Ron Paul: Dept. of Transportation only needs 'one guy and a computer'

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul doesn't want to abolish the Department of Transportation, but he said on Tuesday that the agency really only needed "one guy and a computer."

During a town hall event in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the Texas congressman made the case for "user fees" for national parks and the federal highway system.

"Ideally, you can come up with all sorts of schemes about private highways and all, but that's not going to happen," Paul explained. "But we do have a user fee with our gasoline tax. Trouble is, they take that money then they spend it on something else."

"If you had a user fee for our highway, what you could do is have one person in the office. Oh, we got umpteen billions of dollars in gasoline tax and all they have to do is divide up the people in each state or, you know, the size of the state and send the money back."

He added: "And you could do that with one guy and a computer. But instead, we have a Department of Transportation, probably has tens of thousands of people, you know, playing politics with it all."

Paul has said that he wants to abolish at least five federal agencies, a list that does not include the Department of Transportation.

Watch this video from CNN, broadcast Jan. 17, 2012.