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 realize we're kind of down to historic low levels, but it's still a trillion dollars. Where are we spending it? That's why I would have loved to have seen somebody like Eric Prince, who wrote an excellent article, Too Big to Win, become defense secretary and really take a look at how are we fighting these wars? What do we need to do to defend America?
I don't think that's necessarily true. Again, you still have that industrial base. You spend a trillion dollars out of a $28 trillion economy, $29 trillion economy. It's a pretty good chunk, but it's not the majority of it. We make a lot of stuff. I think that's kind of a mistaken notion as well. Industrial production continues to rise here. Oh, yeah.
We don't have, again, we become more and more productive. That's a good thing. Again, right now, we don't have enough workers to be manufacturing a whole lot more stuff. I mean, the last thing we should be doing is trying to attract high labor content product back to the U.S. We just don't have enough people to do it. Interesting.
I don't know. I'm just putting the basic numbers. I mean, that's interesting. So what happens to this bill? Well, again, what I'd like to do is split it into two parts. Do the, you know, quite honestly, what has to be done now. And that is provide the funding. I think they're asking way too much. I point this out with Kristi Noem. They're looking for $46 billion for the fence, right?
Or for the wall. Well, in the first Trump term, I can't remember the exact numbers. I think something 485 miles. We spent $6.6 billion. So that's like $14.4 million a mile. Now they want 46 billion? That's built over 3,000 miles. So I asked her, square that circle for me. And she really didn't. She was actually saying they're projecting $12 million.
I was willing to give her 14.4, even though I was in Israel when I was chairman of Homeland Security. They built their very effective fence for less than $2 million a mile. Wow. But lay that aside. So provide border funding. The price you have to pay for that is more defense spending. Bank...
What savings we can, you know, take the good work the House has done, bank that savings, extend current tax law, take an automatic tax increase off the table, provide that certainty to the economy, bump up the debt ceiling for a year. To keep pressure on us to come back and then do the big, beautiful bill, we'll consider President Trump's tax proposals. Listen, I'm all for no tax on cash tips.
Can't collect it anyway. So why even try? And that keeps currency circulating through the economy as well. I think that's a good thing. I don't want to go to a government-backed digital security. So that's good. I mean, the other tax proposals he promises to me in the campaign, they're not pro-growth. They're just going to reduce revenue. You know, no tax on overtime.
You know, I ran a continuing shift operation. I think... The one time and a half or double time is more than enough incentive. We all live under a tax system. Income is income. Why would we increase the regulatory burden on people who administer payroll to cordon off some of the overtime to don't tax it? I mean, it'd just be a pain in the butt.
You can be a nonprofit by not making a profit. Right. I've done that too. I still pay taxes. If you're a university, a church, something like that, you bring in revenue, you spend it, you've got no profit. You're a non-profit.
The other reason I wanted to split this into two parts is we need to take the time to go line by line, to do a doge impact on the entire budget, to find the outrageous spending, eliminate what people won't even notice, but also to simplify and rationalize our tax system. We have a grotesquely Complex tax system.
So simplify it. Again, using basic principles. Don't try and socially and economically engineer the tax code. We're terrible at it. You can't. You're not that smart. So raise the revenue you need. Try not to do any economic or social harm. So that would imply a very simple tax system. They always say lower the rates, broaden the base. But personally, I've done well in this country.
I don't mind having a progressive tax rate. I really don't. Certainly exempting a certain amount of income so people can live without having to pay tax and stuff. But within those confines, keep it as absolutely simple as possible. Now, one thing I know is there's nothing simple about simplifying the tax code. I mean, everybody's got their little tax break.
And even right now, one of the reasons I'm not looking forward to this – ordeal that's going to come about over the next couple of weeks as I dig my heels in is a lot of people that support President Trump have supported me. They want no tax and overtime. By the way, if all you live on is Social Security, the chance of you paying a dollar tax on that is almost infinitesimal.
So we don't tax Social Security right now. But let's face it, if you have Social Security and you have income above that, why should you exempt some of your income? I think us oldsters have stolen enough from younger generations. I mean, you see the wealth transfer. I used to have a chart on this, but the transfer of wealth From young to old over the decades, it's literally immoral. It's immoral.
I've noticed. So let's not exacerbate that problem. It's disgusting. And again, if you can do something on taxes, again, I don't want to increase people's taxes, but I don't think this is a point in time to be cutting taxes that aren't incentivizing growth. And again, I'd rather not be incentivizing growth. Again, trying to use the tax code to try and come up with some way to incentivize growth.
Just keep it simple, uncomplicated, rational. Income is income. Basic principles like wherewithal to pay. Approach all of these things with principles. The big problem in the house, what was the goal there? I would think the goal of this Republican budget reconciliation would be to reduce the deficits. Seems like in the House, the only goal was to pass one big, beautiful bill by Memorial Day.
Great. You achieved your goal. But you didn't solve our fiscal situation. You didn't even come close.
Well, it needs presidential leadership. And he needs to get behind fixing this problem. Now, he said in the State of the Union he's going to balance the budget. Fine. But I know in his mind, he thinks he's going to balance a budget with tariff revenue. I'm sorry, tariffs are a tax. We're not quite sure who pays them. Whereas the foreign companies, the foreign countries, the U.S.
consumer, again, the instance of tax is never particularly certain, but tariffs raise the cost of goods. For what? Again, there's no doubt there's certain products, high-end semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, rare earth minerals. We got to be basic in those. We have to produce these here just from a standpoint of national security.
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