Ron Johnson

I have a great deal of faith in individuals, in local governments, State governments, local teachers, school administrators.

We are a compassionate society. I think all Americans want a strong social safety net.

The way we start controlling health care costs is we reconnect the consumer of the product with the payment of the product.

Do any of you know of a tax increase that is going to promote economic growth or that will make us more competitive globally? Does it one exist?

I would like to scrap the entire thing, rebuild the tax system on pretty basic principles: raise the revenue you need, do no economic harm.

I would suggest--I am glad that Senator Wyden is here--the way to do that is treat all corporate income as pass-through income.

We have enticed our children to incur collectively $1 trillion of debt in higher education.

I just kind of have a common-sense notion that the way you really strengthen the middle class is have a strong economy, and you have businesses that have the incentive to risk their capital.

I just want to ask any member of the panel, is there any tax increase that you know of that helps our economy grow or keeps us competitively globally?

But the balanced approach, if you increase taxes, it is going to harm economic growth.

There are no tax increases that are going to help our economy grow.

And we all want a strong social safety net. We are a very compassionate society.

Government-run programs, government-funded programs run way too slow.

If what we have does not work, why would we want to pour more in?

We are spending more per pupil and we are getting terrible results.

The Social Security Trust Fund in total, on a consolidated basis, has no value to the Federal Government.

For anybody to say that Social Security is solvent to the year 2035 is just--I just think that is a false statement.

Within the next 10 years, the cash deficit in Social Security will be about $1.3 trillion.

I think we all share the same goal here. We all want a prosperous America.

So increasing taxes on the rich is a tenth as effective if we would actually just return our economy to a normal economy.

I do not see any way we start solving these problems until we are honest with the American people in terms of the depth of the problem.

If we would just return to a normal economy, which we had in 2007, when revenue generation was 18.5 percent of our economy, that would add an additional $435 billion per year.

But, Madam Secretary, do you disagree with me that a simple phone call to those evacuees to determine what happened would have ascertained immediately that there was no protest?

I mean, this attack started at 9:40 p.m. Benghazi time, and it was an assault.

I appreciate the fact that you called it an assault.