 Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to our discussion event, our virtual discussion event, entitled a policy potpourri, a panel on domestic political events and issues. This is a virtual panel discussion that's being hosted by the Department of Political Science and the School of Education and Behavioral Sciences. We're being also co-sponsored by the MGA Political Science Student Organization and the Alpha Musata chapter of Pisac Baffle, which is the National Honorary Society for Political Science students. So before we get started, we will talk a little bit about our department and its programs and things like that. I'll introduce the panelists. We'll talk a little bit about the structure of the event, our discussion topics, and go from there. So as far as our programs go, our department offers two bachelor's degree programs, Political Science and Erdice Party Studies. So if you're not familiar with those programs, please feel free to learn a little bit more about those. We also are part of our new Doctrine Public Safety that's been started with our friends over in the Department of Psychology and Criminal Justice. That'll be starting in January with our first cohort. We also offer undergraduate minors, so if you're majoring in something else, if you're majoring in something like business or nursing or education or psychology or criminal justice or any of a myriad of other things, aviation, you can add a minor to your bachelor's degree. So if you want to study another area, and we offer several of those, including Political Science, African-African diaspora studies. If you're interested in that subject in particular, Dr. Kaverly will actually be teaching the introductory course in that area in the spring. So that's something you might want to sign up for if you're interested in that minor. We also offer minors in environmental policy studies, global studies, and pre-law. So if you're interested in law school or paralegal work, things like that, pre-law is a minor for that. And finally, we also are participating in the University System of Georgia's certificate in European Union Studies, which is a program that involves college faculty from about eight different universities and colleges across the university system of Georgia. So let's introduce our panelists for today. First, I'd like to introduce Dr. John Hall, who's an Associate Professor of Political Science. He's been here at Middle Georgia State University since 2015. His doctorate in Public Policy Administration is from Auburn University, which just suffered a horrendous defeat at the hands of Ole Miss. Rolls-eye. Also, we have Dr. Matthew Kaverly, lecturer of Political Science, who has been here at Middle Georgia State since 2016. His doctorate is in Political Science, and his PhD is from the University of Florida in Gainesville. And finally, I'm your illustrious moderator. Dr. Christopher Lawrence, I'm the professor or a professor and the chair of the Department of Political Science. I've been here since 2012, and my PhD in Political Science is from the University of Mississippi, which of course is the school that beat Auburn over the weekend. I'm only rubbing this thing because I know that John is not actually an Auburn fan. So, in any event, speaking of our event, we'll go ahead and get started with a few topics that the panelists have discussed beforehand. We will, though, entertain. We actually want your questions as well. So if you have questions about topics you'd like us to discuss or if you want us to elaborate on something or feel free to have those subjects as well, you can add your thoughts or your questions in the chat window, and we will try to address those in the order that we receive them. We do have a couple of ground rules there. First, that while you're welcome to ask and contribute multiple things, we do prioritize answering one question per person if possible. So if you add, you know, if there aren't a lot of questions and you have two or three questions, that's fine. But sometimes we do have situations where we have quite a lot of questions and we want to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to ask a question if possible. So we will prioritize giving each of you a question before going and asking or using additional questions from the audience. Also, please be courteous and civil to each other in the chat window. This has not historically been a problem in our chats before, and I hope this is not the day that it becomes a problem. But if it does, that will be nipped in the bud just to make you aware the expectations of all of our community members are for civility and lightness towards each other, particularly on subjects that may not necessarily be ones on which we all agree. And so particularly don't engage in personal criticism of other people in particular as sort of a ground rule there. So as far as our topics are concerned, some of the ones we're going to talk about, although we did promise a domestic policy and events topic, we have had one important international event emerge over the last couple of weeks. I think it is worth some discussion has had some impact on domestic politics as well. And on our domestic situation, although certainly it's not solely an American issue or even close to an American, a solely American issue. But nonetheless, there have been some repercussions in American. So we do want to talk a little bit about the conflict that's going on between Israel and Hamas and Gaza a little bit. We're also going to talk a little bit about hopefully the Speaker of the House in a random. So if you're not familiar with that, we'll certainly get into that subject in a moment. And we also want to talk a lot about state politics because we haven't talked a lot about state local politics this semester. And so we're going to try to address some things like the state budget surplus. There's a big surplus in our state budget and there are debates and discussions about what's going to be done with that money. And I think we can have some fruitful discussion about that. Also, Medicaid expansion, speaking of things that we could be spending the surplus on. We may talk a little bit about that as an example, but also there has been a some expansion Medicaid and we're going to talk a little bit about how that's been going. We're going to talk about something called a splost. You've never heard of a splost. We'll talk about splost until the ears bleed. Also, some controversies have been arising with the Fulton County Jail over the last few months. There's been a large number of inmate fatalities over the last few months at the Fulton County Jail in particular. And what is being done to address that. And then last but not least, as I imagine we put it on the slide, Rico Suave, which is a dated reference that probably nobody in the audience other than us old foggy professors will get. But you know that as some of you may know, there is a ongoing prosecution of Donald Trump and various co-conspirators on charges related to their attempts to try to get the state government to change the results of the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump. And this is called the Rico case. So we'll talk a little bit about that if time permits and our panel is interested. So those are kind of our topics. So I will make this go away so you can look at us instead. I don't know if that's a plus or a minus. And let's see. Without further ado, we'll go ahead and get with our first question here. So it has a long preamble, so I will begin the question. So although this is certainly primarily an international political issue, the attacks on Israeli civilians by the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Israel's response to the Gaza Strip have had effects on Americans and American politics to including the murder of a Palestinian immigrant child, more recently a murder of a Jewish community leader in Detroit and violence and threats against both Jewish and Muslim Americans. There are also American citizens being held hostage in Gaza by Hamas. I think they're about 10 or so last estimate. There are Americans trying to get out of the region. There are Palestinian Americans. So Americans are American citizens that are also Palestinian. They're trapped in Gaza. So lots of Americans are affected by this either directly or indirectly. What role is the United States playing this conflict? And how has American domestic politics been impacted by this conflict, which as of today is only just over two weeks old, even though it probably feels like a lot longer? I'll jump in on this. Dr. Cavali may be more knowledgeable on this, having served in the military, but I'll give it my best shot. I want to give a quick little aside. Earlier when introducing the topics, I started to chuckle and laugh when I saw Rico dot dot dot suave. It occurs to me that Dr. Lawrence was mentioning the deaths in Fulton County jails when I did that. So please know that I was not chuckling at that. I was laughing at the suave. Having said that, the crisis in Israel as we're all following, we've been covering this in class with several of my students asking questions about it. We will look at this from a domestic policy standpoint in terms of US involvement. The key is to understand that US involvement in the Israeli Gaza war does not involve any. Projections for US direct military involvement. We are not going into Gaza. Having said that, we are redeploying naval forces to the area. We have deployed one aircraft carrier group, the Ford. That is our most recent state of the art, 14 to 15 billion dollar aircraft carrier. We are also deploying the Eisenhower. So we have two aircraft carrier groups that are either there or on the way there. That is an enormous amount of military firepower. We also have additional amphibious units that are being deployed, which also include about 2500 combat Marines. They will be in the area along with the aircraft carriers predominantly to encourage all other groups, all outside actors that are thinking about taking advantage of the war in Israel and Gaza to not do so. The prospect of directly engaging US aircraft carriers is something that no nation state, no terror group necessarily would want to do because the odds of winning are so dramatically small. So first and foremost, we are projecting force into the Eastern Mediterranean, predominantly to show the world that the United States is there and any other actors who want to get involved need to change their mind and not get involved. Having said that, we are furthering US aid to Israel. We have always given aid to Israel since the late 1940s. The most recent aid package in 2022 was a little bit over three billion dollars. The Biden administration has recently asked for a little over 10 billion dollars in aid, predominantly to help the Israelis resupply, particularly regarding the Iron Dome anti missile defense system that they have been using extensively, both in the southwest in Gaza and sporadically in the north with Hezbollah in Lebanon. We could talk about them more later, also potentially launching rockets into Israel. We are looking at sending in additional Patriot missile systems, which is another form of anti missile defense. And strangely enough, I actually saw this today when looking at most of the most recent Biden administration efforts to assist Israel. We're looking at sending in the FAD anti missile system, which is something that can shoot down ballistic missiles that are coming in from outer space, not entirely sure who that would be for other than Iran. But I was actually surprised to see that FAD might be going in there. We have an extraordinary amount of military capability in the area, not just in the Eastern Mediterranean, but we also have military forces in the Red Sea. In the recent days, missiles have been fired from Iranian supported Houthi rebels in Yemen that were shot down by Arleigh Burke class destroyers in the Red Sea. They shot down only four missiles and up to a dozen drones that were sent from Yemen. Not entirely sure exactly where those were going, but they were sent in the general direction of an Arleigh Burke destroyer. So they're going to knock those out of the sky every time. In general, again, just to kind of summarize, because I could keep talking about this forever and I have to make myself stop. So far, the US is doing a couple of things. We are one without question showing the world domestic and foreign audiences that we support the Israelis that we reject the terrorist government of Hamas and the surprise attack from over two weeks ago on a Jewish holiday, which was also coinciding with, I believe, the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war in 1973. We have without equivocation shown the world that we support the Israelis. We are also not, and I can't repeat this enough, not interested in getting militarily involved with any actual boots on the ground in Gaza. Now, there might be an exception because we do have US special forces that are from everything I've seen, almost certainly in Israel, and we have a few thousand combat Marines that are going to be off the coast soon, if not already, they could very easily be used to help rescue the US hostages, not to mention other hostages, but particular US hostages. If we are able to locate areas where US hostages are being held, then I assure you, we will have special forces on the ground to go and get them. But again, in general, we're there to help support the Israelis, and we have zero interest in putting boots on the ground in a large way, and we're trying to encourage all other actors to stay out while continuously consulting with the Israelis in their efforts at eradicating Hamas. Because for decades, the Israeli foreign policy toward the internationally recognized terrorist group Hamas, which won elections in 2006, or took office in 2007 after the Israelis pulled out of Gaza in 2005, we are overwhelmingly supportive of the Israeli efforts to eradicate them. US, excuse me, Israeli foreign policy toward Hamas has changed forever. They are no longer going to coexist with Hamas, and we are there to help them. With that, I think that's just as good a spot as any for me to stop talking and turn things over to Dr. Cavali, who can fill in the multiple blanks that I left. Oh, thank you, Professor Hall. Well, I think I will, I think I will focus my comments away from the too much of the security dilemma aspect of this, I think that's been covered pretty well. The politically, well, one for starters, in terms of foreign aid, Israel is historically the number one recipient of American foreign aid, and has been now for decades. And in particular, regarding the, the Arab, various Arab Israeli conflicts of which, if I counted, I've tried to count them up my head, I think this is the eighth one, I might be off on that we might already on the ninth one. Anyway, while the United States did not overly healthy Israelis in the first two 4856, but since the Six Day War 1967, the United States has been the number one security supporter of Israel. Before that, it was the British and the French. But having said that in terms of domestic politics, some people often are, well, why is that the case? Well, there's a number of groups that that are relatively bipartisan in terms of American Israeli relations, which by the way, puts us in a bad position with American Arab relations, Palestinian otherwise. So the within the Democratic Party, the the Jewish vote. Now, American Jews are very small group. However, I do want to say this. The number one, a lot of people make this mistake, they think that most people of Jewish extraction are Israelis. That's not actually true. Most of them are Americans. America's number one Jewish country in the world. But Jews are a small minority in America. But American politics reflects really two things, the organized and the resource. And an American Jewish community is very organized, very resource. And they are a key component of America's Democratic Party. And they have a very strong interest group orientation that their group is called APAC and and they are power hitters in American elections and in governing. They're very successful lobby groups. APAC stands for American Israeli quick action committee. Well, on top of that, in America's Republican Party, again, another group that is not just organized and resource but also has great masses as big is the white evangelical community. And the white Protestant evangelical community has very pro Israeli leanings, largely because of biblical connections to the Holy Land. And, you know, the fundamentalist read the strict instructors, if you were originally to the Bible, where the, you know, where it says that you if you support Israel, the Israeli people, the Jewish people, you will you will receive the blessings of God, and you'll be an honored country. And if you don't, you're you're going to get the ira God, the wrath of God, all that good stuff. So what you have, while it is true that in the American Democratic Party, there is a pro Palestinian faction. They are also organized. And they have an interest, they have powerful interest group, sort of powerful, but they're not powerful compared to what the Israeli community has in American politics. So it's an asymmetric balance between the two that definitely favors the Jewish community or the Israeli community, writ large at the expense of all the Arabs, including the Palestinians. While the Democrats have this faction of pro-Palestinians, they've actually been in the news a little bit. Tlaibs, she's a representative from Michigan, and she has a strong Arab community that she represents that she herself is Palestinian. And she's made some speeches, she joined a squad, the so-called squad, or an Omar and a few of the others that have been out talking on behalf of the Palestinians. But I can want to tell everybody that that is a minority position for good that are in different reasons. That's a minority position in American politics. Even in the Democratic Party, while the Palestinians are there, they are, if you will, they punch far below the power that American Jews have. And in the Republican Party, there's no real, just significant Palestinian or even Arab presence whatsoever. In conservative interest groups, the same thing. So what you have is you have an overall Israeli dominated Republican Party and an overall asymmetrically balanced in favor of Israeli politics, Democratic Party. And so from those domestic considerations, it's not that surprising that America right now is, if you will, America is funding the war. So, and we'll probably continue doing that. The other thing that I would say on these matters, and then I think we need to try and move on or something here, but when you look at American politics, one of the great difficulties though that we're going to have, remember, I said that America is the number one funder of Israel. But it is also true that in the current foreign aid campaign for the Palestinians, which is being run through the UN, America is also the number one contributor to that. So this is an interesting play out. Now that's going to play out more in diplomatic affairs. But you know, there's a lie somewhat behind the Biden administration is asking the Israel's, the Israelis to to hold back a little bit on their ground encouragement, their ground invasion. Because of course, what Mr. Netanyahu has said is that he wants essentially to destroy Hamas as a not just as a military entity, but as a political entity. And to to force the Palestinians to rebuild from the ground up in a way maybe that would be more less of a risk to the Israelis. But if you notice, the Biden administration is trying to get the Israelis to hold back a little bit on that. And I think some of that is that's because the humanitarian issues that's going on in the if you will, you have to understand something about their Israeli way of war. Israeli way of war is they conduct total war. They are they're absolutists. So they in America, we have not practiced that form of warfare since the Second World War. In America, we've got very used to fighting limited wars with limited means for limited ends. And sometimes that led to success and sometimes not so. But for the Israelis, they go all in. And if Netanyahu is serious, and I think he's very serious, he's going to try and absolutely crush the Palestinians. But in that process, that is going to produce a tremendous humanitarian crisis. And the risk of that, I'll just and then I'll leave this alone. But the risk of that is that if there's anything's going to spread this thing outside of Palestine, it might be that the Egyptians have all in the in the Iranians have already signaled that they they might get involved. And that would be a scary thing if with this thing blew up in a regional war, Professor Hall worried about the possibility of America, that America does not want to put significant numbers of boots on the ground. I agree that completely. But one of the unfortunate things about the fog war is that that whole thing blows up. And our people are there. We could be living in a very different world in as little as a couple weeks from now. So I just want people to understand this is a very scary time. And, and just remember that in warfare, ever since the arrival of 20th century, warfare has mostly been leveled against civilians. And so what's happening in the Gaza Strip is not unusual. By the way, it's exactly what's happening in Ukraine. That doesn't make the news as much. But we make war on civilian populace. And that for our sensibilities, that's very difficult. Because in the history of warfare, prior to the 20th century, warfare was about soldiers fighting other soldiers and sailors fighting other sailors and Marines fighting Marines, all that warfare today is about crushing civilian will, destroying their infrastructure. You know, there's a lots of things that are out there. In the last say in the last 30 years, two million Iraqis have been killed. And the United States had a lot to do with that. But the one thing we, I think we should all hope for is that this thing does not blow up. But I am very worried about what's going to happen in Gaza. Okay, anyway, that was enough of that. And hopefully got a little bit of domestic in there. And so let us move on. That's a great point, Dr. Cavali. And I wanted to point out again, that Israeli foreign policy has changed forever regarding Hamas. And it's important that we note Hamas is not Palestinian. Palestinian is not Hamas. Hamas is the government recognized by the EU, the UK, the US and other nation states as a terrorist organization. So the Israelis have made the decision, Prime Minister Netanyahu, to annihilate Hamas, not the Palestinians. But again, when you're dealing with urban fighting, as Dr. Cavali said, it is a horrific, horrific environment where civilian casualties are impossible to avoid no matter how many different methods that you use. And the Israelis do use different methods to avoid civilian casualties. It is going to be a horrific, horrific event, annihilating Hamas, when Hamas specifically embeds itself within the civilian population. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that we're going to be able to, and by the way, you know, if you want a more in depth treatment of the, you know, Israeli, Palestinian conflict to that sort of thing, you're not going to find that today, unfortunately. And you know, we could spend the next six hours on the background of that. There will be, at some point, a faculty Q&A with a professor, probably me, because I think I'm the only person that volunteered on this topic that will be published soon. And you may want to keep an eye out for that. But but until then, you know, you'll just have to, well, your own research, I guess, even though that that phrase has become unfortunately attached to a lot of bad ideas of late. But nonetheless, and particularly when it comes to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, doing your own research will definitely lead you down some rabbit holes of misinformation. So and that's one of the things I'm going to try to avoid when I'm writing this thing. One of the reasons why I haven't written it out fully yet. So because it is a very complex topic and one that is very easy to caricature when we're the other and not give a fair treatment to. So with that, I want to move on to hopefully a little bit lighter discussion. And that is the situation with the Speaker of the House representatives. So as some of you may know, a few weeks ago, we had a Speaker of the House. Again, it probably seems like months ago, but but we did. But he was removed by a few members of the majority party who voted for something called a motion to vacate the chair. So so what is currently going on with that? And how how is this sort of entering them affecting government in the meantime, because we do have after all, a federal budget that should have been passed. Oh, I don't know, three weeks ago already. And we're kind of, you know, muddling through in the meantime. Dr. Kathleen, did you want to start on that one? Oh, sure. Well, the so so there's two theories that are in in congressional studies that that I think are maybe worth thinking about on this. So a one one theory that that has been proffered this years ago is something called conditional party government. And what it what it worked on is it said that that the Congress would utilize this political parties to hold together. But they could only do that for a certain period of time. And then they would inevitably fall apart. And because at the end of the day, it's the Constitution is very clear that members of the US congressman, representatives and senators are the most powerful parliamentarians in the world. They let me rephrase that in the Western world and in the in the the idea of liberal democratic institutions. We don't have parliamentary back ventures. They all have lines in the budget. They all have guarantees of power. They're actually exclusive of of they don't owe the president, they don't owe their job to the president. They don't they don't owe their job to the speaker of the house. They don't know their job to the Senate majority leader or minority. They get there on their own. They stay there on their own. They develop their own linkages with the parties with the medias with the voters with public opinion, with the social movements with the interest groups, they're powerful people. And that tends to make party government a conditionality. And that's been especially true with the decline of the parties as organizational entities. Back in the days, which we started more for your history classes, when they tell you about teach you about the party machines and the party organizations, but one of the unintended consequences of the progressive movement, and related movements was that it created a body ultimately of weak parties, which no longer control candidate nomination and the conduct of elections. So the party has an organizing force in the government is conditioned on the likelihood that these voters will fall along. There's an alternative theory to conditional party government that was proffered was called Pivotal Voter. And it was just sort of a an old idea about rat from rational choice theory, that said that at the end of the day, to get anything done, there's a Pivotal Voter. And sometimes that Pivotal Voter is the 50% plus one. Sometimes it that Pivotal Voter is just whoever it is to get to a quorum. Sometimes that Pivotal Voter over in the Senate is somebody that can beat a filibuster. But that Pivotal Voter that get into that minimum winning threshold, is what governing in the Congress is all about. And when they fail to do that, they fall apart. So if we look at this thing through that lens, those two lenses, those theoretical models, you can kind of say, well, conditional party government has once again been conditioned right out because of the rise of the pivotal voters and Pivotal Voter in this case, was one guy. And he can he's the representative out of out of Pensacola, Florida, and his name is Matt Gaetz. And the so the question that that this is bagged is, is, what can you do? Well, the parties remember the parties organized the government. They still have that job. But the so there's been a lot of talk about well, yeah, but you know, these eight Republicans joined with the Democrats, listen, the Democrats, the Democrats are just sitting back and waiting for their shot, waiting for their chance in all of this. The Democrats were would have only saved McCarthy, if he had went to them hat in hand, and made a whole bunch of concessions to them. And Kim speak, the Speaker McCarthy wasn't willing to do that. So minority leader, Jeffrey said, Well, then okay, fall on your sword. So he did. That's what happened. But it's a fascinating thing. You know, if you go back, the last time they tried to to access speaker was around the time of the speaker for both back in 1910. And believe it or not, Joe Cannon actually survived it. He was the old czar. He survived it. But he had to cut a deal to survive it. He cut a deal that he would leave the rules committee. And when he did that, the unintended consequence of that was the rules committee changed the rules that throughout were called the reads rules. And from that moment on, we had the modern Congress of today that were pivotal voters on a regular basis overtake that conditional party government. But that's something that I would like to think about what you're seeing playing out at this at this time is a kind of an extreme version of it. But in a in a smaller way, the Congress has this problem over almost everything. Because at the end of the day, it's not really one Congress. It's not even two conferences, meaning the House and the Senate is 535 separate conferences. Joe Biden once said he was trying to deal with the Senate, he was once said, and remember, he used to be a senator, he said, he said, you know, he said, really, he said, it's a hundred senators, it's 100 Senate. And and it was a time of frustration, kind of making a joke about it. But he used to be one of them. And that's this is an extreme example of that. But one of the things if you want to try and find a silver lining, and I'm going to be quiet on this, but if you want to find a silver lining is that to some extent, this is where separation of powers and checks and balances within an institution is coming about. That that it's checking the control of a party leadership. But the problem is that they've so checked it that, you know, when when they can't, if you will, in in the in the 18th, 19th century, what the Congress did really well, was it legislated at the national level. Now it was a small government back then. But they could they did that through the parties. But what they haven't been able to do in the 20th and 21st century is they've broken up and become more of a representative assembly of increasingly, I'll just keep calling them to the roadies term pivotal voters. And they're great at representative, you know, people get mad at Matt Gaetz, but the simple truth of matters looking he represents, he represents his constituency, and Pensacola very well. The problem with that is by him doing that, you could maybe argue he's hurt the country as a whole. But again, that's the great dilemma the Congress that happens all the time. Okay, anyway, I'm going to turn it over to Professor Hall. Great summary there, not much to add other than just some basic details of what's happening. As we have covered in class with many of my students, the US House of Representatives has 435 members. Currently, there is a very, very small Republican majority. I believe it's 221 Republicans, so about 212 Democrats with a couple of vacancies. And the vacancies even out once Democrat ones Republican. What we're seeing here in the Republican Party in the House is unprecedented, decapitating themselves. The way they have done is something that we just have not seen taking out your own speaker. This is interesting because it is symbolic of a revolution of sorts that is going on in the Republican Party. The Democratic Party in recent years past had even smaller majorities in the House, but we're still able to legislate. This is a very specific Republican issue. I would say easily you could mark 2010 and the emergence of the Tea Party and then eventually the Trump administration winning in 2016. You have, as Dr. Cavali pointed out, in our system of government, our congressional system, incredibly strong individual members of the legislature and a weak party system. And as a result, you have, as again, you said with regard to Representative Gates in Florida, you have people who are doing exactly what their constituents want. And there are a number of current what I'm going to call Trump slash MAGA voters, whatever makes you feel more comfortable, who look at the thought of an impotent, kneecap Congress that can't do anything. And they look at that and they think, absolutely, that's what we want. So in many ways, many representatives are doing exactly what their constituents want. Now, how will this impact our government moving forward? It will bring it to a standstill. We do not have a House of Representatives right now for all practical purposes without a speaker of the House or without some serious bipartisan rule changes. The House of Representatives is not going to be able to do anything. We are currently under a continuing resolution that should end in mid November, at which point the federal government's probably going to shut down if the Republicans haven't fixed this particular problem. You have to think about it after they decapitated their own Speaker of the House voluntarily. This is proactively done by a small minority of Republicans. Keep in mind, if you have a 221 seat majority in the House, that means you can lose like what, four or five representatives and you no longer have the majority. They then went with the next best available individual to be the Speaker who was the majority leader. He lost. They then went with the judiciary chairman, Jim Jordan, who just this Friday after a third or fourth vote lost and pulled his name out, there are now no fewer than nine Republicans vying for the speaker. They want that gavel and I do not see any math that will necessarily put any of them in the speakership. So this is a catastrophe for the Republican Party in my opinion, because they are showing the American public that's paying attention. One thing they can't govern. They have a majority in the House and they cannot govern the civil war within the Republican Party has completely taken away their ability to govern. Keep in mind, there are many Republicans constituents who want that, who like that. They are, they look at government being incapacitated and think that's exactly what we want because for a number of reasons they don't like the federal government. Having said that, what are the projections? How is this going to affect the government moving forward? It's going to basically bring it to a by God standstill. It is a nightmare to think of mid-November and how long the government shut down could go if I can't imagine the Republicans won't have a speaker by mid-November, but at the same time, I couldn't describe to you how they will get a speaker given what we have seen. So it's going to be, for lack of a better word, interesting moving forward. Beyond that, yeah, it's a little scary. The thought of having a government that really can't do anything. And all of this while in many respects, the world is burning down around us. We have the continued war in Ukraine. We have a war between Israel and Gaza. And the Biden administration, while recently asking for about $105 billion of additional aid to the Ukrainians and to Israel, about a little over 10 billion of that going to Israel, about 64, 5 billion going to Ukraine. We can't get that done. So this is kind of a political nightmare. This is one of the worst case scenarios in the fractured separated government created by Madison. Yeah, I'm as afraid of what's happening right now in the house as I am of many other issues we've talked about. I don't see how it ends. I don't have a positive spin on that, my apologies. Well, I don't know about it. To try and find, again, we're trying to find a silver lining here. I would say this, they're going to exact, they're going to exact cost from them, but so I'll make a prediction and I'm usually wrong in my prediction about making a shot. At a certain point, they're going to get the Democrats, they're going to negotiate with Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, and they're going to sliver of Democrats who will join the moderates and the traditional conservatives, not the Matt Gaetz, a hard end of the Freedom Caucus, but the traditional conservatives. They'll get a coalition of the willing, a very small working majority, but probably only one or two votes and they'll get some. Now the thing is about, I don't know if any of these nine people that are currently running are going to be that person. So that's my, that we'll see if I'm correct on that, but I think eventually they're going to have to do something because otherwise they're going to get too afraid that they're going to get punished in the polls. And in particular, they've got the former president who's trying to become president again, you know, nipping at her heels, telling them, listen, you got to, you got to get something going here because I'm trying to, I'm trying to beat Joe Biden. So anyway, we'll see what happens in there, but, but I think that I do think that that they're going to ultimately make a shot, but they're going to probably require the Democrats, which is what they had to do in order to get a the last budget agreement and stuff like that. They'll have to do that to get a to get something else through. And remember, each time they do this, the Democrats are going to exact costs from them. Jeffries is not just going to give them a victory on a platter and because that's, you know, that's partisan politics, but we'll see. Hopefully, hopefully something like that happens and we don't completely burn down. Yeah, so, so a couple of things I would just add to that. First thing is that, you know, I think it being the end of the day, right? There is a, as Dr. Cavley says, right? There is a point at which, you know, there is going to be a, I don't know, we call it a coalition, the winner, willing or whatever you want to call it, but there are enough people for whom governing is in their interest to get something done. Now the point, I guess the the underlying sort of end game here question is, and this is the thing that's really been the problem even from the very beginning of this, is that Gates is getting worse outcomes than he would get had he kept McCarthy in the speakership, right? Because when the Republicans hang together, they can get stuff, right? But if he and Marjorie Taylor Green and these other, you know, hardcore freedom caucus people defect, you know, the quote-unquote coalition, the willing, has to go with the Democrats, right? And while that might be great for their 2024 fundraising, it might be great for their districts, one, they're going to get reelected anyway, so why do they care? And number two, if you think about in terms of policy, they get worse policy because, you know, Gates is not getting across the board budget cuts to everything except defense, which is what he wants, right? He's not going to get a cut off, you know, the anti-Ukraine aid people are not going to get a cut off of aid to Ukraine if the Democrats have, because that's going to be, you know, a condition of any deal with the Democrats. They're not going to, they're not going to do any deal that doesn't involve giving aid to Ukraine. And, you know, the pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine, whatever we want to call it, you know, is going to do worse out of that than, you know, having to get, than they negotiated, I mean, you know, a deal with Ukraine, they're going to be, Ukraine's going to get some money, right? But they're probably going to get more money if they have to deal with the Democrats than, you know, in the House than if they don't. It's just simple, you know, going back to what Dr. Cavali was talking about, coalition politics and veto pivots and this sort of thing, right? Which I realize is a very high-flute jargon among political scientists, but that's how negotiations work, is, you know, you build a coalition based on what people are willing to accept and, you know, people aren't willing to deal, then, then you go and find somebody else you're going to deal with and, again, you know, while that might be good for your fundraising, if you really care about policy, and again, you know, maybe they don't care about policy, right? That could be, you know, if they just want government to fail or if they just want to, you know, run against their own party, then, you know, if they're nihilists, then maybe that's fine with them, but there's going to be a cost to that, right? And eventually the cost is going to be are the Republicans who want the government to function at some level going to tolerate that, right? At some level, you know, this stuff works with a angry subset of voters that shows up in the primaries, but, you know, the people that bankroll these campaigns, the people that, you know, the quote, quote, the main street Republicans, the Wall Street Republicans, they need a government that functions just as much as Democrats do, and eventually they're going to say either, you know, you know, I mean, we've been careening towards this for, you know, arguably, I would say probably 30 years, going back to Newt Gingrich, you know, and it's just one of those things that, you know, Newt thought he could control these sort of ideas and he couldn't, right? And, you know, we're saying, and then the Tea Party emerged and the people that were kind of begging on the Tea Party thought they could control it and they couldn't, and then, you know, the people that pushed for, you know, Ford Trump thought they could control him and they couldn't, and now we have, you know, nihilists basically. Not most Republicans, but some, right? Just enough to be a real, you know, pain for everybody that wants to get things done. The other thing is if you're fascinated by these sort of discussions, that's worth it. I have the class for you on the spring schedule. We have a class on Congress. First time we've talked about that in about five years, so if you're interested in learning more about that, all you have to have is American government. It'll be Mondays and Wednesdays. I think it's 11, if I'm not mistaken. 11 or 1230, a camera, which it's on the schedule, but all you need is American government first. You don't have to be a political science major to take the class. Hopefully these sort of discussions are interesting. If you want to learn what a conditional party government and veto pivots and all these things are, you know, procedural cartels. We will talk about all these things in that class. If those things make your eyes glaze over, that's okay. We'll talk about some of the things too. We'll talk about the history of Congress and the structure of Congress and things that add a lot more detail as well. So let's see. So one more thing before I get on to the next question, not a self-promotional thing. For our audience, if you do have questions or there's things you didn't want clarified, feel free to ask your questions in the chat. While you're thinking about your questions, that's your thing. Let's go ahead and move on to our next question. We're going to turn a little bit to state politics and talk a little bit about the budget. So as many, some of you may be aware of the last couple of years we've accumulated a bit of a budget surplus here in Georgia and I think the surplus is now at a record level. And the question is, well now we have this money, what should we do with it? I'm always a good problem to have usually. So Dr. Hollidge, you want to start on that one. Yes, this is a great topic in terms of champagne problems. This is the one that you want to have. The state of Georgia in the last fiscal year brought in a little bit over $5 billion of budget surplus. This goes with what we already had and that put us with over $10 billion in extra cash to spend. Again, budget surpluses are fantastic. The federal government actually had one toward the latter part of the Clinton administration in the 1990s. But there's more to the story than that. We also have over $5 billion in a rainy day fund, over $2 billion in the education lottery reserve fund, which brings Georgia to over $18 billion that we have in some form of reserve funding. But for our purposes here, we're going to look at the little over $10 billion that we have as surplus from the last few budgets. What to do with that? That's being debated right now. There are those who would like to spend that money on infrastructure. There are those who would like to spend that money on education. There are those who would like to spend that money, and a lot of those fall into the Democratic Party minority in Atlanta. The camp administration has several ideas for how to spend this. We have just gone through a second round of state income tax rebates, where a little over a billion dollars of the budget surplus went back to Georgia taxpayers. There might be a third round of tax rebates that the camp administration is looking into. But that's really not getting at the lion share of that budget proposal. Some Republicans, particularly the lieutenant governor, want to use the budget surplus to work toward eventually eliminating Georgia's income tax altogether. Georgia has also in the last year, I believe the year, maybe two, reduced or actually gotten rid of our gas tax and our diesel tax, which amounts to somewhere in the realm of about a hundred and eighty five million dollars per month. So so far in terms of where we could possibly spend the budget surplus, the camp administration has already shown his desire and willingness to send it back or parts of it back in terms of income tax rebates. The more aggressive goal by particularly the Republican Party would be to eventually eradicate the income tax altogether. Recent budgets, strangely enough, with the budget surplus have actually been a little austere. There have been reductions and this hits home personally to the university system of Georgia's budget. The last budget cycle, I believe it was over 60 million dollars cut from the university system of Georgia. So while we are accumulating this ever increasing budget surplus, several state agencies and departments are actually being reduced in terms of their funding. So at the end of the day, this is a debate between the traditional Republican and Democratic parties in Georgia. What to do with the money? There are a lot of ideas for what to do with the money and currently the Democratic Party is nowhere near control over the legislature or the governor's mansion. So we will probably be going whichever route the Republicans decide and we will probably go that route when Republicans decide what to do. There's also the possibility of limited tax rebates to Georgia taxpayers while continuing to accumulate more and more of this money. There's some debate that it could be used to improve healthcare in Georgia, particularly in rural areas. But right now we just do not know. That's pretty much where Atlanta is right now. We are still in the process of debating what to do with it without any grand scheme that looks like it has the support of the legislative branch and the governor. That's a quick little run through. Might I left some openings there for Dr. Cavali? Thank you Dr. Hall. I don't have too much to add other than to say that I agree completely. Georgia gets a lot in the news at the presidential level and the top of Georgia has a purple state and all that. But Georgia has a long legacy of it used to be Democratic Party dominance and then it became Republican Party dominance. But the point is there's legacies of one partism here in Georgia and they are manifested in gubernatorial control and most of the state cabinet offices and of course that both houses the Georgia General Assembly, the state legislature. So this could be a Republican only show for the most part. So here's what Republicans are really good at. So we talked before when we lived at the House of Representatives which are maybe not so good at at least right now. But here's what they are really good at. They're really good at giving tax cuts. They're really good at sending money back out to the voters but what they mean by that is usually the higher end voters. Because of the progressive taxation schemes the more you make the more you pay. So they're really good at giving money to wealthy people and big corporations. And my guess is this is just a guess. That they're probably going to do something like that with at least a significant portion of this money. They'll use it some kind of development for high-end you know whatever. Where they might utilize monies in short of a traditional kind of say a less kind of you know we're actually going to spend money for a public program. My guess they're going to spend a lot of agriculture. Because Georgia is agriculture is again legacies now Georgia is becoming an increasingly economically diverse economy. I mean it's it's got manufacturing and it's got service sector and my god we got a movie industry here. And so Georgia is kind of increasingly becoming like certain other big relatively big economies in the states around the country. But there's legacies and one of those legacies is agriculture. We are an agricultural state in our background. We are Georgia peanuts and Georgia cotton and Georgia this and Georgia that. And my guess is I think that they're going to spend some money on that. If you want to talk about the rural medical program the suggestion for it I would argue that that is also a legacy of the agricultural basis rural base economy of old of old Georgia that has lived on a path dependency. There might be matching stuff that goes on with some of the public infrastructure. You know they're getting a lot they're going to get they're getting a lot of money from that infrastructure act. But there could be additions on that. They might finally finish the highway system around making. That's annoying. Anyway that was a personal comment. That's that that be removed. I've been here eight years that they're working on the same stretch of road. So but in writ large what what explains this I would argue in some ways with Georgia is Georgia is at least in terms of political economy Georgia is a traditionalist political culture. What Daniel Elazar would have called it. It's limited government. It states rights become local rights. And you know they're they're they're not going to so notice Dr. Hall mentioned well what they cut. They cut public education. They money to public education. In particular they cut it to colleges and universities. Well why is that? Well because the you know the rap on on people that work in in our industry is that we're a bunch of so called woke liberals. And so they're going to get at us. So that that makes sense. But the so from a you know why they would why they why would you cut public higher ed when you have all these surpluses. Because you don't like to people in public higher ed. You can do it because you're the Republican Party has a legacy of dominance. So that that's an example on it. But so I would I would think that the way to to kind of gain this might be to think about who's going to have the power to do it. It's the Republican Party where they're going to do the good Republican Party things. So are they going to do are they going to do a whole lot with civil rights. I can spend a lot of money on civil rights. Probably not. Because that's not their jam right. That's not what that's not what Republicans do. Will they give money to law enforcement. Good shot law enforcement fire EMS. Those cats might get some more money. Dr. Hall mentioned you know I leave a part of my life in the military. We in the military side we might get a few bucks. But that would make sense. That would be predictable on a Republican dominated framework if you will. Which is the best way I think to think about what the budgetary surplus politics. But it is kind of a nice thing to talk about you know the politics of the black rather than the red right. All right. Thanks Dr. Catholic. Yeah I think there are a couple of caveats or additions I would make first. You know the first thing is you know we are headed into an election year right. So 2024 you know the members of the General Assembly are going to be up for re-election. Obviously there's you know we don't have statewide races in the same way. But but nonetheless they're going to want to try to put the best work forward for their parties. And usually election years are good spending years just because of that right. You want to you want to spread the wealth a little bit. Just to you know grease the skids at the poles a little bit. And so you know I would say that's one thing you might want to look at or consider is that there is going to be probably some degree of loosening of the purse strings just because it's an election year and it's in members best interest to be able to take credit for for some spending. And I would say also that you know dark have is quite right to point out things like rural development and things like that hospitals as Dr. Hall but you know rural health care has certainly been a big issue that's emerged over the last few years in Georgia as one where there's probably going to be a lot of bipartisan agreement. And so and I think also for the future of the state you know the state I think state government has an interest in you know making making sure that Georgia does not become overly centric on Atlanta and a few other you know urban areas you know rule rule depopulation becomes a cost train on the state you know because you still have to provide services you still have to provide roads you still have to provide all these things but there's not a tax base there then it becomes the thing where you have to extract that from the places that do have people and then they start asking questions like why am I spending money to build roads in you know in Bainbridge right when I'm up here in Atlanta and I'm stuck in traffic all the time and that sort of thing and so you know we're already turning in the direction where basically half of the state's populations in metro Atlanta I think that's something that if if state lawmakers have their drawers they probably want to reverse that's a trend that probably is I would say you know demographical ads sell so that having a unicentric sort of state in that way is not is not politically healthy for a state you know having having lived in states that you know have multiple centers of power I think that that kind of helps ensure that everybody gets a little bit of the the pie a bit better than you know kind of it's Atlanta and everything else so that's the first thing I would say the other thing I would say in terms of the budget is you know that you can also you also need to to consider the personalities involved and things like that and you know the particular situation with the university system was very much driven by one lawmaker and kind of an unrelated dispute and so if those issues are resolved or papered over or addressed then that doesn't necessarily mean those problems are going to arise in the future budget so that's something to consider and also you know Governor Kemp has shown that he's not averse to using the line item veto to retaliate against that something that perhaps some lawmakers didn't anticipate when when they were doing some of those cuts because after all these you know when it comes to the governor's budget the governor wants that money it's not like the governor was asking for this was not something that you know university professors were asking for this is something the governor was asking for and he saw that as retaliation against him not just simply go those woke liberal professors because it really wasn't right it was really targeted at you know something this particular lawmaker wasn't happy about and and that's something to consider as well so the other thing I would say about about you know government spending and prospects for government spending is you know Georgia is one of the few states that doesn't have a statewide need-based financial aid program for college students that's something where potentially there could be some bipartisan agreement I think particularly given you know that you know access to you know the state university system is increasingly expensive I think that might be a cheaper way to get some of those costs down for lawmakers than giving more money another thing is the state may find itself in a legal position where it has to give more money to other universities and things like this the the administration the Biden administration has actually basically told Georgia and several other states that they're under funding some HBCUs and they will be sued if they don't find more money for them and while certainly obviously that would money would primarily seem to go likely to be likely to go to HBCUs I think politically it'd be hard to say we're going to give you know say an extra thousand dollars per student to Fort Valley State University without also giving that money to other universities as well at the same time I think politically that would be a hard sell in the legislature since there are other underfunded universities in the system and so you know I think there are you know that the other thing I would say mentioned is you know inflation is not going away and there's a good chance that they may need to raise salaries again just to simply keep up with inflation things like that we've already seen a couple of cost of living increases from the legislature that may be an area where again you know the money may be identified although the other the flipside that is right you don't want to create structural costs right because you know the the budget surplus that we're seeing may not persist right and so they're going to be cautious about recurring spending and that would suggest things like for example one-time spending like infrastructure spending or you know something on rural hospitals or maybe you know giving money to universities for endowments and things like that as opposed to kind of operational spending which tends to be something they can put you on the long-term which is also reason why they why I would say that using the money to try to cut the income taxes relatively unlikely I think there are some lawmakers that would like to do that and that would be great for their own personal political aspirations but it also means they would be putting themselves a bit of a hold down the road because there's only so much you can cut from the income tax or that sort of thing and so I think it's probably more likely we'll see kind of more of these one-time kind of deals just simply because you know structurally long-term you know if you if you cut the income tax then that money isn't there when there's a downturn in income taxes one of those things that actually you know and the other thing I would say about income taxes increase them because of the demographics of who pays income tax because of the movies that shoot in Georgia because of these sort of things because of professional athletes a lot of income taxes not paid by Georgians anymore you know if we're bringing a lot of people from out of state to you know do stuff it's actually in our interest to tax people that are have high incomes because many of them don't live in Georgia and and that's something to be aware of as well and and from the republicans perspective they're losing a lot of richer voters you know there has been a little bit of demographic shift in terms of who's actually supporting the parties and the republicans may see in the future that they actually don't mind so much soaking the rich we've already seen some of this at the federal level where the cut in the itemized deductions for example was something where you know essentially that was a something that targeted relatively well off taxpayers which stretch me you think we're as being republican but you know in that case most of the people that benefit from that deduction tend to be Democrats so so things to consider definitely we're in a very interesting sort of time as far as those things are concerned let's see so we talked a little bit about we didn't talk about Medicaid in this context but there is some discussion of expanding Medicaid by the way also if you have questions feel free to post them in the chat nobody's posting questions not to say you have to but if you do have questions to ask them because we do have about 15 minutes left so time for a couple more questions so speaking of Medicaid expansion so Governor Kepp has put out a limited expansion Medicaid how has that been going how has it been criticized that sort of thing I'll keep it very brief Matt did you want to ask that or Oh sure sure well the so back when Obamacare the Affordable Care Act was put through a part of the Affordable Care Act was expansion of Medicaid and of course for those people that that don't know this it's just kind of getting the weeds on policy Medicaid is is actually administered by the states so they have greater discretionary authority in what they can do with it so Georgia along with a bunch of other Republican-leaning states chose to opt out of that Medicaid expansion but what has happened over time is that we've had some financial crises along the way and the reality is that we talk about inflation effects well inflation has actually been a bit asymmetric it but one of the great areas that has been an ongoing problem has been health inflation health costs have been going through the roof for years a bit like education inflation also going through the roof for the year so we've talked before about getting money back into get money into education I mean one of one of the principal calls of that is just that it's getting more and more expensive college degree but that's especially true you know in in in medical costs so at a certain point it seems that many of these states that had previously so hated the Medicaid expansion of the of the old ACA have either adopted it or they have tried to develop their own short of expansion and that's kind of it seems that that seems what we're doing here in Georgia we're we're not adopting the the full-blown Medicaid expansion of the of the ACA but we're adopting a limited expansion and again some of this comes down to I think that that chair Lawrence there was was really honest something with this the demographic changes within the Republican Party as a Republican party has become more working class in and white working class incident not necessarily not a white working class but has become more more white working class class issues like healthcare access have become increasingly important we already saw an example of that by the way with the rule the money put into rule rule healthcare well I think this fits that same that same area you know the recognition that people just can't afford to go to the doctor and they can't afford to go to the hospital so what's happened they're going to emergency rooms and they're racking up medical bills and they're like I can't pay it here's $5 a month for the rest of my life and and so the system is either arguably already broken or it's teetering on the edge of a fallen entity this and so this is an attempt to put a band aid on a on a hemorrhaging wound and so we'll see how this works out but but but I understand that the governor is looking for a win here and he's looking for a win and within the mode of the limited government ethos of conservative political economy but I think that Georgia like many other states has had to face the reality that look you can you can watch your healthcare system completely collapse or you can do something and so they've chosen they're they're doing something um but obviously the democrats would prefer and so this is the criticism the democratic criticism is well why doing this why don't you just just take the full bone expansion um so anyway I think that's that's really frames the uh frames that argument and the kind of the frames the the decision of of what the governor's trying to do here turn it over to professor hall great summary there um when you when you look at the heart of this question this issue you have to go to the patient protection and affordable care act which dr capri mentioned um this signature obama administration legislation had twin pillars that would make it work on the one hand there would be the individual mandate which would require anyone and everyone who does not have uh health insurance think about you know two in the 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s if you're healthy you people would not get health insurance and require them to get some kind of federally uh recognized basic health insurance that was immediately challenged and chief justice roberts in the civillian's opinion upheld the individual mandate he upheld it as a congressional power to tax now the second pillar of the affordable care act which would make it work was the medicaid expansion uh expanding all states forcing all states to expand their medicaid roles up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line this was a bridge too far for the roberts court and they struck this down uh as an unconstitutional uh use of legislative power so basically the affordable care act was kept alive by allowing the individual mandate to continue but it was kind of crippled from day one by not requiring states to expand their medicaid roles now this pitted for simplicity democrats versus republicans republican states said absolutely not while we have the ability to choose to expand our medicaid republican states said hell no democratic states said absolutely but as dr cavley mentioned economic um catastrophe since then have gone beyond politics when you cannot afford to go to the hospital when you cannot afford a doctor and you know all your governor and legislature has to do is agree to medicaid expansion and boom you are instantaneously going to be one of the people who now has medicaid coverage that changes things right now 40 states north carolina is the most recent theirs won't really take effect to the end of the year 40 states have expanded their medicaid roles keep in mind when you expand your medicaid roles as dr cavley mentioned these are state-run uh operations how are you going to afford it well the affordable care act calls for 95 percent of the additional medical costs for the first two years to be covered by the federal government and 90 after that to be covered by the federal government for all eternity so states that choose not to expand their medicaid roles they know year in and year out like georgia they're costing themselves billions and billions and billions of dollars and it's the sweet money from the federal government it's money that comes from the entire republic so georgia is one of the last 10 states when you look at the states that still have not expanded medicaid it's georgia south carolina florida alabama tennessee mississippi texas these are heavily republican states that are still holding out what governor camp is doing here is like a diet caffeine free version of medicaid expansion and he's trying to connect it to employment this is something that he actually had to go to federal court and he won the federal court allowed for the connection of medicaid expansion to employment but it's a lot trickier than just expanding medicaid under the affordable care act as a result and these numbers when i actually looked at them earlier today i was amazed at these numbers there are only a few thousand georgians who are signed up and on board with this new employment connected medicaid expansion mainly because it's just a lot harder if you have to prove employment prove that you're working 80 hours a month if you have to bring in all this paperwork to the state of georgia there are a lot of people who simply do not have the time or the ability to do that so so far a medicaid expansion connected directly to employment uh which should be targeting upwards of a hundred thousand georgians has gotten a couple of thousand georgians on board and that does not come close to the near half million georgians who would be instantaneously covered if georgia simply expanded medicaid under the affordable care act so if i had to describe this the this program so far i would say it's a massive failure in that so many of the people that are expected to be on board this new medicaid expansion connected to employment are simply not on board and the opposition as dr. cavley pointed out particularly democrats are screaming from the rooftops and have been for going on the better part of a decade and a half why don't we just expand medicaid under the patient protection and affordable care act instantaneously providing medicaid coverage for a half a million georgians and bringing in billions and billions of dollars that the state is refusing to accept having said that uh we will see where this goes this is definitely an innovative policy decision by the camp administration um it's one that was supported by the trump administration um but we'll see where it goes as of right now it's hard to call it a success and there are definitely alternatives out there that might be quite simpler just noticed that i've been talking for quite a while and i'll stop now yeah thank you dr. hall um and i think that was a good overview from both of you there so uh moving on to our next question which also has been requested in the chat so several counties and cities in georgia are having votes this november in just a couple weeks actually early voting is underway now on what i call it something called splost or splost what is a splost what are the different types of splost and how did they differ uh uh dr uh last year in particular mentioned in the chat hauston county has a splost but we can talk about other counties as well or in general and dr hall did you want to start on that one yes um well for the students at home um when you when you look at taxation georgia has a a special form of taxation uh the term splost it doesn't roll off the tongue uh it's not necessarily easy to say but it stands for special purpose local option sales tax or splost now this is specifically a county level tax that the voters of a particular county have to agree to it comes up as a referendum during the election and the revenue from splost or again special purpose local option sales tax generally speaking has to be used for capital outlays and the taxes subject again as i said to voter approval and it's protected it's collected by the department of revenue there are other forms of taxes like this we also have the lost or the local option sales tax we have as the name suggests education special purpose sales tax that can be used for capital outlay projects for educational purposes specifically we also have the what i've always called the t splost or the transportation special purpose sales tax which again must be approved by voters and this is another transportation funding option that the state of georgia has available so all of these are different forms of sales taxes generally and i don't know if this is a mandate but i think i've never seen any and i can be corrected here above one percent that are available to georgia voters for very specific projects it's an additional form of revenue that uses a very democratic method for implementation i know we're running out of time so i'll open the floor up for any of the comments all right i i think uh i think uh dr hall there covered it very well although i will i will say i think i'll defer my time on it if uh if professor lester is on here because i know that she is an expert in georgia in georgia policy science if she's willing to pop in here she might uh she might be able to enlighten us a little bit better i'll meet it to uh i think she probably knows this stuff better than better than either john or myself put together do i'll pop in but i'm not gonna turn my camera on um you guys know why what's going on in my life um yeah you guys did a great job sploss there are several losts or aus taxes in georgia it's a county it's the county has to call for the referendum but what happens is that they can go into a intergovernmental agreement or local agreement with qualified municipalities in their county to use that money and like dr hall said uh one percent the enabling legislation is one percent so you're not going to see a sploss of you know four percent the base is four percent georgia and then different counties municipalities have extra taxes on top of that some counties don't have sploss or some counties use sploss differently so like you said it was um for capital projects and they are five year taxes or if there's an governmental or local agreement between counties and qualified municipalities uh they can be six years and i keep saying qualified municipalities that's defined in law as far as most municipalities in georgia municipalities are also called cities if you wonder what i'm talking about here are qualified municipalities you're qualified municipality if you have like fire department police department public library waste water there's this whole big list so the reason why i brought hauston county up was just because there is one this year and i know we probably have some hauston county voters on here who may be like should i vote for this should i not i'm going to obviously tell you how to vote if it does not pass your taxes will go down by one percent until they bring it back on the ballot again so some people may be motivated by that some of the different projects are going to use the money for an art center a lot of road extension because if you live in hauston county or drive in hauston county you know it's insane new animal shelter a lot of money for parks and recreation and of course that money would be in the county as well as centerville water robins and perry and as far as allocation i was reading the other day too in makin bibb 2025 is when the next sprawl still come up and they lester miller said hey we need a new jail because if you follow makin news i don't think they found those guys yet maybe i'm wrong there um but um so a lot of uh counties use this money for for projects like that and there's tier one projects there's no tier one and that's getting too much into the weeds on splost but it's something that's important i think in the narrative because of course i'm really interested in narrative a lot of people say well this is just an extension of splost i don't know what the splost number is for hauston county but my county has a splost up we're on splost six right now we got to vote for splost seven in the november election so a lot of narrative has been well splost six and seven splost seven if you agree to it it's just a continuation of splost six i call bs on that that's not true accg would even say that the association of county commissioners or georgia i've heard them actually say that in hearings at the state house it is not a continuation because it's used for different projects so just something to think about when we talk about policy making and the stories and the narratives and policy and all the different policy areas that are discussed tonight think about how people are using language to shape public opinion on the different sides of the issue so thank you yep thank you dr lesher yeah that that's a very good point um you know in particularly when it comes to um a splost in particular right because you know as you pointed out right that you know for each new spots are coming up with a new list of projects and um unless for some reason there was just a shortfall and they weren't able to afford something from our previous splost um they're all going to be new things right so um although from a voter's perspective or i guess a taxpayer's perspective you could sort of think of about it as continuing the same one percent tax or half percent or whatever it is in a particular case um you know the reality is that is a separate tax for a different period is just not going to overlap with the previous one right um and you know as uh dr hall pointed out right there's other types of local option sales tax as well um uh bibb county for example recently had a uh a vote on a uh a local option sales tax to reduce the um property tax um which is also one that's been used in a few counties there's a bit of debate about whether or not that actually is beneficial to counties or not depending on who's actually paying the taxes in those counties sales tax versus property tax also do renters benefit from um you know a property tax cut um well it would depend on what sort of property tax cut it's going to be it's going to be a property tax cut about across the board or is it just going to be for homeowners is it just going to help homestead um you know extend the homestead exemption well no then you know then renters are going to end up paying actually probably more tax um uh as a result um because they're not going to benefit from the at least uh from the homestead exemption right so um see there are things to be aware of um not necessarily on the on the house in county or some of the other spots that may be out there um there's been as dr hall so mentioned there's been some discussion of a new of new tea splots um i don't think house in county is on board with one at the moment but um maybe after this uh one room the uh the upcoming spots to resolve maybe there'll be some discussion reviving that as well um since there are certainly some transportation needs that aren't going to be met by this um spost um uh let's see so um so we have reached basically um six thirty four so that's more or less the end of our meeting but i did want to talk about a couple things very brief food for we uh uh adjourn first i'd like to thank our panelists uh dr cavalry and dr hall uh and also dr lester for uh joining us as well and speaking and um also wanted to let you know that a recording of this event will be available on our departmental news or departmental youtube page um which is just youtube youtube.com slash at sign uh mga paul sigh um there also leads to that on our facebook and twitter pages or whatever twitter is calling itself to speak um i also did want to promote our next upcoming political science event which is going to be in uh three weeks time uh that sounds right um so uh dr yura yuri loboda you somebody may know um is our full bright star in residence he's been designing us from the national defense university of ukraine um and he will be speaking on uh the endless 20th century will the 21st century ever start um this is an event that's part of international education week as being co-sponsored with our office of international programs um that event will be monday and november 13th at 12 30 p.m uh be 12 30 to 130 in the makin library so on the makin campus there i think it's going to be on the second floor uh there will be refreshment served um and uh we're hoping to be able to record that event as well i'll have to talk to dr loboda and make sure he's okay with that but probably he will be so um so we will definitely record that we may be able to live stream it may not depending on how our technology is working that day um i like to take our audience for joining us and uh thank you all hope you have a good evening if you um can't join us for our next event hopefully you'll be able to join us for a future event and uh maybe join us for some of our classes in the spring if you're not already signed up for one so um see you all soon