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 tried to lay out the basic numbers. That's what I was talking about. You know, my pre-pandemic levels of spending, Clinton, if you use that process, go from 1.7 to 5.5 trillion. That's how you plus up that spending. Obama would be 6.2, Trump's 2019, 6.5. So now you've got a baseline budget.
You've always heard these Republican members of Congress running for office saying we're going to go to zero-based budgeting. They're not even willing to go to 5.5 to 6.5 level baseline of budget. Again, what is the process that just might work? Doge has kind of shown it to us. Line by line, you have to scrutinize all this. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of time.
And that's why I've always argued for a multiple approach here, multiple step. Provide the border funding. I would just extend current tax law. I mean, I would have voted for that if we had been smart enough to use current policy back then. We wouldn't be even having this conversation. Extend current tax law takes an automatic massive tax increase off the table.
Increase the debt ceiling enough for a year to keep pressure on the process to do the work. To go line by line, expose spending. I've got to believe, when you've gone from $4,400 billion to $7,000 billion worth of spending, if you start scrutinizing that line by line, there would literally be hundreds of billions of dollars that the public wouldn't even know were not spending.
The only people who would know would be the grifters who are sucking down the pork.
Well, again, as I pointed out, Most don't even recognize the full reality. They don't know the numbers. I've heard it said, I didn't hear McConnell say it personally, but I've heard him say, show me a member of Congress who ever lost the election because they spent too much money. So there's no public pressure not to spend. People love tax cuts. People love the free money.
We collectively as a society are whistling by the graveyard. Nobody wants to say that this is unsustainable because to fix it is painful. I mean, you are going to have to reduce spending. And then you're very open to the political accusations as, you know, coming in. We're trying to slash Medicaid for disabled children.
Now we're trying to preserve it for disabled children, try and get the able bodied, childless children. working age adults back to work and on private sector healthcare. But again, that's a more difficult argument to make. So it's just the way that the process just plows on. We've never, as I said, there's never been a process to actually control spending. So this is what we've always done.
You come up to these deadlines, you put everything into one big bill. You give people things that you have to vote for. You don't want to default on the debt. You don't want to increase taxes. So those elements you bundle up with a bunch of crap.
and you twist people's arms to pay for it, and keeping them basically ignorant because you never talk about the massive numbers, the massive problem that we're really in.
I mean, people kind of know it, but as long as the press isn't reporting on it, as long as the press isn't connecting the dots that the massive deaths of spending is why you can't afford things, why your dollar you held in 2019 is only worth 80 cents versus the buck it should be. By the way, a dollar you held in 1998 is worth 51 cents. OK, so we again, we don't teach people.
There's no there's no public pressure in terms of reducing spending or reducing deficit. There's just virtually none from conservatives right now. I'm getting it all the time. Boy, make sure that you make no tax on tips permanent. Make sure you make no tax on overtime permanent. So, well, first of all, we probably shouldn't be doing either of those. By the way, I'm all for no tax on cash tips.
We can't. can't collect it anyway, so don't even try. All for that. But you've got to recognize these other tax cuts, they're not going to grow the economy. They're not going to focus on the one component that Besson's talking about, that we have to grow our economy.
I don't even think it's even 50 and 60 people constructing this. I think it's a much smaller group of people, and then you maybe have 50 or 60 chiming in on one issue or another. Let me push back on overtime with you, though. I ran a plastics operation continuous shift. If you're going to work 24-7, you need four shifts.
So part of the problem with no tax on overtime, first of all, it's no tax on some overtime. So that's going to add to the regulatory burden. I wouldn't want to be the accounting clerk having to keep track of that, but I know with computers it's easier to do so. But in public service employee units, they refuse to go to four shifts. because they like the overtime.
They should be forced to go to four shifts because they burn out, pay them more. But from my standpoint, having run a continuous shift operation, I think there's enough incentive paying time and a half or double time on Sunday for people to work Income is income. I don't want to segregate. I don't want to socially or economically engineer through the tax code.
And that's just part of that economic engineering through the tax code. I love the fact we're focusing on working men and women. Great. But I would rather simplify the tax code for them and overall lower their tax burden. But again, lower the rates, broaden the base. But we're not doing that. We lowered the rates and we made it more complex. We did not simplify the tax code in 2017.
One of the reasons I actually want a two-step process to simplify and rationalize our tax code.
Well, I've talked to numerous people who benefit from carried interest. I always ask them, can you explain to me why that's not ordinary income? And they can't. It is ordinary income. Speaking to other ones that are pretty big into it, they do make a pretty powerful case that all these deals, all these structures, all these business arrangements are already structured that way.
You can eliminate that break and it's really not going to raise any revenue. They make a reasonably convincing case there too. So that's kind of where we're at on that.
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