Uploaded by Tucker Carlson Show
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: I’m generally the skunk in the room, or, you know, the kid who says the emperor has no clothes. I just ask my colleagues, “Hey, does anybody know how much we spent last year in total?”
Dead silence. What the federal government spent in total. If anyone knew, they didn’t volunteer it.
I went out to the Washington press corps. “Would you happen to know what we spent last year — what the federal government spent in total?”
No. Just the bottom line.
If anybody knew, they didn’t volunteer. I went out to the Washington press corps, asked them the same question. One of the reporters said, “It was over a trillion dollars.”
No, that’s just discretionary spending, that’s about 25% of the budget. I mean total spending. The answer is, I think, $6.3 trillion.
Understand, the federal government is the largest financial entity in the world. We, in theory, are the 535 members of the board of directors, and nobody really knows in total how much the federal government spent because we never talk about it.
TUCKER CARLSON: Which is a weird thing not to talk about, since that’s your job.
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: Exactly, but that’s how it’s been set up. There’s discretionary spending, which we appropriate, and then there’s mandatory spending that just gets spent. It’s on automatic pilot. So it’s out of sight, out of mind, and it’s completely out of control.
TUCKER CARLSON: May I ask how that works? I thought the Constitution gave Congress the responsibility , the duty, to appropriate the money.
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: So, Congress has written laws like the Social Security law, then Medicare and Medicaid. They call those “entitlements.” So they’re not annually appropriated. You just set up a law saying: if you qualify, you get X number of dollars. It’s on automatic pilot.
TUCKER CARLSON: And there’s no cap on that spending?
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: No. None. You qualify, you get it. What has happened over the years is, in addition to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, they’ve slid what should be, in my min, discretionary spending into mandatory. I’m the guy that pointed this out in conference. I said, “Do you guys realize that in 2019, other mandatory, again, not Social Security, not Medicare… other mandatory spending, pretty well runs the gamut of other appropriation accounts. That was $642 billion last year. Fiscal year 2024 is at $1.3 trillion. This year, it’s a little over a trillion, and that’s pretty much the projection as far as the eye can see, according to the CBO, a trillion dollars.
So, total discretionary spending is about $1.7 trillion, but they’ve effectively slid about a trillion dollars now, ongoing, of what should be discretionary into what they now call “other mandatory” spending. A trillion dollars. I don’t think anybody was really aware of that.
TUCKER CARLSON: So for 2024, what did the federal government spend total?
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: In 2019, total federal government spending was $4.4 trillion. This year, we’ll spend over $7 trillion. I remember around the Obama administration, about when I got elected in 2010, we had our first trillion-dollar deficit in 2009. I think it was $1.4 trillion. We’ve stopped talking about hundreds of billions, which used to move the needle, now it’s trillions. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… it just doesn’t feel like that much anymore.
So: $4,400 billion spent in 2019, $7,000 billion
Next year (projected): $7,300 billion
TUCKER CARLSON: We’re going to spend $7 trillion this year. What’s the bottom line number on tax receipts?
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: About $5.1 trillion. So we’ve got a structural deficit of around 6% right now. CBO is projecting that over the next 10 years, 6%. Federal revenue, according to CBO, will be 18.1% of GDP. It’s currently about 17.1%, but they’re projecting a built-in automatic tax increase next year. Spending will be around 23.4%.
TUCKER CARLSON: So, that deficit spending, where does the money come from?
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: We borrow it or we print it.
Let me put this in better historical context. In 1930, less than 100 years ago, the federal government spent 3.1% of GDP. State and local governments spent 9.1%. That matched the Founders’ vision: a limited federal government within the constraints of enumerated powers, and most governing at the state and local level.
We’ve blown that up. Today, federal government spends close to 24% of GDP. State and local governments are over 16%. So now, total government spending is around 40% of GDP. Three times what it was less than 100 years ago.
And I would argue, as government grows, our freedoms necessarily recede. Government either takes more of your income, borrows money (causing inflation), or both, and inflation is a silent tax.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do we have any idea what percentage of Americans are net receivers, meaning they get more from the government than they pay in?
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: I’d guess it’s more than 50%. That’s the death knell of a democracy, when the voting public realizes they can vote themselves benefits at the expense of others. But what they don’t realize is the cost: massive deficit spending that devalues the dollar and causes 40-year high inflation. That hurts everyone.
TUCKER CARLSON: So yor guess is most Americans receive more from the federal government than they pay?
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: I shouldn’t say because I haven’t checked that figure, but my guess is more than 50%, when you consider all the entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare. Well, people say, “That’s my money!” Well, most of it is, but most people probably get more out than they put in. Medicare and Medicaid are entirely funded by general revenues. Add in food stamps and all the other trillions in transfer payments, it’s staggering.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why is this not sustainable? What happens if it continues?
SENATOR RON JOHNSON: When I ran in 2010, we had just hit trillion-dollar deficits for the first time. We were spending about $3.5 trillion a year and had $14 trillion in debt. I launched my campaign in June 2010 with the message: “This is a fight for freedom. We’re mortgaging our children’s future. It’s wrong, it’s immoral, it has to stop.”
Then, we were $14 trillion in debt, spending $3.5 trillion.
Today, we’re spending $7 trillion and we’re nearly $37 trillion in debt.
And CBO projects over the next 10 years, we will add another $22 trillion to the debt.
That projection assumes $4 trillion in additional revenue from scheduled tax increases. If we extend current tax law, that $4 trillion goes away. I support not raising taxes, but that means even more debt.
So we’re projecting deficits for the next 10 years of a minimum or $22 trillion, and I would predict that is a rosy scenario, particularly what they’ve done with the “one big beautiful bill.” They’re not reducing spending to what I’ve been calling for, a pre-pandemic level.
At the danger of spouting out too many numbers here, I want to put this in perspective. President Obama, over eight years, his average deficit was $910 billion. When President Trump came into office, in his first three years, the average deficit was about $800 billion. Then COVID hit, and we had a deficit of $3.1 trillion — just that one year. What we should have done when Biden came into office, was return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level. The pandemic was over. We had unemployment spike up to 25 million people, it’s usually aroud 5-6 million. Within a few months it was back to 11 and then it returned to normal in early 2021. We didn’t have to keep stimulating the economy, but Biden did. Biden averaged $1.9 trillion in deficits.
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And now CBO’s rosy scenario projects $2.2 trillion annually for the next ten years. This takes our debt from $37 trillion to $59 trillion.
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So much of the savings in the “big, beautiful bill” is phony, it’s fake. Or it’s in the out years, where if Republicans lose power, Democrats will just restore it. However you slice it, CBO’s $22 trillion of ten-year deficit is a rosy scenario; it will be more than that. What happens then is what’s happening in the bond market. Interest rates are going up. If global creditors decide the U.S. is uncredible — our 50-year average interest rate on debt is over 5%. Right now we’re at 3.3%. If we increase that to 4.3%, add another $4 trillion. If it goes up to the 50-year average, add another $8-9 trillion.
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We’re spending more on interest now than we spend on national defense!
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