Republican Senator Rand Paul says the US government’s balance sheet would be in better shape if officials changed their approach to managing the national debt.
In a new interview on the All-In Podcast, the Kentucky senator warned of consequences from the nation’s ballooning debt.
-->Instead of trying to outrun the country’s debt by growing the GDP, Paul says the better path is to run smaller budget deficits every fiscal year.
“You spend what comes in. Most people do. You borrow if you have an asset that the bank can hold, like your house or something. This is what normal people do. And they spend what comes in. Your government should behave that way. And the same way, there are ramifications to you, personally. If you overspend, you’ll ultimately be punished. It’s going to happen to us. And so the first thing we do, we don’t even need to think about the [$37] trillion. We need to think about the $2 trillion we’re borrowing next. And that number needs to be smaller. But I can tell you, people aren’t getting it…
The deficit this [fiscal] year, the one we’re in, it’s going to end in about three weeks, is going to be about $1.9 something trillion. And that’s going to be about $150, $160 billion worse than last year. And as a percentage of GDP, I think it’s going from 6 to about 6.2. So we are getting worse.”
At time of writing, the US national debt is hovering at $37.430 trillion.
