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April 8, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
20:30
$1 Trillion Military Budget Coming? Watch The Demise of the Fake Economic System

President Trump casually mentioned that the U.S. will have its first TRILLION dollar military budget. This does not, in any sense, sound like a government looking to cut waste, fraud and abuse. We have been bankrupted (economically, and more importantly, morally) by a century of endless wars. The federal debt continues to rise, even with total Republican control. This is all bad news for our nation.

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American People's Demand 00:06:51
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Chris Rossini, the co-host.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
We have interesting subjects.
They're fighting too many wars, and we're spending too much money at home.
So what are we going to do about it?
We've been telling people they shouldn't do that, but they just aren't listening.
Well, we've applauded, you know, this new committee, Doge and Musk, and even Trump and even we praised them.
But it doesn't look like it's getting very far.
And because the news item that we've discovered today that sort of dampens our enthusiasm is the announcement by the administration, HEGSA, says Pentagon will get its first $1 trillion DOD budget.
And then if you read the article in anti-war, they say, you know, next year, because of some hidden ways they hide the spending and the momentum, they're saying the military budget next year could be $2 trillion.
I'll tell people listening, don't sweat it.
We'll never make it that far.
You know, if we're going to spend like that, there may be a conclusion to all this.
And I think that's what we're witnessing now these last couple days and couple months and couple years is a whole system that came from the original 1913 Federal Reserve Act.
And then that morphed into all kinds of things throughout history.
And we trace those, but we've drifted a long way from that.
We don't have a sound currency, and yet we are powerful.
We still have the weapons.
And it seems like the American people like to tell other people exactly what to do, even if they have to fudge a little bit.
You know, this is important.
It's important for jobs and all this stuff that we have to go out.
And now, in addition to our interventionist foreign policy, we have this idea that tariffs are magic.
And that argument's been around for a long time.
And I can remember Al Gore and somebody else arguing a debate one time.
And Al Gore was on the right side of that issue.
He made fun of the opponents supporting a huge tariff.
But anyway, it's up there.
And we're in the midst of turmoil.
And today it just happens to be a rest.
Some people say, well, no, it's all over.
It's a rapid adjustment.
It'll all come back later on, maybe today, maybe next week or whatever, because they haven't changed policy.
Matter of fact, I think it's making it worse.
It's making people complacent.
The people who were most organized to resist some of the spending, there's only about two or three in the Senate and two or three in the House that are willing to do it.
And so there's no real resistance.
There was a time, even when I was in Congress early on, that we used to get some allies coming from the left who would say something about some of this spending overseas.
But they're as hawkish, if not more so, than the Republicans now.
Republican rhetoric has actually improved, and the election showed that the American people are generally with cutting back on the adventurism militarily overseas.
So this is a real mess.
I consider it a philosophic mess, a consequence of interventionism in economics, intervention of personal liberties, intervention overseas when we shouldn't do it.
And it can't last forever.
And it will be based eventually on the destruction of the currency, just as it's happened hundreds of times over history.
And the famous time, of course, was when the Roman Empire bit the dust because they did exactly the same thing.
It was the militarism and are the largest back at home.
And right now we're seeing things come under glued.
So it's rather disturbing.
I'm going to check with Chris, see if he's been disturbed by a trillion dollars.
Maybe he's not going to get upset until it's $2 trillion.
How about that, Chris?
I don't know.
I hope we don't get that far down.
But I think you're right, Dr. Paul.
I don't know if we would make it to $2 trillion.
Yeah, you're 100% correct.
We started off hot.
The Trump administration, we were excited ourselves.
Cutting, actual cutting with Doge was happening.
Finally, you know, this is something that never happens.
But as the weeks go on, we started to notice, you know, this is only like leftist stuff, good stuff that was being cut, but only the Democrats were upset.
And anybody who's been around a little while knows that our problem is not simply the Democrats, it's Democrats and Republicans.
And the Republicans are not upset.
And in fact, Pete Heggseth, as you mentioned, Dr. Paul, thank you, Mr. President, he says, coming soon, the first trillion dollar Department of Defense budget.
President Trump is rebuilding our military and fast.
And here's the funny part.
P.S. We intend to spend every taxpayer dollar wisely on lethality and readiness.
End quote.
I mean, how stupid does he think Americans are?
If we were, if the military was efficient, they would cut it 50, 75% from what it is now, not increase to a trillion dollars.
So it is starting to feel like we've been duped.
You know, the question has always been in my mind: will President Trump try to save the empire or save the nation, America?
And by all, you know, appearances today, it's looking like he's trying to save the empire, which means that it's going to bankrupt the nation.
Very good.
You know, a little bit of laughing and ridicule relieves us to a degree, but it's really pretty sad that this is so serious.
I mean, you're not, you're not supposed to laugh and cheer unless it's your enemy at funerals, you know.
And I see this as the end of a system rather than the glorification of a system that is pro-American, pro-liberty, pro-peace, pro-balanced budgets, and all that stuff.
So, but the American people loved what was happening.
Treat Others As You Want To Be Treated 00:02:33
And our program here, we praised it many times every time, especially with U.S., you know, USAID exposing that horrendous mess there.
And, you know, even though I'm not convinced it's all going to happen and eventually cut that spending, but just the exposure, it does wake people up.
But it is also very difficult to achieve.
So that's what we're seeing when this, when we see that they were going to investigate everything, even mentioned Pentagon, you know, and they were, the committee was willing to talk about stopping foreign aid and all of this.
But none of that seems to have happened.
You know, there's a saying about the golden rule.
We should treat other people as we want to be treated.
And that's a religious moral principle.
But I always assume that countries should do that too.
Well, we want to be treated the way we treat other people.
But you know, I've decided that individuals sometimes, and countries especially, they want treated as they propose to treat other people.
But I'm more worried about how we treat ourselves.
Some people are self, there's this self-mutilation and self-destructive, and it's a disease when they do that.
But I think this flagellation and what we're doing, you know, take the terrorists for example.
I think they're so dangerous and not very wise.
And the foreign policy, the same thing.
And yet we do this and we think we're going to avoid it.
But just think of the things that we do to ourselves.
We write these laws.
The people approve, you know, indirectly and sometimes directly all the spending.
The special interests get it, especially for the wars.
Then we also have the spending on the welfare state.
And that's the way we treat ourselves.
So we shouldn't be surprised that others mistreat us too.
Oh, treat us like we treat you.
Well, I don't think that's a full answer.
We'd be able to talk more about how we're treating ourselves and thinking about protecting the very valuable things.
And for me, that's the protection of personal liberty and a wise monetary system and a wise economic policy.
That should be our goal.
Yeah, absolutely.
Empire Versus Republic 00:09:44
Unfortunately, that's not the goal at the moment, at least.
And, you know, it's sad to say that my entire life, my country has been at a war somewhere with someone.
And it's worse than that.
My entire parents' life is the same, you know, before I was even born.
It's the same stories.
And it's even worse than that.
My grandparents were intimately involved, terribly affected by the world wars.
And this is what has bankrupted our nation, not just economically, but morally too.
We really have a lot of people that, you know, they don't value life outside of this country.
They're very fine with just bombing them.
And that's it, as if these are not human beings we're talking about.
And this trillion dollars, even if President Trump doesn't do anything drastic, which we have to hope he doesn't, because that's not looking good either.
You know, if you build this up even more, some neocon, some warmonger will get in there and will use it, you know, for very bad purposes.
You know, the purpose, the hope with President Trump was to cut and abolish and bring the troops home.
But it's not happening.
It's going in the opposite direction.
So our economic and moral bankruptcy will not be reversed, you know, if things continue as they are today.
Yes.
You know, to help make the point I was making earlier, I want to read two headlines.
The first one here, this came out this morning.
The first victim of Trump's trade war, Michigan's economy.
They didn't stop and think that the tariffs they've imposed puts a tariff on all the parts they buy to energize the auto industry in Michigan.
So right away, it's engineering.
And, you know, it's just hard for me to believe that, oh, that'll pass.
They'll adjust.
They'll do this.
We have other tools that we can do.
But that's the first thing they do.
So it doesn't help.
It looks like it's making it worse.
Then the other headline is the one that says, Trump has threatened Iran over an ultimatum that likely cannot be met.
So they're making ultimatums against Iran, which they do endlessly.
And it's usually in collaboration with Israel because there's probably some real dangers there.
But for us to inherit all the danger to the world, I think is a mistake.
So they go in and they do this.
They make these threats and ultimatums.
And it's all over.
The Iranians are having a nuclear weapon.
Yeah, Saddam Hussein had a nuke.
He never, yeah, he became pretty desperate to the point where he was hiding in a rat hole.
And we excited the world into World War III on its way.
And it's just people just seem to lose it.
And just go to these excessive.
So now we're out threatening Iran on top of the dumb policies we have here and the false promises of really being serious of coming back and looking and predicting now people who are credible people predicting at the rate we're going, we're going to have $2 trillion next year in the militarism.
And if we go on threatening Iran, what if it annoys them?
What if they get annoyed by all this?
What if they start talking to China?
Who knows what they might do?
So it just makes no sense whatsoever.
So that just guides me back to some of the basic principles that we promote.
And it's not aggression.
It's not militarism.
It's not inflationism.
And it's not empire building and all that stuff that brings harm to us more so, at least, than a lot of other people.
Chris?
Excellent, Dr. Paul.
I'll finish up.
It's a shame we don't have good news today for our viewers, but that's life.
You know, it should go without saying that humanity flourishes in peace, voluntarism, trade, voluntary exchange with one another, and humanity is destroyed by war and force.
And when you look at our nation, I don't know how many Americans actually even know this.
I'm going to say a very, very small percentage.
We have approximately 750 military bases around the world.
And just so they know, that's not normal.
Okay, that's no one else does this, and we shouldn't do this.
That wasn't the purpose of America to pepper the world with our arms.
And at the same time, we live in our own little fantasy world over here.
We're told that China is a major threat.
They have one military base in Djibouti, Africa.
We have 750, and many of them are surrounding China.
Yet if you talk to Americans that watch television, unfortunately, they still do, you know, they're afraid that Xi Jinping is going to appear under their bed.
So we live in a fantasy world here.
And, you know, I'll finish up.
We expected more from Trump.
It's still early.
Things can change.
But the direction, it's not looking good.
Very, very good.
You know, the things that are going on right now, in my mind, I describe it as everybody's wringing their hands, and we do that too.
But I think what we're witnessing is the collapse of a totally fake economic system, starting with the monetary issues, starting with the deficit, starting with our foreign policy.
And it's all fake.
You know, what's good for America?
And they come up with these other things, come up with tariffs, and they immediately wipe out jobs domestically and push up prices.
And so that's yet to be seen.
So that to me is very discouraging.
The other thing is, how do these trillions of dollars get passed if they don't make very much sense?
And we're not in a hot war.
Nobody's about to invade us, except they might invade us in an economic sense.
Maybe we've spent too much money overseas and maybe they're investing it and maybe they're competing with us.
And nobody analyzes that and say, well, maybe we have some self-blame that maybe we did something wrong there.
But the special interests are very powerful.
They put the money into it.
And of course, the military industrial complex is behind all the militarism.
But in a bigger picture, I think there's a debate going on, a historic debate, and it's always between empire and republic.
It certainly was a clear battle with the Roman Empire and most of the empires, those who love liberty and those who say we want bigger government.
Sometimes they get away with it for a long period of time.
Sometimes it ends badly.
And sometimes it's sort of miraculous how it ends.
Because as a kid, I was very much aware of the Soviets.
And this was a very dangerous thing in World War II.
This was really something that people worried about.
And I think that the empires sometimes aren't nearly as strong as they think.
And they come to a halt rather quickly.
So throughout the 60s and the 70s, there was still this thing of the threat of communism, the Soviets.
And all of a sudden, it was over.
And it was over because communism didn't work.
They ran out of money and people gave up on it.
And that could be what we're starting to see right now, the opening salvo of people giving up on us financially and economically and looking at our dollar and maybe looking at our militarism.
And they say, oh, no, we are powerful.
We have a lot of weapons.
And that's true.
But maybe it's such that maybe we'll run out of the money, you know, and we won't be able to maintain this type of spending.
So the empire versus the republic is something that has been fought.
And of course, our founders argued the case that they were favorable toward a republic.
And they actually deliberately ignored and belittled the whole basic concept of democracy, pure democracy.
Give it to the majority.
Whoever can go to gang together and say, we have 51%, you do as we tell you.
We can do anything we want to the minority.
And guess what?
The minorities, economically speaking, aren't doing all that well.
And I think we could break this down into two groups of people.
There are authoritarians.
They're born that way.
And they gravitate into politics and they gravitate into authoritarian positions.
And they're willing to bend the rules and lie.
Battle for Liberty 00:01:11
But the other side of this are the people that believe in liberty.
And these are the people that are willing to work in this system and compete with those who are actually nihilists.
They think that it's smart.
And he actually even admitted on TV.
I heard a person the other day that we should, you know, tell them these stories because they have to understand our position.
So we have to lie.
They didn't use the word lie, but we have to, you know, tell stories about that to convince people.
So they believe in that.
So it's a battle between truth and nihilism.
It's a battle between authoritarianism and liberty.
There's certainly a battle between peace and prosperity.
So there's no reason why we should be discouraged because our philosophy, I am so convinced, is far superior to the philosophy of authoritarianism and that of canceling our personal liberty.
And if you look at the history, you find out the freer a country, the more likely it is that they will be living in peace and prosperity.
That should be a good goal for all of us.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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