Politics

Rand Paul: Obama will bail out Detroit ‘over my dead body’

Caitlin McClure Contributor
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Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul will fiercely oppose any plan President Barack Obama’s may put forward to bail out Detroit.

“He is bailing them out over my dead body, because we don’t have any money in Washington,” Paul said in a phone interview with Breitbart.com on Friday.

While the White House said Thursday they are monitoring the situation, there is no bail out in the works. However, Paul worried that Obama is “making indications that Detroit can be expected to be bailed out.”

Paul warned that if the president decided to bail out Detroit, his action would set a dangerous precedent for other cities and states that overspend recklessly.

“Those who don’t have their house in order, who are teetering on disaster, will continue to make bad decisions,” he said. “You don’t set up an implicit promise from the federal government that everybody is getting bailed out.”

Detroit is not the first nor the only city that has gotten itself in major financial trouble. A federal bailout would exasperate problems in other cities such as Stockton, California, which filed for bankruptcy, according to Paul.

“I mean, the statistics in California are staggering. I think there’s over 100,000 people there getting over $100,000 a year in retirement,” Paul said. “You got police chiefs in medium-sized cities getting $350,000 a year for a salary. It’s become untenable… We cannot send a signal from the federal government that cities and states are going to be too big to fail.”

If Detroit had been more fiscally responsible, the path back to stability would have been much easier, Paul explained.

“Bankruptcy in Detroit is going to be much harder than if ten years ago, they had started downsizing and making their pensions and salaries more commensurate with the private sector,” he said.

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