By: AIF Staff
Simi Valley, CA – Ahead of the Reagan National Economic Forum, Paul Ryan joined The Guy Benson Show to break down the One, Big, Beautiful Bill, explaining why it will spur economic growth and upward mobility. In the interview, Ryan detailed the erroneous criticisms leveled by Democrats about this bill and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He also praised Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republican Leadership’s deft ability to pass this legislation out of the House and prevent trillions of dollars in potential tax increases from hurting American families and small businesses.
Listen to the full interview here or check out a few of Ryan’s responses, edited lightly for clarity, below.
Extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is critical to preventing a debt crisis:
“If you want to prevent a debt crisis this country, there are two things that you have got to do. You have to get your spending under control, and you have to have a faster growing economy. This [One, Big, Beautiful bill] gets you the faster growing economy.
The same things that were said about our bill in 2017, which this current bill being considered extends, are being said right now. It’s basically people saying: “This is going to do nothing but add to the deficit and the debt,” but there is no calculation being made about what would happen to the economy [if you don’t act].
[If you don’t act,] the economy would get hit with an enormous tax increase and it wouldn’t just be bad for families and people with kids who receive the child tax credit, but also for businesses, most of whom file their taxes as individuals.”
The pro-growth legacy of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
“What I’m most proud of is the fact that [the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] really gave people a big pay increase and provided a big increase in living standards. I mean, COVID obviously smacked our country and our economy pretty hard, but when you increase productivity, that’s a thing economists really think about and care about and the tax code really affects that.
When you increase productivity, you end up increasing living standards and you increase real wages, meaning people’s pay goes up faster than prices. And so, we saw the fastest increase in real wages for lower-income workers that we had seen in about 20 years. We saw a real material gain in the prosperity and the livelihoods of blue-collar workers and that, to me, was one of the best achievements we had in this bill.”
A growing economy is key to American dominance in the 21st century:
“We need growth, and this [reconciliation bill] is the best growth lever we have. I think there are two good growth levers that the Trump Administration is pulling on: deregulation and this tax bill.
Deregulation takes a long time. You have to put people in agencies and then you have this thing called the Administrative Procedures Act that takes a long time. So, to have a better regulatory footprint for businesses to take risks, expand and hire people, it takes a long time. You can’t do that in a few months. We need regulatory certainty and that’s going to take time, so then you also need tax policy.
Both of those things are great growth levers that the Administration is going to be pulling on, but you have to get this [One, Big, Beautiful Bill] passed…. We have projections by some noted economists that we could have a recession this year and I don’t want to risk that, so they have got to pass this bill, in my opinion, to help guarantee that we don’t go into a recession and don’t have a huge tax increase, which would be just devastating. I don’t know how you avoid a recession if you don’t get this bill passed.”
Praising Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans’ deft handling of reconciliation:
“[Speaker Mike Johnson has a harder job that I did. I had a much better vote margin than he has. We wrote the original bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and I lost some “SALT-y people.” I call them “SALT-y people.” I lost some votes from Members representing New York and California, these high tax states because of SALT.
Speaker Johnson has no margin, and he was able to put this thing together and get it out of the House. I’m really impressed with his leadership and with his results. He is delivering results with a razor thin majority. So honestly, everybody in this country should be grateful to Mike Johnson for his leadership skills.”