GOP presidential candidate Perry Johnson tells Newsmax he's one step closer to being on the debate stage next week in Milwaukee after a new Trafalgar poll gave him more than 1% of voters, and said when he gets there, he'll be the candidate with a plan to fix the country's economy.
"We're at over 50,000 donors right now, so I believe that we will make that debate stage," Johnson, a businessman who also ran for governor in Michigan, said on Newsmax's "Eric Bolling The Balance" on Thursday night. "My strategy is just to go out there and tell them about my plan … it is kind of interesting when you look at the fact that we are literally five months away from a caucus, and I'm the only guy with the plan to solve the problem."
Johnson told Bolling that the United States is in debt for $33 trillion, a number that is "so massive, people can't even relate to it."
"But, it's about $610 a month that each family has to pay in interest payments on our debt," said Johnson. "As a result of all that money that [Democrats] threw out there, we have this inflation, and inflation is the biggest tax of all."
Johnson has written a book, "Two Cents to Save America," and his plan to cut government spending includes freezing the budget and cutting two cents out of every dollar of discretionary spending.
Johnson will be featured on a Sunday night program on Newsmax, "Perry Johnson in Prime Time: Backstage Pass" which will air at 9 p.m., and he told Bolling the program will be "very exciting."
"The only reason that we're spending $3.50 to $4 for gas and in some areas, $5, is because they threw so much money out there and decided they weren't even going to produce that much oil," said Johnson. "Heaven forbid you want to buy a house today? You have to pay mortgage rates that are around 7.2%. They're about as high as they've been, what, since 2000 to 2002. They hit 7.1% today."
Meanwhile, Johnson told Bolling that he believes his path to a White House nomination includes a high placing in the Iowa caucuses, following wins in other early-voting states.
"I think if I finished fourth in Iowa, that would be a major win finish," said Johnson, adding that wins in New Hampshire and his home state of Michigan would put him "on the way to winning the White House."
But still, the debates haven't started yet, he said, so expectations could change.
"We did have a concert over there in Iowa with Big and Rich," he added. "We had that concert to celebrate all my donors, and it was very exciting. We'll have an opportunity to see what's really happening in this race because you have to look at it realistically. I come into this race, and I have an extreme long shot, and well, everybody is really a long shot except [Donald] Trump right now, even the staff is a long shot. But let's look at it this way. I'm really an outsider of outsiders. What do I want to do? I want to actually trim the budget. I want to cut the government down to size and have them on a diet."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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