Senator Eric Schmitt
speaker
478 appearances
21 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Senator Eric Schmitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
Well, Charlie, well, first of all, like you, I'm a big supporter of President Trump. He is a unique political figure. He is doing things that have to be done that nobody else would do. So I'm a big supporter. I want to see him succeed. But the fact of the matter is the debate in the House, It was pretty absent of looking at the relevant figures.
They pretty well pulled $1.5 trillion out of the air. Sounds like a big number, but over 10 years, it's really not even a rounding error when you're spending more than $7 trillion a year. So again, I'm focusing on the facts and figures. That's kind of what I'm doing is forcing the debate in the Senate. I've always agreed with Senator Thune that we really needed to do this.
What we had to do had to be done in a couple different steps. it wasn't all going to get done satisfactorily in one step. I think that's proven true. So again, it's not too late to acknowledge that fact, do the things that have to be done, border. Yes, we have to add defense to that, but we need to sharpen our pencils on both of those.
Use the good work in the House to reduce spending to the extent we can, extend current tax law, take a massive automatic tax increase off the table, provide that certainty to the economy, increase the debt ceiling for about a year to keep the pressure on, leave all those other items for a second round using fiscal year 2026 budget reconciliation.
That'll give us time to go through the budget line by line. 2,600 programs in the federal government, forensically audit those. Trump and Elon Musk showed us how to do it with Doge. We need to take that Doge effort and expand it. And again, just delve into the federal budget, into these programs, forensically audit them, expose them to the American public.
And Charlie, I have to believe when you've gone from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to $7 trillion, there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars lurking in all of that spending that if you eliminate it, nobody would even notice it other than the grifters. who are sucking down that waste, fraud, and abuse. But you have to do the work. And that's going to take time. That's going to take a lot of effort.
And this big, beautiful bill has gone through the standard process. Exempt most programs. Look at a couple. Tweak them. Get a CBO score. Pick a number out of the air that doesn't meet the moment and say you've done a great job. I'm sorry. Appreciate the challenge that Speaker Johnson has. But you need to expose this. You need to sell to the American public to get them on your side.
And again, you got to do it in multiple steps. You can't do it all in one fell swoop.
Yeah, we have all kinds of crazy rules that are right. You can't touch Social Security. You can't touch discretionary spending through the reconciliations. It's only about mandatory. But again, remember, mandatory is way more than Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid.
There's a trillion dollars of other mandatory spending, which probably should be discretionary, but the meeting party has deviously transferred that into other mandatory, so it's never looked at. So you need rescission packages. I've been baffled that every week...
based on what doge has found that we didn't just send up their weekly uh findings and rescind them i i don't understand why they haven't done that they should start doing that but again you need the american public on your side but what i'm talking about a budget review panel forensic audits of every line of the budget every program that's going to take a lot of time but that unlocks all of this so you have to do the work but you have rescission as long as we've got majorities in this white house and by the way you can't count on
You know, winning and having the same setup in the next Congress. This is our moment. We are mortgaging our children's future. This is our chance. We can't blow it right now. I'm sorry. The big, beautiful bill blows it.
So the red bars are actual. And that just shows the average deficits in different terms of presidency. So you can see in Bush I, he averaged over eight years about $250 billion of deficits. Wish we were there. President Obama came in and averaged almost $1.3 trillion in his first term. That sparked the Tea Party. I'm part of that. And you see the Tea Party's impact in terms of fiscal deficit.
We literally held spending flat for about five years at about $3.5 trillion. He'd taken it from $2.98 up to $3.5. So Obama in his last term averaged deficits of $5.50. Trump comes in, had to deal with Democrats. And so that average deficit went up to $810 billion. For his first three years, then COVID hit, $3.1 trillion of bipartisan spending blowout.
Responsible leadership should have reduced that deficit back at least below a trillion dollars. But that's not what Biden and the Democrats did. They continued the spending spree. So we averaged deficits of $1.9 trillion. And all of my analysis of this is based on CBO's 10-year projection. I'm not a big fan of CBO. I'm not a big fan of their static scoring, that kind of stuff.
But the general direction of spending and revenue is pretty accurate. And so what the last three bars show is on a four-year average rolling basis, we're not reducing the deficit curve down. We're going from about $1.9 trillion. I guess accepting $1.9 trillion deficits is the new normal. and ramping that up to over $2.5 trillion, averaging $2.2 trillion over the next 10 years.
Completely unacceptable. Now, you can argue about how CBL is going to score this thing. Again, whether you tweak those bars a little bit higher, a little bit lower, the trajectory is undeniable. And I would argue that this is probably a rosy scenario because there's interest rate risk, 1% increase in interest rates, and we're seeing that happen in the bond market, that add $4 trillion.
$400 billion to each one of those lines. They're assuming, again, if you eliminate, if you extend current tax law, don't have that automatic tax increase, well, from those estimates, it takes about $4 trillion away. Now, you can argue, and I would, that you're not going to get that $4 trillion because you're going to harm economic growth. Are you going to be able to replace it?
I used Grok this morning, and I said, OK, what happens if we grow at 5% nominal growth? That's 3% real economic growth, real GDP growth, and 2% inflation. By the way, for the last 20 years, we've only experienced 2% average growth. So let's say we grow 3%.
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