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
$1.5 trillion sounds like a lot, but over 10 years, it's $150 billion against a $7,000 billion a year budget that only six years ago was $4,400 billion. If I've got one complaint in terms of the process in the House, It's basically a void of reality.
We're not talking about the numbers we should be talking about, which is a 10-year deficit projected by CBO of $22 trillion, averaging $2.2 trillion a year. We don't talk about it. Instead, we focus all on $1.5 trillion, and then they're patting themselves on the back that they didn't even achieve $1.5 trillion.
That understates it. Now, they'll talk about dynamic scoring, and I believe in dynamic scoring as well. But in this case, if you take a look at the tax cuts that President Trump is proposing, they're not going to generate growth. They're just going to reduce the deficit. The CBO projection I'm looking at assumes we're going to gain another $4 trillion from increasing taxes.
So again, we may not get that $4 trillion, but no matter what, the CBO projection right now that is adding another $22 trillion to our debt, it certainly would add at least that. I would argue it'd probably add another $3 or $4 trillion. So it's not going to be $59 trillion. It's going to be more like $62, $63 trillion.
And I would agree the current CBO projection, that's what I'm talking about here, You know, going from 37 to 59 trillion dollars in debt is a rosy is, you know, the rosy scenario that that's as good as we're going to do. So we're simply we're simply this does not mean the moment in terms of what we have to do.
It covers the entire gamut of federal spending, education, welfare, food stamps, veterans benefits. Again, they've just transferred that into mandatory spending. So it's completely... out of sight, out of mind, and unaccountable.
Well, discretionary is actually supposedly passed each year through an appropriation process, which is completely broken. We don't pass individual appropriation bills. We generally at best, which is awful, minibuses or omnibuses. These are these multi-thousand page bills. bills that get dropped on our desk and we have to vote on them literally within 24 to 48 hours. Nobody reads them.
Nobody knows what's in them. That process is pretty broken down right now. We are operating for this fiscal year under a continuing resolution, which tweaks a few things, but it's basically spending at last year's levels on all those appropriated accounts. So again, that's about 25% of our budget. Then 75% is in the mandatory accounts, the entitlements and just other mandatory spending.
Well, let me give you an example from about three years ago. This was after COVID, and bipartisan bases were on a massive spending spree in 2020, but then the Biden administration just continued that. So, you know, we were in omnibus spending debate. And for the first time, even though the Republican Senate conference, we have a resolution against earmarks.
McConnell is negotiating an omnibus spending bill. And all of a sudden, members are sucking down earmarks. So I asked my colleagues at that time, I said, hey, anybody know how much in total we spent last year in the federal government? Room was dead silent. I went out to Washington Press Corps, asked the same question. Hey, anybody know how much we spent last year?
One reporter said it was over a trillion dollars. No, that's just discretionary spending. The answer was something like $6.3 trillion. Because we had gone from $4.4 trillion in 2019 up to $6.5 trillion. And we've never looked back. And the analogy I use is no family, if they had an illness, borrowed $50,000, pay medical bills.
If they got well the next year, they wouldn't keep borrowing $50,000 to spend at that level. But that's exactly what we've done. But the point of my story was nobody knew in total how much we spend because we never even talk about it. I mean, talk about. So that's out of sight, out of mind. So it's completely out of control.
I mean, I am the guys, you know, starting with my Wall Street Journal column January 1st about return to a pre-pandemic, pre-pandemic global spending. I mean, I've been hammering the Senate Republican conference on a weekly basis. Just, you know, ad nauseum, quite honestly. But what's the pushback? What do they say? They just throw they throw in the towel. Well, it's too hard.
I mean, that's unrealistic. You just can't do it, even though I lay out. So let me just tell you how I laid out my pre-pandemic levels of spending. This is between Christmas and New Year's. I'm trying to figure out how can I communicate this? How can I justify this? What kind of control can we put on things? So I literally went back in history.
I went back to Clinton in 1998, Obama in 2014, and Trump in 2019. And I exempted Social Security, Medicare, and interest. You know, spend what we need to spend. But all other actual outlays in those three years, I increased them by inflation and population. You know, reasonable control, right? It's what we should have. We don't have a balanced budget amendment.
At least we should have some reasonable control over outlays. Population growth inflation would make sense.
First of all, by my calculation, our average interest rate over the last 50 years on government debt is about 5.8%. So that's 50 years. And we're down here about three, somewhere around 3%. Those are not exact calculations. Listen, that is the hope of all of us. I mean, I will absolutely agree that the number one
component of a solution to our enormous debt and deficit problem is economic growth we have to grow the economy but here's the problem is when the government is sucking out of the private sector all you know we're the ones borrowing the money so there's not a whole lot of money left for businesses in the private sector not enough capital there now you can print more money uh
But then that sparks inflation. And that, of course, erodes everybody's balance sheet. It also makes our debt less expensive as well. But because we're so in debt, that drives up the interest rates. And again, it ends up being a death and debt spiral. So nobody can predict this.
But I mean, that's just the wishful thinking of people putting forward a policy, one big, beautiful bill that doesn't live up to its name, but actually exacerbates the problem.
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