Rand Paul at the Fourth GOP Debate

No, we need a safe country, but, you know, we spend more on our military than the next ten countries combined?

Jerry Johnson, president of the National Religious Broadcasters, is one of the most important evangelical leaders in the country.

“Marco, Marco”, the Kentucky senator said. Marco Rubio has proposed what Kato Institute has said is a trillion dollars in new military spending. Marco Rubio and Paul over government spending. We have to be conservative with all spending, domestic spending and welfare spending. “Make no mistake, there is corruption in the monetary system and crony capitalism throughout, but few candidates are addressing the deeper issue that government is innately immoral”. Paul, who wants to abolish numerous government agencies and supports using drones to kill people who rob liquor stores, was the only person mildly resembling a voice of reason in the debate; this is how extreme the Republican Party has gotten. It is meant to offset income and payroll taxes and is considerably larger than the $1,000 credit that is now available.

Defense spending must be done in the context of an overall budget strategy to better prioritize, allocate and “hold the line” on necessary expenditures while squeezing down the size of government along with tax and regulatory burdens on US taxpayers, he said.

No where did Rubio explain or did the moderators ask him how he’s going to pay for it. It nets out your tax liability, crucially including payroll taxes, but no further.

“They’re also collecting your credit card confirmation”, he said. It’s actually a great feature of the policy.

Rubio’s tax credit is not an entitlement, or a handout, or welfare. It’s a tax cut. He said, “We have no choice if we are going to run our country properly and we are going to be a country”. Conservatives believe that your money belongs to you.

The Paul-Rubio dispute is among a number of niche battles among GOP candidates that have developed recently.

Rubio defended his plan, ending with the statement: “You think defending this nation is expensive?”

PAUL: Marco, I don’t think we’re any safer. Well, that’s wrong too. “One thing we understand, each one of those tax plans is better than the mess that we have right now”. So the question is, are we stronger if we borrow our way, are we going to be able to project power from bankruptcy court? We also believe in protecting natural institutions that serve human flourishing, including individual liberty, but also including the family, communities, subsidiarity, and so on.

Jindal claimed that there were “more people working in Louisiana than ever before”.

The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, also did an estimate of the original tax credit proposal and came up with a figure similar to that of the Tax Foundation – an estimated loss of almost $1.58 trillion in tax revenue over 10 years.

But Christopher Preble, the vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said he believes Rubio’s plan to increase defense spending without offsetting the cost is simply “not a conservative sentiment at all”.