Continuing from Part 1 of my interview with Eric Johnson, in this post we see the Senator’s comments on the Nuclear Power Financing Act, ‘Super Speeder’ and Trauma Care, re-creating Milton County, tax evading legislators, and tax reform in general. The full audio and transcript of this interview is available at the end of this post.
Regarding the Nuclear Power Financing Act, SB 31, (audio) Senator Johnson defended it saying “You don’t pay cash for your car or your college education, you save up. What 31 was doing was allowing them to prebill the numbers rather than financing the engineering and permitting which is in the tens of millions of dollars and several years worth of work that will hold down the ultimate cost of the plant and the cost to consumers. It ramps the cost of the nuclear plant up slower than if you go and have to get it all at once. They showed all the charts and convinced the General Assembly in a bipartisan manner on a very complicated issue in how you finance nuclear power plants. Most everybody is for – they say they’re for nuclear power. Well, they were given an opportunity to say whether you were for nuclear power or not. The only people that 31 really does not help are the people that are going to pay the additional costs of the tack on their utility rates who will either die or move out of the state before the plant is built. I don’t know what that is, five or six years, but at some point there will be a group of people that will not benefit but overwhelmingly Georgia and most Georgians will benefit from that action“.
Regarding one of the criticisms from the blogging community that this decision is actually the Public Standards Commission’s Constitutional duty, Senator Johnson said “of course the PSC – after the session – did what we knew all along they were going to do was approve it. All we did was give the financing people in New York or wherever they are confidence that another PSC won’t come along and change it. … the PSC can change it. And of course the Legislature can change it, but it would be a lot tougher to do. The reason that we had to move faster than the PSC was it didn’t have to go through one side. I mean, you can’t pass a bill, the PSC was going to make their decision 4 or 5 days before the end of the session and by then, the bill has to be there. We assumed it would go to a conference committee and it didn’t need to, but that’s why we had to move faster than the PSC because we couldn’t wait and then pass the bill after they did it“.
On ‘Super Speeder’, HB 160, and trauma care (audio), the Senator said “Trauma is one of the issues that – I started the whole trauma debate. I did the first study committee, and then when the duties of Pro-Tem were so heavy I found out Cecil Staton was big on that issue, so he carried – he created the Trauma Commission and is sort of taking the lead. But I started the trauma debate, and I’ll come back to Super Speeder. As you know, as a good Libertarian, so much of health care is just cost shifting. One of the most expensive cost shifting is in the ER. They’re getting killed so they’re charging more for private pay, more for insurance, more for everybody else to cover that. In my mind, trauma is a legitimate statewide responsibility. No matter how rich you are, no matter how good your private insurance is, you can’t afford an ambulance showing up with the jaws of life on I-75 to rip you out, a helicopter landing and taking you to Macon, a plastic surgeon at four in the morning to operate on you for six hours. There’s nobody that can pay that. So its legitimate to say we as a State are going to help fund a trauma system. If that is your argument, you may disagree with that, that’s my argument, if trauma is a legitimate function of a community, then we have to come up with a way that puts some sort of designated permanent stream of money. The real cost of trauma isn’t in the hospital facility, it is in the doctors that are on call 24/7 and have to leave their private practice, have to be there within 30 minutes, and they may have 12 hours worth of private pay patients and all of a sudden they’re in the hospital for three or four hours fixing somebody. That’s the real cost of trauma is the contracts that the doctors charge to be there, which is another issue we can do tax credits or something for them. So I believe it’s a legitimate thing and I believe most Georgians would agree with that. Cars are 75% of the cost of trauma, so something that focuses on cars – super speeder was the Governor’s proposal. I’m not thrilled about it, I prefer to let everybody vote on a $10 tag, but I voted, and I think it will pass and it’s the cheapest health insurance you can buy, 10 bucks. Y’all down here are in the worst shape of anybody in the State with a lack of trauma and you or your wife or your children could be in a bad car wreck, so that’s why I voted for it.”
When asked about his bill to essentially allow the re-creation of Milton County in northern Fulton County (audio), Senator Johnson said “What that proposal says is if you previously were a county, you can be re-created. Fulton was actually three counties, so there is a – I can’t remember the name – Milton was North Fulton, but there was one in South Fulton and I forgot the name of it. So you could create a South Fulton county. I waded into that partly because local government is smaller government. Fulton is huge. Fulton is bigger than seven states. It takes two hours to drive from one end to the other, and it is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. I don’t know whether Milton, recreating a county, is the right decision, but I did make a change on my version from the House version which allows them to contract out services so that they wouldn’t have to have a new DA, and a new court system and a new Sheriff’s office. They could actually contract with a city for services, for jail services. If I were starting government from the beginning, I wouldn’t require all those constitutional offices and you can contract out for services that privatize things you want. So my version of the constitutional amendment would allow the new counties to do that.”
Regarding Senator Johnson’s Tax Evasion bill (audio) that caused some drama during the session, he said “Right now the Constitution in the State of Georgia says that you can be removed from office for failure of paying your taxes after final adjudication, the final court decision. Well, there’s very few tax cases go to court, if you go to court you can go all the way to the Supreme Court. All these people that are not paying their taxes will eventually be outed – but in 6 or 7 years. They know the process. They know the Department of Revenue, they know when the deadlines are, they can call up a buddy and say ‘hey, I put my check in the mail’ and all of a sudden that tax form goes to the bottom of the pile and three months later somebody finds out about it. Then they go to the court and they go in under their middle name instead of their first name so that the press doesn’t see it. So they’re hiding, but these aren’t people with tax problems. These are people that are refusing to file multiple years, and I just think that a Legislator that tells you to pay your taxes ought to be paying their taxes. It’s a handful of people and it’s bipartisan by the way. The law is now in effect, and we expect names to be named soon.”
As we were concluding the interview, Senator Johnson looked down at my notes (which I intentionally leave visible to both myself and the person I am interviewing) and saw one more issue he wanted to comment on: Tax Reform (audio), specifically his SR 453. On that, he said “It’s been 19 years since Georgia did a comprehensive study of their tax code and we can’t do FairTax state wide. I’ve talked to Linder about that. That’s going to have to be a national program. But I am confident that Georgia can make a tax code broader, simpler, fairer, and lower. And that we can do a better job of rewarding work and risk and not punishing it. I think we start – there’s been this tendency to sort of shove everything down to the local level. I think we start with the local governments and the state government working together. That doesn’t mean we agree at the end, but we all represent the same taxpayers. We all deal with traffic and education and water and infrastructure and all that. The taxpayers ultimately don’t care who they’re paying taxes to as long as long as the services they want are being delivered efficiently. I want to start with a top to bottom review with all taxing groups at the table. If you read that bill, I also made sure that I wanted tax payers on that committee, not just taxers so they could listen to the same thing and give input. So its not just ‘how much money can we get’, but you have real people sitting there listening to the revenue numbers and listening to the debate and can say ‘hey, I’m a small business guy and I like this’ or “that wouldn’t work”.”
[...] the issues for this short interview. The full audio and transcript are available at the bottom of Part 2 of this interview. On his most passionate issue, education (audio), when I asked Senator Johnson [...]
[...] candidates for the GOP nomination for GAGOV, however, told SWGAPolitics.com when we sat down for an interview earlier this summer that “It’s been 19 years since Georgia did a comprehensive study of [...]