It was President Obama speaking, but it was rock singer Bob Seger that Sen. Rand Paul said he was thinking about.
The Kentucky Republican and potential 2016 presidential contender, noting Mr. Obama’s declaration that the country could now “turn the page” on recent hard times at his Tuesday evening State of the Union address, said the Detroit rocker expressed it much better in his 1972 song about the difficulties of life on the road.
“All I could think about was Bob Seger’s song, and I was wishing Bob Seger was up there speaking and not Obama,” Mr. Paul told a moderate Republican group Wednesday morning at the Capitol Hill Club.
“The song is kind of melancholy,” he noted. “It is ultimately about moving forward. But I think we — as a nation — are moving backward.”
Mr. Obama used the “turn the page” line to tout what he said were his administration’s successes in guiding the economy back from the Great Recession, but Mr. Paul argued the president’s policies have only left the U.S. in a deeper hole.
The president “is on course to add more to the deficit than all 43 presidents combined. And he has the gall to brag about reducing the deficit,” Mr. Paul told a breakfast meeting of the Ripon Society.
The Kentucky senator offered what he said were better ways to stimulate the economy than government checks to “random” citizens.
“If I have $800 billion and I want to pass it out, if I randomly select people to give the money to, I don’t know if they are going to use that money on businesses,” Mr. Paul said. But returning that money to Americans in the form of a tax cut, “you’ll find that it is a hundred times more effective than the government just passing it around.”
The winning formula for economic recovery, Mr. Paul said, is to “lower taxes, build revenue, stimulate the economy, and build highways. It’s a win-win.”
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