Donald Rainwater: My Plan Is That We Basically Eliminate Property Taxes
Libertarian candidate for Governor of Indiana Donald Rainwater joined the Kendall & Casey Show to talk about his policies if elected this fall.
The full hour interview (below) focused on 3 major points: Property Taxes, Gas Taxes and Leap.
Rainwater on Property Taxes:
When I heard your show on Friday (Braun’s appearance) and I heard that things were going to be reset back to 2021 levels, my first thought was what if I built my house in 2022? What does that mean? Then you know the next thing when I look at the documented part of the plan. I noticed that if you own a home and your next-door neighbor owns the almost exact same home in a lot of developments… and you’re 35-year-old couple and the people next door are 35 years old and they have a child at home, and you don’t, you pay more property tax than they do… We have someone running for governor who wants to treat Hoosiers differently based on certain criteria. To me, it was very similar to, well, let’s close down some small businesses, and let others stay open. It’s not the kind of thing all Hoosiers deserve. The same property tax plan and mine would apply to every Hoosier…What we what we have is a a group of people. Who? Govern by segregating Hoosiers into subgroups. And I believe that that’s both inappropriate and dangerous. my plan is that we basically eliminate property taxes. We abolish the property tax, replace it with a 7% sales tax on a real estate transaction where you can either pay 7% of the purchase price at closing or you can escrow it 1% of the purchase price per year for seven years. Once you’ve paid the 7%, you’re done.
Rainwater on Property Taxes:
So let’s talk about the gas tax. We have one of the highest gas taxes in the entire nation. We have two gas taxes. We have a use tax or sales tax, and then we have an excise tax piled on top of that. I know it’s not the classical definition of double taxation, but I consider it double taxation. The first thing I would do is ask the General Assembly to first of all repeal the 2017 as you call it, largest tax increase in the history of the state of Indiana, and then I would work on. Abolishing the excise tax on gasoline altogether, 1 tax per item. That’s all we should have in the state of Indiana.
Rob Kendall:
So, the argument is going to be, how do you do roads then?
Rainwater:
How do you do roads now? Well, I mean, they’re using the gas, or at least they tell us I love the I love the verb they’re using, right, the gas tax once again, the person I heard in here on Friday said government shouldn’t spend more than it takes in, right. So what they’ve done and if you really look at things closely and with a. An eye for the truth, you’ll see that. There’s a lot of money spent on not a lot of work. Yeah, our, I’m a professional project manager and I will tell you that one of the biggest wastes of taxpayer dollars in the state of Indiana is bad project management, really bad vendor management. And what we need to do is. We need to get in there and we need to start holding vendors accountable for doing projects on time and on budget. This practice of lowballing a contract and before the ink dries start. Submitting change requests that expand the project past the initial time and cost has to stop. It is an abuse of the citizens of the state of Indiana and our roads aren’t getting fixed today. Why don’t we you know here again If there’s a if somebody’s overweight, and I speak from experience though, you look like you’re trying, I’m trying, but you know, if somebody is overweight, you got to cut their intake.
Rainwater on LEAP and the IEDC:
I think the, the first thing that you have to do is get all of the facts. Here again, our government does a tremendous job of hiding the truth. I by the way, the clip that they always play of you, Casey, before you guys come back that says, “My government wouldn’t lie to me, would they?” My answer to you is every freaking day. I just want all of your listeners to know that assuming that government is my friend was our first mistake. Government is, if you’ve ever, and I’ve used this I think before on the show Government, if you’ve ever seen the movie with Steve McQueen, The BLOB. Government consumes people and the more it consumes, the bigger it gets, and the bigger it gets it more it means to consume people. Government is designed in its current. Makeup to create dependency and to keep that dependency going. So, they don’t want you to be free. They don’t want you to be independent. They don’t want you to take personal responsibility. They want you to produce for their benefit… Governor Daniels viewpoint was that we needed to have a way to help raise. Wages in Indiana. My, my problem with that is Democrats want to raise the minimum wage. Republicans want to bring in companies from outside that force Hoosier small business owners to raise their wage. And what has really happened, it’s put who’s your small business owners and franchisees out of business. We actually have fewer small business owners, individual franchisees, in Indiana today than we had a decade ago and it’s because we are too hyper focused on bringing in new jobs instead of creating an environment where small business owners and Hoosier entrepreneurs can flourish and create the jobs on their own. You will never hear me as governor of the state of Indiana say I created new jobs. Government does not create jobs. Individual private businesses create jobs. Government just overregulates things into oblivion.
Rob Kendall:
I got the impression, you can correct me if I’m wrong, that you believe that the role of the IEDC is to help with entrepreneurship in Indiana and small business owners?
Rainwater:
Well, I believe that’s what it should be. Believe that the only economic development that government should be involved in is providing an opportunity for all comers to have. That opportunity to create and build. A business here in the state of Indiana. I believe that what we have today is a situation where government again, and, and it’s an old phrase that people are probably tired of hearing, but government picks winners and losers. And unfortunately, what government should be doing is safeguarding everyone’s unalienable rights. One of the things that I think is really important is the difference between Jefferson saying that we had the right to happiness and the right to pursue happiness. I believe that that that phrase, the pursuit of happiness, can apply to things like healthcare. We have the right to pursue healthcare. And when government gets in the way, they’re infringing on our rights. We have the right to pursue business ownership. And when government gets in the way. It’s infringing on our rights and when government gives one business a 35- or 50-year use tax exemption but doesn’t give it to somebody else, to me that’s government infringing on our rights.
Casey Daniels:
I want to go back to the LEAP project that’s going on because a lot of people have big concerns about that and what role do you think that the government should play in supporting or expanding this project and everybody keeps going back to “we don’t have enough water here in central Indiana and eventually something’s going to need to be done about that.”
Rainwater:
That’s a great question, right. And you know, here’s is a tremendous example of where the current government mindset is. Throw us into a crisis situation because the current government mindset is we’re going to do this and we’re going to collect enough taxes to do it, and we don’t care who gets hurt in the process and government should never benefit Rob, by hurting Casey.And what we’ve seen with the LEAP project is somebody is getting the government’s help, and it’s hurting thousands of Hoosiers and that’s wrong. So, what we need is for government to do its constitutional job, which is to safeguard everyone’s individual rights, which means we don’t steal water from Tippecanoe County to give it to Boone County. We figure out what is the right way to produce the water that the people in Boone County need, and then we partner with the corporate entities who want to consume that water to create that new water source. And if we can’t do that? Then we tell everybody we’re sorry, this isn’t going to work, and we pack it up and go home… In other words, private business, private industry needs to provide for itself, and not ask the citizens of the state of Indiana to do things for it that it can and should do for itself.
Listen to the discussion in its entirety here:
Donald Rainwater Interview 1 hour into the full show:
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