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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Appearances
We did something called the Budget Control Act, which literally reduced discretionary spending for three years in a row until we learned how to weasel around it. So we pretty well flattened out federal government spending at about $3.5 trillion for five or six or seven years. And then the last couple of years of the Obama administration started creeping up.
And then under Trump, it went from about $4 trillion to $4.1 to $4.4. And then it went to $6.5, and we've never looked back. And the analogy I use there is I don't know of an American family, if they had an illness and they had to borrow $50,000 to pay for the medical bills, if that family member got well, you wouldn't keep borrowing $50,000 and spend at that level.
But that's exactly what we've done. And like nobody... Other than, you know, I'm the first guy who wrote the Wall Street Journal article about we really need to return to a pre-pandemic level. It doesn't seem radical. And I've laid out options, you know, Clinton, Obama, Trump. COVID pandemic. This was just like a couple years ago. So, I mean, what Biden should have done, I mean, we had...
We overspent in 2020. When we first were talking about that CARES Act, it was like $750 billion, which I knew we had to do something fast and massive so markets wouldn't collapse. But within like a week or two, that went up to like $2.2 trillion. We sent out direct payment checks to 166 million Americans three times.
Way late, way after unemployment had already returned from the 25 million person high. Again, 25 million people unemployed when normally you're at five or six. We sent out direct payment checks to 166 million Americans three times. So we way overspent even in 2020. So you had trillions of dollars sloshing around the economy as you come into 2021.
The economy is coming roaring back because you have all this pent-up demand and all these dollars sloshing around. The last thing you should have done is add more fuel to the fire. That's what Biden Democrats did. Again, on average, $1.9 trillion of deficit spending. over the next four years. We never came down off of that $6.5 trillion, a little bit 6.2, 6.3, but then started going back up again.
Yeah, or your meal deal at McDonald's all of a sudden jumped from five to 10 bucks. When did that happen?
I haven't heard McConnell say this, but I've heard the quote attributed to him, and this is one thing I agree with him on. Show me one member of Congress who ever lost because they spent too much money. There just isn't public pressure. There's not public awareness. We don't educate our young people. The news media doesn't connect the dots.
Why people can't afford things is because of massive deaths of spending, which sparked four-year high inflation, devalued the dollar. I mean, to me, it's pretty obvious. But normal Americans, they just get all surly about it.
Well, so if you're living on different transfer payments or different types of welfare benefits, you may not get those. You can't borrow more money, so you're going to have to take what money we spend on other government programs and we'll have to service our debt. You have to pay it off, unless we want to go into full default.
Which means you'll never float more debt. So you can't, you know, other than print more money, which then creates even more hyperinflation. So now people can't afford anything.
I think it happens enough. But what always happens is, you know, countries like U.S. go in there and we help them restructure their debt. I think that's happened numerous times.
Nobody can. Again, we will lose our position as the world's reserve currency and we'll lose our ability to print dollars that people accept. I mean, it's a marvelous thing that we just print dollars. We can send them overseas and people will produce products and ship them over here. High quality products are pretty low cost.
I think it's one of the reasons we've been able to keep inflation in check. producing all these massive deficits over the last couple of decades. Because we do import a lot of products. We've got billions of people either or underemployed around the world. We provide the capital. They produce the factories, they produce the goods. And then we just give them paper. It's fiat currency.
We print it, we keep printing it, and it's been working out pretty well. At some point in time, that gravy train might stop.
Yeah. Again, I can't predict. I'm trying to avoid it. It'll be painful. But potentially really painful. And who really suffers are people at the lower end of the income spectrum that have no safety net. They don't have any kind of hard assets that will inflate with inflation. They just be destitute.
Yeah. Yeah.
I had my comm staff put together a video. I asked them to find all these Republican leaders that have talked about balancing the budget. We have a spending problem. It starts out with President Trump saying in the State of the Union, I'm going to do something we haven't done in 24 years, balance the federal budget.
Then every Republican leader, some form of, we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. In those clips, we have Elon Musk saying, if we don't fix this, there won't be money left over for anything. And I think that's a pretty accurate statement.
No, it exacerbates the problem. How can that be? Because we're not serious about returning to a reasonable pre-pandemic global spending. We've picked a number out of the air, $1.5 trillion. It's totally out of context. It's not really related to the moment. It's missing the moment.
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