The jon kiper show

What's happening? Welcome to the Jon Kiper Show. I'm Jon Kiper. So my girlfriend, Emily, my partner, is on a trip to North Carolina to deal with a house that her father inherited. And so my co-host today is gonna be this plant. Plant's probably not gonna have a lot to say, but I didn't wanna sit here alone like a weirdo with no friends.

It's hard to find people to come on the show who are willing to talk honestly about their political views, and it's also hard to find people that. constrained together a coherent sentence in a way that you, the listener, will be able to hear. But today we're going to talk about, my new Community First economics agenda.

So I'm 42. My entire life has been built, the economic system that our country has been using since. I was born is this idea of trickle-down economics, okay? Where if we cut regulation for businesses, if we cut taxes for businesses, if we cut taxes for wealthy people, the money will just trickle down to all the poor and middle-class people.

This is Reaganomics. It's something Ronald Reagan championed and that, frankly. a lot of the Republican or the Democrats and Republicans after him also championed this. Bill Clinton once said, the era of big government is over, and this is when the Democrats were basically surrendering to the, corporate interests.

And this is what we're fighting back against now, is the results of this trickle down economic theory, which let's be honest, and I wanna say this for everyone in the back. Trickle-down economics is bullshit. It's bullshit. It's always been bullshit. It was never gonna work. It was just a simple way for the Republicans to sell.

Tax cuts for the rich and for them to, sell, lack or a reduction in, corporate, oversight and corporate regulation. And let's look around. What's happened? What's happened in the last 40 years? The rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poor, and the middle class is basically, haul it out, is a shell of itself.

And, this wasn't always the case. and a big, one of the big reasons why this happened, in my opinion, is that over a number of court cases, beginning even in the seventies. The Supreme Court began to allow more money to be, donated to political campaigns, money, particularly from corporations.

Eventually, it was through political action committees, but they kept freeing up the amount that people could donate. And when money becomes free speech, someone with more money has more free speech than you do or I do. And it used to be that the Democrats took a lot of money of donations from the unions, and then they worked with the unions.

But after these court cases and leading up to Citizens United, and after Citizens United, the Democrats said, "Hey." The Republicans are getting all this corporate money. We've gotta take corporate money too, or else we're not gonna be able to compete with them. And what happened is they took the corporate money and it was way more money than the, unions could provide.

So they basically. The unions were left out of the discussion, and since then, union, membership in this country has just been falling and falling until now. It's at its lowest levels in decades. I think it's about 11% of the country is in unions right now. at its peak. I think it was like 30% of the country was in a union during the fifties, the roaring fifties, when the government or the economy was doing really well.

It was because a lot of people were in unions and those unions were fighting for a lot of the rights that you and I take for granted, rights like an eight hour workday, a 40 hour work week, a five day work week in which we don't have to work weekends. these are all because unions fought for them for decades and decades Now that we know that trickle-down economics doesn't work and that big corporations have too much power, what's our new paradigm? What's our new idea that we're gonna go, gonna use to, to change this? And that's where I came up with recently this idea of. Community First Economics. And what is Community First Economics?

It's where we focus on our local community first. So we worry about, a, single mom who can't pay her rent or is struggling to pay her rent and is working multiple jobs. And I'm thinking of specific people when I say that in my, town. We worry about elderly folks who are getting priced out of their trailer park or their mobile home because the taxes keep going up.

we worry about children who are going to school and don't have money for lunch, right? Kids at school should be fed, period. And, when we focus on our local community, making sure everyone's housed and has access to good food and good education, then. The, corporations will benefit because people will, one, if they're paying less money for rent and more because they'll have more money to spend at the corporations, to go to Target and buy things, to go to my burger shop and buy things and, to have more money in the economy.

It's not very helpful if someone's working, 60 hours a week and is still paying more than half their money towards rent or mortgage. You have all this money going to. The banks that own the mortgages and the landlords, and it's not sloshing around in the economy. A healthy economy, people are spending about 30% of their money on housing, 30% on rent or mortgage.

In an unhealthy economy like we have now, it's 50, 60, 70%. I know people that are basically spending their entire paycheck, almost, on rent. And mortgage and utilities and all this stuff. So we've got to address these issues and that's where my campaign, again, eco economics, sorry, community. first economics is our plan.

And how are we gonna address that? we're gonna begin with three things, and those are. Lowering property taxes. And it's important that you understand, even if you're a renter, high property taxes raise your rent, okay? Your landlord takes a portion of your rent and pays the property taxes. So every time the property taxes go up, your landlord uses that as a reason to raise your rent.

So it's, we gotta lower property taxes. Now how are we gonna do that? We do that by changing the way that we fund education, and right now the legislature's actually working on this. A judge recently told the state of New Hampshire that the state needs to double the amount, almost double the amount that it sends to the towns for public education.

I've said in this other video, it's been, in case you missed it, your town is paying 60 to 70% of the whole budget for your school. That's not how it's supposed to be. According to the New Hampshire Constitution, as was laid out in several court cases, Claremont one, two, and three, it's the state's obligation to pay for public education.

And if you, if you're curious, it's Part Two, Article 83 of the New Hampshire Constitution, where it lays out that the state is supposed to cherish education. Now, what does cherish mean? I would say. Make sure all the kids are well educated. Okay? And I will say this, okay, sometimes money is not the answer.

Sometimes teaching methods need to be, evolved and adapted. But the third thing we're gonna do, so like I said, we're gonna address property taxes by changing the formula for how we fund education to make it more equitable and fair and not regressive. 'Cause under the current system, the richest towns pay the least, the poorest towns pay the most.

So the third thing we're gonna do is build affordable housing and address the affordable housing crisis. So again, the three things we're gonna start with focusing on a community first economics agenda is education funding, property taxes, affordable housing. Like I said, your rent is higher because of the property taxes.

Also, your mortgage is higher. When I first started looking for a house several, many, years ago, 'cause as, you may or may not know, I live in a 740 square foot apartment above here. When I first started looking for a house, I talked to my buddy who's a mortgage agent, and he said, John, you could buy.

you're qualified for, I think it was $300,000 in New Hampshire. But if you move to Maine, I could qualify you for $350,000, for a mortgage because the property taxes are lower. And when you're getting a mortgage, they look at the monthly amount based on your monthly income. And I used to own a house in 2005.

I bought a house in Eliot, Maine, and my taxes were $2,500 for the year. It was a 2,200 square foot house. On about two acres in New Market right now. And I'm sure that the taxes have gone up. That was many, that was decades ago. But, point being my, that was one house, $2,500. Now I live in a 1,400 square foot house, so a third smaller than that house.

And my taxes are about, 6,000, 7,000 a year. So way higher, And of course, taxes have gone up everywhere, so I'm sure that taxes on that house are higher. But, point being Maine has lower property taxes. I met someone in Claremont who had moved across the border to Vermont, and they said that they're, they were saving $500 a month because the property taxes are that much lower in Vermont.

Now, of course, in Vermont and Maine, you have an income tax, and that's part of the formula that you gotta figure out. Does it make more sense for you to live in Maine or Vermont or New Hampshire? But for a lot of people, leaving the state saves them money. So that's bad because the people who are leaving are people like me, middle class working people who this state really needs.

So this is why it's so important that we have a new system and we move beyond this idea of trickle down economics. it was never, gonna work. And it was a bill of goods and it's time for the Republicans to be forced to explain themselves. Okay. And the Democrats. We need to make this argument that trickle down economics didn't work.

And we need a new, a new system by which to run our whole state and our whole country. And like I said, this is community first economics. Now, those three things that I talked about, housing, property taxes, education funding, those are just three things. There's obviously many, other things that we need to be concerned about in our state, but here's the problem.

I'm in a campaign, a political campaign for governor. If I talk about all of the problems in our state, and there's probably. Dozens that I can just think of. If I thi if I was to focus, if I was to talk about all of the issues, no one would remember anything and no one would know what my campaign was about.

So you have to have three things. And if you're gonna run for something, if you're gonna run for governor or Senate or Congress or whatever, have three things that you are gonna talk about. You can use my three if you want to, if you wanna push community first economics. But the point is that, People have a limited capacity to hear and remember things. So when I go and talk to people, I just reiterate these three things: housing, education, property taxes, housing, education, property taxes, community first, economics. I say it over and over. It's that people walk away and if someone says, what's Kuer about?

They go, oh, what? What's Kuer about? Alright, community first, economics. Housing, education, property taxes. Okay? And this is also why these are good issues, because I know from running this restaurant for a decade, okay, I talked to lots of Republicans. I also talked to Democrats, I talked to independents. I didn't ask people's political affiliation before they walked into the restaurant, but.

When I started running for governor, I found out people would say, "Hey, I'm actually a Republican. I can't vote for you in the primary." And I was shocked to, to find out that some of my regulars, young people, some people that I just assumed were Democrats, were in fact Republican. I had I no problem with that because I need their money.

As a business owner, that's how it works. You need to take their money, but. So one thing I learned from talking to these people is they had the same concerns as the average Democrat, okay? They were concerned about property taxes, housing, particularly for their kids. Baby boomers would say, "Hey, my kid's still living with me," or "My four kids are still living with me, and I want 'em to move out, but there's nowhere for them to live."

And, the education. everyone wants their, to feel like their kids are getting a good education. Now, I think it's really important that we look at, and talk about education because money is not always the answer with everything. definitely the teachers should be paid more. Sure, definitely a hundred percent.

But I think that there's probably some administer, I think the Republicans are right when they say hey, there's probably too many administrators. We should get rid of. We should minimize the, number of administrators as much as possible to save some money and use that money to boost teacher pay.

We should consult, we're gonna have to consolidate some school districts. The state of New Hampshire has too many school districts. just the fact that Newmarket, my town, is one school district with two schools and we have our own superintendent that we have to pay. I think it's 160, 170,000. It doesn't make any sense.

and Mississippi recently did a really cool thing. Mississippi was in the bottom of the educational rankings for years, like I think. 44 out of 50, like really even maybe really low. I can't remember what the numbers, but really low at the bottom. And over the last handful of years, they have totally reversed that and now they're about 11th in the rankings.

And how did they do it? It's really interesting. They just focused on literacy, hardcore, hardcore focus on literacy and reading where they just, pushed this one issue. And I'm sure there's probably more to it. It probably wasn't just that, but, that was my main takeaway: that they really focused on making sure that the kids could read.

And at grade three they said, "Hey, if you are not reading at a proficient level at grade three, you're gonna have to repeat grade three." And what ended up happening was that even parents were like, I don't want my kid to be held back in grade three." In grades one and two, I'm gonna make sure they know how to read and I'm gonna work with 'em to make sure that they can read.

And it ended up that after a little while, after a couple years, they didn't have to hold that many kids back because everyone got on board with this. Our kids have gotta be able to read, and this seems so stupidly obvious that if a kid isn't that literate, they're gonna do poorly in school. But it seems to be that is, is one of the issues.

And I just love, I'm a Yankee. Okay, let me just point that out. I'm a Yankee. I'm, a big reason that I'm running is because. I've got 850 signs in my attic that say Vote Kuper, and I'm not gonna throw those away. because I'm a Yankee, what is a Yankee? It's someone who doesn't wanna throw things away.

You might call us hoarders, but I like to say Yankee, someone who reuses things, someone who fixes things, someone who is willing to, Just do everything that they can to not spend money. It's thrifty, it's being thrifty, frankly, is, a Yankee and the state of New Hampshire. We are, have to be thrifty. I don't want to, as governor, to be raising taxes by billions and billions of dollars.

Okay? I don't wanna live in New Jersey or Connecticut with super high taxes that everyone complains about. I don't wanna do that. And frankly, I think when the government gets too much money, they start doing stupid stuff. Okay. and. And that's just not the New Hampshire way. We're never gonna live in that state.

We need a little bit more money to just make a level playing field, and like I said, put community first so that we don't have homeless people, we don't have hungry kids. everyone's getting a good education. these basic, basic aspects of civilization we've gotta focus more on. And When people say, how are we going to pay for property taxes?

I get this question a lot. If we're gonna lower the amount of property taxes we're collecting, we gotta collect more money somewhere, right? the Republicans just put in an interesting, one of the Republicans put in a bill to raise the statewide education property tax. And to have it actually paid to the state as opposed to right now.

This is one, this was one of the original ideas to solve the education problem, was to have the statewide education property tax. Everyone pays into it. Some towns that need money get paid out, get money out of this fund. But the rich town said, "We don't want to pay that." Coincidentally, a lot of those richer towns were Democrat strongholds.

But they didn't like the system, so they stopped. So basically, every town now collects statewide property tax and does not give it to the state. They just use it. And many states, many towns actually use it to lower their taxes. So it just, it's stupid. But anyway, so the Republicans are actually trying to come up with a, with a solution.

Now, I don't think that one's gonna probably fly. and there's other people talking about an income tax or a sales tax. I don't think those are gonna fly either. And I'm not running for governor. Demanding income tax or sales tax, because I just, I don't think that's what we need. Why? Now you're gonna ask why don't I support income tax or sales tax?

for number one, as we move forward, there's going to be more jobs that are held by robots, by AI, by artificial intelligence, by automation. We're gonna be losing. A lot of jobs. Okay? There's gonna be a lot of people Unemployed, unemployed people do not have an income to pay taxes on, and neither do they have money to buy things and pay a sales tax.

Okay? So we really need to tax wealth and not work. Let me say that again. We need to tax wealth and not work, and how do we tax wealth? what is great about New Hampshire is that we. Had, we have had some great wealth taxes that the Republicans have eliminated. One of them was the interest and dividends that under Chris Sununu, they, got rid of it and it was collecting 187 million a year is what we're losing.

This is a massive chunk of the budget, 187 million. And who was paying it? Mainly very rich people because it's people that are earning their income off interest and dividends. But you know what, is coincidental about Chris Sununu and them getting rid of the interest and dividends? Kristen New's family's very wealthy.

Okay? They would've been paying a lot of money in interest in dividends taxes, and now they're not. Coincidence? I don't think so. But this is what the Republicans do. They say, they say, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna lower taxes. And then everyone on the Republic side goes, yeah, lower taxes. What they don't realize is when they're lowering your, taxes, IE interest in dividends, that most of you weren't paying anyway.

It just means your property taxes are going up. Okay. It just means your property taxes are going up. Alright, so, we could bring back interest and dividends. how much, first I should clarify the amount of money that the state needs to come up with at a minimum is about 500 million. So we bring back interest and dividends, that's like 180 something million.

Now we used to have an estate tax. Okay? This was a tax that on estates, I think it was over a million dollars. We need to bring back some form of estate tax because I think it's just, it's a, play. it's a playing field leveler. Right now, you're not taxing a hundred percent of what someone's inheriting.

You're taxing a portion of a million dollars or more estate. And why is this important? Because inherently, if someone builds up a bunch of wealth and then can pass it down. We, that just is building income inequality into the system now. We're not taking all of the money someone's inheriting. We're not, we're taking a small portion and using it to fund education, to even the playing field.

'Cause this is what's so important about democracy. We need an even playing field. Everyone needs to start off at, An equal point for capitalism and democracy to function, and that's not happening right now. And so education needs to be funded so that all the kids graduate with the same opportunities for college, and for the future.

Really important to understand that this is, a fact that. Kids who are less educated obviously don't go to college at the same rates. They get into more, more likely to get involved in crime, more likely to have, early teen pregnancies when they're not in school. and the outcomes of these people's lives end up hurting society in the, for, and we end up paying more.

So if someone does poorly in school, they end up being a criminal. So we're paying for their, them to be in prison. It doesn't make sense. We could spend less money on prisons. If we spend more money on schools, okay, this is actually fiscally responsible and I need the Republicans and the Democrats to start thinking about this way.

Investing in schools is fiscally responsible. It is the conservative way to not spend more money down the line. More money on schools, less money on prisons. Okay? the number one way to lower crime rates is to reduce inequality. This is a fact. You can look it up. So how do we reduce inequality by boosting education?

This is also a fact, and the reality is the corporations need educated people. They need people going to UNH, University of New Hampshire, going to Plymouth State, and yet the Republicans are simultaneously pretending to be the friend of the corporation. Yet don't want to invest in the very thing that the corporation needs, which is an educated population.

Okay? And this is where, to my Republican friends out there, understand your party has abandoned their values. They're not conservative, and they don't care about business in a way that is actually tangible and will help businesses. businesses are leaving because there's not enough young people here to work for them.

there's a guy, an inventor in Manchester, I'm gonna mispronounce his name, Dean Cayman, and that's his name. And he's doing this bio research. He's doing all sorts of research. He's a, he's an inventor, biomedical research right now, but he's having to bring people into the state because there are not enough people that are educated in the, in the fields that he's working in.

And this is, just an aside. A lot of 'em get here. They get to Manchester and they're like, oh, geez. where's the nightlife? Where's the fun stuff? And Dean Kamen is actually trying to build up more nightlife in Manchester so that when he attracts these, kids in their twenties to come work for his company, that they actually wanna stay.

'Cause some of them have just gotten bored and left. this is, why we can't let New Hampshire become a retirement community. We can't let New Hampshire become, just a suburb of Boston, which is right now, I think the Republicans, that's their agenda. They don't, it's not intentional.

Maybe it is, but that's what the Republicans are creating in our state because of their focus on, LGBTQ issues. Frankly, the Republicans are obsessed. With trans people, they're obsessed with, with trans people in sports. It seems to be the only thing that they wanna talk about. And why is that?

Why is that? It's because they will do anything but talk about the real issue, the real issues of property taxes, housing, and education funding. To get how this works, so this is really the goal of my campaign, is to have this conversation about who pays taxes in New Hampshire, how we raise revenue, and how we can raise more revenue to fund our schools properly.

and I wanna say like New Hampshire is actually, we spend a lot per pupil. Like we're in the top five, I think, or maybe at least top 10 for per pupil spending. But most of that money is coming from your local town or city. It's not coming from the state. The state is only contributing 20% of the education bill of the public education system.

And that is fundamentally wrong. And it's regressive. The poorest pay the most, the richest pay the least. Just to recap, okay. Community first economics. I'm focused on housing, property taxes, fair funding of education. And again, there's so many issues out there, and people will be like, sometimes someone will say, you didn't mention the environment.

You didn't mention abortion, you didn't mention LGBTQ issues, you didn't mention, democracy you didn't mention fighting for, clean whatever. It's, whatever someone's issue is. Democrats got to focus on one, three issues. You focus on more than those, and, this is in the campaign. This is what you gotta understand.

The campaigning is different than the governing. When we're governing, we can focus on many things. There's a lot of legislators. We can write a lot of bills, we can get a lot done. But when you try to campaign on everything, you end up campaigning on nothing. Okay? And we can't help, we can't do anything for women's reproductive freedom.

We can't do anything for, to protect our L-G-B-T-Q, friends and allies unless we have power. Okay? And this is my message to the Democrats, okay? We have to get like the Republicans in a mindset of. Craven lust for power, and I know that kind of sounds bad, but we must get in this mindset of, I will do everything I can to win this election.

I will do everything I can to win this election. I'm going to win this election. Once we have that mindset and we focus on issues that are not self-serving, okay, a lot of the issues that Democrats talk about are their issues. Okay, you've already got. Everyone that's concerned about abortion rights is already voting as a Democrat.

Okay? There's no one on the sideline going, if Democrats talk more about abortion, maybe I would vote Democrat. They're not there. They're already on your team. Okay? I'm a Democrat. I firmly believe in a woman's right to choose her own medical care. Understand that I firmly believe in the LGBTQ's, right to do the same and to be left alone from government intervention.

So just because I'm not campaigning on something does not mean I don't care about something. If I was left to campaign about the most important thing to me, it would be the environment. Okay? It would be the environment, because global warming, microplastics, PFAS, those are gonna harm my child. And his, my grandchild and all the way down.

That's actually my biggest concern is environmental things, and I frankly think that should be all of our concerns, but I'm not going to campaign on environmental issues because it's just not salient enough in the brain of the independent voter, and not only independent, but Republican leaning. Okay, let me get this.

Just so everyone understands, New Hampshire has a gerrymandered political map, which means that the, Republicans have drawn up the districts in a way that they have an advantage. So we have to be a little bit more conservative in how we campaign. Again, the difference between campaigning and governing, completely different.

We can govern in a different way than we campaign on. We're gonna govern and cover a lot of issues. We're gonna deal with issues that we're not campaigning on. We campaign on the issues that the independent voters who aren't really checked in, who aren't really paying attention, are gonna care about, and that's economic issues.

This is the only thing that those people care about is economic issues, generally. There are a couple others. There's, people out there that only vote on abortion, right? And they are, they don't believe in abortion and they're never gonna vote for someone that does. And we're never gonna win those people over.

We're never gonna win 'em over. And, but it helps to not be only talking about abortion, be talking about housing, these economic issues. And frankly, I think one of the reasons that the Democrats have embraced some of these issues. And I'm gonna say LGBTQ, gun rights and abortion.

Those three, you know why they embrace those? Because they don't cost the donors any money. Okay, let me say that again. It will not cost the donors economically if we focus on those issues because the real issue. Is and will always be the struggle between the poor and the rich, and every other issue that people bring up is a distraction.

When the Republicans bring up trans kids in sports, it's a distraction so that we don't talk about the poor getting screwed and the rich getting richer, and the Republicans facilitating that transfer of wealth. Okay? when the Republicans bring up abortion and start bringing up this whole, like the left is killing babies, it's just to not talk about the class.

Warfare that we need to focus on. So it's just really important that people understand the difference between campaigning and governing, and that you just cannot campaign on everything and you need to pick economic issues because the independent voters vote on economic issues primarily. And that's why Trump won.

He won because people were concerned about their economics, and the Republicans put up a better, Made a better pitch. That was it. All Kamala Harris had to say was, the economy isn't good right now. Joe Biden didn't do everything he could. I'm going to do more now. I will tell you right now, Joe Biden did a lot for the economy, and you could even say he did everything he could, but this is the difference between governing and campaigning.

When you're campaigning, you have to be optimistic and you have to give people something to believe in, something to fight for. Okay. Even if you know the reality is different, for instance, the economy is doing better than it would have been had we not. Taking the steps that Joe Biden took. But if the average person is saying, my reality is that the economy is bad, perception is reality.

Perception is reality. Perception is reality. You've got to understand that it's so important. So I think this all the time we have for today, but I really appreciate you guys tuning in. Thank you for my co-host, the Plant. And, we'll see you next week.