During last Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate, just about every candidate touted their plan to solve the United States’ debt crisis.

Herman Cain’s now infamous 9-9-9 plan, which includes a 9 percent business flat tax, 9 percent individual flat tax and 9 percent national sales tax, was pilloried by the rest of the Republican candidates. Rick Perry touted his soon-to-be-released economic plan, which apparently will feature a flat tax. Mitt Romney has a 59-point plan.

None of these really addresses the issue of the debt in this country. All candidates skirt around the edges.

All except for one man: Ron Paul.

Last week, Ron Paul released his “plan to restore America,” which would cut $1 trillion in his first year as president, achieving a budget surplus by 2015. Dr. Paul would abolish five cabinet departments ”” Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior and Education ”” end corporate subsidies, stop foreign aid, end all foreign wars and return most spending to 2006 levels.

As for entitlements, Paul would allow young people to opt-out of Social Security without touching our seniors’ benefits. He would block grant Medicaid to the states, freezing the program’s spending allotment. And he would do all of this while reducing the corporate tax rate to 15 percent and extending the Bush tax cuts.

This is now the standard to which all Republican candidates must compare themselves to.

Paul’s plan doesn’t just set us on the path to fiscal solvency ”” it takes us all the way there.

“Ron Paul’s plan is the only one that seriously addresses the economic and budgetary problems our nation faces,” Paul campaign chairman Jesse Benton said. “It’s the only plan offered by a presidential candidate that actually balances the budget and begins to pay down the debt.”

Even still, it has come under fire for its “draconian” cuts.

“At the scale he’s talking about, it’s unlikely you could have an immediate reduction in government without hurtling the economy into recession,”American Enterprise Institute economic policy director Kevin Hassett said in the Washington Post. And on Meet the Press, host David Gregory had a tough time understanding how the Paul plan would not hurt Americans.

None of these concerns take into account the dire consequences of Americans if immediate action is not taken. If the United States continues to fall deeper and deeper into debt, a recession isn’t merely in our future ”” stagnation or a full-blown depression would be likely.

And, Dr. Paul says, Americans, under his plan, would be just fine.

Comparing his plan to the spending cuts the American government enacted following World War II, Paul said, “the resources aren’t diminished, the resources are put back into the economy and the people spend the money. Now all we do is give them debt. We tax, we borrow and then we inflate, and then we distort the economy and destroy production because the government takes over the economy, and that’s the negative.”

Ron Paul is right. Government intervention into the economy does not help (see Bush, George W. and Obama, Barack).

What our economy needs is a bold plan that will cure it of its ills in the short-term so that it will be healthy in the long-term. What it needs is Ron Paul in the White House.