Sen. Rand Paul - Tariffs, DOGE, and the Dept of Education

want to thank specifically Fisher Homes. After hearing my conversation with Jess over they reached out to Peyton's Lemonade Stand. They are now an official sponsor, So God bless the Principles at Peyton Holmes for making that decision, and that's why I am giving you a shout out today. Let us turn to Senator rand Paul. Always a distinct pleasure to have you on the program. Senator Paul, Welcome back.

IRS social Security Department of minding tax dollars. How easy is or how difficult a chore is it to get people off active Social Security number lists when they obviously do not exist, are dead.

You know, this isn't a brand new problem. During the middle of COVID, we noticed that there were reports coming back of dead people getting COVID funds, you know, getting these PPP loans for their business and stuff. This was a real scam and I think it was a thousand dead people got over like a billion dollars or something crazy. And so I went to the floor and we passed legislation to try to clean this up. But it's amazing,

how you know, the system just is so slow. So when I tried to clean it up so dead people wouldn't receive checks, there were people complaining, and they said, oh, well, we'll do it in three years, but first we have to merge this system with that system, and it's going to take three years. And I said, that's ridiculous. Let's do it now, do it tomorrow. And so I appreciate Elon Musk and President Trump frankly just raising Ellen saying we're not going to do it anymore.

is is they expose themselves. For example, you know when Elon Musk points out and I've pointed this out as well, that we're spending two million dollars on sex change operations in Guatemala, three million dollars on girl centric climate change in Brazil. Nobody's for that. When you ask people at home in Kentucky, any part of Kentucky, do you want to send two million bucks to Guatemala to help them do something obscene to their children? People are absolutely enraged

by this. But the Democrats haven't figured this out yet. The Democrats are not for cutting one penny of foreign aid. Unfortunately, there are many Republicans that aren't for cutting four and a too. I put forward an amendment about a week ago to basically take what Elon Musk and Doze has found in wasting four and eight about sixteen billion, and eliminate it. And I got twenty seven Republicans, but I got twenty six Republicans of vode to keep spending the

foreign aid. So this is where we're stuck. Is that you know, there are some decent Republicans. There are no Democrats that will cut one penny in foreign aid. That's just the truth, and people can look it up, but it's the truth. On the Republican side, it's only a little over half on a good day that I can get to vote to cut this waste. We're gonna have the same thing come up this week. The Republicans are

putting forward a budget. It'll be only Republicans that vote for it, but they're going to ask for five trillion dollar increase in the dead scale. And so I'm going to tell them, look, of course, unless you balance your budget immediately, you have to keep borrowing money. I'll let you borrow five hundred billion, which is crazy, but that's three months worth of borrowing, and in three months we'll come back and we'll assess whether or not you're doing

what you promised. See, they're making these promises that they will cut spending and they'll behave and they'll be better people, and they won't be the typical big spenders that Republican leadership has been. And I say, look, trust, but verify. I'll give you three months worth of borrowing and then we'll see what happens. But it'll be interesting to see how my amendment does because there's a possibility that people

across the hour might even vote for it. Design So I'm going to try to red from five trillion dollars in ball rang, which is about two years worth so we're going to borrow two and a half trillion each year for the next two years during supposedly conservative Republican rule. But I'm going to try to change it to five hundred billion. But it'll be quite an interesting vote to see how Republicans vote on my Amma.

we've got. Those systems are collapsing under the weight of themselves. Something is going to have to do. It be done, and no one says they are willing to, you know, put their elected a job on the line to actually save us from ourselves.

at all spending. And so one of the proposals I've had is not actually to cut people immediately off Medicaid, but to simply say to the states, you know what, you got to share half of the burden. That's what it used to be. States paid half of medicaid, federal government paid the other half. But when Obamacare happened in twenty ten, we added about fifteen million people to medicaid, but we said, hey, it'll be free. The federal government will pay ninety percent and the states will have to

pay ten percent. So this isn't This is one of those fixes that is eminently reasonable and not even that draconian. We don't cut anyone off. We just say to all the states, you now have to pay fifty percent of these new people people, And that saves about five hundred billion for the federal government. Now, state government would have

to pick up the tab. But the difference is the state governments don't have a printing press, they don't have a federal reserve, and so they might have to make more responsible decisions, and they might say, hmm, if you're able bodied, you have no physical helments, you're not on any medications, why aren't you working?

Get up there and work. There are many good jobs out there. There are many good jobs with insurance out there. But we can't keep doing what we're doing. There's just there's too many people in the wagon, not enough people pulling the wagon.

eliminating which require an active Congress. But our lives are not better because the existence of the Apartment of Education. Just looking at the nation's failing schools and the inability of many children to even be able to read or write at grade level. Block grants of the states, rather than going through the Department of Education and giving the freedom to the local school boards and school districts to determine the future of their children. That's a better path, is it not.

They spend a lot of their time teaching the kids according to the testing, and the kids aren't necessarily getting more proficient at reading or math because we've been forcing them to take these federal tests for the last you know, forty years or so. So I think we should promote this as pro teacher. Also, it's you know, sixty eighty ninety billion, it's a huge pot of money. That money's

not going into teacher salary. You know that you've got bureaucrats in Washington doing DEI diversity equity conclusion, some bureaucrats and in Washington consumed with race when we should be getting away from race and talking about people's individuals, not as you know, what ethnic group they're from. But we have people making four hundred thousand dollars as bureaucrats in the DEI bureaucracy. That money could be spent more on

education or frankly, teacher salaries. So there's a lot of ways that teachers I think should look at getting rid of federal control and sending it back to the States as a good thing not only for students, but for teachers and Frankly, you're exactly right. Over the last forty years, our scores have gone down. I mean, really, science proficiency is under ten percent. Reading proficiency about a third of the kids can read at grade level. I mean, it's not an overwhelming success.

But when you see China, for example, head in place and has had in place a sixty seven percent tariff on goods imported from the US, and you can go across the board and look at some of these outrageous tariff. Of course, the people that live there get fewer American products as the price out of the market, and that exists in a multitude of countries that now have at

least some tariff on them. I mean, if one thing this has been eye opening on it's that well, we're being mistreated in the global sense.

buy a lot of stuff from US. In fact, Canada buys more from US than China plus Japan plus England plus France. So Canada buys more than four countries combined, four big countries combined. And putting tariffs on that that just makes our products more expensive. But there is The thing is is, let's say that you make one hundred thousand dollars a year and I make five million dollars a year. Who do you think has a bigger trade deficit with Amazon, or with a grocery store or with

you know, luxury goods. Well, the person who makes more will always have a bigger trade destict because they buy more stuff and they don't make anything themselves. A rich person doesn't necessarily make anything. So every individual has a bigger trade deficit if they are rich. So the United States is rich, we will always have a trade deficit with Canada because we're rich. It's like five million people in some reindeer living up there, you know, And so

we always will have a trade deficit with Canada. But doesn't mean we've gotten poorer over seventy years. We've gotten richer over seventy years, and so the Canadians. But if you put a tariff on potash, which is you know, goes into fertilizer, what's going to happen to our farmers is they're going to pay more for fertilizer. And what happens that people eat the stuff our farmers make is going to cost more. So it's a mistake to get caught up in this country versus that country when every

individual trade, if it's voluntary, is a good one. If I'm a farmer and I buy my fertilizer from Canada, it's a voluntary trade and I buy it from them at a certain price, but it isn't something I'm not getting ripped off. Nobody who makes a trade has ever ripped off, because when you make a trade, you agree voluntarily to give up your money for something you want. The person trading with you gives up something they made

for your money. So a trade is never bad, and a trade is never injurious to any of the parties of the trade if it's done voluntarily. If you look at the last seventy years and you look at the curve of international trade, international trade has grown exponentially over the last seventy years. But if you look at GDP per person across the world, it has grown exponentially. Also, every day one hundred thousand people escape poverty. We the

middle class is not being hauled out. The middle class has actually gone to the upper class in the last seventy years. If you look at household income, those who make fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars, there's slightly less than there was seventy years ago. But if you look at the lower class, there's also slightly less. So where did these people go. There's less people in the under fifty thousand dollars category, there's less people in the

fifty to one hundred thousand dollars. Guess what, There's three times as many people in over one hundred thousand dollars category. And this is including inflation. If in long term historical trends, trade and wealth are proportional. You know, the more trade, the more wealth we've gotten. And then wealth is more apparent in the poor countries because they started out poor. But we are all getting richer. And if we want American manufacturing, the best way to do it's lower their

taxes and less than their regulations. We have the smartest, most capable workers in the world. We still make many things here, but you know, we don't make shoes. We don't make some of those things. But you know, if the tariff history day is a fifty percent tariff on Vietnam, so para nikes instead of costing one hundred and twenty dollars are going to cost one hundred and eighty dollars or or whatever the price is going to be. I don't think that makes us any richer. I think that's

just going to make us poor. We're not going to make shoes here tomorrow. You know, you think in five years of fifty percent tariff on Vietnam or all of a sudden, you gonna make shoes here. No, we's every American is going to pay more for shoes, which means we're all going to be poor.

than Vietnam. I wouldn't move to Vietnam, and still being Vietnam would move to Vietnam, they wouldn't be want to move over here. So having a ninety percent tariff, you know, that's what we're trying to go towards because we think it's on fair and this unfairst argument doesn't really make sense because it doesn't make me want to move to cant to Vietnam that has ninety percent tariffs.

You know, us in Israel, we have no tariffs. We're basically a free trade zone between US and Israel since nineteen eighty five. So I don't begrudge President Trump if he wants to try to tell them go lower, and will go lower. But just slapping these things on, you know, fifty percent tariff on Vietnam is the crazy thing. You know, we fought the war, we got through the war, and you have many veterans that go back now and we actually have better relations with Vietnam now. But fifty percent tariff.

It is not a good way to keep good relations. It's a good way to sour things.

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