Rand Paul Column on the Sequester

Here is the Senator's latest column in the Washington Times:

You may have witnessed Mr. Obama's histrionics recently, where President Chicken Little tried to persuade us all that if the sequester happens — and barely 2 percent of government spending is cut — we will all die. OK, he may not have said that, but I wouldn't be surprised if we learned that such hyperbolic rhetoric was removed from his speech at the last minute.

I have rarely witnessed such a performance in public by anyone, let alone the president of the United States.

There are many things the president got wrong or didn't tell us last week, but I will focus on just two.

First: He said the sequester wasn't his idea. Actually, the president asked for it and signed it into law. I voted against it, not because it had too many cuts, but because it didn't have enough. The sequester deal also left too many open questions as to how the cuts would be handled.

For all his brash statements about this last week, Mr. Obama has no one to blame but himself. Now, however, he wants a deal. Are we supposed to forget this was his last deal — for which he received as much as a $1.5 trillion increase in his ability to borrow money and increase our debt?

Second: What the president is forgetting to tell you concerns the enormous growth of the federal budget under his watch, which increased by 25 percent, or nearly $750 billion annually, during his first term. This administration has accumulated nearly $6 trillion in new debt, and we continue to spend a trillion dollars per year that we do not have. Yet, Mr. Obama still wants to stop the relatively minuscule spending cuts envisioned for this week.

This is not sustainable. Over the next 10 years, we will spend $47 trillion, yet the president would have us believe that spending a little less than $46 trillion instead will somehow ruin the country.