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
Well, again, they're not stealing it. They just don't realize that how it's financed is by printing money. And they can't afford things because of that. Well, if you're taking other people's money at the point of a gun, it's called theft. Yeah, they try and tax it, but we're not taxing anywhere near enough.
So we're going to have to borrow $2.2 trillion for the next 10 years, every year, at least.
So you're basically paying $10 for a Big Mac and a Coke. Yeah, inflation is a silent tax. It's really nasty. Do you have any hope? I'm not the world's greatest optimist. I mean, how can you be? I fear we've passed the point of no return. The reason I'm digging my heels, and Tucker, I don't want to. I bet you don't. I really don't. I mean, I'm not looking for it.
Listen, I love what President Trump is doing. He is such a unique individual, unique political figure, unique president. He is doing things that only he would do. Nobody else would do it. And it's things that have to be done. Okay, so I'm so supportive of most of what he's doing. But this is a once in a lifetime opportunity here. We've never had such an unprecedented level of spending.
Returning to a reasonable level is just so common sense and not that hard. It's not going to be easy. But what I've done in laying out those pre-pandemic options, go back to Bill Clinton, 1998, when we actually had a surplus for the first time in 1969. I don't think we spent too little in 1969 or 1998. Obama in 2014 or Trump in 2019. There are three options.
Leave Social Security, Medicare, and interest as they are. Spend what you need to spend. But for all the other outlays, you just increase them based on population growth and inflation. A very reasonable control, right? Yeah. you end up somewhere between $5.5 and $6.5 trillion.
Now, I would go back to Clinton, recognizing that 9-11 happened after that, so you probably have to plus up defense, although I'd like to hone how we spend our defense dollars. I think we talked about that earlier. I don't think we spend them well. But somewhere between $5.5 and $6.5 trillion. And then I've printed out the budgets, a couple thousand lines.
And then go through those budgets line by line and just ask the question, well, this is what Clinton was spending, fully inflated. Why are we spending this much more? Or this is what Obama spent. Or Trump. Why is it so much more? Explain yourself. Like I said, in business, this would be simple. Yeah.
I'd tell my manager that I said you could increase your budgets based on inflation, the number of customers you serve. You're 10% above that. Cut it. Kind of like, I don't care how you do it, just do it. Get back down to that level. To do it so it doesn't harm our business, so it doesn't harm people's lives, but just do it.
Because what we were spending 1998, 2014, 2019, I think is probably pretty adequate. And by the way, if you go through it line by line, there will be lines I think you look at, scratch your head and go, we probably shouldn't be spending anything on that. I think Doge has taught us that. So, again, Trump, again, I think that was brilliant, what Trump and Elon did with Doge.
But we haven't realized those savings yet. I think we stopped spending on contracts. But unless we set up and pass a rescission package on the discretionary end, unless we take whatever they discovered in mandatory and eliminate that through the reconciliation process –
Those monies will just be sitting out there unobligated and some Democrat Congress and some Democrat president will spend it without even having to appropriate it.
We did not heed Eisenhower's warning. I think the military industrial complex has way too much power. I would love, and we should do this, is we should go back, at least as far back as Vietnam, and analyze each one of these foreign entanglements, each of these foreign wars, and ask ourselves and gather some basic information. First, what was our goal going in?
Secondly, what did it cost in human life, ours, and our adversary, our enemies? What did it cost in terms of dollars? And then the final question is, did we accomplish the objective? I think if you do that... And I hate to say this because it's true. I mean, we're filming this on Memorial Day. Yeah. The finest among us.
People who love this country, who've stepped up the plate, willing to serve and sacrifice more than a million, have paid the ultimate price. So I don't even like saying this, but the fact of the matter is... If you did that kind of analysis, you wouldn't walk away very satisfied.
I think it does. So if you were to do that, I mean, I was just recently in Hanoi a couple years ago. What wonderful people. Yeah. They love Americans. I mean, even though they love America because they're entrepreneurs, they're hardworking, they want, like most people in the world, they want what we have. They respect the values of America, the principles of freedom, individual liberty, okay?
We never should have been to war with them. We never should have bombed those people. But follow it all the way through. Afghanistan, Iraq. Syria. Syria. I mean, what have we accomplished with the Ukraine war right now? We have actually solidified the relationship between Russia and China and North Korea and Iran. That's completely opposite of what our goals ought to be. So it's just not working.
I mean, we have not accomplished these goals. They've been miserable failures. How many people died in Iraq based on that false intelligence? The best book I read on Afghanistan is written by special ops folks. And they basically made the point that we'd pretty well accomplish what we need to accomplish in Afghanistan before Tommy Frank ever put a boot on the ground.
You know, we said, hey, listen, you guys harbored Al Qaeda. Don't do it anymore. Kind of punish the Taliban. And that's probably where we should have left that. How many Americans lost their lives? How many, you know? Afghanistan citizens lost their lives. What did that cost? It's almost incalculable.
Again, it's the military-industrial complex. And there are some just basic metrics people use, like percent of GDP spending on defense. We're kind of a low level, and we should be – I mean, we've got right now, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, McConnell, they want to dedicate 5% of GDP to defense. So where are you going to get that money?
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