Rand Paul: Unless you're willing to tackle entitlements, you're not a fiscal conservative

Sitting down with FreedomWorks' Jason Pye, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) was discussing future congressional actions to be taken once President-elect Donald Trump assumes office. One of the things he's looking forward to tackling is the budget, and finally balancing it out.

However, Paul believes he will be running into opposition. Not just from the left, but from Republicans as well. The right also has a bad habit of spending more than we should. As an example, Pye mentioned the era of President George W. Bush, and how we blew threw budget deficits every year.

"It's largely why I chose to run for office," responded Paul. "The Bush administration went from $5 trillion debt, to $10 trillion debt over eight years. It really bothered me that Republicans became big spenders. I don't want that to happen again."

"The other problem is that when you look at the budget, two-thirds of it is entitlements, and a third is non-entitlements," continued Paul. "Most people only look at the third. But if you eliminate the third, which is military and non-military — and I'm not proposing we do that — but if you eliminated it completely you still don't balance, because entitlements are growing so rapidly."

Paul believes that in order to make any positive change in the budget, then entitlements will really have to face some changes. He worries, however, that Trump may not be so willing to go along with him in shrinking the largest growing problem in our spending.

"President-elect Trump, I've tried to agree with him when I can, but he's also said he hasn't been interested in looking at entitlements," said Paul, "and I think if you are unwilling to do that, I just don't think you're a fiscal conservative, or your serious about the significance of the $20 trillion debt."

Watch this, and more in the clip below: