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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Depends whether it's a chronic or acute crisis. I'd say we're already in a chronic debt crisis. That is what I would consider the devaluation of the dollar. I laid out, and we talked about this, my pre-pandemic options, going back to 98, 2014, 2019. So a dollar you held in 1998 is only worth 51 cents today. Ouch. A dollar you held when I- It's devalued that much just since 98?
It's been cut in half. When I ran in 2010, that dollar is worth about 68 cents today. A dollar you held during Obama in 2014 is worth 74 cents. A dollar you held just in 2019 is only worth 80 cents. So again, that is the devaluation of the dollar. That's inflation. This is why everything is so expensive. Yeah, that's a silent tax.
Yeah, and that's why you had four-year high inflation. So that way I would consider the chronic debt crisis. It just continues. And it's the danger. We have not... tamed inflation yet. We've tamed it, but we haven't conquered it.
So I think that's always on the horizon, particularly if we continue deficit spend, particularly if the bond markets continue to react as they are, keep driving interest rates up higher, and you start increasing the amount of interest expense, crowding out other spending. So an acute debt crisis would be where you have a bond market failure, like what happened to Greece.
All of a sudden, you can't sell your debt. So you either print the money, which sparks another round of 40, 50-year high inflation, devaluing the currency rapidly. We're not necessarily immune to hyperinflation. Other countries have experienced it.
Nobody buys them. And so, again, the advantage the U.S. has over any other country is we are the world's reserve currency. Right. So we can print dollars. So we can get by that moment except for you're printing dollars. And inflation is pretty easy to define. It's too many dollars chasing too few goods. Right. So you just print all those dollars, and again, the dollar devalues.
The cost of your debt is lowered. Again, it's a silent way of addressing these massive deficits. How far away from a moment like that are we? I don't know. I would have thought we would have experienced it by now, but we've experienced it instead as, again, 40-year high inflation. The devaluation of the currency. I mean, I think that's pretty shocking when you take a look at that.
It's a dollar just 11 years ago. It was only worth 74 cents. Six years, it's only worth 80 cents. That's an amazing level of devaluation. It's not even close to hyperinflation where you've got inflation rates of hundreds of percent. So when that crisis comes, what do you do? Well, you have a great deal of turmoil in your society. It won't be pleasant. It's what we need to try and avoid.
And by the way, why I'm not in a full-blown panic, people like Art Laffer, economist of the Laffer curve, he does correctly point out America has enormous wealth. I mean, hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of wealth. So $37 trillion in relationship to hundreds of trillion dollars worth of wealth That's manageable.
It's just like if you're a billionaire, but you don't work, you can have some pretty large mortgages on homes, but you still have to generate some income to service the debt. And I think that's kind of the point we're making. I mean, it's not irrelevant debt to GDP ratio. And we do have massive wealth.
But we need to manage the cash flow problem here, too, as well as just the pernicious impact of all these transfer payments, providing encouragement for people not to work. There's a great article written, I think, in 2017 by Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, Our Miserable 21st Century. You know, talking about how 20% of working age men are permanently out of the workforce.
Yes. You know, on Medicaid, using the Medicaid card to buy opiate drugs to, you know, help finance their living. You know, all kinds, all those pernicious impacts of a society where we literally don't require people to work. We actually incentivize them not to. That's, to my mind, that's one of the biggest problems we have with the big welfare system.
Yeah, somebody's got to do the work.
And, you know, we were talking earlier when I first entered this political realm, going to dairy breakfast, the first issue I heard in Wisconsin was, you know, we don't have enough workers. Now, I come from a manufacturing background where for 20 or so years, you couldn't find enough people to work in a manufacturing plant. Yeah. Which is why I always kind of scratch my head.
Listen, there are certainly products that we have offshored that we need to reshore. You know, things that are strategic that impact our national security. But right now, I think our biggest problem is we don't have enough workers. If you bring all this manufacturing back to America, who's going to work the factories? And we certainly shouldn't be bringing back high labor content product.
I think you need to diversify your supply base. You can't be so dependent on an adversary like China. Spread it around. You know, that would reduce your risk.
Well, they just ignore it. Again, one of the reasons I'm digging my heels in as the one big beautiful bill comes over the Senate is we haven't had the discussion or the debate. The only number you heard about in the whole House debate here was $1.5 trillion, which sounds like a lot, right? I mean, $1.5 trillion in spending reduction.
And, of course, they're focusing on programs like Medicaid that – The main problem with that is Obamacare, which is now called Medicaid expansion, allowing states to gain the system, putting at risk Medicaid for the truly vulnerable. But that's all you really heard about. You don't ever put that in context.
$1.5 trillion compared to $89 trillion spending over the next 10 years, it's barely a rounding error. We haven't been talking about the massive annual deficits. We don't talk about the debt.
Well, again, it was really sparked by the pandemic. Right. I'll give the Tea Party movement a fair amount of credit. I ran because we were Mortgage and Kids Future. We were running deficits for, I think, three years in a row over a trillion dollars. But once we got to town in 2011, we started having these budget debates. We had divided government. Obama didn't get everything he wanted.
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