Ron Paul: Americans should be ‘outraged’ with Obama budget

{mosads}“The debt should be priority number one, for everybody. It is for me. But it doesn’t seem to be for the people in charge,” Paul said.

The president’s plan has earned widespread criticism from Republicans, who have charged that the budget does little to address entitlement reform. But the White House insisted Monday that they addressed spending cuts in a serious way.

“I don’t think we take a pass,” Acting Budget Director Jeff Zients told reporters Monday.

Still, the plan drew a chorus of criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill – including Rep. Jeb Hensarling, who served as co-chairman of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which failed in its mandate to find $1.6 trillion in cuts.

“I’m bitterly disappointed in two respects. No. 1, the president told us that at the end of his first term he would cut the deficit in half,” Hensarling said on CNN. “Second of all, there’s a debt crisis and the president’s budget doesn’t deal with it.”

Rep. Paul said his economic plan — which calls for more than $1 trillion in cuts within the first year of a hypothetical Ron Paul presidency — was necessary to fix the country’s budget woes.

“There are some like the President who believe we can simply tax ourselves out of this predicament, I totally disagree. Washington does not have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem. So, it doesn’t matter how much we raise taxes, if we do not cure our disease of overspending we will not end the vicious cycle of borrowing and printing well beyond our means,” Paul said.