Senator Ron Johnson
speaker
231 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 31 Dec
Senator Ron Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
So I'm going to force this debate. That's why I'm on your show here today. That's why I'm going to be doing Jake Tapper tomorrow. I'm going to bring the numbers to the fore.
I've been pretty upfront. The first goal of this Republican budget reconciliation should be don't add to the deficit. That ought to be the first goal. Beyond that, what I've always said is I want a commitment to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending and a process to achieve and maintain it. I'm reasonably open. I recognize we have to get the votes. So I don't have a hard number.
But what I've done is I've laid out these options. And right now, the hard number accepted by and expected by a lot of senators, enough to not pass this until we achieve it, is $6.5 trillion in spending in 2026. And I can walk through how you get to that point. But that's kind of the number right now. We're expected to spend about seven point three trillion next year.
So that implies about eight hundred eight trillion dollars in deficit reduction rather than one point five trillion that the House has in their meager house reconciliation bill.
That's why I try and simplify things, okay? I'm focusing on spending. We went from 4.4 to it'll be 7.3 next year. Let's bring it down to a reasonable pre-pandemic level 6.5. Spending, spending, spending. I voted for President Trump because I wanted him to defeat the deep state. You don't defeat the deep state by continuing to fund it at Biden's levels.
So the minute you start bringing in revenue, nobody can project that. Nobody knows exactly what the impact is going to be. So that starts muddying the waters. So I focus on spending. I don't really want to fund the deep state. OK, I would like to bring certainty to the economy. I'd like the trade wars to end so we can bring that level of stability. I don't want to increase taxes.
So, again, my approach would be multiple step border defense, bank the savings, take whatever good work the House did, bank that. Extend current tax law as often, as complex as it is, just extend that. Increase the debt ceiling for a year to put pressure on us to come back and do the work on the spending. And then we can bring up President Trump's taxes as well.
I mean, I would keep this as simple as possible, get it passed, and start doing the work. That would be my approach.
I would say the only reason I'm not in a full-fledged panic is because people like Art Laffer do point out we have vast wealth. I mean, so our debt to GDP ratio is probably not the most relevant. It is relevant for inflation, that type of thing. But debt to total assets is probably the more relevant. So we literally can't afford this level of debt.
But you do have to compare it to income as well and our ability to service the debt and the debt spiral. So again, this all ends up being a lot of different – factors coming into what's going to make it possible for people to live. And again, inflation is probably the one metric that we need to avoid. And I think that's the thing that I'm most concerned about in terms of deficit spending.
I'm not concerned about America going bankrupt because we have this vast wealth. I'm concerned about us being insolvent in sparking massive inflation and just wiping out people's savings, making it very impossible for them to live and retire.
Well, I'm highly concerned about just the conservative movement. I think Trump is a completely unique political figure. I think he definitely did drive turnout. He's expanded, you know, certainly our base, which, by the way, is one of the reasons I am sympathetic to what you're talking about in terms of the tax cuts he's proposed.
I mean, we need to focus on the working men and women of this country. It's really the Trump coalition. But I'm concerned about how effective Democrats are. The coalition they have made up of the media, primarily social media companies, that type of thing. Their relentlessness of letting all these undocumented people in this country who are voting.
I mean, we're starting to see that type of fraud that are. You know, they are trying to cheat. I think they do cheat in voting. I think we don't have a real feeling in terms of how, you know, the order of magnitude of their cheating. But a quick example of, you know, we had that important Supreme Court race here. Elon Musk came in here, did some pretty innovative things, spent a lot of money here.
The liberal candidate got 78% of Kamala Harris's vote. The conservative candidate got 62% of Donald Trump's vote. Even though we were all out there saying how important this is, if you don't want to see President Trump impeached by a Democrat-controlled Congress in the next Congress, you got to get out and support President Trump. That didn't resonate.
Again, 78% of Democrats came out, 62% of Republicans.
No, I think the greatest danger at MAGA is it's really tied toward one individual. You know, Tea Party movement was tied toward the vision of America, freedom, you know, debt and deficit, not mortgage, our kids' future. I think that survived. I mean, they did a pretty good job of marginalizing Tea Party, but we're alive and well. We are the House Freedom Caucus.
We're the people that are gonna stop this until we just get a much better bill in the Senate. So we're still alive and well, but in terms of voters, I mean, the Tea Party pretty well merged with Republican Party. I'm not sure all the mega voters are just disgusted by the whole process, as am I. And they're much more likely to sit on the couch unless their guy is on the ballot.
No, I'm not sure you are off at all. No, I think we may have already passed that hinge point. That's my concern. I mean, people ask me, are you optimistic? No, I'm a pessimist. I'm looking around. That is the death knell of a democracy or a republic when a majority of the voters realize, hey, I can vote myself benefits. Don't worry about the debt and deficit. We can print money.
Well, the data that backs us up is, and I wrote this in my Wall Street Journal column, 1930, the federal government spent about 3.5% of our GDP. 3.5. State and local governments were about 9.1. That was the foundational premise of America. Government close to government, where it's more effective, more efficient, more accountable. Now we're spending close to 24%, the federal level.
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