Laken Riley Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I think by now you have seen all kinds of different versions of this depressing chart of total U.S. debt.

Back in 1998--and we will be talking about that year--when Bill Clinton was President and we had our first budget surplus since 1969, the debt level was about $5\1/2\ trillion.

When I arrived here in my first year in the Senate in 2011, the debt was about $14 trillion. I ran, quite honestly, because we were mortgaging our children's future.

I will talk a little bit about 2014 when President Obama had a certain spending level that was up to $17\1/2\ trillion.

As recent as 2019, before the pandemic, our debt was somewhere around $22\1/2\ trillion.

Today, our debt exceeds $36 trillion on a path toward much higher heights.

If you look at President Biden's final budget here, he is predicting our total debt will be $52 trillion in 10 years. This is clearly not sustainable. As I said, this is a depressing reality.

The result of all that debt--one of the many results--was the devaluation of the dollar. A dollar you held in 1998 is only worth 51 cents today. We have basically cut the value of a dollar in half since 1998. In 2014 when President Obama was President--now the value of that dollar is only worth 74 cents. The value of the dollar prior to the pandemic, 2019, is now only worth 80 cents. That is why people can't afford things.

This inflation caused by massive deficit spending--this is the stealth tax on every American. It is a very regressive tax. It primarily hurts people at the bottom part of the income spectrum. Wealthy individuals have stocks, and they have other assets that inflate as the dollar devalues. So, again, this harm primarily affects lower income Americans. The men and women who work are harmed by this.

This can't go on. This is an outrage. This is a tragedy.

I just want to ask a bit of a hypothetical here before we talk about this chart. Let's say you are an American family of four, and you are doing pretty good. You make and you spend about $100,000 a year.

Let's say the next year, you have a serious illness in your family, and all of a sudden, you have major medical bills totaling $50,000. So the next year, you spend $150,000.

Well, let's say you get some good news. That medical condition is now solved. Your family member is healed. What would most American families do? If their income level stayed the same--around $100,000--I don't think they would keep spending at a $150,000 level. They certainly wouldn't borrow $50,000 to maintain that spending level. They would reduce their spending level back to what it was before the illness, right? It would go back to somewhere around 100,000 bucks, maybe a little bit more based on inflation. That is not what the Federal Government did. This, I know, is shocking most Americans as I am laying out the reality of the situation. In 2019, prior to the pandemic, total Federal Government spending was $4.4 trillion. Then we had COVID, and I think we very unwisely shut down a lot of our economy. It destroyed people's businesses. It destroyed people's lives, our miserable failed response to COVID. It cost a lot of money. So Washington went on a massive spending spree, and in the year of the pandemic, we spent actually closer to $6.6 trillion.

Now, again, if it would have been like a normal family, once the pandemic passed, we would have returned to some reasonable spending level, but we didn't do that. The last 5 years now, we spent, on average, $6.5 trillion. That is $2.1 trillion more than we spent in 2019. There is no justification for that.

This last year, we spent a total of $6.9 trillion, $2.6 trillion-- $2.5 trillion higher than the $4.4 trillion. Again, there is no justification for that.

So the question I have been asking is, How do we return to a reasonable, prepandemic spending level?

I will guarantee you that the people who voted for President Trump do not expect the Federal Government is going to continue spending at President Biden's and the Democrats who have been in charge, at their spending levels. This is unacceptable. It is unsustainable.

So what I have done is, I have laid out a couple different options here. Again, I will use another analogy. Let's say that same family of four I was talking about with an income of $100,00, let's say they have a baby. Now their population, their family size, has increased 25 percent. I think most people recognize that if that family of four could increase their income 25 percent, from 100,000 to 125,000, and then tack on an amount for inflation--let's say it is 3 percent inflation--up to 128,750, I think most people would recognize now that family has been kept whole. They have been made whole. They have been able to maintain their standard of living.

Well, I think the same thing would be true for the Federal Government, for Americans living within America, you know, looking at different benefits the Federal Government bestows on Americans as it extracts our hard-earned tax dollars.

So I went back to a number of different years prior to the pandemic. I went back to 1998. Again, that was the first year we actually had a budget surplus since 1969. That is how irresponsible the government has always been. But back in 1998, what a magic moment. We actually had a budget surplus. That was under Bill Clinton. We spent $1.7 trillion.

That is obviously too low because we have had inflation, because we have had population growth. So what I have done in each one of these scenarios here is I have taken the basic spending levels. I have increased them based on population growth and inflation, plus I exempt Social Security, Medicare, and interest. And I have plugged in President Biden's 2025 budget amounts for Social Security, Medicare, and interest.

So the result of that analysis for 1998, for Bill Clinton's spending level--I don't think anybody would really argue that Bill Clinton spent too little in 1998--if you did that, the increase would be based on population and inflation, plus you use today's 2025 Social Security, Medicare, and interest expense, you would end up with $5.5 trillion.

Now, it is not a secret. The reason I chose 1998--I looked at all of these years. Doing that with 1998 spending levels, if you compare that to President Biden's budgeted revenue for this year, which has not decreased because of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act--the revenue has consistently increased to $5.5 trillion--we would have a balanced budget. What everybody says is impossible to achieve, going back to Bill Clinton's spending levels, increasing them by population and inflation and using today's Social Security, Medicare, and interest expense would balance the budget. We wouldn't have to increase the debt ceiling. We wouldn't be experiencing or threatened by more inflation.

OK. If that is too reasonable for Washington, DC, let's look at another scenario. Let's take a look at Barack Obama's--President Obama's--spending levels in 2014. Again, I don't think President Obama was spending too little in 2014. I was here. He was spending too much.

But if you take his 2014 levels, inflate them by population growth since then and inflation, using today's Social Security, Medicare, and interest, we would be spending $6.2 trillion this year. Pretty reasonable. Not a balanced budget, but a whole lot better than the 6.9 or the $7.3 trillion that President Biden budgeted for this year--a far more reasonable spending level.

But if you don't like that, if that is just too reasonable, too aggressive for you, just go back to 2019 when we spent $4.4 trillion, increase it by population growth, inflation, using President Biden's Social Security, Medicare, and interest, it would be 6.5. I mean, I think that is completely unacceptable. That has been the average.

If we increase that $2.1 above the $4.4 trillion, it would still be a whole lot better than President Biden's 7.3 trillion or last year's spending of $6.9 trillion.

How can anybody justify spending at this level when we were only spending $4.4 trillion 5 years ago?

Here is what I am suggesting. Set those other scenarios aside. President Trump was just elected. Again, I don't think anybody-- certainly not me. I voted for President Trump. I was not expecting President Trump, and I do not expect him, to come into office and accept and spend at President Biden's levels. So I would encourage President Trump to go back and take a look at the final budget he proposed for fiscal year 2021 and look at his estimate for spending in 2025.

So I have done the exact same thing. I am using the fiscal year 2025 estimates from his last budget, but I am using this year's Social Security, Medicare, and interest expense. If we do that, we are looking at a spending level of $6 trillion.

So, again, we can look at individual expense items. You can take a look at defense, if you don't think we are spending enough on that, if it is too risky a world. I mean, somewhere within the range of 5.5, which would literally balance our budget, up to 6, $6.2 trillion, that is a reasonable base that we ought to include in a budget we will be passing this year, and that should drive future spending. That would reset spending levels to a far more reasonable level.

Again, let me just reemphasize, whether we use Bill Clinton's 1998 spending level, which would result in a $5.5 trillion baseline; Barack Obama's 2014 spending levels, which would result in a baseline budget of $6.2 trillion; or President Trump's final budget, which would result in a $6 trillion spending level, that is a reasonable approach.

That is what families do. That is what businesses in America are forced do. They don't just say: Spend whatever you want. Put 70 percent of our spending budget on automatic pilot. We will never look at it. We will just spend whatever we want.

That is how you bankrupt a family. That is how you bankrupt a business. That is how we are mortgaging our children's future. It has to stop.

So I am putting everybody on notice. I am on the Budget Committee. I am on the Finance Committee. I am going to insist that the budget we pass now that Republicans are in control of the Senate returns to some reasonable baseline.

Listen, I am reasonable. I will negotiate. I am not saying this is gospel; this is etched in stone. But President Trump, our majority leader, our majority leadership, House leadership, they are going to have to justify to me how you would justify spending more than these reasonable baselines.

I ran in 2010 because we were mortgaging our children's future. I remember doing parades, shouting that. ``We are mortgaging our children's future.'' It is immoral. It has to stop. We are spending 24, 25 percent of GDP at the Federal Government level. That is not the vision of our Founding Fathers, of sovereign states where government is primarily at the State level, at the local level, where it is close to the people, where it is more efficient, it is more effective, and it is more accountable.

Now Washington is gobbling up all of our resources, borrowing these vast amounts of money, devaluing our currency. They are not solving problems. They are not reducing poverty. They are not making lives better. They are putting American lives at risk.

And as Government grows, our freedoms recede. And Americans have to understand that of all the things that have made this country great, the men and women who have worked and built this marvel of a nation, the one essential ingredient they have always used is just that, freedom. It is freedom that allowed them to dream and aspire and build and create this marvel of a country. It is freedom that will allow these young people sitting in front of me here to do the same thing.

But as long as government continues to grow, those freedoms will necessarily recede. It is a direct relationship. So we have allowed government to grow way too large. It influences far too much of our lives, negatively influences it.

We need to jealously guard our freedom. We need to jealously reclaim our freedom. And the best way to do that is to shrink the size, the scope, and the cost of the government and its influence over our lives. And the only way you do that is you have to reduce total spending by the Federal Government. This is the metric. We talk about all kinds of things. That is the metric.

And one final point: We are not going to be able to tax our way out of this. We don't have a taxation problem; we have a spending problem. I want to make my final comment, the refuting of the false narrative that we hear ad nauseam from the other side. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did not cause our deficits. When the CBO scored that, the score at the time it passed was that it was going to reduce revenue and increase our deficits by $1.5 trillion. And CBO then after passage, I think April of 2018, projected out revenue for 10 years. If you take a look at that revenue from 2018 to 2024, we actually have the actual results. They projected about $27 trillion worth of revenue over that 7-year period. The actual amount of revenue we raised from 2018 to 2024 was $28.7 trillion. We beat CBO's estimate by $1.7 trillion. So if the original score is 1.5 trillion--it was--in 7 years, we actually beat their estimate by 1.7. We paid for that tax cut in 7 years, plus $200 billion.

And we had the severe COVID recession in the middle of that. So don't believe anybody that tells you that Tax Cuts and Jobs Act caused our deficits. They didn't. They paid for themselves in less than 7 years and then some.

We have a spending problem in this country. There is no justification for going from $4.4 trillion to $6.5 trillion, and now we are at 6.9 with no end in sight.

This is immoral, what we are doing to our children. We have got to get this under control, and this is about as good a rationale, as good a justification for setting some dollar limit and using the budget process unlike we have ever used it before, not just for being able to pass some kind of reconciliation package with a mere majority vote but actually use the budget the way American families and American businesses do to set the spending limits.

And then ask our committees and the chair of our committees to take those budget caps seriously and figure out how they can structure spending, how they can structure these programs to actually live within those budget caps, and, again, if they actually used Bill Clinton's 1998 spending level and inflate it the way I have done here, actually balance the budget.

That is what the people who came out in November voting for President Trump, that is their goal. That is their expectation. I suggest we live up to their expectations.

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