The jon kiper show

Jon: All right. What's happening, New Hampshire? My name is Jon Kiper. I am running for governor of our great state. For the Jon Kiper Show today, welcome. My guest is my partner, Emily. 

Emily: Hi, 

Jon: Emily. Emily, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do? 

Emily: mostly I'm just your partner. I just, Hang out upstairs, but what do you do 

Jon: for work? 

Emily: I'm a, licensed clinical mental health counselor, 

Jon: and this is very important because 

Emily: Jon needs 

Jon: it. I have need for a 24-hour on-call therapist. No, just kidding. That would be highly unethical. She cannot do therapy to her boyfriend, and I keep telling her this every single day. but no, really, so we're gonna do a thing today where, I want to cover some issues that I think everyone in New Hampshire who cares about the state of New Hampshire needs to know about. And a lot of people do not know about these three issues that we're gonna talk about. And Emily here is going to pretend like she has no idea what I'm talking about. And she's gonna ask questions accordingly, because she does know what we're talking about. But she's gonna stand in for the average person that I meet on the street who has no idea about these issues. Yeah, 

Emily: and to be fair, I don't know. Everything to do with these things. Yes, so it's actually fair. 

Jon: Okay, so the first thing we're gonna talk about is the Free State Project. So Emily, have you heard of the Free State Project? 

Emily: I know what it, I've heard the name, but I don't know much about it. 

Jon: Okay, so the Free State Project started out with a guy named Jason Sorens. so Sorens. Sonos anyway. 

Emily: Was he a cool guy though? 

Jon: I have only talked to him one time. He seems pretty cool. So this guy, Jason. Wrote, and I'm probably mispronouncing his last name. This guy, Jason, I think he was going to Harvard, and he basically wrote this paper about how you could get a bunch of people to move to one state, libertarian people who want as few laws as possible, and that they could infiltrate the government and make a state that was like a libertarian utopia. There'd be as few laws as possible, and so this is how the Free State Project was born. And basically this was in the nineties, and they looked at all the states in the country and they said, New Hampshire has got a small population, but they've got a really big legislature, 400 members, so we could probably best infiltrate the government in New Hampshire. So they said, we're gonna try to get 20,000 people to move to New Hampshire, 'cause that was the number that they decided they would need to change our laws. And so beginning in the mid nineties, people started moving to New Hampshire. And thousands of people have moved here now. the Free State Project has been pretty successful in getting into the government. They are on school boards, they are on town councils, and they represent, a number of towns as state representatives. And one of the reasons that they're able to do this is because in New Hampshire we do not pay our legislature. It's, a very limited group of people who can drive to Concord three or four days a week for six months for no money. So the people in the Free State Project, because they are really driven by their ideology to lower the number of laws in New Hampshire. They're willing to literally beg, borrow, and steal to, to serve in the legislature. they'll sleep on their mom's couch, or they'll, have roommates and just do whatever they can to have their living expenses as low as possible. A lot of 'em are into crypto. 

Emily: Why is that? Why are they different than other people in that way? What do you mean? Like, why can they beg, borrow and steal when other people can't? What, 

Jon: so other people could? It's just that they are more, Driven. So they're willing to say, I will, I, don't need money because, and I'm not worried about my financial future as just a resident of New Hampshire, because I'm driven by this bigger ideological movement to, create a state with as few laws as possible. Now, one of the problems that they have, and this is a problem for pretty much every libertarian organization, okay, is if you say to people. We want a country or a state with no laws, you have a couple of problems. First of all, a lot of sketchy people showed up. There was just a few people that were in the organization that were definitely pedophiles. And one of the first things, or one of the things that they've been pushing for is to lower the, age of consent that you can marry at, which is again, Adjacent to this, we don't want any laws and we're pedophiles, fringe group of libertarians. But the other problem with libertarian, just ideology in general, is there is no cohesive definition of what a libertarian is. And you could be doing it in one way, I could be doing it in another, and it could be different. So for instance, some people in the Libertarian movement, Believe that abortion should be left up to the women should, because why should the government, be making laws about a woman's body? But there's other libertarians that say no. The woman is taking away the liberty of her unborn child right now. I dunno, obviously, I believe women deserve the right, to their own medical treatments, but you can see where the ideology starts to butt heads with itself. With this level of freedom, you can't really come to cohesive. answers about things. And I know a lot about the Free State Project because when it first started, I was interested. I thought, this is cool. I think I was 19 years old, or 18, just getting outta high school. I thought, oh, this is cool, let's make a state with no laws, And in my head I'm like, oh, we can walk down the street smoking pot or whatever, It was at 19, 20, early. I was like, oh, this is great. But then, like I said, as it turns out, you get a lot of pedophiles that show up. You get a lot of sketchy people. And so the Free State Project has not reached their main goals of bringing 20,000 people here, but there are, I think, about five or 6,000 now. Over the course of the, this project, they have had a lot of infighting. People have left. my campaign manager actually was moved here in 2016 as part of the Free State Project, and then basically figured out that there's a lot of sketchy stuff going on, and she got out of the. Of the group and a lot of people have left. And there are a lot of good people that, that are in the Free State Project that just I think don't quite understand. how we have to work together to get things done. And this is one thing, a lot of libertarians, I think, have never been on a town council. Once you get on there, and actually I have served on town council with a guy who wasn't libertarian, but you realize that it's just a lot more complicated to get things done and that things have to get done. Like streets getting paved and water getting cleaned. Or else society will break down, and a lot of the libertarians don't have good answers for this. Is this all making sense? 

Emily: Yeah. can you explain a little bit about which side they fall on? Are they more Democrat? Are they more Republican? 

Emily: Oh no, 

Jon: they're Republicans. Yeah. So basically what happened is the libertarians initially were separate from the Republicans and. Then over the years they merged, and one of those reasons that they merged in my opinion, and this is just my opinion. Is that in 20, 16, there was a Senate race. Kelly Ayotte was a Republican. She was the incumbent running against Maggie Hassan and the Democrat, and there ended up being two guys who ran as Libertarians. Now, Maggie Hassan had ended up winning that race by only a thousand votes, and the Libertarian candidates both got, I think, 10, tens of thousands of votes. So many of the Republicans said, "Hey, we lost this Senate seat. Kelly Ayotte lost her seat because of the Libertarians." third party, candidates. So they said, and, I have no reason to back this up. This is just conjecture, but I think it makes sense. The Republicans said to themselves, either consciously or unconsciously, we need to become more libertarian, that these people don't run as Libertarians, and then we just bring them into the fold. And you can see the Republicans in New Hampshire have just gotten more and more libertarian, as the years have gone by. And now the difference between the Republicans and the Libertarians and the Free State Project is not, there's no difference. They're all conjoined and, even Jason Osborne, the majority leader in the House. he is a Free State Project person. there's a number of them up there and this, so this is a Free State Project. They've infiltrated our state. They are trying to basically destroy the public school system. That's one of their big missions. And what frustrates me about the Free State Project is if they would focus on like legalizing cannabis and lowering zoning laws. So we can build more houses. I would be in favor of that type of libertarianism. But what's frustrating is that they're not, they, not that they don't work on those things, but their bigger priority is they want to dismantle, public education in this entire country. And so it's not just the Free State Project, but the libertarians in general have got this idea that we need to eliminate public schools. Everyone would go to private school and somehow that would save us all money and be better for everyone. I don't think that's true. 

Emily: Why do they think that is true? 

Jon: It's this kind of market, free market mentality where it's if we had a bunch of private schools and no public school, the best private school would get the most people going to it. And therefore it would be like a market, of ideas. So let's say you had a school in Newmarket and one in Exeter, but the one in Exeter is doing better. So every, all the kids would go to the one in Exeter? The problem where it falls apart is that. The, public school system is, or schools in general, are just expensive to run, and there's no world in which the libertarians want to actually put up the amount of money it would cost to send all of the kids. To private school. it costs, most private schools are 15, 20, $30,000. some of them are, they can get really high. So it's just, in my opinion, not a realistic way to, deal with schooling and the other, and, I'm willing to criticize that. There's probably some ways we could do public schools better for sure. But eliminating them I don't think is a good idea. And I think most people agree with me. So that brings me to issue number two that you need to know about, because this is caused basically by the Free State Project. Sorry, before we move on, do you have any other questions about them? 

Emily: It just sounds a little, and I'm sorry to say it, it sounds a little culty. 

Jon: It is definitely very culty. It's very culty to the point where. I've talked to ex-members who said that once they left the group, they were basically excommunicated. And there's a woman, I'm not gonna say her name 'cause I didn't get permission to, but there's a woman I know who was a big Free State Project person, and then she got cancer. And all of a sudden, this experience of having cancer and fighting the insurance system, fighting the Medicare, Medicaid system, she realized, wow. I was so wrong about being a libertarian because just randomly terrible things happen to people, and we need a government safety net to support people when these terrible, things like cancer happen. she's a really powerful, speaker and has a great story. I'll try to, I'm gonna get her on at some point. But anyway, so the Free State Project leads us to the next. Terrible thing that the Republicans slash Libertarian slash Free State Project has brought the state of New Hampshire, and that is education, freedom vouchers. Okay. And lemme spell you out what this is, this means, and it started out where they had a very pretty low income threshold where, you had to make, I think it was under $80,000 to qualify, but that was the first year. So they said what we're gonna do is we're gonna give $4,000 checks. And I think that it can even go higher than that, but I'm not exactly sure the details. But $4,000 checks to every. Parent of a student who wants to either homeschool or send their kids to private school, $4,000 checks. What's that? 

Emily: That's $4,000 for the year. 

Jon: It's $4,000 for the year. So that is also the same amount of money that the state gives to each town or city for each student. That's how much the state provides. and let me just give you the logic of the Education Freedom vouchers. I don't agree with them, but let me explain to you what the logic is. The logic is if we spend this four grand, take the kids out of the public school system, their parents are now paying the rest of their school. let's say it's 20 grand, so the parents are paying 16, state's paying four. That's cheaper in the long run. That's the idea. You pull the kids out of the public school system and now it saves money for the taxpayers, 'cause now they're going to. Private school. The problem with that is that there's a lot of fixed costs in a town or a school system. So let's say New Market. We built this school for our population. I think it's roughly, 400 kids for the high school. If you take five kids out or 10 kids out, that doesn't really lose you a teacher, that doesn't lose you, it, it doesn't, your admin is still the same. It's just you're, just losing those 10 kids and that $40,000, 'cause now the town's not getting that money for those students. And not to mention the fact that the money is coming out of the Education Trust Fund, which is the pool of money that the state gets to fund our schools. 

Jon: Do you have any questions so far? Feel 

Emily: free to interject if you do. It's le, it's feels elitist because, to imagine that these families, the only families that can send their kids to these private schools are ones that can fit the bill for the rest of it. 4,000 isn't enough. 

Jon: There's yeah, most, there's, no school, private school that's $4,000, so most of them are at least 10. There are some cheaper ones that are like. I think maybe eight or nine, but I don't know how good of an education you're gonna get for $89,000. 

Emily: I was just talking to a friend of mine, who sends her kids to Montessori and her kids are, middle school and elementary, and it's I think she said $15 per kid. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Emily: Per year. So I just imagining that if she didn't have a. the father of her kids wasn't as rich as he was. Like, they, could never be going 

Jon: well, and this is really the thing is, like, how many really poor families? Are $4,000 short of going, sending their kids to, private school? No. generally, if you need 15 grand, four is not gonna get you there. If you're making $30,000 a year, it's just not realistic. 

Jon: Obviously, there's some families that have done it and have made these sacrifices, but one of the problems is when they first implemented this program, 80% of the kids were already in private school. So all they're doing is sending a check to the private schools and When I first heard about this, was in, I think, 2019, 2020, and they basically said that the. Chairman of the Commissioner of Education, Frank Brogan, said this is going to cost us $126,000. When the final tally came up, because they didn't cap the amount of money that was going to be spent on this, the first year it cost over $8 million. So I called up the Department of Education. I said, "Hey, you guys have this program, these education vouchers. You said it was going to cost $127,000 or $126,000, and it ended up costing over $8 million." Like, how do you explain that? And it was so funny 'cause the woman who answered the phone at the Department of Education said, "What are you talking about? Who's, where'd you see that 8 million number?" And I said, it's in a memo that your office released earlier this year." And she had no idea what I was talking about. And frankly, actually, frankly, Frank Ope called me back about a, an hour or two later and it was defending this system. I said to him, I said, "Frank, if the fire chief in our town said the new fire department, or the new firetruck, is gonna cost $127,000, and instead it costs $8 million, he would be fired. this is clearly fiscal mismanagement. It's not fiscally conservative. I don't know what this is, but it's not." What I would call a traditional Republican policy. it's just doesn't make any sense. And he was trying to defend it a million different ways, but it just, it, 

Emily: so how did he try to defend it? 

Jon: so his defense was, 'cause he knew I owned a restaurant. He said, imagine you do a Taco Tuesday deal and, and, hundreds of people show up. It means it was a good deal. And I'm like, that doesn't work the same way with fiscal financing of a, state or a town. if more people use a tax rebate or tax credit, it doesn't mean that it was successful, more successful. It just means more people qualified than you predicted. It means you didn't do your job right when you're trying to estimate these costs. but. I did a little bit of research into these vouchers and listened to some podcasts and did some, diving in and, what's really interesting is, where do you think the idea of vouchers would've started? 

Emily: Ugh, 

Jon: I'll tell you. It was around the sixties, 1960s. 

Emily: I was gonna guess restate, but 

Emily: no, 

Jon: It started, I think it was in Arizona. 

Emily: Tell me. 

Jon: It was when they started integrating. The schools so that black kids and white kids were gonna go to school together. Oh no, the white parents said, "Hey, we don't want our kids to go to school with black kids." But we also don't wanna pay the full cost of 'em to go to private school. So they came up with this voucher system where they could take their money and send their kids to a PRI private school that was only white children. Oh. So that's where this comes from. And I hate to say it 'cause there's so many times in New United States politics where you go up. Yep. It's racism again. But yes, again, 

Emily: what do you mean? You hate to say it? We need to say that. 

Jon: it just sucks how many things end up, you, follow the rabbit hole and it's oh, this is racism again. God, Why, why do we keep doing this? It sucks. Yeah. it just, it sucks. but we should just all be aware of that's where it came from and now they are trying to implement these, programs all over the country and it's literally bankrupting some of the states that are doing, Arizona is. Hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole. it's just crazy. I heard the other day that Ohio has got a rule that private school kids have to get bused, have to, there has to be buses for the private school kids, and so they don't have enough, but there's no mandate that they, public school kids need to get bused. So there, some of the public school kids don't have buses, and this is all part of a bigger ideology, like I said earlier, for the libertarians to eliminate public schools altogether. So the idea is. It is. They just slowly pick away and pull funding and get on school boards and mess with the functioning of the public school to the point where the average parent who's not paying attention doesn't know about these programs, doesn't know about the free state, goes, "Oh my God, our school board screwed up our school. We have no money." and, it's the fault of the public school system, so I gotta put my kid in private school, so now I need the voucher. 

Emily: and that's what I was just about to mention. Mention is like it feels really obvious. I had experience working in a. Public, school as well as like having exposure to people who voted for Trump, like at my other job, and they don't know what they voted for. 

Jon: Yeah. 

Emily: I think I, shared this story with you, but I was passively faxing something at my job at the hospital, and I had a nurse come up to me knowing that you had run in for, governor. So I think she believed that I knew a lot about politics and I know just enough where she was. Like, what is, if we're defunding education and my kid has to go, if I want to use, one of these vouchers to send my kids somewhere, somewhere different, is it true that my kid's IEP won't be, Respected or serviced. And I said, yeah, you, IEPs don't really exist outside of the education system. And that's, 

Jon: yeah, and this is the problem. 'Cause the private school can say, hey, we don't want to take your kid with ADHD, we don't want to take your kid with dyslexia, we don't want to take your kid with a disability. And they can do that because they're private. and this is the craziest part, in my opinion, about this whole freedom voucher thing, at least in New Hampshire. If you read the Constitution of our state, the New Hampshire State Constitution, more than once, I think at least twice and maybe even three times, it mentions, no, definitely twice, that the state of New Hampshire cannot fund religious education. It says it straight up. So what the legislature did is they made this nonprofit organization that technically the state gives the money to the nonprofit organization. Nonprofit distributes to the parents who then pay the schools, but obviously they're circumventing the intention of the Constitution, of the people who wrote it, that they very specifically did not want their, their taxes going to fund religious schools. And why would that be? I will tell you why, because they had just left England and they had seen all these different religious sects, fighting with each other in Europe for, years, hundreds of years, thousands even. And they realized, hey, we wanna keep the government and the religion separate. and it was because they did not want, some religious sect taking over the educational system, taking over the government, and then having these religious based violence, which. funny because seems like we're getting quite a bit of religion-based violence when you look at the way that the United States conducted the War on Terror, for instance. and I think it's just really important to understand how much the founders of this, of our country, first prioritized education and just did not want religion. Involved in the state, in the state funding of it. of the schools and just this, they, clearly knew that, every education system, and let me say this very clearly, every educational system is indoctrination. That's what it is. There's no educational system that does not involve indoctrination. You're indoctrinating your kids into the, your worldview and, culture and your culture and how you conduct yourself in society. And if you're a conservative town, that's how you know your school's gonna be conducted. It's gonna be indoctrination to a conservative lifestyle. And if you're in a liberal town, it's gonna be more liberal. That's just what it is. we teach our kids, we want our kids being indoctrinated into a world that, really, pri prioritizes science and math and literature and education and really, supports the, just the idea that people should want to be, knowledgeable and intelligent and, be seeking out knowledge. And the founders of this state, if you read the Constitution, and I really urge you to. you will see how much they really, just loved and venerated education and wanted to support it. So do you have any more questions about the education freedom vouchers? 

Emily: no, 

Jon: and I think one really good argument against it in my opinion is. The way that our system works is we have one set of like free services. For instance, we have a free road, that you can drive unless you're on a toll road, of course, but generally, inter-town roads are free. we have a free, the fire department, if you call them, you don't, they don't ask you for money up front. The police, if, if you, if someone's breaking into your house, you call the police. Now, can you imagine how crazy it would be if we follow the education freedom voucher logic all the way down? so they're saying that if you're not happy with the public school system, you can take your tax allocation and go to a private school. what if I said the same thing about the police? I said, oh, I, I don't trust the police in my town. I need to spend the same amount of money that's going to the police, but on private. Security, or I don't trust the fire department in my town. I wanna hire a private fire department to look after my house when I'm, not home or something. it just doesn't, it falls apart, 

Emily: That's so helpful to explain it that way. 

Jon: Yeah, and it just, it's, the most important thing to think about. It's just like the way that our system works is you have one. School. The public school. And we fund that. And if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere. There's charter schools, you can homeschool, you can choose to, if you have the money, go to a private school. 

Emily: and I just would argue that the reasons that someone would want to take their kids out of a public school is that they're not getting some need that they think that they, their kid needs, it's not being met. And I just imagine that if we hyper-focused on that and funded the schools, then all of their needs would be met. And we could do things like alternative schooling in the. Private, public school 

Jon: a hundred percent. 

Emily: Like Waldorf, like focused or Montessori focused. Yeah. For certain, kids that might need that or charter based learning, that could all be under one roof if we just funded it. 

Jon: and that's I'm not gonna say there isn't ways we can improve the public school system. Any system can use improvement 

Emily: and they're underfunded, so that makes sense. 

Jon: But yeah. but we need the funding to do it in general. yeah, I would definitely be down with public schools being a little bit more Montessori, a little bit less, Rigid in the way that we do, the classroom time. Particularly I think my son needs more time outside, more time, doing physical learning as opposed to just book learning. but that's an argument that we can have within the public school system. We don't need to have this alternative school system which drains funds from the, public schools. So that leads me to the next. Thing that I wanna talk about, which is very important. So we've covered the Free State Project, which is trying to destroy the public school system. We have covered the Education Freedom Vouchers, which is basically their tool for defunding the public school system. But I wanna talk about a bigger issue, which is just how we fund the schools. Writ large in New Hampshire. And, the way that it works is the state of New Hampshire pays 30% of your public school, bill, and the state pays the other seven, sorry, the state pays 30% and your town pays 70% of the school, bill. So most of the school bill is paid by you. So when I was on the New Market Town Council, our tax rate was $26 per thousand, which meant if your house cost $1,000, you would owe $26. In taxes, if your house costs $10,000, it would be $260, and so on and so forth. So it was $26 was the tax rate. Of that $26, $6 went to run the town. So that's to pay all the, the secretaries of the town office and the town manager, to pay the fire department and the police department. So $6 covered all the town services, the roads, all that stuff. The other $20 went to the school and. It was through this realization that as a restaurant owner who, and we are in my restaurant now, I realized that 

Emily: it's not a restaurant anymore. 

Jon: That's true. My closed restaurant, and the reason it's closed is 'cause there's no parking. And why is there no money for parking in towns like New Market? Because of how much we're funding the school. So much money is going to fund the school. And. It's really important for you to understand this. So because schools are funded by property taxes, if your town has more valuable property, then your tax rate is lower and the amount that you are paying is therefore lower. So for instance, in this house building, it's 1,400 square feet. My tax bill is about, roughly, a little under $8,000 per year. If you go to Newcastle, which is much more expensive, houses I found on Redfin, a house for 30. sorry. It's three and a half million dollar house. It was, I think, 3000 square foot. So double the size of mine. Way bigger lot. Obviously a mansion. New Castle, it was three, three and a half million. The taxes on that house were $6,000, $2,000 lower than my little building in New Market. So what is. The effects of that, it means that poorer towns and businesses in poorer towns are struggling even harder because we have these bigger tax bills. So I, for instance, this would happen so often, especially when I first opened my restaurant, where I would think, man, I finally made money. I'm making a profit. And then I'd get the tax bill in the mail for $3,700 and I'd think, dang, I just, all the money I thought I made is inevitably seems to always get sucked up into taxes. So it means that towns like New Market. Are paying a higher percentage of our whole income. And you can look this up. So basically, if you're in a town and the, median income is under a hundred thousand dollars, there's a really good chance you're paying a very high percentage of your income towards public education. And we have some towns in this state because of the way that the system works that are paying basically no money towards public education, literally no money. And the problem with that is. Children in New Market are going to go and grow up and they're going to work in a hospital in Portsmouth, or they're going to work in a retirement home in Durham. And so if you're in a town that has no children in it and your taxes are low, but you're using the services of these future educated children, you are a freeloader. You are a freeloader in our state. You are a parasite. This is a parasitic relationship. And let me be blunt. Parasitic relationship means you are living off of the host. The host is the poorer towns that educate all the children, the cities that educate all the children. And then you benefit from these educated children when you go shopping and there's a kid there that knows how to read, can count change, et cetera. And it's particularly egregious in New Market, 'cause we have, about half of our state is rentals, is rental units. So we have a lot of people who are. Working in service industries and stuff like that, they'll go to a town like, Newington, where there's the mall and there's Best Buy, and they'll work at Best Buy. And yet there's very few children in Newington, and so their tax rate is really low. So we are subsidizing the city or the town of Newington in the fact that they don't have to pay as high of taxes because we are funding the education of their children. And again, why do we want to educate children? 'Cause they're the future, number one. And number two, because it's mandated by the constitution of. New Hampshire, we have to do it. This is not optional. And for people to, especially Republicans who frequently talk about how important the Constitution is, it's frustrating when they don't. support education, because not only is it important for generally to have people educated, but our businesses, which we rely heavily on for taxes, need educated workers. We need to fund higher education because if these businesses don't think that there are people there with the. Training and the education that they need to open higher end, manufacturing, they're not gonna move to New Hampshire. And, the ones that are here are gonna leave and, we're starting to see that happening. 

Emily: Then what's your plan then? what do you suggest if, there's different towns that are paying different prices for taxes? 

Jon: So basically, and this is something that's really important to understand too, is the, and this is almost a whole bigger story, but I'm just going to do it really short, this, the city of, Claremont sued the state of New Hampshire in 1991 because of this. Regressive system in which poor towns pay more, richer towns pay less. They said, this isn't constitutional, it's not fair. And multiple times the judges have agreed with them, but nothing has been done about this. So how are we gonna do it? Great question. This is how I'm gonna do it. As governor, we're gonna flip the formula. So the towns are only paying 30%. We cap it at 30% of the cost of education. The state will pick up that other 70%. Now where are we gonna get that money? There are a lot of small ways we can increase revenue, such as, legalizing cannabis. We'll bring in 30, 50 million, rolling business taxes back to what they are raising them back to what they were in 2015, 2016. We raise them some revenue, a hundred million or so. But ultimately we need to have this bigger discussion about. How are we gonna fund the state? There's a lot of ways we can do it. We could have an income tax, sales tax, value added tax, good and services tax, consumption tax. we could have taxes on second homes that were over a million dollars that are sold. There's a lot of ways we can do it, 

Emily: OnlyFans, 

Jon: but ultimately what I want to do is have a big conversation with everyone in the state and have a series of forums, get people on board and say, hey. What do you think the tax system should be? Defend your idea of sales tax, defend your idea of a property tax. if you wanna keep the system as it is, 

Emily: Jon, that sounds like it would take a long time. 

Jon: You think so? I don't think so. Okay. I think we could do that, a series of forms and maybe over the course of a year. 

Emily: Yeah. 

Jon: this is gonna take more than, just so you understand, the governor's only in there for two years. 

Jon: I'm not gonna totally overhaul the entire funding of public education in New Hampshire in two years. That's not even feasible. So the first part of my campaign, or the first part of my, first cycle of my two, first two years, and I'll win another two years, is going to be setting up this transition because it's, we're talking a massive. Change in New Hampshire politics in the way that New Hampshire fund schools. And so we are going to have to spend a year. Coming up with a plan in another year, educating people about the plan, because what we want is consensus. Because what we've done in the past is they did the statewide education property tax. That was the first answer to the school funding. And this was a tax that was gone, that went over every town and city. It was an additional property tax, and then they were pooling the money and giving it out to the towns that didn't have as much. They needed more money. And then what happened? The towns that were paying this. Into this fund called themselves donor towns, and they said, we're donating money to these outside towns. We don't wanna do it. The governor at the time was, Lynch, and he said, okay, we won't do that. You can keep the money. So literally what happens now is every town and city in New Hampshire collects a statewide property tax. They don't give it to the state, they just keep it. And if they don't need it, they just lower their taxes with it. So it's a statewide property tax that never goes to the state. 

Emily: Cool. 

Jon: It doesn't make any sense. And. 

Emily: So is that why there's some towns that are richer than the others because of that one time? 

Jon: that, and, it was bad before. Yeah, it was bad before, but that even made it worse because they're collecting more money, but they're using it to just lower their taxes in general. 

Emily: Yeah, 

Jon: so point being that we don't want to put in another system that's going to be rejected in two or four years. And, the point is this. For so long, New Hampshire has been thinking only in two-year cycles, 'cause that's when the governor and the State House and everyone in the Senate gets reelected. Executive Council. Everyone's on a two-year cycle. We have to think 10 years down the line, which is gonna require us having a plan that goes beyond the two-year cycle. And that is really what I'm talking about. there's issues with an income tax, there's issues with a sales tax, there's issues with the current property tax. Every issue has. Pros and cons. And we've gotta just discuss this and figure out what's gonna work so that 60% of us are happy with this plan. 

Emily: Yeah. That sounds like almost any problem, like in our country too. 

Jon: It is. And we just have to be realistic that there's not gonna be any solution to a problem that doesn't have. Good. winners and losers, pros and cons. There's just no perfect solutions. There's never going to be, but currently the current situation that we have now, one is illegal, unconstitutional, and two, is unsustainable because the property taxes keep going up and it's driving older people out of their houses. It's making it harder for the rest of us to afford housing. It's making housing costs more. And a lot of people don't think about this, but I want you to think about it for a second. When I was looking for a house, this is the first time I started looking, my mortgage, broker, he said to me, he's you could buy $50,000 more house in Maine. So he was saying if, I was qualified for $300,000 in New Hampshire, I'd be qualified for $350,000 in Maine. And it's because. The mortgage is based on your monthly costs, and your monthly costs will go up in New Hampshire because property taxes are higher. And I met people in Claremont that had moved to Vermont, and they said they were saving $500 a month on property taxes buying the same house in Vermont that they couldn't afford in New Hampshire. So it, it has these bigger implications that people just need to really think about what is happening with our current system. Fundamentally, the current system allows the rich to have better schools and the poor to have worse schools. And it's just undermining and enforcing inequality and making it so that the rich get richer and the poor get poor. 

Emily: Yeah. 

Jon: You have any, questions about that? 

Emily: No, it's depressing. 

Jon: It is a little depressing, but it's why I'm running for governor, because we've got to fund our schools in a constitutional and fair way. So just review. We got the Free State Project. You gotta be aware of them. You gotta watch what they're doing because they're sneaking, they're trying to overthrow our entire, public school system. 

Emily: It's weird that they would still even identify as a Free Stater. Like they wouldn't be embarrassed with all that's out there. 

Jon: No, they're not. If you wanna learn more about that, there's a book called, Google it, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. It's a really good read. It's about the Free State Project and what happened in Grafton County when they were, when they first moved in there. And if you want to learn more about the history of education, I'm gonna put a website that you can check out about, learning more about that. Andrew Valencia's gonna been a really. a fighter for this issue for, decades now, and he's got a great book out called The Last Big Sell. My name's Jon Kiper. This was the Jon Kiper Show. Thank you so much.