Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's nothing but controversy and scandal, and we welcome on here,
someone who's been sadly pretty free of that during his
time as Nebraska's governor and senator, has not given us
a lot of really titillating things to talk about from
his own life. But Senator Pete Ricketts joined us.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
You say, sadly, sadly.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Well, it'd be more fun. Yeah, it'd be more fun
if you were caught up in scandal after scandal. Senator
Pete Ricketts is here. Good morning, Senator.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Well, good morning, thanks for having me on. But I've
been trying to avoid that stuff. I think let other
people do that. How about let other people do scandal.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Well, many of us know that there's a lot there.
It just hasn't been uncovered yet, and I'm too polite
to do it. So instead, we'll talk about some of
the the rest of this stuff here before we get
to some of the rest of that here. A lot
of this has to do with the scandal that some
people say is present in this big, beautiful bill that
you got. Some people saying this is going to be
(00:57):
throwing Nebraskans off of their health insurance. They're going to
be denied healthcare families are going to be denied. Healthcare
families are already being ripped apart by Ice and all
the rest of it. What do you make of this
bill that you've voted for and in many parts of
it are already law of the land. We still have
a year, year and a half two years until most
(01:19):
of this is implemented the big beautiful bill. Is this
a win for Nebraska?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
This is a fantastic bill. Is rare that you get
an opportunity to be able to vote for something and
it's going to have a generational impact to put the
country back on the right course of growth. This bill
really does that. So first of all, when we're talking
about families, the first thing it does is avoid a
twenty four hundred dollars tax increase in your average Nebraska family.
(01:44):
So that's what would have happened if we didn't pass
this bill, because your taxes would have gone up, and
that's what Democrats wanted. They wanted your taxes to go up.
That's why they didn't want to pass this bill because
Democrats love taxes. So it's the first thing that does
so it also will benefit the tax breaks in this
will actually benefit people making fifty thousand dollars or less
(02:04):
because you're going to have the no tax on tips. Right,
your first twenty five thousand dollars in tip income will
be tax free. Your first twelve thousand, five hundred overtime
right because there's no tax on overtime. So that's going
to benefit to people who are working hard right there.
So that's part of also how we're going to do it.
The Council Economic Advisors figures that this will increase family
(02:25):
incomes take home pay like four thousand to seven thousand dollars,
So you throw another two thousand dollars on tax and
they're twenty four hundred dollars on taxes. Now you see
people's take home pay really go up, and that's going
to be huge form the resk of families. In addition,
if we hadn't done this, the child tax credit would
have dropped from two thousand to one thousand dollars, so
that gets cut half. Instead, it's going up to twenty
(02:47):
two hundred, so it's actually going up. Your standard deduction
would have got cut, I mean like just all this
sort of stuff where people would have paid more taxes. Right,
So this is really a good bill to be able
to help families. We're taking the deduction for dependent care
from five thousand bucks after seventy five hundred bucks, so
that's a good thing for families. I mean, like, there's
all sorts of things that are going to be really
(03:08):
really good for seniors. We're gonna give you a bonus
deduction of six thousand bucks, so that's going to help
our seniors make ends meet, you know, after getting done
with four years of Biden inflation. That's a good thing.
And then just this whole stuff about what we're doing
to medicaid to reform it and strengthen it. Medi Kaid
is supposed to be about kids elderly to disabled. What
(03:29):
we're saying is, look, if you're deceased, you can't be
on it. That's pretty common sense. We're going to saying
if you're trying to collect in two states, you can't
do that. And we think there's like maybe a couple
million people doing that right now, so we were thinking, no,
you can't do that either. You can only collect in
one state. And we're also saying, hey, look, if you're
able bodied without young kids at home, and you're getting
(03:51):
this low cost government insurance, you should have to do
something for it, just like we do for the you know,
Temporary Assistance for Needy Family program that Bill Clinton did
back in the nineties. You got to do something. We're
going to ask you to work twenty hours a week,
volunteer in your community, twenty hours a week, go to
school part time, something like that, just to be engaged
in community to this low costomer insurance. I don't think
that's too much to ask, and a lot of those
(04:13):
things are awesome.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Those work and volunteer requirements don't even take effect for
several months from now, so people have a chance to
kind of get their stuff in order if they think
that they're going to be impacted by this. But I
think that there are those who on the other side
of the political spectrum who know all that. Senator, why
do people keep saying, Well, people are going to lose
(04:34):
their healthcare, Families are going to be torn apart, kids
are going to go hungry. They're going to flood the
food banks, and the food banks are not going to
be able to keep everyone supplied with food, and people
are going to die in the hungry in the streets.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
The Democrats wanted to raise your taxes. They want to
distract from the fact they want to take more of
your money and give it to the government. And so
they're making up all this other stuff that is simply
not going to be true about medicaid. It's just the
politics of fear. This is something the Democrats do all
the time. But that's why, you know, Hey, look we
passed the bill. We got to go out and talk
about it. And so I'm going to be talking about
(05:07):
this bill for months because there's so much good stuff
in this bill. We're just hitting on some of the stuff,
but there's so much other stuff. There's great stuff for agriculture.
There's great stuff for defending our country. There's great stuff
for securing our border. There's great stuff for releasing our
energy potential in this country. There's just a lot in
this bill to be able to make this country strong.
It's really going to be, like I said, a generational impact,
(05:30):
pushed on the right path.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Senator Pete rickets with us here on news radio eleven
ten kfab. There are those who say that this is
all being led by a president who should be led
in handcuffs to jail because of his role in what
Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and then you got those
to say, yeah, it's the former president Barack Obama that
should be handcuffed and sent to jail for treason for
(05:53):
trying to manipulate the twenty sixteen election. What do you
make of all of these claims, Senator, with.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Regard to the most recent ones, with regard to what
the CIA is and what Telsa Gabbert's releasing and that
sort of thing. Look, this, obviously it ought to be investigated.
But if Obama was directing the CIA to get involved
in our elections, that's something that happens like in banana republics,
that needs to be I mean, like, if that actually happened,
(06:20):
that's a bigger scandal than Watergate, So we need I
would I would recommend if somebody would, if the administration's
asking my advice, the Justice Department needs to investigate, theyould
probably get an independent counsel and have somebody really vet
to see if there's a there there. It looks at
the very least, we know that the CID didn't even
follow their own procedures and didn't do a good job
(06:40):
with us. The Steele dossier, which we know is was
totally faked, so and they use that as a basis
for making some of these claims. So we know that
the CIA already didn't do their job with a Steele dossier,
but we really need to investigate further to find out
what's going on here, and I think you should have
an independent counsel on that. And then with regards to
the Epstein stuff, Look, transparency is always important, right, We
(07:02):
should always have transparency. We've got a lot of things
we've got to deal with, and frankly, my job here
in the US Senate is to work on the things
that are going to make this country stronger, like this
one big beautiful bill, or deterring China from you know,
trying to replace US as the world superpower here and
getting US into a war or something like that. So
(07:23):
that's the kind of stuff I'm focused on out here
in DC.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Are there Republicans who want to see President or President
Trump removed from office brought down by this Epstein scandal.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I don't know of anybody in the Senate or the
House like that. Now, there's something I can't say that
I was the one hundred percent reasons, But I got
to tell you, go, look at what this president has
done in just the first few months. In office right,
whether you're talking about this one big, beautiful bill which
is gonna be fantastic for kicking off growth just like
he did in his first administration. Remember the first three
(07:57):
years of the first Trump administration, we saw record number
of Americans getting back into the workplace. We saw record
low unemployment for African Americans, low unemployment for Hispanics. Like
just so much. I mean, like there was so much
economic activity that this country was humming. And then you
look at what he's done since he's got an office
this time with regard to international He's gotten Indian Pakistan
(08:19):
to de escalate. He's gotten you know, a rod to
start coming back to the table maybe talking about how
we get rid of their nuclear program. He's got Israel
and Hamas talking about how they can de escalate in guys.
I mean, this president truly wants peace. He's trying to
get Putin to the table. Putin doesn't want to be there.
So now he's like, Okay, well we're gonna have to
(08:39):
get tougher with Putin. He is trying to get this
world back on some stable footing that, frankly, because of
Biden's weak governance, got out of control when you have
a weak president, bad actors like Putin or Hamas or
the Houthis or Iran or China, they're going to act up.
And when you have a strong president, they start getting
(09:00):
back and lining. And that's what this president's been doing
and working on getting this country back onto a path
of really strong growth. President Trump has just set us
on the right path here. We got more work to do,
but so far, you look at the first six months,
this has been a pretty incredible period of getting this
country back on track.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
What do you see happening in the next six months.
I mean, it's been one thing after another here.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
I don't know. I gotta tell you, guy, it's like
we're living dog years here. It's only been six months,
but it seems like a lot longer than that. Yeah.
You know, the president clearly spent four years thinking about
what he would do when he got re elected, and
now he is busy working on those plans, whether it's
you know, getting the tax cuts extended or getting our
trade deals squared away. He is working hard to get
(09:50):
this country on a strong economic footing so that American
families don't see the inflation we saw the last four years.
That we see the growth in the job oportunities. We
see take home pay go up again, go back to
his first administration. I think take home pay went up
like four thousand dollars for your average American family, right.
And we see we saw in Nebraska and the Trump
(10:11):
administration that we were able to, you know, grow manufacturing jobs,
that we were able to you know, trade our agricultural
products overseas because he did a good job opening up
those markets. So this is what he's going to be
doing yet here in the second term is get all
this squared away and make sure people understand that America
is the greatest country in the world and we expect
(10:31):
to be treated that way.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Allowed you to get back to it, Senator, thank you
so much for all the time this morning.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Great Thanks a lot, Scott. I appreciate you having me
on
It's nothing but controversy and scandal, and we welcome on here,
someone who's been sadly pretty free of that during his
time as Nebraska's governor and senator, has not given us
a lot of really titillating things to talk about from
his own life. But Senator Pete Ricketts joined us.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
You say, sadly, sadly.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Well, it'd be more fun. Yeah, it'd be more fun
if you were caught up in scandal after scandal. Senator
Pete Ricketts is here. Good morning, Senator.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Well, good morning, thanks for having me on. But I've
been trying to avoid that stuff. I think let other
people do that. How about let other people do scandal.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Well, many of us know that there's a lot there.
It just hasn't been uncovered yet, and I'm too polite
to do it. So instead, we'll talk about some of
the the rest of this stuff here before we get
to some of the rest of that here. A lot
of this has to do with the scandal that some
people say is present in this big, beautiful bill that
you got. Some people saying this is going to be
(00:57):
throwing Nebraskans off of their health insurance. They're going to
be denied healthcare families are going to be denied. Healthcare
families are already being ripped apart by Ice and all
the rest of it. What do you make of this
bill that you've voted for and in many parts of
it are already law of the land. We still have
a year, year and a half two years until most
(01:19):
of this is implemented the big beautiful bill. Is this
a win for Nebraska?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
This is a fantastic bill. Is rare that you get
an opportunity to be able to vote for something and
it's going to have a generational impact to put the
country back on the right course of growth. This bill
really does that. So first of all, when we're talking
about families, the first thing it does is avoid a
twenty four hundred dollars tax increase in your average Nebraska family.
(01:44):
So that's what would have happened if we didn't pass
this bill, because your taxes would have gone up, and
that's what Democrats wanted. They wanted your taxes to go up.
That's why they didn't want to pass this bill because
Democrats love taxes. So it's the first thing that does
so it also will benefit the tax breaks in this
will actually benefit people making fifty thousand dollars or less
(02:04):
because you're going to have the no tax on tips. Right,
your first twenty five thousand dollars in tip income will
be tax free. Your first twelve thousand, five hundred overtime
right because there's no tax on overtime. So that's going
to benefit to people who are working hard right there.
So that's part of also how we're going to do it.
The Council Economic Advisors figures that this will increase family
(02:25):
incomes take home pay like four thousand to seven thousand dollars,
So you throw another two thousand dollars on tax and
they're twenty four hundred dollars on taxes. Now you see
people's take home pay really go up, and that's going
to be huge form the resk of families. In addition,
if we hadn't done this, the child tax credit would
have dropped from two thousand to one thousand dollars, so
that gets cut half. Instead, it's going up to twenty
(02:47):
two hundred, so it's actually going up. Your standard deduction
would have got cut, I mean like just all this
sort of stuff where people would have paid more taxes. Right,
So this is really a good bill to be able
to help families. We're taking the deduction for dependent care
from five thousand bucks after seventy five hundred bucks, so
that's a good thing for families. I mean, like, there's
all sorts of things that are going to be really
(03:08):
really good for seniors. We're gonna give you a bonus
deduction of six thousand bucks, so that's going to help
our seniors make ends meet, you know, after getting done
with four years of Biden inflation. That's a good thing.
And then just this whole stuff about what we're doing
to medicaid to reform it and strengthen it. Medi Kaid
is supposed to be about kids elderly to disabled. What
(03:29):
we're saying is, look, if you're deceased, you can't be
on it. That's pretty common sense. We're going to saying
if you're trying to collect in two states, you can't
do that. And we think there's like maybe a couple
million people doing that right now, so we were thinking, no,
you can't do that either. You can only collect in
one state. And we're also saying, hey, look, if you're
able bodied without young kids at home, and you're getting
(03:51):
this low cost government insurance, you should have to do
something for it, just like we do for the you know,
Temporary Assistance for Needy Family program that Bill Clinton did
back in the nineties. You got to do something. We're
going to ask you to work twenty hours a week,
volunteer in your community, twenty hours a week, go to
school part time, something like that, just to be engaged
in community to this low costomer insurance. I don't think
that's too much to ask, and a lot of those
(04:13):
things are awesome.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Those work and volunteer requirements don't even take effect for
several months from now, so people have a chance to
kind of get their stuff in order if they think
that they're going to be impacted by this. But I
think that there are those who on the other side
of the political spectrum who know all that. Senator, why
do people keep saying, Well, people are going to lose
(04:34):
their healthcare, Families are going to be torn apart, kids
are going to go hungry. They're going to flood the
food banks, and the food banks are not going to
be able to keep everyone supplied with food, and people
are going to die in the hungry in the streets.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
The Democrats wanted to raise your taxes. They want to
distract from the fact they want to take more of
your money and give it to the government. And so
they're making up all this other stuff that is simply
not going to be true about medicaid. It's just the
politics of fear. This is something the Democrats do all
the time. But that's why, you know, Hey, look we
passed the bill. We got to go out and talk
about it. And so I'm going to be talking about
(05:07):
this bill for months because there's so much good stuff
in this bill. We're just hitting on some of the stuff,
but there's so much other stuff. There's great stuff for agriculture.
There's great stuff for defending our country. There's great stuff
for securing our border. There's great stuff for releasing our
energy potential in this country. There's just a lot in
this bill to be able to make this country strong.
It's really going to be, like I said, a generational impact,
(05:30):
pushed on the right path.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Senator Pete rickets with us here on news radio eleven
ten kfab. There are those who say that this is
all being led by a president who should be led
in handcuffs to jail because of his role in what
Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and then you got those
to say, yeah, it's the former president Barack Obama that
should be handcuffed and sent to jail for treason for
(05:53):
trying to manipulate the twenty sixteen election. What do you
make of all of these claims, Senator, with.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Regard to the most recent ones, with regard to what
the CIA is and what Telsa Gabbert's releasing and that
sort of thing. Look, this, obviously it ought to be investigated.
But if Obama was directing the CIA to get involved
in our elections, that's something that happens like in banana republics,
that needs to be I mean, like, if that actually happened,
(06:20):
that's a bigger scandal than Watergate, So we need I
would I would recommend if somebody would, if the administration's
asking my advice, the Justice Department needs to investigate, theyould
probably get an independent counsel and have somebody really vet
to see if there's a there there. It looks at
the very least, we know that the CID didn't even
follow their own procedures and didn't do a good job
(06:40):
with us. The Steele dossier, which we know is was
totally faked, so and they use that as a basis
for making some of these claims. So we know that
the CIA already didn't do their job with a Steele dossier,
but we really need to investigate further to find out
what's going on here, and I think you should have
an independent counsel on that. And then with regards to
the Epstein stuff, Look, transparency is always important, right, We
(07:02):
should always have transparency. We've got a lot of things
we've got to deal with, and frankly, my job here
in the US Senate is to work on the things
that are going to make this country stronger, like this
one big beautiful bill, or deterring China from you know,
trying to replace US as the world superpower here and
getting US into a war or something like that. So
(07:23):
that's the kind of stuff I'm focused on out here
in DC.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Are there Republicans who want to see President or President
Trump removed from office brought down by this Epstein scandal.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I don't know of anybody in the Senate or the
House like that. Now, there's something I can't say that
I was the one hundred percent reasons, But I got
to tell you, go, look at what this president has
done in just the first few months. In office right,
whether you're talking about this one big, beautiful bill which
is gonna be fantastic for kicking off growth just like
he did in his first administration. Remember the first three
(07:57):
years of the first Trump administration, we saw record number
of Americans getting back into the workplace. We saw record
low unemployment for African Americans, low unemployment for Hispanics. Like
just so much. I mean, like there was so much
economic activity that this country was humming. And then you
look at what he's done since he's got an office
this time with regard to international He's gotten Indian Pakistan
(08:19):
to de escalate. He's gotten you know, a rod to
start coming back to the table maybe talking about how
we get rid of their nuclear program. He's got Israel
and Hamas talking about how they can de escalate in guys.
I mean, this president truly wants peace. He's trying to
get Putin to the table. Putin doesn't want to be there.
So now he's like, Okay, well we're gonna have to
(08:39):
get tougher with Putin. He is trying to get this
world back on some stable footing that, frankly, because of
Biden's weak governance, got out of control when you have
a weak president, bad actors like Putin or Hamas or
the Houthis or Iran or China, they're going to act up.
And when you have a strong president, they start getting
(09:00):
back and lining. And that's what this president's been doing
and working on getting this country back onto a path
of really strong growth. President Trump has just set us
on the right path here. We got more work to do,
but so far, you look at the first six months,
this has been a pretty incredible period of getting this
country back on track.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
What do you see happening in the next six months.
I mean, it's been one thing after another here.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
I don't know. I gotta tell you, guy, it's like
we're living dog years here. It's only been six months,
but it seems like a lot longer than that. Yeah.
You know, the president clearly spent four years thinking about
what he would do when he got re elected, and
now he is busy working on those plans, whether it's
you know, getting the tax cuts extended or getting our
trade deals squared away. He is working hard to get
(09:50):
this country on a strong economic footing so that American
families don't see the inflation we saw the last four years.
That we see the growth in the job oportunities. We
see take home pay go up again, go back to
his first administration. I think take home pay went up
like four thousand dollars for your average American family, right.
And we see we saw in Nebraska and the Trump
(10:11):
administration that we were able to, you know, grow manufacturing jobs,
that we were able to you know, trade our agricultural
products overseas because he did a good job opening up
those markets. So this is what he's going to be
doing yet here in the second term is get all
this squared away and make sure people understand that America
is the greatest country in the world and we expect
(10:31):
to be treated that way.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Allowed you to get back to it, Senator, thank you
so much for all the time this morning.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Great Thanks a lot, Scott. I appreciate you having me
on
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