 which is closer to the board. Hello, welcome to this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgart, your host. Thank you for joining us. And by us, I mean former Senator Cal Potter and the... And me. And you. And the Net Boulevard. And it is an honor to be with these two esteemed gentlemen I've known for a long time and have respected you so much. One of the things I wanted to do as I lost the spot where the net's name was that is to talk about a variety of things that are facing us. But first I wanted to talk a little bit about the rising seas and the hurricanes that has left disaster and destruction in its past in the billions and billions of dollars while we do a little bit to raise the roads so we let people move to those areas in large numbers. And rebuild. And rebuild. There's a fellow in the Houston area who has applied for a FEMA bailout and this will be his fourth time. He's collected already $507,000 rebuilding each time. In the same dangerous place. Yep. What we need to do is have a few people who say there are some places you ought not to build. They're just too low. And as a result, not encouraged development. If you go to Miami for example, the high rise construction right on the waterfront is just unbelievable. And if a category four or five hurricane directly hits them sometimes the damage amount is going to be tremendous. Yeah. And on the keys where the buildings weren't well protected although some of them were built fairly well just were demolished when they get hit by the full force of the hurricane. And of course with the warming of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico in those areas the chances of storms and bigger storms tend to be more common. Sure. Warm water or warm air holds more water and that's why you get the tremendous rainfalls and storms of the intensity. The thing we need to talk about I think is the fact that the world is warming. And it's unfortunate that there are political people who are beholden to the fossil fuel industry who don't say they believe it. But last year was the warmest year on record and the year before that was the warmest year on record. I'm sure that this year will be likewise. I ran into a fellow the other day at a social environment. The situation, the guy had gone to college and he said he just didn't believe that the world was getting warmer and it's actually getting colder. I said have you been listening to Rush Limbaugh or some other idiot on the radio? I said all the evidence is contrary and 99% of the scientists will tell you that. So what's happening is the ice caps all over the place are melting and the waters are rising and so most of the nations that either are islands or are like Florida very little above sea level parts of Boston, parts of New York will be shortly under water particularly during the surges that come with storms. So it's actually in everybody's financial best interest to put aside whether you like the fossil fuel industry or not and just come to the conclusion that building in a low place is not a smart thing to do and realize that most of those people who have built in those areas and Boston has been built in these areas that have been filled in as well as New York were done so within a relatively short period of time in man's history and so you didn't have this so-called global warming in those days and everybody thought everything would be the same for generations to come, well that's not the case. Well even those who argue that yeah maybe the world is warming up but it's not human cause, right? It's all, it's a natural trend, it'll go back but you're pretty convinced it's human cause. Well I think it is but even if it isn't, it's warming up and so if it's a warmed up there's still gonna be a financial cost during storms and in flooding and so whatever the cost, you can just say it's God's will or whatever you wanna hang your head on go ahead and do it but it's still warming up. All right. Yeah and of course one of the things that you don't wanna do is just force or allow huge numbers of more retirees or those that wanna go to a warm climate to pile into those areas that can be affected heavily by a hurricane. Well we just saw eight people died in a nursing home. Yeah. There wasn't enough air conditioning I guess to the heat I mean. Well and of course prior to the air conditioning you know back in the 1950s people didn't go to Florida and some of those areas cause they were just too hot during the summer and there wasn't the types of conditioning to keep them cool. There wasn't that rush to those climates because people didn't wanna sweat all night long. The sad part about it in this whole initiative of building again is that the political power with the population moving south has also shifted to the south. So places like Phoenix and Miami and wherever else where there's been tremendous growth they've gotten more clout. Yes they have. Not only in their state legislators have become more powerful because of reapportionment and all that other things but to Congress as well. So you're gonna see what's so interesting is there are people who opposed bailouts for New Orleans during Katrina for very partisan reasons cause New Orleans tends to be more democratic than any of the areas down south. They were opposed to that but now they're screaming bloody murder that we need to help Texas and we need to help Florida. Right at a little hypocritical in that. But we don't wanna end the show without talking about Foxconn. No I'm gonna come to that next. Before we go there, I wanted to point out that some of the communities down along the Gulf on their own are raising the heights of the roads they're requiring more sturdy buildings and codes so that when they do get hit they don't get shredded that they have a chance to withstand some of these heavy winds but it's being done more in a piecemeal county effort or city by city effort rather than a national effort to make sure that we're doing this with some rhyme or reason and we have the best engineering's going on so that we're gonna have an impact on the rising seas. But anyway, we do have billions of dollars being spent elsewhere including Wisconsin. It's called Foxconn. Yeah you wanna talk about that, don't you? Well I'm guessing that Cal is as concerned as it about it as I am. That's only money. It's only three billion dollars that could go to public schools, to hire more teachers. We have a severe shortage and it's gonna get worse of good quality teachers. All this money, the biggest giveaway to a foreign company in US history. What can you call that conservative? We can do that because we just will borrow and build roads on loans. Borrowing the money, that's another great conservative idea. And one of the interesting things is that this has been a growing trend to have states compete with each other in order to woo companies. The companies now know it and they can hold back on their own capital investment. Hoping the states will come in with a relief package or some type of incentive package. And Wisconsin's topped everybody with this one. My contention is that this is over the board, over the top and if that foreign company needed that much money, they maybe should have gone to some other state in the sense that they're promising 13,000 jobs, that may not occur. And one of the things that Wisconsin needs to do is get back to focusing on why it is that businesses like to be here in the first place and it has been in the past, a good university system, the technical college system and educated people. And we've always been on the top generally in performance based on that investment in education. And I would contend that if we continued to do that, put more money in the university rather than cutting at 300 million as we did in the last budget and cutting primary and secondary education and cutting everything else that relates to human and education activities, we would have a populace that people would want to hire versus coming here for a short term investment. But that's not the trend right now, but I think it's a boneheaded way of approaching it because it was not a long-term solution. Well, and one of the reasons they want to be here is because they need large amounts of clean, clear water. And Lake Michigan happens to be one of the great lakes. So rather than them trying to ship or go down to the southwest where they don't have enough water, they're coming here plus they're getting a $3 billion bonus or whatever the amount is that they're getting. And does this bill require them to hire Wisconsin workers over, say, Chicago, which is not far? Yeah, I don't think so. But I'm sure that they're not all gonna be Wisconsin residents being hired if they build a plant. Well, I think you have to remember that this is a foreign company also. And I'm sure that many of these foreign companies in their global operations will still find it more lucrative to hire somebody from Sri Lanka or India or Thailand for a buck an hour versus even $15 an hour or whatever they're gonna be paying the people, even a relatively low amount for our society in the area of Racine, Kenosha. So I'm just not so certain that we're gonna see all that growth because of the expectations of workers in this part of the world. Well, but it's a clean water that may interest them and it may have been the Great Lakes area that this Foxcom would have settled in on anyway because they apparently use huge amounts of water in that operation on these flat screens. So maybe they should have been given us part of that $3 billion rather than us. Yeah, we were already attracted to that. I guess I get it. We have a budget that will be worked on by the time this program appears the governor will have done his line vetoes and we'll have a $76 billion two-year budget. A little bit late, but there it is. And some of the problems that are out there still are not solved. We look at the transportation issue near and dear to people in this area is the inadequate funding that will be coming for certain roads such as Highway 23. And we see that any money that's going into transportation funding right now seems to be in the area of borrowing, which is a really short sighted because of the fact that you still have to pay it back with interest so that it eventually costs you more in the long run than it would be if you'd raise the gasoline tax, which is an opportune time to do it when it gasses about $2.40 a gallon. And I think they've done polls and the majority of people are willing to pay a little bit more in gas tax if it means better roads because we are all affected by how terrible those roads are. Yeah. Well, Schaboykin County's a good example of four years. You couldn't, the County Board could not get a sales tax passed. And once they tied it to roads, there seemed to be a change amongst the even conservatives, that's where they need. Well, on the net boulevard, Cal Potter and me, the program is running to the end. There's so much more to talk about. I know we could talk about all the crazy things going on, NSC citizens that are watching this program that need to be aware and need to pick up the phone, call their legislator and question whether they're doing things that they think they should be doing because that's your job. So next time, this has been Legislative Update.