Idaho Nuclear Waste, School Choice & the Prop 1 Fight

Bob Neugebauer Welcome once again to the Idaho Post. This is your host, Tea Party, Bob, here to bring you information about things that are happening in our state that will not get, um, I guess, mentioned in the liberal media today. We have one of our regular guests, Ronald Nate, president of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, an organization that actually does the homework that the liberal media has refused to do. So let me welcome Ron to the Idaho Pulse and let’s hear what words of wisdom he has for us today. Welcome, Ron.

Ron Nate Hello, Bob. Great to be back on Idaho Pulse. Um, I am. I’ll just tell you right up front. I’m talking to you remotely today. I am actually in Orlando, Florida. I’m at a conference called the State Policy Network. And what the State policy network is, is an opportunity for um state policy think tanks and action tanks like Idaho Freedom Foundation to get together, compare notes, talk with one another, uh, build, uh, alliances, so to speak, so that we can work on good freedom, limited government policy across Idaho and that these other states can do the same thing. So there are sixty three affiliates with this. So there’s sixty three other Idaho Freedom Foundation like organizations across the United States. Idaho Freedom Foundation is the only one unique to Idaho. There’s some others like, uh, the Freedom Foundation, which works across a lot of different states. But Idaho Freedom Foundation is the only one that is specifically Idaho. And so we are here to represent, we are also here to learn and grow and figure out what Idaho needs to do to maintain its competitive Edge. Edge in terms of being a beacon for freedom across the US.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I hope you won’t mind me today interrupting you on several things, because I have a bone to pick with the Idaho politicians and what’s been going on in our state for the past twenty years.

Ron Nate I. Okay, newsflash everyone. Bob Neugebauer has a problem with Idaho politicians and Idaho government. What is it? What’s the specific problem today, Bob?

Bob Neugebauer It’s not one, it’s many. It’s the fact that you can’t trust these people because they never do their homework. They promise you our page and they give you the stink bomb.

Ron Nate Um, you know, I, I can’t disagree. There’s been a lot of times I’ve been felt let down by, by politicians who talk one way and then act another. And that that’s why we exist, frankly, that’s why Idaho Freedom Foundation is around is to be a form of government and politician accountability by showing Idahoans what really is going on in the state House and in local governments versus what is being told to them. So what what’s the issue that’s got you fired up today?

Bob Neugebauer Well, right now the issue is the new deal for the n e l I n l and all of the big business that’s going to bring to Idaho from the federal government so they can reprocess fuel rods and take one third of all of the radioactive material waste from every state that wants to put it here and put it up there at the I n l. Now, do you remember the last time they did this?

Ron Nate Oh, yeah. there’s the problems with managing and running the waste and everything like that. It really hamstrung us for decades.

Bob Neugebauer In nineteen fifty through nineteen eighty three, they were putting waste into the ground that was liquefied. They just put it in the ground, expecting it to disappear. Well, it did right into the aquifer. The snake River aquifer, by the way. And

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer they’re still trying to clean it up, but they say they’ve resolved all those problems now and that it’s safe. Well, let me tell you something. They said Three Mile Island was also safe. They said Chernobyl was also safe. Now we’re looking at putting more waste than we have ever before, taken in into a repository that still sits over one of our largest aquifers. And by the way, is not exempt from an earthquake.

Ron Nate Well, let me frame some of my comments this way. Nuclear energy, I think, is the answer to our energy problems.

Bob Neugebauer Agreed.

Ron Nate That wind is not going to do it. Solar’s not going to do it. Hydro has limited capabilities, but nuclear power is a source of energy which is remarkably strong and vast for a little amount of fuel. The only drawback I see to nuclear energy is dealing with the waste. Now, as a as a naive economist here, I’m like, you know, there’s a. I thought it would be an obvious way to deal with waste and, and, uh, Elon Musk might actually agree with me that. Why don’t you just jettison it into space? I mean, it let it go, let it go instead of trying to bury it in our ground. But anyway, the amount of waste that is generated from nuclear power production is remarkably small. There is not a lot of it. Do I think Idaho ought to be the repository of all that waste? Probably not. Um, but, uh, I don’t want that. A battle over nuclear waste to get in the way of a source of energy that can be very beneficial to to man, essentially.

Bob Neugebauer I don’t I don’t disagree with you in general. I don’t disagree with you. But the waste problem is a serious problem. The people

Ron Nate Sure.

Bob Neugebauer of Yucca Flats did not want the waste down there. Now,

Ron Nate No.

Bob Neugebauer do you realize how long it takes for plutonium two hundred thirty nine to become basically harmless

Ron Nate No.

Bob Neugebauer twenty four zero zero zero years?

Ron Nate Oh, well. Well, the first hundred years, which will span all of our lifetimes. Uh, should be, uh, should be no different than the, the, the next one hundred years. And so, yeah, I, I don’t know, we dealing with, with the waste, uh, is, is something that I think the energy industry can, can figure out. Um. You know, I, I just see a time where nuclear is going to be the predominant energy source just because it is so dramatically efficient.

Bob Neugebauer I don’t disagree, but I don’t think that Idaho should be the repository for one third of the waste in the country.

Ron Nate No, no, send it to the moon. Send it to outer space.

Bob Neugebauer I don’t care where they send it, as long as it’s not here.

Ron Nate Yeah, yeah. There you go. And, uh, you know, man, as feeble as we are, we haven’t shown that we can deal with it that that well, because it was a problem in Idaho for decades. And, uh, so yeah.

Bob Neugebauer That was just the question I had to ask you. It’s just been on my mind for the last week.

Ron Nate Yeah. Well, it’s I think it’s very good one. And if we can crack that nut, then we can just, uh, realize that nuclear energy is a is a very, uh, beneficial prospect for our energy needs. Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer Well, look, energy, just like what happened today when the, uh, Idaho Power said they’re going to have to raise our electric bills by so much, maybe three percent, because there’s a low amount of water. Have you ever heard of them lowering the rates because we had an abundance of water?

Ron Nate That that’s a very good question. Is that, hey, it’s, it’s been a very wet year. We’re going to lower your power rates now. It never happens. But whenever

Bob Neugebauer Exactly.

Ron Nate it’s dry. And by the way, uh, whenever it’s a drought year, um, they’re like, well, thank goodness we have cloud seeding. But I’m, I’m thinking that, you know, cloud seeding should make it so we never have a dry year. I thought

Bob Neugebauer Yep.

Ron Nate that was the point. And so, uh, it’s, it’s an amazing thing to have it both ways when it’s a wet year. They’re like, hey, cloud seeding is very beneficial when it’s a dry year. Hey, good thing we had cloud seeding and you’re like, oh really? It’s like, we shouldn’t have the dry year if we had cloud seeding working the way it should. And by the way, a lot of Idahoans are, uh, frustrated and fearful about cloud seeding because there seems to be a lot of secrecy and not a lot of disclosure about what it really is, how it really works, and what the potential dangers are. And so I know legislators who are working on, on legislation or at least memorials to, to say, you know what? Let’s let’s put a pause on this until we have more information.

Bob Neugebauer Oh, we’re just like, maybe we should put a pause on putting any more waste up there in the I n l.

Ron Nate Yeah. until we have more information. But I know this is how politics work, is that we elect, uh, senators and congressmen to go to D.C. and the expectation from a lot of Idahoans is, uh, bring back these projects to Idaho, bring back the federal dollars to Idaho. Idaho state government is forty percent dependent on federal dollars. Uh, are the job of our representatives is to not is not to go to Washington, D.C., expand the federal government. But it’s all good and peachy because we’re bringing dollars back to Idaho. How about we just don’t send the dollars away to begin with, and that we let Idaho run Idaho and let the federal government do its minimal role and not have Idaho be a subsidiary of the federal government. That’s

Bob Neugebauer I

Ron Nate my

Bob Neugebauer don’t

Ron Nate future.

Bob Neugebauer I don’t disagree with you, okay? I mean,

Ron Nate Mhm.

Bob Neugebauer we look at what happened at Lava Ridge. Nobody did anything in a political world except for our attorney general to try and stop that. We

Ron Nate Mhm.

Bob Neugebauer have a governor who has accepted data centers without understanding the cost of the electric and the water problem that we may have at some point in time. We expand micron by another ten thousand square feet and don’t realize how much electricity or water they’re going to use. I mean,

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer think about the dumb things our politicians in this state have done over the last ten to twenty years. It is abominable.

Ron Nate Yeah. Well, Milton Friedman used to say the art of politics is getting the wrong people to do the right things because you’ve lined up the incentives the proper way.

Bob Neugebauer Thank you. That’s exactly the way I feel.

Ron Nate And so right now, the incentives are working against us, that the politicians are rewarded for working with big business and big government to bring the dollars in, and then they get to go and cut ribbons and make their Facebook posts and say how great Idaho, how well off Idaho is because of their work to bring the money back. Well, it’s we need a paradigm shift.

Bob Neugebauer Ron. I spent thirty seven years in the brokerage business doing all kinds of stock and bond deals. I will tell you only about three percent of the companies who actually I actually work with actually cared about what they were doing and how it affected the people, and did it for the purpose of improving things, not making money.

Ron Nate Yep, yep. That’s right. So, um, let me do this. Can I talk about a specific Idaho policy for a minute?

Bob Neugebauer Let’s go. Let’s

Ron Nate We’ve

Bob Neugebauer go.

Ron Nate talked about school choice a lot, but, uh, here’s, here’s something I want to point out about school choice. And Idaho is in its first year of its very young school choice program and very limited school choice program. It’s limited to about ten thousand students because of the amount of money that government gives up, by letting people keep more of their tax dollars instead of sending it in. It’s a school choice program that says you pay less in taxes when your kid when when you’ve opted your kid out of public schools, that’s all it is. It’s not government dollars going to private schools. It’s people keeping more of their money and funding private schools instead of standing in as tax dollars. Well, I went to a great little session here on, you know what? The benefits of school choice isn’t just for the students who opt out of public schools. Now, I keep hearing from public schools and public school teachers and public school administrators that they’re worried about school choice because it takes money away from public schools, and they’re really concerned about public schools. They’re not. They’re really concerned about public school employees. They’re really concerned about their their establishment.

Bob Neugebauer Jobs.

Ron Nate And

Bob Neugebauer Their jobs.

Ron Nate but then but they will make the argument that if public schools were fully funded, they would be performing as well or as better as whatever private school options there are. Well, the evidence does not show that that in order to cease any kind of improvement in public school education, um, they, they say we want to increase funding. Well, in Idaho we spend about thirteen thousand dollars per student a year. If we increase that by a thousand dollars per student, a thousand dollars per student. Now, that would be quite an investment in public education spending. We would see the improvement of students based on studies. Based on these. These studies of about zero point three percent improvement. About.

Bob Neugebauer Not very high, is it?

Ron Nate No, it’s not very high, but it is an improvement. But it’s a very expensive improvement. A thousand dollars more per student to get about a zero point three percent increase. And that’s you know, that you know, that’s less than a standard deviation increase in student performance. And so you go, you know what? I don’t dispute their argument that more money for public education will help students. The question is what will help students more. And let’s look at school choice. If we spent the same kind of money on school choice and looked at the students in public education, I’m not saying. Let’s look at the students who exercise school choice. I’m looking at the students within public education, the ones who did not opt for school choice. There is an improvement that happens because of school choice, because of the increase in competition, because of the administration worried about losing students, saying we need to step up our game and it’s about a factor of twelve over what? Just funding more public education is. So a thousand dollars per student spent more on school choice translates into about twelve times the increase in student performance that just giving the same amount of money to public education would be.

Bob Neugebauer So the question is why haven’t we done more of it? And why don’t the administrators and teachers and the politicians understand the dynamics of doing something like this?

Ron Nate Well, first of all, I think they themselves don’t even know the evidence on this that if you look at the studies, if if we wanted to run an expansion of school choice bill next year, uh, teachers and administrators would come and testify against it and they would say, look, we need to fund more public education. We don’t need to fund more school choice. And they would cite a study, the Jackson study back in twenty twenty three or something, and say, look, this shows that spending more on public education helps. Well, it helps point three percent. But what they don’t see is the counterfactual that if school choice is expanded, the increase is twelve times as big for

Bob Neugebauer Because it’s competition.

Ron Nate public for public education students. So if you’re really worried about all students, this study looks at public education students and sees them being helped twelve times as much through school choice than just throwing more money at the public education problem. And here’s the other benefit that these Ben. These improvements don’t just happen once. They compound. And so whatever benefits you see in years one, two and three, which are the the first years where it’s hard to see any benefits to begin with. Those are multiplied by factors over the years. When you get to ten and fifteen years of this and twenty years of this, the results even get better over time.

Bob Neugebauer But that’s nothing more than competition drives innovation.

Ron Nate That’s right. We saw that the, um, a thousand dollars spent more per student in public education would lead to. Here’s a way to measure it. An average of about five to six days of gained learning. So five to six days of learning, uh, added to their school experience, uh, school choice program, which is, would be funded. The same would add one hundred and twenty days of additional learning on average,

Bob Neugebauer What’s

Ron Nate and

Bob Neugebauer different

Ron Nate that’s

Bob Neugebauer between

Ron Nate for public

Bob Neugebauer this

Ron Nate schools.

Bob Neugebauer and.

Ron Nate That’s public school students.

Bob Neugebauer But what’s

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer different between that and corporate, uh, entities that invest in themselves because competition comes in and creates a reason for them to do that.

Ron Nate That’s right. I mean, there’s so many more aspects. You you talk about corporations talk about, you know, public, private, public versus private. But I, you know, we can’t we’re trying to steel man this as much as we can. What is the gain to public education for investing more in public education? What is the gain to public education students when we have more competition via school choice? And the results couldn’t be more stark. That school choice adds more to the public school experience than throwing more money at the public school experience.

Bob Neugebauer How do you get that across to the politicians and the voters?

Ron Nate I. You just have to keep confronting with them with the evidence. So when they cite the Jackson study that it added zero point three percent, you just have to say, you know what? Uh, scaling school choice by the same factor leads to eleven to twelve times more effectiveness than simply increasing school spending. And you just got to keep confronting them with the evidence. And it’s, uh, it’s an amazing thing. And so I think in this next legislative session, we ought to look at making our school choice more universal in that we don’t have an income test for it, that any student that wants it ought to be able to exercise it. And, um, the, the students who will benefit are not just those who exercise school choice, but all the other students who, uh, see public school as still their best option tend to do way better than when there’s no school choice.

Bob Neugebauer Let me make a prediction. If indeed you did something like that.

Ron Nate Mhm.

Bob Neugebauer I, I tell you, you will lose between ten and twenty percent of the students in public school that will want to go for school choice because that’s where they really want to be, but they can’t get there.

Ron Nate Yeah. And in Arizona, uh, they’ve been running their school choice program for, what, five to ten years now? Uh, ten percent of the students in Arizona are in private or home school settings. Now, that means that ninety percent are in public schools, but those ninety percent are not falling behind. They’re actually doing a lot better than if there was no school choice. And so that that is the the narrative shift that needs to happen is school choice benefits all students. And if you’re worried about public school students, school choice benefits public school students more than any other Program yet discovered. Even looking at tutoring, looking at more school days, looking at, uh, paying teachers more, looking at just paying the schools more. Nothing compares to school choice as creating the incentives for improved education for all students.

Bob Neugebauer Because it increases innovation. It makes people work harder. It actually gives you an opportunity to change a system that is so archaic in so many ways that

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer it, it, it really has been misguided for many years. People don’t get that. And you have to teach them by showing them competition is a great way to do it.

Ron Nate It is. And, uh, you know, I’ll just finish with this little economic experience with it is that, uh, I cannot imagine the innovations that could happen if. But given the choice to do that, that, uh, you know, in private industry. There has been tremendous periods of growth in the US. Tremendous innovations that none of us could have imagined before the fact. But then afterwards, we look back at it and go, I cannot believe electric cars are driving themselves now. Now, if we test government a hundred years ago with the job of creating electric cars that can drive themselves, do you think we’d have that now?

Bob Neugebauer No.

Ron Nate I don’t think so. But the industry did it on its own because there was a huge incentive for innovation and expansion of technology. And so things we couldn’t dream of happen in a free market. And we just look at it and go, well, yeah, of course that happened. But if government was doing things, would we ever get there? No, they I don’t know. They might offer a wider variety of colors of automobiles, but not necessarily better ones.

Bob Neugebauer Well, is it any different than the fact that everybody wants to import electric automobiles, but nobody realizes how much electricity it it takes to charge all of these cars, or the fact that we don’t have any charging stations worthwhile around the country. So what are we doing? We have gas cars.

Ron Nate Well, yeah. Gas cars. And you know what? It’s a it’s a paradigm shift in the automobile industry too, that, uh, you know, if you had an electric car, you can, you can drive to Salt Lake and you’re not going to run out of charge there. There’s, there’s enough charging, you know, the, the grid fixes itself. They’re just more people use it than more of it’s developed.

Bob Neugebauer I have a friend of mine lives in Salt Lake City, comes up here to visit her mother. She has to stop in Boise to charge her car.

Ron Nate There you go. Yeah. That’s okay. It’s okay. You know, we we didn’t have to, uh, artificially build a network of gasoline stations For for the automobile. It just happened as a natural evolution in the market that the market finds a way.

Bob Neugebauer Agreed.

Ron Nate Hey, uh, I got two more topics. Do you have time for two more topics?

Bob Neugebauer Oh, I always have time for you. Ron, I’m glad you’re back.

Ron Nate Okay. All right. Stop prop one. Uh, the battle continues, and this is going to be huge that, uh, we are building a network of folks who want to work against this proposition because we’re talking about innocent babies lives on the line. And here is the blessing that comes from this prop one battle is that I have seen conservatives come together like no other time in the past that, uh, we are united on this idea of protecting innocent lives. And so the grassroots network is growing the network of conservative groups working together. Uh, we’re going to crush this proposition. Now, I don’t say that for you to for everyone to relax and go, oh, okay. It’s going to go down no where everyone has to do the work. And if we can crush this, like ranked choice, voting was crushed. If we can show that seventy percent of Idahoans want nothing to do with unfettered access to abortion, then we, uh, then maybe we can crush it forever. And the benefit that goes on for obviously many thousands of saved lives in Idaho, fifteen hundred a year. The other benefit is that we have a conservative movement that can do a lot of other good things that was created out of this opposition to prop one. And so let’s let’s take that that weaponry that was developed for this very important battle and use it for all the other important battles, like reducing taxes, like getting the government out of every aspect of our lives, including health care and vaccine mandates and, and everything else the government imposes on us. We will have an army here to do a lot of good things.

Bob Neugebauer Ron. I fight for that every day on the radio. And I

Ron Nate Mhm.

Bob Neugebauer have to tell you, it doesn’t seem to be making a dent in the conservatives who are so far getting rid of this prop one, but they don’t seem to care about so many other important issues. How do you get them to change? How do you get them interested?

Ron Nate Well, let’s first of all, let’s show what can happen when we do work together. So let’s crush this prop one. And then we’ll look at each other and go, wow, that was amazing. We crushed prop one. All right, now let’s crush the idea of property taxes. Let’s put our minds together and work on that. And, uh, and we can even handle the first, most obvious lame question that we get. What are we going to replace the money with? We’re going to replace it with reduced government. That’s what we’re going to replace it with, uh, government is swimming around in way more money than it needs. There’s plenty to go around. We don’t need a property tax on top of everything else, so we’ll have that. It’ll be amazing. It’ll be amazing.

Bob Neugebauer You mean we didn’t really need that seven billion dollars more in budget over the last seven to eight years?

Ron Nate Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer We could

Ron Nate It’s

Bob Neugebauer actually

Ron Nate been

Bob Neugebauer get rid of it.

Ron Nate it’s been growing way, way too fast. And so, uh, a few years of fiscal discipline and we can see we can start to gain back some of that opportunity that was lost. Government, uh, taking over more of the economy, um, resulting in efficiency results in a misallocation of resources. And only when you start to dial it back do you realize, wow, the market could have done a lot better here. But when you’re in it, you don’t realize the opportunity cost the government imposes on society.

Bob Neugebauer You only have to look at the infrastructure in the Treasure Valley to figure that out.

Ron Nate Yep, yep. That’s true. Um, last thing I want to talk about is I have a very short econ one hundred one lesson today. And, uh, it’s, it’s from macroeconomics principles of macroeconomics and it’s measuring, uh, the measuring the health of the economy, measuring how big the economy is. And, um, when we talk about economic growth and what the economy is all about, really, it is, it is the command over resources, converting them into goods and services and what we can produce with all of our resources. So when we talk about gross domestic product, okay, I don’t want all your listeners eyes to glaze over, but gross domestic product is a very boring name for how much is being produced in the economy, how many goods and services are being produced? That’s the measure of production in an economy. And there’s a couple ways to measure it. And it’s always measured in dollar terms, you know, dollars of of goods and services produced. So naturally prices start to factor into the mix when, when you talk about it. But here’s how do we measure that. Well, you could measure it by adding up all the goods and services produced and how much that is worth. And that’s really the way we we kind of do it. And it’s called, you know, we call it gross domestic product. And it’s the sum of four categories, all the spending on consumption of goods and services. So when households buy goods and services, we add up all that spending. Well, that’s that’s what households have consumed of the goods and services produced. So that’s one big component. And it is the biggest component close to seventy percent. The second category is businesses buying goods and services. And I don’t mean ingredients or intermediate goods because those are imbued in the in the final goods. So I mean, when businesses buy a new factory, when businesses buy a new truck or whatever, then that that is businesses consuming goods and services. Um, net exports. So it’s other countries buying goods and services, minus the fact that we buy some goods and services from other countries. So we wouldn’t want to count that as, as ours. And so it’s really net exports. Whenever we produce something and sell it to a foreign country, that should count as our production as well. And here’s the last category and the one that I want to raise a warning flag about, and that is government spending. Government buys goods and services to. Sometimes government produces it themselves. And we add that in like when they build a nuclear submarine or a stealth bomber or something like that, or a government building. But government does buy paper. They buy office chairs, bureaucratic things. They buy vehicles. And so government spending is part of it. And so really, when I teach economic product, it’s consumption investment, government spending and net exports. C I g net exports. And we add those up to get the total production in the economy. And that is macro one hundred and one. I’m looking at the Federal Reserve website right now and looking at what what gross domestic product is. And they’ve put it into four categories personal consumption, business investment, net exports of goods and services, and government spending on goods and services. It is exactly those four categories. But here’s the catch. Did you know? Did you know? Did you know that because government spending is part of that calculation, that whenever there’s a recession or something like that and government increases its spending. It automatically makes the economy look better than it is, because government spending is counted as part of part of the economic production. So it’s really a misnomer to say that FDR rescued us from the Great Depression because they dramatically increased government spending back then. They just redirected the spending away from the private sector toward the government sector. And if you look at the data, the Great Depression was only great because FDR extended it by eight to ten years. Not that he solved it.

Bob Neugebauer Never should have had a third term.

Ron Nate A second one or a first one. Uh, you know, when they do surveys on the best presidents, for some reason, FDR pops up into the top five best presidents. I put him in the in the bottom two because, um, a lot of what he did was simply surface that, you know, made you think that the economy was better when it really wasn’t. In fact, go ten years earlier, uh, when Woodrow Wilson left office, um, it was Harding and then Coolidge. Coolidge inherited an economy that was almost a, a mirror image, not a mirror image. An exact replica of the economy inherited by FDR. Unemployment was going up, approaching ten percent, both in the early twenties and the early thirties. Prices were going down, which sounds like a good thing for a consumer, but it’s a very bad thing for an economy because if prices are going down, businesses do not generate enough revenue to buy the resources for the next cycle of production. It’s a very bad thing. It’s a sign of a bad economy. Um, investment was going down dramatically. Uh, the production of goods and services was going down dramatically. Beginning of Coolidge’s term looked a lot like the beginning of FDR’s. Coolidge did not do increasing government spending, did not do a new deal, did not create Social security, did not do all those things that FDR did, which were surface things that looked like the economy was better because it was just government spending. All Coolidge did was reduce the income tax rates down from seventy percent, that Wilson had them back down to about fourteen or fifteen percent. What did we have, the Roaring Twenties? What did FDR have the Great Depression for over a decade?

Bob Neugebauer And by the way, tax rates stayed up at that seventy after FDR got in up until the seventies.

Ron Nate That’s right. And in the sixties, uh, the top tax rate was in the ninety percents.

Bob Neugebauer You’re correct. Yes.

Ron Nate Who, who wants to work for another dollar when ninety cents of it goes to the government and you keep ten cents of it.

Bob Neugebauer I’m going to Mexico.

Ron Nate That’s right. And then you when you go to spend that ten cents, you get to pay sales taxes. You get to pay state income taxes on. There’s all sorts of things. And so really, you’re working for nothing. And so that’s my lesson today is macroeconomics is very deceiving because government spending is counted as part of the health of the economy. And also that, uh, when government does it, it displaces the private sector. And so even though you may think the numbers are getting better, the people don’t feel it.

Bob Neugebauer You know, I only wish you could teach this course to all of the politicians we have in office currently.

Ron Nate Yeah. Um, you know, I taught in college for twenty five years and it was, it’s, it was great to, visit with those students on a daily basis, hear about what they’re thinking, teach them what economics is about, and feel like they can go out and make a difference. But when I tell the same stories, give the same lessons to legislators. The problem is, you know, Reagan used to say Democrats aren’t so much of a problem. It’s just that so much of what they think is true is not true. So much of what they think they know happens to be false. And that’s what I find with legislators, is that they’re beyond the point of listening because they think they they’ve got it all figured out when history has shown that even in. FDR hasn’t got it figured out.

Bob Neugebauer Well, Democrats have a lot of false positives.

Ron Nate True, true. And so that’s, that’s why Idaho Freedom Foundation exists. That’s why the Idaho Pulse exists, because we’re out there trying to to spread the truth beyond what people believe. On the surface, there are so many false notions out there about how the economy works. We need more people like you and me out there, Bob.

Bob Neugebauer Well, I hope I can stay around a little longer so we can do that someday.

Ron Nate Oh yeah. You’re going to stay around a little longer, so let’s get this done. Yeah.

Bob Neugebauer Well, thank you again for being here. I do appreciate having you on.

Ron Nate Thank you. I appreciate it, Bob. Thank you. And your team, Idaho Pulse is awesome. Uh, I look forward to next week. Talk some more.

Bob Neugebauer Take care, my friend. Be careful down there in Florida. I hear the gators are very ravenous when it comes to people from Idaho.

Ron Nate Okay. Well, yeah, uh, I haven’t seen any yet, but I think I might get a taste of some tonight, so we’ll see.

Bob Neugebauer I tried a golf course as I’ve lost many balls out on those.

Ron Nate That’s great. Have a great day. Peace out, my

Bob Neugebauer Take

Ron Nate friend.

Bob Neugebauer care. Take care, my friend. Thank you very much.

Ron Nate You bet.