Station: KCOL

Show: 600 KCOL Mornings

Guest: Cory Gardner

Link: http://www.600kcol.com/main.html

Date: 3/23/2010

Topics: Healthcare, Laffer Curve, Stimulus Package, Candy Tax Exemption

Click Here for Audio

WAGNER: Rick Wagner, filling in for Keith and Gail and here at 600 KCOL. Nice of Keith and Gail to let me come up here and commandeered their studio… we do have a guest on today that I wanted to get on.  And we are going to go to Corey Gardner, who is running for the Fourth Congressional District up here and also serves in the Legislature right now. I’m going to try and click on his line and see if he is there.  Corey how are you?

GARDNER: Good morning Rick, I’m doing well.  How are you?

WAGNER: I am doing very well thank you.  To the interest of full disclosure here folks, I have sent Corey Gardner some money before I knew I was going to come over to a radio show. A few months back I sent Corey a little cash because I don’t donate to folks in my district because I write and talk about it a lot. But I didn’t know I was in the come over here.  Corey is a friend of her friend of mine, Josh Penry, who does something.  Does he do anything down there?

GARDNER: We try to get him to do a little more to try to pull his own weight.

WAGNER: Just pull, get out there and at least just pull the same direction.

GARDNER: That is right.

WAGNER: Tell him hi. I need to talk to him. We want to get him on here to. Corey I wanted to talk to you anyway and, like I said, I am a little biased here but I am going to try to…well I’m biased.  What I wnted to say is that I saw that you talked to Neil Cavuto yesterday a little bit about the Fourth CD race here on Fox huh?

GARDNER: We did. We actually ended up talking to Neil Cavuto about the health care vote and Congresswoman Markey’s vote against the interests of the people the Fourth Congressional District.

WAGNER: Now she got a little shutout from Labor Secretary and from the President.  Is that pretty intimidating for you? That pretty knocked you out of the race I’m guessing, hasn’t it?

GARDNER: It just made our phone lines light up a little bit more about how incensed people are about this.  The President of the United States stood up and credited for voting against the interests of her district.  People understand what this bill means to them and understand it is going to increase dramatically the deficit and the debt this country faces.  And they want somebody in Congress who actually represents them instead of just does the party work.

WAGNER: I wanted to come over here and host to show and Keith and Gail were nice enough to let me do it when they were out of town.  I wanted to get a sense of what is going on this side of the state.  In our county, in Mesa County, the area that my show is at, we are pretty conservative.  My knowledge of Fort Collins was that there are a lot of independents up here but they are down to earth bunch. I thought that we would mesh pretty well and so far I have been seeing that. Do you get the feeling out there that the independent group out there are a little tired of what is going on?

GARDNER: Absolutely, and you can see it. Especially with the amount of money that Congress has been wasting away.  A year ago Congresswoman Markey and the Democrats were saying the stimulus package, the largest spending bill in the history of this country, would keep unemployment rates below 8 percent.  Now they’re saying spending $2 trillion on health care is going to save money.  The independents, conservatives, Democrats are fed up with it and we see that in the people that show up for our meet and greets and people who call our office.  They are of all stripes, these are people who aren’t necessarily party people but they are people who understand what is happening to their country and they want to make something different happened.

WAGNER: Kind of a related question, would we have to do to make folks at the state legislature understand what is going on in Colorado?

GARDNER: That is another great point. The Legislature is just as out of touch as people in Washington D.C. are.

WAGNER: I have to say that this last round of tax increases, I know they try to pretend that it isn’t under Tabor, but these 11 bills that the Governor signed increasing taxes or doing away with exemptions, as they like to put forward on things.  It is just shocking to me that it slides by so easily but I suppose even if all the conservatives pushed the no button it still goes through, right?

GARDNER: Unfortunately in the House it is very clear this year it shows that elections have consequences.  When you vote for somebody in November who has made it very clear in the election that they are going to increase taxes that is exactly, this is exactly what you get when the majority of people like that takeover.  At the state legislature we have seen that time and time again.  Elections matter, this November 2008 had dire consequences and the tax increases are a direct result.

WAGNER: It has been surprising to a lot of people to see the rapidity of these changes and the lack of concern, at least in my observations, that the Ritter Administration has shown to try to cut back government first before start asking for more money.  It seems to me the tightening of the belt like a normal person would do under house or their business to see what they don’t need, that did not last for long before they started looking around for just more money.  As private citizens we do not have the availability to go out in course money out of people but not the government.

GARDNER: You are exactly right. Where Coloradans across the state were tightening the belt, the Governor and his budgets hit the buffet.

WAGNER: It seems like they hire more people. They do more things.  The Governor hired a straw boss to run the stimulus money. I do not know if that guy is out with a screwdriver putting up the Governor’s name beneath all these signs we see on the roadwork or what the story is.  He’s got that guy out there.  We have got tons of money being spent and I can tell you anecdotally, Corey, that this tax on candy and in my town and where Josh is from too, there is a big candy maker there named Enstroms candy, and this whole Byzantine exercise in trying to decide what is candy and what is food based on how much in nuts and flower and all kinds of crazy things they get into before they got out of this legislation. It just shows how crazy this is. You about have to hire some sort of CPA to figure out if there’s too much chocolaty nougat in their or enough flour, if it’s a food or whatever.

GARDNER: It shows a really out of touch these guys are.  Because not only is it going to be impossible to implement but they have forgotten that when you make it more expensive for businesses to do business, then you end up hurting them. They are going to pay less in taxes because they’re doing less business.  And you end up in a self perpetuating cycle, a downward spiral so to speak, where they are paying people less money and wages and hiring fewer people because they’re getting less money in for their goods and then the result is the state has less money to collect in tax revenue.  I remind people everyday that there are no employees in the state of Colorado without employers and if you continue to punish them on the tax side, our revenues are going to hurt even more.  Basic economics seem to be lost with people in Washington and in Denver.

WAGNER: You are very timely because just the segment before you came on I was going through the inability of individuals and government anymore it seems like to understand that cost projections based on units sold or services delivered at one price point are not going to be accurate if you multiply the cost. In other words, if I add a dollar to everything, you’re not going to get the same amount of units sold and you are not going to collect as much tax.  That is related to macroeconomics and formerly the Laffer Curve and I just do not understand why time and time again we see people in the Legislature, in both the national and the state legislature, think that the fastest way to get money is to assess a tax and then eventually after there is a bump and you got out and essentially gather the money up and sneak off into the night and then people find a different way to do it. So that the revenue projections never match up when they are extended out over a year or two.

GARDNER: That’s right.

WAGNER: I don’t sound like I am lecturing but it seems to me that this should be obvious.  And I have to say, and I don’t expect you to comment here, but Terence Carroll said some of the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time about health care the other day.  I am sadly concerned about what is going on at the Legislature down there.  The lunatics have taken over the asylum and something has to be done to get it back.

GARDNER: That is what has been so exciting to see all these people who have been active and engaged this year in politics and to see them try to take an active part in policy and government in these elections.  And I just hope, were sitting here in March of 2010, I hope that in November that fires burning even more brightly.

WAGNER: Corey, you’ve got a website or anything people can go to? I just like to let people promote that to get a little bit more information, sent you hate mail like they do me, Whenever.  Go ahead and give it out.

GARDNER: Thank you, it is corygardner.com and we are also on Facebook, Twitter, and you name it. We’ve got some Youtube videos up. If you want to see the little portion we did on Neil Cavuto you can check that out on Youtube.  But go to our website, corygardner.com and join our fight.

WAGNER: We wish you luck. We’re happy to get Betsy Markey on here if she wants to call in.  We will be waiting anxiously for that. She has got some explaining to do.  Did she get anything by the way for that vote?  Should I be looking out for a truck to deliver something here in Fort Collins?

GARDNER: I think it’s clear that she will be taking care of.  We’ll see in the campaign commercials that come up and how much they’re spending on those but certainly this was a path fraught with a lot of gold on the sidelines.

WAGNER: There is a lot of chief assistant to the undersecretary to the assistant jobs that are the going to be given away to out of work congressmen, I think, in 2011.  Cory, thanks a lot for calling, we appreciate it.