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
States are probably somewhere 12 to 15, haven't looked that recent. And as Lord Acton pointed out, power corrupts. Government is power. That is really the definition of government is power. So it gets corrupted and it's been corrupted. And I don't know. You know, I fear we're past the point of no return. Why did I run again for a third term?
As disgusted as I am in this process, I couldn't turn my back on this country. I can't give up on it. I'm not overly optimistic. And again, it's not just the as government grows, your freedom recedes. As government grows, you get more and more people dependent on it. Well, that's right. And they're not doing things productive. You don't have a vibrant economy.
I think Rand Paul is pretty much a hard no, regardless. Now, again, I don't think you get a good enough bill where he'd vote yes. My other allies for sure in this thing are Mike Lee and Rick Scott. Each one of us has our own thoughts, may accept something different than the others. I'm pretty well dug in, but I'm reasonable. You give me something that
like I say, commits to getting to a pre-pandemic global spending and a process to achieve and maintain it, I'll work with you.
Now, one of the things I did, and we had it pinned to my top of my X page, I think it's further on down now, but I put together a video about a minute 30, starting with President Trump and State of the Union saying he was gonna balance the federal budget and then the vice president and everybody on down some version of, we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.
At the very end of the video, I asked, so are we willing to fix it? Right now, it doesn't appear we are, but I tend to insist that we do. So I'm going to dig my heels in. There's nothing that President Trump can do to pressure me. other than start work with me, acknowledge the numbers.
I'm texting, they're probably annoyed with me, Bessent and Hassett and Russell all the time, saying, here's my viewpoint. What am I not getting right? So they know exactly what I'm thinking. They know exactly my concerns. They know exactly the numbers. I had a nice lunch with Scott Besson in the Treasury Department. I gave him my charts and graphs, all that kind of stuff.
He asked for the electronic version of those so he could distribute those to the Treasury Department. So none of this should come as any surprise to anybody. And again, the ace I hold is I am going to force the numbers that we have to look at out in the public. To this point, we haven't discussed it.
I first focused on spending.
89.3 trillion, again, that represents government, right? That represents that power that's been corrupted. That represents the just unprecedented, other than World War II, increase in spending from 2019 of 58 to 60%. So if you can't deal with that,
In my column, I pointed out our forefathers, the greatest generation, responsible leadership, entered World War II spending about 11.7 percent, ramped it up to 41 percent during the war. By 1948, they were down to 11.4 percent. So it's entirely possible, but you need leadership. I need the president of the United States. By the way, I've been in the White House with him.
I've shown him my charts and graphs. He goes, I love this. I love this. The House ought to love this. Has this been presented? No, Mr. President, let's go to the House, let's present this. He didn't do that. We need President Trump to embrace The reality that we are spending way too much money. He was elected to defeat the D state. You don't defeat it spending it by his levels.
He needs to see the detail. Again, I think, you know, to be charitable, I think he's been so busy doing so many other wonderful things that I support. He hasn't focused on this. I'm going to force him to focus on this.
Yeah, and again, I don't think the numbers are that complicated. It's like about $22 trillion of additional deficit spending. That's a rosy scenario. That's $2.2 trillion per year. Obama, he averaged about $900 billion in your deficit. Trump, before the pandemic, was about $800 billion. But Biden's up to almost $1.9 trillion average deficit. Clearly unsustainable.
We got to get back to a reasonable level. And by the way, if we do, I think the bond markets would rejoice. We wouldn't be looking at a ramping up of interest costs. We can talk about debt to wealth as opposed to debt to GDP because we've got that monkey off our back.
And we also have to focus on economic growth through the private sector, not fueled by government deficit spending. I mean, I don't know what percent of our actual growth came from $2 trillion a year deficits. I think a pretty good chunk. So have we really had real private sector growth?
I think we have, but not as much as I think the headline numbers because so much of it has been fueled by the government. By the way, that's also true in terms of revenue coming from the government. It is true that we beat the CBO estimates. But that's because of trillions of dollars of deficit spending starting the pandemic years followed through with Biden.
Prior to the pandemic, we really weren't matching even the CBO's downgrade of revenue coming in after the TCGA. We weren't hitting it. But then he had COVID hit and, again, trillions of dollars of deficit spending that also boosted revenue. So, again, all these people saying, oh, we're going to, you know, that tax increase is going to be dynamically scored and it's going to pay for itself.
Listen, I'm all for dynamic scoring, but let's be realistic. And again, I'll point out the CBO projection I'm dealing with, $22 trillion, that assumes we go from 17.1% to 18% of GDP in terms of revenue. So, you know, if we don't cancel the tax increase and there's dynamic scoring effects, it just means we don't hit 18.1 and that number is still lower.
That's why I'm not an optimist. But, you know, I've heard people rationalize this. And I mean, important people rationalize, you know, just go along with this. Get us a patent. I mean, this is what we have to do to win the majority, maintain the majority in the House in 2027, right? What good is a majority if you literally don't solve the problems that you're aware of?
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