Ron-Nate_11-12-26

Bob Neugebauer Hello, Idaho, and welcome to the Idaho Pulse. This is your good friend, Tea Party Bob. Here to bring you all the information you need to know about what is happening around our state and in our state legislature of all things. Joining us today is our good friend, Ron Nate, president of the Idaho Freedom Foundation. And he has some interesting subject matter to talk about with us today. So let’s get on with the show and welcome our guest, Ron Nate, to the Idaho Pulse.

Ron Nate Hello, Bob. Great to be on Idaho Pulse again. Uh, lots going on in in Idaho politics a week, a little over a week out from the election and, uh, repercussions from all that. But our work, uh, you know, there used to be a quiet season between legislative sessions, but there is always stuff going on now. There’s elections, there’s policy meetings, there’s budget requests by agencies. There’s the governor out doing stuff. And so we’re always busy and we’ve got a lot going on this fall. And I can update you on a little bit of that. And then we can have a little discussion about economics and politics.

Bob Neugebauer Sounds good. Let’s get on with the show, my friend.

Ron Nate Okay. And as I mentioned before, our pork report is out and it’s published. So you can go to Idaho freedom dot org and click on the Pork Report and find out all the examples of waste, fraud, and abuse that’s happening in Idaho government at all levels, state, local, um, school district level. You know, you have City of Boise putting up gay pride stuff, spending your taxpayer dollars just to make a point. You have, uh, millions of dollars going to public schools to get this to train teachers how to teach reading using phonics, which I thought would be a prerequisite for becoming a teacher. But Apparently times these times they are a-Changin. And so they, they need money for things like that. And as always, Medicaid expansion, which has been the, the biggest money pit that Idaho has ever dipped its foot into, um, to the tune of, gosh, one point three billion, one point six billion a year. Um, and, and really wasteful spending on a government program that should not exist because it’s not the proper role of government.

Bob Neugebauer Well, we always said, excuse me. Once they instituted it, you wouldn’t be able to get rid of it because you can’t give somebody something and then say, I’m taking it back. They won’t deal with that. Um, that was a warning that so many of us told the legislature, but they just wouldn’t listen.

Ron Nate Exactly, exactly. Um, right on the heels of that Idaho Freedom Foundation, we have released our Idaho Freedom and Family Agenda for the twenty twenty seven legislative session. And we’ve gone through the the the key issue areas that we want to address, and that’s championing fiscal responsibility. Like we’ve always been arguing for increased prosperity and affordability for Idahoans in all areas of their life. Safeguard Idaho from illegal immigration, protect Idaho families and children from the the culture war. Restore and defend health freedom in Idaho. Improve Idaho education and expose corruption, waste, fraud and abuse in state and local governments. Those are our our areas of of impact here. And so leading up to the legislative session every week will be one of those topic areas. We’ll have a series of articles in this week’s began. We released the agenda on Monday, and this week began with our series on our budget articles, you know, to champion fiscal responsibility. Our budget analyst from Hillsdale College, Brett Ferrugia, he’s a PhD candidate. He is putting out his series this week on what government should be and shouldn’t be doing, how government has, how the spending on government has grown beyond even what inflation and population growth would dictate, and that if we got it under control, we could do a lot of other wonderful things like letting people keep their own money, like getting rid of an entire class of taxes altogether simply by limiting government growth and cutting it back.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I’ll tell you. I’m in your camp. Nothing I would like better than to see taxes cut. Uh, the unfortunate part is that, uh, we have a lot of people who like to spend our money, and the more we give them, the more they spend. Which shows you why the budget has doubled in seven years.

Ron Nate Yep. At the view of government is if you have it, spend it. Uh, it’s usually their last instinct to say, hey, maybe we have too much. Maybe we ought to cut taxes for government. They can never have enough. And I’m saying that in Idaho, where it’s eighty percent Republican legislators and they still want to spend money beyond inflation and population growth.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I think it was a good old governor who said that we’re not going to increase the budget at all this year. And next thing you know, hey, here is twenty million dollars here, twenty million dollars there. And that’s

Ron Nate Well.

Bob Neugebauer not possible. It’s not going to happen.

Ron Nate Just last year, governor little little otter. No little governor little he, uh, he came into the session saying, we want a three percent cutback and we, we’re going to trim government. And by the time the legislature was done with things and all the budget bills that the governor himself signed off on, We ended up with a nearly a two percent increase, not a decrease at all. So even in a year where he says it’s a budget crisis and we need to cut, they couldn’t even find the the will the spine to cut government.

Bob Neugebauer Well, we know they’re not going to cut government because they are giving so many tax breaks to the technology industry that’s coming in here by leaps and bounds that they can’t afford to do that. Uh, if

Ron Nate True.

Bob Neugebauer if they

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer if, if they were to tax at the rational rate, which everybody else pays, we’d have plenty of money. But the only problem is they find other ways to spend it.

Ron Nate True. You know, uh, Reagan showed back in the eighties that by cutting the income tax rate, actually more tax revenue flowed into government because the tax rate was so high that, uh, and this is an economics principle when you when you lower taxes. In other words, when you increase the incentive to work, produce and prosper, you get more of that. And actually, the smaller percentage of the big economic pie was bigger than the big percentage of the small economic pie. That’s supply side economics right there.

Bob Neugebauer See, I think people forget going back into the seventies and even before we had taxable rates for those who were making large sums of money in the seventy and eighty percent range. And I know because I happen to be in that range at those times. It was

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer very disheartening to turn over that much of my hard earned income that a federal government, so they can go and waste it on all kinds of crazy programs. Even when Reagan cut the rate, if you remember, Jimmy Carter was the guy that came back in and put a thirty nine percent rate back in for, for corporations.

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer Um,

Ron Nate And then Reagan had to cut that. Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer Yeah. I mean, you know, we have a lot of, um. Coulda, woulda, shoulda and all, all of them, they they’re just talk. They really don’t do much of anything.

Ron Nate Yeah. Well, in Idaho Freedom Foundation, we can’t fix the whole world. But we can certainly influence Idaho politics and Idaho government. On December fourth, we will release our press conference on the budget. And so the way the process has always worked is the agencies submit their their budget requests. The governor’s office goes through it. And on the first day of the legislative session, the governor presents his proposed budget for the following fiscal year, and then the legislature takes that recommendation and they maybe they trim, maybe they add. Maybe they usually come in higher. But anyway, the legislature then deals with those recommendations. And so it’s a process that starts with the agencies fed by the governor, fed by the legislators, and then you end up with budgets that have grown beyond the pale over time. Well, we wanted to disrupt the apple cart, so to speak. So we started last year and we’re doing it again this year. We’re going to lay down what a conservative budget looks like before the governor even steps into the Capitol and say, you know what? This is what Idaho ought to be doing. We’re going to limit growth. We’re going to cut spending away from those areas where it is overgrown. And we’re going to show you what a conservative budget looks like and what could be accomplished if you actually did that, such as repealing a grocery tax, repealing property taxes on residents, and then eventually on corporations. And maybe Idaho could be the first state without a property tax.

Bob Neugebauer Well, from your lips to God’s ears. Ron. I just doubt that we’re going to see it. Uh, maybe in my lifetime. Might be in yours. But, uh, I don’t see any rush to try and help the people who pay these taxes. They don’t care about it. They are government that is, uh, ensconced in a spending frenzy and have been for a long time. And I don’t see it changing.

Ron Nate Well, imagine if Idaho government and the governor operated in an environment where nobody scrutinized it. There were there was no third party. Look at this saying, hey, you know what? Maybe government’s growing too fast or not. Well, Idaho Freedom Foundation fills that space because I don’t see any other organization concerned about government growth, concerned about Overtaxation. It is us. We are. We are the ones out there sounding the the siren there that, uh, Idaho government has been and keeps wanting to grow faster than it ought to.

Bob Neugebauer And the problem is, when you look at what’s going on here in our state, uh, we have a two, two and a half percent unemployment rate that’s full employment here in Idaho.

Ron Nate It is. I mean, when I was when I was a young buck in in graduate school for economics, we learned that the full employment rate was somewhere between four and six percent. And that was considered, you know, there’s always somebody that’s between a job and actually getting a better job, or there’s always some sort of change in technology where it’s structurally puts some people out of work while other people are being put into work. So there’s always a natural kind of a frictional unemployment of about four to six percent out there. But if you’re at two point two percent, man, you’re, you’re you’re well in the range of full employment and, uh, actually an employment rate, that unemployment rate that low would probably mean that wages start going up, which makes a lot of things affordable.

Bob Neugebauer Well, we know wages have started to go up aside from the illegals. And we know also that the employment unemployment rate is less because we have one hundred thousand illegals who are currently working in various corporations, in dairy industry and on these ag ag farms. Um, so I look at it from the viewpoint that as the technology continues to come into the state in, in these huge, um, behemoth type building projects, guess where the new, uh, employees are going to come from. It’s not going to be from here in Idaho. It’s going to be from the fifth five hundred and seventy three H-1b visas that micron has already applied for, and from people out of places like Arizona or California, where we have a lot of technology people that are going to come in and they’re going to work here. What’s that going to do to the population, though? It’s going to change it again and increase the liberalization of our core center, which is the Treasure Valley.

Ron Nate Yeah, I would like the government, Idaho government to just recognize that economic growth is a thing. It wants to happen on its own. You don’t need to stimulate it. You don’t need to try and engineer it. Um, you just need to have a set of clear rules. Um, that is, uh, left alone. And that set of rules being left alone is, gives, um, potential businesses and existing businesses the clarity they need in order to plan. And one of those things you can say is that you can only hire those who are here legally, those who are citizens, those who are, um, you know, uh, ready to sign up and pay their taxes and also, uh, receive the, the, the government public services that are provided. But let’s limit government, keep it as small as possible, enforce a clear set of rules, and then businesses can plan and thrive and workers can prosper. And it’s, it’s, uh, the markets do wonderful things when they don’t have to outthink what government’s going to do for them or against them.

Bob Neugebauer I don’t disagree with you. And I think what has happened here in our state, and when you look at the industries who are hiring the illegals, I, you know, if you do the homework, you will find the projections for twenty fifty are forty nine percent of the workers in our country are going to be immigrants. Now, I don’t mind having immigrant workers, but let’s pay them a fair wage and let’s not give them amnesty. There has to be some way of giving them the opportunity to work and fill in for the jobs that we don’t have people to fill. And that’s going to happen. I see that already.

Ron Nate It’s called immigration and naturalization. That’s the way immigration has worked, you know, throughout American history. The illegal immigrants coming here, uh, are probably an indicator that our immigration and naturalization process is is

Bob Neugebauer It’s broken.

Ron Nate inefficient and onerous. And, and it it’s not workable for those who want to come here. And so we just, you know, I think like Trump said early on, let’s have a big, beautiful door for them to come come in. But let’s know who’s coming in. Put them on the tax rolls, put them in the system so that they can’t be exploited. If they’re here illegally, they don’t have the same opportunity to exercise their rights as citizens because they don’t want to take their employer to court. They don’t want to accuse them of doing something because they themselves, uh, are are already here illegally. Right. And so if, if immigration and naturalization worked well, we’d welcome a lot of new workers here. It would keep it would keep, uh, wages fair because markets, uh, will, will ensure that those who want to voluntarily work for the market wage do. And those who don’t, don’t. And the markets have a great way of attracting just the number of workers that are needed for just the kind of work that’s needed.

Bob Neugebauer See any other problem is they don’t pay taxes. If they don’t pay taxes, we

Ron Nate Mhm.

Bob Neugebauer don’t get the benefit of the fact that you pay them a legal wage, but make them pay the taxes at the same time. You know, if indeed we had all of the illegals working as legal immigrants, we

Ron Nate Mhm.

Bob Neugebauer wouldn’t have any problem looking at the future of Social Security and probably not the same problems we have with Medicare either, because

Ron Nate Yeah. Well.

Bob Neugebauer that would fill in.

Ron Nate Yeah. If you have a segment of the population who’s, uh, getting government benefits using public services but not paying taxes. Imagine how much lower taxes could be for everyone if if all those in society were, were paying their taxes. And so when we say they need to come here and pay taxes, it’s not that I’m looking for more money to flow into government. It’s that I’m looking for a fairness thing here, that when you’re in society, you pay the taxes. You also receive the public services. But if everyone does that, we can get government pared down to be the smallest it can be and have the lowest tax rate. Overall, a small, efficient government can can do a lot of good things, but an overly grown government with uneven tax policies is is just it’s unfair. It’s too big and it’s too onerous.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I don’t disagree with you, uh, in any respect when it comes to, uh, talking about what happens in government. Because when I look at your pork pork rolls, okay, and I happen to like pork rolls when, you know, I get them from the Chinese restaurant, but not so much when I read about them in, uh, in your documents. Uh, if I remember correctly, there was four hundred million I allocated for, uh, uh, for, uh, illegals, uh, for education, for medical, for different, uh, services in, uh, the budget last year. And all of a sudden, uh, I don’t see that same number there because they broken it down.

Ron Nate Yeah, yeah. And and the pork reports pretty good at doing this, highlighting all the different areas and not just lumping it all together. So yeah, you can see it broken down to, um, the, uh, so we have that series on freedom and family agenda, starting with the budget series. Next week, I’m going to be doing my series of articles on increasing prosperity and affordability for Idaho families and businesses. And then the week after that, uh, we’ll touch on the illegal immigration issues. But that whole series I’m looking forward to, and then our budget press conference in December for my econ one hundred and one lesson. Today, I want to revisit a topic we talked about before and that is marginal analysis. Remember that.

Bob Neugebauer Is that the marginal propensity to consume.

Ron Nate That’s part of it. Yep. And

Bob Neugebauer There you go.

Ron Nate what you know, I when I taught economics for twenty five years, I taught them that when I say marginal, think additional that, uh, that’s what we mean. We don’t mean edge, we mean additional. So, uh, we, we view people’s people as making decisions on the margin. In other words, they don’t just consider costs and benefits of actions. They do it in an incremental way. They can consider the additional costs and the additional benefits of continuing or growing in activity. And if the additional benefits outweigh the additional costs, they will pursue it. If the additional costs outweigh the additional benefits, they won’t pursue it. That’s why a a seemingly tiny but insignificant change in tax policy will, will and can have dramatic impacts because people make decisions on the margin. You raise the tax rate by zero point one percent. Uh, then it changes how much money people are keeping, therefore how much money they can spend on things, how much businesses can grow. And so you say, oh, it’s so small, it won’t affect anyone. But marginal changes can have big effects. Relating it to these elections this week, I’ve, I’ve heard and seen people saying, oh, Idaho escaped the blue wave. You know, we didn’t have we didn’t have the the changes that Texas and West Virginia and Arizona did. And that’s true. But there were marginal impacts that happened in Idaho. We have fewer conservatives at the end of this election cycle than we had at the beginning of the year that we added three conservatives, but we probably lost between six and eight conservatives overall, if you consider both the May and and fall elections, those impacts are important. The Democrats flipped six seats. You might argue that those are rhinos and they were voting like Democrats anyway. And so those were the easy ones for Democrats to pick off. Maybe so, except one of them, Tanya Bourgoin, was a conservative. She lost in the primary, and then her seat was flipped to a Democrat. And so that was a big conservative loss. So even one seat has a marginal impact. So Democrats flipped seats, conservatives on net lost. And to to make the point about marginal analysis that small changes can have big impacts. I lost my legislative seat by thirty five votes in twenty twenty two, the very next legislative term. Governor little is proposing Idaho launch. Remember that Idaho launch

Bob Neugebauer Right?

Ron Nate one hundred

Bob Neugebauer Yes.

Ron Nate million dollars a year for basically higher education welfare that he won’t give to K-12 because that school choice. But he wants to give it to university students just as a handout, because his big industry cronies want the state to train their its workers instead of them training them themselves. So Idaho launch, he proposed one hundred million dollars a year, and it passed the House by one vote.

Bob Neugebauer Oh,

Ron Nate Now,

Bob Neugebauer gosh.

Ron Nate the person who replaced me in the House voted for it. I would have voted against it. So marginal changes can have big impacts. We have Idaho launch. We’ve had it now for three years. That’s three hundred million dollars taken out of Idahoans pockets and transferred to a welfare program for higher education because of one marginal change, the marginal change from this last election, I think we lost on net about five solid conservatives. We lost six squishy Republicans. but those squishy Republicans vote the right way on some key issues like like trans and women’s bathrooms, like, uh, um, elective surgery to, uh, sexual transition surgery on minors that even the squishy Republicans tend to vote the right way on those things. These impacts are important. And if we bury our head in the sand and say, oh, it was just the rhinos that lost or oh, those conservatives were too radical. Anyway, uh, we’re going to end up with some bad policy and we’re going to set the stage for this trend continuing because we’re telling people, no, there’s no need to change what you’re doing because everything is fine. Saying everything is fine is how a red state turns blue. Ask Colorado.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I’ll take it back to Carville’s comment that it’s the economy, stupid. And as I told you before, I see what’s happening down in the Treasure Valley as we continue to build these data centers that we continue to see companies like micron expand exponentially. The workers that are going to be coming in here, I do not believe we are going to see conservative workers in our eyes come in here. And I do believe that’s having an effect on the shift that’s taking place in four of our major counties.

Ron Nate Yeah. You know, it wasn’t so long ago was about fifteen years ago. Um, Barack Obama was tackling illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is a is, you know, uh, what is it, um, a plague on on America. And he wanted to stop it. But then the Democrats realized that, you know what? This immigration helps the Democrat electoral and the Democrats totally changed their tune. And when Trump comes along and says, we need to put up a wall and we need to control illegal immigration, suddenly the Democrats are like, oh, no, Wee wee wee. They’re they’re people too. We need to be nice to them because they want the voting block. And so it’s interesting how people change and how this whole immigration picture has changed. And it’s because of electoral politics. You know what I, I think that most Americans would be okay with a fair immigration policy, a fair process for putting them on the tax rolls and, uh, for, for being becoming naturalized citizens just like America always was. But when it seems to be manipulated and abused for political reasons, that’s where Americans have have frustrations.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I don’t think you’re going to change the general attitude of the Democrats. They’re going to continue to do what they’ve been doing, uh, for, for decades, literally. You know, they find they find a sector and then they, uh, it’s like when they brought Haitians in or when they brought the Somalis in or when they just open up the border to anybody who wanted to come in. We had one hundred and eighty eight different countries represented in

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer the immigration that took place in Biden’s time.

Ron Nate Absolutely. Oh, and back to my marginal analysis thing. I identified Idaho launch passed by one vote. Also, our continuing and technical education passed committee in the Senate by one vote. We thought we had enough conservatives on that committee to kill it. But one of the conservatives flipped. And now we have that fifty million dollars program year after year that’s happening. And fifty million dollars may sound like a drop in the bucket at the state level, but fifty million dollars is, on average, twenty five dollars a person across the state family of four. It’s one hundred dollars a year for that family. Uh, couple that with Idaho launch, and you’re talking five hundred dollars a year for a family. And so these things add up. Marginal changes end up having big impacts. They change your decision structure. They they change the outcomes. And so using marginal analysis is important here. School choice probably doesn’t pass. If we didn’t have that conservative wave that happened back in, in twenty twenty for these.

Bob Neugebauer But Ron,

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer when you when you have seven hundred lobbyists, excuse

Ron Nate Mhm.

Bob Neugebauer me, they have the free reign of the Capitol. You have to expect these things to happen because they pressure these legislators. And I don’t care whether they’re buying them a steak dinner or taking them on a golf outing. It

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer doesn’t matter. It sways them.

Ron Nate Mhm. And so, uh, which this might be a good way to wrap this up, which is why we need the few good conservative organization organizations in Idaho that exist. Imagine Idaho without an Idaho pulse, without, uh, what is it? The gem state Patriot without Idaho freedom Foundation. If we don’t have these general interests pushing back against the special interests. Idaho has lost in in in one or two election cycles would be my claim. But Idaho Freedom Foundation, we do the Freedom Index. You know who you’re voting for now we’re going to do the local government Freedom Index, where you can look at city governments, county governments and school districts and determine whether you’re in a free community or one that’s being taken over by the socialists. So we we have that work assignment because of all those pressures of special interests and squishy legislators that happen.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I’m glad you guys are doing what you’re doing. I hope we can, uh, get this, uh, new radio, uh, venture off and running, uh, first of the year and do some real hard work on trying to change what has been a sea change for the last fifteen years in Idaho. It has to go back the other way or we are doomed to become another Colorado.

Ron Nate That’s right. And so my, my encouragement to you and to all your listeners is let’s not look at election results and say, hey, Idaho left unscathed. You know, we’re we’re still Republican led. Um, that is ignoring that is ignoring the flow. It might be a static look at Idaho that, yes, our officers are Republicans, but every single Republican officer re-elected in Idaho did so by a smaller margin than before. Our state and federal officers on average lost. I think it was like six point six percent from their total. Another another wave like this, another two waves like this. And you’re going to look and go, wait, how did how did we end up with a Democrat governor? How did we end up with a Democrat congressman? Remember, we’re going to get a third congressman in the next census. And the redistricting on that is going to be very important. Uh, it it could actually hurt Idaho instead of having two Republican congressmen to have two Republican and one Democrat congressman. We’ve lost ground that way. We need to be very careful about redistricting and about what Idahoans are doing when they go to the polls and elect their legislators and leaders.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I’m glad you guys are fighting the good fight. We’re going to do whatever we can on our end. Um, it’s just a matter of, uh, educating the people. I think, more than anything. And I find that they’re still out there riding their ATVs, drinking beer and watching football games.

Ron Nate That’s right. And you know what? Go ahead and have that fun. That is the prosperity that America is creating. But recognize that prosperity didn’t just rain from heaven. It came because we had hard workers and we had a system and a politics in place that allowed people to be free and prosper. And if you get complacent, you lose that. And the pain of trying to restore it is much more awful than the effort it takes to retain it.

Bob Neugebauer I don’t disagree with you. Is there anything else you’d like to, uh, spend some time on? Well,

Ron Nate No,

Bob Neugebauer we.

Ron Nate I think that, uh, um, we have great opportunity here in Idaho. We need constant vigilance. Uh, the, some of the other states in the country are going to experience some of that real pain for the next couple of years, and either they turn it around or they’re going to prolong it. Idaho is is took a step toward the cliff’s edge on becoming one of those blue states where you have mixed government and they want to raise taxes. They want to infringe on your freedoms. And, uh, we would stop being the oasis for the conservatives who want to come here from California. Right. And, uh, and, and find the freedom that they had taken away from them in California. Without Idaho, where do you go? Where do you go? I don’t know what the next step is.

Bob Neugebauer There’s not much left. Literally,

Ron Nate Okay.

Bob Neugebauer there’s there’s not much left. And even Montana, Wyoming, they are turning to they’re changing.

Ron Nate Yep. So let let’s stay vigilant. Let’s keep doing our work. Uh, follow Idaho freedom dot org. Fido, follow the Idaho pulse and, uh, help us to be successful. We’re fighting against very moneyed interests. And, uh, we we, every, every bit of support that comes to us gets put to good use.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I remember the infamous words of Khrushchev, we will bury you.

Ron Nate Yeah. That’s right. Well, God willing, that won’t be the case in Idaho, but let’s stay vigilant.

Bob Neugebauer Thank you very much. Ron, appreciate your time. And we’ll talk to you next week.

Ron Nate Thank you. Idaho Pulse. Thank you Bob.