➡ The speaker is advocating for a return to pre-pandemic level spending to balance the budget. They suggest scrutinizing every line of the budget to identify unnecessary spending and propose a budget review panel to oversee this process. They also recommend a multi-step process to address issues like border funding, tax law, and debt limit. The speaker believes that this approach, although challenging, is necessary to prevent further financial instability.

➡ Senator Ron Johnson, a strong supporter of Trump, has been discussing his views on Obamacare and other political matters on various programs. Despite some disagreements, he believes his logic is sound and has been supported by the president. He also shared insights about his Wall Street Journal column, “The ugly truth about the big beautiful bill”. The conversation ended with gratitude for his time and contribution.

I’m Chris Farrell, and this is On Watch. Welcome to On Watch, everybody. The Jewish Watch podcast where we go behind the headlines to cover news and information that the old legacy media really doesn’t want you to know about. We try to recover some lost history and explain the inexplicable. Today, to help us explain the inexplicable, we are very fortunate to have the senator from the great state of Wisconsin, good senator Ron Johnson, joining us here on Watch. Welcome, Senator Johnson. Morning, Chris. Happy to be with you. Thanks very much. Just a couple of days ago, you published a very important op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.

And with your committee assignments and finance and banking and your long history of experience when it comes to the budget process, you’ve raised the flag with this op-ed. You’ve said that there’s an ugly truth about the big beautiful bill that the president wants. And in your opinion, it’s not too beautiful of a bill. Why don’t you give our viewers and listeners a little overview, a highlight of what you’ve written about in the Wall Street Journal. Sure. By the way, let me first say that I’m a huge supporter of President Trump. What he’s done on the border, ending wokeism, what he’s doing right now in the Middle East, promoting peace, huge supporter.

But I just have to point out the truth about the big beautiful bill. It’s going to actually exacerbate the problem. I would think the first criteria, the first goal, the first principle of a Republican budget resolution, we should be trying to control the deficit. We should try to reduce it, but in fact, we’ll probably increase it. So I’m trying to force my colleagues in the administration to look at the forest, it’s on fire, rather than arguing about the twigs and leaves. So what I point out in my Wall Street Journal column, and I’m just using CBO’s 10-year projection, the latest one, they project we’ll spend $89.3 trillion over the next 10 years.

The House bill, as it’s framed right now, would increase spending on border and defense, about $340 billion, supposedly cut $1.5 trillion, but a lot of those are in the out years. Some of them are fake cuts. So at most, we’re cutting $1.2 trillion of spending, that’s 1.3% of the $89.3 trillion. And if you do the math with all the additional tax cuts, extending current tax law versus the CBO estimate, we’re probably going to add, I would say, about $4 trillion to deficits over the next 10 years, which would mean that in 10 years, the deficit won’t be $59 trillion, it’d be closer to $63 trillion.

So that’s just the truth. We’re not controlling this. We’re mortgaging our children’s future. I ran 2010 when we were $14 trillion in debt, now we’re $37 trillion. We went on a massive bipartisan spending spree after COVID, during COVID, from $0.4 trillion to $7 trillion. We haven’t returned to pre-pandemic level. So I’ve laid out the options. I’ve laid out a process. Elon Musk showed us how to do it. You have to go line by line. You have to do the work. You have to take the time. So again, I want to support the president.

He’s doing a great job in so many different areas, but the one big beautiful bill, I’m afraid, is false advertising. It’s big, but it’s not beautiful. It’s going to actually exacerbate its problem. It’s not solving it, and we need to solve this problem. As you go through your op-ed piece in a Wall Street Journal, about the first two thirds of the article, you lay out some devastating numbers. You point out the COVID level of spending, we haven’t gone back from that. We’re still spending like drunken sailors. In fact, the numbers are crazy.

Your colleagues, your namesake over there in the House, in the Speaker’s office, he controls this entire thing. The House is the appropriator, and he’s the head guy. And so how is it that the House Republicans are not more interested in actually glomming onto and implementing all the things that Elon Musk has pointed out through his Doge process and all the points that you’ve made? Why is the House so reticent to actually enact the cuts? For example, why are they promoting and expanding Obamacare under the name of Medicaid expansion? I mean, how is it that they don’t get the message? There are a lot of cheerleaders for Trump when it comes to actually putting the numbers into the budget.

All of a sudden, everybody kind of gets a little weak in the knees. First of all, it’s easy to spend other people’s money. Right. And the American public loves free federal funds, and they’re just not connecting the dollar. Well, that’s why we had 40-year high inflation. That’s why we devalued the dollar so tremendously. But also, I don’t think they really know the numbers. Most of them are, they’re not accountants like me. They don’t come from the private sector. And so I’m trying to give them the numbers. You know, three years ago, during one of our omnibus spending debates, I just asked my colleagues in the Senate, hey, anybody know how much we spent last year? Total? No.

Nobody knew. Nobody knew. Nobody asked the same question. Somebody said, well, over a trillion. Now that’s just discretionary spending. That’s about a quarter of our budget right now. Three quarters of the budget is off, you know, mandatory spending. Nobody looks at it. It’s out of control. Yeah, it’s servicing the debt is one of those. They just don’t know. They don’t know the number. So they put out some criteria. I said that they set the bar way too low. They said, well, we’ve got to have at least a trillion and a half dollars of spending cuts.

And it sounds like a lot, right? It’s paltry. It’s 1.3%. And it’s not even real. But they hit the 1.5 trillion with fake spending cuts delayed to the out years where you’ll never realize them. They claim victory. They did their job. They’re not going to come under the ire of President Trump, you know, because they’re delivering that one big, beautiful bill. And so now it’s up to a few of us in the Senate to just point out the truth. Call for what it is. It’s false advertising. It’s big again, but it’s not beautiful.

It’s exacerbating the problem. I’m sorry, you know, I I’ve literally given up 15 years of my life. I know, I know to try and stop the mortgage, our children’s future. It’s immoral what we’re doing to our children, but the transfer of wealth from young to old is unconscionable. But it’s politically popular. No, seniors are a big voting block. And we just continue that outrage. Now, at some point in time, us pollsters have to understand what we’ve done to our grandchildren and take it seriously. I’m not looking forward to it. This is not going to be pleasant.

Yeah, it’s not. I agree with you 100%. So now setting aside reality, which is a Washington DC specialty, pushing reality off to the side. You know, President Trump wanted one big, beautiful bill because he doesn’t want to expend political capital fighting over a series of six to eight bills or, you know, Biden in his first year knocked out or first 100 days, knocked out 11 bills. He doesn’t want to go through the fight, the negotiation, the horse trading, the vote by vote, win loss. He just wants to roll it all up.

And I get why I understand the political battle, but he wants to roll it open one, pass it, move on, and we’ll figure out the details later. That’s the political reality of it. Not the dollars and cents, not the actual spending and accounting. So what do you say to people that will remark and say, look, just do what the president wants. We’ll figure it out later. Because that’s what that’s the counter argument that that’s what you’re going to face. It’s so we do have a process here for more generic children’s future.

And that’s the process. Again, it’s like the wimpy. I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for hamburger today. Right. That’s that’s why we’re $37 trillion in debt. And why in the big, beautiful bill, rather than ending up in $59 trillion in debt in 20, 20, 35 will probably be 62 or $63 trillion in debt. So again, it’s exacerbating the problem. It’s a slogan. It’s false advertising. And I’m calling them on it. It’s so there’s a reality. So somebody’s got to do it. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We again, we’ve never had something spending increase like this.

It’s unprecedented, except during World War Two, right. We had the greatest generation. And I put that in my column prior to the start of World War Two, we were spending 11.7% of GDP. Okay, we went up to 41%. But because we had responsible leadership back then, they realized we can’t keep spending that level. So they decreased it to 11.4 by 1948. They went back to below pre-war spending. We haven’t done that. We started out at 20.6, which again, that’s like double where we were. Right. We’re approaching 24%. We have a structural deficit gap of about 6% right now.

We’ll probably exacerbate that to seven with the big beautiful bill. So again, at some point in time, either we get spending under control, return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending. Again, I’ve laid out the options. I’ve laid out how to do it. Just take a look at Clinton or Obama or Trump’s 2019 spending, leave Social Security, Medicare and interest alone, grow all those other actual outlays. By population growth inflation, we’d be talking somewhere between 5.5 and 6.5. Basically, we have a balanced budget. Now, that was Clinton’s 1998 before 9-11. So you’d probably have to plus up defense and veterans benefits.

But again, that would be a reasonable baseline to start discussions from, as opposed to more than $7 trillion and then throw in the towel. We can’t cut that, can’t cut that, can’t cut that. We’ll tweak this one a little bit and we’ll put all the savings out in the future years so we don’t feel the pain right now. So nobody can complain, nobody can lie about us and we’re not even willing to engage in the debate. Well, they’ll lie anyway. That’s part of the deal. So you come out with this Wall Street Journal article, you lay it all out.

It’s black and white. It’s math. Take all the emotion, all the adrenaline out of it. You’re just doing math. You’re laying out the consequences for this craze spending. So how many phone calls from either the White House or the Speaker’s Office saying, Senator Johnson, what the hell are you doing? Well, listen, I met with the President twice, with the Budget Committee and the Finance Committee. I laid these numbers out for him and pre-pandemic level spending. He loved it. So I love this. The House is going to love this. Has it been presented to the House? Well, not yet.

Why don’t you and I go and we’ll present this. Two years should go arm in arm and go see Speaker Johnson and have a little seance together. My demands have been a return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending. I haven’t said an absolute number. I know we have to get the votes for it. But more importantly, a process to achieve and maintain it. And again, that’s where Elon Musk and the brilliant doge effort between Elon Musk and Trump, now we see how to do it. Again, we’ve never had a process to control government spending, right? We don’t have a budget balance requirement.

I didn’t realize the appropriation committees were actually established because the authorizing committees were big spenders. So as the appropriation committee was going to be the control on spending, that didn’t work. That was supposed to rein it in, but it did not work. So we never had a process. The only process I can imagine is going to work is literally scrutinizing every line of the budget. And yeah, it’s going to take time. It’s going to take work. It’s going to take the doge crew, people like that, coming on over and helping out. You know, we don’t have the congressional staff.

We don’t have access to the information. We can set up the process. So again, that’s why I recommended my second in a series of articles. The Wall Street Journal is a budget review panel. Serious senators with serious House members with Russ Vogt and his team at OMB. We’re the budget review panel. Then you get the department heads with their budget head. Come on up and justify every line every sub line of your budget. If you do that, listen, $7,000 billion a year, there’s got to be hundreds of billions of dollars within there that if you didn’t spend it, nobody would even know other than the people in on the grift.

So everything you’re saying makes perfect sense. What’s going to happen? Well, if I have my druthers, we slow this process down. We revert to a multiple step process. Give the border funding defense bank $850 billion. Let’s not waste the effort of the House. They’ve identified some real savings cuts. Let’s bank those. Let’s enjoy those. Extend the current tax law so we take an automatic tax increase off the table. That brings certain to the economy. Make sure we don’t default. I’ve never voted for an increased debt limit, but I’ll vote for one to make sure we don’t default, but not a big one.

Something to keep the pressure on so that we come back for the big beautiful bill, which is the complex bill of trying to simplify and rationalize a tax code. You know, anything we do ought to be promoting growth, simplify the tax code, should be focused on the working men and women of this country. And then, you know, also go line by line, take the time then to scrutinize spending, expose it, and then don’t spend it, reduce it. And Speaker Johnson and the appropriators in the House, any feedback, any well Senator, that’s a great idea, but, or yes, let’s meet next week and do it.

After my second column, where I was laying out that budget review panel, you know, the Senate Majority Leader is all for it. I had the Speaker and the Majority Leader of the House on the phone. They were all for it. We were talking about who the members ought to be. They sent me on the phone call with their key budget staff. The next day, and the key budget staff said, no, we’ve been working on this for a year. We’re comfortable with where we’re at. We don’t have the time to do this, which is pretty much the response side of OMB too.

They don’t have the time to do it. So, okay, well, let’s take the time. So when I proposed to Senate leadership to go back to the multiple, by the way, that’s John Thune’s idea. He was right. We should have taken this in steps. When I say, well, let’s go back to that. We’ve got a Senate budget resolution. Let’s go for that. And I get the response, well, that ship is sailed to which I respond, well, let’s call it back to port because I think the ship that the big, beautiful bills on, I think that’s, that’s called the Titanic.

I think that’s going down. I think I have enough support in the Senate that we’re not going to support what the House has done again. I appreciate their efforts, but it exacerbates the problem. It doesn’t fix it. Well, the big, the big tiebreaker on this is a guy named Donald Trump, because if he picks up the phone and calls people or has, or summons them to the White House and says, I want you to do A, B, and C, guess what’s going to happen? They’re all going to do A, B, and C, even if they hate it, even if they don’t like it, because he’s the only guy with enough horsepower to make it happen.

So I hope, I wish that he’s, I know he’s busy overseas right now, but that, what you’re proposing and what you’re saying clearly is a very, by the numbers, it’s math, take all the spin and jazz off of it. You’re just doing math and trying to get to a reasonable number. And all the folks that are saying I’m too busy, I’ve already done it, leave me alone, go away. The only guy that can change that is Donald Trump. So I hope that there’s a way to communicate that. And because he doesn’t want to lose the idea of one beautiful bailout, he doesn’t, anything less than that, any concession that doesn’t have one big beautiful bill, he’s going to view as a loss.

He doesn’t like losing. It’s not going to happen. So the only thing to do is to force them to force people to enact what you’re proposing and still do it in one big beautiful bill. So I will remind him that repeal, replace Obamacare was one big beautiful bill that didn’t fail because John McCain did thumbs up down. It was an awful bill. It wasn’t worth passing either. That was not going to pass the Senate. So again, that approach didn’t work in the first Trump term. And by the way, I had to say no on the Tax Cut and Jobs Act as well, because the president just wanted a 20% tax rate for C-corps.

And the other 95% American businesses, the pass-throughs were completely hosed and left behind, unable to compete with big C-corps. And I’m the guy that had to dig my heels in and say no. And I got the strongly phone calls and 10 o’clock at night from the Oval Office. I got the scoring of Wisconsin talk radio. Right. But in the end, everybody sings my praises for really fixing that bill. So again, I’m trying to fix this one as well. It’s tough. It’s tough being the adult in the room when everyone’s giving out free goodies and you’re there saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, there’s a limit.

So I admire your tenacity and I admire you doing the tough math and pointing things out that are unpleasant and inconvenient. I just hope that we get there. I hope that people take the long view and realize that we can’t keep borrowing money from the Chinese to, you know, service the debt and go down the path that we’ve been on for so long. And we need to not continue to do things like have Republicans pump up Obamacare, which sounds like insanity to anybody. That’s part of this too. But listen, I appreciate the opportunity.

I think the good news is I’ve gone on a lot of these types of programs. And again, I’m a big supporter of Trump, the whole star big supporters of Trump. Nobody has disagreed with me. Nobody in my conference can disagree with me. They may be looking at their shoes, throwing the towel right away, but nobody can dispute this logic. And I think that’s again, I’ve been the president. He loved it. He agreed with it. So we need to figure out a way of implementing. Again, I want to see him succeed. I don’t want to be going up against him.

Okay. I don’t like having to be the guy. Right. This says this isn’t quite so beautiful. I get it. I get it very well. Senator Ron Johnson, thank you so much for joining us and taking the time to explain the background and the inner workings behind your column in the Wall Street Journal. The ugly truth about the big beautiful bill. Senator, we appreciate your time. Thanks very much for joining us. Have a great day. I’m Chris Farrell on watch. [tr:trw].

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