By Kevin Price
Freshman Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has caught a great deal of attention for his honest assessment of our nation's fiscal crisis and for offering solutions that make sense in the real world. David Rogers of Politico.com notes: "Republican freshman Sen. Rand Paul introduced legislation Tuesday that seeks to cut $500 billion from government spending in one year alone, wiping out three cabinet departments and the entire foreign aid budget while sparing neither the Pentagon nor 2011 war-related funding for overseas military operations." There will be many who will cry about the pain this sweeping proposal will deliver, but few who will be able to argue, with any credibility, that they are not needed. I think Paul's proposals make sense in light of our recent headlines. With a national debt of over $14 trillion and additional $1.3 trillion added this year alone, this country is desperate in its need to restore some semblance of fiscal sanity.
The areas that Paul suggests cutting are deep:
* Ending the Department of Energy, except for those areas that would be appropriately handled by the Department of Defense. After all, this department has only worsened our dependence on foreign oil and has not produced a single drop of energy in any form, except for maybe hot air.
* Ending the Department of Education. This is an area that was clearly meant for the states and the citizens. The federal involvement has made local school systems more bureaucratic, less efficient, and has led to massive increases in students in the classroom and teachers out numbered by them.
* He also proposes the end of Housing and Urban Development, another agency that has done little to improve the ability to obtain affordable housing.
* In addition, he wants to take out seven independent agencies, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and national endowments for the humanities and arts.
In all these areas Paul believes they are better left to the states and citizens, and he has a Constitution that backs up that belief. The states seem to be the best place to solve these problems. Traditional conservatives who feared that Paul was a typical libertarian that lacked real world answers to the situation should be glad to see that he isn't running around yelling about Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution or the Tenth Amendment. He has looked at the numbers and has made a proposal based on the economic realities of the day and on the Constitution that he swore to defend.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) was the only other true cost cutter in the Senate before Paul came along and his numbers are roughly half that of the Kentucky Senator. Paul is seriously trying to bring a new era to the way the government spends its money.
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Kevin Price
Host, Price of Business, M-F at 11 am on CBS Radio News
Frequently found on Strategy Room at FoxNews.com
Syndicated columnist whose articles appear on a variety of media outlets.
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