 Welcome to this week's show, Legislative Update. I'm Jim Baumgart, along with Nanette Bullabush as your co-host. Thank you for joining us. We wanna talk about some important issues like taxes. Right, and we have our special guest, Carl Potter. And we have a tax-expectualist person here. Well, a political specialist, someone who, a keen observer of national and state issues. Carl Potter, former state senator, who went through many state budgets and knows that they understand that you have to pay the bills and be fair. And we had a recent bill that passed the Congress. Passed without any democratic support or even a public hearing. Oh my. It just passed. So the Tax Reform Act, which some liberals have nicknamed the Donor Relief Act. Donor Relief Bill, because it helps the donors. But you tell us in your words, why is this bill such a bad thing for us? Well, when you look at the total package, which is gonna add about a trillion and a half to the national deficit. Of that money, about 83% of it goes to about 1% of the wealthy in this country. 1%. So when you're talking about that amount of money being shifted, it's just gonna, nothing else is gonna exacerbate the disparity of wealth in this country. We over the years have allowed giant corporations and individuals to amass extreme amount of money so that today I would say 75% of the wealth of this country is in the 10% of the population. And that means 90% of the population owns the other 25%. That's us. That's us. And what I always, I oftentimes get into heated arguments that they don't start out that way. But they do because I hear people, sometimes very working class people who say, so what? Let the wealthy keep their money. And I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. I said, there's just so much money. If everybody wanted to be a millionaire, the national treasury would not say, all right, start up the press. We're gonna print enough money. So everybody can be a millionaire. It doesn't work that way. There's just so much money. And the only way that you can have a functioning democracy in a functioning capitalist society is by the distribution of this wealth in a more even manner. And so that's why you had, even in Eisenhardt years and the Reagan years and the Bush years, you had tax rates on very wealthy people that were very, very high. It was stated that somebody has to pay the bills and the people who pay the bills are the people who've got the money. People who don't have money can't pay the bills. And otherwise, also, you need to have people be able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. I hear that all the time. Why don't people of color just do what I, my family did pull, we were immigrants, we pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps. Or you can't do it when there's, like I said, 90% of the people have 25% of the wealth and they're working for a minimum wage. And the minimum wage of 750 has been there for decades. So there's no way that they can survive. They can't even pay their rent on what they're making. And so multiple jobs and multiple people in the family are the only way these people can survive. So if you have a tax bill now that starts actually raising the tax on some of these poorer people and just giving it to people who now have money in Swiss bank accounts and all over the world, laundering in that manner, or corporate coffers where they have so much money, they don't even know what to do with it, you're not gonna solve the problem of equity, of wealth, of poverty, and all the other melodies that go along with the underfunding. So a tax bill is more than the ads now running, oh, I'm gonna get $2,000 and I got a cute little family saying, well, we can buy grandma a new microwave oven or something, very simplistic, misleading, and complete baloney approach to this whole issue. And temporary, the corporate tax cuts are permanent. So Apple is going to get $47 billion in tax cuts over the next decade or so. We will get, I believe, if you are of middle income, somewhere between $46,000 and $80,000, we'll get something like $70 a month this first year. So $800, hey, we're doing great, $800, thank you, President Trump. But I wanna urge people, please don't be fooled by this $800, because one, it's gonna go away, whereas the other tax breaks are continue, two, other costs are gonna go up, like healthcare. Things are gonna hurt, so it's not a win situation. They're gonna be hurt, but it's so easy to be fooled by that little extra money that's gonna come fairly soon and that's what concerns me. Well, there's also a fallacy here that trickle down economics works. This is not the first time this nation has embarked upon this. Right in the beginning of Reagan's first term, there was a fellow named Stockman, and he and Reagan concocted the tax breaks that were supposed to give big tax breaks to the wealthy with the idea that they were gonna create jobs. It didn't work. Shortly thereafter, Stockman left the Reagan administration and Ronald Reagan never said much about it. Later on, matter of fact, I think there were some tax increases in his term after that in order to balance the budget. You don't give more money to the wealthy, expecting them to create inordinate amount of jobs and raise wages. So you're not operating on a premise that's proven to work economically. Another thing is that sometimes this trickle down economics argument is used as a ruse for the real reason why this was given. And I would contend that the pure public policy analysis on this, that this was a payback to people who now give big money to campaigns. I believe Paul Ryan got $20 million right after that tax bill. He got this $20 million donation. It was like, thank you, Mr. Wow. We've had Supreme Court rulings, as you know, Citizens United that said corporations are people and people have free speech and therefore corporations, their free speech can give as much money as they want. And so that's what we're having. We're seeing that particularly in the conservative realm, there are very few people who are giving money in the tune of $25 or $100 or whatever. They're not even sought to contribute in that way. The people who are in office go after the Koch brothers or the Walton family or some other, the Mercer family who don't give $100, they give millions of dollars. And so as a result, that's the constituency. So who do you keep happy when you put together a tax plan? The people who are gonna benefit the most who give you the most. It's a sick, sick system. But it's unaware, I think, of many people. And that's why, like I said before, I run into, and I get in arguments too often. My wife says I'm confrontational, but I says it takes me off to have people who I know don't have much. They're trying to live in social security who say, let the rich people keep their money. What's wrong with this? I said, well, you're screwing up the whole society is what you're doing. There was a reason why in the 50s and the 60s and 70s we had the growth of a middle class. You don't have to go far back into the depression years, the 20s and the 30s. Where you found a disparity of wealth and even worse at the robber baron era of the Rockefellers and the Mellons and all those folks where they built these big mansions on the Hustads and River and the Carnegie's and Mellons and all these people who made their money and steal and so on, and they kept it. And there were then tax laws that were written to put in the progressive income tax and the estate taxes and so on in order to fund government to make this whole thing a little more equitable. And we did achieve very good equity in the 50s, 60s and 70s and now it has gone off the rails. Yes it has. Money has taken the high road rather than the low road. Well, money corrupts and money's a nice thing but it can corrupt people and make them very selfish and not very benevolent in some cases. No, and when somebody gets 50 or 100 or $4,000 because of a tax break, they feel very good and maybe they don't care that the very wealthy are gonna get millions and millions and millions because they've got their thousand dollars once. Or the deficit that has suddenly gotten worse that the Republicans said they were so concerned about. I was one of our senators, Senator Johnson was so concerned about this in 2014. I spoke with a member of his staff just a couple of weeks ago, I went to Oshkosh and they heard us, I appreciated that, but it was like all of a sudden this isn't important, we're gonna make that up. We're gonna make that money up because the economy's gonna be so good. Well you know how they're gonna make that money up. The cynic in me says there is a grand thought here already and what it's gonna be is that the big ticket items like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are gonna be purported as being the ones that have now contributed to this deficit. Not the tax plan, but the big entitlement as they call it. Yeah that's the big way that they're gonna go after. What you're gonna see is an effort then to raise the retirement age, flatten out benefits. And what you're gonna find out is that they're gonna be elderly people who are not gonna get help when they need nursing home help, which is what Medicaid tends to do besides helping poor people. And you're gonna see Medicare maybe not paid, they won't pay 70% of cost as they do now. They'll pay 60 or 50% and then people are gonna have to find out where they're gonna pay the rest of their bills. And they're gonna have more and more doctors when they get paid 50 to 60% not take Medicare patients. So this whole thing is going to go to hell and that's how this is gonna play out. And that's why again the people who think well let the rich people keep their money you don't know what they're gonna get. You're gonna get bit in the behind on this one. And I can just see Paul Ryan and others saying we can't afford these programs. Well why, because they created a system where they can't afford them. How do we, how are Democrats gonna fight this? I mean it's, you have to admit the other side has done very good with its messaging. If people like those that you're talking to are so, just think Trump can do no wrong or their Republican senator or congressman can do no wrong. They've been persuaded effectively. And how are we gonna get that progressive voice out there? How are we gonna convince people to? Well I would hope that it would still be a free press. And that's being under, That's much diminished, yes. But I mean there's some excellent reporting coming out of even the Wall Street Journal today. New York Times, yeah. And the Washington Post and New York Times. There's some good papers out there yet. Not many, but there are some. And they are finding, they've got some Bulldog reporters who are trying to find out where the Russian money is being laundered and we're finding it might go to the NRA even. I know. It's being invested in condos and people like Rachel Maddow. So you've got some good people who I think are doing very good reporting and hopefully if people pay attention to this news releases and do a little reading of Main Street news they will learn something for a change and it won't come just from politicians who are Democrat or Republican. Pontificating on an issue will come from somebody who hopefully has some credibility in journalism. He's telling us we're running out of time. Is there any other? No, I'm just looking at all the points that I had like the three hours. That we aren't gonna get to. Yeah, anything else you wanna bring up in terms of federal or national issues or you? We only have a half a minute. Oh, okay, well. We can't say much. We didn't solve the world again. Next program. Right. But there are things that we should be dealing with. Next program and the comments that the president said about the African country's in Haiti which is a country that's been very helpful to us or the dreamers or other things. We should maybe spend time in the next program. Yes, can we allow our children to listen to the president? And I have to thank Cal Potter and Nanette Boulibouche for being emotionally involved in this program. And until next week, this has been a legislative update. Thank you.