Nick Gosnell: Michael Murphy is running for Kansas State Senate District 34. He'll be on your ballot assuming that you are a Republican. He's in the Republican primary this the 6th of August, so less than a week away. We wanted to get him in to talk to us a little bit. Good morning, Mike.
Mike Murphy: Good morning, Nick.
Nick Gosnell: All right, so why are you running for State Senate this time around?
Mike Murphy: Well, I was approached by a number of people to run. I was comfortable with where I was as a representative. I'd served two terms there. I felt like it was maybe the right thing for me to do. We prayed about it. We talked about it with my wife. I knew that it would be a battle because I knew that I would have an opponent. When I filed, nobody else had filed, but I assumed that somebody else would. And I've got a good relationship, of course, with many House members. And over the last few years, I've built a good relationship with some senators, and I've been able to get some things accomplished. And so I just felt like it would be a good move for me.
Nick Gosnell: What's the most important issue to you that the state needs to address?
Mike Murphy: Well, we've got a lot of issues going on. Taxes are an issue. We've tried to lower taxes. Several things got vetoed. Spending is a real problem. Those right there, and I would say property taxes in particular. But the neat thing is we get asked about property taxes a lot. We really only control about 20% of that. I mean, 20 mills of that. The rest of it is local. And so when you're looking at a solution to that, you need to look a little closer to home.
Nick Gosnell: Yeah. Property taxes are really, to a great degree, have to do with local government. And the 20 mills, just to make a point for people, because I think if I've said it once, I've said it a dozen times, that's part of that school funding mix. And because of the legal issues the state had over the last several years, if you cut that, you have to backfill the money someplace or somebody is going to sue. That's just the way school finance has worked here in Kansas for the last 30 plus years.
Mike Murphy: Right. And when we looked at one of our tax bills, we did look at cutting that, but part of that legislation was that any shortfall would be backfilled from general funds. So that was not going to affect schools in that sense.
Nick Gosnell: All right. Now, what are the core functions of government that the state does need to fund?
Mike Murphy: Well, certainly education is one. Yeah. Your basic services, roads, bridges, things like that. We tend to look to government to provide things for us, when in reality, government was set up to protect rights. And so when we look at a situation like this, the more and more that we do for people, the more and more it takes from those who are paying. And so it just ends up with a situation, for instance, our K-12 through higher education is 62% of our budget. Medicaid is 23% of our budget. We're at 85%. Now those are technically things that you would consider the third rail, the things that you can't touch, which leaves us 15% to work with. I would back up to what they tend to call constitutional funding of schools. The Supreme Court never had the authority to do that. And the fact that the legislature allowed them to do it, put us in the situation we're in now.
Nick Gosnell: All right. What are the things the state should get out of the business of doing? Is there anything that you say, you know what, why are we doing this at all?
Mike Murphy: Well, there's probably quite a bit as far as that's kind of a question that kind of catches me off guard as far as I never get asked about that. I always get asked about what more can you do? What more can you do? And so there's an awful lot of things that government gets into. Once again, government's job is to protect rights. And I don't care what level you're at, you know, city, city government, county government, state government, federal government, the job, the core job is to protect our rights. And so those basic, excuse me, those basic things that government has to do, we obviously can't build our own roads and bridges. You know, we obviously can't all build our own school, although a lot of people do homeschool and they solve that problem. So there's things that we need to start kind of thinking outside the box for things, because we just keep doing the same thing over and over and hoping it's going to work out. And I think that's the definition of insanity.
Nick Gosnell: Mike Murphy, he is running for Kansas Senate District 34, and he's on your ballots on the Republican side for August the 6th. So Mike, I asked this of Bob Fee earlier this morning, but I asked him if there was a way to restructure the tax system to end up with a similar amount of revenue, maybe not the same, and end up with a different way to handle that. And I think you actually had some legislation in that regard, right?
Mike Murphy: Well, I had a bill that I never filed it, but I had a lot of research done and we did have the bill written. Wasn't ready for, you know, filing it would have been pointless at that, you know, because it wasn't going to go anywhere. What I wanted to do is start the research and start the process. Yeah, there's, once again, thinking outside the box, what creates our tax problems and why we have such a burden on us is there's so many people get a free ride. And so you've got this public-private partnership where legislators and lobbyists work together and they carve out these special deals for certain groups. And I don't care, you know, some of them are nonprofits, some of them are not. The bottom line is they all, when we've got to have revenue, we have to have a certain amount of revenue. And so if you shrink the number of people that are paying, then the amount that each person pays is more. And so the idea being, and I don't know if anybody, you know, listening has heard about the fair tax at a national level, but essentially what I would like to see at the state level is a fair tax. And what that does is that use a consumption tax to replace all the other taxes. So when you buy something, you pay it. It, once again, the negotiation of how that works out and how much that needs to be in Nebraska, they looked at it, it was seven and a half percent and it replaced all their other taxes. Now, then you have people though that, that are not paying tax now and they scream. And the nice thing about it is that everybody else pays less. And so in the end, it's the fairest way to tax. And yet, by the way, our government works in the way the situation is with the super PACs and all like that. They usually control that and prevent that from moving forward.
Nick Gosnell: Well, and a part of the issue with something like that is that the, the people, to a certain degree, and I'm, I'm, I'm getting a little off topic here and I'm going to try to get back to it, but to a certain degree it, it's, it's just change is hard for people regardless of what it is.
Mike Murphy: Yes. You get used to the status quo and you don't know what's around the corner. And so you, you, you think, you know, we, we think back when we were little kids, you know, what was under our bed? Nothing. What was in our closet? Nothing. But in our mind, there was this, there was this boogeyman, you know, that we, we wanted to avoid, you know, so, and that's what we get here. And so then that, that fear is used to control people and legislators and how they, how they make their decisions.
Nick Gosnell: All right. So let's talk about Medicaid expansion, kind of in that vein. The boogeyman on this has been rural hospitals will close if you don't expand Medicaid. What do you think about the issue generally?
Mike Murphy: Well, if you think back in 2009, 2010, before the Affordable Care Act, what were we told? We're going to save, every family is going to save $2,500. Your, your, your premiums are going to go down and everything's going to be rosy. Is that what happened? No, they lied to us then and they're lying to us now. Every state that has gone to Medicaid expansion, the people that signed up is somewhere between two and four times what was projected. The cost overrun is crazy. Another thing people don't understand is that Medicaid pays about 30% of what, what private insurance pays. So if people have private insurance and they ended up on, on Medicaid expansion, which by the way, if you have private coverage and qualify for Medicaid expansion, you're kicked off your private coverage and you're forced onto Medicaid. So then you go into the doctor, the hospital, and they get 30% instead of a hundred percent. So I, I don't see this as a, as a, as a solution. The one thing that I did this last year, I fought against my leadership and I fought against the big pharma lobby groups for the 340B drug plan. This is a federal plan that guarantees low prices for these people, for Medicare, Medicaid, and people who are, you know, underprivileged and such. And many of the pharmaceutical companies were reneging on that deal and not, and not offering that price to a lot of the pharmacies. So this was legislation that had been passed in other states and had been upheld by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. So I got it through. I worked across the aisle and we had a number of Republicans and Democrats together. We got that, we got that passed. We fought off a poison pill in the, in the, in the omnibus. And in the end, it's part of our, part of our budget process. And so now that has been, that has been assured for people. I had rural hospitals tell me they've, this is far more important to them and makes them far more solvent than Medicaid expansion ever would.
Nick Gosnell: All right. And one other note of something that you accomplished, or at least got, got in the conversation in the legislature was discussing monetary policy at the state level and, and ways to accomplish that.
Mike Murphy: You know, you're talking about the ESG.
Nick Gosnell: And the gold standard.
Mike Murphy: Yeah. The, the ESG thing, we, we got partway there. Once again, Super PACs fought that off and we had it to where it did not affect Kansas companies and banks. It was only going to protect Kansas companies, banks, and people. And yet they, they fought it off. For what reason? They were, they're not protecting Kansans or Kansas businesses. They were, you know, protecting outside interests. The gold and silver is an interesting concept. We would have had a depository here in Kansas and I haven't given up on this. We will, you know, continue forward to this next year when I'm back in the Senate. And we'll, Kansas will have a gold depository. It's a trend. There's technology where they can make that truly transactional. People can put their own money in there in actual gold. It's not paper, actual gold and silver, and use a debit card to spend it. And this gives us an option in the sense of a, like if the Fed comes out with a CBDC or, you know, if our dollar collapses or whatever like that, it gives Kansas an option.
Nick Gosnell: Any particular place you want that to be? I'm thinking there's a bunch of caves underneath Hutchinson. That would be a great place for a gold depository.
Mike Murphy: It could be.
Nick Gosnell: Mike Murphy with us here. He's running for Kansas Senate District 34 on the Republican ballot on August 6th.