John Gardner (31:09)
Yeah, I think we've had a great year. Especially the business media casts a light that oh, we have $2.2 trillion paid in income tax and that's too much to replace. However, the thing that stands out to me is that $600 billion by 2022 numbers is what 90% of the lower income taxpayers pay in America. Imagine replacing 90% of the income tax that Americans pay. How much that would help the working families in the middle class. And I'm with you, Steve. I think you've called for, hey, taxes on millionaires are okay, but let's help the working class and the people trying. You know, we're an extra 500 bucks a month really gets them a lot farther. And we can replace 600 billion of that easily. And I want to remind the President here, he posted this on Truth last year where he said he was creating the External revenue service on January 20, 2020 5th, and that for far too long we have taxed our great people using the Internal Revenue Service. And he's really trying to steer America back to the original vision the Founding Fathers had. The Founding Fathers never intended to for the citizen to be an indentured servant to the government. And they proved this income tax was never a conversation with the Founding Fathers ever. The very first legislative act they passed was the Tariff act. And they passed on July 4th, which had a lot of meaning for the Founding Fathers, Independence Day. And that first major piece of legislation said, whereas it is necessary for the support of the government for the discharge of the debts of the United States and encouragement and protection of manufacturers, that duties be laid on goods, wares and merchandise imported. So they never had a plan to punish the citizen and garnish their wages. And I want to ask the audience who may believe in, you know, be anti tariff, what is a truly more limited government? What provides more personal liberty to the citizen? It's been pitched to the American people that when you go to the store and you can choose from Chaicom products or products from India and you don't pay a tariff, that's more personal liberty and you have more freedom of choice. But I say and President Trump is going to say and prove that you have more freedom of choice when you can choose, hey, I'm going to buy a foreign good and I choose to be taxed or I'm going to buy an American made good and choose not to be taxed and not pay income tax. That is a truly more limited government when we remove income tax on the citizen and we pay our bills with external revenue. And what is more, freedom of choice? Buying something and saying, I choose to be taxed or buying an American made good and say, I choose not to be taxed and not have income tax. And so that's why I believe external revenue and tariffs actually are more limited government and they actually are more personal liberty for the citizen. And on the note of personal liberty, the 16th Amendment, which created income tax has no boundaries on it. The 18th amendment was passed prohibiting alcohol or it would, and we repealed it. And the main reason we repealed the prohibition on alcohol was because personal liberty. And I think it's time we start to look at putting some parameters on the 16th Amendment and its intrusion in the citizen's life. And I think what fascinates me the most, Steve, is how did we get, you know, Andrew Breitbart said politics are downstream of culture. And how, how did we get to the point in America where, you know, this is a 1919 ad from a toy maker and he says, for your country's sake, buy American made toys, be a partner of Uncle Sam, of all American industries, see that your money is helping American grow. Buying foreign toys won't do it that way. Your money goes overseas and doesn't come back by insisting on American made toys. Your money stays here, every bit of it, to work for your own country and for you. But now we're at the point in the business culture that we have a toy maker suing the president and his administration because of the tariffs. And now it's in front of the Supreme Court. Where is the patriotic and moral fiber of the business culture in our America? And I believe it was eroded with this embrace of unilateral free trade. Now I believe in free trade within the borders of our nation. Unilateral free trade. And it means that no matter what another country does to us, no matter how much they tariff us, no matter how much they steal our intellectual property, we do nothing. And this was advocated for. And this is where the cultural disconnect and we need the next generation, the turning points and the pragerus and all the next generation to get this cultural shift away from tariffs are bad. And let there be no doubt that Milton Friedman, when he called for no tariffs, he. He called for no unilateral tariffs. He says, this is Capitalism Freedom, page 88. I believe it would be far better for us to move to free trade unilaterally. And he went on and on about no matter what another nation does. But he didn't calculate what is the true cost of unilateral free trade. He didn't calculate the cost of national security, the cost of intellectual property theft with Communist China, which is the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of civilization, the cost of our cities dying, the meccas of industry dying, and having the societal cost of paying for homeless people and paying for drug rehab clinics. Those were not factored in the cost of supply chain issues. And so I think that we need to change our definition of free trade and unilateral free trade to America first free trade and America First Capitalism. In my book, I define America First Capitalism as a production based economy protected by a wall of tariffs accompanied by free trade only within our borders. And the last note, because I don't want to go on too much, is free trade really erodes the freedoms that capitalism builds. Unilateral free trade does. So much so, in fact, that Karl Marx encouraged free trade. In his 1848 speech on free trade, Karl Marx said, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade. Free trade breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeois to the extreme point. Is that not what's happening in America today? And under free trade, the whole class of small manufacturers is ruined and thrown into the ranks of the working class. This is a direct quote from Karl Marx. This is all happening in America today. And, you know, no one who cares about America should desire the ruin of the whole class of small manufacturers. So people who side with unilateral free trade are siding with Karl Marx because he thought free trade would hasten the fall of capitalism. So I'm really excited to see how President Trump's steering us more in alignment with the Founding Father's vision for America and away from the economist dogma that has really.