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
So if we can actually have some reform, bend that curve, have revenues with all of the good things that are happening with President Trump catch up, it's realistic to think we can have a balanced budget in a few years. But we've got to do that hard work, and we can do that in the reconciliation process too, which only takes a simple majority in the Senate.
And I think for the audience, that's the most important thing. If the House can hang together and Senate Republicans can hang together on this, we don't need a single Democrat vote. I wouldn't expect to get one because they're not – rational at this point. So we got to make sure we take care of our own business here.
Sure, and you're right. I think that... it's coming into focus now. We spend more. We spend a trillion dollars a year on the interest on that $36 trillion debt. That's only going to grow as some of these things become more mature and they need to be refinanced with higher interest rates over the last few years because of Biden inflation, right?
So that problem is only going to get more significant unless we can find real savings. I think there's two ways to look at this. One is There's a lot of discretionary spending that we're finding the savings. This is the work that Doge is doing, right? And so we've just take USAID as an example. All of that money, Guam on sex changes, DEI and Burma.
LGBTQIA, you know, programming in Sesame street in Iraq, that all stuff that adds up. Right. And that's the kind of thing like take Marco Rubio, what he said was, he said, 83% of the stuff we were doing, we're not going to do that anymore. The 17% that remains, we're going to go move in further American interests overseas. Right.
That's the kind of reform you have internally that Doge finds that gets embedded in savings moving forward. What are some other things you can do? I think what's broadly popular, um, is work requirements. If you're an able-bodied adult, you should be required to work. That explosion under Obamacare is really affecting people who need it most, Medicaid.
So when President Trump talks about making sure we're not touching Social Security, not making sure we're touching benefits on Medicare and Medicaid, I think we're all with him in lockstep. But we got to make sure that the able-bodied population that's not working, they're draining the system. They're crowding hospitals. They're crowding out doctor visits for
you know, pregnant mothers, individuals with disabilities, what that program was really meant for. So there's a lot of work to do, as I said, to put meat on the bones there, but I think we can get there. And here's the way to look at it.
If we just went back to pre-pandemic spending, Charlie, 2019 spending levels, plus inflation and population growth, that's like a trillion dollar difference than what we're spending right now. So I think we can make some real progress here.
Yeah, I spent a lot of this week, I think, defending President Trump's leadership in Washington. And permanent Washington is totally disconnected from what's really happening. Sort of the global elites have had their run here. After World War II, we had all these favorable deals for countries who were trying to get back on their feet, Germany, Japan, all these countries.
And with the goal of defeating Soviet communism, we won. After the Cold War ended, though, we didn't adjust at all. So you can't buy or you don't see an American car in Europe. You don't see an American car in Japan. You don't see an American car in Korea. Yet all of their cars are in our markets because they have erected these barriers over time through tariffs, trade barriers.
in China specifically, stealing our IP. It's been very unfair to us. And I do come from a state, and I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood where all those good-paying jobs, those factory jobs, they went overseas. fentanyl, you know, we got fentanyl in exchange. And so my message is America isn't an economic zone. America isn't some strip mall with an airport attached to it.
It's a people, it's a place, it's our home. And we finally have a president that's willing to stand up and say, you know what? We've been treated very unfairly. We're going to treat you like you treat us. And now look what's happening. 70 countries plus have come to the table and said, we heard what you had to say.
We understand the United States of America is 39% of all the consumption in the world. It's 25% of the world's GDP. It's a very important market for us. So we're going to lower our trade barriers so that we can actually have fair trade. So President Trump has made tremendous progress on this. And by the way, it opens up markets for our farmers and our other industries around the world.
I think the way to look at this, Charlie, is you've got two different buckets. You've got communist China and you've got everybody else. China is the worst defender. They made a terrible decision trying to escalate this. They rip off our IP. They steal our jobs. They create trade barriers.
They say, oh, yeah, no, you can't sell your chickens here because you didn't wash them properly, or you can't sell your electronics here because there's this bolt that's out of place. It's not just the tariffs. It's all the other hidden trade barriers that prevent our goods getting to market. They export five times more than we export to them. They have a hell of a lot more to lose in this
If they continue down this path. So we'll see if they have a come to Jesus moment or not. I think the rest of the world is. And I think at the end of the day, it's going to lead to greater prosperity for us because we're going to have more markets open.
We'll have more revenue coming into this country and we'll bring back industry, those good paying jobs that we had for a very long time that didn't need to go somewhere else.
Will do, brother. Take care. See you.
You know what? I'm not Charlie Kirk. I'll just keep it real simple and emotional. How much do I love this president? I love this president. He has just been so extraordinary. He gets it. And, you know, Charlie, what's at the heart of this? And it's not like I was thinking to link to Bonhoeffer, but of course it is. This is a man of courage. This president stands up to bullies.
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