Senator James David Cain discusses Stelly Tax Plan on Legal Lines with Locke Meredith

Hello. I'm Locke Meredith with Legal Lines. I'd like to invite you to join us on the next show. We've got Senator James Kane. He's been a Louisiana State Senator and in the House of Representatives for over 31 years. He's been there through a lot of governors and he's got a lot of expertise and a lot of knowledge. We're going to talk about the Staley Tax Plan, what the big issues for the state are for the new Governor Blanco and her new administration and his position as chairman of the Insurance Committee. So join us on the next legal lines coming right up. Welcome to Legal Lines. I'm Locke Meredith. I'm very pleased to have on the show Senator James Kane. He's a Louisiana State Senator and been there for over 32 years. Is that right? Well, almost that long. Thank you very much for going on the show. Give me a little personal information. Well, I grew up in Western Louisiana. I'm still there and I used to be a basketball coach. I'm lucky enough to be in our State Basketball Hall of Fame and I played in college and that was my life dream just to coach basketball. I did pretty good at it. I got the assistant, offered assistant coach, Louisiana Tech and I said, well, I believe I'll pass on that. I believe I'll get the head job at McNeese. Head job came open. Politics got involved. Politics got involved. I didn't get it. Well, I'm in the wrong business. Now I'm naming the coaches. Just kidding. But that's how you were introduced to it. Yeah. I was introduced to it when I applied for a college basketball job and I said, you know, I need to get involved. And is that when you got involved in hockey? I got involved. I ran for State Representative and it's the first job I ever run for. I took me 11 months. I saw everybody in the district and they voted for me. Where's your district? Weston, Louisiana. A boy guard, Vernon, Sabine, Kykeshue Parishes, Fort Polk area in Weston, Louisiana. That's why we're part of the State that taught different. You know, a lot of people say, what do you talk like that? I can't say right, right, right, right or not, right. But we talk different over this. A lot of people think we're in Texas almost. Are you saying I'm pretty Texas? I know. I know I did. Well, tell me. And so you were elected as the State Representative over there. And how long did you hold that position? 20 years. And then I knew it was time to go up and get out and I went to the Senate and I tell people I was part of the problem. I believe. When I first got elected, I thought if you give a guy hand out and get him on his feet but then, you know, the world had turned around and it'd be better. You know, we were wrong. We got third and fourth generations now in welfare. It didn't work. And so about five or six years ago, I began to travel the state and talk to other people in Louisiana, got involved with the water issues and brought the water issues to light. And I began to travel around Louisiana and talk about water and felt like we need to do something about the water issues in Louisiana and got that started. And during that time, I began to hear from other people across Louisiana. It certainly made me a better legislator and every legislator, I'll have to go in other parts of the state and talk because if you did, the people there will tell them what you need to hear. And you district sometimes they'll tell you what you want to hear. And I began to hear people loud and clear and they were fed up with taxes and I began to vote different. I voted for the least amount of taxes in the last five years of any legislator. It takes a pretty big man to sit there and say for 20 years, he did the wrong thing. Pretty much. And you know, but I was just stating my little district, listening to my people, stating my little world and that's why I encourage other legislators to go out. Last year, we made 75 speeches across Louisiana. When I leave here today, I'll run the dance bill, make a speech next week, I'll be in Spring Hill. And people hear me talk and I talk about things that what we did in the past, what we should do now, and they listen. I was on the committee to say the same, so I thought, we're great, let's say the same. I think New Orleans ought to pay for it, I didn't think three for it, I did. So they put me on that and then I got on the issue of against income taxes. I thought income tax, the worst thing you could do to people. Why punish a guy for working? You really shouldn't do that. And they said it would not travel the state, saying it wasn't good. And these are positions contrary to what you've taken previously. Well, pretty much. But after you get into listening to people and figure out, you got to admit, sometimes when you're wrong, you've got to take three steps back. You've got some history behind you, though. You've been there through Democrats and Republicans and Democrats and Republicans and the good and the bad. And they changed parties. I turned my life completely around, I did it back overflip. But look, sometimes you got admit that you were wrong and sometimes I was young, I got down here young and we did some things that, looking back on it, we thought that's what we ought to do. And I believed that, hey, let's just give people handouts, they'll get on their feet. It didn't work. I was wrong. And I admit I'm wrong. I was wrong. I'm not wrong now. Now, one thing I did do the whole time I was here, I never ate or drink was obvious. I'm the only legislator, been here 30 years and I'm on nobody's expense account. Nobody ever whined and dined me. And let's say, take the whole legislature out of the whole committee, I don't go. It's not anything I just like about lobbyists, you know what a lobbyist is, a lobbyist somebody walking up to revolving door and they're behind you and you're in front of them to come out ahead of you. They're slick. So, but I learned real quick, don't fill those two people too much. You got to listen to them, but I mean you don't, I don't let them whine and dine me though. And the reason is, is you want to maintain independence, you don't want to be influenced improperly. I mean, I know you're not saying that every lobbyist is- Oh, they're all good. They're all good. They've got to tell the truth. They lied. They wouldn't be there five minutes. They're all good people. But I just don't think that's the way we as legislators, I saw legislators when I first got here and they say, let's, here's going to take us to lunch today. Well, I said, you know, I think they didn't think that was right. Maybe that's one reason I got overweight. I went to the movies and ate hamburgers. How do you think the process, the political process needs to change? You've been there a while. We've got to get more independent of the governor. I tried to pass a lot of bills, the last few years to where we can be more independent from the governor. Well, we need to take more, name more, name more of the board, to send it to the Senate. Now we can firm them. I tried to do this and my good friend, Jay Darden, fought him and fought him up and down and good friend of mine because he was a floor leader for Boston. I've had Jay on the show. That's right. He was a floor leader for Foster. Now that same person said, well, we need to get more independent of the governor because he's down in a good team with, with, with, with, uh, black hope. So I guess his two doctors being gourd. I mean, I've been friend with all the governors. I mean, you know, throughout the came in with Edwards, I've seen them come and go. I've got, they've been some good governors and they've been some that I wouldn't, you know, I'm not going to say which one, but some is just, you just couldn't get a decision out of them. That's one thing. And some that you just couldn't, one or two, you just, one of me just couldn't hardly believe. Really? That we forget who that is. You know? You know? Tell me, uh, then you're saying maintain independence. How would that be accomplished, legislation? Well, legislation, we, we need to take more. So you've got the executive branch, you did, she'll in the, in the, in the legislative. The executive branch in Louisiana, let's describe what they do for the folks. Well, the executive branch is, you know, is, is the governor and that group and it runs executive offices and so forth and sets up all the different heads of the different departments. Then you got the legislative branch, that's the house representative in the senators. And then you've got the judicial, the judge and so forth. But the executive branch has got so strong in Louisiana that they just manhandled the legislature. In fact, one of the strongest governorships in the entire United States is on the floor. It is. And they manhandled the legislature. They handpicked their, uh, head of the house, head of the Senate, the legislators ought to be doing that. But we don't. We cave into them. Well, I know that there was a dispute for a while between Hankel and, and Governor Blanca is, um, well chosen for sure, but ultimately, uh, Governor Blanca won because she's a governor and, and, and, and because she has the power to, to capital outlay projects, projects in your district. Very fun. Line out of veto. Pass out the money. Pass out the money. And, and, and we as legislators have to take more control. I tried to pass lots of legislation about three years ago about this, didn't pass one piece. Well, no governor's going to allow you to reduce their value. No, you can't do that. And it's understandable. And the four leaders of that particular governor, which one of them was Jay Darden, my good friend, bought it. Same one. Same now. We'll say, well, we need to take more power back. It's just like, again, it's, when you're there, but it's sad in a way. But one of the things, my pet peeve right now is taxes. People are taxed and death, and that's why I traveled the state and, and fought the income taxes that Stelly, so-called, put on it. They did put them on it. Let me tell you this. It's very important that the public knows this. They sold. They told the people it was going to be tax neutral. Tax neutral. Well, that was tax neutral the first year, but you know why it didn't start the June 1st. It already paid our income tax, see? That was a trick right there. All right. What we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and follow up with that discussable taxes on the next segment. This is Locke Meredith with Legal Lines, got Senator Canon, we're going to talk about taxes. Welcome back to Legal Lines. I'm Locke Meredith. I'm very pleased to have on the show Senator James Cain. He's a Louisiana State Senator, again, Senator Thais. Yes, sir. Let's talk about the taxes. I know that's a sore subject for you. There it is. You know, the people were told on the stepplet plant, it would be tax neutral. Every time they open it. Let's define the stepplet plant real quick. Stepplet plant is making up the income tax, putting the brackets higher, taking all your itemized deductions away from it. If you give to your church, you can't take it off your income tax. If you've got a home mortgage, you can't take it off your income tax. I tried to tell the public that and we went out of the state and tried to tell they say we're helping the poor people, but we gave the poor people $143 million in food stamps every year. They are already eating with food stamps, which is good. They deserve them. They needed them. Absolutely. But they don't pay sales tax on that. So what we did, we shift a burden from one group of people to another group of people, and that group of people is the guy that makes between $30 and $150,000. Two school teachers, a school teacher, and maybe their wife works at Walmart, they're going to really get an income tax, they're going to go way up this year. In this goes in effect this year? In fact, last year, actually, they said it would be a tax neutral thing, which means what? That it would be, you swap out, you take away the sales tax on food, but we up the income tax, it'll be neutral. So you're not going to pay any more money? But that's a bottle phase life. Explain to me why. Okay, because the fiscal office now has admitted that in the first 10 years of the sterile income tax, it will bring in 800, I'm going to repeat that, 800 and $45 million more dollars to the state coffee. So if it's neutral and one is going to increase, where's the money coming from? Coming income tax. Route the back to the middle class people, that's where it's coming from. And obviously, it just really aggravates me, I call it a self-mugging, the people mugged themselves. And I don't really blame legislators for voting far too big. I mean, who sends out the information and sells a tax plan like this and doesn't explain, I don't understand that. Well, who do you blame? I debated these people and if I didn't want to debate anymore and it wouldn't debate anymore, they gave out false information. Who's day? Well, Vick Stanley did it first, because he said it only cost 8% of the people more money. That's what I was going to say. 8% is little people segment of people, 8% is going to cost you, that's the only one is going to cost more money. And 92% of the population will not pay them. That's what they were told. And that wasn't true. We found out now that's not true at all. It's going to be like well over 50%, anybody makes more than 30,000 is going to pay more. So that that's just wasn't true. Pay more than what they were paying when it was just to sell. So the legislators got false information, the house voted it through wound, it came over to the Senate. But the time it got to the Senate, I began to look into this a little closer, this can't be. So I got up and began to study a little bit and made a five speech on the Senate floor about it. And I had about 15 or 20 of the house members come, so I get a copy of that speech. We voted for it. We didn't know it did all that. I said sure. And I handed out copies. And we began to fight, a few of us began to fight the tax. But the governor falls for it that time was for it. He was trying to bring in more money to the state, and he had some money to put on television and radio. I didn't. In the last few nights, they passed it. And it's unfortunate, because now the middle class is really getting hurt. And it's sad. So during this special session coming up in the regular session, I filed a Senate Bill 1. The first bill to give us back our deductions. Now that's... Explain to the folks what a deduction is again. Okay. If you donate money to your church, you can take it off of your income, and thus your income's lower, and the tax rate then is not as high. Itemized deductions. And about 40% of the people itemized, and those are the people who got hurt real bad too, because it's safer. You put your mother in the nursing home, God forbid, and she has to pay $30,000. All of her check goes into the nursing home. Well, then what happens is you can't itemize that off of your income tax. So besides that $30,000 that she made over a little retirement or whatever, you've got to pay about $1,000 a day to income tax on it. On that $30,000? Yeah, because you can't itemize it anymore. Whereas before you could. Yeah. I mean, happened for a bit. I don't want to talk about gamblers, but even gamblers. Okay, gamblers comes to Louisiana. I'm not a gambler. I didn't vote for Gammin. It's here. We making money off of it. But a gambler of gamblers in Louisiana, let's say he wins $100,000. He loses $100,000. Well, that don't bother me a whole lot. Okay, that's fine. Next time. That's fine. But that guy, he can't take his $100, either. He can't itemize. He's got a lot of Vegas and Gammin quit gambling here. That's fine, too. We'd state end up losing money. I've used that example. You lost all your itemize. Give me another example of an itemize that doesn't. A home mortgage. A young couple may raise, they get married, a school teacher, and so I might as a graduate male issue. They've got a home mortgage like most of us do, and they can't take that home mortgage after income tax. And the interest they pay on the mortgage. They pay off that. So they can go or taxes, they can be $10,000 or $5,000, and now they're going to be taxed on that five or 10,000. You're driving young couples out of Louisiana. That's a kind of people that's leaving. Two school teachers. I mean, that's a kind of, you can't take, give to your church. Just give me another one. Give to your church. People give to their church. Give to their different churches. You used to, you could itemize it off your income tax. You can't anymore. Not with a steady plan. So what you're going to do? Okay. This bill that we'll file it next week, Governor Blanco left me a loophole to get it in the bill, get it in the legislature. And so we're going to put it in the special session that phase it in like she's doing the business taxes. If you're going to give business a break, that's wonderful. Give the middle class a break. Give us one, too. Phase it in over 10 years, cost about $13 million a year, that would phase it in over 10 years, starting next year. Now I say, what's it going to cut? We're not going to cut anything. But remember, it's going to bring in $845 extra million, so we're taking some extra money. The state's going to start collecting and just giving it back to the people. Instead of letting the state legislature and the governor spin it where they want it. You still got $715 million left, but they're going to get extra. Now the fiscal office, that's their numbers, that's not mine. So that's a win-win. Any legislator going against that ought to be beat the next time he runs. What do you think is going to happen? Yeah, they're going to work on it. I think that the governor's office will probably be against it. I went up there and talked to her about this, and I like her. I think she listened to me, gave me $30.45, and I said, Ms. Blanco, if you'll put this in there in a special session, you'll be a saver to the middle class. Honestly, it probably gets you reelected because you don't make it elected anyway, but I said, you're giving business a break. Give the middle class a break. You shouldn't punish a person for that. Yes, sir. I mean, it's given us a break. Is this putting us back where we were? Well, you're not really. It's not even real. Because the brackets are still going to be hard, but the brackets went up. So you're still going to pay more income tax. No matter what. No matter what. But at least give the poor devil's back their item out of the dupch, so we don't tax the church. And basically, we're indirectly taxing the church, because you're getting away the ability for donations to do that. That's right. Interesting. So this is a bill we file. We've asked as many co-authors as we could get. We've got it in. We'll let people are calling in. I just got a call today from a senator. I remember, I think, as a new senator, I represent him from South. He just calls. He was going to come home. Mike, me show at the Lafayette calls that put him down right quick as he could. We're getting a Scalia's just call from South and Debrae and Slidedale put him on. What do you tell the folks that are watching the show to do to encourage it? Tell your legislators to vote for Senate Bill 1 because it gives you and gives the public and the working class people a break. It gives a guy that works at Exxon. His wife works at the Walmart, our school teacher, gives him a break. Anybody who makes over $30,000 will get a break. Pretty much. If they itemize it, get this break for sure. A lot of people should itemize if this goes through. Let's part of it. It does now. Let's talk about, kind of, wrap that up on the next segment and then let's talk about the other big issues before the government right now. This is Lafayette's Legal Lines and Senator Cain will be right back. Welcome back to Legal Lines. I'm Lafayette and again, very pleased to have on the show Senator James Cain, Senator again, thanks for being on the show. Been there for, in that legislature for over 31 years and you got a lot of experience and I appreciate you being on the show. Let's talk about the economic picture of Louisiana and the other big issues of not only economics but also education. Well, you know, we're not, some people say we're really bad in education but we've come a long way in the last few years. We've put a lot of accountability things in and I think it's going to help. Not pretty. It was just talking about that. And I think that we've come a long way towards helping education in Louisiana and we've got to do something and help the schools in New Orleans because we're all pitched into one big pool and sometimes they've got some good schools down there but we're going to have to work with them to help them to even make them better because now they've got a grading system. So that's got to be done and we're working on that. I think the education part's on the way up. We're on the time for, we're low, we're low but we're not as low as we were. So we're going up and we're gradually going up every year. That's good. We're not going up and then going down and going up. We're on the way up every year. So what else do we do? We've got this accountability for teachers and students. You're talking about, I guess, a better allocation of funds to districts that clearly need it. Yes. What else can we do? And we've got the teachers pay raise up pretty good. We want the very first and brightest to be teachers. I mean, I used to be a teacher but I dig roots and herbs for it to go back in the classroom. In the reason it is. Well, the pay was bad. And number one, but that's one thing, but just the atmosphere was not that great. But we've made it 30 years ago. Yeah. And we've made it a lot better now. It's a lot better. We've got to pay way up there. The first year I taught and I'm not going to tell my age, I made $3600. You know, if I hadn't been in the Army two years, it would have made $34. So that's not long ago. That was in 63 and four. I was starting to teach school. So we've come a long way from there. So a lot of people would go into the plants and work at the plants, bright people and work shift work instead of teaching school, they could make so much more money. So we didn't have the very brightest in the classroom. We have some money. We have some money. And we've got it up there. I average teacher's salary is now around $38,000. We're way up there now, doing pretty good and so we're good enough. So that part is doing, I think, pretty good on education. I think we're only up swing. So just keep doing what we're doing. Keep doing what we're doing. Keep paying the teachers what they need to get to stay and maintain an accountability of the students and teachers in control of the classrooms. Right. And the other thing that you would mention to me about was about water. I wouldn't mention that because I was chairman of Environmental Quality Committee and I'll be brief on this. But I got a call from people in Union, Louisiana and asked me what I'd come over and hold a meeting there. There was a merchant power plant going to locate that. Now let's tell our list of what a merchant power plant is. Because I don't know what it is. A merchant power plant is a power plant that will come in and generate electricity and shift electricity all over the United States, could ship it to Mexico if they wanted. So it has nothing to do with Louisiana. Not much. So it will create about nine jobs, about four of them probably would maybe, if we're lucky, get them from Louisiana. But they generate a lot of electricity and so, but they use a lot of water. And they were going to stick a hole in the ground and use about eight and nine million gallons of water a day right out of the aquifer. And the farmers were upset that they were going to use the water up and up again to research it and found out gosh, I mean they're going to create this many jobs. They're going to use our grids. Now the grids for the listeners is the powered grids going across. And maybe they had a blackout northeastern America watch all that go out. Yeah. Well, they were going to use our grids to ship this electricity all over the United States. Who's going to pay for it? Using our resources. Yeah. In essence, paying for it. Yeah. 13 of these people that had applied for these power plants, one in Boca-Losa, one up in the peach orchards in Rustin and so, I began to do research and found out that, look, these things are not that great for Louisiana. If we need to, if we need to electricity, yeah. But why didn't they locate it on the chapel I river, or the Mississippi river, or some worse than a stick in the hole in the ground to get off of them? Well, we found out that we didn't have any water policy. Anybody from Texas to Mulverg, just stick a hole in the ground to take our water back. San Antonio wants our water. They offered to Sabine River authority up there about $400 million for what our hive of the water going in the Gulf of Mexico through the Sabine River. They need water over there in Texas. So we were just throwing it away, letting a good time row. So I began to travel the state, tell people we need to have a water policy and people listen and we do have a water down, water policy. But at least we got it started. It was too big a deal for the last few governors to handle it because why would you not charge for a resource like that, and people don't, you know, it's something that traditionally they've got for free and water is, you know, it's something that you have a piece of land to water under it's yours, just like the all under it's yours and we didn't, and we didn't, people do have some people that charge right here in Baton Rouge, you have some of the best water in the world. It's probably a thousand years old, the water here in the aquifers here, where the problem was that in North Louisiana, where they had started, they were beginning to hit saltwater, you wonder, why did saltwater have North Louisiana? It's not near the Gulf of Mexico, well, I guess the main reasons, according to geologists, they just started using the water about a million years too quick because the water hadn't turned to saltwater, hadn't turned to sweetwater, they've got some serious problems in North Louisiana. We don't do something within 10 or 15 years, they're going to start hitting more and more saltwater, and they've got to start conserving, and I want to say something right here, the biggest industry in Los Louisiana was stone container in Jones, Jonesboro, and they are good corporate citizens, they were using some 15 million gallons of water a day, they're down to about 7 million gallons a day because of Michael went around the state and asked him to do this. James Davidson, a entrepreneur in Rustin who built Squires Creek golf course, when we did this, he went out there and built ponds to water all the golf courses he's using that and using sewage water. So we've come along with water, conservative, that was a good thing that we did, and I'm glad I had a part in that, traveling the state, it might expense to do that, so that was a big issue with us, and it brought out for the next few years. Is understanding that you've been appointed as the chairman of the insurance committee? Yeah, I have. I have a new president in the sense, would you take me off environmental quality, I had two good bills in four years, I had to water, and I had to what we call a corbella bill, I don't want to go into that, that's another bill over Southwest Louisiana. But if you'd like watching Grace grow as a wonderful committee, but I got tired of that, I want more action, I wanted to go to some place where I could do something, and I'm interested in a terrible problem in leisure, and they wanted to put somebody knows nothing about interest, but I'm going to learn, but you've got to go into sometimes with someone that doesn't know a lot about it, and I said in their ways, you know that's how you change. Because you're open to being educated. Open to be educated. We've had a seminar already on insurance, brought in all the people that do the insurance, you said, maybe like the what's talked, what's the in-house, I've got to hear their side of the story first, is why we have the problem we have. The main thing we have is already I found out it's competition. We've got to get more competition here, we've got to get more insurance companies to come here. We've got to do something about coastal erosion, you say, well what's that got to do with it? I was about to say, well, let me tell you something, okay, that we lose all the barrier islands, all the coastal islands, everything, the hurricane comes in. The wind blows, the wind blows as far north as Alexandria. Okay, that's a state problem, it's not just a local problem, I'm learning a lot about insurance. We've got to do something about fraud, especially in New Orleans, I'm on the name of Spain to Spain. They've got a lot of fraud down there, they've seen a lot of cars, they're doing a lot of things. That makes everybody's insurance go up. We don't put some teeth in those fraud laws, get the district attorneys another to prosecute what we put in and get the judges to get some sentences, and let people know if they fraud, do some fraud in insurance, you're driving my insurance up, your insurance up, all your family's insurance and people's insurance up, and I'm going to put some teeth in those fraud laws. We're very glad to have you on the show, and I look forward to your head and up that committee. Thank you for being with us.