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
Yeah, my guess is just not going to happen. Right. And kind of going the overtime, it's just not that big a revenue generator one way or the other. Might make you feel good. Could screw up the way deals are made. Is it really worth messing with?
Well, I think it's insane that we've been shutting down coal-fired electrical generation. We need a lot of it. I would really focus on nuclear myself. I think that is, you know, if you're concerned about climate change, yeah, I'm not. We'll adapt. But nuclear would be the thing we ought to be pushing. I really don't want to subsidize energy production. I don't want to subsidize anything.
Again, I want a simple and rational tax story. So my approach would always be to simplify those things. I don't want to pull the rug out from under people. I mean, if we've subsidized things and people made investment based on certain things, kind of respect that.
I say Congress in general doesn't understand what you're talking about. Again, I said, I don't want to pull the rug out from other people. I understand investment because I was in business. But again, I want to move toward a more simple system. And again, it's insane what government Yeah, all the green new energy thing. It misallocates capital.
Take a look at what's happening in Europe and Germany and stuff. They're artificially driving up the cost of power for what? OK, I mean, it's a fantasy. It's a self-inflicted wound. We spent like five or six trillion dollars globally on climate change. And whether you believe it or not, we haven't bent the needle. That's just five or six trillion dollars basically wasted.
So, yeah, I recognize the fact we've wasted a lot of money. We've incentivized people for a certain type of power. The solution would be quit doing it. long-term and let the marketplace provide as much energy cheap as possible. Again, protecting the environment. I don't want pollution, but the whole climate change thing is... I care about electron...
First of all, it was beneficial for no other reason than it exposed how oblivious and ignorant Congress was of all this waste, fraud, and abuse. Okay, I mean, that has value right there.
It should have embarrassed every member of Congress, all these department heads that this kind of spending, this kind of crap was going on, and they weren't doing oversight on it, they weren't taking a look at it, and, but.
And I tried getting Elon's attention, quite honestly, about give me somebody in Doge that I can work with so as soon as you identify the spending, we can connect it to an appropriation account. We can connect it to a mandatory spending account so we can actually codify it. He didn't seem to have the time. And quite honestly, in a personal conversation, he said, well, we don't have to do that.
Well, we do have to do that. And so, you know, we've been hammering Russ Vogt, you know, send us a rescission package. You know, finally he bundles up $9 billion when on, I think the last time I looked at Doge's website, they were up to $165 million. It's higher than that now. They're kind of, they have fallen short of the goal. Listen, I'm not criticizing for that. them for that at all.
But the fact matters, it has to be codified. Just putting it on the website is valuable, but we got to bank the savings. And so anything that's mandatory has got to be done through reconciliation. Otherwise, it's got to be done from rescission. You got to get the public support for this. I don't know why they haven't done it.
There's a question. They've stopped contracts. They're no longer spending money that way. But the question is whether the president on his own can impound those funds. So they may not be spent, but they're just going to be sitting out there as unallocated spending to be spent sometime in the future, unless you rescind them. And again, that's the beauty of rescission and reconciliation.
We don't need Democrats to help us there. We can do that with simple majorities, both the House and the Senate. And again, it'll be pretty depressing. President Trump in his first administration sent up a $15 billion rescission package and has voted down the Senate to Republican senators vote against it. And my guess is they paid no political price for doing that.
Any Republican that would vote against the rescission package ought to pay a pretty huge political price in voting that thing down, but it's going to take presidential leadership. He's got to be focusing on that. And I'm sorry, I don't think President Trump, he's doing all kinds of great things. He's not focused on reducing spending.
I just think they are overwhelmed. I mean, you see all the activity and this just hasn't hit his radar yet. It's going to hit his radar here this next the next few weeks. So, again, he liked the concept, the slogan of one beautiful bill. I don't think he was overly concerned or understanding what the details were. I'm going to force him to take a look at the details.
I'm going to force the discussion on spending.
So we've been in finance committee. We've been working on these things. But again, it's all about scores, right? I've got to point this out. You hear these scores, right? But they're divorced from, they're not tied to anything. It's like, okay, I got a score of 65. Well, good. I mean, it's good if you're golfing. It's awful if you're bowling. So you get all these scores.
They're divorced from reality. So again, the process is complete chaos. It's by and large a charade, okay? Somebody else is going to write this thing, and it's going to be shoved down people's throats. So what I intend to do is I intend to open it up and bring this to the light of day. I've been doing this since January 1st, writing about –
giving three pre-pandemic levels, three options on pre-pandemic levels of spending. Next column, here's the process, a line by line, deep dive, forensic audit. I'd love to take the Doge team right now and just bring them over. Let's focus on this. Let's spend months doing this, but we'll need time. We'll need a two-step process.
And then literally my last column just kind of put it all together, the big numbers, and this is why you have to do it. But again, you were following the debate in the House. Did you ever hear $2.2 trillion average deficit being projected, $22 trillion, $59 trillion in debt? Nobody. It's just $1.5 trillion. Oh, that's a lot. It's almost meaningless. It's a rounding error.
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