Iraq
“I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, "I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier." They have already now since that time have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.”
***
“After 9/11, we went into Iraq. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, we've occupied two countries now. They were already complaining that our support for countries like Saudi Arabia and our military presence in Saudi Arabia was one of the inciting reasons for them to come here. So we did exactly the opposite of what we were supposed to do. Now we're in worse shape.”
***
“And all we can do is dig in our heels and say, "Well, we can't leave because there will be chaos." We've created chaos. The longer we stay the more chaos and the more expenses we're going to have.”
Other Foreign Policy Issues
“So called free trade deals and world governmental organizations like the International Criminal Court (ICC), NAFTA, GATT, WTO, and CAFTA are a threat to our independence as a nation. They transfer power from our government to unelected foreign elites. The ICC wants to try our soldiers as war criminals. Both the WTO and CAFTA could force Americans to get a doctor’s prescription to take herbs and vitamins. Alternative treatments could be banned. The WTO has forced Congress to change our laws, yet we still face trade wars. Today, France is threatening to have U.S. goods taxed throughout Europe. If anything, the WTO makes trade relations worse by giving foreign competitors a new way to attack U.S. jobs.”
***
“NAFTA’s superhighway is just one part of a plan to erase the borders between the U.S. and Mexico, called the North American Union. This spawn of powerful special interests, would create a single nation out of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, with a new unelected bureaucracy and money system. Forget about controlling immigration under this scheme. And a free America, with limited, constitutional government, would be gone forever.”
***
“Let’s not forget the UN. It wants to impose a direct tax on us. I successfully fought this move in Congress last year, but if we are going to stop ongoing attempts of this world government body to tax us, we will need leadership from the White House. We must withdraw from any organizations and trade deals that infringe upon the freedom and independence of the United States of America.”
***
“But I'm talking about a noninterventionist foreign policy. The founding fathers taught us about it, no entangling alliance. Don't get involved in the internal affairs. If you eventually did that in the Middle East, yes, we would be less vulnerable.
But just to back away a little bit and still have our puppet governments in Saudi Arabia, support Israel against the Palestinians, and be in Afghanistan, no, it's not going to change anything. As long as we have this mercantilistic idea that it's our oil, we have to be over there, we have to have cheap oil, we're going to be resented.”
***
“Defend our interests, defend our liberties, and we do not need to be occupying Europe and Japan, Korea, all these countries. We have troops in 130 countries. We have 750 bases around the world. We can't afford it, and it causes trouble for us.”
"In the year 2000, we won the election by condemning the Democrats for nation-building and
policing the world. And now, what are we doing? We're policing the world. We're involved in all these countries around the world and threatening going into Iran and in Pakistan and on and on. So no wonder our coalition is breaking up. We actually have lost our way."
"It would be much better to have a balance by being out of there. And I think it would be a greater incentive for Israel and the Palestinians and all the Arab nations to come together and talk because I think we get in the way too often. And besides, it's costing us a lot of money and it's costing us lives now.... We're out of money. We can't do it any longer."
"Mr. Republican Robert Taft didn't even want us to be in NATO, and you're saying now that we have to continue to borrow money from China to finance this empire that we can't afford? Let me see if I get this right. We need to borrow $10 billion from China and then we give it to Musharraf, who is a military dictator, who overthrew an elected government. And then we go to war, we lose all these lives promoting democracy in Iraq. I mean, what's going on here?"
Climate Change/Energy
“The government shouldn't be directing research and development because they are bound and determined to always misdirect money to political cronies. The government ends up subsidizing things like the corn industry to develop ethanol and it turns out that it's not economically feasible. So, my answer to energy is to let the market work. Let supply and demand make the decision. Let prices make the decision. That is completely different than the bureaucratic and cronyism approach.”
***
“On environment, governments don't have a good reputation for doing a good job protecting the environment. If you look at the extreme of socialism or communism, they were very poor environmentalists. Private property owners have a much better record of taking care of the environment. If you look at the common ownership of the lands in the West, they're much more poorly treated than those that are privately owned. In a free-market system, nobody is permitted to pollute their neighbor's private property -- water, air, or land. It is very strict.”
***
“I think some of it is related to human activities, but I don't think there's a conclusion yet. There's a lot of evidence on both sides of that argument. If you study the history, we've had a lot of climate changes. We've had hot spells and cold spells. They come and go. If there are weather changes, we're not going to be very good at regulating the weather.
To assume we have to close down everything in this country and in the world because there's a fear that we're going to have this global warming and that we're going to be swallowed up by the oceans, I think that's extreme. I don't buy into that. Yet, I think it's a worthy discussion.”
Healthcare
“Congress needs to craft innovative legislation that makes health care more affordable without raising taxes or increasing the deficit. It also needs to repeal bad laws that keep health care costs higher than necessary.”
***
“The lesson is clear: when government and other third parties get involved, health care costs spiral. The answer is not a system of outright socialized medicine, but rather a system that encourages everyone – doctors, hospitals, patients, and drug companies – to keep costs down. As long as “somebody else” is paying the bill, the bill will be too high.”
Education
“However, there is a real danger that Federal voucher programs will expand the welfare state and impose government ‘standards’ on private schools, turning them into ‘privatized’ versions of public schools. A superior way of improving education is to return control of the education dollar directly to the American people through tax cuts and tax credits.”
***
“Instead of expanding the Federal control over education in the name of parental control, Congress should embrace a true agenda of parental control by passing generous education tax credits. Education tax credits empower parents to spend their own money on their children's education. Since the parents control the education dollar, the parents control their children's education.”
Homeland Security
"...And then we turn around and we talk about liberty. And we've undermined the 4th Amendment and personal liberty and personal privacy."
Debate Moderator: You would eliminate the Department of Homeland Security in the midst of a war, sir?
REP. PAUL: Well, I think we should not go to more bureaucracy. It didn't work. We were spending $40 billion on security prior to 9/11, and they had all the information they needed there to deal with the threat, and it was inefficiency. So what do we do? We add a gigantic bureaucracy, which they're still working on trying to put it together, and a tremendous amount of increase in funds.
***
“The talk must stop. We must secure our borders now. A nation without secure borders is no nation at all. It makes no sense to fight terrorists abroad when our own front door is left unlocked.”
Taxes/Fiscal Policy
“So yes, there's a lot of things that we can cut, but we can't cut anything until we change our philosophy about what government should do. If you think that we can continue to police the world and spend hundreds of billions of dollars overseas, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars running a welfare state, an entitlement system that has accumulated $60 trillion worth of obligations, and think that we can run the economy this way; we spend so much money now that we have to borrow nearly $3 billion a day from foreigners to take care of our consumption, and we can't afford that.
We can't afford it in the government, we can't afford it as a nation.
So tax reform should come, but spending cuts have to come by changing our attitude what government ought to be doing for us.”
"Look at what we've done over these last 10 years. We finally got control of the government and we became big-government people. Our deficit's out of control and we no longer are opposed to new entitlements. We're entitlement people. "
Illegal Immigration
“You know, we've always had workers come to this country, but they have to be legal.”
***
“And we have to deal with the welfare state. We can't allow the illegal immigrants to qualify for Social Security after working here for 18 months. We just can't flat out afford it.”
***
Physically secure our borders and coastlines. We must do whatever it takes to control entry into our country before we undertake complicated immigration reform proposals.
Enforce visa rules. Immigration officials must track visa holders and deport anyone who overstays their visa or otherwise violates U.S. law. This is especially important when we recall that a number of 9/11 terrorists had expired visas.
No amnesty. Estimates suggest that 10 to 20 million people are in our country illegally. That’s a lot of people to reward for breaking our laws.
No welfare for illegal aliens. Americans have welcomed immigrants who seek opportunity, work hard, and play by the rules. But taxpayers should not pay for illegal immigrants who use hospitals, clinics, schools, roads, and social services.
End birthright citizenship. As long as illegal immigrants know their children born here will be citizens, the incentive to enter the U.S. illegally will remain strong.
Pass true immigration reform. The current system is incoherent and unfair. But current reform proposals would allow up to 60 million more immigrants into our country, according to the Heritage Foundation. This is insanity. Legal immigrants from all countries should face the same rules and waiting periods.
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