Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – official guest host Aaron Gulbransen welcomed Grover Norquist to comment up on Virginia Congressman Don Beyer (D-VA-08)’s legislation proposing a 1,000 percent tax on assault-style weapons.
Gulbransen: We’re going to go right to our newsmaker line. We have the president of Americans Tax Reform, an anti-tax warrior, nationally known, Grover Norquist. How are you this morning, sir?
Norquist: I am doing peachily keenly.
Gulbransen: So we were talking with some of your staff members and they brought something to my attention. And then I absolutely lost my mind over this.
So bitter former candidate for governor a million years ago and Virginia Congressman Don Beyer is drafting legislation to impose a 1,000 percent tax on, “assault-style weapons.”
Norquist: An AR-15 would go for somewhere between $5,000 and $20,000.
Gulbransen: So if somebody who didn’t have that kind of money was trying to protect their house, I guess they’d be stuck with bottom basement things according to this plan. What is Byer’s real motivation here?
Norquist: Hitting the newspapers should be seen as important and relevant to express his contempt for people’s ability to protect themselves.
And look, if you’re a politician and you can take something that’s specifically written in the Constitution, Second Amendment, and imagine it’s not there, then you’ve just really opened up the door for a Democratic Congress and Senate and president to pass any law.
One of the things that they’re very clear about in the Constitution is the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. There are very specific reasons because, of course, the British tried to disarm the American people.
And throughout history, tyrants always do. So if you can go around that or think you’re somehow being tricky and lawyerly or something, then there isn’t anything…we have free speech, but we’re going to have $100. tax per newspaper that you print.
You’ve just made newspapers illegal in any meaningful form. So it is an assault on the Constitution. They’re out there thinking of ways to strip people of their Second Amendment rights.
One of the things that Senator Moynihan of New York years ago, a Democrat, passed away now said, oh, I know they won’t let us ban arms. Okay, here’s what we’ll do. We will ban the production of bullets.
See, that’ll be clever. Then in 25 years from now, when bullets, at some point age out, they don’t really work very well because gunpowder doesn’t keep going. And then we’ll basically have disarmed America cleverly getting past the ban on arms.
It didn’t say bullets, did it didn’t say bullets. It just said arms. Elizabeth Warren, Trump used to call her Pocahontas. I think we should call her the $400,000 lady because she was getting $400,000 a year to teach, like one course at Harvard.
There are 100 people in Boston who would have volunteered to do that for free, to be a Harvard professor, lecture a day or something, lecture a week.
Four hundred thousand dollars. And we wonder why do we have student loans? Because of Elizabeth Warren. That’s why we have student loan problems. Because they’re paying their friends ridiculous amounts of money.
Carmichael: Grover, let me jump in here and ask you a couple of questions because we were talking about earlier in the program that Schumer is still trying to pass massive trillion-dollar taxes and build back better bill through reconciliation. Can you update us on that between now and the next 60 days?
Norquist: Sure. This is in their view, and I think they’re correct their last chance to get a trillion-dollar tax increase and a trillion-dollar spending increase in 10 ten years because they have so many unmet needs, meaning parts of the Democratic coalition didn’t get enough of the $2 trillion that they threw up in the air and want more and they want permanent spending as well.
So they’re trying very hard. Manchin is not a moderate Democrat. He just has some lines in the sand. He doesn’t want to destroy the energy industry. He’s from West Virginia. They make coal there.
They made coal there millions of years ago now they dig it out of the ground. So he said no to some of this stuff. And even from time to time says, why are we spending this much money and getting into more debt when the Democrats have created this inflation problem?
This is just going to make it worse. So he has some lines in the stand. There isn’t anything he won’t give the labor unions or the trial lawyers. So he’s not Republican material. It’s not like he might switch parties.
But he has said, I don’t want to do certain things. And he’s talking about raising taxes one and a half trillion instead of the three and a half trillion that five of the other Democrats want. More serious is the Lady, Senator Sinema from Arizona.
She’s put a cap of no taxes above $1 trillion. She said we’re not raising taxes on businesses. If you looked at the cut in the corporate rate that Trump and the Republicans did from 35 percent down to 21, we used to be at 35 percent.
China is at 25, Europe’s at about 25. Okay, we came down to 21. But we also have local state income taxes on businesses. So we’re okay competitively at 21. Trump wanted to go to 15. I thought that was a great idea.
We couldn’t work it out that time. We might have come back and gotten a corporate rate of 15. Simply by doing that we increased the median income for a family of 14 in 2019 alone. That one year, 6.8 percent increase, $4,400.
That was huge. Why? Because when you cut the corporate tax, companies have more money. What do companies do? They spend about 70 percent of their money hiring people and paying them.
And if you text a company, what you’re doing is reducing the pay and the number of employees that companies can hire and 70 percent of the corporate tax, which Democrats like to pretend that some guy named General Motors pays those taxes, not you and me, not real people.
Carmichael: Everything that you’re saying is exactly why we shouldn’t increase taxes on corporations. And I think you just said that Sinema says that she will not approve any tax increase on corporations.
My sense of it is there are other Democrats in the Senate who are telling Manchin and Sinema to hold the line because they don’t want to lose their progressive base in their own state, but know that if they vote for a trillion-dollar tax increase, they’re going to lose this coming fall.
Gulbransen: Multi-trillion.
Carmichael: My question is to you do you think there will be a substantially material tax increase passed by the Democrats through reconciliation in the next 60 to 90 days?
Norquist: 50/50.
Carmichael: Wow.
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Grover Norquist” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
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