Key Vote YES on the Rand Paul Budget

Dear FreedomWorks member,

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your U.S. Senators and urge them to vote YES on the Paul Amendment #263 to S.Con Res. 8, Senator Rand Paul’s substitute budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2014.
 
Senator Paul’s budget plan contains many provisions that make it stand out as easily the best budget plan being offered in Congress this year.  First, it balances the budget in five years, and unlike other budget plans it does not use President Obama’s past or future tax hikes to achieve balance.  The plan returns annually appropriated (discretionary) spending to 2008 levels, and eliminates four cabinet departments (Energy, Education, Commerce, and Housing & Urban Development), agencies whose benefits are debatable and whose responsibilities in any case are, as a constitutional matter, more properly handled by state and local governments or the private sector. .

More importantly, the Rand Paul budget structurally reforms the federal government’s biggest spending items – entitlements.  It block-grants Medicaid, food stamps, and children’s health insurance to the states, allowing states to choose how best to use that funding for their own citizens. The budget allows seniors to opt out of Medicare and to opt into the same, highly popular, health care plan enjoyed by Members of Congress.  The Paul budget also reforms Social Security by allowing individuals to opt out in favor of personal accounts. And crucially, it eliminates ObamaCare, which at a cost of at least $1 trillion over the next decade should really be called the Unaffordable Care Act.

The Rand Paul budget fundamentally reforms our byzantine tax code, replacing the entire current income tax system with a simple, 17% flat tax (with a personal exemption that avoids burdening lower-income households).  In doing so it eliminates numerous deductions and loopholes that individuals and corporations use to avoid paying today’s high tax rates, ends economically damaging double-taxation of income (including abolition of capital gains and death taxes), and sweeps away corrupt tax-code handouts to powerful corporations and special interests.

In addition, this budget contains fundamental regulatory reforms, reining in unaccountable executive-branch bureaucracies whose endless rules affect and distort nearly every aspect of our struggling economy. These reforms include repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial sector rules that protect banks deemed “too big to fail”, routine sunsetting of regulations, and the REINS Act, which would require Congress to vote on major regulations before they can take effect.

This comprehensive, principled plan addresses most of the fiscal and economic challenges facing the United States today, and if implemented would surely result in a massive surge in economic growth and job creation.  Most importantly, unlike other plans Senator Paul’s doesn’t just slow the growth of the federal leviathan, it actually downsizes it, moving America back toward proper constitutional limits giving states and individual citizens more freedom, more choice, and more control of their economic futures.

For all these reasons, I urge you to call your U.S. Senators and ask them to vote YES on Senator Rand Paul’s Budget, Amendment #263 to S.Con. Res. 8.  We will count the vote on this amendment as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2013. The Economic Freedom Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom.

Sincerely,

Matt Kibbe
President and CEO, FreedomWorks