Pulse On Policy: Texas 21 Congressional Forum With Video

On Wednesday, May 2, the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Austin Chamber Commerce to host and sponsor a forum for the Texas 21 Congressional runoff candidates…

On Wednesday, May 2, the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Austin Chamber Commerce to host and sponsor a forum for the Texas 21 Congressional runoff candidates.

The four candidates hope to replace Congressman Lamar Smith. Smith was first elected to Congress in 1986. He announced his retirement from Congress in November 2017.

He currently serves as Chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee and continues to serve on both the Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security Committee. He is the former Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Ethics committee.

Democratic candidates Mary Wilson and Joseph Krosper, as well as Republican Candidates Matt McCall and Chip Roy, attended the event to discuss issues from the recent Tax Reform bill to immigration and education.

The date for the primary runoff election is May 22; Early voting begins Monday, May 14, and ends Friday, May 18.

• QUESTION 1: Late last year President Trump signed into law a major overall United States Tax Code. If you had been a member of Congress while it was being considered, would you have voted for and why or why not?

JOSEPH KOPSER(D): No, I would not have voted for in it’s final form, not at all. It was mean spirited. It in the end was not benefiting middle class like it was claimed to be. It ended up being a giveaway at $1.5 trillion to our debt. You find me any fiscal conservative who can look at you with a straight face and that that plan was not a giveaway, I dare you.

I’ll go point by point.

Secondly, it was also done to undermine the healthcare system in our country that is law today by removing the mandate for healthcare. That was again mean spirited because the leaders knew exactly what would happen. By reducing the mandate then you now no longer have the opportunity to be able to keep healthy people in the market which will make healthcare markets even more unstable.

And lastly, if you really want to help business, if you really want to spark innovation, why in heaven’s name did they allow the R&D credits to expire? Why did it make it so that middle class tax cuts will expire? It was done to pay back all of their investors, all of their donors who saw that Congress was getting almost nothing done in 2017 and had to have at least one piece of legislation.

And I dare anybody with a straight face to say that that was a fiscally conservative piece of tax legislation. Even Mitt Romney, a previous Republican candidate, didn’t want to go below 25% corporate, and they went all the way down to 21% without closing those two loopholes. It was a poor piece of legislation.

MATT MCCALL (R): Isn’t that wonderful, in America we can really disagree on things. And I still see it completely differently. Yes, I would have voted for this tax bill, and yes, I don’t think it went far enough. And I wish that those middle class tax cuts were permanent to begin with, and I’ll do everything I can when I’m there to make sure that they are permanent.

We’ve had the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. And we’ve had some of the lowest import duties in the industrialized world. So we had been cramming jobs overseas. This is not the way you build an economy; this is the way you get everybody hooked on importing cheap stuff.

And I’m against that. I’m for the American worker. And the American worker needs good paying jobs, and the way you get good paying jobs is you create more jobs than there are people and wages go up. That’s why I want to build the wall and seal the border.

It is that we’re flooding the economy with cheap labor, and we’ve gotten hooked on it. And the lower classes, the middle classes haven’t had a raise in 20 years. I don’t want the Government to say, “Hey, we’re gonna raise minimum wage to $15 bucks an hour” like they have in California, and they just start laying off people with all these restaurants.

What we need to do is create more jobs so that restaurants like in Midland have a starting wage of 15 bucks, and they pay you $600 bonus to come and work for them because there are so many jobs.

So I would agree that we actually need to…I would like to scrap corporate income tax. I’m not a real fan of Paul Ryan, but I like his border adjustment tax. And that is we set a low, reasonable black tariff, I would say 20 percent, on everything that’s imported.

And then there’s no income tax and guess what, everyone in the world will want to build everything in the most efficient country in the world, and that’s us.

MARY WILSON (D): It is good that we can disagree in this country. I would have absolutely voted no on this particular bill for multiple reasons. Not the least of which is part of what Marco Rubio just acknowledge is that none of this money in this tax bill, and tax quote-on-quote cut, has made it to the average person.

It’s a corporate buyout. It’s a corporate grab. Between the buyback shares and so forth, there is nothing that’s getting to the, especially the lower class. Maybe the middle class here and there at random places get some, get some tax benefits for a brief period of time.

But it does not help the people that are most in need. When 47 percent of our population does not pay income tax because they don’t make enough money, this particular tax bill is not gonna help them. Because all the money is at the top.

And the whole idea of trickle-down economics as started with Ronald Reagan, is completely completely wrong. What happens is the people who have the most don’t let it trickle down, they just get a bigger ball of pudding in it.

So anyway, my answer’s no. I would not vote for this bill, and one of the reasons is actually that Joseph mentioned is to cut out the individual mandate for healthcare which is going to completely dismantle the Affordable Care Act which I think is a travesty. Because we all saw 20+ million people get healthcare that never had healthcare before.

And so when I look at bills like this or any other bill, where I’m coming from, from my background as I mentioned earlier as an educator and as a minister is who is being hurt by this bill. And the people that are being hurt by this bill are the ones who continue to be hurt and to be ignored and those are the ones that are on the lower economic status of our country, who actually need a $15 minimum wage in order to afford an apartment.

If you can’t afford an apartment, where are you supposed to live with your children because you can’t make enough money.

So we have to address the lower income, those in the lower income of our community and our society, by actually passing legislation that helps them. Not legislation that helps the wealthiest among us and hoping that somehow that wealth makes its way down to them.

So the answer is no.

CHIP ROY (R): So, I’m gonna go back to saying it with microphone, everybody can hear me okay?

Wow, where to begin. And it is very good we can disagree, and I do disagree with our opponents on the other side of the aisle.

What we see over the last 15 months is the benefit you get when you get regulations out of the way and you get more money in your pocket. So, the people who create wealth, the entrepreneurs, the people who are running businesses and money in the pockets of the American people.

When we’re out there talking and we talk to people throughout the district, and I know all of us do that are up here, we get great positive responses from people that are seeing the real effects of having more money in their pocket.

Seeing the real effects of economic strength that is rebuilding in the wave of eight years of mediocre growth.

We’ve been running at one and two percent economic growth for as long as I can remember over the last decade under the previous administration, and that’s not gonna get the job done.

When you talk about trickle down and you talk about things in these sort of disparaging terms, all you’re simply talking about is, are there more dollars available in the economy to create wealth?

The American people and entrepreneurs and businesses create wealth. The government stands in the way of wealth creation. And what we’ve been able to see through, getting us out of the Clean Power Plan which would have been disastrous for the American economy.

Disastrous for Americans who need to be able to afford heating and gasoline in their car.

There are 54 million Europeans right now choosing between heating and eating because of the disastrous policies bowing down at the alter of climate change hysteria in Europe. That was coming to our shores, and we’ve been able to stop that and push up against that.

The tax bill, absolutely I would support the tax bill. Did it go far enough? No, it should have been permanent. We shouldn’t have it expire in 10 years. The estate tax should go a lot further so that people with barns and owning wealth that they’ve created can pass it on generationally to the next generation.

That is the American way, families creating wealth and passing it down. And absolutely the individual mandate was a great addition to that bill, to make sure that we can start to dismantle the monstrosity that was Obamacare.

So I would have proudly supported this.