US Sen. Rand Paul. Reuters/John Sommers II US Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) is a 2016 presidential candidate.

Last year, when the Republican Party gained control of both houses of Congress, the American people were promised that things would change. The American people were promised that the economy would improve — that President Obama and his reckless spending habits would be pinned down once and for all. One year later, however, things do not appear to have changed at all.

Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced that the deficit for this fiscal year will hit $544 billion — $130 billion more than expected — while the 10-year deficit is projected to climb over $1 trillion higher than previously forecast.

That’s right: We are already over $18 trillion in debt — we already have a debt that is equal to our GDP — and yet our Republican-controlled Congress is still ready to continue spending more of our money at every turn.

Throughout my time in Washington, I have worked tirelessly to wake up Republicans and Democrats to the dangers of their reckless spending habits, but neither side is willing to face fiscal reality.

In the last decade, we have added nearly $10 trillion in new debt and the results have been far from stellar. Our labor force participation rate is sitting at a near-40-year low. Wage growth has remained stagnant, while real median household income has declined by over 7%.

What frustrates me the most about Washington’s penchant for spending $7 million a minute is that there is clearly hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of pork barrel spending that should be removed from our list of expenditures. For example, we recently spent taxpayer money on everything from a $104 million subsidy for millionaires to live in public housing to $850,000 on a foreign made-for-T.V. cricket league in Afghanistan. I cannot imagine that anyone living outside the beltway would support such wasteful expenditures.

Although there is clearly plenty of waste within our budget, my Republican colleagues — including fellow presidential candidates Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — refuse to cut even a penny.

This March, Cruz and Rubio wanted to increase military spending by $190 billion over the next two years. I proposed raising defense spending by exactly the same amount, but also proposed offsetting the hike with cuts to wasteful spending. Cruz, Rubio, and nearly every other Republican in the Senate voted against my amendment. Fiscal conservatism is apparently much easier to preach than to do.

The problem in Washington is that there is an unholy alliance between right and left. They come together to spend more of your money at every turn. Conservatives want more military spending and liberals want more domestic spending. As a result, they shake hands and agree to spend more on everything.

Last October, this secret alliance came together to introduce the Bipartisan Budget Act, a statute which aimed to suspend the debt limit until the end of President Obama’s tenure and increase spending by $85 billion in just three years. It also proposed taking $150 billion from the Social Security trust fund — the trust fund that is projected to reach insolvency within 20 years — to fund other areas of the budget.

The US Capitol. Thomson Reuters

When it came time to vote on the Bipartisan Budget Act, I was not shy in expressing my disapproval. In hopes of convincing my colleagues of the negative impacts that this legislation would have on our economy, I voiced my objections on the Senate floor until the wee hours of the morning.

Instead of thanking me for fighting for conservative principles until the bitter end, however, many of my colleagues cursed and yelled at me for wasting their time. In the end, only 34 of my Republican colleagues stood with me to restore fiscal sanity.

It is disappointing that Republicans would agree to any new spending, especially since there is plenty of pork barrel spending that can and should be cut. Unfortunately, however, wasteful spending is the common ground that the unholy alliance never ceases to agree upon.

The truth is, Republicans are just as fiscally irresponsible as Democrats. Conservatives may support lowering your taxes, but they are still willing to spend more of your money at every turn. Cutting taxes while increasing spending simply means that American workers will be taxed in a more discrete and worse way. It means that our borrowing will increase, which will lead to more debt, higher inflation, and less money in all of our pockets.

Unfortunately, both parties will continue to spend us into oblivion until we restrain them from doing so. That’s why I have consistently advocated for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. We need to make every Congressional representative swear an oath to balance the budget and ensure that it gets done.

Throughout my time in the Senate, I have also proven that I am serious about balancing the budget by laying out precisely what programs, departments, and expenditures I would cut in order to bring fiscal stability back to our nation's checkbook. Every conservative that pays lip service to reining in the debt should follow my lead. We can't afford for politicians to be "all talk." We need action, and we need it now.