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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I think my best guess is conservatives in the House, who I love, didn't want to be blamed if this thing failed. So they said, well, listen— In order for us to accept a $5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, we've got to get at least $1.5 trillion in savings, spending cuts. I don't think they were looking at the big picture.
I think they just pulled a big... I criticized them at the time privately. I said, listen, you set the bar way too low, you guys. This is completely inadequate. They set the bar way too low that it should have been easy to meet it, quite honestly. But even that was difficult. Because they didn't go through what I would consider the right kind of process.
So maybe we can shift in terms of what we have to do, what I'm trying to accomplish here and my digging my heels in. Doge has kind of shown us what we can do here. We've never had a process to control spending in the federal government. We don't have a balanced budget requirement. I didn't realize this, just found out.
Do you know they established the appropriation committees because the authorizing committees were big spenders? So the appropriation committees were supposed to be the control on the big spenders. Well, that didn't work. The Budget Control Act of 1974 didn't work. Simpson-Bowles didn't work. The Budget Control Act didn't work. It did for three years, but then we weaseled our way around it.
So what process could possibly work to control spending? Well, first of all, you have to know the numbers. You have to understand what a deep hole we're in and have a commitment to address it. But Doge has pretty well shown us how to do it. Now, I come from the private sector. I think I probably spent more time
either analyzing my department head budgets or my own overall company budget, then Congress in total spends analyzing the $7,000 billion budget of the federal government. So Doge has shown us if you go line by line, contract by contract, You will discover and uncover spending that, if the American public saw it, they'd be outraged by it.
If you eliminated it, my guess is most Americans wouldn't even know it's eliminated. About the only people that would know would be the grifters who have been sucking down the waste, fraud, and abuse.
So you have to go step by step. So that's why I've always been supportive of multiple steps. reconciliation process here. I was always recommending three steps. First step, give President Trump the funding on the border, defense, bank, $850 billion of real savings, not make-believe, you know, now. And Lindsey Graham agreed to this $85.5 billion.
each year for four years to pay for the four years worth of spending and then extend that out 10 years, that gives you 850. That's more than half of what the House budget reconciliation supposedly gives us. Second step, I would just extend current tax law.
If we would have been smart enough in 2017, had somebody like Chairman Crapo who really came up with this idea of let's just use current policy for taxes, then we can make this stuff permanent. You should never pass, in my mind, a tax law that automatically expires, just creates all these fiscal cliffs and puts all kinds of uncertainty in the economy. Yeah, why do they do that?
So this gets into real budget wonkery, but for spending, to score it, you use current policy, which means if a spending program ends, if you want to extend it, you score it based on, oh, it's going to be extended anyway, so it doesn't cost anything. For taxes, though, we use current law.
So if the tax cuts are ending and you want to extend them, well, you're scoring that on the fact that they are going to end. So now to extend them, it's going to be a trillion dollar score. So then you got to pay for it. It's hard to pay for it.
And so that's how it was all scored back in 2017, where if we would just use current policy, if we use current policy now, we can just extend current tax law and there's no score. So that's really what we're doing now. But we have to recognize when you're comparing to the CBO budget, CBO budget is assuming taxes do increase and bring in about another $4 trillion worth of revenue.
So that's why I say the $22 trillion in projected deficits is probably a rosy scenario.
Well, I would say we're missing the focusing on the right thing. We had to focus on spending. And the reason I say that is spending is pretty certain. Again, who knows what revenue you're going to bring in? It's hard to predict. Spending, that's pretty easy to predict what that's going to be. Plus, I personally voted for President Trump because I wanted him to defeat the deep state. Yeah.
You don't defeat the deep state by continuing to fund it at Biden's levels. Yeah, I know. So, again, when you start talking about controlling the deficit, well, you can control the deficit by tariff revenue or selling the gold card. But that keeps funding the deep state. You have to focus on spending. We've just gone through an unprecedented level of increased spending other than World War II.
Just a quick aside on that. We entered World War II spending 11.7% of our economy of GDP on federal government, 11.7%. That got ramped up to 41% during the war. But by 1948, because we had responsible leaders, you know, the greatest generation, that actually went down to 11.4% of GDP. We returned to pre-war level spending.
I mean, you know, the war is over. Let's return to a reasonable pre-war level spending. We didn't do that during the pandemic. And that's what we have to do. We have to focus on, it's such a reasonable thing to do. It should have been done in 2021. We didn't do it for four years, but now we're just pretty well accepting that.
We're accepting the fact that Obamacare, now called Medicaid expansion, is putting at risk Medicare for the truly vulnerable, even though we all ran on repealing and replacing that and obviously failed in the first Trump term. But now we're all okay with it. Now we're not going to touch that because they renamed it.
So again, I'm trying to force the discussion over the real numbers. Okay. And again, $1.5 trillion. in abstract seems like a lot, but we've really ramped up from 2019 to this year. That's over 10 years. That's $29 trillion of increased spending over 10 years, 29 trillion. And we're talking about cutting out 1.5 of that.
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