In Life or Death the Taxman Cometh – with Steve Moore [Ep. 83]

P101-ep-83-podcast transcript

Linda J. Hansen: Welcome, thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101 Break Room Economics Podcast. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host and the author of Prosperity 101, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, The Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck and the creator of the Break Room Economics online course. The book, the course, and the entire podcast library can be found on Prosperity101.com. I seek to connect boardroom to break room and policy to paycheck by empowering and encouraging employers to educate employees about the public policy issues that affect their jobs.

My goal is to help people understand the foundations of prosperity, the policies of prosperity, and how to protect their prosperity by becoming informed, involved, and impactful. I believe this will lead to greater employee loyalty, engagement, and retention, and to an increased awareness of the blessings and responsibilities of living in a free society. Listen each week to hear from exciting guests, and be sure to visit Prosperity101.com. Thank you for joining us today.

My guest today is Steve Moore. He is chairman for the FreedomWorks Task Force on Economic Revival, and he is a co-founder, along with Steve Forbes, Dr. Art Laffer, and Phil Kirpin of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. Steve consistently and passionately communicates a vision for a pro-growth economic agenda.

He is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the Project for Economic Growth at the Heritage Foundation, and he previously served as president of the Club for Growth and as a member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. In addition, he has been an advisor and contributor to Prosperity 101 since the beginning, and I count him as one of my dearest friends and favorite colleagues. Thank you for making time for this interview today, Steve. Welcome.

Steve Moore: Hi, Linda. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, thank you for taking time. I know you're really busy and you're in demand for so many interviews, and I thank you for squeezing this interview in because I just think these topics are so important for listeners to understand and kind of take a little bit deeper dive in so they know how to respond.

In the news most recently is the infrastructure package, and I know this includes enormous spending. We're talking about debt ceiling, limitations, and what we need to do to stand for a limitation on the debt ceiling. Could you explain to our listeners exactly what's happening and what they can do to help our country moving forward?

Steve Moore: Well, Linda, great points.

Let me just say that you're famous for Prosperity 101, and it seems to me that what we're now practicing in Washington is Poverty 101. I think these are very dangerous times for our country. I think we are facing financial ruin and potential national bankruptcy if we allow Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to continue to massively spend and borrow money in the multi-trillions of dollars.

When I first got in this business, we talked about the budget and the millions and billions of dollars. Now we talk about it in the billions and trillions of dollars, so the numbers are so large now people have a hard time even understanding and comprehending. I mean, I know I do.

I have a hard time comprehending the trillion dollars, the 1 followed by 12 zeros, and what that means to the average American, but one of the ways I like to relate this is every child born today is going to inherit about $500,000 in debt. It's like we are giving them a second mortgage from the moment that they are born, and no country does that. And this story of massive debt and massive government spending that's approaching half of our entire national economy is not a story that has had a happy ending anywhere in the history of the world.

It hasn't worked in Argentina or Venezuela or Cuba or Mexico or Zimbabwe or many of the most socialist European countries. So I'm very afraid. I'm afraid for what's happening in our country, and I think we need people to revolt peacefully, obviously, but we need to have our voices heard.

That's why your podcast and your activism is so important, because the American people have to tell them that the politicians work for us. We don't work for them.

Linda J. Hansen: Exactly.

That's one of the things I think the American people forget, that even though we call these politicians our leaders, they are actually our servants. We elect them and we pay their salary. And so we need to remember that we are in charge.

You know, there's more of us than there are of them, and we need to be the voice for change. 

Steve Moore: You know, our great mutual friend, the late and great Herman Cain, who was such an asset to our country in so many ways, he wrote a famous book, I don't know, five or six, seven years ago called They Think We're Stupid. And I think the politicians think we're stupid.

I think Herman was exactly right. But you know what? We're not as stupid as they think we are.

By the way, they're the stupid ones.

They actually believe that by spending trillions of dollars, they're going to make America more prosperous and more fair and, you know, better for our children and minorities and low income people. And it's going to have exactly the opposite effect of what they propose. But, you know, they think we're docile.

They think we're stupid. And we'll just stand back and take it and we're not going to take this.

Linda J. Hansen: Right. We cannot take it anymore.

And we can't sit back and be docile. We have to stand up. One of the things that they often do, because they think we're stupid, is switch the narrative. Herman Cain would always call it the sin tactics. And I'm so thankful you brought him up.

It was just a little over a year ago he passed away and he was so endearing to us. We miss him every day. But I hear his voice in my mind every day as I approach these issues.

And one of the things he always would talk about is the sin tactics. They shift the subject, ignore the facts, and name call. And any time you get over the target of what they're actually trying to do to destroy the country or take away freedom for American citizens, any time you get over the target, they'll shift the subject, ignore the facts.

And if that doesn't work for them, they'll name call with ad hominem attacks and start attacking the person. And so we have to be really aware of these tactics and be wise and be able to say, no, these are the facts. This is the truth of what happens.

And we can't allow them to erase history and to censor out history, not only for our own country, but the history of other countries like you mentioned, Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba. Cuba's in the news right now, right? We can't allow them to censor this information. So this upcoming generation is forbidden from understanding the monstrosities of these economic policies.

This is one way to usher in socialism and communism, dividing the country and destroying it economically. And we really have to stand up. This is the mountain we have to die on, in a sense, right now to save this country. It's a tipping point.

Steve Moore: Well, that's when you look at the way I'm going to be fine, I'm 61 years old, so a lot of the damage that we're doing right now, and the massive multi trillions of dollars of debt, I'm not going to pay. It's going to be the young people.

By the way, the young people think that socialism and communism, big government is the solution to their problems. And of course, the joke is on them, because the cost of all this massive debt and borrowing bills have to be paid. It's not going to be you and me, it's going to be our kids and our grandkids who are going to pay extreme costs for this.

But the other group that's going to be really burdened by all of this spending and borrowing are the lowest income people, because you look at what's happening now with the economy and the massive inflation, we have the highest inflation rate now in the United States that we've seen in 15 or 20 years, in some cases, in 30 or 40 years. And you see the higher food prices and the gasoline prices and the travel prices and construction prices and home prices. And then you say, Oh, my God, who's the one who suffers the most with high inflation?

Well, it's lower income people that are now paying $15, $16 more to fill up their tank and their grocery stores rather than paying $70 or $100. And if we're living on an income of $30, $40, $50,000 a year, that causes real hardship. So the very people that Democrats say are going to be helped by these government programs are actually the ones that are going to be hurt, as well as, by the way, the small businesses. You know, the big businesses in America are doing fine right now.

It's really the small businesses, the mom and pop shops, the restaurants, the small construction and manufacturing companies that are really struggling as we raise prices of everything and that it's impossible for them to get their workers back because their rich Uncle Sam is paying them more money to stay unemployed and go back to work.

I'm frustrated because I think the little guy is the one who's really getting clobbered right now.

Linda J. Hansen: Oh, absolutely. And as we see this in its totality regarding all of these different policies that are hurting our nation, the economic policies are central. But these policies of division—whether it's mask mandates and vaccination mandates, or whether it's dividing by color, race, ethnic group, or even by gender—all of this is really part of that playbook in terms of taking down a culture.

And now we look and these policies are hurting us so much in so many ways. I mean, just take the border. We've got people streaming in the border—no COVID test, no vaccination, sometimes no ID, no family here, but they're at risk for human trafficking. They're being sent all over the country. So every town becomes a border town. That hurts the economies of these towns. It hurts the economies of the individuals impacted. Yet that just goes on and on and on. Right now we're looking at mandating more restrictions for the taxpaying American citizens. This is ridiculous and not a way to build a prosperous country.

Steve Moore: Well, and you know what's so frustrating to me is, I played a pretty big role in advocating against all of these business closures and stay-at-home orders and other lockdowns. Number one, they were infringements on our basic freedoms as Americans, but also incredibly harmful to our economy—and with very little, if any, health benefits. It was one thing to put in place these lockdowns a year ago when we were still discovering what was going on with COVID. But now we have the evidence that lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and other government restrictions really had very little effect.

They were completely ineffective. And yet here we go. We're going to do the same thing again. Hopefully I'm wrong about that. But you've got a lot of liberal governors and mayors and a President of the United States who seem to be in favor of lockdowns. Politicians love to exert control over our lives.

And when you take into account what they're doing in terms of our personal freedoms, and then you look at the massive shift of expenditures away from workers and businesses to the government—by the way, the only way the government can give someone $100 is to take $100 from someone else. There's no magic money here. The government is no longer our servant; government has now become our master.

Linda J. Hansen: Absolutely. And as we look at how small businesses have been shut down and families impacted, the increase in wealth of these big businesses has really created an oligarchy of sorts in our nation. We see it with big tech. We see it with big business. And I know that there are millions of Americans who are starting to wake up and push back in a variety of ways—whether it's in what they're choosing as their investments, where they send their kids to school, or how they're getting involved in their local communities.

More people are stepping up to be involved at the local level, which is truly important because all politics are local. There’s nothing more local than where you go to work, where your kids go to school. It has to bubble up in order for us to change this country. We absolutely have to educate, engage, and activate grassroots activists. Help them understand that what's being fed through mainstream media is a lie.

It is actually a lie.

Steve Moore: Well, you know, when I first met you, Linda, which was 10 or 12 years ago, you got me engaged in the Tea Party movement, which really changed America in a very positive way. It led to sweeping reforms. We were able to stop—well, not all, but many—of the most egregious government power grabs. That was an amazing accomplishment. Everyday citizens—housewives, construction workers, bus drivers, school teachers—were just fed up with what the government was doing and made significant change.

Back then, Obama was proposing about $900 billion of so-called stimulus. Today, Biden is proposing $5 trillion. My God, Joe Biden makes Barack Obama look like Ronald Reagan. These people are radical. They are crazy. They are going to bring the country to the brink of a fiscal cliff that we all crash over if we don't stop them. I really do believe there's more of us than there are of them.

I think that even some of my more liberal friends—people who voted for Joe Biden—are just aghast at what's happening. They can't understand why these politicians think that spending trillions of dollars on failed programs like massive unemployment benefits and expanding Medicare and Medicaid is going to make our country rich. It's not. It's going to make us significantly poorer. And we're going to spend not years, but decades, regretting these decisions if we don't stop them.

Now, the Democrats are trying to do this with only Democratic votes. They have 50 Democrats in the Senate and maybe a five- or six-seat majority in the House. And they're going to try to steamroll this through Congress. They think we will be sycophants as citizens. We'll just sit back and let this happen.

I'm not going to let it happen. I hope you and all the people listening to the show will rise up—peacefully, of course—and protest. It's our First Amendment right to protest against the grievances of government, to take to the streets and be spokesmen and spokeswomen for the freedom movement.

We need it so badly right now.

Linda J. Hansen: We really do. I just watched an incredible video this morning of millions of people marching in France—peacefully marching against lockdown mandates and vaccine mandates. It was amazing. And I think in America, people have been so conditioned to be afraid to speak up.

But there are more of us than there are of them. We need to speak up. You mentioned that we need to let our voices be heard. Listeners need to contact their representatives, their elected officials at all levels of government—but especially right now at the federal level—as we look at these spending increases. Tell them no to increasing the debt ceiling. Tell them no to programs that increase the debt on future generations and topple our nation’s economy.

But also, what would you tell business owners about how they should explain all this to their employees? Because people are afraid to talk about politics in the workplace. And I keep telling them—it’s not politics. It’s policy. It’s economics. It’s not Republican or Democrat, red or blue. It’s about economic prosperity and a nation that needs to survive and thrive.

Steve Moore: Loving our country and standing up for it—this is the least our business leaders can do.

Think of what we all owe to our country and our freedoms. I despair sometimes when I see people willing to give away the freedoms that generations of Americans have fought so hard to preserve. And for us to just voluntarily surrender those freedoms to politicians—I don’t care if they’re Republicans or Democrats—they’re taking power away from us and arrogating that power to themselves.

One thing small businesses really need to be aware of is this new death tax that Biden wants to impose. For the first time in 100 years, we would tax people on their capital gains from the time an asset was bought. So let’s say your father bought a farm for $300,000 and built it up to be worth $5 million. As soon as he dies, the heirs are going to have to pay $4 million in death tax.

That means people will have to sell their family-owned businesses, ranches, and farms just to pay the tax. Over time, more and more of our assets and businesses will be owned by the government—not families. People don’t build businesses just to sell them to the state. They want to leave a legacy.

Linda J. Hansen: Exactly. People build up their businesses to leave an economic and family legacy. Now the government, with this death tax proposal, is threatening to take that away. This is unsurpassed in the amount they’re asking.

Steve Moore: It could be as much as a 40% federal tax. In many states, the death tax can be another 15–18%. That means the government could take over half of someone’s lifetime earnings. And don’t forget—these are people who’ve spent a lifetime paying taxes. Sales tax, property tax, payroll tax, income tax, state tax, gas tax… you spend your whole life paying taxes, and then when you die, the government wants to take half of what you’ve built. Even Russia and Sweden don’t do that.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, well, we definitely need to stand up against that.

So as we look at how we can empower employers and individuals—that is one thing they need to learn more about and stand up against. They can find more information from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity newsletter at CommitteeToUnleashProsperity.com. You’ve written about the debt ceiling, the infrastructure package, and more there.

Also, FreedomWorks.org has a lot of your other work. 

Steve Moore: And don’t forget about Prosperity 101, which is so important for educating people on personal finance and economics. A lot of this is common sense, but it’s put in a very understandable way.

I hope people will go to that website, get the documents, and spread the word. It's not just enough to educate yourself. Tell your neighbors, your friends—even if they disagree with you, even if they voted Democrat or for Joe Biden, and didn’t like Trump. Ask them: Are you for this? Are you for trillions more in debt? Are you for 10% inflation rates? Are you for massive government spending programs that are paying people not to work?

I could go on and on.

But the point is, I think once people— we’re a country of people who have a lot of common sense—when they see the facts, I think the facts will change their minds.

Linda J. Hansen: I think that's a really good point. And thank you for bringing up Prosperity 101 again, because as the listeners may not know, I have a book that you contributed to—so thank you. It's Prosperity 101: Job Security Through Business Prosperity, The Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck.

We really help people understand the basic freedoms that we have in America and why they're so essential to our economic prosperity—and what we need to do to protect those freedoms and our ability to be prosperous. Along with that, I have an online course, a 12-lesson online course. And I know you and I will go anywhere, speak to anyone, do anything we can to get this message out. So thank you, Steve, for bringing that up and for all you do to help our country. We’re just so grateful for your voice. Continue on in the good fight.

And if people want to reach you, they can go to the Committee to Unleash Prosperity or FreedomWorks.org, correct?

Steve Moore: That's right. And if they want to get our hotline—what we call our Prosperity Hotline—it’s free. All you have to do is just sign up for it and we’ll get it to you first thing every morning, five mornings a week.

And thank you for your voice, Linda. You know, as I said, I first met you during the uprising when Obama was president. We saw these trillions of dollars being misspent. And now we have a crisis that's significantly worse with respect to our political leadership. The Pelosi-Schumer-Biden team is dangerous—dangerous to our freedom and our economic health. So you can’t be a pacifist right now, folks. You have to be engaged and involved, and you have to have a loud voice.

And we’ve seen it. Linda, I remember when you said, “Hey, we’re going to flip Wisconsin. We’re going to make Wisconsin a red state.” And I rolled my eyes… and sure enough, it happened. We got really good leadership in Wisconsin. That’s going to happen. I think we could see that kind of flipping in eight or ten or twelve states across the country—in Nevada, in New Mexico, in New Hampshire, in Arizona… even Illinois, my home state—one of the bluest states. I think the people are so upset with what's going on there. And the highest-taxed states like New York? I think New York could see significant change.

Obviously, New York and New Jersey have been the most mismanaged states in the country. So there’s something brewing in America. And we just need to channel that energy in a positive way to, as you said, take back our country and make America great again.

I mean, we were great under Trump. We had the most incredible policies in place. And I really worry that now we’re moving in the wrong direction.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, I agree. And when we really first met about 13, 14 years ago—13 years ago now—seeing the impact of the grassroots activists was powerful. So to all of our listeners, I say: pick one thing. You can’t do everything.

Not everyone is going to be a Steve Moore or a Linda Hansen or a full-time volunteer. But you can do one thing. You can call your representative. You can educate your neighbor or your children. You can do one thing. You can attend a school board meeting. You can attend a city council meeting. You can do one thing. So figure out what you can do as a grassroots citizen to protect your rights as an American citizen.

And don’t forget to read the Constitution. Get our book Prosperity 101. Follow the Committee to Unleash Prosperity hotline. Educate yourself so you can help educate others and stand up for your freedom.

So thank you, Steve. Thank you so much.

Steve Moore: Thank you, Linda. We appreciate it.

Linda J. Hansen: Thank you. Thank you again for listening to the Prosperity 101 podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share, and leave a great review. Don’t forget to visit Prosperity101.com to access the entire podcast library, to order my newest book Job Security Through Business Prosperity: The Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck, or to enroll you or your employees in the Break Room Economics online course.

You can also receive the free e-book 10 Tips for Helping Employees Understand How Public Policy Affects Their Paychecks. Freedom is never free. Understanding the foundations of prosperity and the policies of prosperity will help you protect prosperity as you become informed, involved, and impactful. Special thanks to our sponsors, Mathews Archery, Inc. and Wisconsin Stamping & Manufacturing. Please contact us today at Prosperity101.com to let us know how we can serve you. Thank you.