Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 08-12-25_TUESDAY_7AM

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

08-12-25_TUESDAY_7AM

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Klausur Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at Klausurrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. We're going to dig into some of the economic news this morning here. Dr. John Lott, Jr., of course, with the Crime Prevention Research Center, was founded by Dr. John Lott. He's an economist and a world-recognized expert on guns and crime. And we're going to have to talk about crime statistics this morning, too, here, Dr. Lott.

Welcome back to the program. Good to have you on, sir. Oh, it's great to be on, thanks. All right. You have a piece out right now that, okay, hey, experts, admit it, what you got so wrong on Trump's tariffs. I mean, are we actually experiencing a time right now in which the tariffs that have been talked about with President Trump really aren't having, you know, a huge impact on what is going on in the economy or not? What do you think? Well, I mean, I think they have some.

impact for short, just like any taxes. The point of the piece was that, you know, when people talk about the fact that tariffs reduce the amount of trades that people have or make it more costly for consumers or reduce growth, all those things are true. The problem is that people don't seem to acknowledge that that's true for all taxes. You know, sales tax. taxes, raise prices. They reduce the number of trades that people are going to be having or purchases that they're going to make. Income taxes, reduce the amount of labor that people are going to be willing to, you know, the amount of work that they're going to be able to do or willing to do. They reduce investments. They reduce growth. The same thing with corporate

income taxes. Well, just like what we have here in the state of Oregon, are you familiar with what we have, which is the corporate activity tax, which taxes corporations based on the money flowing through the company, but it has absolutely no connection to do with where there is profit. So when you have a, let's say you have a big grocery company, a big grocery store, very low margin business, but lots of cash goes through it. So they have to take 1% of that cash and send it to the state of Oregon. What does that do to a company formation, right? That's another strain, isn't it? Right. So all those things have, you know, have real impacts on the amount of activity that people engage in. And the point is also that the size of the distortion that you have

is related to how high the tax is. So if I have a 20% tax, I'm going to have more than twice the distortion on people's behavior than if I had a 10% tax. And so, you know, prior to Trump, tariffs were about 2.5%. But if you compare it to something like the income tax, if you add the federal plus the average across the different states, you're talking about 43% there for the top rate. If you're talking about corporate income taxes for the federal. and across states, you're talking about an average of about 27%. So, you know, those are much higher rates.

And one of the things that Trump and the Republicans have talked about is kind of raising the tariff and using it to go and reduce the rates that you have for these other taxes. And, you know, if the goal and economists you think would care about this is to try to reduce the amount of distortions. They're created by tariffs. Raising something that's very low, or raising something that's very low, but lowering the rates that are very high can help accomplish that. Very good. And it's an interesting piece on the New York Post. I'm certainly going to put that up there. And is it a little bit early, though, to judge the full impact of the Trump tariffs that we've been talking about here for the last few months?

Because even right now, I understand that the 100, is it, 145% tariff that was talked about for goods from China, that's been put on hold again? I mean, aren't the most punitive ones being put on hold still as trade negotiation moves forward? You know, one thing that's pretty clear to me is that economists are not very good negotiators. Just listen to the comments that they've been making on these things. And, you know, if you go look at, you know, apparently these guys refuse to read Trump's book, The Art of the Deal, and that is you don't, if you want to end up at a certain level in the negotiations at the end, you don't start by kind of giving your ideal position there. You go and you ask for a lot more than you're planning on getting. Yeah, you have Trump wants 25% in the end, though. He's not going to start with 27, in other words, is what you're saying.

Right. Okay. You know, so he ended up with 15% for Japan and for the EU. Look, I don't know whether 15% is the right amount. I know that 2.5% may have been too low to begin with by a fair amount. But, you know, whether the right amount to kind of equalize the distortions is 10% is I guess there's some negotiations that have resulted in that or some other level. I couldn't tell you.

But wouldn't it take several months of steady tariffs being in place to really be able to judge the impact good or sideways or bad? Wouldn't that be fair to say? I mean, we've had them for several months. You know, Liberation Day or whatever was April 2nd. So we've had them for over four months now, you know, almost four and a half months. So, you know, surely places like the Powell with the Fed and others were expecting inflation to increase earlier. Look, even if you have tariffs, it doesn't create inflation. it doesn't create an overall increase in prices.

You know, Milton Friedman used to say that inflation was a purely monetary phenomenon, which basically meant if you increase the money supply, which the Federal Reserve has been doing a lot of the last few years. And so if I go and I increase some prices, but I don't change the money supply or what they call, velocity. Yeah, is that inflation, right? Is that inflation? Maybe not, right? Right. Well, what would happen is that other prices will go down to balance it all. Okay. So you're not going to have, you know, you're going to have, you're going to have to have some changes in the money supply there in order to cause overall, all prices to rise. Otherwise, look, if the amount of money that's going to be spent in any period of time remains constant. And some

prices go up and other prices are going to have to go down. And that's basically what you'd have happen. So you wouldn't have overall inflation just because you have tariffs. All right. Fair enough. Dr. John Lott, Jr., once again, Crime Prevention Research Center is what you found. And that's what I want to go to next year, because President Trump, of course, driving a lot of our news cycle. There's no way we get away from that, Dr. And President Trump announced that he's taking over the D.C. police department. Now, he has 30-day authority to do this. And if he wanted to keep us in effect longer, he would have to go to Congress for this.

But this was on the basis of what they're detecting as a massive crime increase in Washington, D.C. Now, a lot of this anecdotal, and I noticed that the D.C. police union chief was backing up President Trump's efforts saying, hey, immediate action necessary. I find it interesting the union saying yeah, we've got some problems here in D.C., but then you have the mayor of D.C. now coming out and saying, hey, crime is less this year

than it was the year before and the year before that. It's even less than it was before the pandemic kicked off. And Dr. Lott, I know you and I have talked about how a lot of crime statistics have been doctored over the years based on

police departments choosing not to report as much crime or kind of downplaying certain crime by not reporting it. Do we know if Washington, D.C. has done any of that. I don't know if you can help us out on this. We've talked about this before. Right. Well, what we talked about was the fact that there are two measures that you have of crime. You have the number of crimes that report to police, and that's what the mayor and others point to.

And then you have the actual total number of crimes, only about 40% of violent crimes report to police, only about 30% of property crimes are reported to police. And in the past, prior to COVID, basically there was a general relationship between increased reported crimes and increased total crimes. Since then, these two numbers have generally gone in kind of opposite directions there. And there are multiple reasons for that. One reason is the fact that you've generally had a drop in arrest rates. People aren't being caught and punished at the same rate that they were before. And that affects the rate that people are willing to report crimes. it's also become more difficult in many places in the country to report crimes to the police.

You know, six years ago or whatever, if you had a crime that occurred and you called up the 911, they would send out a police car in order to find out what happened and to make a report. Now there are parts of the country that will ask you, well, have you, is the criminal still there committing a crime? and people will almost always say, no, the criminal's already left. And then they'll say, well, you can come down to the police station and wait in line and fell out a police report. And, you know, if you make it more time-consuming, more difficult for people to report crimes to the police, you're going to have some people who are going to say, look, it's just not worth it for me to go and do that. And so it ends up becoming a negative feedback loop of sorts.

If you're not seeing people arrested, if you're not seeing people punished, then you, as a resident in an area, just kind of sit back and take it, I guess, or work to fight it yourself, I guess, that kind of thing? Yeah, right. That's right. That's what can happen. All right. And so, you know, so we're in a situation right now. We don't know the individual data for a place like D.C. That's just national data that we have. And so, you know, there's a question about whether that's happening in D.C. But it's surely something that's been happening nationwide. But here's the thing.

Is it true that crimes rates have fallen over the last year or so, a couple of years in D.C.? And answers, yes. But they're still high. And, you know, you look at murders in 2023, the last year we really have data. across the country that's finalized D.C. ranked fifth among the 60 most populous cities in terms of murder rates. You look at something like... In fact, in fact, if I recall, I think it's about 24 murders per 100,000 people on a yearly basis. I think I saw a stat like that, which I thought was pretty high. And even Moscow, which

they consider a kind of a gangland, you know, Putin crime syndicate kind of said he's only 10 per 100,000. But, yeah, I mean, what the president did yesterday was kind of go through the numbers for a number of capitals around the world, places like Mexico City and others that one would think would be much higher or worse, actually have lower rates that are there. And, you know, you look at the president was focusing on carjacking, given that you just had this young man, this kind of wizard. kid who had been working with Doge.

Yeah, just beat into within an inch of his life there. Right. Quite bloody pictures showing the harm done to him. And, you know, so you look at something like that. And over the last couple of years, it's fallen. It's gone from 959 and 2023 to 496 last year. But at the same time, what you find happening, is if you go back to before COVID, in 2017, you're talking about 95 or 92 and 2018.

So we're still way higher than what would be considered a normal, just average year in the nation's capital, right? Even now. Right. Okay. So, boy, you know, this is the interesting part about the crime statistics. They can be used for great political effect, can't they, Dr. Lott? Right. Well, I mean, it's just interesting to me to go and watch kind of the discussion that you have in the media fact checkers, where they go and they say, you know, Trump is wrong. Carjackings are falling.

And they just ignore the fact that he said over the last five years, it's tripled. You know, that's what he said. It's still high. He's basically making the point that you and I just made about the fact that, okay, it's gone down. still extremely high for some of these crime categories. And, you know, it's just, I don't know, it's just kind of comical watching the media just wanting to go and, you know, try to protect the narrative on these things. Yeah, doing backflips on the statistics.

I know the last time I was in the nation's capital, I think it was four or five years ago. I forget exactly what year. But even then, everybody knew. We were staying in a hotel about three blocks from the Capitol. And everybody knew, Dr. Lott, whatever you did, you did not go out in the evening, especially late in the evening, unless you were accompanied in a pretty large group, et cetera, that, you know, walk in the streets of the nation's capital was not something that was a good thing to do. In fact, I seem to recall, wasn't it Rand Paul that then ended up getting assaulted on the

on the street late at night, one night by the Capitol, or maybe it was the White House. Remember that story? It was a few years ago. Right. Well, that was a little bit different. That was after, or right at the end of the Republican convention. Oh, that's right. Trump had that event at the White House. And a lot of kind of BLM demonstrators were attacking them as they left the White House. Well, whether it's BLM or, well, BLM can commit crimes to. B.L.M. has created a lot of crime over the years, no doubt. Right. Well, I mean, you just look at, and Trump kind of talked about them yesterday to some extent about destroying statues in Washington, D.C., and about how that all stopped when he discovered this kind of 100-year-old law that imposed 10-year prison sentences on people who destroyed monuments within Washington, D.C.,

see something that hadn't been used or hadn't had to be used. Well, that'll be taken care of it pretty quickly. Punishment does tend to dial it down a bit here. Dr. Lott, I always appreciate you to check it in here from the Crime Prevention Research Center, and that's CrimeResearch.org. You write on this. You'll so write on economics and do all sorts of things. I'll link to your New York Post deal, and we will have you back on, and you have a good day.

Thank you very much. I look forward to talk to you again, Bill. Thank you for being there. Indeed. And remember, his website is crimeresearch.org, and you're on the Bill Meyer show. This is the story of the one. As a lineman, he does whatever it takes to keep the power on in his community. And he wants a partner like Granger, who does the same. Granger offers the professional-grade products he needs, from voltage detectors to harnesses to hard hats, plus fast, dependable delivery. So he can rise to every challenge. Call 1-800 Granger, click Granger.com.

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I mean, my concern has always been that right now, in the current situation, we lose Pacific Power wins one way or the other. But Pacific Power has been sued so many times, which ended up leading to our wildfire intelligence setup. So we'll have a conversation about that and a bit more also coming up on the Bill Maher show. 7.30. Oregon Truck and Auto Authority is your work truck and van headquarters, proudly offering Adrian Steel interior shelving packages, partitions, and the best ladder racks in the business.

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Plus everything else in this store is 25% off. That's right, big savings on accessories, ammo, and firearms. Good Guys Guns, the Valley's Firearm Leader, 4934 Crater Lake Avenue, Medford. Good Guys Guns. Good guys' guns. News brought to you by Millette Construction, specializing in foundation repair and replacement. Get on solid ground. Visit milletconstruction.com. From the KMED News Center, here's what's going on. As hot weather continues today for much of the state, there are no large active fires in Oregon. So far this year, Oregon's Department of Forestry reports just under 195,000 acres burned statewide so

far. Jackson and Josephine counties are now under extreme fire danger. The Oregon Department of Forestry says it spurred by dry vegetation, fire behavior, and consistent hot and windy conditions. BLM officials say campfires are restricted on all BLM Medford District lands, including at Hyatt Lake Reservoir. It coincides with a fire weather watch for the region today with wind gusts of 20 to 25 miles an hour. The state of Oregon's chief financial officer says federal cuts will cost the state, $15 billion over the next six years. Medicaid takes the biggest hit, losing more than 11 billion, followed by the Oregon Department of Human Services at nearly $3 billion. Governor Tina Kotech says she'll convene lawmakers to consider strategies to reduce the impact

of the cuts. Bill Lennon, KMED. Great to see you. Come on in. Hi. Thanks for letting me stay in your guest room. Our pleasure. Right through here. The door sticks a bit. Just turn, lift up a little. And give it a good shove. Okay, thanks. Oh, and if it gets a bit warm in here, crack the window.

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Two DogsFab.com. Hi, I'm Limon from Orleans, and I'm on 106.7, KMED. 734 on Pebble in Your Shoe Tuesday. We have former state senator Herman Barrettiger. We always talking about politics and things going on this. morning. Herman, my teeth are hurting about all of these stories about how much the big, beautiful bill is going to be hurting Oregon. Have you noticed those stories just like, you know, filling the airwaves and looking on newspapers and news sites? It's amazing. Well, you know, the lion's share that is going to be Medicaid, and what it is, is they've discovered that there's a lot non-citizens and a lot of people that don't qualify under the rules for Medicaid are on Medicaid

in Oregon and so they're going to cut those. And Oregon actually chose during the COVID time to truly, I mean, massively expand the amount of people on the Oregon Health Plan. Wasn't that the case? I know I've been reading about that for years. They chose to do it. Yeah. It's just expanded, you know, and so what's happening is the Trump administration is just going to make Oregon adhere to the rules. They're not changing the rules, Bill. They're just upholding the rules. They haven't been enforcing the rules or upholding them for a number of years now, past administrations.

Yeah, and, you know, for the guy that packs their lunch or the person that packs their lunch every day and goes to work, has to ask themselves, I'm going to go to work today, and some of the money that I'm going to earn is going to go to supporting a non-citizen medical needs. Yeah, maybe we don't want to do that anymore, right? Yeah, if you're fine with taking some of your paycheck and giving that to a non-U.S. citizen for their medical needs, I guess you're fine with it, but I have a problem with it myself. Yeah, a lot of other people do, and the Trump administration certainly does too.

The other headline that is making my teeth hurt is when Oregon Public Broadcasting was talking about in this same story about what was going on with the big beautiful bill. Oh, $12 billion going away. And they said with tight income, with tight revenue expectations. They talked about tight revenue as if the money going into the state of Oregon, Herman, is actually reducing. And then I looked at the revenue forecast from May and what the reports were talking about. And they said that the revenue forecast said, well, we were looking at a slight decrease.

in the overall coming in of money. But that was a slight increase from what they had forecasted it was going to be. In other words, they forecast, let's say, an extra $14 billion coming in, and then only an extra $13 or $12 billion, I think, is the number they were bringing up, was actually going to be coming in over the next couple of years. And that is an alarming something, oh, my gosh, we have to have a special session in raised taxes, Herman. Isn't that essentially what is going on?

They're still going to get more money. They're still going to get more money, just sitting there. That's the Democrat solution to any problem is raised more taxes. All right. It's never, it's never, you know, in Oregon is not a, it's not an income problem to state Oregon. It's a spending problem. And it always has been. It always has been for the most part.

That's right. And so I will once again ask, and I, I think I asked this to you last week, but I'll continue to ask unless you've heard any different. Republicans are all against this special session. And then why would Leader Drazen and all the rest of the people just make it easy to provide quorum? When they know that it's a bad thing for the people. I was talking to some folks up in Salem. And I says, what's the strategy with the governor calling it on Labor Day?

So she can say, oh, the Republicans didn't show up and didn't do their job. job on Labor Day? Well, Labor Day is a national holiday. I don't understand. I don't understand this governor. But I don't understand the Republican strategy of volunteering to provide quorum so that the business of tax raising can go on with enough Republicans present. I guess the assumption is that if life gets bad enough in the state of Oregon, then Oregon residents will blame the Democrats and then start voting for Republicans in mass. But I haven't seen any evidence of that having occurred in the past, have you? No, and I guess you have to ask these representatives that represent us up there.

Do you like us or do you like your job more? Which is the priority? Now, I know that I was talking, I was over at Pacific Powers event last week, which was the wildfire unveiling of the wildfire intelligence center out on Foothill Road in Medford. It was pretty impressive to see, you know, how they're monitoring everything, and that part of it's good. But I ran into a state representative Emily McIntyre. And she was telling me that the legislative council ended up claiming that, well, the rules say that you have to be there for all sessions. That's true. It is the rule.

And that the legislative council said that if they didn't show up to provide corner, that somehow this would be considered an unexcused absence. And I said, well, I told Emily, I said, my issue with this is that that's nonsense because how can you be charged in absence for a session which is not legally brought into existence? You see her from Herman? Yeah, you always remember Elsie's hired by whoever's in charge and the Democrats are the ones that are in charge.

Okay, so Democrat lawyers are saying that Republicans can't deny quorum by not just showing up and gabbling in. Okay. All right. Yep. All right. Yep, yeah. But still, even then, if it's supposed to be a six-day session, and you got 10 days to deny, why not just deny it? It'd just be great to see a little bit of fight, wouldn't it?

Just a little bit. Just a little bit of rebellion? Well, I think I'd be making a bigger deal out of the Labor Day issue, make the governor look bad. I mean, make her explain why Labor Day. Make her explain that. Well, you know why they went on Labor Day and one's paying attention to it. That's why. They don't want anybody watching it.

I don't know. Makers say that. Okay. Speaking of the Pacific Power, Wildfire, the Intelligence Center that I was at last week, and I was talking about that the day after, you took me to task later, gently. I mean, we're just having fun here a little bit. Right.

And you're saying that when you heard me talk about, to express a little bit of sympathy for a Pacific power. You just about fell out of your chair, I think, was the term that you ended up using. And so, well, I don't want you falling out of your chair. Explain where my thinking may not have been totally fleshed out. What do you say? Well, you know, the history of Pacific Corp goes back, you know, to the beginning of the last century.

And so, you know, it started out as a small company. It acquired, you know, Popco. and it acquired several other companies and it built up pretty good size. It was traded a couple of times. Scottish Power owned it at one time and then Brookshire-Hathaway Energy bought it. And when they bought it,

and this is kind of how I got into politics, was over the removal of the dams on the Klamath River. And so I went and researched that a little bit, refreshed my memory how that happened. Now, Senator Jason Ackisand, that was a senator prior to me, was the only Republican to vote for a bill that allowed Pacific power to charge all the ratepayers to remove the dams on the Klamath River. And what was also striking during that conversation on the floor is, and I think I knew this,

but I forgot about it, Senator Jason Atkinson had. to announce a conflict of interest as he was a consultant for Pacific Power. Now, I don't know what kind of qualifications the senator had, and I don't know what kind of consulting, but I thought that was a little interesting. Well, actually, from the outside, it sounds slightly sketchy, just a little bit. Yeah, right. And especially at the time, at that same time, he was building this great, big, beautiful home and everything.

and so, you know, I don't know. You can, I don't have anything really to point to, but it all looks, like you say, a little sketchy. Yeah, it just looked like a strange trail of influence, I guess, would be the way to point. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what Senator Axton's expertise were on the subject matter that he was consulting for Pacific Power, but. Well, it's kind of like Hunter Biden's expertise with Burisma, natural gas holdings. Okay, where's the connection?

Right? Now, I'm not saying it's the moral equivalent, but still. Right, exactly. So, you know, you would like to know, and I think when a politician does those things, and maybe it's perfectly legitimate, I think that they should open up a little more and say, hey, I'm a fish biologist, and, you know, because I am a citizen legislator, and I did some work for Pacific Power on fish passage, blah, blah, blah, you know what I mean? Just shut some light on. What did you do, and what is your expertise? teeth. I think that would have helped him out a lot, but anyway, it didn't happen. So now we're in the wildfire, and they got a lot of judgments, a million dollar judgments about their infrastructure failing and their lack of ability to shut the power off during those windy conditions and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, and this has been essentially the response now that when it gets windy and when we detect any kind of an overload on a line, we will

will automatically either kill the power immediately or examine it and choose to put about manually if we think conditions are such that there's a public safety shutoff. They've been doing this several times over the last few weeks. Yes, and so a couple things. One, they lost these lawsuits, but now also what has emerged is they're appealing to the appellate court. The reason they lost the lawsuits is four service personnel testified it was their infrastructure that caused the fire. Now they're appealing it because how many years later, Oregon Department of Forestry has done their own investigation and has come out and determined that it was not their infrastructure that failed.

They caused the fire. Oh. So I don't know. I don't know how all that goes. So now they're headed to the appellate court to overturn all of these judgments. Interesting. All right. So, Kay, you want to engage in a little.

of conjecture there? I just don't know how that works, and I just don't know how this far after the fact. You know, I don't know all the facts. I just find it interesting. And what do you think there was some political juice, perhaps it could have been used to strong arm and investigator? Well, I do know that the Democrats have been very cozy with Pacific power. that's been my experience in the legislature.

Now, Senate Bill 762, there was a lot of interesting stuff in there, and some of it I don't quite know how it's going to work, but my assumption is, my take is, is it authorizes the Public Utility Commission to entertain programs from the power companies on how they're going to harden the system for wildfire. And part of that approval is when the power company says, hey, we need a 20% rate increase to harden the system,

and the PUC approves that, and this is what the program is. And so we're looking at our rates soaring in reaction to this. Sure. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, my take is, this is my take. this is how I perceive it is the power company yes under they are hardening the system to try to prevent forest fires but you but my perception is they're also getting a brand

new infrastructure for the next hundred plus years um that is paid for by the ratepayers all right so question being is that this is an investor owned utility why aren't the investors paying for this new infrastructure maybe they're paying a portion of it, I don't know, you know, I don't know how all that works, but I do know our rates have went up. That's a big increase for a big whack, you know? And, you know, they're getting a whole new infrastructure that's going to last a very long time. Now, I was told by a person who, what I'd say is very credible, that the power poles and all that equipment is also owned by Brookshire-Hathaway that makes that stuff.

So, you know, I don't know. Did the legislature by approving Senate Bill 62, 762, did they give a blank check to the utility company? Maybe this is the stuff that Senator Golden was talking about. Well, you know, there are good parts about Senate Bill 762, not just the, even though we don't like the wildfire map, could that have been what he was referencing? I don't know.

I don't I just don't know I but you know I will tell you my personal observation of what's going on now why they're replacing all the power poles and power lines in my neighborhood is kind of baffling because we're not even in the in the we're not even in ODF protected lands or anything it's all green farmland and now we've got all these steel posts going in so I don't understand that. But I'm also not in the PowerPole business, and I'm definitely not alignment. But you just kind of scratch your head going, you know, there's a lot of places out there that are in the wooey. Why aren't they being targeted first? You know, that's an interesting question because that's a question which I, well, kind of around that era or that issue, that when I was at that press conference for the Wildfire Intelligence Center

and there was a Mr. Gutierrez who was the spokesperson there and I said you know what is the long-term plan because they were just so proud that they have the ability to monitor the fires and then shut things off when the conditions get bad and I talked about what I had experienced up on

Nugget Butte in Gold Hill I don't know if you're familiar with that area Herman but we have have a lot of communication towers on top of that, K-B-O-Y, K-R-W-Q radio are up there. There are cell services, all these things. And for years, and I'm talking about for years, 15, 20 years that I've been going up there, I would see what was happening underneath the power line right of ways. And I'm thinking, boy, this is just a massive wildfire slash accident waiting to happen

that would just incinerate the place. You just knew that's what you were looking at. And over the winter, they ended up contracting and getting the big machines up there, those big masticator machines that chew the trees down. They cut the trees down, and they cut everything down to the ground level. And they clear that up all the way to all the way up the mountainside. It is beautiful. You couldn't throw gasoline on that what's left down there and do much to burn the place down now.

It's excellent. and I see this as they shut the power off to the Applegate and out in Roche and all these other areas they'll be doing all of these wildfire cutdowns or these these shutoffs and yet they're running wires through similar situations like what we had in Gold Hill and I'm kind of curious when are they going to grind and take all those trees out on these power line rightaways on Highway 238 going even all the way into Josephine. County and Murphy, places like that. Well, one thing they're doing is the wire they're replacing with. So historically, electrical wires had no insulation, but... Yeah, they're a bear. Yeah. Yeah, now they're, now they've got insulation, so that's supposed to help.

But I just feel by my observations and understand politics is that the legislature basically gave Pacific power a blank checkbook to harden the system. And I understand it's for wildland fire, but to the, you know, but we've always had wildland fire, Herman. Yes, we always had it, but why are they working all this overtime and every, you know, these linemen, they're hard workers, that's a dangerous job, got all that stuff. But I also, as a guy that's had employees for 40 years, also know that overtime adds to the cost very quickly, and, you know, why is it a big hurry?

I guess there's just a lot of open questions that need to be addressed. And I would dare say that, frankly, the investors should have a dog in this fight, too. It shouldn't be something placed solely on the ratepayers because, frankly, this is something they should have been doing for a long, long time. They shouldn't have been waiting to modernize and improve just at this point in time. Or am I wrong on that? So I think there's good questions to ask. How much is this going to cost? How much increase the rate payers?

Are we going to have a 20% rate increase forever? Or when they're done hardening the system, does it back down again? You're a funny man. You're a funny man, Herman. So, I mean, there's all these questions that need to. How long is this going to take? What are the guarantees? So, you know, and if they win their lawsuits,

now of a sudden they're not being, and they don't have to pay billions of dollars out. And they get a whole new infrastructure for the next hundred years at the expense of the guy that packs, you know, the person that packs their lunch and goes to work everything. That's who's paying for. And in cahoots with the Oregon State Legislature and the PUC then, is what I'm hearing. Listen, they weren't in my office very much, but they lobbied the legislature like crazy.

They knew, you know, I got all twisted up over the dams with them. Then I got all twisted up over the smart meters with them. I got all twisted up over increasing rate. So I was not their pitcher child, poster child, I mean. And these same issues are continuing today. I guess this is the reason why I wanted to kind of go back in your history with this, because you were telling me, oh, man, they lobbied like crazy. Yeah, and, you know, I had, I had dam.

one night with the CEO of Brookshire-Hathaway Energy in Washington, D.C., on top of the Hilton where Reagan got shot. And I think with all confidence, I can safely say at the end of that dinner, that individual probably never would want to talk to me again. Well, what you're also telling me, though, is that there were likely a lot of other legislators from Oregon, who are more than happy to talk with and do the bidding. Right. And I would have to go look.

I don't know if they ever gave me any money or not. They probably gave me some token money for my campaign finance. But I was noted. I was pretty well known in the legislature that, you know, you can give Herman money, but good luck changing his mind. Well, what I was concerned most about with trying to be balanced in my opinion, of the business model of Pacific power is that one thing that the public utility commission did do, and this was based upon policy forced down from our governors, whether it was Governor

Brown, Governor Kotech, is that you will concentrate first and foremost on renewable energy. Well, if you're going to concentrate on putting up windmills and solar cells first, something is going to give, and it would appear that grid maintenance and taking care of the wildfire stuff was probably part of that. Would you agree? Well, I think that, you know, especially under Governor Brown, I think that was the trading thing is we're going to go green energy and we're going to help you pay for it. I don't know, you know, Kotech is not the environmentalist that Governor Brown was.

Okay, so she's more focused on unions and LGBT stuff and all that stuff. where Brown was more focused on the environmental stuff. And we're still suffering from some of that, and we will suffer for decades. And we're suffering even right now in our planning. Climate-friendly, equitable communities. You either go the gangrene stack and pack. I know that ProPublica would probably say that I am referencing a conspiracy theory, but I'm pretty sure it's true.

But you know what's interesting is even after all of that, It's 60% of the powers that is generated for specific power is still coal fire. 50-something percent and some change, almost 60 percent, and just a very little is green energy. I know that the energy, what was at the EIA.gov site used to actually put where the source was of your power on the grid at any one time. and up until a couple of years ago, two, three years ago, you could routinely say that about 50, 60% of the power that Southern Oregon was consuming was from the, oh, like the, was it the Montana, you know, the Montana coal plants that they had out there. And supposedly that has stopped now, but they also changed the website so that you can't really tell what power is on.

So maybe it's one of those things where politically it became too hot to be truthful. Well, Pacific Power over the years have bought lots of coal reserves and a lot of coal infrastructure stuff has been part of their portfolio. So I don't know exactly what. But that's okay, Herman. We can feel good about the renewable energy because we, little Oregon, are saving the planet with our reduction in carbon output. Isn't that great? Well, you know, I've always, you know, in Josephine County, the average income per capita, not household per capita. is $29,000, almost $30,000, you know.

And so how does those people absorb a 20% increase in electricity? With great difficulty. Yeah. Yeah. So I just think that was, that was just, you know, whatever that number is, I think it's supposed to ramp up to 20% bill. You know, it's hard to really pin down these numbers. Well, every year we seem to have yet another request from Pacific Power, and we'll just kind of leave it at that.

Hey, Herman, I'll tell you what, so I will temper my sympathy in the future then, okay? I will do that. But, hey, I would never want to be sideways with you, but I appreciate a bit of that lobbying education, I guess, would be the way to put in, huh? Well, it's just some history, you know? I mean, you know, you look at, they benefited from the little generation from the, dams for a hundred years or whatever, or 80 years or whatever. And then they forced the ratepayers to pay to remove their liability as they saw it from their books, right?

Exactly. All right. Herman, I appreciate the take. Now you know how I got into politics. All right, Herman. Thank you so much. Appreciate the history. We'll have you next week.

Take care. Bye-bye. Former State Senator Herman Bairchigeron. KMED, KMED, H.D-HT-1 Eagle Point, Medford. KBXG Grants Pass. Oregon Eat deals has unbeatable offers for you. Grab a $25 gift certificate to Artisan Bakery for...