Track Transcript - PBS · Poverty - Tim Phillips Transcript – 4-19-2012 PAGE 3 OF 34 a place...

Poverty - Tim Phillips Transcript – 4-19-2012

PAGE 1 OF 34

Track Transcript

00:12 AG: Well I was gonna, you know, first off I was just gonna ask you a question about your background, but I was also, I mean talking about economic issues and social issues. I mean when you were working for century strategy, that’s more social issue oriented shop, was it not?

00:23 TP: It was and it wasn’t. I mean we did a little bit of everything.

00:27 AG: So tell me a little bit about your background, how do you come, we’re gonna talk today about Americans for Prosperity, talk about how you know, sort of, your background. Have you always been in politics?

00:37 TP: Well my dad’s given name, born in the mid-thirties, is Frankin Delano Phillips. You can imagine what my ancestry’s like. His dad was a WPA man, and so I grew up in a very strong, populous democrat household. Uh, my dad was a factory worker, uh, textile mills, and then drove a bus later on. Mom was a factory worker as well, um, they were active in politics, though, kind of the old Democrat machine, so it was a different kind of politics. But my dad was active in it. He was a driver, driving people to polls, and so I grew up around, uh the political world, not for hire, my dad was more just in the machine, but yeah, I’ve always had an interest in it, and one of the more traumatic episodes in our life, literally, was in the late seventies, I’m a kid, teenager, and uh we’re watching Walter Cronkite, which, you know for God, our family there was Walter. So every, every evening our household stopped, and uh, this Ronald Reagan guy came on. And I remember it very clearly, I was probably thirteen, fourteen, and they were talking about, I think it was the Panama Canal, I guess, was the issue, but it wasn’t more about the issue it was about watching Reagan. And I remember turning to my dad after a clip from Reagan and going Dad, I’m gonna be for that guy. I’m gonna be for Reagan. And I remember my dad getting up, turning off the TV, calling my mom in, you thought I’d said, you know, I’m moving to the Soviet Union, I’m gonna become, you know, a godless communist atheist or whatever, but it was traumatic it was, cause you know Jimmy Carter was running for re-election, southern Baptists, we were southern Baptists so our faith was there, a Southerner, so you know the regional pride and the south is very strong obviously, but it was Reagan. And so from then on I was hooked, and um, at that point, not that long after I knew I wanted


PAGE 2 OF 34

to go into the public policy arena for the rest of my career.

02:17 AG: Uh-huh. And what was it about Reagan, you think, that did it for you? I mean, a number of people had that same reaction.

2:23 TP: Yeah. Optimism, for me, optimism he portrayed a vision, a big bold vision, it wasn’t about little kind of nitpicky things or, it was a big bold vision about where he wanted to take the country, and it was a belief in America that resonated with me very strongly. I remember my dad always saying, well son you know those Republicans, and I was thinking more Reagan than Republicans frankly, I just wasn’t thinking in those terms, cause in South Carolina there really were no Republicans to speak of, it was more about him, as an individual. Um, and I remember my dad saying, they’re for the rich man, they’re for the rich man son, come on, are you kidding me? And I remember thinking, well what if I want to be rich one day? I remember I told my dad that, well maybe I want to be rich one day. Uh, but at minimum I wanted to be able to determine my own destiny, and I think Reagan, you know, was the best way to do that, so.

3:08 AG: And so, you have the moment, um, Reagan’s your guiding light, what were the, what were some of the pathways by which you, how did you enter the political process in terms of wanting to be part of that?

3:21 TP: I went to Liberty University, for a semester, which was, still is a strong, very strong Evangelical university, my family and I have a very strong personal faith in God, and so I went there, to Liberty, very quickly ran out of money, cause I was paying my own way, and I saw a flier for an internship in Washington, this was the fall of eighty-three, and I realized that they didn’t charge you for, they only charged you for the tuition—there were no books involved, and they only charged you for room and board, because they had an intern house in Washington, and so I thought, okay, well I’m out of money anyway, and I have to drop out of school, so I applied for it, and got it, so in the winter of eighty-four, I did an internship in Washington, for the Reagan administration, which for me was big, in the department of education, and it was a great experience, more importantly though I started meeting people, you know, in the Conservative movement While you’re up there, it tends to happen, you know you’re out there, and you’re matriculating, and meeting people, met my future wife, who, ended up marrying her within the same year, and that’s how I got really, a start. I went to


PAGE 3 OF 34

a place called leadership institute, Morton Blackwell, who is still around today, he does training to get young people involved in the conservative movement, and I was out of money for the fall, for school, so he put me on a political campaign. So I worked on a Congressional race in Virginia, which is how I got roots in Virginia, I was from South Carolina, and did my first campaign that year, we lost, a heartbreaker, but [Heaten Worton]? called me up the week after the election and said hey, why don’t you come do another one, you got good marks for you work and energy, and drive, so I did that, and I was hooked. I was already married by then, my wife and I eloped, as young kids, and uh so we start off in business together and there from there I just built a career, and you know, the political world is pretty topsy-turvy, you know you’re unemployed every November win or lose, and so you learn how to kind of, ride, and roll with pretty tough punches.

05:09 AG: So, how do you describe to people what you do?

05:12 TP: That’s hard. I mean, it’s funny, I had someone say to me once, when you go home for thanksgiving, and you’re seeing that cousin or aunt you haven’t seen in a year, what the heck do you say? I just say I’m saving the country for them and their kids and grandkids, and you know, smile, and they never really buy that Alex, shockingly, I don’t know why, I’m disappointed kinda, but what, the way I describe now what we do at Americans for Prosperity is, we’re genuinely fighting to preserve and expand economic freedom. Which we believe is the best way to get folks from every walk of life prosperity and a shot at a better life. And that’s what we’re doing at Americans for Prosperity. When I was in the campaign world, I was a Republican operative, no doubt about it, I was unabashedly a partisan Republican operative. And I really thought, and maybe it was my own naivety, but I thought hey, if we elect enough Republicans, we will save the world. That’s how you do it. And I remember after the 2000 election, we’d been relatively successful, both professionally, but also as a party, and thinking wow, we’ve done it. You know we had the house, the senate, the presidency, we’ve got lots of state legislatures out there. Boy, things are, we've done it. Let’s go to Tahiti and take a few weeks off. I did not go to Tahiti by the way, wish I had’ve, but I remember being frustrated, because while they did some good things, they cut taxes, which I think was good, the oh one oh three tax cuts, the other good things, they also went crazy on the spending front, and they really did not bring genuine dramatic reform to government, to make it better, and to make it more efficient and smaller. And I


PAGE 4 OF 34

remember talking to republicans, guys who had been clients of mine, and they would say look, Tim, your job is to help us get re-elected. Your job is not really to give us philosophical advice. And I remember that, and they were very friendly, and they were buddies, so it wasn’t like they were being rude, but I remember a couple of those conversations, and I remember being frustrated by two or three. And that’s when the idea behind, and for Americans for Prosperity, uh, began being talked about, and I was ready to do it, when it happened I was ready to go.

07:13 AG: So how did you come to Americans for Prosperity? I mean, were you a part of its founding, was it founded before you, uh came there, what was uh, how did that happen? Were you working for century strategies then?

07:20 TP: I was. I was with Ralph Reed at Century Strategies, Ralph was a dear friend, still is today, and we had started Century together back in ninety-seven, late ninety-seven is when we started, he had left the Christian Coalition, and we had launched it together, and I initially was a consultant to the organization, when it was first being founded, basically helping to work on the model, what would the model look like, and how it could be effective in bringing our goals to fruition. And so I did it as a consultant, in 04-05, and then by late ’05 we had found a model that we found worked. State-based, genuine grassroots infrastructure over a long period of time. Uh, frankly go out and raise money, real money, cause you had to have that, and we had a model that we felt had promise. It had potential. And so the catch was, you know the board had said to me, you know well look, you know, if you’re gonna come with us to run this organization you’ve gotta leave your business cause it’s kind of a conflict to do both. And so it was a very difficult decision, I’d always been in the private sector except for a brief stint as a chief of staff on capitol hill, I loved being in the private sector, running campaigns, but I was intrigued by the idea of being able to build a movement based on economic issues, the way that Christian right folks had built a movement based on social issues, the way the second amendment folks had a built a movement based on their issues, the way the left, the way the environmental movement, genuinely built a movement, based on environmental issues, uh I wanted to see if you could build one based on economic freedom, just broad-based, ideological economic freedom. So I left my business and started in January of ’06 full time.


PAGE 5 OF 34

09:04 AG: Now we say we, I mean who did you, who says ok, we’re going to hire Tim Phillips? Who’s we?

09:08 TP: Well we have a board. Art Pope is our C4 chairman, David Koch is our C3 chairman, uh those guys are all, we have probably have a public listing of those guys.

09:16 AG: Now, what’s the difference between a C3 and a C4? I mean, that goes off the tongue, I know, but for people out there that don’t have a clue, what’s a C3 and what’s a C4?

09:26 TP: A C3 is focused on genuinely on broad-based education only. And a C4 lets you advocate directly for specific pieces of legislation or against pieces of legislation, or specific um ideas in a more direct fashion. So the best way to try to explain that, if you’re talking about government spending, the C3 can do an event or a TV ad that simply says, government spending doesn’t really work that well, it’s not an indicator of prosperity, it tends to be wasteful. You can make the case that government spending alone is not helpful and is actually hurtful to prosperity. A C4 lets you actually say, the stimulus bill that president Obama put forward in January of 2009 cost us almost a trillion dollars, it wasted money, it lets you very specifically argue for or against a piece of legislation like the stimulus bill. A C3, you can’t do that, you’ve got to be broader in terms. That’s the easiest way I know how to describe it probably. [AG: Is one tax deductible and one not tax deductible?] I’m sorry, yes, the C3 is tax deductible, a C4 is not.

10:34 AG: So, could you dig down a little bit deeper into the values of AFP? You say it’s for economic freedom, practically, or philosophically speaking, could you expand on that, but then also say practically what that means as far as you’re concerned.

10:50 TP: The core issues we focus on are trying to lower the tax burden on every American, trying to lower the regulatory burden where the regulations are excessive or don’t serve a purpose. We’re not someone that says, there’s no role for government regulation, of course there is. I mean you want clean air, and you want clean water, and so we’re not saying, we’re not a pure libertarian who would say no regulation. Uh, but excessive regulation, regulation that doesn’t serve a purpose, or where the regulation, where the return on the investment of that regulation is not helpful versus what it costs people. Third is government spending. Trying to reign in the size of government, government spending waste, abuse,


PAGE 6 OF 34

and then working for other areas, other issues, where economic freedom can make a difference. For example, school choice. We very strongly favor giving parents, teachers, localities, more choice when it comes to how to educate their children. So those are the core issues of Americans for Prosperity. And the way we do that is to go out and build genuine grassroots support for those principles, and that to us means getting as many Americans as possible from as many different walks of life as possible, to take action. And so our staff is focused heavily on that. There’s both an education phase and an activism phase, and so we may do a TV ad that educates, but then we’ll turn right around and do rallies, events, or training sessions where we one on one are actually trying to activate individual Americans to either touch their legislators, you know to call, email, visit them, or to go out and touch fellow Americans, to educate them.

12:27 AG: So how big is AFP, how many members, how would you define, who’s in AFP, never mind the board for a second, who’s in AFP? Is it people who are on a mailing list, is it people who pay dues, how does it work?

12:39 TP: We don’t call them members because they aren’t asked to pay dues. So we call them activists instead. Uh, we try to always call them activists anyway, and we have just over two million people who’ve taken action. For some people, that’s incredibly elementary. They saw a petition online that said, I stand with governor Scott Walker. I wanna show I support Governor Walker still in Wisconsin. They take a minute and a half to sign that petition online. That’s an action. That’s an incredibly small action, right, so it’s not like they’re closely tied to the organization, but they are acting with us at that point. Other people, though, within our database, we try to keep track of all this, they come to rallies, they’ve come to events, they’ve actually gone out and knocked on doors to help us educate on particular issues, or where a particular member of congress stands on an issue, they’ve actually used their Facebook other social media platforms to deliver a message that we are working on at AFP. So, the activism is a pretty broad scale, but it means among those two thousand folks they take an action like that, and then over different periods of time we scrub the list because someone who took action seven years ago, but they never took action again, than they’re not really an activist, so we do have time limits where we try to scrub that list.

13:53 AG: And where does the, um, how are the C3 and the C4 funded?


PAGE 7 OF 34

13:58 TP: We’ve gone out and found over seventy five thousand donors who’ve given funding to us, ranging from one dollar to, candidly, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

14:09 AG: And how does that break out, in terms of what percentage comes from the smaller donors, and what percentage comes from the larger donors?

14:15 TP: Yeah, we don’t share any information like that at all, uh, we found that, when you’re dealing with government, and candidly, this could be with both parties by the way, this isn’t a partisan statement, but we found that it’s best for a group like ours to not disclose our donors, because it opens them up to pretty aggressive, uh, action from people that don’t agree with them. And again, that’s not a partisan statement. There could often be, you know, Republicans and Democrats. I’ll give you just one example, Alex, uh, summer of 2010, uh, the white house deputy economic adviser is on a conference call with reporters. He doesn’t realize at that point, that he’s on an open mic, he thinks it’s still on mute, the question of the Kochs come up, David Koch’s our C3 chairman, at Americans for Prosperity foundation, and he says without joking, we should look into the taxes of these guys, you know these guys are really funding, and they’re pretty involved and active, it was a pretty intimidating statement for a senior level staffer in the white house to make about a private American citizen, strictly, or citizens, brothers, strictly because of their perceived involvement in the public policy process, opposing some of those policies. We publicized that, the Washington post, others, did run it, to their credit, and they called it in to question, the white house quickly said, oh well we were, it was kidding, I forget exactly how they phrased it, but that’s the kind of thing you do see a fair amount of, so we happily tell donors we’re not gonna disclose if you give to us, we’re not gonna disclose who gives to us.

15:45 AG: So, I wanna talk a little more about philosophy for a second. You came out of a FDR household, so one of FDR’s signature achievements was social security. So what’s AFP’s view on social security, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is that government pouring money down a hole, what’s the scoop?

16:03 TP: Well both my parents are on social security. So, they’re both retired now, my dad still kinda helps make a little bit of extra money at flea markets, selling some stuff here and there, but it is something near and dear and important to me. Uh, and we do


PAGE 8 OF 34

think there oughta be some kind of safety net there for people, to help folks. Our concern with social security is, it’s about the least efficient kind of safety net you can possibly imagine. First of all, it’s in debt, in reality, I know you know this, to the tune of, literally, hundreds of billions of dollars, now. It’s underfunded, they took past congresses, again republican and democrat, so this is not a partisan attack, past congresses and presidents raided all the social security money, they pulled out the money that was being piled up by coming retirees, and they spent it. They spent it on wasteful, for the most part, programs in the near term, uh and so it’s underfunded, and the return on investment that folks get is pretty low as well. So we do believe there oughta be a kind of safety net, we just don’t social security is well run at all, uh when you look at both the return it gets for the money that folks put in, but then also the way it’s administered by the government.

17:13 AG: So what’s the solution?

17:15 TP: We [UI] there oughta be more choice for it. We look at what Chile did. They actually allowed uh, pretty carefully calibrated, broader investment of, they call it pensions, I guess although it’s not really a pension cause it’s not folks who worked in government, but, of benefits for the long term, retirement benefits, and we do think, there oughta be, we wanna make people more consumers, both in their retirement but also in healthcare, which we’ll talk about later on, but I think one important thing is to help make Americans, to give them more responsibilities for being consumers. I know that when Americans buy a product, they’re pretty darn good at being a consumer. Uh, we’re a consumer driven economy in many ways. Our folks are smart, they have good judgment, and we would like to see solutions that give consumers, to the people that are on social security, more choice. And I’ll give Paul Ryan credit, he gets demagogued a lot, but when you look at his Medicare reform plan, and I don’t pretend to be, by the way, a policy expert, I’m more of a grassroots guy, but we have read through it and dug into it, uh I think his plan does that for Medicare, which along with social security, is the big two. We’ve gotta fix those two entitlements or we’re not gonna have solvency for anybody long term.

18:34 AG: Now, let’s turn it to deficit for a second, before we get to um, healthcare. And I wanna ask you two questions about the deficit, which is, who’s responsible for our current deficit? And then I wanna ask you about a conspiracy theory.


PAGE 9 OF 34

18:51 TP: Okay. I love conspiracy theories, we’ll go there in a minute

then. The truth is that both parties are absolutely to blame for the deficits, and that’s one reason I was frustrated being a campaign operative. And not getting to be, hopefully, part of a movement. Because when you look at discretionary spending, when Republicans had control in the early two thousands, if they had kept spending to inflation, and spent two hundred billion a year on the Iraq Afghanistan wars, both of those things, I think, we’re imminently doable. We would have had a surplus of just over a hundred grand by the time they left office and democrats came in. I’m sorry, I said a hundred grand, a hundred million. Which is, you know, it’s a real, that’s a surplus. It’s small, but it’s a surplus. If they had just done those two things, keep spending to inflation on discretionary side especially, and spent two hundred billion a year on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, by the way we don’t have a position on foreign policy so I’m not arguing about those wars for or against [AG: No, but economically it’s an issue because how do you pay for it], it is, correct. And so, you could have done that, and we would have had a balanced budget. But they didn’t do that. To say the spent like drunken sailors was to give a drunken sailors a bad name. I mean they were out of control. President Obama has accelerated that, no question about that, spending has increased dramatically faster under his administration than under the republican administrations, but you know what an interesting piece about spending, Alex, that may surprise you, it may or may not, it surprised me a few years ago. When you look at the last forty years, of spending, just spending, not regulation or taxing, just spending, if you want the lowest possible growth of spending increase, have divided government. It’s not about, both parties have so failed on spending, that if you look historically at the last four decades, divided government has been the best way to spending increases being the smallest possible. So both parties are to blame for the deficit.

20:44 AG: Alright, here’s my conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory from the left is this, that what Republican administrations like to do, is get into office, radically increase government spending, particularly defense spending, cut taxes at the same time, run up a huge deficit, then when they’re out of office, they say, oh, boy, we’ve got a real problem now, now we gotta cut spending, but they don’t cut defense spending, they cut all the spending that traditionally Republicans don’t like, social safety nets. We gotta zero out entitlements. And zero out regulation. That’s the conspiracy


PAGE 10 OF 34

theory. The Trojan horse, which is, lower taxes, even as you’re spending zillions for a war. What’s your view?

21:33 TP: One flaw in that. The data shows that cutting taxes increases revenue. And I know people look at that, it’s counterintuitive [AG: I’ve looked at the data, I’m not sure that that’s accurate]. I disagree, I mean I think back to John F Kennedy, I was reading some of his works, I’ve always been intrigued by him, and I was looking at his work to lower tax rates, from ninety one percent to seventy percent was what he did, and he said then, he didn’t say the word counterintuitive, I think he said it’s ironic. It’s ironic, but by lowering these rates, we’re going to increase the amount of money coming into the government, and that absolutely happened in the sixties, we went from forty eight billion to seventy eight billion during the Kennedy years after those tax cuts. Fast forward to Reagan. The numbers there, there’s not even a doubt, Alex, when you cut the rates that Reagan did, revenues went up. Go to, but then people say with the Bush rates, that’s where the example breaks down. Actually, that’s not true at all. I tend to trust about half the time, the New York Times. Sometimes even three quarters of the time. After the Bush tax cuts in oh three, there was, in the words of the New York Times, a surprising, close quote, surprising windfall in tax revenues. Specifically, on the capital gains and dividend front, and yet those were the rates cut most dramatically by the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Bush hates it when you call them the bush tax cuts so I won’t, I’ll say the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So revenues did go up. Now the deficit exploded because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because discretionary spending and entitlement spending continued unabated at an ever increasing rate. So the bush tax cuts, even the New York Times, they were surprised by it, we weren’t surprised by it, by the way, we said it was gonna happen, and even the left now, even when you ask president Obama, which he’s been asked about the capital gains cut, they say well there seems to be all this data that when you cut that rate, the government gets more revenue, so why do you want to continue increasing it. And the president, finally, was completely candid. He said, because it’s more fair. That’s what he said about cutting the, raising the capital gains tax rate. So never mind that he’s gonna have less money to spend on the programs that he wants, under a cap gains, he said that. It’s his words, fair. By the way, when Hillary Clinton was running in oh eight, [AG: Well I don’t think he denied the other, I think he may have just said it was less fair.] No, he, go back and look, I think it’s fair. And Hillary Clinton, when she was running in oh eight, she was asked that kind of


PAGE 11 OF 34

famously as well, and she said the same thing. So, we could have a good healthy argument about it, but I think the data’s pretty clear. You cut tax rates, most tax rates, revenue actually goes through the roof.

24:08 AG: Well let me ask you, again, going back to your parents as Roosevelt democrats, you know, you have a working guy, let’s say, he’s a fireman, he hauls bodies about the twin towers on nine eleven, and he pays a thirty percent rate. And you have a billionaire, who’s paying a fifteen percent rate, because it’s capital gain. Why is that fair?

24:32 TP: Because on capital gains you’ve already, you’ve already paid, they pay corporate rates when the money’s made in the first place, before it ever goes into a cap gains, you’re paying about thirty five percent, federal corporate tax rate. So you’re paying a rate before it ever gets the point where there’s a profit made that’s considered capital gains. So capital gains is an ending point, [AG: Well no no, leave out the hedge fund loophole for a second], well that’s not a hedge fund loophole Alex, it’s fifteen percent at the end, but before that money ever gets to the point where it’s a capital gains, you’re also paying corporate taxes when you make the money. So when the corporation makes the money, it’s paying thirty five percent on top of that.

25:08 AG: Well it may or may not, it may have taken a tax deduction that year because it had enormous amount of expenses—[arguing]

25:13 TP: Well that’s a good thing, because if it has expenses, that means it’s buying equipment, it means—but you can’t divide those two up, it’s not intellectually honest, you can, but it’s not intellectually honest. If you want to do it for intellectually fun reasons you can, but to be intellectually honest, to say, oh, we’re not going to count the money that was paid in taxes when the profit was being made, before it even got to your cap gains account, we’re not gonna count that, cause that’s not as much fun. But it is, it’s the truth, it’s the two of those rates combined together, and by the way, when you look at the tax burden on you know, the top, the top one percent, I guess is the one in vogue, but uh when you look at what they’re paying, and back to the Bush cuts for a minute, this was also something that was interesting, President Obama and the left loves to say, oh those tax cuts favored the rich and everyone else suffered. That’s just not true as well, the rich ended up paying far more in taxes during the period after the 2003 tax cuts. Far more, and again the data, straight from [AG: They’re


PAGE 12 OF 34

earning more]. Well of course, but they’re paying more. They’re also, they’re also taking less of those [DVS]? exemptions you just talked about as well, because they know it’s okay to make investment income now because I’m not gonna get soaked for it, so.

26:24 AG:The um, when I was at the event, the healthcare event, and we’ll segue into healthcare now,

26:30 TP: Can I mention my Mom and Dad? Just for a minute? Cause you mentioned—[UI]. One thing about my dad, and he mentioned he drove a long haul bus for a number of years, a charter bus, and he worked a factory. They never liked paying taxes, no one likes paying taxes, that’s right. And, they would often say to me, and this is kind of, you know populous FDR household, the government gets some things get right, and they felt social security, we disagree on social security, they felt it was a good deal, I don’t, I think it’s not a good deal, but they would say, usually government gets it wrong, I don’t trust those guys either. Even among an FDR populous household, over time, there’s been a dramatic erosion in trusting the government, certainly in Washington, to do the right thing on most issues, social security excepted, by the way, they always felt that was a well run program, although it’s not, but I think that’s one of the problem the left has right now, the public does not trust the federal government certainly the way it used to twenty five, thirty five, forty five years ago. And that’s a huge problem for the left.

27:35 AG: Why do you think that is?

27:36 TP: Because the government screws up all the time. It’s manifestly obvious, and the explosion, and your part of this, the explosion in the number of information outlets as time has gone on, brings that information more, more into focus, for an ever-broader array of Americans.

27:55 AG: So is the solution as, Grover Norquist would say, to just drain the bathtub until you’ve got nothing left, um so that you can drown the rest?

28:03 TP: I mean I’ll leave those words to him, I think that, I think the problem

28:05 AG: Yea yea, but you understand my point is that the only way you can control government is to absolutely cut revenue generation to


PAGE 13 OF 34

the bone?

28:13 TP: Well the problem is, you have the federal government being allowed to run deficits. And so the very solvency of our nation becomes at risk, which we have right now, with trillion dollar plus budget deficits, I guess this is the fourth year in a row now, and so that model I don’t think is sufficient, I think we have to go after pretty direct entitlement reform. And that’s one reason I respect, you know for all the times I criticize house Republicans, I do, if you’ve done research on AFP, we hit those guys. Uh, I really respect what they’ve done with the Ryan budget. Paul Ryan’s budget on Medicade and Medicare takes genuinely dramatic steps to maintain, still, a safety net, but to do so in a way that we can actually afford and that works better for people. So I do give them credit for that.

29:00 AG: Listen I want to talk a little bit about the event I went to. Two things, first let’s talk about, I mean it was an event, describe the event for me. As I understand it, it was an event precisely because the supreme court was weighing in on Obamacare.

29:20 TP: Right. We knew that oral arguments were taking place, that the white house had actually held a meeting a couple weeks earlier the New York Times reported on, where they were saying hey, this’ll be a big time, all the national focus, both media but also congress and the courts, they’re only humans, I mean I know they’re impartial judges, but they are only human, public displays of support or opposition do impact them, they asked their allies and activists to get out there and show support for the president’s healthcare legislation. We thought it was important to have an alternative view, while the court was in session. So we did that. We held a rally that Tuesday, right in the middle of the Monday Tuesday Wednesday oral arguments, uh we brought in literally thousands of our activists from states mostly on the east coast to make sure that two things happened. Number one, uh that our message was absolutely in the mix, for the justices to see, for congress to see, because in the end I think this legislation will be back in their laps again, and for the American people to know that there is still a great deal of fire and frustration and concern against this legislation. That’s why we did it.

30:21 AG: Now why is that legislation so bad?

30:24 TP: It does three or four things that are disastrous I believe.


PAGE 14 OF 34

Number one, the cost of it is through the roof. It’s about a trillion dollars over the first decade. We cannot afford yet another entitlement program like that. Uh, number two, it is going to limit Americans’ healthcare choices, in our view. When you look at the Canadian system, when you look at the British system, which are the two we’ve studied most carefully, uh there’s no question that you have government making more decisions about the, which treatments will be covered under the government funding, cause they are providing the dollars after all at that point, so we do think it will limit the choices from a health care perspective for American families. Number three, it’s going to increase, and bare with me on this just for a moment, it’s going to increase the cost of insurance. And people go, ah that doesn’t make sense, it’s going to guarantee insurance. By definition it’s going to drive up the cost of insurance because it’s going to have the individual mandate that it will force every insurance company to take everyone walking in the door. We think it’s going to drive up costs, it already is driving up costs in anticipation of it kicking in in two thousand thirteen, fourteen, the various provisions. Uh, so those are the three biggest concerns, there are others as well, there’s a tax increase, the president said he wasn’t gonna raise taxes under two fifty, two hundred fifty thousand a year, there are tax increases throughout this legislation, including when you purchase that insurance that you have to purchase, there’s a new fee on that, at the federal government side that’ll hit just about every American. Uh, so it’s riddled with problems, but those are the three, it adds over a hundred new government agencies, over a hundred. We don’t think it’s ever a good thing when a hundred new government agencies are created.

31:58 AG: Well, the point that I find, I mean but there’s an emotional flashpoint here, and that’s why I want to stick with philosophy for a second, the emotional flashpoint is, Obamacare is taking away our economic freedom. So what’s, let’s use one example. Um, you know, pre-existing conditions. Okay, how is, if you have uh, you’re a poor family, you have, your child has a pre-existing condition, and you have to switch insurance companies, and the insurance company won’t take that person, and you’re facing now debilitating losses, why is it that that is some kind of freedom, to be able to now go broke because you can’t, because an insurance company won’t cover a pre-existing condition of your child?

32:46 TP: I’ll give you, you ask a very specific question, I’ll give you a specific answer to that, because it’s difficult to give a broad


PAGE 15 OF 34

philosophical answer to a specific question.

32:52 AG: Well it’s tied, but it’s tied, isn’t it tied to some extent to the mandate? In other words, the idea is you can’t ask the insurance companies, cause this I think, this plan was originally a heritage foundation plan if I’m not mistaken.

33:02 TP: It was. It absolutely was and we disagree with heritage on that. But, the broader question, but I do want to go specific, because the answer to that’s tougher unless you answer the very specific question, but we think that when your solution to that issue is to have government require you to buy a private product, in this case health insurance. For the federal government to do that, is a dramatic escalation of government power, not to mention by the way our view that it’s unconstitutional. I’m no constitutional lawyer, but as I’ve read about it and talked to attorneys they feel there are significant, uh, issues with it, and it seems the court also has concerns if you read the, listen to the questions, lines of questions they had a few weeks ago, it’s a dramatic escalation of government power, so you’re trying to fix an issue that’s real. Pre existing conditions are tough, I mean my brother, many years ago when he was married, his wife to be had just fought through Hotchkins disease, which back then, my brother is fifty four, that was a very, it’s more survivable now, back then it was very tough, and they struggled with the pre-existing issue for a number of years. Because of her illness when she was in high school, they married at nineteen. So, I know that issue, it is tough, and we do want figure out ways to solve it. I don’t think though you solve it by literally having federal government power to force every American to buy a private product at pain of fines or even potentially broader penalties, civil penalties in court beyond just fines, down the road, I think that’s a recipe for trouble. There are other ways to fix it, we could go into that, I don’t think, you’re probably not interested in the specific ways, but just one quick way is to allow competition for insurance across state lines. As you probably know, there’s a federal rule that says you can’t do that right now, that it was done mainly by corporations, mind you, who wanted to protect their fiefdom in individual states for health insurance. So these corporations, in most cases the corporations, got this rule passed, they protected it over the years, that says an individual American living in New Jersey, can’t go out an shop for insurance that’s across state lines. So therefore, most states, the competition’s not that, I mean it’s three, four, five six companies. Alabama’s one of the worst in the country. There are many Alabama citizens who


PAGE 16 OF 34

have one choice, literally. One. And so that is one way, not the only way, to fix the pre-existing conditions issue. I don’t mean to get into, it’s too much, but

35:21 AG: But you raise a good point, that’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask, uh, you know, I wanna ask you, which is, if competition is so good, what was wrong the idea of competition with a public option? In other words, if you’ve got—[crosstalk], you know, you got private companies and I think you broadly agree that when it comes to economic issues the private sector is almost better, almost always better at producing something that’s efficient as opposed to the federal government, so if that’s so the federal government will be costly, inefficient, and terrible, and so everybody will always opt for the private option, so why isn’t the public option.

36:05 TP: You’re forgetting one thing. The federal government, if it has a public option, and it’s in the marketplace, it’s a competitor. It’s also writing the rules. So Alex, when you’re writing the rules and competing, you can play all sorts of games with the rules, and I know this is going to shock your viewers, the government does, all the time. I mean, take healthcare, take the Obamacare. As soon as it passed, waivers started coming from HHS, right. Who did the waivers go to, just average Americans who really needed help? No. They went to politically connected unions, by the way they went to politically connected corporations, if you were a restaurant in Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district, shockingly, by the dozens, you got exemptions or waivers from Obamacare, so when you have a competitor who also gets to write the rules, which you would have with the public option, you have a recipe for cronyism, corruption, and unfairly titled playing fields.

37:03 AG: You mean, like what we have now? And the reason I say that is, you know I remember the prescription drug program under the Bush administration, it was legislation written by big pharma—[TP: It was terrible legislation. We opposed it.] But um, it was rife with cronyism, it was rife with insider dealing, and it was hugely expensive, because, because under free market ideology at the time, even though, you know and I would probably both agree that it probably wasn’t free market, but that basically what was happening was that you were prohibiting the federal government for using its buying power in order to drive down the cost of prescription drugs.


PAGE 17 OF 34

37:42 TP: Yea, I think that, that we, AFP wasn’t around, so I say we opposed it, I opposed it, I thought it was outrageous, and it’s interesting, when you look at the parallels between how they passed that legislation, and how Obamacare was passed, they’re strikingly similar. Remember? Remember the house held open the vote for what, hours, on end, hours, which was wrong, it was the very thing that that guy would attack the left for. Playing parliamentary maneuvers when they were in power. He did the same thing. And so, that was one of the breaking points for me personally, I think for a lot folks who launched AFP and other groups, was that. And when Delay, it wasn’t just the substance of the legislation which was bad. Uh, it was also how they did it, and it was similar to how they got Obamacare passed.

38:31 AG: But it wasn’t, an this brings me to a related issue, I keep circling back because I want to get back to my question, which is, the application of money in the political process. Uh, now, AFP, is able to, you know, influence legislative issues all over the country [TP: Not as much as we like, but we try.] Okay, but I mean I think you’d agree that the application of money is useful, and I think you see a lot of bad decisions being made though, because congress people know that um, they know where the money comes from, and they tend to, I think that, that, Delay bill, was passed because it was a good deal in terms of what was coming down the pipe for their members if they voted for it.

39:20 TP: Yea. I think there was an expectation that they would be harmed if they didn’t vote for it, no question about that, meaning Republicans, more so, they would face either retribution within their caucus, or they wouldn’t get the money that would pour in if they did vote for it. So, I would agree with that, I think I know where you’re going but go ahead.

39:33 AG: Yea, and I mean, I get to, I mean lemme, lemme take to task a democratic senator, for, Charles Schumer for example. Who I think, as you could probably guess, I’m not a big fan of the uh, hedge fund loophole, but Charles Schumer I think is probably singularly responsible for maintaining that loophole. And, he says, well look I just do it for my constituents. But he doesn’t do it for the firemen, he doesn’t do it for the nurses, he does it for the investment bankers who happen to have a lot more money than he does. I mean, than, sorry, than the nurses. So, what’s the, isn’t that a problem? Or is that just the free market in action?

40:16 TP: I think that in the end, every political, uh, Winston Churchill, I


PAGE 18 OF 34

love him, he often said, you know, democracy is the absolute worst, or representative democracy, is the absolute worst form of government ever known to man, except every other kind of government out there. I think he was right. It is not a perfect system. I mean you have government unions, who probably put in more money than any other single interest group in the country. When you look at the sheer amount of forced dues they have, to put into the process, every single year. And does that give them an advantage, that’s why they have the pensions and health benefits that frankly outstrip anything that the guy working at a diner or anywhere else gets in the private sector. And that is frustrating, but it’s the reality of, of the representative democracy. Uh you know the founders said, uh, that this system, I think it was John Adams, and I should know this, and forgive me, but Adams who said, you know one of the problems with what we’ve done is that it does require a level of virtue. I think he used the word virtue. And that is something that sometimes, uh, a lot of folks on both sides, and again this is not a partisan statement, uh don’t have. And they’re doing it, they’re doing it for corporate good. I do like to think at AFP, one thing we’re working to try to do, is based on a philosophy, not on a corporate get mine or anything else. And I think some of the best examples of that is, we oppose corporate welfare just like we oppose social welfare programs, whether it’s the ethanol subsidy, or whether it’s the natural gas subsidy for corporations, or, we would love to get rid of, we would love, if they would lower the corporate rate, down to a level that’s competitive with the rest of the world, we would support getting rid of all the deductions at that point. So, because it makes a cleaner, uh, frankly easier to understand and execute tax code.

42:00 AG: Getting back to this market based politics for a second, but okay, I take your point about Winston Churchill and representative democracy, and I frankly, you know, having done a film about lobbying, which you probably know, [TP: Yea. I’m familiar with that work. I sure am]. I’m sure you are. That, I have no problem with lobbying. It’s the problem of lobbying attached to money, what former senator um, I’m not going to remember his name now, the guy who had Barack Obama’s seat before, Fitzgerald. Senator Fitzgerald said it was legalized bribery. In other words, a system whereby the application of money, you can, um, you know, use your power, because it’s cost so much money, now what is it three days out of every five or something,

43:41 TP: Yea, but not just money though. Troops, and activism. I mean


PAGE 19 OF 34

when the teachers union comes to you, and says we want x, you know there’s a money component to it, cause they’ve got tons of it, but they’ve also have literally thousands of members, who will go out and do what you saw in Wisconsin, you know literally knock on doors and get petition signatures, so it’s not just money, I would argue it’s also troops, it’s the public credibility that these groups bring, etcetera. Again on the right and left as well.

44:09 AG: If it was only on the troops I don’t think I’d have an issue with it, but I don’t know. Uh, so listen, one of the things that I spotted, when I was roaming the grounds, and chatting to people, uh, at the AFP event in Washington, is there were a ton of posters for Atlas Shrugged. Where are you on Ayn Rand? Are you an Ayn Rander? And is the AFP an Ayn Randed organization, is that, it seems to be a powerful thing, I mean Ryan is very much of that, view I mean what’s your

44:37 TP: I have a faith component. Uh, I’m a Christian. And so, that wasn’t something she had an interest in, or did not take into account very much, and so it doesn’t, I’m just speaking for me personally, I’ll get to the organization in a minute, so for me personally, it’s something I respect the individualism, I definitely agree that big government is a danger, and usually is more bad than good, so I’m wither on several key components of the philosophy, but I personally have a faith component so it’s not quite as the finished product for me as my personal faith does, provides. As an organization, a lot of the components of that movie, and, well, the movie but the book, obviously that it was based on, yeah we support it, we had screenings around the country, and uh we like that story to be out there, and we like the ideas to be out there. So I wouldn’t call us, necessarily an Ayn Rand organization, but we certainly believe and share many of the principles and values that book was based on, and we often tout that book and the movie as well.

45:40 AG: And what are the principles that you found in that book that you find particularly worth touting?

45:45 TP: Well individualism, American individualism is something that is deep in our psyche as country. And I think it makes us different, maybe than the rest of the world, and I read some interesting pieces on why that is, but, I think individualism, a belief and a trust in the individual more so than in the government, a deep inherit skepticism of centralized government, uh, as it not only being


PAGE 20 OF 34

efficient, but also, candidly, having its own agendas, and its own arrogance, that is dangerous because they have the rule of law, or the power of law behind them, more so, and inexhaustible sources of income, to use in the courts, etcetera. To me those are the two keys, and then the idea and the virtue, and the last part of, to me is the virtue of capitalism. It’s, I believe in it, we believe in it, I think the book talks about this, when you wade through it, is that capitalism is a deeply moral, uh, form of, not government but economic system, you would say. Uh, there’s morality to it, and it’s easy to attack from the left, and they do a good job of demagogy it, but I do think that book laid out pretty well, in my view, the inherit morality of capitalism.

46:54 AG: How is capitalism moral?

46:55 TP: Because I believe it gives people the opportunity—my mom used to say to me, one of her, over and over and over, she would say, son, she would say it a little differently grammatically, she would say son it don’t matter where you begin, what matters is where you end. You live in the United States of America. And she would tell me that over and over, and she’s very much older, but I still get choked up thinking about that. And here was a woman who never finished high school, and who still believed deeply in an idea that she necessarily maybe never experienced. She never owned a business of her own, she you know worked different jobs. But she knew her kids could. And that’s something that I think is an inherently moral thing about America. It gives you a chance to make it, and the problem I have with, you know, socialism or with those who always wanna use the fairness argument, is it’s their version of fairness, and maybe I’m just a good old skeptical American, but I don’t trust their version of fairness. I just soon? have the opportunity and let, and let the chips where they end up. And that’ doesn’t mean you don’t have a safety net to help people, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have charity, and you don’t have personal, as well as governmental help, absolutely. Uh, but it does mean you give opportunity. And I believe better than any system out there, capitalism does that.

48:12 AG: Well then let’s talk about then, the safety net, because you know when you look at the Ryan budget for example, which you think would just eviscerate the social safety net, [TP: We disagree on that, but I mean], I think that you know if you’re gonna have to cut entitlements [UI], that’s, you know, in the Ayn Rand book, while it extols the entrepreneur, it also mocks and ridicules the people at


PAGE 21 OF 34

the bottom. You know, the moochers, as she calls them, people who accept help from any kind of centralized source. But you know for a mother, or a mom and dad, who, uh, who have had a crippling injury, or whose kids are having to survive on food stamps, I mean, do we really want to, you know, why do we want to make it harder for them? Isn’t it about economic opportunity? And equality of opportunity?

49:01 TP: Well I laid out the parts of Ayn Rand’s philosophy that I like. Uh, the individual, I could go through them again, but I laid out those. I was careful to say we’re not an Ayn Rand organization, uh, but we do like some of the key things that she laid out there, I think that, it’s interesting, I was watching something the other night, so these aren’t my original thoughts, but when LBJ launched the war on poverty, you know fifteen trillion dollars later, we have a poverty rate that has not gotten better, and we have, government program after government program that supposedly was gonna fix it and make it better. I think at a certain point there’s an acknowledgement, you would think, that government’s not the answer. That it really isn’t very good, the government does some things well, and I would never be one of these people who says oh the government messes up everything. They don’t, they do some things well, but they don’t do social welfare very well, they don’t. I think the church, I think private sector is far better at that than they are. And I think that when you take government to a certain level, it crowds that out. And again though, I would argue Paul Ryan’s reform of Medicare, instead of destroying it, he’s going to make it where it’s preserved, and that’s important. I mean the current system is unsustainable, even the left agrees on that, I mean you don’t hear President Obama saying everything’s perfect as is, he doesn’t say that, and I’ll give him credit for that by the way, uh, everyone agrees the current system is not going to make it, we’re gonna go bankrupt, so at some point folks like my mom and dad are gonna be left holding the bag after they’ve put a lifetime in on that. And that would be morally wrong, by the way. What Ryan’s trying to do with this plan, and I think it’s a pretty good one, again I’m no expert, but as I’ve studied it and tried to dig into it, is he’s giving it a chance to make it. He’s not destroying it, he’s making it where it actually has a chance to survive long term and provide that basic safety net, by requiring people to be more consumers of their own health care. There is a requirement there, I mean that is tough for some folks, I know that, um and I married my wife, thank goodness, makes all of our health care decisions. I mean I’d be lucky to get to the doctor once every five years if it wasn’t for her.


PAGE 22 OF 34

Uh, but it would require people like me, and folks older than I, younger than I, people of different economic standpoint, to become more consumers and decision makers in their own healthcare.

51:16 AG: You had used, you know, the phrase, socialism earlier. Is Obama a socialist?

51:19 TP: I don’t know. I would, you would have to ask him. I look at his policies and his policies are reminiscent of big government, big spending, traditional liberals. So, I don’t, we don’t engage in, I’m pretty careful, I know AFP is very careful, if you look at our TV ads, or our rallies or events, we just don’t typically call people names. We simply lay out what they’re doing and why we think it’s bad or good.

51:44 AG: So, tell me about, I mean obviously, you know, I took a look at the Rachel Maddow YouTube last night, and you know [TP: I’m not on her, I’m still not on her holiday list at all, I’m disappointed, I tried, like Rachel.] You didn’t get the card this year? [No, I still like her. I find her entertaining, so.] But what is your, to what extent do you intersect with the Kochs, particularly David. Is, were they instrumental in hiring you? Did you meet with them first, and to what extent, what kind of influence did they exert on the organization?

52:22 TP: Well, I serve at the behest of the board, uh, you know we’re a non-profit, a C3, and then there’s a C4 component, Art Pope is our C4 who Rachel also mentioned in the interviews, David Koch is our C3 chairman. So I serve at behest of the board, so in the end I would be, um, accountable, to the board, to them, but they don’t, they’re business folks. They practice what they preach, which is to decentralization, delegation, and giving people the opportunity to go out and create and grow, as long as it’s on mission. The mission is clear, which is promote economic freedom, to us that means taxes, regulations, spending, school choice, you know core economic issues, don’t do social issues, don’t do foreign policy, don’t do, um, other things, extraneous items, and as long as I’m within that mission, and having outcomes that are good, then, we kind of run the show. But we are accountable to the board, absolutely, in the end.

53:17 AG: But you don’t, you don’t get phone calls from the board? [TP: No, they’re running kind of significant businesses, Alex. You might


PAGE 23 OF 34

have heard of some of them.] I have, it would surprise you to learn. Um, the, what about, in terms of interacting with other political advocacy groups, like the Weaver Terrace group, are you guys part of that?

53:37 TP: We’re not. We’re not. We made a decision that we would genuinely want to be focused on issues, uh, we’re not a partisan organization, there are times where we absolutely feel that the Republicans we’re making big mistakes, and we want to, we hit ‘em, [AG: Can you give me an example?] You bet, the debt deal last summer, remember last July when that came down the pipe? We went out and sat on the rooftops shouting, this is a bad deal, don’t do it, and urged speaker Boehner by name, majority leader Cantor by name, we did calls, emails, events, into the districts of Republicans, urging them not to do that. Uh, the natural gas subsidy, which they’re pushing right now, several Republicans are. Sullivan, from, uh Oklahoma and Burr from North Carolina, two republicans. Excuse me, are pushing national gas subsidies, we think that’s wrong, we’re pounding away at them. Uh, republican appropriators, who opposed the Ryan budget last year, when it was, first year it was a big, it was a pretty big fight within the Republican caucus, uh, we aggressively hit Republicans in the districts, mainly they were on the appropriations committee and did not like the budget committee in their view encroaching on their territory which is silly, and we hit them pretty aggressively and dramatically. The last thing I’ll mention, AFP, and you can go look this up, I looked much younger back then by the way, two thousand six, I’m a brand new fresh scrub non profit employee, first time in my life by the way, I’m missing the private sector, our first national issue effort at AFP was something we called the ending earmarks express. And this was winter of oh six, so a different world back then, Republicans in charge of house, senate, and president. Earmarks were exploding, as you probably know, through the roof. We went to twenty seven republican districts, we went to the fifty most egregious earmarks in the country. We did rallies at the side of each one calling attention to them, we did TV ads, radio ads, etcetera. We didn’t have as much money back then, we were just starting out. Twenty seven of those earmark events were in Republican house districts, twenty three were in Democrat house districts, including Jerry Lewis, then appropriations committee chairman on the house Republican side. Uh, so we hit Republicans right from the beginning, and I remember them screaming, I remember them calling us, some members, and they were going, this is an election year. We’re in


PAGE 24 OF 34

danger of losing the majority, what the heck are you doing? Do you not get it? Aren’t you part of the team? I remember saying no, no we’re not part of the team, you guys have jacked earmarks through the roof, there are gonna be over fifteen thousand earmarks this year, and we’re not part of that team, you can bet we’re not. And they lost the house that year, I don’t think we played a role in by the way, but we did as much as possible educate the public on what they were doing, so you bet we hit Republicans, and so we don’t take part in that operation, there are particular issues where we do work with Crossroads and other groups, uh but then there are times when, you know, we feel it’s important to be able to hit Republicans.

56:17 AG: I see. So, cause, as I recall, in two thousand ten, you did work with, you did work with Weaver a little bit, and then [TP: Mmm, we talked to them, but I don’t think we ever, I don’t think I’ve ever been in those meetings, I may have, I think I went to one, and decided not to go back. I think that is what it was, I think I went to one, it was published in politico, and I chose not to go back anymore.] Um, what’s your greatest fear, or what’s AFP’s greatest fear if Obama is reelected?

56:40 TP: I think that he’ll use, the, the unelected bureaucracies, whether it’s the EPA, or the NLRB, or the alphabet soup of unelected bureaucracies that he controls, to really push his agenda without having to use Congress. Cause frankly he’s not gonna get through congress what he wants anymore, that’s done we’ve won that fight. But he’s now pivoted and he’s using his own agencies to drive his agenda, nowhere is that more clear than on cap and trade.

57:10 AG: Um, the, has the Citizens united decision made your job any easier?

57:17 TP: No, because we don’t, we don’t advocate the election or defeat of individual candidates. So it hasn’t impacted us at all.

57:27 AG: Tell me a little bit about, you know, Wisconsin, you brought up Wisconsin, tell me a little bit about AFP’s role in Wisconsin, and what, it’s been significant, it’s been reported on a lot, what are the issues that are engaging there?

57:42 TP: I mentioned earlier that AFP is focused on a model that says, state-led operations, with a genuine grassroots infrastructure over


PAGE 25 OF 34

the long haul. So we start state chapters one by one, our first three chapters were in two thousand four, in Kansas, North Carolina, Texas. Our fourth state chapter, ironically, was in January of two thousand five, I was there that day, when we kicked it off, Wisconsin, that was our fourth state chapter. Today we have more activists in our Wisconsin AFP chapter then there are members of the Wisconsin teachers union. We have a very strong, vibrant operation there. And we fought there for a long time, we lost for many years. The governor, Doyle, the democratic governor before governor Walker, we fought his budgets, by the way, and if you go back and pull up our rhetoric, Alex, you’ll find that our rhetoric is exactly the same. We were saying then, Governor Doyle your budget is unfair, specifically because it gives government unions rights and advantages that average folks don’t have, and it’s leading this state towards higher unemployment and general fiscal calamity. That was our rhetoric then, that was our rhetoric when governor walker took over as well. And we’ve been very involved there, you’re exactly right, I’ve been there personally a lot, we’ve had TV ads, radio ads, rallies, events, because we believe that the principle at stake there is crucial. You can get an economy going again, you can turn the state around, if you do a couple of simple things. And one of them has to involve holding the government employee unions accountable, making them accountable for their pensions and benefits being in-line with what folks in the private sector are getting, cause they’re not right now, and asking them to operate in a more efficient manner. And they’re doing that in Wisconsin, they’re saving tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, it’s changing that state for the better, that’s the important principle.

59:31 AG: What do you think’s gonna happen, in the recall election?

59:33 TP: I think Scott Walker’s gonna win, and win big.

59:36 AG: You know, I have to bring up one issue that [TP: Darn, I was hoping you wouldn’t. Which one is it?] Well, you know, it’s the, the two thousand ten election. Um, as I understand, AFP sent out applications for absentee ballots to a lot of Democratic districts, and it included as I understand it, an address, that was wrong. It was a former P.O box for a Wisconsin right to life group. You know about that?

01:00:01 TP: In Wisconsin, I do, I can tell you what happened. We did mailers to our activist base, not our membership, but our activist base in Wisconsin, urging them to go vote, do their civic duty and


PAGE 26 OF 34

go vote. And we got it wrong, we, there were multiple, um, I guess there were multiple elections going on that we were urging people to turn out and vote in, we weren’t telling them how to vote, it was a non partisan effort, we were just saying go do your civic duty, vote. But, we got the dates wrong, because there were multiple dates based on where you were in Wisconsin, it was during, I think during some of the recalls I think is what we’re referring to, some of the recalls. And there were different dates for some of the recalls. It was last summer I think, eleven not ten, I think, I think that’s what you’re talking about, and so there were multiple dates, it wasn’t one individual date, we made a mistake, we apologized for it, and we actually did calls back to the impacted households, saying we got the date wrong. But the kicker was it was to our activists, it wasn’t to the broad list. Cause, and the reason why I know that’s accurate, under Wisconsin law we could not have done, um, under the segment of law we were operating under, we could have not sent a broad based communication out to every voter saying, you know go vote. It had to be our activist base, our membership.

01:01:16 AG: And your membership is defined as people who’ve taken action? [TP: Taken some action, right. Cause we don’t have them paying dues or anything like that.] I see. So, so AFP couldn’t, why couldn’t AFP just send out, um, a directive across the state and say we urge everyone to vote, and just in case you want to know, here’s where to send in your absentee ballot?

01:01:33 TP: Well there was a nuance of state law, under the C4 component that we were operating under, and I forget, I forget the exact, I could pull it up, there was a reason legally why we did not want to go beyond our activist base, not membership, I think the state would call it membership but beyond our activist base, those that are on our list, I don’t have the exact understanding of state law but I could get that for you. It was, there was a great little nuance, and we took a beating for it, and the kicker was, we actually got it wrong to people that probably agree with us on the issues based on them being active with AFP, the reason it went to a couple households that were so called liberal or democratic was that it was old, an old address and the person had moved. So actually, the person living there now, it wasn’t addressed to them, it was actually to the address that they were residing. The government accountability office which is the Wisconsin office, they accepted, they knew exactly what our reasoning was, they understood it, and they accepted it, and they closed the


PAGE 27 OF 34

investigation in the end.

01:02:29 AG: And, the, um, and the address? The wrong address, to which people were to send the thing, that was also a mistake?

1:02:39 TP: I don’t know, was it to the wrong address, I thought it was the wrong date.

1:02:42 AG: No, it was the wrong date and address.

1:02:44 TP: Ok, I could look it up for you, but I remember very specifically though, it went to our activist base. They would call up membership, but it went to, the communications went to our activist base. So the kicker was, we were giving incorrect information to our own people. And still getting beaten up for it.

01:03:01 AG: You know, the phrase class warfare gets thrown around a lot. Um, and, more often than not, I think you hear it, you know, if I may say, from the right, very often when people are calling for higher tax rates. [TP: From the right. Oh the right says, you’re giving class warfare, oh I gotchya.] Employing class warfare.

01:03:24 TP: Well I doubt Obama’s gonna say, I doubt the president’s gonna say, I’m employing class warfare as I ask for higher tax rates, I doubt he’s gonna say it.

01:03:33 AG: No no no, but he might, somebody might say that um, political groups that are advocating for the evisceration of the social safety net, are advocating class warfare. Or political groups that are advocating for lower taxes on the wealthy, um, are advocating, in their own way, a kind of class warfare.

01:03:54 TP: Ok. Although again, we’re not eviscerating a safety net, we’re trying to make it where it’s actually going to be around for my kids one day, and other folks’ kids and grandkids, so. One man’s evisceration is actually in reality the next guy’s genuinely trying to preserve it for the next generation.

01:04:08 AG: Well you know, you’re right. If we’re talking about Medicare. I mean we can all agree that Medicare is broken.

01:04:13 TP: Yea. Social security is too, it’s going broke, I mean it’s already, it’s not going, it’s already broke, we’ve got to do something, Alex, to get this thing fixed, to, on the current course, it won’t be there


PAGE 28 OF 34

for my kids, I got a twenty one year old, it won’t be there for him. I’m telling you, it won’t. Heck I’m wondering if it’ll be there for me, I’m forty seven. I got us off track, I’m sorry, it’s class warfare, forgive me.

01:04:34 AG: So I mean, look, AFP has been, you know, the subject of a lot of attacks, particularly, and a lot of attacks have been, of course, directed at the Kochs in particular, for advocating libertarian ideas that seem to be at odds with, let’s call it, a social welfare state. Um, and, so the question is, is there class warfare at work here, and if so, who’s practicing it?

01:05:00 TP: You’re probably gonna be stunned here, but I think the left is launching an aggressive class warfare effort. It’s not anything new though, I was reading an account of the nineteen twelve presidential election over Christmas, that’s how geeky I am I guess, and that was Woodrow Wilson, kind of his coming out, I’m sorry it was Roosevelt, actually it was, it was Wilson, it was you know Taft, it was a fascinating election. And when you go back and look at Wilson’s rhetoric in that campaign, it is strikingly similar to what you hear from President Obama and the left today. So this is nothing new. And by the way, TR, he went on a rant like that as well when he ran as a Bull Moose candidate, his rhetoric was very similar. So this is nothing new. When you go back and you look at Kerry, and you look at Gore in oh oh an oh four, they had very powerful elements of class warfare in their campaigns. Here’s the problem for President Obama. And look, it’s a significant problem for him. You know from history that class warfare has a short shelf life with the American people. It just doesn’t work for a very long period of time. Thankfully, Americans are still uneasy with it over a period of time. This president is starting his class warfare, uh, assault, far earlier than most candidates that have been successful with it have ever done. And I think it’s gonna be difficult for him to sustain it between now and November, as he seeks to run for reelection, because I do think Americans are uncomfortable with it, and the Buffet rule that they voted on this past Monday, and I know they love to say it polls well, it does poll well, I’ve seen polling by the way, it does poll well when you ask folks, hey we’re gonna raise taxes on some other guys, oh yea we’re for that. But when you attach it to president Obama and they say it’s a serious, and they know it’s one of his key policy proposals, they see it for what it is. A gimmick. It’s five billion a year, let’s say he gets what he wants, according to the CBO, it’s five billion a year, when we have a budget deficit that’s gonna be one point three trillion. It’s a


PAGE 29 OF 34

gimmick, designed to score points, and it’s not going to work.

01:07:00 AG: What’s AFP’s stance on, on income inequality? Is it a problem in this country, and if so, what’s the solution?

01:07:06 TP: We wanna see every American raised up, and that actually does happen here, probably better than any country on the face of the earth. The US department of treasury has done a fascinating study, it’s one of the most interesting studies I’ve ever seen, on income mobility in America. And this is again, not some think tank for the right or left, this is the U.S treasury department. They took the bottom twenty percent in nineteen ninety six, and the top twenty percent in nineteen ninety six, and they tracked the individuals, not the category but the individuals, in each place, their income, from ninety six to two thousand five. A decade, a good solid long time. What they found was, that the bottom twenty percent, those individuals, increased their income by two hundred and twenty percent, two hundred and twenty percent on average during that decade. The top twenty percent? They increased their income by twenty percent. They found that the bottom twenty were actually getting up and out of it faster, than, and moving up faster, than the top twenty. Now you can argue the top twenty was already there, that’s a fair point. But there is and was, and still is today, intense income mobility within the United States of America. And we want to make sure that there is an opportunity for every American to move up. We don’t believe that government fixing in place for fairness reasons, uh, where people are and locking them in, is the answer to it.

01:08:25 AG: So, you don’t think that, uh, in the past, you know, studies have been I think reasonably clear that in the past ten to twenty years, the income inequality is rather dramatic. It’s growing rather dramatically.

01:08:43 TP: It’s always been dramatic. Though most of those studies, and this is an important point, we dug into those studies, cause we wanted to find out, are they legitimate, is it really worse than saying the twenties, for example, or more dramatic than the twenties, and here’s a crucial distinction within those studies. The vast majority of them do not take into account government transfer of payments for folks in the bottom twenty right now. Medicare, medicade, social security, social security disabilities. Remember, those weren’t there in the nineteen twenties, they are there now, and almost all the studies, when you dig into them, don’t taken into


PAGE 30 OF 34

account those government transfer payments, so they do tend to overstate the difference. But let’s, let’s say they’re right. They’re not, but let’s say they’re right, they’re not, but at the same time, i’m not sure what the remedy would be. To us, the remedy is, let’s give every American possible, or excuse me, every American the best possible opportunity to move up. What happens from the left it seems to me, just watching now, and I watch pretty closely, it’s my business to watch and be a part of this, is it’s punitive. They want to punish these guys, and that’s what it comes across as, we’re gonna punish, we’re gonna get these guys, you know the president was in, I think it was in Florida last week, and he said I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and that kind of rhetoric from a president’s kind of unseemly. But what it also leads to is let’s punish these guys, and, I don’t, I’m not sure that’s what America’s about. Let’s lift everyone else up, or, let me back up, we can’t lift everyone else up, let’s give everyone an opportunity to be lifted up. That’s what we stand for.

01:10:18 AG: So what is AFP doing for the people at the bottom, to help lift them up?

01:10:21 TP: We’re dramatically, or as much as possible, to dramatically fight any tax increases on them, whether it’s tax increases, you know the left always proposes, one of the first things they always do is a gas tax increase. Every state, and the federal level, they talk about gas tax. Who’s that hit the hardest? It hits the working poor, it hits folks who are struggling, utility bills, up until the natural gas finds in the last two years, utility bills were going through the roof as well. Why? Because of the global warming policies that left always espouses? Who does that hurt the most, it hurts the average working poor. We fight those. We support making school choice available to more and more kids, you know the president’s home town, Chicago, half the kids entering ninth grade never graduate. Half. That’s under a public school system that this president and his side on the left defend until the last man and woman. That’s an outrage. It’s wrong. We support school choice to give those kids an opportunity, who’s opposing that, the left’s opposing that, why? Cause the teacher’s unions are one of their biggest donors and one of their biggest supplier troops in the trenches. That’s wrong, and it condemns literally generation after generation of kids to a life that’s much more difficult to get out of. And I know you know this, but one of the key indicators of being able to rise up is a high school diploma. Not a college diploma, although that helps too, but a high school diploma, and they deny


PAGE 31 OF 34

that to a whole bunch of kids by opposing school choice. We support school choice night and day and when someone calls us a corporate front group, I have to laugh. We spend so much time and money on school choice, what the heck corporation are we helping there?

01:11:49 AG: Um, what’s AFP’s stance on cap and trade?

01:11:53 TP: We oppose it. We think it was a disastrous energy tax that would hit every American with higher energy prices, especially the poor, uh and it also would encroach pretty dramatically on individual freedoms for small business and Americans and large businesses too. We opposed it aggressively.

01:12:10 AG: Now, the attack, of course, has been, that cap and trade would dramatically affect an oil company, or an energy company, like Koch Industries.

01:12:20 TP: Yea, but what about healthcare? They don’t have any—[AG: Let’s just stick with cap and trade.] No but you can’t, cause, but then that’s not being intellectually honest though, if that argument is right, that we’re a corporate group opposing things for corporate reasons, than it has to be consistent across the board. [AG: Not necessarily, you could have different interests.] Ok. But when you look at all the issues we fight for, they share one thing in common. A desire to see less government, less government spending, regulation. Cap and trade falls into that just like the healthcare takeover falls into that, just like the spending argument, supporting the Ryan budget falls into that, so our actions across the broad spectrum of issues are consistent philosophically with a core set of principles. And so to pull out cap and trade and to say, a-ha, we have you, because somehow some of your key board members are in the energy business, it doesn’t hold water because it doesn’t hold up across the board. You gotta be consistent if it’s gonna have any intellectual honesty to it.

01:13:11 TP: How much less government does AFP wanna see? I mean, you know there was some early on, the, you know if you go back, some of the libertarian groups that Koch brothers have supported in the past have advocated things like abolishing FBI, CIA, DOE, SEC, how aggressive is AFP on reducing government in that way, in terms of the libertarian agenda?

01:13:37 TP: Yea, I mean, we call ourselves free market, labels get hung up


PAGE 32 OF 34

in my mind a little bit. We’re a free market, and that to us means limited government, less government is better. I’ll give you just a couple of examples. We think that the department of education is a miserable job. It was started under carter, to supposedly increase test scores for kids in America. It’s done a miserable job. Why on earth we don’t close it down and give that money which is wasted on a bureaucracy in Washington to the state would be far more productive I think for kids. Department of energy. Other than the nuclear regulatory systems which you could shift over to other agencies, I think that’s an agency you oughta get rid of. It doesn’t do a good job, other than the nuclear side, which is important for national security, but you can shift that to a new agency. There’s a lot of talk about the GSA, general services administration, you could easily outsource that to the private sector. I mean imagine how a private sector could run that better than the bureaucrats there at the GSA. But, of course we support the FBI, we think that they serve a function, that you need in this country, they’re not always right, they make mistakes like everyone, but they do pretty good work, CIA same thing, I mean, so we’re not [AG: What about SEC?] SEC, I mean, we would not call for getting rid of it, there needs to be some oversight of financial markets, I mean there are times when collusion does occur, you bet it does, and so we haven’t, I don’t, to my knowledge, I don’t think we’ve called for eliminating the SEC, so, we wanna make sure that this isn’t just some anti-government tirade, that’s not what we’re about. I mean there are times, and I’ve said before that there is a version of the safety net that we do think makes sense. And we wanna make sure though you can actually have it for people over the long term, and I don’t think the other side’s being, um, when they say they care about people, then why not fix something like Medicare and social security? And why demagogue someone when they try to actually fix it? I mean they say this current system doesn’t work. Medicare and social security. Paul Ryan puts up his plan, and you can say it’s not perfect, and I’m sure there are things that could be better about it, but president Obama hasn’t once said here’s my plan to fix it, let’s see if we can meet in the middle.

01:15:43 AG: Well look, as you may or may not know, I’m not a big Obama fan [TP: I don’t know that.] Particularly on civil liberties, but the one area where I think he did, he did try to address some problems in Medicare, and he was demagogue by the right for saying he was um, creating death panels. Because, you know, you can do studies, and look at the expenses, you know medical expenses for people, and sometimes, and I know this for a fact myself, you know I, my mom was terribly sick, she was in the ICU, it was clear


PAGE 33 OF 34

at a certain point, that she was going to die. But those doctors have magnificent machines. And they could have kept her alive for maybe another six months, maybe nine months, she would have been lying there, with, um, you know, doing nothing but starting hollow eyed up against the wall, but that’s an enormous expense. And it’s not one, that, by the way, my mom wanted. So, you know, we asked the doctors not to, you know, incur any unnecessary costs. But the point is, you know, by engaging in that comment, by saying you know, we’ve got a problem here, we’re spending an enormous amount of money on trying to protect people who are going to die anyway, let’s face it, we’re all going to die. Um, so that we can’t afford to give healthcare to children, but he was then, he was attacked for death panels. So you know I think he was,

01:17:16 TP: Ok, you know what, that’s a fair point. He did put forward his healthcare, ok, yea, that’s a very fair point. He did. He put forward a plan, that was, full-throated, and I can give him credit for that, we disagree on many elements of it, and we opposed it vociferously, and still do, but I’ll give you that. That’s fair point, he did put forward a plan, that’s true. I take that, that’s a fair point.

1:17:41 AG: Okay. You have any, Vera? Cause I think I’m pretty good. [TP: You put me through the paces, I’m exhausted]. I know. Is there anything else that you wanted to cover that you feel is important, to talk about in terms of AFP?

1:17:52 TP: No, the only, well one thing. I think that one of the best things that I would urge folks to, when they’re looking at our side, is to go out and meet the folks who are a part of this movement. Some of them have warts, absolutely, every movement does. There are folks who say things they shouldn’t say, or have a sign they shouldn’t have, but I literally find, I’ll use the term ninety nine percents, I literally find that ninety nine point nine percent of the folks in this movement are in it for all the right reasons. They genuinely want to see their nation stronger and more prosperous, and they think that our values are the way to accomplish that. Most of them, it isn’t about their jobs, it isn’t about their immediate short term income, it really is about a country, and I hope, I know you’ve been out, and I wanna say just thanks for coming down to DC and taking a day, I know that’s not easy to do, you came down and burned a day with our folks, but I’m glad you did, it meant a lot, it just said a lot, about how serious you are about this effort, and I would encourage you to just go out there and do that, because I have, I was in Omaha Nebraska two nights ago doing


PAGE 34 OF 34

exactly this, I was with our activists in a training session, you know, pump up session, I was in Florida couple days before that, and when you meet these folks out there, you find that they’re the best of America. And look, I’ve met a lot of activists on the other side too. Uh, and I’m not disparaging them, at all. I think that right now, this country, there is one of the most vibrant genuine debates going on about the direction and future of our country, that I can remember in my lifetime. The issues are bold and differentiated, the sides are both passionate. I think that’s great for the country, I really do, I’m as encouraged as I’ve ever been, I think we’re gonna win, by the way, for our side, uh, but, either way, I’m encouraged by our country, cause I have never seen it, this many people, this passionate, and the issues bigger than they are right now. I think that’s a great thing for the country. So, maybe that’s my commercial for the-

01:19:38 AG: Great. Hey, is AFP doing any more big events coming up in Wisconsin?

01:19:43 TP: Uh, yes. We’ll be doing stuff in May, I don’t have the dates, you just missed a biggie, there’s footage of online, I was in Milwaukee two and a half weeks ago, there’s tons of footage online, we had a thousand and so folks, I was there, it was a really cool. But the answer is yes, in mid to late may, we’ll be doing some stuff, and Levi can get the details for you. So, you gotta come out. [AG: Alright, thanks Tim. Oh sorry, room tone. Fifteen seconds of silence]

Track Transcript - PBS · Poverty - Tim Phillips Transcript – 4-19-2012 PAGE 3 OF 34 a place...

Documents

Transcript of Track Transcript - PBS · Poverty - Tim Phillips Transcript – 4-19-2012 PAGE 3 OF 34 a place...