Article from Reason by Eric Boehm.

This year, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R–Ky.) effort to balance the federal budget didn’t even get a floor vote in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Paul’s so-called “Pennies Plan” failed a procedural vote on Monday evening when only 22 senators voted in favor of a cloture motion that would have brought the bill to a final vote. A majority of Republicans and all Democrats voted against proceeding to a floor vote on the bill. It’s another sign that fiscal responsibility is all but dead in Congress, even as the national debt heads toward record highs and the budget deficit approaches $1 trillion this year.

“We teach our children that money doesn’t grow on trees, and then they grow up watching politicians pretend otherwise,” Paul said before the vote. “Meanwhile, our debt soars past $22 trillion, endangers our country, and artificially limits what our nation can achieve.”

Paul’s proposal called for cutting 2 percent from the federal budget for each of the next five years and would reduce federal spending by about $11 trillion over the next decade—even though spending would rise after the first five years. It’s an adaptation of the so-called “Penny Plan” that Paul has been pushing for several years, though he now says an additional penny in cuts for every federal dollar spent is necessary to get the budget to balance.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Rand Paul) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons