Over Taking and Under Giving: The Big Government Food Chain of Dollars – with Steve Moore [Ep. 66]

Linda J Hansen: Thank you so much for joining us.  I have a very special guest, one who has been a repeat guest because he is one of our favorite guests and Steve Moore is with me today.  Steve is an advisor to Prosperity 101.  He has been with me since the beginning and has also been a contributing writer to some of the books and resources.  Steve is very involved economically with so many organizations at the national level including he has been an advisor to the White House.  He is also one of the founders of Committee to Unleash Prosperity.  He is the chairman of the Task Force on Economic Revival with FreedomWorks.  He’s on a temporary leave of absence but serves as Distinguished Visiting Fellow for Project for Economic Growth at the Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity with the Heritage Foundation and he’s a former economics writer and member of the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal.  So with that I’d like to welcome you Steve.  Thank you for being here again.

Steve Moore: Thank you for having me, Linda.

Linda: It’s always great to have you.  You’re been a longtime friend, longtime advisor and I really appreciate all your wisdom, your sense of humor, and your willingness to spend time with us today.  

So I thought the listeners would really like to hear from you regarding so many things that have happened since our last interview which was before the election, I believe.  And we’ve watched as our economy just could be set for a free fall here with these new policies from the Biden administration and everything that’s happening at the border.  I would just like you to start, maybe start with the Covid relief bill and how that’s affecting our economy and how it will affect businesses and families across our country.

Steve: Well, I think I’ll start by saying I think that we’ve lived through in the last year one of the most horrendous, costliest errors in the history of the United States in terms of the locking down of our economy and the closing of our businesses and restaurants, schools and churches.  This was bad public health.  It was horrific for our economy.  It was a violation of our basic constitutional rights and I’m dismayed that there are still people…I mean it’s one thing to lock down our economy a year ago in March and April when we didn’t quite know what was going on with this virus and so on, but a year later you still have people defending the policy which was truly a catastrophe and the cost of this will go on for decades and decades, not just in terms of the economic costs, but the damage we’ve done to our children.  This was one of the greatest episodes of national child abuse in the history of the country and I see it in my own kids who’ve really been deprived of a year of being able to interact with their friends, or be involved in sports or go to school.  The development of our kids has really been stunted by this unnecessarily because we’ve always knew this was an old person’s disease.  The idea of keeping kids out of school to deal with the virus would be like keeping kids out of school to prevent Alzheimer’s.  It was a very, very misguided policy.  

And in terms of economic costs, they were, of course, gigantic, in the many trillions of dollars.  The good news is though, we’re speaking towards the end of March, by the end of April and certainly by May, everyone who wants the vaccine will have it and so that changes everything.  Thank you, Donald Trump, for Operation Warp Speed which is really what gave us the vaccine much faster than we would have.  If Joe Biden had been President, I don’t believe there’s any doubt that we would not have a vaccine by now.  That’s all good news.  

The bad news is we are… all of this spending that we’re doing does really not have anything to do with Covid.  It’s basically just the Bernie Sanders wish list of thirty years of pent up demand for more and more government spending.  It’s quite negative for the economy.  We believe that, for example, the extent of unemployment benefits, the higher food stamp benefits, the increased rental assistance, the increased Medicaid, all of this is just giving people more and more money for not working and that’s very negative.  We estimate that there will be about six million fewer Americans working because so many millions of Americans will make more money for not working than going back on the job and that is bad for society; it’s bad for the businesses; it’s bad for workers. There’s dignity in work.  There’s no dignity in getting a check from the government.

I’m really aghast that these mistakes are being made and I think unfortunately we will pay a high price for them.  The spending has to be stopped.  As we speak there’s a new proposal for two to three trillion dollars for infrastructure and green energy programs and that is a complete waste of money.  Bills have to be paid and debts have to be repaid.  This isn’t free money.  I mean my son said, “I can’t wait to get my free $1400 check.”  Yeah, you got a check for $1400, but guess what?  You are going to have to pay $10,000 in debt repayment to get this $1400 check.  Does that sound like a good idea to you?

Linda: Not only that, I look at the price of gas at the pump.  I look at increased regulatory costs.  I look at various compliance costs that businesses have to pay, everything that is passed on to the consumer as we move forward.  It’s just a multi-level taxation that occurs to the American citizens but they just don’t realize that it’s their own money that has to fund any money that comes back to them.

Steve: Yeah, because the government doesn’t produce anything.  The only way, Linda, that the government can give you $1000 is to take a $1000 from me or someone else. (Chuckles)

Linda: Right. [Crosstalk]  I saw a quote the other day that it not really all that compassionate to give away money you didn’t earn, to someone who doesn’t work for it.

Steve: That’s really true and that’s what we’re doing.  It really is going to create a dependency culture and in fact maybe that’s the objective here.  The left wants people to be dependent on government.  And that’s a really, if that’s true, it’s a very insidious thing.  It saps people of their natural talents and energies and ambitions.  You know, my mom used to say—she had a lot of just truisms—but you never do something for someone that they could do themselves.  

Linda: Exactly.

Steve: You’re not helping them if they can do it themselves.  And so we’re doing that.  We have a nanny state here.  The government’s going to take care of every one of your needs.  That’s not a very wise philosophy.

Linda: Right.  It’s not a wise philosophy and for people who get into that dependency mode, the one thing about being dependent is that you are also then able to be controlled and I think that that is a lot of the base here.  People want power over the citizens.  It is never wise to give that up.  We have been a nation founded on individual liberty, private property rights, individual liberty, free-speech rights, Second Amendment rights, freedom of assembly—all of these rights that we have that we’ve taken for granted in some ways in the United States, but they are all under assault right now.  Our economic freedom is under assault with this big government.  It’s a multi-pronged approach to really create more power over the American citizens.

Steve: The government becomes your master.  That’s not something we want as free people.

Linda: Right.  Government elected officials should be our servants not our masters. (Chuckles)

Steve: Right.

Linda: Right and we need to remember that as individuals.  

You have talked a little bit about this relief bill.  What are some of the other things that we see?  I know that on some other episodes we’ve talked a little bit about the PRO Act, the one talking about the union organization, forced union memberships.  We’ve talked about the Equality Act a little bit.  That’s a whole other round that will cost businesses so much money and so much hardship, I should say.  And then we have HR-1, the For the People Act that is now over in the Senate about the voting rights.  There are so many attempts to really overturn everything about the American system of government and our economy, our culture.  What would you say would be the next thing that businesses should really pay attention to?

Steve: You know, doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that Joe Biden was calling for a unity agenda.  What a joke that is. This is a steam roller that Democrats have.  They are drunk with power right now.  They are trying to transform America.  They don’t like America as it is so they want to transform it.  It’s a very dangerous time; it’s a really dangerous time for our country.  We have to get rid of these people.  (Chuckles)  We have to remove them from office as quickly as possible.  And so if you add the one trillion dollars that was already in the pipeline from the last Covid Relief bill that Trump signed before he left office.  And then we add a two trillion a few weeks after that over Biden.  And they announced a two to three trillion dollar bill on top of that. And they said it might go up to four trillion.   You are talking about six of seven trillion dollars.  These are numbers that will bankrupt our country and will cause severe damage to us for a long, long, long time.  And so the problem is that we have…our system of government is based on checks and balances, the protection of the minority, whether the minority of your skin or the minority of your viewpoint.  That is really one of the hallmarks of America.  It is not majority rule.  It’s a republic, not a democracy.  In fact I always get angry when delegates say, “This is our [unintelligible] democracy.”  We’re not a democracy.  We have a representative form of government that protects the rights of the minority.  You know when you’re in the majority you feel like, oh, do they want a system when the Republicans take the majority they can just trample on the Democrats? No, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.  

And so other things that are coming down the pike that are frightening to me is the two trillion dollar tax increase which will include a higher capital gains tax, a higher death tax, a higher payroll taxes, higher smaller business taxes.  They’re talking about a new thing where they want to put a device on your car to monitor how much you travel, how many miles you travel, where you go, and then they want to tax you on how many miles you travel.  They said we’re going to do this instead of the gas tax.  I’m like, no; they’re going to tax…that’s coming and going, tax us to the gas station and then from the gas station.  And these taxes keep going on and on and they’re not only going to be on people who make a half a million dollars because there’s not enough of those people to get all the money that they’re going to need so they’re going to come after you, and me and everyone else.  

I think of a couple of other things I really worry about is the, you mentioned the suspension of the right-to-work laws that are in 26 or 27 states which basically say you can’t compel someone to join a union against their will.  That seems like a very sensible concept.  It’s not antiunion.  If you want to join the union, you are free to do so.  It just means you can’t force me to join the union.  This is America.  It’s a free country.  And yet they want to force tens of millions of Americans to join a union against their will.  And they keep saying, “Well, this is in their interest.”  Well, if it’s in their interest, why do you have to compel them to do it?

Linda: Good point.  Good point.

Steve: And then they have…I’m really worried about the election reform law which would basically get rid of voter ID laws.  You know you’ve got to have an ID for just about anything now—to cash a check, to get on an airplane, to drive a car, to go to a movie, go to a bar—you need your ID, you need your photo ID.  And yet we’re not going to have a photo ID for voting.  Of course that’s just an invitation for massive fraud.  The left calls that voter suppression to require someone to have an ID.  

These are things that do worry me.  They want to get rid of the filibuster rule that says it takes sixty votes in the Senate to pass things.  That’s one of those protections for the minority to make sure that you pass things with sixty votes, not just with fifty-one votes.  They want to get rid of that. 

They want to get rid of federalism.  We have a system that’s set up of state, local and federal government.  But federal government, as you know from your history, federal government is a creation of the states; the states are not a creation of the government, but they want to federalize and nationalize everything so states can’t compete with each other which is exactly the opposite of what our Fathers set up which is that the states should be laboratories of democracy.  That they could try different approaches to dealing with everything from crime to health care to welfare, to economic development and that states would learn best practices from the others and they don’t want that.  They want every state to be the same so that you can’t escape liberalism.  Everything is going to be left-wing.  So if you live in a state like Florida or Texas or Tennessee that has no income tax, they’re just going to keep taxing you and taxing you. If you live in states with right-to-work, they’re going to get rid of your right-to-work laws.  All of these things are meant to impose these policies on all of us no matter where we live and I’m really very concerned about that.  

Linda: Yes, and all of things come with a price tag, too, like you mentioned, increased taxation for people.  Every single time a new law is passed a new industry is born in Washington, D.C., in a sense.  There’s an entirely new industry that starts to go into motion and people who start lining up to be part of that food chain of dollars that comes through complying to that law or opposing that law.  It really promotes big government every time we do this. 

Now you had talked, too, about the taxes and the getting rid of federalism.  I understand that in some of these bills there is a provision that if states take money from the United States government in this relief package that they will not be allowed to lower taxes.  I would like you to address that.  Is that something that was misstated to me?  To not allow states to lower their taxes if they feel that’s the best way to serve their citizens?  This is a true overreach of the federal government.

Steve:  Yes.  This is in the bill.  The language says that they cannot cut taxes directly or indirectly for four years.  This is supposed to be a jobs bill.  Well, one way you can create jobs is by cutting taxes and yet they’re not letting states do that.

Linda:  I find it interesting that you said, “It’s in the bill and they can’t cut taxes directly or indirectly.”

Steve: Well, what’s happening now, Linda, is we’re all trying to figure out what that exactly means.  Nobody actually read this bill.  Yeah, I was one of the people who found this provision in this bill and I was horrified when I read it.  It was probably slipped in by some twenty-seven-year-old punk, you know, a congressional staffer and now it’s the law of the land and now we have to try to interpret what exactly does that mean.  What does it prevent states from doing?  But I’ve got to tell you that there are at least twenty governors who are mad as hell about this because they want to…they have surpluses.  They want to cut their taxes; they want to make their states as competitive as possible, not just to compete with other states, but to compete against Germany and Russia and China and these other countries.  We need to make sure we have a very pro-growth environment.  And so we’re trying, now that the left has kind of back-tracked on this, saying, “Well, we don’t mean you can’t cut any taxes,” but it’s murky.  This will probably be in court for awhile before we figure out what exactly that means.

Linda: Well, thank you so much for finding that, for bringing it to everyone’s attention, but then also that is part of the reason that I wanted you to clarify that because people have said different things about that and I figured if I go to you you’ll know exactly what  this means for all of [Crosstalk]

Steve: My objective, one of my missions right now because Washington is lost.  Right?  We’re not…These are a bunch of left-wing people who…I don’t think Joe Biden’s reading the scripts.  Right?  The White House is being run by left-wing ideologues which, by the way, remember he said, “I’m not going to be like Bernie Sanders.  This is going to be the Biden administration.”  Right now I think he’s to the left of Bernie Sanders.  This is really radical stuff.  I think most people who voted for Joe Biden had no idea what they were in for.  A lot of people voted for Joe Biden because they didn’t like Trump’s behavior or this or that.  They thought they were getting lunch-bucket Joe, but they’re not getting lunch-bucket Joe, we’re getting the most Stalinistic policies we’ve seen in this country, maybe in our history, and so it’s a time…Republicans need to stand up and I think they need to provide very sound and sensible and populist alternatives to what… you know, we want to drain the swamp; they want to replenish the swamp.  That’s what they’re doing.  They’re giving all of the power to the swamp.  That’s really dispiriting. 

The Wall Street Journal had a story today, in today’s Wall Street Journal, that just talks about how this is a new philosophy that government is going to…that government is a force for good and government is going to help us in everything we do.  It’s going to rebuild our economy, you know, tell us what time we go to bed; it’s going to provide everything we have.  As Ronald Reagan used to say, “A government that’s big enough to give us everything you want is big enough to take everything you’ve got.”  And that’s what we need to really be so worried about is this awesome power grab.  I mean it’s almost, it’s kind of impressive the audacity of this.  They actually think they can get away with it and they may well be able to.  I worry that when you surrender these rights and you surrender your money and you surrender your liberties, it’s very difficult to get them back.

Linda: Absolutely.  And I think Ronald Reagan also said that basically the only thing permanent is a temporary government program.  That’s not an exact quote.  Government never likes to back track control or power or incoming money for a program.  There are very little temporary government programs as we’ve seen over and over again.  

You know you were mentioning the tax policies, too, and I think of our good, our mutual friend Art Laffer, Dr. Arthur Laffer, who said, “If you tax something more you get less of it; if you tax something less, you get more of it.”  And so if we want more prosperity for citizens, to most thinking people, it is a logical outcome.  And to business owners, they understand that if they are taxed more, if they have a regulatory compliance cost that increased, if they are mandated with a minimum wage hike, all these things come into their bottom line and they can’t provide jobs the same way.  Maybe you could even address the minimum wage issue, where we are with that right now in terms of federal legislation.

Steve: Well, it’s a little stalled right now.  The Democrats are making a big push for it and so we’ll see what happens, but that’s certainly high on the Democrats priority list.  One of the biggest problems…look, I’m for the highest wages we can possibly…I want the United States to have the highest waged country in the world, but it’s one thing to have a $15 minimum wage in New York or San Francisco, it’s quite another to have a $15 minimum wage in Little Rock, AR, or Jackson, MS.  You would put all of…this gets to the point I was making earlier that, so what the left wants to do is equal…they want to impose all of these policies on states like Mississippi and West Virginia and Florida and Texas and Tennessee because all the jobs are going to those places.  So you know we don’t have to imagine, “Gee, how would progressivism work?” All you have to do if you want to see how progressivism works is just go to New York and you can see; that’s progressivism and everybody’s leaving.  So…

Linda:  California.

Steve: Oh, my gosh!  Everyone’s leaving.  We can’t let people leave.  We have to force Florida to have the same policies that New York does.  So we’re going to have…if New York has to have a $15 minimum wage, then we’re going to force Florida to do that and that is simply going to cause more unemployment in Florida and it’s going to put us all at a disadvantage.  I think that we created the highest wages ever for American workers with the policies we put into place under Trump, so why don’t we let wages rise as a consequence of higher productivity, higher investment, more business formation?  You need businesses to create jobs.  You need employers to create jobs.  You need more of them.  This bill treats businesses like they’re ATM machines.  We just keep pumping money out of them.  But at some point they go bankrupt. And when they go bankrupt, all of the people lose their jobs.  I really worry about that coming down the pike.

Linda: Why I see that here in the Midwest.  You just see many, many business fold.  Actually before we close which I know you have a commitment you have to get to, but you are very familiar with the economics of the Obama administration and the years before.  Right?  And then you were closely involved, you were an advisor to President Donald Trump.  You wrote the book Trumponomics.  You were very, very involved in creating the policy that helped to bring this economic revival under the Trump years, so could you just address that a little bit?  Some of the victories of those years which I kind of often want to say to people, “So you didn’t like his tweets, but how are things going for you now?”  You know, it’s a very different environment from the Trump economic years to what we’re experiencing now and what the policies under the Biden administration will bring for the future years for businesses and families in America.

Steve: Well, first let me just say you mentioned Obama.  Joe Biden makes Obama look like Ronald Reagan.  I mean, I didn’t think we could ever get anything…I mean; he’s way to the left.  This administration is way, way to the left of where Obama was.  That gives you a sense of far off the cliff the Democratic Party has gone.  They are run by Marxists that don’t believe in free market capitalism and they don’t believe in freedom and they don’t believe in rights.  As you said at the beginning, they want to take away our First Amendment rights, our Second Amendment rights, our Fourth Amendment rights, our Ninth Amendment rights, our Tenth Amendment rights.  And it’s more government control because that’s what left liberals want to do. They want to control what you can and can’t do.

And so it’s a scary time we’re living in and I’m very discouraged by the fact that young people seem to think this is a good thing.  We have paid a high price in our country for letting the left run our schools and our cultural institutions and they are being indoctrinated with a very, very misguided overall philosophy of freedom and liberty and so we’ve got to take back our schools and we can’t wait another day.  We have to privatize our schools.  We have to get kids out of those government schools and I’m not even so sure …I mean, we had schools closed down for a long time.  I wish we’d just said, “Let’s give everybody…get a voucher and they can just go to any school they want to and do away with teachers’ unions,” which by the way have expose themselves as the evil empire in America.  They don’t want to teach; they just want to collect money and lobby for liberal policies.  And when we see these teachers’ unions and the things that they say, we’re like, “These are the people that are teaching our kids.  Oh, my God!  What are we doing?”  And so…

Linda:  I just wanted to point out.  I was noticing yesterday.  I was reading that teachers in San Diego were being sent to teach the children, the illegal migrant children, the underage children, which of course we care about all of the children.  That’s true, but they weren’t being allowed to teach American citizens.

Steve: It is interesting to me that…you know I give lectures on college campuses or to high school groups.  The people will always come up to me afterwards because I talk about capitalism versus socialism and it’s people who’ve lived under socialist systems who always come over to me and say, “I don’t understand Americans.  I came here to get away from government-controlled health care and government-controlled education and government-controlled economy” and yet here I come and we’re emulating the policies of these failed countries.  Do we really want to be Venezuela?  Or Cuba?  Or East Germany? Because those kinds of policies we are moving rapidly toward.  So it’s a…a siren alarm should be going off.  This is a time when we all have to step up as patriots.  Linda, you were very involved in the, remember the Tea Party movement back when we really did take back our country.  It was what, in 2000—?

Linda: 10.  2008 to 2010.  Cycle in there.  It was 2010.

Steve: People rose up and that is our rights as citizens.  By the way they even want to take those rights away from us.  They don’t want us to be able to petition our government.  So we have to do that though.  We really do if we want to take back our country and get back to the whole idea of America first.  I always loved that idea.  We want to put our workers first, our businesses first, our country first and I don’t think these people in Washington want to do that.  They want to put China and Japan and all these other countries first and …

Linda:  It’s really globalist versus…I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to interrupt you.  It’s really globalist versus populist in a sense.  It’s really a global…

Steve:  That’s right.  It’s a global government.

Linda: A global government…

Steve: [Crosstalk] to control everything and then they want like the United Nation everybody lives this kind of Orwellian single state where everybody’s controlled by a handful of very smart politicians who went to Harvard [Unintelligible] school of economics where they’re going to tell you what’s best for you.  It’s kind of a 1984 environment we’re living in.  But I do feel strongly that people are…I see it already…people are already rebelling against this, rebelling in a peaceful way.  Right?  They’re the ones who loot and burn and are involved in arson and shoot…

Linda: Right. The left.  Right.

Steve: They are—the left.  We are the ones who have peaceful assembly, but we need to have our voices heard and we can; we will.  I think…but this is a regime that will not last long because Americans, we have freedom living in our DNA.  I really believe that.

Linda: We do and I just want to really thank you for always standing up for that freedom and that economic freedom and just the constitutional freedoms that we have.

Before we close I do want to just remind people of some of the amazing things that came out of the Trump economic plans because whether you want to…whether you liked Donald Trump or you didn’t, you have to look and say this economy was booming under Donald Trump.  

Steve: And the people who did the best were the people who forgot him.  That was the other thing.  

Linda: Exactly.

Steve: It was the rising tide that lifted all boats.  It was…he had the lowest poverty rate.

One of the things that I think Trump was really proud of was when I showed him the new poverty numbers that had come out.  We had the lowest poverty rate in the history of the United States, for every group: for women, for Blacks, for Hispanics, for Asians, for LGBTQ, for this group, for that group.  Everybody had less poverty, which is really an amazing accomplishment because one way you can judge a policy is how does it affect the least among us and we saw them rise up, too.  And we did the tax cuts and deregulations and promoted American energy.  

That’s another one I don’t get.  Why are we shutting down our energy production?  Does that make any sense to anyone?  We’re going to …only 1% of the cars on the road are electric vehicles today.  How are the other 99% of cars going to get fuel if we aren’t producing it here?   “Oh, we’ll have to get it from the Middle East.  Oh, we’ll have to get it from Russia. We’ll have to get it from our enemies.”   I don’t care what your economic philosophy is, that doesn’t make any sense.  Why is that good for America to shut down our energy and to have to import it from countries that hate us?  That’s what we are doing right now.  We are shutting down our energy.  When you shut down your energy, you shut down your economy because energy is …

Linda: Is key.

Steve: …essential service that provides all of your …everything from this podcast we’re doing to using your cell phone to heating your home to all of everything that we have is derivative of cheap and abundant and affordable and reliable energy.  That’s now being put at risk, too.

Linda: Yeah. And we’ve seen devastation when energy supplies are inconsistent, when we don’t have a stable grid, whether it’s in California with the brown outs, the black outs, or whether what we saw in Texas this year after the frigid weather that happened there had so many Texans without power and so the fact that we had become energy independent was amazing.  It was fantastic and on day one of the Biden administration, it’s 11,000 jobs are eliminated; we’re eliminating our energy jobs, we’re… I think much of the nation, we sat with our mouths hanging open going, “Are you kidding me?  This makes no sense.”  So …

Steve: It is kind of ironic, isn’t it?  Here was probably closer to 20,000 jobs.  We don’t know exactly how many, but the Keystone pipeline is something we’ve needed for a long time and it is a vital part of our infrastructure and so, wait a minute, we’re going to spend two trillion dollars on infrastructure bill when what we need most is our energy infrastructure.  And that doesn’t cost a dime.  That didn’t cost…that was going to be paid for with private dollars.  They don’t want that infrastructure, but they want to pour two trillion dollars into windmills and solar power.  Again, it’s hard to make this stuff up.  It’s the craziness of … it’s, what’s the old saying?  Liberalism is a mental illness.  Sometimes when I hear that kind of thing, I think maybe there is a mental illness here.  Who’d support getting rid of in infrastructure project so we can use our oil and gas and get it to the reaches of the country that need it?   And then say, “Oh, no, instead we’re going to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into wind and solar power,” which is not, as Texas proved, it’s not a very reliable source of energy and all sorts of power shortages and outages if we try to go to 100% wind and solar which is what Biden says he wants to do. 

Linda: And that does not make sense and does not make for a stable grid.  And I just want to point out to the listeners, too, that when you think about America first policies.  We’ve had the media sometimes act like that’s horrible.  We’re not caring about the rest of the world.  But a strong America makes a stronger world and when we have America first policies, it helps to look at the importance of it in terms of a business.  You would never see say the CEO of a major company say, “Well, I’m going to go over here and give a lot of our incoming money to these other companies, like we give it to other countries or these other industries  that are going to in turn hurt us or not supply us as readily.  I mean they just wouldn’t do this.  It would not make any economic sense whatsoever. Yet here we have our President and our Congress making a lot of these same decisions that are not, if you looked at America as a company, or as… it just makes no sense at all.  It’s truly not about providing economic growth.  It’s about power and control and changing the whole way we have government and freedom or lack of freedom really here in America.

One last thing.  I know I keep saying that, but one last thing, the cost to the American tax payer that you see will come through this horrendous crisis at the border, the open border policies of Joe Biden, and what it’s costing the American citizen now and in the future.

Steve: Well, we do have a crisis at the border right now and you’re not going to talk to anybody who’s more pro-immigration than I am.  We would never have gotten through this last crisis had it not been for immigrants, the immigrants who were working in the kitchens and the delivery people, people who really kept our economy running, the people working in the hospitals and the people working in the nursing homes.  Such a large percentage of those were immigrants who came to this country to work hard.  So we all favor that, but you have…

Linda: Absolutely.  We’re all in favor of legal immigration.

Steve: Exactly.  [Crosstalk]  The problem is because the border has broken down, now people…we can’t have a good legal immigration system until we get our border secure.  That’s…and Trump understood that.  Trump wasn’t anti-immigration.  I saw him so many times really praising the work that immigrants do and even when we’d travel with him, he was so respectful of the workers.   He truly was…he was the man, he was the President who represented working class, blue collar America and I am so saddened by the fact that we now have a President who’s an elitist.  He thinks that…I think they thumb their nose at just patriotic Americans who want to work hard and make a better life for their family and believe in the red, white, and blue.  They think we’re bigoted.  They think that this is a systemically racist country, which we are not.  We’re the least systemically racist country on the planet.  That’s why people who are black and brown and orange and red, they all want to come here.  Why would they want to come here if we are systemically racist?  

And so this is about the future of America.  I’ll be fighting.  I know you’ll be fighting.  We need to get this word out there.  Prosperity 101.  We’ve got to get in the schools.  We’ve got to get it in the churches.  We’ve got to get it in the media.  We’ve got to get it in the movies.  We have to reeducate America.  That’s our challenge.  We fell asleep.  We let the left take over those cultural institutions.  They have now polluted the minds of people who…and now they are saying, “Oh, the people who voted for Trump need to be reprogrammed, like we’re the ones who are crazy.  I think that’s how strange and scary these times are.  

But we’ll prevail.  We always do.  Freedom always prevails.  We take these detours.  We took a detour under FDR.  We took a detour when Woodrow Wilson was president.  We took a detour when we had the Great Society which was a huge failure and now we’re actually rebuilding the Great Society.  We’re getting rid of the welfare reforms that we put in place that got people off of welfare into work.  That was…their goal is get people off of work into welfare.  I mean it’s…I’m serious.  They want people on welfare.  So it’s really, really a difficult time but, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”  But we are going to prevail.  We will.  We have to.  Because I believe Reagan was right that was…we were preordained to be the beacon of freedom and that light of freedom, that torch, is not going out.  I don’t think so, do you?

Linda: No.  I don’t think so and actually I just got chills when you said that because when I think of God’s hand upon our nation, it truly has been an amazing story and I really invite people to look back at the story of America.  And also when you’re looking at the narrative of the left and how they like to paint America as a systemically racist country or bigoted or all of these policies look back and see exactly who was fighting for freedom.  It was the conservatives.  It was the Republicans who wanted to give Blacks the right to vote, who wanted to give women the right to vote.  It’s not to say that we didn’t have issues in our country that needed to be fixed and resolved, but over the years we’ve just tried to make them better and better and, like you said, we’re going a little bit backwards now but we need to stand for freedom.  

I invite everyone please to make use of the Prosperity 101 resources, whether it’s the book that we have, Prosperity 101: Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck, or Steve has written so many great books and you can access those if you just go to either freedomworks.org.  You can see his bio and some of the things he does.  You can go to committeetounleashprosperity.com and you can read more there.  But Steve has put out together with others the “Rich States, Poor States Report” that comes out.   How often does that get released?

Steve: Every year.  We’ve done it for thirteen years now and Utah has come out number one every year.  The idea is to lower your taxes, lower your regulation, have right-to-work laws, balance your budgets, the stuff that’s common sense.  Do that and you will have a flourishing economy.  Right now you’ve got all these states like New Year and California and Illinois and New Jersey and Connecticut that are really melted down because of bad leadership and bad laws.  We know what works on the state level.  We know what works on the national level.  We’ve got to get back to these very simple pro-growth, pro-freedom ideas because we want a better future for everyone.  You and I are not going to pay the price for this.  We’ll be in our graves.  It’s our kids and grandkids truly that are going to pay the price for what we’re doing today because it’s going to take fifty years to pay off all this incredible, wasteful spending we’re doing right now.

Linda: Well thank you for being a voice for upcoming generations.  Thank you for being a voice for our country and the freedoms that our Constitution provides.  I really respect your work; I love working with you and love having you as my friend and advisor.  

Steve:  Me, too, Linda.

Linda: Thank you so much, Steve.

Steve: Thank you.  Have a good one.  Bye.