Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joins CNN's John Berman (D-Massachusetts) to talk about the massive amount of money the federal government is spending on entitlements and other government programs, and how it's out of control.
00:04:46.420What has happened over the years is in addition to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, they've slid what should be, in my mind, discretionary spending into mandatory.
00:04:56.000And so I'm the guy that pointed out the conference again.
00:04:59.100Do you guys realize in 2019, other mandatory, again, not Social Security, not Medicare, not Medicaid, other mandatory, pretty well runs the gamut of other appropriation accounts.
00:05:11.880Last year, fiscal year 2024, that was $1.3 trillion.
00:05:16.540This year, it's a little over a trillion.
00:05:18.340And that's pretty much, as far as the eye can see, according to CBO, a trillion dollars.
00:05:22.140So, again, total discretionary spending is about $1.7, but they've literally slid about a trillion dollars now ongoing of other mandatory or what should be discretionary into what they call now other mandatory, a trillion dollars.
00:05:40.380And I don't think anybody was really aware of that either.
00:05:43.580So what's right now for 2025 or let's say 2024, what did the federal government spend total?
00:05:51.380So in 2019, total federal government spending was $4.4 trillion.
00:05:57.160This year, we will spend over $7 trillion.
00:06:00.560So I remember somewhere around during the Obama administration, about when I got elected, 2010, 2011, we had our first trillion-dollar-a-year deficit in 2009.
00:06:12.920You know, I think it was $1.4 trillion.
00:06:15.180And we stopped talking about hundreds of billions, which used to move the needle, to now trillions.
00:06:20.020You know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, it just doesn't seem that much.
00:10:36.280And CBO projects, over the next 10 years, we will add another $22 trillion to the debt.
00:10:44.520That's what our projected deficits over the next 10 years is, $22 trillion.
00:10:48.960Again, that's assuming about a $4 trillion increase because of taxes are scheduled to automatically increase.
00:10:55.300If those taxes don't increase, first of all, I'm not sure you get the full $4 trillion.
00:11:00.100But again, take $4 trillion away if we extend current tax law, which is I'm in favor of that.
00:11:08.200I don't want to increase anybody's taxes.
00:11:10.120But I don't think this is necessarily time to do additional tax cuts, particularly when those things aren't focused toward economic growth.
00:11:16.880But anyway, so we are projecting deficits for the next 10 years of a minimum of $2.2 trillion.
00:11:25.300And I would argue that is a rosy scenario.
00:11:28.460And particularly when you take a look at what they've done with the one big beautiful bill, they're not seriously reducing spending to what I've been calling for as a pre-pandemic level.
00:11:39.660Again, the danger is spouting out too many numbers here.
00:11:44.320I just want to put this in perspective.
00:11:46.880President Obama, over the course of his eight years, his average deficit was $910 billion.
00:11:54.020Over the last, and I want to quick do this so I'm accurate, over the last four years of his administration, it was about $550 billion.
00:12:32.780We didn't have to keep, you know, we had unemployment spike up to, I think, 25 million people, normal unemployment somewhere between five and six.
00:12:40.100But within a few months, it was around 11 and then returned to pretty much normal early in 2021.
00:12:45.160We didn't have to keep stimulating the economy.
00:14:37.200If global creditors look at the United States as uncreditworthy, our 50-year average interest payment that we've paid on our debt is over 5%.
00:14:53.160But right now, we're borrowing probably about 3.3%.
00:14:55.640That's been the average over the last 25 years, 3.3%.
00:14:59.000And that's kind of where we're at right now.
00:15:00.320So if we increased that interest, if that interest expense increases to, or rate increases to 4.3%, add another $4 trillion in deficit spending.
00:15:10.760If it goes up to the 50-year average of 5.3%, add about $8 or $9 trillion to the $22 trillion.
00:15:17.620So again, you go $22 trillion plus extending current tax law, add another close to $4 trillion.
00:15:24.680If interest rates start creeping up, and they are, just one percentage point, add another $4 trillion.
00:15:29.720So you can see very quickly, you go from $22 to $26 to $30 trillion, add down to $37 trillion, we're up to $67 trillion in debt.
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00:21:17.240I would have thought we would have experienced it by now, but we've experienced it instead as, again, 40-year high inflation, the devaluation of the currency.
00:21:27.400I mean, I think that's pretty shocking when you take a look at that.
00:24:47.540Again, one of the reasons I'm digging my heels in as the one big beautiful bill comes over the Senate is we haven't had the discussion or the debate.
00:24:57.280The only number you heard about in the whole House debate here was $1.5 trillion, which sounds like a lot, right?
00:25:04.660I mean, $1.5 trillion in spending reduction.
00:25:06.960And, of course, they're focusing on programs like Medicaid.
00:25:10.080The main problem with that is Obamacare, which is now called Medicaid expansion, along states to gain the system, putting at risk Medicaid for the truly vulnerable.
00:25:19.360But that's all you really heard about.
00:25:39.500Why is the—I mean, when you were describing the progression of debt accumulation, it feels like it's been really rapid in a short period of time.
00:25:50.060Like, the federal government's spending almost twice what it was just the other day.
00:26:19.720Obama didn't get everything he wanted.
00:26:21.660We did something called the Budget Control Act, which literally reduced discretionary spending for three years in a row until we learned how to weasel around it.
00:26:28.560So we pretty well flattened out federal government spending at about $3.5 trillion for five or six or seven years.
00:26:35.440And then the last couple of years of the Obama administration started creeping up.
00:26:38.760And then under Trump, it went from about $4 trillion to $4.1 to $4.4.
00:26:44.320And then it went to $6.5 and we've never looked back.
00:26:47.980And the analogy I use there is I don't know of an American family if they had an illness and they had to borrow $50,000 to pay for the medical bills.
00:26:55.600If that family member got well, you wouldn't keep borrowing $50,000 and spend at that level.
00:27:03.500And like nobody other than, you know, I'm the first guy who wrote the Wall Street Journal article about we really need to return to pre-pandemic levels.
00:27:14.360And I've laid out options, you know, Clinton, Obama, Trump.
00:27:17.360The COVID pandemic, this was just like a couple years ago.
00:27:19.680So, I mean, what Biden should have done, I mean, we had, we overspent in 2020.
00:27:26.080When we first were talking about that CARES Act, it was like $750 billion, which, you know, I knew we had to do something fast and massive so markets wouldn't collapse.
00:27:33.700But within like a week or two, that went up to like $2.2 trillion.
00:27:36.620We sent out direct payment checks to 166 million Americans three times way late, way, way after unemployment had already returned from the 25 million person high.
00:27:51.900Again, 25 million people unemployed when normally you're at five or six.
00:27:56.080We sent out direct payment checks to 166 million Americans three times.
00:29:18.340You know, we don't educate our young people.
00:29:22.580We don't—the news media doesn't connect the dots that, you know, why people can't afford things is because of massive deaths of spending, which sparked 40-year high inflation, devalued the dollar.
00:29:56.000Maybe it would awaken people to the threat if they knew what would happen in a debt crisis.
00:30:02.080Well, so if you're living on different transfer payments or different types of welfare benefits, you know, you may not get those.
00:30:09.460You know, you can't borrow more money, so you're going to have to take what money we spend on other government programs and we'll have to service our debt.
00:30:17.300You have to pay it off unless we want to go into full default.
00:30:20.080And that's where you just say to Japan and China and Germany and everyone else who's bought those bonds, like, we're not paying.
00:30:26.860Yeah, which means you'll never float more debt.
00:30:31.000So you can't, you know, other than print more money, which then creates even more hyperinflation.
00:31:01.740Again, we will lose our position of the world's reserve currency and we'll lose our ability to print dollars that people accept.
00:31:08.460I mean, it's a marvelous thing that we just print dollars, we can send them overseas, and people will produce products and ship them over here.
00:31:16.840High quality products at pretty low cost.
00:31:18.620I think it's one of the reasons we've been able to keep inflation in check, producing all these massive deficits over the last couple decades.
00:31:24.980Because we do import a lot of products.
00:31:26.820You know, we've got billions of people either un or underemployed around the world.
00:32:35.360It starts out with President Trump saying in the State of the Union, I'm going to do something we haven't done in 24 years, balance the federal budget.
00:32:41.760Then every Republican leader, some form of, we don't have a revenue problem.
00:35:12.620I think my best guess is conservatives in the House, who I love, didn't want to be blamed if this thing failed.
00:35:25.060So they said, well, listen, in order for us to accept a $5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, we've got to get at least $1.5 trillion in savings.
00:35:46.460They set the bar way too low that it should have been easy to meet it, quite honestly.
00:35:52.140But even that was difficult because they didn't go through what I would consider the right kind of process.
00:35:58.740So maybe we can shift in terms of what we have to do, what I'm trying to accomplish here, and my digging my heels in.
00:36:05.800Doge has kind of shown us what we can do here.
00:36:09.040We've never had a process to control spending in the federal government.
00:36:12.460We don't have a balanced budget requirement.
00:36:14.360I didn't realize this, just found out, do you know they established the appropriation committees because the authorizing committees were big spenders?
00:36:22.840So the appropriation committees were supposed to be the control on the big spenders.
00:36:54.960I think we probably spent more time either analyzing my department head budgets or my own overall company budget than Congress in total spends analyzing the $7,000 billion budget of the federal government.
00:37:09.500So Doge has shown us if you go line by line, contract by contract, you will discover and uncover spending that if the American public saw it, they'd be outraged by it.
00:37:21.940If you eliminated it, my guess is most Americans wouldn't even know it's eliminated, but the only people that would know would be the grifters who have been sucking down the waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:37:36.460So that's why I've always been supportive of a multiple step reconciliation process here.
00:37:40.820I was always recommending three steps.
00:37:43.000First step, give President Trump the funding on the border, defense, bank $850 billion of real savings, not make believe, you know, now.
00:37:52.020And Lindsey Graham agreed to this $85.5 billion each year for four years to pay for the four years worth of spending and then extend that out 10 years.
00:38:04.580That's more than half of what the House budget reconciliation supposedly gives us.
00:38:09.480Second step, I would just extend current tax law.
00:38:11.540Now, if we would have been smart enough in 2017, had somebody like Chairman Crapo who really came up with this idea of let's just use current policy for taxes, then we can make this stuff permanent.
00:38:22.040You should never pass, in my mind, a tax law that automatically expires, just creates all these fiscal cliffs and puts all kinds of uncertainty in the economy.
00:38:33.360Yeah, because we – so this gets a real budget wonkery, but for spending, to score it, you use current policy, which means if a spending program ends, if you want to extend it, you just – you score it based on, oh, it was going to be extended anyway, so it doesn't cost anything.
00:38:50.520For taxes, though, we use current law.
00:38:53.240So if the tax cuts are ending and you want to extend them, well, you're just going to end the fact that they are going to end, so now to extend them, it's going to be a trillion-dollar score.
00:39:03.720So then you've got to pay for it, and it's hard to pay for it.
00:39:06.380And so that's how it was all scored back in 2017, where if we would just use current policy, if we use current policy now, we can just extend current tax law, and there's no score.
00:39:16.860So that's really what we're doing now.
00:39:18.600But we have to recognize when you're comparing to the CBO budget, CBO budget is assuming it does – taxes do increase, and bring in about another $4 trillion worth of revenue.
00:39:29.880So that's why I say the $22 trillion in projected deficits is probably a rosy scenario.
00:39:35.900I mean, it seems like the core problems are just so familiar.
00:39:38.960One is short-term thinking, and the second is the misplaced belief that you can see what the future will be.
00:39:45.300And both of those are, like, silly and unwise.
00:39:49.160Maybe – are we bumping up against the inherent limits of the system?
00:39:53.000Well, I would say we're missing the – focusing on the right thing.
00:40:27.880So, again, when you start talking about controlling the deficit, well, you can control the deficit by tariff revenue or selling the gold card.
00:40:34.580But that keeps funding the deep state.
00:42:33.120You said that the problem with democracy is once the majority figures out they can just steal money, then, you know, then you're just like headed to the cliff and there's no pulling back.
01:06:31.200And again, that's shifting gears into really the failure of our health care system of establishment medicine, of pharmaceutically driven medicine.
01:08:08.880But as I got involved in the whole COVID, and I got to meet all these doctors who had a second opinion that weren't going along with the narrative, that had the courage and compassion to actually treat COVID patients that took seriously the vaccine injured.
01:08:22.900It just connects you to just alternate opinions, you know, alternate thinking.
01:08:28.980And one of them, you know, laid out the listed side effects of statins, and one of them is sudden hearing.
01:08:35.120A lot of people are thinking it could be a main driver of Alzheimer's.
01:08:38.780But again, they'll never admit it because that's a multibillion-dollar industry right there.
01:08:43.040Do you think it's possible that statins are responsible for dementia?
01:09:31.820Is it because I was on statins all those years?
01:09:33.440But I know I was going – being treated because I was having pretty severe dizzy spells, almost the point of passing out frequently, going up a step or whatever.
01:09:43.220I took myself off statins under a doctor's care.
01:10:04.040You know, Zantac and Prilosec and then Nexium, which, by the way, were great in terms of relieving symptoms, but also have some pretty nasty side effects.
01:10:12.500So, again, you know, reading these alternate opinions on stuff, hydroxychloric – no, hydrochloric acid has been known for decades to be a gestivate.
01:10:26.560The theory behind what causes acid reflux is you don't have enough stomach acid.
01:10:32.680You're not – you're not digesting the food properly.
01:10:35.960You're not providing the signal to the, I guess, sphincter muscle, whatever, that closes your stomach off from your esophagus.
01:10:44.960So what you do to solve it is you introduce more acid, you know, in the form of a natural vegetarian-based product, and that's called hydrochloric acid.
01:10:57.220So I take one tablet now before my evening meal.
01:11:01.900I miss it probably at least half the time.
01:11:11.200It's just completely natural, and it's completely opposite of what all these other patented drugs do for you.
01:11:18.860So it's just – it's just HCL, and they call it baiting or something like that, but it's just an over-the-counter supplement, and it's worked great.
01:11:29.880I mean, you would think given what we –
01:11:31.820So I will get all kinds of guff for talking about this stuff, but it's just – because that's what – that's what they do.
01:11:45.340It will be because the pharmaceutical industrial complex, again, it's all about drugs that can treat chronic illness, which is why you can't talk about these things,
01:11:56.220which is why they completely sabotaged the treatment of – early treatment of COVID using things like hydroxychloroquine and, you know, particularly ivermectin,
01:12:07.180which I heard – because, yeah, I was at the tip of the spear.
01:12:09.960I got all kinds of people calling me, what doctors would treat this?
01:12:14.320And so I heard the amazing stories of recovery with ivermectin.
01:12:18.820You know, we will hold a hearing on this.
01:12:20.680There's one attorney that got called in to sue a hospital because somebody's loved one was in the hospital,
01:12:27.740and they were begging them to use ivermectin.
01:12:32.340So this lawyer went in there and sued, was successful, saved that person's life.
01:12:37.380So in the end, because he did this, I think he had something – this is a rough number –
01:12:41.880something like 200 families that he went to court for to force the hospitals to use ivermectin or budesonide or some of these other drugs, right?
01:13:08.100So you take a look at these hospital protocols.
01:13:10.120There's a great documentary, VAX-3, that really goes through this and just talks about the hospital protocols using remdesivir,
01:13:18.020which the nurses called run death, death is near.
01:13:21.000The Anthony Fauci said this is the treatment, even though they – whatever study it was,
01:13:26.000they changed the endpoint from, you know, death to just days in hospital, which I don't think even that was true.
01:13:32.760The number of conflicts of the people reviewing that that were associated with Gilead.
01:13:37.560I mean, the WHO recommended against using remdesivir, and yet we still use it.
01:13:42.760I mean, you see what happened during COVID, thoroughly corrupt.
01:13:46.320And, you know, we just had our hearing on the signals on myocarditis, which they completely downplayed, hid for months on the COVID injection.
01:13:57.200So why are we giving any money to a system that not only fails to improve public health, but actively conspires against it?
01:14:06.440I would say the primary reason at this point in time is because in 1997, Clinton, through regulation, allowed pharmaceutical companies to advertise.
01:14:16.940And you look at those ads, you don't have any idea what those drugs do.
01:14:21.020But that's common around the world, right?
01:15:23.460I mean, that's what completely opened up my eyes.
01:15:26.420They're paying NBC and Fox News and CNN and CBS and everybody else not to criticize the COVID shots.
01:15:31.960I ran in 2010 after I'd given a Tea Party speech and two things I said, which my campaign guy said, never say that again, is I defended big oil and big pharma.
01:15:41.360I said, what, am I the only guy that likes a gas station in every corner of the town because I run it down to empty?
01:15:48.900Or am I the only one that wants a life-saving new drug?
01:15:51.940By the way, there are wonderful drugs.
01:17:04.840Why can't, if Clinton allowed pharma to advertise, allowed pharma to buy the media, which they did, I can verify that since I worked there, why can't that be undone as easily?
01:18:14.140Bobby Kennedy showed up and we had a bunch of social media influencers on nutrition.
01:18:17.960And one of the witnesses specializing, he's a psychiatrist specializing in nutrition's impact on mental health, I think, probably made the best little snippet of testimony.
01:18:29.360He said, you know, they don't want to know the root cause of chronic illness.
01:18:57.120They're not invited to my house for dinner.
01:18:58.680But I thought that was a very interesting comment.
01:19:00.140They don't want to know the root cause.
01:19:03.440Because if they find out it is some pharmaceutical product or some pesticide or some herbicide or some toxin in our food, that's going to disrupt multi-billion dollar business models.
01:19:17.980And those businesses are fully engaged in lobbying.
01:19:21.740They're fully engaged and have captured our regulatory agencies.
01:19:32.200And as Lord Acton aptly stated, power corrupts.
01:19:36.540And so what has happened over the decades is these businesses, and I have a great deal of sympathy for them being over-regulated by big government, right?
01:19:44.500But they're smart, especially the big ones.
01:19:54.560And then they capture it for their benefit to the detriment of their competitors, particularly smaller competitors, and detriment of the American public.
01:20:03.520And that is what has happened, I would say, across the board in government, whether it's pharmaceuticals, whether it's military industrial complex, whether it's our big food.
01:20:13.180That's what I want to see Donald Trump defeat.
01:20:15.860And you first defeat it by exposing it.
01:20:18.740People have to understand this is what's happened.
01:20:21.960But certainly what I learned, you learned, Bobby Kennedy learned during COVID, it is very difficult defeat, back then, what I called the COVID cartel.
01:20:31.120That is a powerful group of interests, and they're not going away.
01:20:35.540Let's start with a really easy one, and those are the vaccine injured.
01:20:38.240So these would be American citizens who obeyed their government and took a shot that they were required to take on pain and punishment, and then were injured by or killed by that shot.
01:21:14.320Yeah, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
01:21:16.040Yes, but that's a government reporting system.
01:21:19.680Now, some conditions are mandatory to be reported, but they're still not.
01:21:25.360The two complaints about or hits on VAERS is it doesn't prove causation, but it also dramatically understates the number of adverse events because people just don't report them.
01:21:38.780So, on VAERS' system, to date, worldwide, there's over 38,000 deaths associated with the COVID vaccine, and 24% of those, to date, either occur on the date of vaccination or within one or two days.
01:22:45.200That's, you know, that's their excuse.
01:22:47.880And even those that are vaccine injured want to think it's just long COVID.
01:22:53.920I mean, nobody wants to admit that they maybe should have taken a little more time, gotten a little more educated about this experimental COVID injection.
01:23:00.520They don't want to think there may be a ticking time bomb in terms of turbo cancers.
01:23:05.580But, again, more and more evidence is coming out that in tumors, they find the spike protein.
01:23:10.720The spike protein, as well as the modified RNA, it's not true mRNA, that does degrade very rapidly, circling the body for months, possibly years.
01:23:19.860Again, they find the spike protein in autopsied hearts, in tumors.
01:23:25.460You know, we know from people like Kevin McKernan that there was DNA contamination.
01:23:29.920It can integrate into the cell, could cause cancer.
01:23:33.920Again, there's so, yeah, I hate talking about it because I know 70, 80% of Americans got vaccinated.
01:24:20.660It was regulations kind of the wink, wink, nod, nod to get it passed that they implement, you know, promulgated regulations that actually provide that liability protection.
01:24:31.240And again, it wasn't just for the three vaccines, I think, at the time that were on the schedule.
01:24:36.980It exempted all future vaccines, which has led to an explosion because, again, the greatest risk—
01:25:01.400This is, you know, Aaron Seary testified at our hearing last week, and he's expert at all this in terms of—the American public would be shocked at how little testing these vaccines actually receive.
01:25:12.740But you have this—it's almost a religion around the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
01:25:38.860But then hold them to the same standard that every other product that you buy, certainly every product that's mandated by government, is held to.
01:25:45.680And that's one that's backstopped by the courts.
01:25:51.180Like, why would there be this one thing that's exempt from a process that every other thing is subject to?
01:25:57.020Because there were so many injuries manifesting themselves before that law was passed that those manufacturers are going to be sued out of existence.
01:26:07.040And, again, the religion and faith that these vaccines are just so crucial.
01:26:12.740Even though you read a book like Dissolving Illusions, you realize the main reason most of these diseases were eradicated is because we no longer live in squalor.
01:27:24.740Okay, but a lot of diseases can be treated.
01:27:26.980We ought to be focusing a lot more, from my standpoint, on treatment as opposed to loading up our children, our infants, with dozens and dozens of doses and not even asking the question.
01:27:40.160So, okay, have these been thoroughly tested?
01:27:43.200I mean, have we tested giving multiple vaccines at the same dose?
01:27:46.840I mean, every time you put a vaccine in somebody's arm, you're messing with their immune system.
01:27:53.460Why do we have all these autoimmune diseases nowadays?
01:27:58.460I mean, we're just not able to ask the question because, to get back to my witness in that last event, is they don't want to know.
01:28:04.900And they attack anyone who asks, including you.
01:28:08.660And, I mean, watching what's happened to you has really been the greatest of all wake-up calls for me because, I would say, of the senators I know, which is most of them, you're, like, the most temperamentally moderate and accountant, number-based, like, not a wild-eyed radical at all.
01:28:22.960Well, at all, and there are some crazy people in the Congress, you're not, you're the opposite, you, like, budgets and stuff.
01:28:30.860So, if they're calling you a wacko, they discredit themselves.
01:28:34.900That's just, as an observer, my observation.