The Dispatch Podcast - Will Trump Lower Your Taxes? | Interview: Grover Norquist

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Kevin Williamson is joined by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, to explain the tax policy of the second Trump administration. The Agenda: —“I want to be left alone” —Unionization —State income taxes —Republican record on tax cuts —Tax exempt tips —SALT deductions —Government bullying —Tariffs and deregulation Show Notes: —“Right-wing zealot” The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. This is Kevin Williamson.

I'm sitting in for Jamie, who is, I think, out with the flu or something like that. Who knows what's really going on with him, but that's the official story. Our guest today is someone who I've always enjoyed talking to about politics and policy, although we've had some pointed disagreements about some things over the years. He is someone who has had a hand in Republican politics and the development of tax policy, particularly, a long, long time since a lot of us were little baby pundits and such. This is Grover Norquist, who is the president of Americans for tax reform, probably best known for his very successful effort to get Republicans to pledge not to ever vote for a tax increase, as I would add

parenthetically, even in those cases when it might be a good idea. That being said, it's a good conversation. I think you'll enjoy it. Grover Norquist. Corby, thank you for being here. Before we get into the tax stuff, there was one question I wanted to ask you first. It was occasioned by the headline I saw in the New Republic, which still exists, by the way. A lot of people don't know that the new republic still exists. I didn't know that. It's not really quite the same thing as it used to be, but it's one of those headlines that kind of jumped out at me because it says something about our political culture.

Let me read this to you. The right-wing zealot who wrecked the budget process and made Washington dysfunctional. Grover Norquist's 45-year-long reign of terror started with a simple pledge. Now, by the way, that was written in 20, 23, 45 years before that you would have been a college undergraduate, I'm pretty sure. So my first question is, were you really that influential when you were 22? My serious question is, are you a right-wing zealot? Because I've known you for a while, and I followed your politics for a while, and I don't think that's true, is it? No. I mean, my goal in life is to be middle of the road without moving my positions

and to move the Overington window towards more liberty, towards expanding liberty. I would argue that the modern Republican Party is the Reagan Republican Party, and even to this day, is a movement, a political movement that is made up of people. If you sat around the table, everyone's there for the same reason. They want to be left alone, but they're there because they want to be left alone in different zones. Leave my Second Amendment rights alone. Let me have freedom of religion. Let me educate my own children, either homeschooling or parochial schools. Leave my business alone. Leave my money alone. Allow me to vape if I want to to quit smoking cigarettes. And so around the table, they're very different people. The person wants to. go to church all day, looks across the table at the guy who wants to make money all day, and says, that's not how I spend my time. And they both look over at the guy who wants to fondle his guns all day and say, that's not what we do with our time. But it's not necessary that Americans agree how you employ your freedom, but that you want to be left alone and you

wish to grant that to other people by the government. So all you have to do is agree to vote for somebody in the middle of the circle who says, I'm going to leave your kids alone, your guns alone, your money alone, your land alone, your business alone, your property alone, your ability to speak alone, and then you vote for that guy. So it's a low-maintenance coalition. Is it now? Because it certainly doesn't seem that way. Well, it is as long as you explain things properly. If a social conservative says, I want everyone to study the Bible in school, they have to go out and force school boards to make everybody do what they want. If they say, I want my child and children to have the right to study the Bible in school,

well, then you're for school choice, then you're for homeschooling, you're for local control. And you're not in conflict with anybody anymore. Now you're the guy next to you goes, well, that's fine. I don't care. Just don't tell my children what to read in school because I'll go to my own school. A lot of issues on the right where people think they have. conflict, is that they look at the problem in the wrong way. There's big, government's so big that you can always make things better by getting the government out of something to a certain

extent. And the fiction, I think, that you can make things better with more government. We could get to that after we've done eliminating the bits that the government caused. Perhaps we don't need to do more things if we just get the government out. If you want parental control of education that can either be Washington passing edicts that parents have to decide everything and teachers nothing or something, or it can be school choice. One leads to very few conflicts except for those people who want to run other people's lives. And the other has many conflicts, even when people really shouldn't be arguing with each other because they're not, they don't need to be in conflict. So I guess my, yes, I think not raising taxes is key. I think it's, I think

It is the key issue that divides the two parties to this day. There are no Democrats who won't raise taxes, and almost every Republican is committed, never to raise taxes, and kept that word since 94. So that's the huge difference, but it comes from the fact that the Democrats need to raise taxes because they need to feed their team. And our team benefits as taxes go down and everybody has more freedom. So it's unlikely to change. Your analysis seems to me that it would have described about maybe 85% of Republicans in, say, 1994.

And now it's maybe more like 70%, 65%. I think there's certainly a more, a less libertarian, more statist element in the Republican Party, some of which is coming out of the kind of right-wing populist stuff, of which you've been on the receiving end sometimes in a very unpleasant way on a couple of issues. And in some of it, I think, it's just maybe, you know, kind of drift of politics in a, you know, digitally driven social media age where you've got more political involvement, but less sort of a contemplation. You know, there are more people getting their political views from social media. If you were getting it from books or even, you know, 750 word op-eds or 3,000 word essays in national review or something

like that. It's just a different kind of politics. But I think I would agree with you that generally you're there. For direction of the party. Okay. Some people have argued, well, you know, we should be give union bosses more power because then workers would like us. Now, mind you, we're getting blue collar votes stronger now that 7% of the private sector's paying union dues than when 35% of all employees in the country were paying union dues. So with the union bosses removed from standing between Republican candidate and voter, we're doing better.

Why would we ever reintroduce union bosses to stand in between us and workers? The idea of having the teamsters, how do the teamsters come and speak on behalf of working Americans is a joke? It's a 50-year-old memory people have of, you know, I'm the union boss that I tell everyone what to do. And that was sort of true. if you're dealing with on the waterfront territory, less true now. You know, I helped start a newspaper in Philadelphia once, and we got picketed by the Teamsters every day that we were in business. And the reason for that was because we wouldn't sign a Teamsters contract for our distribution.

And the reason we didn't sign a contract with the Teamsters was that we didn't have any drive for hers or own any trucks or anything like that. They still wanted money, and they would come out and they would stand in front of our place and picket us. And, of course, the Teamsters can't afford to pay Teamsters to pick at you in Philadelphia. It's way too expensive. So it'd be like one, you know, picket cap and a bunch of guys that picked up from a home of shelter. And I would come in, you know, in the afternoon. And I'd bring them coffee, you know, and welcome them to the picket line and all that. And I said to the picket boss out there, you know, the great thing about being ticketed by you,

picketed by you guys is you're going home at 415. I mean, you're not doing any overtime to picket Kevin Williamson in Philadelphia. There's one issue upon which you and I have, I think, that kind of a fundamental. disagreement, and I've always kind of wanted to bring this up with you in some form, and I guess this is a good place to do it, which is that I've argued, and I still believe this, that your hallmark issue, the thing you've really dedicated your career and such a tremendous amount of injury to you is actually a secondary issue, that taxes don't matter nearly as much as spending, that taxes are something that we're going to deal with at some point down the line that has to do

with essentially an accounting problem for how we pay for all the spending that we're going to do. and more important at this point, all the spending we have done. We now have a situation in which interest on the debt is as big a piece of the federal budget as national defense, or at least as the Defense Department, it depends on how you towed up total national defense spending. So I wonder if you've refought that any in the last 20 or 25 years as the focus on taxes has not appreciably slowed down the growth of government or the growth of debt. Well, if you look at the 50 states, I would argue that the state's willingness to phase out income taxes or not have income taxes, the number of taxes matter because all taxes are raised to the breaking point. All taxes are raised, income tax, sales tax, property tax, they're raised to the point where political careers are broken. And when political careers are broken, those taxes start to receive. If there is one tax, the property tax in, it's a shorthand, but the property tax in New Hampshire,

it's a very low tax state because you don't have an income tax and you don't have a broad sales tax. If you have in New York and California a property tax, a sales tax, an income tax, then there are other taxes as well. each of those grows up there was the tragic situation of New Jersey that in 1965 I only had property taxes no broad-based sales tax no income tax New Jersey right kind of hard to imagine New Jersey but that's New Jersey around 66 they said we should do something about this and they added a sales tax in order to have the property taxes go down that was the theory. The property tax is too high if we swallow a second tapeworm. The first tapeworm will discipline itself. And you'll be much happy with two small tapeworms than the one annoying

one. And then they decided to swallow a third tapeworm, which was the income tax 10 years later. So we have to have a sales tax because the property tax is too high. And then we have an income tax because the property tax is too high. And now in New Jersey, they have a high property tax, a high sales tax, that high income tax, and all three tapeworms are growing at their own pace. And had they only had one tax, it would have blunted the effort there. Florida has no personal income tax in the state of Florida. New York does. New York, the number is about two years old, has fewer people than Florida does. Imagine that. About two million, two and a half million fewer, but they spent 230 billion at the state level, Florida 115. So two to one

ratio. Because Florida does not raise taxes, it does not easily spend. Their spending is half. They didn't, neither started, Florida didn't start, they used to spend more like each other, okay? As New York raised taxes, it spent more as Florida didn't raise taxes. It didn't spend more. And so they have $115 billion. They don't have to raise because they don't spend it. And yes, at the end of the day, the deadweight cost of government, the dead weight cost of government is spending plus the regulatory burden. And the regulatory burden includes that taxes interfere with how you run your life. It's not just they stole the dollar. It's that they took the dollar because you are driving your car. And now we're going to drive your car less because they're taxing

energy. So the regulations, the kind of things we think of as regulations, you can't have plastic bags or something, plus the regulatory cost of extracting, you know, trillions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people is its own cost. And some people argue that every dollar of taxes is $2 of cost. That may be a high ratio, may not be actually correct. But it's not zero. It doesn't caught, you know, the government doesn't get a dollar by harming the economy, a dollar. It has to root around and chase you down and catch you and beat you on the head and then take your dollar.

And that's expensive. Or find it hidden in a bank account somewhere. So I would argue that it is the reason why the pledge has been helpful, and I don't know if this is cheating, but on this chart, the top is blue. So the blue part is Democrats in the Senate, Democrats in the House, and there are Republicans controlled the House in the Senate between 1932 when this charge starts and the yellow line, 1994. During that 62-year period, the Republicans controlled Congress twice, two years under Truman, two years under Eisenhower.

What was 1994? And then since 1994, the Republicans have controlled Congress, 60% of the time. The difference, 96% of Republicans signed the pledge never to raise taxes. They watched George Herbert Walker Bush win the Cold War, kick a rack out of Kuwait without sticking around for 25 years to occupy the place. Fairly successful presidency. One small problem, one hole in the bottom of the boat, raised taxes. And he got out. He lost to some guy from Arkansas, which at the time wasn't even a state. From 32 to 94, 62 years, twice the Republicans control Congress. Since then, 60%. Being the party that will not raise taxes, keeping your word running. Presidents who run on that, Congressman Senators, is huge. And yet our national debt is enormously larger today than it was in 1994, which is my real point here. I have no doubt that the tax stuff is good an issue for the Republicans. Nobody likes paying taxes. This is Jude Wininski's two Santa Claus theory, right? That the Democrats can promise you goodies in the forms of, you know, welfare benefits or payments or subsidies or the

thing. The Republicans increasingly are open to that sort of thing. Republicans will promise you benefits in terms of tax cuts. But my argument is that the focus on taxes, while being politically good for Republicans in a party, I increasingly care less and less about over. Because every day, that's another issue. Hasn't produced the sort of fiscal outcomes that I think we would like. And so I wonder if you're ever going to get to the collect. It's performed better fiscal responses, meaning, more freedom, more growth, more opportunity, more wealth, better living standards than the failed focus on chasing the deficit. The Republican Party used to be the party that raised taxes to pay for the welfare state. Goldwater, pre-Ragan, Goldwater, voted against

the Kennedy tax cuts, which gave us tremendous economic. growth in the 60s. Now, the Democrats had power and they used it to spend money and to create the great society, massive spending. But the tax cut itself was very important. If you want to reduce the deficit, cut taxes for growth, cut spending to reduce the size of government. Our job, my job as a political activist, is spend less, spend less, spend less, cut taxes. cut taxes, cut taxes, in a pro-growth way, meaning reduce marginal tax rates on everything. But only one of those things is actually happened. Well, we spent, when the Republicans are in power, they spend significantly less than when

the Democrats are in power. That's post-Ragan, that's just clear. Not as small as we should. I'm not arguing, I'm not happy with the size of government. Let's talk a little bit about changes in tax policy that we foresee coming up sometime in the near future. I don't know what the Trump administration wants to do on taxes. They tend to be kind of all over the place. Sometimes it seems that certainly as a candidate that Trump would just say the first thing that would come into his head sometimes. I think that the idea of exempting

tips from taxation, by the way, was just sort of an off-the-cuff thing that now has become sort of fossilized policy priority. At the same time, he's also proposing a gigantic new tax in the form of tariffs. Two questions. what do you expect the Trump administration, three questions, really, what do you expect the Trump administration to push foreign taxes? Do you think the tax debate is really going to be driven ultimately by the Trump administration or by congressional Republicans? And in light of those two things, what should we expect to actually happen with things like solid deductions and tariffs, exempting overtime, social security benefits, those sorts of things? Lay out the prophecy for me.

Yeah. This is one of those good things where instead of saying the three, parts to that question. Three parts to your question are all the same answer. And that is because this is not Trump's first rodeo. He and because the House and the Senate have been getting ready for this. The House and Senate leadership and the House and Senate tax leadership, Ways and Means, Jason Smith, and Crapo from Idaho, Senator Crapo on Senate Finance, they've been working together for a year or more. And the president helped, and a lot of those people helped craft the bill in 2017, along with the president, who sort of laid out some outlines and then the House and the Senate had a whole bunch of input. We're not talking about taking something that was a

consensus issue in 2017, and that Republicans have run on and defended and benefited from for the last eight years now, and saying, let's continue that and maybe make sense. some minor changes or some positive changes if we can make it fit. So what Trump wants and what the House and Senate Republicans want is actually pretty much the same. And I'm working with each of the characters there. And they're working together well. They talk together much more than House and Senate people have, I've seen do in the past.

And the president meeting with the groups in the House and the Senate, this is not done. during other Republican presidencies. If he's supposed to be the non-party guy, he's much more into party unity, the president, than previous presidents have who thought they could send edicts down to the House and Senate, people were supposed to pay attention to them. So good news is what is Trump want,

what's going to happen in the hell of the point? It's the same thing. Trump wants what the House and Senate wants, and because they're all in stuff, something very close to the following will happen. Step one, the House and the Senate agree, leadership, and backbenchers too, even some of the problematic backbenchers agree, we're going to go the baseline for what are we changing from? What are we building on? We are not going to build

on present law. Present law is that in a couple of years, all of the tax cuts disappear. So if you assume that that's your baseline, which is the tax cuts all disappear, the doubling of the per child tax credit, gone, the doubling of the standard deduction, gone, and the tremendous simplification of the tax code that flowed from that, lower tax rates for every American who pays taxes, gone. And expensing for new investment, which was very important, gone. The only thing that stands, like the gentleman's shopping centers and Los Angeles area surrounding everything, but is the one thing that stays is the corporate income tax, that everything else goes, disappears, and that's the same, because they protected that, knowing,

that one, it's the one thing the Democrats would be willing to kill in a second. They kind of have to help us get some of the stuff back, even if they don't want to. Or you build from present policy, which is what's happening right now, continue that. So there are a couple of the tax cuts that have begun to disappear. The expensing has gone down a bit. And so those will have to be quote-unquote paid for with lower spending to out into the future. But that's de minimis compared to the whole bill. We're talking about $4 trillion, which just keeps going in reduction. What we normally have is a $4 trillion increase. If we just sit on our hands, taxes go up by $4 to $5 trillion over the next 10 years. We're not going to allow that to happen. And so we're going to go

with the policy, the standard, I'm sorry, the present policy, not present law, that's the important part there. And what you're talking about as a matter of how this is accounted for and talked about. Yes. Yes. And then the other piece to that is there'll be a couple of things that they'd like to add. The president came up with the idea in the middle of the campaign when he was in, oddly enough, Nevada, which has a lot of tipped workers of let's not tax. tips. Now, I'm not usually in favor of selecting ad industry or a particular way people do. I like across-the-board tax cuts so that everybody benefits and you don't end up with people being jealous. How come Fred has something I don't have? But on this one, it is a tax cut that reduces how much the government

has to mess with your life. Do they have to look over your shoulder while you're receiving a tip as a restaurant worker or somebody who paints people's fingernails or cuts people's hair. Or do they really have to be on top of you for that? Let's leave that alone and have that privacy. The other piece to it is the unions, as you know, city by city are trying to kill tipping. Why? Because you cannot unionize an industry where people tip. In unionize, you say, all of you are the same.

Our work is all the same. and people who work in restaurants and who do nails and chat with people at the barbershop know perfectly well. I'm a bartender. I'm a better bartender than other bartenders. I get more tips. Don't tell me I get paid the same per hours that other guy who doesn't work as well or as hard as I do. You cannot unionize that. If you say no tips, all of a sudden it becomes easier to unionize you, which is why the left wants to get rid of tips and go to everybody hourly all the time. So it is both a labor union issue as well as a tax issue, as well as a privacy issue, and it doesn't cost that much money to the government. And Ted Cruz has written a very good bill,

along with Dane's senator from Montana, to make sure that you don't have billionaires tipping themselves to pay their salaries out of tips. And so it's not a big piece of the puzzle, but it's an important piece of the puzzle. Imagine, as we go forward, and we make the case for making the tax cut permanent, you bring someone who runs a nail salon and you say, no tax on tips, this is what it means to me. Then there's another piece of no tax on tips

which facilitates for barbershops and nail salons and other places. What we already have in restaurants, which is you can tip on your credit card and that money goes to you through the restaurant. But right now, you do that with your nail sales salon person, you give, you do it on your credit card. The person who runs a nail salon pays taxes on that. And then it goes to you and then you pay taxes on it. It's ridiculous. It's very

painful. That is going to be gotten rid of as part of the budget deal. We're going to have spokesman in the ear of everybody who gets their hair done or gets their nails polished for the next number of months explaining why this bill is important. Add to that, people who talk about how simple it is to do the taxes when you have the standard, the twice-the-size standard deductions because you don't have to keep all those pieces of paper and prove that you gave money at church on Sunday and have all the little receipts and so on.

Plus, everybody sees lower rates. The businessmen see expensing for businessmen and women. We put four or five people in a row, and I don't know how the Democrats are going to stand up and say, I vote against all of you. I vote against all of you and don't want to see the doubling of the per child tax credit and don't like the simplification and the lower taxes of not $12,000 with a zero bracket, but $24,000 with a zero bracket for a married couple and a simplified life for people who get tips

and make it easier for people to invest in new houses and new opportunities for people to live in apartments. This is a very powerful pitch that Republicans have, and so I think we'll see that move forward. The only changes I hope for or expect, I hope for many, I suppose, but hope for and expect, is that we take the corporate rate from 21%, which is where it is now. It was 35 when Trump became president, 35 was higher than all the other countries in the world, stupider than France, higher than China. We tax our businesses, worse than China taxes there. So they're communist countries.

What is this? We get down to 21, but you have to add the four plus average state corporate tax. So really at 25. We're taxed at the same rate as communist China. That's still stupid. We need to take that down to 15%. A little bit trivia for you. In the United States, government spending has a share of GDP is slightly higher than it is in China

by about two points, I want to say. I want to see it's 36 versus 34 or something like that. I'm definitely going to bring up the tipping thing with my hair guy as soon as I as soon as I'll see him and see what he thinks about that. For people who aren't tax nerds, could you talk a little bit about expensing and why that's important and what that means? Sure. Expensing instead of long depreciation lines, if you buy a piece of machinery for a factory

or build the factory. or buy tractors or trailers or big trucks, you could either deduct, you get to, with depreciation schedule, could be five years, 10 years, 20 years, 40 years for building sort of thing. So you, let's say it's a 10-year depreciation schedule and you spend a million dollars. You get $100,000 deducted from your income. You don't pay taxes on it each of those 10 years. So you have to spend the million dollars year one, but you only get. credit for not having the million dollars that you don't have anymore over a 10-year period.

Expensing says you buy the million-dollar piece of machinery so you can put people to work in your factory. You expense it, meaning if you earn $2 million, but you spent a million on improving the productivity of your factory with this million-dollar machine, you expense that year. You don't pay taxes on it because it's not income that year. And then that tremendous drops the cost of employing capital per worker. Some people think that the going to expensing was as important in job creation and increasing the productivity of workers that long run, you can only pay a worker more if he's more productive. You can't pay him more just because you like him because you're not creating the wealth to pay him. But when they become more productive

because you've got a truck instead of a borough, you can pay the guy who drives the truck more than the guy who rides a borough. And everybody's happy with that because the guy's more productive. He can create more wealth. And the guy who finances either the borough and pays the staff and finances understands this as well. So very important to have this low cost investing in new capital to make people more productive because that's what makes wages go up. When Republicans cut the corporate income tax, the projection by Kevin Hassett and others, was that you'd see a 7% increase in wages. They thought it would take several years. The tax cut didn't take effect until January 1st of 2018, because all of 2017, there was this argument about whether we could

abolish Obamacare, which you can't do under reconciliation. which is a specific rule that one time a year you can do this, okay? And what you can do is you can cut spending, cut taxes, increased spending taxes, but you can't change laws. And people want to change laws. And we spent several weeks and months arguing about that. Anyway, it got delayed. The most important thing this year is that we get the tax cut agreed to early in a matter

of three or four months, not a year. And that everybody knows that when this is finalized, its effective date will be January 1st, 2025. So you can now begin to invest in new equipment for workers, hire more employees, get better trucks and better computers and better machinery. Now, otherwise, businessmen and women waiting around go, I don't know. Am I going to be able to expense it or not? Still a bit of a bit, though, I mean, because it's not a fate to complete that's going to happen, even if you backdate the... Which is why it's... But it's important to do both. Not just that you pass it soon, but that you tell them, it may take us five months to pass this, but understand when we get it done, it starts on the first of the year. I think people understand that something very close to what we have now and a little bit better is what we're going to make permanent.

And so while there'll be people standing up and saying, look at me for half an hour, because I just said something outrageously stupid or interesting, that isn't going to stop the bill from passing. There's been some speaking of outrageously stupid or interesting. There have been some interesting little political kerfuffles that have come up in this a little bit, and I'm curious what you think about them. You've got a number of Republicans in the House from high-tax states who want a much higher. deduction for state and local taxes and are threatening to make trouble if they don't get it. And then you've seen actually even a couple of like Freedom Caucus types talk about increasing corporate income taxes as a way to offset reductions in personal taxes and you're getting rid of the taxes on Social Security benefits and tips and things like that. Are those serious

fights? And if so, how do you think they're going to shake out? They're serious. They're important because anything with more than two people involved can kill the bill. So these are small minorities of people are focused on those two challenges that you talked about. But that doesn't matter. Three of them is a big number because of the narrow margin that Republicans have. It gets a little bit better three months from now as we elect some of the congressmen to replace the people that Trump put into his administration or is putting in. into his administration. But it's still tight. So step one, deductibility of salt, state and local

taxes. This affects well-to-do people with big houses and big incomes in high tax states and high tax cities. So in New York and in California, but not too many other places because there's $10,000. You can deduct $10,000 of your property taxes, of your personal income, state income taxes. your income. That's not my income because I'd give it to the government, state or local, and now I pay taxes on the rest of it. By taking 10,000, that solved almost everybody's problems in the country. That's why the Republicans picked 10,000 because it got them all the votes they needed to pass the bill in 2017. There are some Republicans who are in-seat states that have more people who think that they're affected by the lower amount of state-local

taxes being deducted. A handful in New York and a handful in California. Mind you, every one of those people has been elected several times since the bill passed with present law. So while they could say, I think this is important to some of my constituencies, it's not Libre d'I for them. They've been through this before and won the election. The likely fix is the one that was already agreed to once during an earlier negotiation. And that is, right now it's 10,000. $10,000 per tax filer, meaning an individual can deduct $10,000 or state local taxes from their income, if they pay taxes, and a married couple can also deduct $10,000. Well, there's a marriage penalty there.

Two people, each allowed to deduct $10,000 from their incomes when they pay their taxes, get married. Now they can only deduct $10,000, not $20,000. So the agreement that we came to, and I was working with some social conservative groups, with the relevant leaders in the legislature who are now having this conversation, and we agreed taking it to 20,000 for married couples, 10,000 for individuals, got rid of the marriage penalty, reduced the number of people affected at all by it rather dramatically, and seemed to solve everybody's problem. I think that there'll certainly be some who argue,

well, maybe we could do more than that, you know, but will we come to an agreement that is somewhere close to that? I think the answer is yes to that. We were there once before, and it is progress. And again, the Democrats' alternative minimum tax already takes away the salt deductions for anybody with a certain income. So many fewer people are hit by salt, not being deductible, than think they are. Because the Democrats took it away with one hand it to you with other and then took it away with the AMT. We ended both the AMT and the deductibility. And so it's actually a much smaller number of people affected. But you can reduce that number by going from 10 to 20 for married couples. I think something close to that

will happen. The people who are concerned about this are not sitting there with a hand grenade ready to blow up themselves and everybody else. If they don't get some extreme position, they do want to be listened to, and they will be, and something will happen there. And the president enunciated what I just said, the 10 to 20, for the marriage penalty, to end the marriage penalty, which I think is wise in a good position. The other one that you mentioned was... I assume somebody has an intern somewhere whose job it is to call the 41 Republicans in Greenwich, Connecticut, who are going to be really affected by this.

It's not as big a number. I think if your donor file, a bigger number of percentage of your donor file than the people who vote in your district. And I think people need to understand, my guy is fighting for me. It doesn't mean he gets to win all the time. You know that. They know that. But they do want to hear them saying, I'm looking out after my district in a serious way.

The benefits to a little interesting. Democrats say that Trump tax cut was only for rich people, but there's this other piece of the pie that isn't as beneficial to rich people as they'd like. So they have a little bit of an odd conversation to have there. No Democrat actually wants to get rid of salt. It wants to restore assault deductibility because that would be more money for rich people, but they want to talk about it because they're from those neighborhoods. So it's an odd one.

You did mention this weird situation where some Republicans think they're populace because they like, well, maybe we should raise the corporate income tax. Here's the challenge. members of Congress know that the corporate income tax plays one role, and that is to hide who pays the corporate income tax. The corporate income tax is not paid by some guy named Mr. General Motors. It isn't. If you go into a company and say, I'm taking a million dollars from you, and 70% of the money that that company spends is on wages, where do you think, who gets hurt? the best estimates are that about 70% of the corporate income tax comes out of the pockets of

working men and women in lower pay and fewer hours and fewer people working. Now, if you're in a non-competitive market, you might be able to raise prices to pay some of that million. So consumers get hit, workers get hit. And if you've been saving for your retirement as more than half the country isn't a 401k or an individual retirement account to find benefit pension, then if the tax is bad enough to hurt the value of the company that you're involved in and people say, oh, look, we ought to tax Google. Millions of people are counting on Google as part of their retirement. You're not taxing Mr. Google.

There is no Mr. Google. What you're taxing is people trying to retire who have Google stock in their portfolio, in their 401k or their IRA, the health savings accounts, all that cool stuff. This is a real opportunity for us to re-engage in the comment that Reagan made early on, which is the corporate income tax should be zero. All it does is hide that they're taxing workers and consumers and savers while they're pretending they're taxing somebody else. It's a dishonest tax. And I know some of the people who said that they want to raise corporate income taxes for that.

And they've also told me, I know that's not a good idea. I'm not really for it. I want, here's what I want. I want to punch those guys in the nose because they're so woke. And that's what this is. And which, not that it ever made a lot of sense that you attack workers and make them less well off because you're mad at woke, you know, the guys in the sea level offices. But we now have companies. We're discovering these companies weren't woke.

They were being threatened and held hostage. They were being told, we could hurt your company. you know, Mr. Meta, if you don't do what we want and censor people. These guys did not invent censorship. The FBI and the guys who didn't, you know, the guys who ran the COVID operation didn't want you to say things that they didn't want heard. Don't let anyone hear that. They threatened companies, the livelihoods of their employees, the stock value of all the people who invested in them, and said, we'll get you if you don't censor people. So I think we're seeing now with even Google, which people thought of as terribly woke, going, we don't want

to be censors. We're not in on this anymore. And meta going, you know, at great length, explaining the threats that he got from the government, do this or we'll get you, Kit. It's really ugly what we discovered happened there. So I think it's very nice that the business community is going, the woke stuff was imposed on us largely, not everybody, but largely. And by the way, why would you raise taxes? on the workers, the customers, and the savers because you are mad at some CEO who is a liberal. You know, I think, I mean, maybe it's easy for me to say this, but if I were a billionaire, you know, if I'm Jeff Bezos and I'm the wealthiest man in the world at sometimes,

I think I might be a little less difficult to bully than these guys are. I mean, what's the point of having FU money if you never say FU? This is why rich people have their kids kidnapped because they have money. Why does the government bully someone who, all they have, to do is file a some one of those lousy antitrust lawsuits and the net and the net value of your company can drop by trillions. Is there somebody in the world somewhere he's going to talk Trump out of this dump tariff stuff or is it going to happen or what should we look for there? And are you going to be out there supporting a gigantic national sales tax with exemptions for domestic goods,

which is what it is? Well, I think with any of these issues, if you start with what's the problem you're trying to solve. China cheats on our intellectual property. How do you stop? that. Do you tax Americans who buy goods as a way to punish China by taxing Americans? Because look, tariffs are taxes paid by Americans. If China puts up taxes on our products, Chinese people pay that tax. All damage done in trade wars is done by friendly fire. Your own government makes you worse off because they're putting tariffs on you. This is not an American problem. There's a worldwide problem. It's a problem through history that people have have looked to this. The opportunity we have is that if you want to compete more with China

and Europe, you can do that by reducing the regulatory burden by a trillion dollars, which makes the cost of our goods lower. And it's like having a tariff in the sense that it advantages the American consumer and the American producer who can now make goods that compete with China and Europe, even if they're subsidizing and cheating and doing all the stuff that we know that Europeans and Chinese people do, the best way to compete with them is to have lower taxes and less regulatory burden. And the tariffs, and this is, that way goes Argentina. Argentina set up tariffs because they didn't like the competition from outside. And behind the tariffs, you had unions set up. And they could have very high wages.

way beyond productivity. And you can have businessmen taking profits and charging more. And every time anyone challenged their monopoly rents, both the labor unions and the capitalists who were investing in these projects, you just kept raising the tariff barriers. And after a while, the problem is if you looked outside of the bubble of Argentina, you realized how poor you were. And you realize the disaster you're in. And we're now seeing that being unraveled by Javier Malay, doing all the things a good Republican would tell you to do, okay, including taking tariffs down. So tactically, I think the president says I like to be able to threaten Mexico and Canada with tariffs and then they do stuff I want. But the long-lasting thing that we can do,

if we have tariffs on China, as we did, they then refuse to buy our soybean. and a lot of the money that we gained by tariffing China's goods, we raised taxes on the American people to pay those tariffs, and then we paid welfare money to the people who were farmers who weren't able to sell their goods because China retaliated. And then Europe retaliated when we had some tariffs on them. So you end up with a trade war. If you simply say, we're not fighting with you, we're going to reduce by a trillion dollars, which is just, you know, a fraction of the total regulatory burdens, not all of it.

We're going to reduce to train us. What are you going to do to, you know, to combat, to fight us? You're going to deregulate? That'd be nice, okay? But I don't know if you're capable of it. Let's have lower taxes and lower regulations and a smaller government compared to them. That's the way to compete with them. I agree.

We need to compete with them to discourage them from cheating and subsidizing their goods and stealing our intellectual property. I don't think that tariffs are the best way to do that. I think rather reducing our own costs is the better way to do that and to have faster new products that come out. I mean, we dominate all the new pool technologies in the world because they were largely the deregulated ones. The heavily regulated, unionized steel and auto

haven't really done anything new or different in the last 60 years, but all of a sudden in six years, we're halfway to Mars for crying out loud, and AI is all over the place. So, yes, the one is a concern. I don't know that tariffs is, I know that tariffs are not the best way to deal with it, and I think we can move rather in reducing the cost. Our own government imposes on our own workers, consumers, and savers. And on that harmonious point of agreement, I'll thank you for being here. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Good to be with you.

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