California Congressman Tom McClintock telephone interview 06-04-09
Congressman McClintock represents the 4th District of California and was in Washington D.C. when he called me to conduct my scheduled interview.
65% of the targeted people in Obama's "very wealthy" tax bracket are actually small business owners. How are these small business owners supposed to survive this recession while Obama guarantees to raise all their taxes in 2010?
"They're not. A lot of these businesses are hanging on by their fingernails as it is, in this most difficult economy. The last thing that you want to do in a recession is to raise taxes. Adam Smith said that raising taxes made about as much sense as a shopkeeper raising his prices in response to a sales slump. California just proved that conclusively when it imposed the biggest tax increase by any state in American history. $13 billion dollars of tax increases effective April 1st. One of the principal parts of that tax increase was a 13% increase in California's state sales tax, by a penny on the dollar. In the months before those state increases took effect, sales tax revenues were down 19% year over year. That's what the recession did to our sales tax revenues. The tax increase took effect on April 1st. At the end of April our sales tax revenues were down 51%. 19% of that was the recession. The rest of that 51% drop in California sales tax revenue was because of the damage that the sales tax increase did to retail sales in California. The tax increases didn't close the budget gap, the tax increases made that budget gap worse. And now we want to do the same thing to our country? I don't think so".
Everything that you just explained to me is very basic. Any person who understands basic math or the fundamentals of basic taxes should know that. I don't understand why the federal government thinks that raising taxes during a recession is a good idea.
"It's true, it's common sense. Like I pointed out, shopkeepers don't raise their prices when their sales drop, they slash their prices, they hold sales, they reduce the costs when their sales go down. This administration in Washington and the Schwarzenegger administration in Sacramento did exactly the opposite. It not only defies basic economics, it defies any semblance of common sense".
Do you think Obama and his administration should forgo forcing the Universal Health Care and Cap and Trade Bills onto the American tax payers during this recession, to let us recover?
"Perhaps he (Obama) would like to ask the American tax payers, 'what do you think about paying an extra $2500 a year on your electricity bill?', because that's essentially what the cap and tax bill will cost you as an average consumer. These are nearly a trillion dollars of new taxes on energy producers that are gonna get passed onto us as the consumers through higher prices. In fact, that's true of any business tax. Businesses do not pay business taxes. There are only one of three ways business taxes can possibly be paid. One, is by us as consumers through higher prices and that's where you're gonna see their (the Democrats) cap and tax burden hit. The two other ways are that you also pay the taxes as employees, through lower wages, or you can also pay business taxes as investors, through lower earnings. Those are the only three ways a business tax can be paid. In respect to the government takeover of our health care system, ask anybody from Canada or Britain what they've had to go through once government bureaucrats are given the power to tell them what treatments they may have, and when they may receive them. The waiting lists in Canada and Britain, which is just a natural consequence of bureaucracy, are killing people all across those countries, and sending an exodus of Canadians and Britains to America to get decent care. Now if we are going to wreck America's system, where are we going to go to escape government controlled health care? Why would we want to put the same people who run the DMV, and the post office, and the TSA in charge of our doctor's offices? Universal health care implies that everyone is getting health care. That's not the case. People are being denied health care left and right. If you are too old,you no longer get it. The bureaucrats make the decision over whether you're gonna be treated, and when you are going to be treated, when they can fit you in. The nice thing about the American system, as chaotic as it is, it's still based on competition. If one health insurance company keeps you waiting too long, you can move to another. If you have the freedom to actually own your own health plan. The problem we have in America is that unless you are self employed, you don't own your own health care. Either the govt owns it or your employer owns it for you. If you don't own it, you can't control it. We need to get back to a system, and we can do that through the use of simple tax credits that would be within the reach of every American family. At least with a basic health plan, they can choose, they will own, and they can change, if it fails to serve their needs."
From my perspective, this administration is naive. They could just look at Spain and see what their version of Cap and Trade did to them, as well as look at Europe to see what their health care systems have done to their health industry.
"Or they could look at how a similar program, how the AB32
( http://www.climatechange.c
is systematically shutting down entire sectors of California's economy. Agriculture, energy production, cargo and passenger transportation, baking, distilling, construction, are all being systematically shut down by AB32, which is simply a form of this administration's proposal".
California residents already pay the highest income tax and sales tax in the country, why doesn't the state of California, actually, why doesn't the federal govt follow the pattern of Texas Gov Rick Perry, and the state of Texas? Which, at the same time, lowered it's taxes and has spent more money on border security.
" That's what we found in a recessionary economy, reducing taxes actually increases your revenues. Reducing the burdens on productivity actually increases productivity. That's something else that shouldn't be a big surprise to anyone and yet this government simply can not get it through it's thick skull, that's simply the way the world works. To understand what you can do, look back at California's own history a generation ago, in the early 1960's. We were paying about half the taxes per capita and yet California could boast of the finest highway system in the world. We had the finest public school system in the country, we were offering a free university education to every Californian who wanted one. We were producing electricity and water so cheaply that many communities didn't bother to measure the stuff. The only thing that has truly changed between those days and these days is public policy."
"In the 1970's we bureaucratized, we unionized and we centralized our service delivery system, which is simply and inherently, an efficient way of managing human institutions. Now today we face a very strange bureaucratic paradox. Despite record levels of spending and record levels of borrowing, somehow we can't produce a decent school system, or protect our families from predators, by locking up prisoners, or build a decent highway system. That is a management problem, that is not the fault of the taxpayers for not paying enough taxes."
Why isn't the state of California doing more to stop the problem of illegal immigration? It costs the state of California over $11 billion dollars a year on illegal immigrants. Shouldn't that $11 billion dollars, be used for the legal resident taxpayers of California instead?
"Of course it should and Arnold Schwarzenegger has utterly failed at his responsibilities as Governor to address that issue. And it's true that the federal government's principal responsibility is to protect the integrity of our borders, and it's true that George Bush completely abandoned that responsibility and presided over the biggest illegal immigration invasion in our nation's history. A trend that this administration shows absolutely no interest in addressing as well. But, there is a lot that the states could do then on their own and you only need to look across the border to Arizona, which several years ago, placed a requirement that every employer, before hiring an employee, had to check that employee's residency through E-Verify, which is about as simple as running a credit card through a scanner. You simply provide the name and the social security number and the federal government does an instant match on that. That has reduced the employment of illegal immigrants to practically zero, which by the way is the federal law. It is illegal to hire an illegal immigrant, that was the whole thrust of the 1986 Immigration Act, that legalized the presence of, what was then a population of about 3 million illegal aliens in the country. The deal was, we'll legalize everybody who's here now but then we're gonna actually secure our borders and prohibit the hiring of illegal aliens. Well, we legalized that population but we failed to do anything to secure our borders or to enforce the anti-employment law. The states that have done that, have had dramatic success. Arnold Schwarzenegger could have imposed that by Executive Order, but he's refused to do so for years despite repeated calls to do so."
Why did Janet Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security, order the halt of all immigration raids by federal authorities?
"I think, because they (Democrats) want to encourage illegal immigration, because they see that as a huge voting population. Our immigration laws were not written to keep people out. Our immigration laws were written to assure that as immigrants come to America, they come here in order to become American. That they acquire a common language, a common culture, and a common appreciation of American legal traditions and American constitutional principles. Illegal immigration undermines that entire foundation by which a nation of immigrants can be built. I think what they (Democrats) are actively seeking to do is to encourage the mass migration of a population that has not assimilated into American society, that has not shared those American beliefs, in limited government, in individual freedom. And I think the principle reason is because many of today's ruling Democrats don't believe in those American concepts of limited government and individual freedom."
I just wrote a piece on what you said last night. I'm glad people will now know, that I'm not a "conspiracy theorist" per se.
"It's not a conspiracy theory, its actual politicians acting in their
self interest. And by so doing, acting directly contrary to the
interests of our nation. The good news is that there is a huge silent
majority of Americans who in the past, have not paid a lot of attention
to politics because they felt they haven't needed to. You have a lot to
do to run your life. You got to get up in the morning, get the kids
ready for school, you've got to get to work on time, you've got to pick
up the kids from school, get them to soccer practice, stop at the
grocery store, stop at the dry cleaners, get dinner ready, then turn
around,
and do that all again, the next morning. That doesn't leave a lot of
time for people to spend their time and attention on politics until
things get bad enough that they begin to sense that their country is in
trouble. That's when they begin focusing enormous amounts of their time
and attention on politics. They start thinking these things through
very carefully and they start making very good decisions. That's how
democracies get themselves out of trouble. I think we are seeing that
occur now in this era of American history. I think people are beginning
to sense that things are getting seriously off track. I mean, today we
have the President of the United States traveling the middle east with
an appeasement policy straight out of Neville Chamberlain's playbook."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wi
"I hope people look at that and look at all the other developments. The government takeover of our banks, the government takeover of the automobile manufacturers and automobile dealerships, and now their attempt to takeover our health care system. People are starting to become very seriously concerned about the future and that's when I think you're gonna see them start to set things right. As bad as the Jimmy Carter years were to live through, and people forget we had double digit unemployment, and double digit inflation, and 21% interest rates, and mile long lines around gas stations, and American embassies seized with impunity,and an American military so badly weakened, it could not even stage a simple rescue mission. Those four years, ultimately produced 8 years of Ronald Reagan. You look back on that now, and that's a fair trade."
Do you think the Stimulus Bill was actually a bill to help the economy? Or a bill disguised to help the Democrats, especially Obama, get their payoffs completed and their liberal pet projects done?
"Of course it (the Stimulus Bill) does not help the economy. A govt cannot inject a single dollar into the economy, that is not first taken out of that same economy. That entire policy is based on the assumption that if you take a dollar from Peter and give it to Paul and Paul's got another extra dollar to spend, he's gonna spend it and that dollar is gonna ripple through the economy. Well that's all well and good, but they forget the other half of that equation, Peter now has one less dollar to spend in that same economy. On paper that equation nets to zero. In practice, it nets to much less than zero because we're shifting huge amounts of capital from investments that had been made by Peter, based upon economic considerations to investments being made by politicians, strictly on political calculations. That is not a very productive pursuit. And that's why an $800 billion dollar stimulus package by the president's own calculations, is gonna create about 4 million jobs at most. That comes to $200,000 per job. And by the way, if you haven't noticed, they are all government jobs."
How does ACORN, which Obama had worked for in the past and is currently being investigated in over 21 states for voter fraud, be given a Stimulus Bill, tax payer gift of nearly $6 billion dollars?
"That's what politicians do. They reward their friends, they punish their enemies. ACORN was a moving force behind the democratic registrations, and 'get out the vote' efforts. It (Acorn) is now under indictment in several states for voter fraud, including right next door in Nevada. The Obama administration is rewarding them for political services rendered. I can't put it more bluntly or clearer than that.That's why the American founders believed in limiting our government. Because they knew that politicians often act contrary to the public interest when it's in their own political self interest to do so and that the best way to contain the damage they do, is to limit their power to only those things that are directly necessary to protect our freedom, our liberty, and our sovereignty."
Is the current administration and the Democratic Party taking us in a Socialist direction?
"Well, I don't know what other word you would apply to a government in which the banks, the automobile manufacturers, automobile dealers, and soon the hospitals and doctor's offices are all controlled by the government. That is Socialist. I'm sorry, but that's the word we use for it. I don't know of another (word) that applies."
What is your take on how the mainstream media has portrayed the current administration? Is the media helping the current administration pass a liberal and socialist agenda?
"Well, the good news on that front is that it used to be, you'd get your news from major newspapers chains and three networks. Technology has now taken us far beyond that. Of course, the old style media is radically left wing and we can see that bias on the NBC Nightly News or the ABC World News Tonight every single day. We all have common sense, whether you are liberal or conservative, you can look at those reporters and say 'that's really biased'. The good news is that there are so many ways to get information without having to go through those left wing avenues and people are doing that. That's why cable news stations like Fox News are doing so phenomenally well, that's why conservative talk radio is dominating the radio markets across the country, and the internet now gives everyone the ability to spontaneously organize. That's how the unprecedented turnout at these tax payer tea parties occurred. It was a tiny little cable broadcast, by Rick Santelli, from the floor of one of the stock exchanges, ranting about how he was sick and tired of being called upon to pay for the neighbor's mortgage, who took out the extra room, who bought more than they could afford, and now they decided that they can't afford that house anymore. So now, he's being called upon (by the government), in addition to pay his own mortgage to also pay theirs (the mortgage of his neighbors) as well, through his taxes. As you recall, the entire floor erupted in applause, but then something very strange happened. It got picked up on 'YouTube', and it got circulated all over the country. Pretty soon people started emailing it and started calling one another and saying, you know, he's right, we need to do something about this. I like the idea of a taxpayer tea party, let's plan on doing something on April the 15th. Nobody organized that. That was spontaneous grassroots organization. In Sacramento, one of the 800 cities in which these tax tea party rallies occurred, where normally it has 200 people showing up at a tax payer rally (in Sacramento), that's a big turnout, and we had 6,000 people show up. There were a number of groups that put it together, but there was not one central sponsor. It just happened because people recognized their country was in trouble. They needed to do something about it. Because of the internet, cable news and talk radio, they were able to organize that spontaneously. That made a big impact by the way, on the calculations of a lot of politicians. The reason why the left wing reacted so violently and viciously to those tax payer tea rallies is because they know the old story of the Emperor's new clothes. It takes one person to stand up and say, hey, the emperor's not wearing any clothes before a lot of people begin to think to themselves, so, I'm not the only one who believes that, somebody else who thinks that too. Once that happens, the entire facade comes tumbling down. That's what they're so scared of."
Why do you think the left wing media and celebrities like Janine Garafalo portrayed the people who attended these tea parties as being "racist" and "unpatriotic" ?
"And don't forget potential domestic terrorists, by the Department of Homeland Security. The Department (of Homeland Security) also by the way, refuses to use the term 'terrorist' now, in reference to Al-Qaida and to Osama bin Laden. But they are perfectly content in calling Americans, who happen to believe in the (United States) Constitution, potential domestic terrorists. There is a reason why that report (by the justice department) came out just a few days before the tax payer tea parties. They were trying to suppress the turnout by making people afraid of being smeared by that name (domestic terrorist), if they dared to turn out and protest their government and stand up for their constitution. This really is becoming this current generation's fight, over the future of our liberties, as Americans."
So many things I agree with and so many things I have learned. A Congressman, who not only spoke his mind, but spoke the truth. Not only was McClintock a great interviewee, he was also a great guy.
Please visit Congressman Tom McClintock's official home page on the United States Govt website.
The Republican Party has a future.
www.conservativerule.com
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