Rand Paul Announces 2016 Presidential Bid
Senator Rand Paul’s Presidential announcement came from his twitter account in the form of a video, which compiled Paul’s speeches and fans chanting his name.
The video displayed the following full-screen text: “On April 7 one leader will stand up to defeat the Washington machine and unleash the American dream.”
Sen. Paul (R-Kentucky) is expected to announce his Presidential bid Tuesday.
Rand is the son of the very popular Ron Paul, who has long time been a gold bug. Rand does differ from Ron in marked ways.
As Paul unveils plans to run for president on Tuesday, he’s framing his candidacy as that of an outsider, the antidote to the Washington establishment. His slogan: “Defeat the Washington machine. Unleash the American Dream.”
At its most basic level, that motto would have applied to the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns of his father, former U.S. Representative Ron Paul, whose iconoclastic political beliefs inspired a dedicated army of libertarians activists to give their time and treasure to his cause.
But two-thirds of the way through his first Senate term, Paul the Younger has pursued a somewhat more moderate, politically pragmatic economic course and shown far more willingness to work within the system he now wants to dismantle.
His attempt to satisfy the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, while scoring well with its traditional deal-making center, underscores the balancing act facing Paul as he takes aim at the White House. Paul’s ability to leverage the energy of libertarian loyalists while still appealing to the typical Republican primary voters will help determine the success of his campaign.
“He’s a libertarian,” Stephen Moore, the chief economist for the Heritage Foundation and an informal adviser to Paul, said in an interview. “But he understands he has to broaden his reach beyond the traditional, hard-core, anti-government base of his father.”
Paul himself has noted the overlap that exists between conservative and liberal activists on some economic policy. “The origins of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement really had some commonality, and that commonality was that government shouldn’t bail out Big Business,” Paul said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in 2013. “It has been a part of the early message of the Tea Party, but the Republican Party hasn’t captured that message.
“The average guy who’s working class is not real excited about paying taxes and sending it out to bail out a guy who makes $100 million a year,” he said. “And so I think the Republican message should be that we treat people the same whether you’re a small business person, a working-class guy, or a big bank on Wall Street.”
Paul, 52, has split from his party on some issues, such as foreign policy and civil liberties. But on economic ones, he’s portrayed himself more as a conservative deal-maker and less of an inheritor of his father’s policy.
Ron Paul, for instance, wanted to shutdown the IRS and eliminate income taxes. Rand Paul wants to cut the tax code, but replace it with a 17 percent flat tax. A revamp of Paul’s flat tax plan, which a spokesman said was still a few weeks from completion, may be among the first major policy proposals of his presidential campaign. At the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, Paul promised “largest tax cut in American history.”
After the party’s victories in the 2014 midterm elections, Paul called for Republicans and Democrats to come together to let U.S. companies bring home as much as $2 trillion in offshore cash stockpiles at a reduced tax rate.
That plan, on which he teamed up with Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, would use new revenue to fund highways. President Barack Obama also has called for using taxes on overseas profits to fund infrastructure, but Obama wants more permanent changes to make it harder
