We didn't hear enough of that. We didn't hear enough of the ensuing inflation that we got from
the Biden administration. You know, we have most average American working families have less money to go on vacation, less money for gas groceries. People are actually in the mew trying to decide what meat they can they can afford. And that's all because of Biden's spending and borrowing so much and creating this inflation. I don't think we've heard enough of that in the debate. I think if we
hear more, policy wins. But if we get stuck in the run of how big the crowds are, sometimes that's just not a winning, winning approach.
Senator on that front, I'm holding a story here from Reuters, and I agree with you. When it was done about ten forty five at not I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that wasn't good. I said, this isn't good. But then I didn't go to sleep till like three or four o'clock in the morning. Finally got a couple hours rest. I woke up and said, now, wait a minute. She may have won the debate, but her policies are the same. We're in the same position
we were in before. I'm looking at the story out of Reuters and Reuters identified and interviewed in researched ten undecided voters, three in Wisconsin, three in Michigan, four in Pennsylvania, and they were all unconnected to each other, so it would be more legitimate. And at the end of the
debate they had to say who won the debate. Six of these undecided voters shifted towards supporting Trump, three ling toward Harris, one remains undecided, and a small sampling they said basically, well, she's in power now, why can't she do what she's already saying? She's in the future. Why hadn't she done it yet? And they also said her facial gestures didn't look presidential. She looked a little according
to some woman, looked a little goofy. And so is it possible that those of us in politics who live and diet see it through a different lens than someone who is undecided, who's not clear who's running for president. I was with a dentist about two nights ago, and she's very bright, intelligent, smart, And she asked me, is the debate this week or next? Is Kamala Harris still running? Or is it Biden? And this is a smart person who doesn't watch the news, doesn't care about politics, thinks
she's going to vote for Trump. So is it possible that we in the field see things that the undecided voters don't see?
Yeah, because a lot of people are going to make their decision not necessarily on a debate, but on their own personal circumstances. So if you make sixty thousand dollars a year, or you and your wife make that as a combined income, and it's only buying fifty eight thousand dollars worth of stuff because you're losing two thousand dollars
to inflation. You see that every day. They know whether they could go on vacation this year, whether they can drive across state lines or go to a park, or do the vacation they'd like to do, whether they can afford what they want to buy in the grocery store. So that is an economic reality they can't escape. But elections do come down to, you know, sort of Santa Claus versus the American dream. The American dreams want of opportunity.
It's not necessarily concrete, but it's it's freedom and the opportunity to strive, to learn and succeed and to prosper them. Santa Claus is someone who just offers you free stuff, and they pander to you, and they say, hey, here's twenty five thousand dollars for a house. Some people will jump to that and say, I can't get a house, and no bank will give me the mind, and I don't have twenty five thousand dollars. So I'd love to have Santa Clau it's giving you twenty five thousand dollars.
But there's also are there enough thinking people who will think of the repercussions of putting up twenty five thousand dollars that isn't real, giving it to people, and then causing more price inflation. Maybe the house actually goes up twenty five thousand dollars more because you've stimulated an artificial demand with fake money. So I think there are enough
voters out there. So we have to make the debate over who is going to lead the country and which party will lead the country on policy, and you know that we've got to and get beyond certain impediments that for people who don't like Donald Trump. He has to get beyond that to the policy. And I think it could have been better last night, but he still has every opportunity and long enough to make sure people can get that message.
Your father was excellent on this issue. I had your dad on several times. I've had you on a few times about the deficit. And it's out there. It's a looming giant. It's terrible. It's almost like an asteroid that we know it's coming. I can tell you when it's going to hit within five years. But when it hits, it's going to destroy humanity as we know it. Right now, it's thirty six trillion. We're going up the rate about
a trillion every one hundred day. He's going to add two trillion this year to the national debt, and as far as the eye can see it, it'll be a fifty trillion dollars by twenty thirty two fifty trillion dollars. And when I watched you with Joe Kernan and Becky the other day on squad Box, you talked about what will happen when the world quits buying our debt or the dollar is not the reserve currency. There's an unbelievable crisis coming. Can you explain that to the American people?
Know, we spend about six trillion, we bring in about four trillions, So we're gonna have a two trillion dollar debt. That debt we sell, We pay for it with the Treasury bond. Somebody buys them. The public buys about a third of those, foreign countries buy about a third, and the Fed bas a third. When the Fed buys the debt, they do it by just printing up money, so that cost is inflation. But if there's a loss of confidence, it doesn't always come gradually. It might happen tomorrow, it
might happen next week. It might not happen for five years. But there can come a time where there's a cataclysmic loss of faith. Realize that even in Europe, as bad as they are in Europe, over half of the countries in the European Union balance their budget on an annual basis. Most of them have high taxes, but they don't go into debt for their social Security and their Medicare programs. Most of them have the age increasing for all these programs based on longevity. We don't do any of that.
We've got real problems. It's going to hit the fan at some point in time. My hope is that we wake up and realize this and try to slow down the accumulation of debt before we get to a catastrophe. But I fear that both parties are ignorant of this and terrible with the spending. I mean, the Trump administration added eight trillion in debt. The Biden administration is going to add eight trillion in debt, So there really has not been a lot of difference between the addition of
debt between Republicans and Democrats. And that's the sorry truth.
From George Washington in seventeen eighty nine to George Bush and twenty oh one. Think of the economic military difficulties America had between George Washington and Bush. Forty three, we went through Hell's half Acre, Great Glory one wars. The total accumulated national debt in twenty oh one was about four and a half trillion dollars. We add twice as much of that. We had that same number every two years now, So seventeen eighty nine, the two thousand and
one was about four trillion. We now add that same amount four trillion every two years.
How's that sustainable?
Yeah?
You know the George w. Bush doubled the national debt from your right just a little under under five to ten. Obama doubled it from ten to twenty. And now it's going up at an even faster pace. During COVID, when we made a terrible decision to close the economy down and pass out pre checks to everybody, the deficit exploded like it's never done before. So you know, I've offered for years a penny plan, cut one percent across the board to balance the budget. But it no longer works.
It now has to be called the sixpenny plan to it'd be a six percent cut for five years, would balance the budget. But I actually will get a vote on this in the next two weeks. I will force them to vote on it. Right now, there is no budget. There's been no vote on a budget. Republicans didn't produce one in the House, Democrats didn't produce one in the Senate. There has been no vote on a budget. So we're spending six trillion dollars with no budget plan. And this
is outrageous. No corporation would go through a year, you know, a billion dollar corporation wouldn't go through a year without a spending plan. But I'm going to force them to vote online and it will be the sixpenny plan. We'll cut six percent a year each year for five years,
balances in the fifth year. And my I guess is I'll get somewhere between about sixteen and twenty five Republicans, about maybe half the Republicans if I'm lucky, no Democrats, and then half the Republicans will vote with the Democrats against my budget, but at least somebody will put forward something, put something on paper and force them to vote.
We have about two minutes remaining.
In a concrete way, what happens when the world quit spying our debt or the dollar is not a reserve currency.
What happens? How does the crisis manifest itself?
Well, this is the question, and the question is whether it's a gradual crisis and it looms over weeks and months, or whether it happens in one day. This is a scary thing about it. If you look back at the calamities of the last one hundred years, most of the stock market calamity is unfolded in a period of twenty four hours. So we sell our debt periodically, and when they go to have this auction of our debt, people
show up and buy it. There could be a catastrophic day when nobody shows up and people just say we have lost confidence. What will happen on that day is a federal by one hundred percent of it. But what it happened is to get any of the private marketplace to buy it again, they have to raise the interest rates. And you know, we had a significant crisis like this with when in nineteen eighty when Volker raises interest rates all the way to nineteen percent. Part of that is
to get people to buy the debt. But also realized is that we have so much debt, is thirty five tillion dollars debt, that the interest payment we've been doing was under two percent, and we were keeping you know, we were doubling the debt and actually staying with the same interest payment. But now the interest rates just begin to rise. They're paying a little over three percent on the debt, but our interest payment's over eight hundred billion now,
it's about equal to the military spending. It's becoming the number one item in our budget. So I don't know whether it's a gradual or abrupt ind but there are people who talk about a black swan. A black swan can be in the stock market, can be an abrupt loss of confidence, but it could also be in the in the marketplace for the dollar, because the dollar really isn't backed by anything anymore. At one time it had
a link to gold, but with no link. It's the full faith and credit of the United States, and the people believe in the taxing power, and we've destroyed our currency at a slower pace than you know, say Argentina or some of these other countries. But you know, there are other things that people can go to.
Now.
You know, there's a story in the Wall Street journals today about tether, which is a stable coin. It's a cryptocurrency back to one to one with dollars, and the extraordinary amount of commerce going through that now. And the question is, one day will people bail out not just for gold, but will they bail out for a cryptocurrency that is backed one to one with some kind of hard asset in the stocks or with gold.
Well, in today's world, things don't happen slowly. I would anticipate almost a nineteen eighty seven crash, and that within one or two days there'll be a precipitating factor and the world's going to figure out we can't repay our yet, we have no chance that we're paying the principle, and the interest rates must continue to skyrocket. The federal by most of the debt print more money, which means every
dollar you got is worth less. Lastly, the fourth branch of government, some say the most powerful branch, is the regulatory branch. All the three letter capital letters, you have something called the Rains Act, Can you give us an update on what that is and what it seeks to do.
This would transform the regulatory environment in our country. Regulations are killing business and have any huge cost to the economy, costs US millions of dollars in jobs and millions of dollars in prosperity. The Rains Act would say that any agency that creates a regulation that is a major regulation that will cost the economy over one hundred million dollars, they can't just write it without the approval of Congress. It would have to come back and be voted on
by Congress. Unfortunately, only Republicans support this concept that no Democrats on the bill. We're forced to vote on occasion and never gotten a Democrat to support it. But this is a great distinction when people trying to think who they want to vote for. There are no Democrats that are for repealing any regulations. Just the truth of the matter. There are no Democrats that are for reducing any taxes. There are only Democrats out there that will say we
need increased taxes on the rich. The truth of the matter is the rich pay all the taxes already. The top one percent of wage earners pay almost half of the income tax. The top ten percent of wage learners pay ninety percent over ninety percent of the income tax. But there are distinct differences. The Rains Act is difficult to pass. The only thing I can say that's good right now is this Supreme Court has gotten rid of
this deference to regulatory agencies. And there is a chance that by lawsuits gradually making their way to the Supreme Court, that we will neuter some of these federal agencies that are writing such egregious regulations.
And lastly, talk about corporate taxes, company business taxes. Every dollar from government requiring businesses to pay more. Corporate tax whatever it might be, are not paid by the companies. They're paid by the consumers in the form of higher cost higher prices for the goods and services produced by that company. And so the canard by Kamala Harris and the great debate that somehow corporate taxes are going to go up that means you're going to pay more for goods and services as a consumer.
Correct, without question, that's true. Consumers pay the taxes, but also realize that if you raise taxes on American corporations, you'll have less American corporations, meaning that these corporations go overseas. So if you want American corporations to succeed, you have to have a level playing environment. You have to have equal taxes. For decades, Sweden, Denmark and all these countries we thought were more socialists than us actually had lower
corporate taxes. We finally lowered it under Donald Trump. And lowering the corporate taxes low and behold calls an economic boon. And guess what, more tax revenue. Because the economy grew so fast that even at lower rates, more tax revenue came in. So this is a big distinction between the parties. And if we can make that distinction, and I think people will choose the prosperity that comes with lower taxes
less regulation. But we've got to make that case, and got to make the case that we are the Party of the American Dream, where the millionaires of next year will be people who will have come from ordinary circumstances, ordinary backgrounds, who become the wealthy of an inter generation America. But only in America does that happen because of freedom, capitalism, international trade, you know, and only one party is offering that, you know.
Quesse Senator rom Paul, thank you great having you on again. Even though Kamala Harris may have won the debate, the policy differences remain, and you have to think as a consumer, as an American. She may have won the debate, but I'm not voting for Trump. I'm voting for the United States of America. I'm voting for our system of government. I'm voting for the way the First Amendment should read. I'm voting for the Second Amendment. I'm voting for the
Fourth Amendment. I'm voting for a closed down border. I'm voting for legal immigration. I'm not voting for Trump. I'm voting for America. Senator ran Paul, Yeah, I couldn't. I just I wish there was more senators out there like you.
So thanks a lot.
Bill enjoyed it.
We'll see what happens.
Ill.
Let's continue with more. Thank you, senator.
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