U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., railed against the federal government in a talk with University of Wisconsin students Tuesday, saying Congress’ roughly 15 percent approval ratings are “still too high.”
“You know what those approval ratings really are?” Johnson said. “They’re also the public’s justified disgust with the federal government. They’re right. The federal government is dysfunctional. It’s ineffective. It’s inefficient. It’s a terrible place to send your hard-earned tax dollars to try and solve the problems.”
Johnson took questions Tuesday from the UW College Republicans in a packed Humanities Building lecture hall. He said the federal government unintentionally drove up college costs after expanding student loans in the 1960s, leaving students today with a record $1.2 trillion in college debt.
“We’ve done a huge disservice by enticing kids to take out those student loans,” Johnson said. “So the federal government, with the best of intentions, it’s actually made college less accessible because we’ve made it so much more unaffordable.”
Johnson has voted against a proposal from U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., that would allow student loan borrowers to refinance their loans at lower rates.
“It’s incentivizing the wrong kind of behavior,” Johnson told The Badger Herald after the event. “We shouldn’t be incentivizing our kids to get in a deep debt hole. We should be disincentivizing that, and that’s the problem with Sen. Warren’s proposal.”
Johnson instead said the solution will be “trying to get government out of our lives as much as possible.”
Johnson slammed Mary Burke, the Democrat running against Gov. Scott Walker, for reports that parts of her jobs plan were copied from previous Democratic campaigns. He noted Burke had mocked Walker’s 2010 four page jobs plan when she announced hers earlier this year.
“You don’t need 100 pages,” Johnson told The Badger Herald. “But the fact that she was going around the state criticizing Gov. Walker and saying that she was spending hundreds of hours putting together her plagiarized jobs program — that kind of shows her as quite the empty suit. I hope Wisconsinites are paying attention to that. We don’t need a governor that plagiarizes. We need a governor that actually understands what makes Wisconsin vibrant.”
Calling it a “self-inflicted wound on the American economy,” Johnson called for potentially eliminating the federal corporate tax, saying the boost in the economy would make up for any lost revenue.
He also said raising the minimum wage would harm the economy and lead to job losses, doing nothing to solve the country’s “wealth gap, [which is] a serious issue.”
“There are true income inequalities. … That is a real problem,” Johnson said. “But the solution is not to have government redistribute the wealth. It won’t work. It never has. What we need to do is we need to get a robust economy. If you want rising wages, if you want a more livable wage, what you do is you have a robust economy where businesses have to compete for wages.”
