Transcripts. Bannon’s War Room. EJ Antoni Joins War Room to Discuss the US Debt Surpassing $34 Trillion. January 4, 2024.
Topic: US Economy and $34 trillion in debt. January, 2024.
Transcripts from War Room on Rumble: EJ Antoni Joins WarRoom To Discuss The US Debt Surpassing $34 Trillion
January 4, 2024.
Steve Bannon
EJ, the 19th looms. Now it looks like we have a fight over the border. But tell me, brother, you've been the number one guy to say, “Hey Steve, I think we're going to get the $34 trillion pretty quickly”. We passed that and also you were the first guy to say, “Hey, Steve, I think the way they’re short-term financing is we're going to be over a trillion dollars in interest expense.” Even they now admit to you, admit that they agree with EJ Antoni, four months after you first broke it. We're now going to be spending over a trillion dollars in interest, minimum, Sir.
EJ Antoni
That's absolutely right, Steven. I have to say, you know it really is bittersweet here. It was much more fulfilling when accurate prognostication under Trump meant things like rising real wages are growing middle class and American prosperity. And today it means exactly the opposite. You're absolutely right.
We are seeing the debt and the deficit spiral out of control. And we are quickly getting to the point where interest on the debt is eclipsing all categories in the budget, not most categories, but all. There's literally only two-line items in the Fiscal Services monthly report that are larger, that's the Department of Health and Human Services and the Social Security Administration. Everything else on an individual basis is smaller than how much we're paying, just in interest.
Steve Bannon
You've also said cause you this is the great thing about EJ, as you can tell, he's a lot of laughs, so every month he's in the numbers. EJ, you're the first guy. “Say, hey, look, they can lie all they want”, you know, you see the tax revenues are coming in light on capital gains except for the (missing ?) that shows you the economy slowing but you're the 1st to point out, “Hey Steve we're running at $200 billion plus a month in deficits”. Is that still the case and do you project that out because the conversations on Capitol Hill essentially, and I hate to say this are meaningless. I mean, they're talking about $10 billion here, $80 billion here. They're not grasping the crisis we're in about the about these deficits, are they?
EJ Antoni
No, not at all, Steve. You're absolutely right here. What they're talking about are essentially just drops in the bucket. We need radical spending reform if we hope to turn this thing around. Anything else is essentially just stretching out the time horizon. It's kicking the can down the road.
It's buying us a little bit of time, but that's only valuable if you're eventually going to make the kinds of cuts that are needed here. And right now, I mean other than what a dozen people in the House of Representatives, it really doesn't seem like there's any appetite in Congress to actually give us the kind of spending cuts that we need to put us on anything that even resembles a path to a sustainable path to some kind of fiscal sanity here in DC.
Steve Bannon
What would you when you talk about cuts to discretionary spending? I'm going to hold you through the break. We got about a minute here about 30 seconds. What are you talking about?
EJ Antoni
We are talking about radical cuts here. We're talking about putting spending back to where it was several years ago, and you may think, okay, several years that's not a big deal. Yes, it is because all of the emergency COVID spending that should have been one time has been replaced by the Biden administration with other new spending, mostly entitlements. And so, you have essentially doubled outlays. So, you need to radically cut back on what the government is spending today.
Steve Bannon
OK, EJ hang on for one second. So, EJ, real quickly tell me how we go back. This shouldn't be that heavy a lift, I wouldn't think. How can we go back just to pre COVID, the governments 40% spending's 40% increase since COVID. How difficult would it be for us to go back to some pre COVID levels?
EJ Antoni
Well, not difficult from an accounting standpoint, we would just simply have to essentially undo everything that that Biden has done to date. It comes down to though, there's no political will in DC to actually make that happen right now. And what's really fascinating, Steve, is that if you were able to actually do that, to take us back to 2019 levels, you would find that current receipts today, in other words, how much the government is, is taking in with tax revenue that actually exceeds the $4 trillion and change that we were spending in 2019. So, you actually would go from a massive multi trillion-dollar deficit to a surplus just like that.
Steve Bannon
Are you calling on that to happen? Because we're a big proponent of that. Tell me, walk me through the plan, the action plan and how we make that happen.
EJ Antoni
Oh, I am absolutely an advocate for that. And by the way, I don't think that that's just an end goal. I think that's a good first step. President Trump did a lot of good for this nation from an economic standpoint, but more could be done. It was not perfect by any stretch. And a lot of that had to do not just with the President but who he had to deal with in Congress.
But how do we actually get back to 2019 again? I think you just have to simply go through the logbook of everything that President Biden has done and simply reverse it, claw back all of the spending and that's the only way that we're going to get again to any kind of trajectory that will get us to somewhere resembling fiscal sanity.
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