The economic numbers are growing under President Donald Trump, but Democrats won't admit that because they are "hoping that we fail," Sen. Ron Johnson said on Newsmax Thursday.
"They are literally cheerleading for America to fail so that President Trump doesn't succeed so they can have a political victory," the Wisconsin Republican told Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "It's really pretty sick on their part."
The passage of Trump's "one big, beautiful bill," he added, "prevented a massive automatic tax increase."
And even though Democrats didn't vote for the bill, they supported keeping Trump's first administration Tax Cuts and Jobs Act by not repealing it when they had control of the House, Senate, and White House with President Joe Biden, Johnson said.
"I guess they're smart enough to realize that we probably shouldn't increase taxes on the American people by $4 trillion," he said. "We took that automatic tax increase off the table. That brought a great deal of certainty and stability back to the American economy."
Trump's trade deals will also bring some certainty and stability to the U.S. economy, Johnson said.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, by voting against Trump's call to lower interest rates, is taking a "wait and see" attitude, said Johnson.
"I'm always concerned about spending and massive deficits and the impact of those on long-term interest rates," he said. "The Fed can certainly control short-term interest rates. It's the long-term bond that certainly concerns me."
He added that he's going to keep concentrating on returning the nation's spending to pre-pandemic levels.
"We made some first steps with the one big, beautiful bill," Johnson said. "We did have some pretty significant historic spending reductions. The problem is that we had orders of magnitude spending increases in 2019. You know, over the last five years, we've averaged deficits of about $1.9 trillion. We have to address that going forward."
The administration is reportedly planning to announce another rescission package, after lawmakers voted to approve the first set of cuts, and Johnson said there is already a "massive amount of potential savings" by returning to the levels being spent in 2019, which Biden failed to do.
The senator said he is working with the Office of Management and Budget to determine where cuts can be made in the federal budget.
"It will probably take months' worth of work, but there's plenty of potential savings on the table," he said. "You want to do it intelligently. You want to do it so you're not harming individuals."
Johnson said that he has to believe that "when you've gone from $4.4 trillion to $7 trillion, when you have 2,600 programs in the federal budget, you can eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of programs, and nobody would even notice, except for the grifters that are sucking down the waste, fraud, abuse, and pork."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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