Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 02-13-26_FRIDAY_7AM

Episode Date: February 14, 2026

State Senator Noah Robinson with the latest from the legislature, the bill to move the ODOT tax date is moving, and he has introduced a bill to greatly increase the political tax credit, open phones follow.

This hour of the Bill Myers Show podcast is proudly sponsored by Klausur drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for more than 50 years. Find out more about them at Klausor drilling.com. Generation. Always a pleasure to bring on State Senator Noah Robinson from Southern Oregon, Josephine County area. And by the way, which district are you again, Noah? I never keep track of this stuff. I never remember it on all the reps and senators, but which district are you?

And he did district, too. That's grants pass and surrounding and get up a little bit, you know, a cold hill road river and on toward up toward Canyonville. All right. Very good. So there you are in the porcelain nut house up there, end of day two, of week two, rather. It's been a lot of kicks in the teeth to anybody looking for some common sense legislation. Would that be a fair assessment of what we've been witnessing so far over the last two weeks? I think that's a very fair assessment, yes. Okay. And it does appear that the ODOT vote is moving forward, and that's going to be moved over to May. Am I hearing that correctly? What's going on in the session? Well, there's still a lot of wrangling about that, but they have set up a special committee to do it. We, of course, have put up a fuss. Testimony is 99% against it. 4,000 Oregonians have filed testimony opposing it.

So we will see. I still hope that they could finally leave this alone, but we will find out if they bring it to the floor. I find it fascinating that your colleagues in the Democratic Party were more than happy to vote for the big ODOD bailout and the huge tax and fee increases in the special session last year. But they really don't want to share the ballot with the repeal of that. Find that interesting, don't you? I find it very interesting. And remember, if you go back to the special session we had, Republicans argued that they should just put it on the ballot because they could have, with a simple line in the bill, have just put it up for a vote. And instead, they felt that maybe we wouldn't get the signatures,

or Oregonians would be listening, but they didn't want to give them an opportunity to vote. And then Kotech held her signature as long as possible to shorten the period in which you could collect signatures, hoping to get in the way of Oregonians expressing their voice that way. And that didn't work. And so now we're trying to fiddle with the election date because I think it'll hurt them on the ballot in November. So it's quite something to see. I wouldn't be doing it that way if I were then.

Yeah, well, of course, you're a pretty good guy, at least from what I know. A couple of bills that are moving here in the session, I wanted to ask you about it. And then I want to ask about one of your personal bills here a little bit later. Senator Jeff Golden's climate bill, the polluter pay thing in which the student robots and the so-can people were walking out the other. Oh, polluter pays, polluter pays. I find that ironic that this bill is moving forward, and this is the day after the Trump administration just yanks out that entire endangerment finding from the EPA rules that is looking at carbon dioxide is some poison in the environment. causing us. We will die without it.

It's essential for life. Yeah, I know that anybody with even a monocum of scientific backing knows this, Noah. Yeah, they know that, Senator. But yet we're still, I guess Jeff Golden is doubling down on this, in essence, right? Yes, he does. This is amazing. He's trying to set up, if this has been sent to ways it means. If this passes, they want a government committee to get together and decide how much,

The effects of climate change can be attributable to CO2, and you know how this works. Some computer model will come up with a number. And then they want the oil and gas companies to pay and to fund for whatever amount they decide. It's very open-ended. So we have a bad spate of weather in the summertime or else we get a bunch of lightning strikes. And then the legislature with this committee gets together and says we're going to bill a Vista, you know, a billion dollars or something. because the natural gas was burned in the wintertime? I mean, what?

Is it that simple? Or maybe more than that. Baltimore County has sued oil companies for $41 billion because of a heat wave a few years ago, which they're blaming on oil and gas. And remember, this is all being proposed in an environment where you can still buy gas at the gas station. So if they were being consistent, if they really think that this evil substance is destroying the climate and that the companies that have made it should pay, you think the first thing they do is just ban it completely. Well, I think even they realize, though, that society would collapse, would it not?

That's the problem. You see, it can't be done because they know they cannot get away with that. But it's still very strange when the society is dependent on a substance for energy, dependent on your dependent on gas to drive cars, and electric cars aren't a good, substitute. And by the way, dependent on, you know, oil, diesel, various other things, to feed people. But how about to feed people, Senator?

To feed people, to farm, to transport, to fertilize, to process, to bake bread. I mean, all of these things, it's all connected, is it not? That's exactly right. So we do not have, we do not have a modern society. People start

Like you say, people starve. You have nothing without these substances. And they're going to sit here and say, well, these are some sort of evil drugs that's destroying our state and we're going to find anybody that produced it. It is a bizarre position. Is Senator Golden, this is a serious question. I don't know. Are you on that same committee, by the way, that passed this out? No, I'm not. I'm not on that. No, I'm not. How does Senator Golden get to the session? Does he ride a horse and buggy? Does he walk? Does he bicycle from Ashland? How does he actually get here? Maybe it's an electric car.

I don't know. I don't know him personally anymore on such matters. Do you know? I assume he has a car, but I haven't asked. Oh, okay. But even if it's an electric car, how many services does he use in between that depend upon oil and gas? it's it's uh it it's i just find this astonishing and of course i have last session i did a whole string of remonstrances on a scientific basis behind as you show graph of the temperature

grass of the you know the weather is not getting worse i mean you can definitively show it very simple data i would imagine though that what the senator's going to try to do though is leverage the fact that it's been a warm snow-free winter so far that's probably going to to be indicative of the need to pass the polluters' pay law, right? I suppose so. It's a great position for them because every time the weather fluctuates, we point it, we pointed hydrocarbons and blame them. It's a very, very flawed scientific ideas. My point being, though, is, is it constitutional to do what they're trying to do and just assign blame for the weather on a particular industry?

I say, oh, it's obviously, obviously unconstitutional. They're not only assigning blame for the weather. They are having a committee that just decides how much we are going to take from a certain industry, which is, I've never heard of that being done before. There's no number given in the bill. It's just, we're going to figure out how much we think that this, these industry should pay. We're just apportionate to the different companies based on how much hydrocarbons they've produced over the last, you know, however long, I don't know what the time period is.

And it's just incredible. I've never before seen something where a committee just gets to decide how much they can grab from a industry. Is it a situation where nobody is worried about the fossil fuel manufacturers? I know that I don't think they're fossil fuels, but that's a different scientific conversation. Yeah. But in all seriousness, we have, in California, we're observing them, you know, trying to chase oil companies and gas companies out. In fact, we have, gosh, people are closing their refineries, then they're leaving. And there's talk about the price of fuel maybe going to $10, $11 a gallon within the next year or so, which will be an incredible burden on society there.

is there no concern from Senator Golden that this whole idea, and by the way, and in my opinion, the polluter pays is a lie. Polluters never pay or any kind of company doesn't pay. It's the customers of polluters who pay. That's right. Of course. That's us. People like you and me, everybody listening. We're the ones who pay.

Yes. Is there any concern that we're just going to go down that same road as California in which the prices will double, triple, quadruple. Well, you know, state policy is to do exactly that. They want to, their whole climate protection program, the idea is we jack up the price of fuel until no one can afford it to force them into electric car. That's state policy.

That's what they want. But electricity is not getting any cheaper. Electricity has soared in price over the last year or two. What are you thinking? That's because we've shut down sources of energy that are expensive. We shut down a big coal-fired. plant and Bordman that was providing a lot of the state's electricity.

It's illegal right now to build nuclear plants. We're not building gas plants. They think it can all be done from wind and solar. Of course, after several decades of spending vast amounts of money on windmills and solar panels, and now we have an energy shortage, and the price is going up, there's talk up here about what can we do. Maybe nuclear power is an option after all. They're moving very slowly on it.

Well, you know, Senator Germany and European Union, of course, heavily industrialized. Germany has gone all in on the wind and solar, and they just failed miserably. And they're not dumb people, all right? They're very technical people. And has anyone mentioned this to Senator Golden, to your knowledge? I don't know specifically whether anybody's mentioned that to him, but I... He should know. Okay.

All right. He's not stupid either. I don't know. And I know Jeff's not a stupid man. But, and I've talked with him before, but how can you try to hitch this? What is this his parting shot? I mean, if I were Brad Hicks, you know, the person on the Republican Party wants to run against him is declared to run against him. I'd be beating him over the head with this.

I kind of expect he will. Yeah. The problem is, and this is a problem up here with a lot of things that just don't make sense. sense. It's an agenda of one party, and it's agenda of those people that fund them. And you see them doing things that just don't make any sense at all, and they just do them. And again, I've talked about, it's not hugely complicated. I've talked to it here a lot about the scientific basis for our position. It's quite clear that CO2 isn't frying the planet and causing weather disruption. And nobody, they all know that, no, no, what I've had to say about, nobody has come up to

being talked about the data and said, are you sure you're right? I have an alternative thing. They know they can't win that argument. So if you actually believe it, you should be able to back it up. You can't stand back and say, oh, I've got a climate expert that I believe, and therefore I'm not going to think any farther. I mean, these people up here are responsible for making the law. Maybe it's just as simple. Maybe what Jeff Golden's climate bill is really all about is at the basis, it's not about the climate. It's not about saving the planet. It's about just having some tax mule to be able to bleed to death.

Well, I guess so. It does put more money in a government agency to direct as they wish. Are there any rules as to where this climate money in Jeff Golden's bill, if it were to pass, would go? Well, it looked very vague to me. They get to decide that he gets spent on various things. offset the effects of the climate. It's very broad. Now, it has been sent to Ways and Means. In the past, I've been told by people that going to Ways and Means is where a bill can go to die. Do you agree with that, that kind of way of looking at it? That is my hope. Because, yes, it is very true that

when things go to Ways and Means, it gets another look at by a different committee. Usually it involves some money being spent, because this does, it will cost money to, they figure they're going to get the money out of these horrible polluters that are providing us with energy. But it is going to cost something to set up a committee and set up a bureaucracy. It always does. So the hope is that in ways and means, people down there will look at this and say, we'll just stop here. And that does happen a lot.

So I am hopeful. Okay. I'm hopeful, too. Well, it's obvious that the legislature does not seem to care whether or not we're testifying or what our opinion in Southern Oregon is on anything, or is there any evidence that our testimony for or against anything has any legs? Do you have any evidence? The testimony does help a lot.

It does. It does. Now, that does not mean you stop something, even with 95% testimony against them. If it's their agenda, they may very well move it. But they do care about what you say. They do worry about it. And I definitely encourage everyone to be testimonials. I can tell you that legislatures up here do look at it.

they count the number of opposed versus support, and it worries them. Whether you will push them over the line or not is not guaranteed, but it does help. All right. So keep the letters and comments coming, one way or the other. All right. I wanted to talk about a bill which you have submitted, and I'm intrigued by this, and it has to do with increasing the political tax credit. That's the one in which we're able to take. I think it's $50 per individual and $100 for a married couple, and you actually take that as a tax credit, and it doesn't go to Salem, and you wanted to increase that? Why? And how big do you want to make it? Well, so I'm, I picked, I thought it should go to $1,000. Now, I know that there will be an argument about where it should be,

and I'm obviously not fixed on the exact number. But I, first, to back up, you know, that is the one way we get to direct some of our tax money. And currently, it's one 10,000th of the It's less than $110,000 of the potential revenue they'd have up here is directed that way. So it's a very tiny amount of the money. But the reason I wanted to do it, and first I think it should be raised, it's been a while. But specifically, in political campaigns, everyone knows that the question is, what lobby, what special interests are going to support you? Someone files for office. You need money to campaign, no matter how good your message is and you can't reach people with it, it is not going to do any good.

Yeah, in other words, money's not everything, but it's not nothing in politics, right? That's right. And in my campaigns and my dad's campaign, we're fortunate because we have a nationwide audience and huge numbers of people in Oregon that have been following us for a while. So it's not hard for us to raise enough money to run a get our message out in a local race like that. But it's especially hard for other people. And the result is that the whole campaigning becomes political jockeying for endorsements, who can support you. And so much has really spent enormous amounts of money with special interests in both sides, particularly on the Democrat side, a lot of union money and so forth.

Yeah, public employee unions tend to control the political actions in this state. And so you're looking at increasing the political tax credit to counter that. In other words, the people who may not necessarily agree with public employee unions, they would have the ability to donate more money too and take it off their taxes. Yeah, so the idea is it's just a simple way of diluting that money with donations for hopefully people in your district. And I think it's because we can talk about complicated campaign finance laws that's always mess things up and don't help.

But I think just eluding out the union money, the special interest money with contributions from individuals would be a tremendous step forward. And, you know, there's evidence that people like this. In the 90s, I think it was, an amendment was passed by ballot initiative to restrict contributions to just the district in which the candidate was running, which passed, and then I think was correctly deemed unconstitutional. So it never went into effect. But I'm quite sure, from people I've talked to and for other reasons, I'm quite sure that Oregonians really like to have that option. I'd like to have the option. I really would.

And just to think, and it actually comes off of your Oregon tax bill. It's not a tax deduction. It's actually against your tax bill. So if you owed $5,000 in income taxes and you did a $1,000 political donation, it's up being $4,000, right? That's exactly right. And you just get to direct your money to another cause. Boy, I can see why public employee unions would not like this at all. That's going to be a high lift, don't you think?

Tall lift. Well, that's true, but I'm straightforward. I told everyone exactly why we were trying to do it. All right. God bless you. How can we support you? How can we help you out on that? I think it's a good deal. What's the name of the bill, you know, the number? 1549. 1549. Where is it right now? Well, right now it's in the Finance and Revenue Committee. Senator Brodman held a hearing on it. He's been very positive. We're waiting to get back some numbers. numbers because they're going to estimate how much it costs to, you know, it's going to cut into revenue by some amount, which I don't think matters at all, because again, I think if Oregon needs to get to direct a little of their tax money, it's a good idea. But I don't know what

it's faded. I've had very positive reactions from a lot of people on both sides of the aisle. So we'll see where it goes. How long has it been a $50 and $100 credit? How long has it been in effect? It's been, we've had it since the 80s, and I think. I think it's been 50 the whole time, though I don't know for sure about the early years. And figure, even if you were to adjust it for inflation since 1980, what, wouldn't you think it'd be 125 per person, 250, at minimum, just to keep up with the inflation? If you want to adjust for inflation, it's going to be a few hundred dollars. Uh-huh. Because I even go back and calculate it, but inflation since the 80s has not been 50%.

It's a lot more than that. Well, I'm thinking if you were to double or triple it, maybe a couple hundred percent, that would be what, triple? You know, what it is right now. That's right. And I think any step in that direction, I don't like compromising on things of principle, but on something like this, it's just a question of how far can you get? If they'd raise it to 200, I'd be to say, that's a great first step and be happy to go forward with that. All right.

We picked a thousand. We thought it was reasonable. Well, you know, do what Democrats do. Shoot high and then see what you can settle for, okay? Or else you could say that for President Trump, too. Shoot high, you know, on a tariff or whatever it is. and they are okay, all right, well, we'll work with you. Trump knows how to negotiate.

There's no question about that. No doubt. State Senator Noah Robinson, Noah, always a pleasure talking with you. Thanks for the update from the Porcelain Nutt House. And is there anything we need to be on the final couple of weeks that we could help you out on? What are you saying? Well, the things we've discussed, we have a, you know, a disconnect bill where they want to take away your car interest, the doctors and things like that. That probably will go forward.

It's like you say, this is not a normal place. You walk into the Capitol and look around, and this is unlike any other place, it's not normal. It's something strange up here. Well, try to make it a little less strange and good luck on SB 1549, okay? You'd be well. Thanks again. Okay, you too. It's always a pleasure.

Thank you very much. State Senator Noah Robinson. 731 at KMED, 993KBXG. This hour of the Bill Myers show is sponsored by Glacier Heating and Air, making sense of the heating and air business. When you call Fontana roofing, our singular focus is a focus. You have questions, we have answered.

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Great to have you here. It is 735. Ran a little along with Noah. We're going to check the rest of the news here in just a moment. And then open phone time here on Find Your Phone Friday. I'll be talking with Herman a little bit later because he got his rejection letter from the Josephine County temporary board. We thank you very much for your wonderful qualifications. But no, you didn't make the cut.

I mean, this just strikes me as such. a faked up kind of stinky sort of coup being put on by this fake board. Just my opinion. Just my opinion. I know I don't have a dog in the fight because I don't reside in Josephine County.

I don't have to put up with your wonderful political diversity. The political diversity in the recalls and all the rest of it. But I'm still kind of shaking my head over that one. If you want to talk about it, that'd be great. There's a story that I have in today's news that I wanted to get your opinion about here just a little bit. It has to do with Senator Merkley.

And let me tell you, I beat Senator Merkley politically like the pinata that he is. The pinata that you smack him, all you have to do, most of the time when you talk about him, you smack him and he explodes and all sorts of garbage. You know, comes out of the Jeff Merckley pinata. But he actually may have a point. He may have actually done something good and reasonable. Kid you not. I'll share that story and I'll take your opinion. It has to do with grocery stores. No, anything involving ice, he's always full of nonsense and everything else. But maybe with grocery

stores, he's right. I'll ask you your opinion coming up. Freddy's diner in Old Town Eagle Point is a family diner designed to please everyone in the family. Along with 13 burgers, there's eight fresh sandwiches and seven to stop a train. Glacier, making sense of the heating and air business. Hi, I'm Paul Strander with Valley Your Nursery and I'm on KMED. 742. By the way, if you're looking to save money on insurance, boy, I got an easy number for you to remember. 261-5444-2-161544-4.

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Randy is in Medford. Randy, you've been on hold. I'm glad to have you here on Find Your Phone Friday. And what's on your mind? Go ahead. Well, I listened to Noah Robinson's your conversation with him. Yes. And my question is, you know, back in the day when they started this pack donation stuff,

it's like they opened the door, so to speak, to allow that. Yes. So who is it now that really decides on what that limit can be? I mean, it's like, okay, we're going to allow it, but we're going to allow so much. So who is if it really decides what that amount will be and how much we can donate? Somebody's got to be pulling the strings on that. Well, if I understand correctly, who controls what the political pack, that $100 deduction we have right now, or the credit, rather? Is that the one you're speaking up?

Or just political action committees in general? No, just the donation amount. We can give $50 per person, so $100 for a $100 for a lot. Yeah, that was done by the state. legislature, it was in the law that actually created it some 40 years ago, and it's just never been changed or readdressed since that time. And I would imagine that for the most part, most of the controlling authority in Oregon doesn't really care much for this, because I don't think they like the idea of you or I choosing where to take a tax credit and going against

something which may be against the power structure here. You know, and that's Democratic Party, you know, the state of Oregon, right? I mean, can you understand that? You figure that out, right? Yeah, and my guess would be that the state of Oregon is feeling that that $100 that we give is $100 less that that goes into the general fund. That's exactly. And that's exactly what it is. And that's the whole purpose of this. But now, political donations in Oregon, of course, are unlimited.

You do know that. But at least 100 of it can then be at least off of your state income taxes. You can still donate to PACs or candidates and things like that, but it's just going to be taxed income. That's all. Yeah. Well, you know, I would support what Noah's trying to do. You know, $1,000 might be much. But, I mean, I think we ought to be able to help out the party that, or the candidate, if a candidate created or somebody created a pack for a candidate and we were for that candidate, I would be forgiven more money to that particular candidate rather than to a union and that they just kind of choose who they want.

And frankly, it would tend to counter the union. It would put regular people at at least a little more parity to the people that are able. Well, the public employee unions that essentially buy the political process here. And there's another part of this, Randy, that I think is important to remember, is that it's the milk of politics or mother's milk of politics money. It's not everything, but it's not nothing. You know, I've known people that have spent $200,000 and gone to lose horribly. in their races locally and elsewhere, right? It happens.

But the point being that, you know, the Democrats, of course, have a really efficient money machine. They're very good, very smart about it. They've really set up a situation, and it's tough to compete against that. And then what will happen is that on Orstar, people will go and look at various candidates, whether they're Christine Drazen's or Ed Deals or anybody else running for, for, a governor or some other statewide office. And then we see all of a sudden, well, here's a big fat check from Big Pharma. Oh, here's a big fat check from these people that you may not necessarily like.

Well, if you're not giving them money, they got to go get the money from somebody. You know what I'm saying? And so... Exactly. And so if you're able to maybe, you know, cut a few of the lobbyists out of there, and so they're not having to sit there and dance and essentially, you know, just, okay, I know it's not polite to say whore themselves out to the lobbies, okay? Maybe if they could whore themselves out to more regular voters, it would be nice if we were to step up to the plate more.

Okay. I hope Noah has some success with that. That's all I'm saying. I hope he does too. Randy, good hearing from you. Thanks for calling from Medford. 770KMED. Good morning.

Hi. Who's this? Welcome. Good morning, Bill. Alan DeBore. How are you today? Hello, Ellen. Great to hear from you.

What's on your mind? Oh, you're loud. I mean, Jeff Golden was working on campaign finance reform. What they finally approved is a 23-page that nobody can understand. And if I understand correctly, once again, it doesn't go into effect for several years, right? Isn't that true? I think next year, but it's all it does is federal money to the unions and stuff. And you know, the federal rule is pretty great. no corporate, no group checks, personal checks only.

So here we are trying to control our budget. So now they want to take away more money. And what we really want is a lot of people donating small amounts and a limit on the contributions, period, because we're trying to take the money out of politics. And I would be okay to that to a certain extent. I don't think having no limits has necessarily been healthy for Oregon. Would you agree?

Oh, absolutely not. And the spending for, you know, a governor's race, how many millions in a Senate race? Why do you think it's going to cost to run a credible opposition to Tina Kotech this time around? What would you say, Senator? Oh, I bet they spend $20 million or something. It's totally insane. I mean, voters just make your decision not on the ads and stuff. Yeah.

Oregon needs a change. It has to have a Republican governor. There is nothing in this state other than workers' comp that's run properly. There needs to be some adult in the room, and we have no adults in the room right now. And I think this is just what happens with the corruption of long-term single-party control. At least it seems that way. What say you? Oh, absolutely.

I mean, we all say that you should listen to the minority, and there's no listening to the minority, which is what, maybe 40% of Oregonians that are voting Republican. And, you know, these people that want to label everything to Donald Trump, this is about Oregon. Yeah. You need to elect people that know what they're doing. Even the unions now are attacking three or four Democrats representatives

because they didn't toe the line. Yeah, nothing against you. I mean, God bless the unions. People are allowed to do that. But I don't necessarily like my government being bought and paid for by that. Agreed? And I like unions. I think they're a valid place.

But the leaders are completely out of control. Well, look at the Oregon Nurses Association. I mean, I've had great service from nurses here in Southern Oregon, so I'm not, I don't like bad-mouthing it. But I'm looking at the ONA and how politicized they've been getting as of, late. And I imagine they write a lot of checks to people in the state of Oregon, too, don't they? Oh, when I ran for Senate, okay, first of all, the Asselm community hospital, I was on the board that sold it to Asante. Yeah. We helped every nurse there. We helped people. We understood health insurance. And when I ran, there's no way they would endorse me because I was a Republican

period. And they endorsed somebody that didn't know anything about nursing, didn't know anything about health care. Never has written on the front of the check, right, on the paycheck, written on the front of that, as they say, that old song. Yeah, we need to take, we need to take money out of campaigns, not have a 23-page bill that sets up all sorts of new programs that union can use. Well, this is obviously then Democrats working to have carve-outs for their particular supporters, I guess, right? They're trying to do that. Oh, it is so out of control. I follow most of the bills. You wouldn't believe there's almost 300 bills in 35 days. Staff can't keep up with it. The attorneys are writing things continually.

You know what my question would be for you, Senator? Senator DeBoer, by the way, former Senator DeBoer here. How is it that everyone was told in the entire purpose of this short session was to touch up budgets, but it's anything but isn't this a little? violation or why isn't this a violation of law, you know? No, absolutely. I mean, we were, I voted no on the short sessions years ago. Me too. Because it just turned into its complete abuse of power and no leadership.

President Courtney, he would throw out bills and would actually control the Senate and limit things. And now it's just nothing. I mean, they just, it's 300. billed 35 days. And you don't have time to deal with the big issues. You know, health care, even the state made an agreement with the hospitals now to pay two times what Medicare pays for state insurance members. And it, hospital loses money on everyone that comes in. Now, wait a minute. Is this a new agreement? Because so the state, which means the Oregon Health Plan,

We'll pay twice what Medicare pays to hospitals? On people that have the Oregon insurance. I don't know about health plan, but I'm sure it's saying. And to people that say we don't have universal health care, anybody that's sick or injured, whether they're illegal or not, can walk into a hospital and get taken care of, period. State Senator, I appreciate the call. Thanks for making that happen.

Have a good one. I wasn't aware of that. 7705633-770 KMED. All right. Now, I wanted to get to something. You know, normally to me, Jeff Merkley, Senator Jeff Merkley, our U.S. senator, one of our two U.S. senators, along with Senator Wyden, and I normally look at him as not a very serious man.

I just tend to, that's my bias, I admit my bias. But you know, there are times that he'll come up with a bill that I'm thinking, maybe he has something here. Maybe there's something that actually could be helpful. And I wanted to run this by. I did put it in today's news when I was cutting that this morning. But Senators Ben Lujan, a Democrat from New Mexico, and Bizarrequely, Jeff Merckley,

ended up introducing legislation to stop grocery price gouging. And what they're pushing to do is lower costs for Americans. Now, they go at this from the Bernie Sanders point of view, of course, that high food price are because of corporate greed. Corporate greed, you know how about all that kind of stuff. But anyway, what they're talking about doing here is going against surveillance pricing. And this is something that I was reading on tech blogs over the last few months. And I've started to see some of this stuff coming into some of the stores when you'll, go into stores and you'll see

electronic price tags, they have little LCD screens on them, and then they can change. And what some of these companies have started doing, and it's mostly big companies, it's not like, you know, your little local chains, it'll be some of the big multinational chains

that will be looking at you, photographing you, surveilling you, databasing you, maybe even connecting you to your rewards card or whatever. whatever it is, what it might be, looking at your income and your buying habits and various other things.

And then in conjunction with these price tags, the price will change. One person, let's say the broccoli will be a buck 99, the next person that looks at the broccoli. The broccoli might be a $259 or may not have the deal, these sort of things. And so what Merkley is talking about doing is dramatically restricting this technology of surveillance pricing. And there's something about that that, A, feels really creepy, you know, to me, and I don't know if you would agree with me on this one. And B, seems to be yet another way to database Americans and raise prices and would be raising prices on some. It seems to me that if you're going to say that the broccoli is a buck 99, a bunch, or whatever it is, it should be a buck 99 for everyone.

To me, it's like a quality before the law. Now, I must say that I've gone into some supermarkets in which I see these things that, oh, we'll give you a coupon, but it has to be an electronic coupon, right? In my benevolent dictatorship, we would get rid of that because what is the electronic coupon? That means that they want you to use your cell phone. your little data monitoring surveillance port and plug it into the grocery store. And then we'll give you a discount in exchange for giving up your privacy and maybe we'll monitor where you are. Oh, okay, Bill's back in here. And we know Bill loves Cheetos, so we're going to give

we're going to give Bill a discount on Cheetos to try to move along the Frito Lays garbage or whatever. I don't know how this is. Or, hey, that's it. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's That's what the deep state would end up using surveillance pricing to get the people who are already in trouble, even fatter and sicker so that they die sooner and they don't reproduce. There's a conspiracy theory Thursday deal for you. But in all honesty, I think that, you know, this is not the worst idea I've ever seen come out of Jeff Merkley's head. You agree or not? Now, Senator Merckley says, of course, they're talking about working families. I don't know.

Why Jeff cares about working families because, you know, hey, illegal, on welfare, great. Come in here. You're working at bankrupting us. But working families are paying more than ever for groceries. Well, huge corporations, he says, are raking in record profits, said, Senator Merkley, we must protect Americans from price gouging

and from billionaire corporations abusing folks' personal information just to charge higher prices. And the Stop Price Gouging and Grocery Stores Act cracks down on this corporate greed in the store and online, putting people over profits. So, okay, and I know it's kind of like the Democratic talking points. He says every single American would be affected by these pricing practices. It would prohibit surveillance pricing in grocery stores. So if you have a grocery store, no looking at you.

Now, they can still look at you. They can still surveil you. That's fine. And make you nervous if you were thinking about being a dirt bag and stealing and shop, Perfectly fine with that. You'd still be allowed to do that. But they couldn't be using you to tie you to a database and then change the pricing going on around you. It would also require stores to disclose the use of facial recognition technology. It would ban electronic shelf labels in large grocery stores. Those are the ones in which, you know, you would stand by and they look at you and they say, oh, let's give, you know, let's charge this person more or this person less, you know, for the, for the same thing. and it would also, okay, now this is maybe the bad side.

Established an enforcement mechanism to hold corporations accountable, that could be the corporate police. And having Merck involved in any law enforcement might be a little bit strange, but I still think there's a germ of a pretty good idea there, don't you? So I have to actually say that even though I throw up in my mouth a little bit, Jeff Merckley may have kind of a good idea. We'll see where it goes.