Rand Paul Asks Voters: ‘Have Any of You Ever Worked for a Poor Person?’

Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul (R-Ky.) framed the 2016 election as a choice between higher taxes to pay for more “free stuff” from the federal government or lower taxes to fund a smaller government.

Drawing a contrast between his campaign and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) views, Paul asked voters if they have ever worked for a poor person rather than a company.

“How do we get to lower taxes in this country? You have to say you don’t want everything for free and you don’t want an enormous government if you are going to have lower taxes. If you don’t, what will you have? Your government will continue to grow and businesses would continue to leave and it’s going to be a problem. It’s already beginning to be a problem,” Paul said during a town hall in New Hampshire.

“But what happens is we get both sides going back and forth and they will pitch to you class warfare. Bernie will tell you we must tax those evil corporations because they’re getting rich and they’re getting all the money, but have any of you ever worked for a poor person? The thing is, we’re on the same side. If someone owns your company and you are 10,000^th in line, you make money when the company makes money. If the company is no longer here you don’t have a job,” he added.

Paul, an ophthalmologist, urged Americans to consider that everyone is “interconnected” and whether or not something that helps the business owner also helps the individual employee.

“Our taxes are chasing businesses away. Our regulations are chasing business away and then it is made worse by the fact that we have allowed our government to operate by executive fiat. What does that mean? The president is just doing whatever he wants,” Paul said, citing Burger King moving to Canada to pay less in corporate taxes.

“The president has a Republican Congress and he can’t get anything passed and he can’t pass legislation so he’s just writing executive orders. Well, our Founding Fathers would be horrified by this,” he added.

Despite gridlock in Congress, Paul said the president should not attempt to write his own laws.

“The problem with that is it is not really consistent with our founding principles. Our founding principles were that it would be difficult to pass legislation – that you would have to achieve consensus,” he said.

“The Founding Fathers were very fearful of a monarchy. They worried that the presidency could devolve into monarchy so they wanted to limit the power of the presidency. The same goes with regard to war,” he added.

Paul encouraged the attendees to call their legislators and urge them to vote in favor of auditing the Fed.

Paul cautioned that the audit the Fed bill would probably be shot down if the vote were held now.

“No true fiscal conservative should ever support the artificial lowering of interest rates – not in 2008, not now, not ever. Doing so is the equivalent of signing a death warrant for our country’s low income earners,” he wrote in a recent op-ed.