How would you strengthen the economy?

Ron Paul on the Evil Fed, the IRS, and Saving the Buck
By Maria Bartiromo

MARIA BARTIROMO
As President, how would you strengthen the economy?

RON PAUL
The most important thing is to get control of the budget, because the more we spend and the higher the deficit, the more we have to tax and borrow and inflate the currency—literally create new credit to buy Treasury bills. We need to restore confidence in the dollar before [its decline] gets out of control. The easiest place to cut spending is overseas because it's doing so much harm to us, undermining our national defense and ruining our budget. I would start saving hundreds of billions of dollars by giving up on defending the American empire. I'd start bringing our troops home, not only from the Middle East but from Korea, Japan, and Europe, and save enough money to slash the deficit. We can actually pay down the national debt and still take care of people here at home. That would restore a lot of confidence.

What is the most important change you would make?

Aim for the federal government to immediately live within its means, to take the pressure off the Fed to create money.

And that means what?

Means no more inflation. If the Fed doesn't create money out of thin air—and they do it mostly to accommodate the deficits—that would restore the soundness of the dollar and give us our purchasing power back.

But as President, you're supposed to be independent from the Fed. You would encourage the Fed to stop printing money?

You know this idea that we can create a secret bank and they manage things and rarely tell us—or Congress or the Executive Branch—what they're really doing, there's a problem there. I can't even go to a monetary policy board meeting of the Federal Reserve, and I'm on the Banking Committee of the U.S. Congress. I want open government, and certainly the Fed ought to be open. But it's an institution that really shouldn't exist. [Its financing] allows Big Government to get bigger without being responsible. And that's why we have runaway spending for both warfare and welfare.

...