Sen. Ron Johnson
speaker
299 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Sen. Ron Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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My guess is it's more than 50%. And, of course, that's the death knell of a democracy is when the population, the voting public, realizes they can vote themselves benefits at the expense of somebody else. And what they don't realize, the expenses, it's costing them all because the massive deficit spending, because we're not taking enough revenue to cover the expenditures.
That's what has eroded the value of our dollar. That's what caused 40-year high inflation. And that hurts everybody.
From government levels. Again, I shouldn't even say because I haven't checked that figure. Yeah. My guess is probably more than 50%. I mean, when you consider all the entitlements, whether it's Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and people say, oh, that's my money. Well... In some cases, it is. Most people probably get more out of Social Security than they actually did put in.
Certainly do that out of Medicare, certainly out of Medicaid. Nobody puts any money into that. That all comes out of the general funds. So we have food stamps. We have all these trillions of dollars worth of transfer payments.
Well, again, when I ran in 2010, we'd just experienced our first deficits in excess of a trillion dollars. We were spending about $3.5 trillion a year, 3.5. So it's more than double just since 2010? Yeah, yes.
I remember I announced in April of 2010, started my campaign in basically June 2010 doing parades. And what I would shout is this is a fight for freedom. We're mortgaging our children's future. It's wrong. It's immoral. It has to stop. That was my campaign theme. Again, we were $14 trillion in debt, spending $3.5 trillion. Now, we're almost $37 trillion in debt.
We're spending $7,000 billion, $7 trillion. And CBO projects... Over the next 10 years, we will add another $22 trillion to the debt. That's what our projected deficits over the next 10 years is, $22 trillion. Again, that's assuming about a $4 trillion increase because taxes are scheduled to automatically increase.
If those taxes don't increase, first of all, I'm not sure you get the full $4 trillion. But again, take $4 trillion away if we extend current tax law, which is I'm in favor of that. I don't want to increase anybody's taxes. But I don't think this is necessarily time to do additional tax cuts, particularly when those things aren't focused toward economic growth. But anyway, just real quick.
We are projecting deficits for the next 10 years of a minimum of $2.2 trillion. And I would argue that is a rosy scenario. And particularly when you take a look at what they've done with the one big, beautiful bill, they're not seriously reducing spending to what I've been calling for as a pre-pandemic level. Again, the danger is spouting out too many numbers here.
I just want to put this in perspective. President Obama, over the course of his eight years, his average deficit was $910 billion. Over the last, and I want to quickly do this so I'm accurate, over the last four years of his administration, it was about $550 billion, okay? So half a trillion dollar deficit over his last four years. President Trump came into office in his first three years
the average deficit was about $800 billion. So he bumped up Obama's four-year average from 550 to 800. Then COVID hit, and we had a deficit of $3.1 trillion just that one year. Now, what we should have done— In 2021, when Biden came into office, we should have returned to a reasonable pre-pandemic level. The pandemic was over.
We didn't have to keep, you know, we had unemployment spike up to, I think, 25 million people. Normal unemployment somewhere between five and six. But within a few months, it was around 11 and then returned to pretty much normal early in 2021. We didn't have to keep stimulating the economy. But Biden did. Biden averaged $1.9 trillion per year in deficit.
So Obama, when he left, his last four years, 550. Trump, before the pandemic, a little more than 800 billion per year. Biden in his four years went up to 1.9 trillion. And now CBO is projecting, and again, a rosy scenario that we'll be averaging $2.2 trillion over the next 10 years. So we'll take our debt from $37 trillion up to 59 trillion and
If we extend the current tax law, take away $4 trillion in revenue, roughly, add another $4 trillion. The spending cuts they're talking about, they're paltry. $1.5 trillion, some of those are fake. Some of those are extended way out. They're offset by 10 years. How far out? 10 years. Yeah. I mean, we'll spend the money up front for the border, for defense.
So that also takes away from that $1.5 trillion in spending. So at most, we're maybe cutting spending $1.2 trillion. Part of that, a few hundred billion, I think, is student loan forgiveness, which the Supreme Court will probably rule unconstitutional. We're not going to spend it anyway, but they count that as savings.
So much of the savings they're talking about in the one big beautiful bill is phony. It's fake. Or it's in the out years where if Republicans lose power, Democrats will just restore it. But no matter how you slice it, from my standpoint, CBO's $22 trillion of 10-year deficit is a rosy scenario. It'll probably be more than that.
And what happens then is what's happening right now in the bond market. Interest rates are creeping up. You can't control that. If global creditors look at the United States as uncreditworthy, Our 50-year average interest payment that we've paid on our debt is over 5%. So I think it's as high as 5.8. It's not the most exact figure. But right now we're borrowing probably about 3.3%.
That's been the average over the last 25 years, 3.3%. And that's kind of where we're at right now. If we increased that interest, if that interest expense increases to, or rate increases to 4.3%, add another $4 trillion in deficit spending. If it goes up to the 50-year average of 5.3, add about $8 or $9 trillion to the $22 trillion.
So again, you go $22 trillion plus extending current tax law, add another close to $4 trillion. If interest rates start creeping up, and they are, just one percentage point, add another $4 trillion. So you can see very quickly, you go from $22 to $26 trillion. to $30 trillion to add down to $37 trillion. We're up to $67 trillion in debt. I don't think we'd ever hit that.
I think something's going to happen. We'll have a debt crisis. We'll have failure in our bond auctions, spiking interest rates even more. And again, we're spending more on interest this year than we spend on defense.
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