During a tele-town hall on Monday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) was asked why he voted for the Republican reconciliation bill which is predicted to add over $2 trillion to the national debt.
00:03My question is, given the tremendous deficit that the country has, why did you, after saying that you weren't going to vote for this bill, why did you go ahead and vote for it anyway, increasing the deficit by $3 trillion?
00:25So first of all, William, it's a very legitimate question. It's a good question.
00:29I think I can easily explain it.
00:31If you listen carefully, I was always looking for a three-step process.
00:36Provide the border funding and defense to clean up the mess that's left behind by the Biden administration.
00:40Then my second step would have just been to extend current tax law, which would have taken the automatic tax increase off the table.
00:48That's a price tag of $4 trillion right now.
00:50That's what caused the deficit numbers.
00:54But again, on a bipartisan basis, nobody wanted to increase Americans' taxes.
01:00I mean, Democrats could have, when they had the presidency, the House, the Senate, they could have increased taxes on anybody.
01:06They could have increased them on the wealthy.
01:08They could have punished success as much as they wanted to.
01:10They didn't do that.
01:11They left the Tax Cut and Jobs Act alone.
01:14We were facing that thing automatically expiring.
01:17Had we had the smarts back in 2017 of reducing spending to pay for permanency, we would have done that.
01:25So again, there was no way I was going to let the automatic tax increase go in effect.
01:30So that, to me, is already table stakes.
01:33And what I tried to do is use my vote to create as much leverage to bring spending down to a reasonable pre-pandemic level.
01:42And so that's why I was so vocal about it as I was pushing and prodding my colleagues, the president, everybody.
01:48We've got to return to reasonable pre-pandemic level spending.
01:51We went from $4.4 trillion to over $7 trillion from 2019 to this year.
01:56Totally unjustified.
01:58The bottom line is this is all we could get.
02:01We got about $1.5 trillion of additional spending reduction.
02:05Historic in nature, just we've got so much further to go.
02:09So, you know, again, a legitimate question.
02:12I'd hopefully explain that.
02:13Nobody wanted to increase taxes.
02:15I certainly didn't want to do that.
02:16By the way, that score could be bogus, too.
02:18You increase people's taxes, there's no guarantee you're going to get that $4 trillion that CBO is estimating.
02:24I've got a real question about the way CBO scores things anyway.
02:27So, but anyway, William, thanks for staying in line.
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