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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Is there a better way of doing that than just generalized increasing a tax, which is what a tariff is? I would argue there probably is. How about this? We just give you a tax holiday for five or 10 years. Again, you've got a high-end semiconductor plant in a different country. We're not collecting the tax on it anyway.
It's no skin off our you-know-whats to just, well, come on over here, produce that here. We'll just give you a 10-year tax. Talk to the people who are going to invest in it. What's it going to take? How long a tax holiday? What's reasonable? Incentivize it that way. But don't incentivize it by mucking up our tax code or, I'd say even worse, things like the CHIPS Act where you pay money
to grifters that don't really fulfill their end of the bargain. Again, we're just not good at doing these things. The free market's not perfect, but it is the most efficient allocator of capital. So, I mean, you provide somebody a tax holiday, and I think you can bring those things back. You're pretty good. Plus, permitting reform.
If you want to do precursor chemicals for pharmaceuticals, I mean, you got to permit the refineries. You got to permit the mines if you're going to mine rare earth minerals and if you're going to refine those things. So, again, we have to look at this, but it requires presidential leadership to go make the case, the logical case, right?
And that, from my standpoint, in terms of me digging my heels in, I'm a reasonable guy. But you're not going to sell me just by saying, you got to pass one big, beautiful bill. I'm tired of the rhetoric. I'm not prone to slogans. It's like, lay out the case.
If you can lay out the case that we are promoting growth and this is what the revenue is going to be and this is how we actually shrink the deficit and this is how we avoid a debt crisis, I want to be on board. I want to see this president succeed.
Well, it's interesting. There's a fair number that are coalescing around the number. And I've never really, I've laid out options, but I've never dug my heels in on a number for a pre-pandemic level spending. But I've laid it out, I think, logically enough. Most people are, you know, there's a pretty big group say that it should be no more than $6.5 trillion in the next fiscal year.
So that implies about an $800 billion increase. difference between what we're expected to spend, which would be about $8 trillion of spending reduction over 10 years. It's a long ways from the $1.5 trillion.
Again, what I've always said is I need a commitment to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending, realizing we have to get the votes, but maybe even more importantly, a process to achieve and maintain it. And that's that line by, do the work, but it'll take time to do the work, but we need a commitment. I can't do it. I don't have access to all the information.
We really need, and what I proposed in one of my Wall Street Journal columns was a budget review panel made up of senators, House members, staff of the OMB, Office of Management and Budget. I mean, those are the guys that know their stuff.
And then have this as a review panel and bring up, just like in business, budget review meeting, bring up the department heads with their budget gurus and stuff and explain it. Go line by line. Again, why are you spending so much more than a fully inflated Bill Clinton level or Obama or Trump? I mean, explain yourself. Why should we be spending even a dime on this category right here?
So you've got top lines within the federal government, more than 2,000 lines. Under each one of those lines, there's probably... Hundreds of lines between all those. So you got a lot of work to do, but it doesn't get done if you try and rush this thing through. And now by July 4th is what would be the goal for the Senate.
So I want to break this up into two parts to give us the time to go through that budget line by line. Will you get it? Right now, I think I've got at least four that will dig their heels in and say, again, we want to see you succeed. We want to pass this. We want to pass something. We'll pass what must be passed now.
Again, we've already set this up in the Senate with our budget resolution to provide the defense and border funding plus $850 billion in savings. Tack that onto the House where we extend current tax law and increase the debt ceiling. By the way, that's going to be a massive amount. It should shock everybody what we're going to have to increase the debt ceiling for just to get us by another year.
Probably be $2 to $2.5 trillion because we have to refill the extraordinary measures that, you know, the buckets they've taken from to extend the debt ceiling. We're right now burning about a half a trillion dollars a quarter.
So you're talking, if you extend it next year, five quarters at half a trillion dollars, that's $2.5 trillion. Just to get us by into next year. That should shock everybody. And that's my whole purpose here. is we haven't talked about the numbers. We haven't put this in context of the big mess we're in, the deep hole we've dug ourselves. And I'm just going to force that debate.
I'm not trying to be obstinate. I'll probably be accused of grandstanding. I'd rather not do this. I'd rather have the House having really succeeded and the president totally behind, again, returning to pre-pandemic level spending, but somebody's got to do it.
No, we're getting sicker. And again, that's shifting gears into, you know, really the failure of our healthcare system of establishment medicine, of pharmaceutically driven medicine. They call it Rockefeller medicine. This is where I've been so supportive. Why do they call it Rockefeller medicine? He's really one that really pushed, you know, pharmaceutical drug companies.
Way back when, I don't understand the full history, but again, that's all petrochemical-based, chemistry-based, and rather than really focusing on health, it's all, we've got a pill for this. Here's an example, and I think this is true, but there was a debate in terms of what caused heart disease. Is it too much sugar? Is it cholesterol? Yes.
From the pharmaceutical industry standpoint, they had a drug to lower cholesterol. Statins. So guess what they chose? Cholesterol. The winner. The winner because we've got a drug to manage that. Now, there are all kinds of emerging serious side effects of statins. One that I read about was sudden hearing loss. Guess who lost their hearing just like that? Who? Me.
Showing 141–160 of 299 · page 8 of 15
← Previous
Next →