The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome. Welcome, Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be together. And a lot happening and in a moment, I’m going to I’m going to have a great chance to interview, to interview a man named Tom McKenna. And he is the guy that’s out of San Diego where the show originates. The radio show the Pro America Report originates, and we’ll talk with him about an effort to hold accountable. Very public officials publicly facing officials who say. That they’re Catholic. Interesting program. I’ll be interested to hear how it’s going and what’s happening. So we’ll talk with him in a moment and a lot more. But first, what you need to know.
I tell you this it’s a very interesting time and the interesting time it’s almost lost on most of the commentators cause they’re lying to you. They want to they want, you know, everything is done for clicks and giggles. I heard someone say that, you know, the old phrase that’s kind of racy phrase, but instead of clicks, put another word in there. You know hooey, but clicks and giggles. Everything about clicks and then sometimes about giggles. But and I’ll be out in actually in Idaho this weekend. And Alex Stein, the good, the comedian, the conservative comedians on the program with me were both speakers at Lincoln Days in near Boise. ID, but. But here’s what’s changing. People don’t realize. Last week, Congressman Jason Smith of Missouri, who’s the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, one of the most powerful positions in government, he said he wasn’t interested — Ways and Means is in charge of the IRS and tax cuts. And he said he’s not interested in just paying attention to big business and traditional tax cuts. And there was a story about how K Street, lobbyists that usually do that, they get paid lots of money to make sure to take care of corporate interests and all. They’re worried. And Jason Smith was interviewed. He said, look, I come from working Americans. We gotta have tax policy that helps working folks. And people said, Oh my gosh, what is that? What is that? Well, that’s the shift that’s happened. It used to be that Paul Ryan and his ilk, his people that came out of the late ’90s, he was, he’s younger than that, but in the 2000s. Into 2010 that, in that decade, they talked about tax cuts and trickle down and all that, and now you have a set of leaders who are saying no, wait a second, we need to actually use the tax code to benefit people in, where they are, and the the last time that there was a Democrat president who was forced to take a major tax bill, a revenue bill. I know Bill Clinton was a a Democrat, had to face the the Gingrich House. But but the last time it was it was Harry Truman.
And Harry Truman had. A had to. Was faced with a mass of the 1948 Revenue Act. And one of the things in the Revenue Act in 1948. Was the ability for people, couples to file jointly and the filing jointly was a big benefit for families. Think about it, if you’re, if the husband or the or one, let’s say this, one of the one of the couple, one of the married couple. Makes $100,000 a year and pays tax on the $100,000 your income tax for those 100,000 you pay that you’re in the highest tax bracket. If you file jointly with your wife or your husband or whatever, whoever is the big breadwinner, now you’re paying the two of you, and so you’re paying less tax because you’re in a different tax bracket. Because of that, you see the difference. So anyway, that was a huge deal and the point. But my point is. That was the tax code as a preference and a policy preferenceI in the last 10 days, the Hungarian Government announced that if you have a baby and you’re under 30 you pay no income tax. I think that’s the way they did it. Now Hungary’s only 10 million people. It’s not as big an economy, obviously, as America. There’s a lot of other things, but you’re using the tax code. You’re using the law not just to maximize. It it is a preference to just maximize profits and maximize markets. That’s a preference, and that preference worked in favor of multinational corporations and Wall Street and big business for about 25 years and changed the heartland into the Rust Belt. And so we need to change that, whether it’s tariffs on China, that’s what Trump did. They said the economy would crash if we do tariffs on China. Trump did tariffs on China. Nothing crashed.
And so now comes President Trump, who is, you know, running for President. But now he’s he’s rolling out a policy ideas and typical Trump, he’s he’s causing people to pay attention mostly initially, ’cause it’s provocative. You know, he he rolled out a policy that said we should take on the cartels by calling them terrorists and then, you know, militarily take care of them because of the drugs and the border. He, he said we should have education system should be changed up by we should be able to elect our superintendents. Directly. A lot of times it’s provocative in the direction of getting people talking about what’s going on. He did it on trade the other day. Well, he rolled out some ideas.
And one of them was about having future cities where people could decide how the cities should be operating, whether they should be, you know, closer together and all liveability and all that.
But within that press release that he put out is an interesting one. He called it baby bonuses. The government would pay, probably through a tax credit. People that have kids. You get paid for that. Now he doubled the child tax credit during his time the 2017 tax cut, quote, unquote tax cut doubled the tax credit. A lot of people that, on the left. And so here’s the interesting thing. The bonus for babies that he floated, it immediately was linked to Cory Booker, who had an idea of baby bonds that you would get special bonds issued if you had a baby. The point is, if you want to incentivize behavior, one of the ways to do that is the policy preferences. That that is the power of public policy. And for too long some Republicans fell victim to this idea that we could somehow be neutral and it would all turn out fine and the neutral was a choice too, again maximizing profits especially, say free markets and open borders and all that was supposed to work out for everybody when it really didn’t. And so I I just have to say this is one of the most exciting things for me to see in the last 10 days watching Jason Smith say something, Congressman from Missouri, powerful position, you’ve got the, the, the policy debate is happening all over the world on families and then you’ve got President Trump floating this idea of, of bonuses that would incentivize having families. Anywhere you can get policies that align with those pro-family values, you’re going to see. I I I would argue a positive changes. Another one is school choice, of course, when you can align the dollars to follow the students, you can have a chance to change the racist schools in St. Louis or Chicago and. And families could break out. So that’s good stuff. It’s good stuff. Pay attention to it. All right, we will take a break when we come back, we’ll talk with Thomas McKenna of of San Diego. The Catholic action effort, as well as we’ll visit with John Schlafly. We’ll be right back. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report, back in a moment.
