Sen. Ron Johnson expresses the importance of bringing baseline spending down to pre-pandemic levels

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., on Tuesday said that in order to get the U.S. budget under control, baseline spending had to go back to "pre-pandemic levels."

"We need to bring the baseline spending down to pre-pandemic levels," Johnson said on the "John Solomon Reports" podcast. 

He said that he had been looking at past budgets under different administrations and how budgets were managed under those administrations.

Johnson proceeded to go through different scenarios about how the budget could be balanced with the surplus and inflation. 

"I looked at a bunch of years and I went back to 1998," he said. "That was the first year we actually had a surplus since 1969, that was under Bill Clinton. So these are Bill Clinton spending priorities, and I left Social Security and Medicare as is. Both parties say 'we're not going to touch them.' So fine."

"I put in Medicare and Social Security at the Biden spending levels for 2025," Johnson continued. "Interest is what it is. But all the other spending categories-I took the 1998 amounts that Clinton spent and I increased them by the growth in population and inflation. And if you do that for 1998, you'd end up spending $5.5 trillion this year, which is what Biden is projecting his revenue. We'd actually have a balanced budget."

He said that the U.S. could be saving trillions of dollars using this budgeting method.