Rand Paul Slams ‘Dishonest’ Debt Ceiling Fearmongering From White House

Wednesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) joined Fox Business to discuss the debt ceiling fearmongering propagated by Democrats and the White House, calling it “completely dishonest.”

“They’re completely dishonest and worry the markets, and are bad for the country and bad for all of us by saying, ‘Oh, we might default.’ There is absolutely no reason for us to default,” Paul said to Fox Business host Larry Kudlow.

“Our interest payments are about 400 billion,” Paul continued.

“We bring in about five trillion, so we have plenty of money to pay our interest payments. We have plenty of money to pay our soldiers, to pay our social security, and to pay for Medicare.”

Paul’s comments come less than a week after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Congress that America had reached the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling last week.

House Republicans have held firm, demanding significant spending cuts to vote on an increase in the debt limit, despite the White House’s vows to refuse any negotiation.

The White House has accused the GOP of holding the economy “hostage.”

“I don’t think you should ever threaten default of the world’s safest security, which is the U.S. dollar, threatening to raise interest rates and undermine the kind of progress we’ve made thus far,” said White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein on MSNBC.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), recently denied a seat on the House Intel Committee thanks to his past relationship with a Chinese spy, suggested forcing legislation through using a discharge petition in order to raise the debt ceiling, the Daily Caller reports.

“We’re about a third overdrawn, so there’s an enormous amount of government waste we’d have to trim,” Paul said.

“Now, if you do it over a five-year period, what I proposed recently, you bring the baseline down, you cut $100 billion immediately and then you freeze spending for about four or five years. Guess what? You actually achieve balance through growth, and so it can be done and it can be done with very small amounts.”

Alongside Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) and Senator Paul, Senator Ted Cruz also ripped the federal government and recent presidents for ushering in exponential levels of debt in just the past few decades.

“Over the course of 42 presidents and more than 2 centuries, our national debt was $5 trillion. Now our national debt is over $30 trillion … This is unsustainable,” Cruz wrote in a tweet.