Rand Paul, the Reasonable One

Not all the tea party candidates are crazy incompetents. Rand Paul for example has yet to propose armed insurrection to solve our nations woes. And he's worried about the deficit!

A spokesman for Rand Paul, the Tea Party-backed Senate candidate in Kentucky, said Paul “will vote against and filibuster any unbalanced budget proposal in the Senate.”

What's more, he refuses to use taxes to do it!

Paul...said it would be better to pair the tax cuts with a plan to reduce spending. However, asked if he would vote to extend the tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts, Paul said, "Absolutely. The money is not the government's. It is ours."

And if anybody makes a move to change that, he'll stop 'em! Some say it's an impossible dream, but there is a way:

Discretionary spending — inclusive of defense spending — in 2010 will be about $1.4 trillion. So Paul would have to get rid of almost the entire discretionary side of the budget (which includes some veteran’s benefits, operational funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Nuclear Security Administration) to achieve his goal.

The non-defense discretionary side of the budget — which is where education funding, housing assistance, FEMA, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service all reside — comes to about $530 billion, nowhere near enough to close the gap Paul wants to eliminate.

So the upshot is that Paul would have to raid the mandatory budget — which is largely composed of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — to entirely eliminate the deficit in a single year, unless he is planning to ditch the FBI and the Secret Service overboard. And extending all of the Bush tax cuts only makes the problem worse.

Rand Paul: WHY DON'T WE LEAVE THE CRIMINALS AND MUZZIES ALONE?