Badger Institute Senior Vice President Michael Jahr sat down with Sen. Johnson in mid-August to discuss the debt crisis, federal spending realities, the likelihood of entitlement reform and the likelihood of restoring federalism as a governing philosophy.   
 
Following is an excerpt from the interview. Read the full conversation here.
 
Michael Jahr:    
Senator Johnson, thank you for taking time to sit down with the Badger Institute to discuss the public debt crisis.
 
Ron Johnson:    
I’m happy to. I’m glad somebody is also concerned about it.
 
Jahr:                     
You are a businessman who decided to run for office in part because of your concern over federal spending and the growing national debt. Why did these issues grab your attention and prompt you to make a career change?
 
Johnson:             
I just remember, at the beginning of the Obama Administration, we were something like — this is off the top of my head — $10.7 trillion in debt. By the time I ran, we were already over $14 trillion in debt, and I primarily ran on a platform that we're mortgaging our kids’ future. It’s immoral. It’s intergenerational theft. It’s got to stop.
 
But I am very disappointed to say, here we are in 2020 in this COVID crisis, and we just authorized $2.9 trillion to $3.6 trillion of additional spending, which is 13.5% to almost 17% of our economy. Before the ink is even dry on the agreement, Nancy Pelosi passed another $3.5 trillion (aid package).
 
We’re $26.5 trillion in debt. We’re on our way to $27 trillion to $28 trillion by the end of this fiscal year, and there’s just nobody talking about it. I would be one of the very few lonely voices out there. It seems like everybody else in Washington, D.C., just views this as Monopoly money, like we just keep printing it and there’ll be no impact from it. I don’t think anything can be further from the truth.
 
Jahr:                     
The numbers are mind-blowing, and maybe that’s part of the issue. It’s hard to get your head around multiple trillions of dollars. Is that part of the problem? Are these numbers so unfathomable that people can’t fully grasp their magnitude?
 
Johnson:             
I think it was Everett Dirksen who famously said decades ago, you know, “A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
 
I was always concerned when we started talking not in hundreds of billions but in trillions. For some reason, $700 billion sounds like an awful lot of money, but (now) it’s a trillion. Now they’re arguing over — you know, Nancy Pelosi won’t even come to the negotiating table until Republicans say, “Okay, we’ll spend at least another $2 trillion.”
 
Think of that. We haven’t spent or obligated at least $1.2 trillion in what we’ve already passed almost unanimously in Congress. This is Democrats. This is Republicans. This is the president. They’re all saying, at a minimum, we want to spend a trillion, and Nancy Pelosi is out there saying she wants to spend another $3.5 trillion. It is beyond absurd.
 
I’m opposed to the Republican proposal to spend a trillion dollars until we actually spend and obligate the $1.2 trillion of the over $3 trillion we’ve already authorized but haven’t either spent or obligated.
 
Jahr:                     
We’ve observed this pattern, too. Regardless of who is in the White House, regardless of who controls Congress, the trajectory is inexorably upward. Is there an end in sight? At some point is there a wake-up call?
 
Johnson:             
I don’t see one. We promised all these benefits. We haven’t put in provisions to pay for them. To try and pay for them by increasing taxes, you harm economic growth. From my standpoint, the number one part of a solution for our debt and deficit is we have to grow our economy faster...

Read the full interview here.