Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed congressional correspondent for The Epoch Times, Mark Tapscott to the newsmaker line to comment upon the recent release of Biden’s budget proposal.
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line, our good friend for many years, Mark Tapscott, who’s now with The Epoch Times. Good morning, Mark.
Tapscott: How are you, Michael? What’s up?
Leahy: Well, I’m delighted to have you here. You are an Oklahoma State graduate. You and I have so much in common in terms of the people that we know.
Tapscott: Yes.
Leahy: You were in a Ph.D. program and they snapped you up to go to work for Conservative Digest back in the 80s. That’s when Richard Viguerie was running it way back then.
Tapscott: You know, actually that goes back even further and man, am I impressed with your memory? That was in 1976. Richard Viguerie owned it, and Lee Edwards was the editor who hired me.
Leahy: The great Lee Edwards. What a great guy he was. And then you, you went on to the Washington Times and of course I back about 14 years ago. I spent about a year working with Richard as the editor of the ConservativeHQ. And, uh, yeah, was, we’ll spend some time in Washington.
And you’ve been with Heritage Foundation, The Daily Caller News Foundation, and now you’re with The Epoch Times. But I wanna talk briefly. In July 2018, you became the founder and editor of Hill Faith: Good News for Congressional Aids. Just tell our audience briefly about the importance of that project.
Tapscott: There are two things in it. Number one, from a spiritual perspective Hill Faith, is about sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, uh, with individual congressional aids, not the senators or the representatives but the aids who work for them and who do 95 percent of the work on a daily basis, tremendously influential and frankly, a very hostile environment overall but one that desperately needs to hear the gospel. That’s the essence of it. And it’s an apologetics ministry and anybody who’s interested in finding out more can go to hillfaith.org. And we’ll tell you all about it.
Leahy: And it’s interesting, somebody who’s involved in Christian Apologetics, who is also an old school journalist in Washington D.C. now working for The Epoch Times, boy that is a small but persistent group, isn’t it?
Tapscott: I suspect I’m the only guy that would reach that would satisfy that description, especially when you add the fact that I also served for five years in the Reagan administration as a Reagan political appointee.
Leahy: Crom Carmichael has a question for you, Mark.
Carmichael: How many aids that you all, uh, your group talks with is preaching to the choir, and how many are, are open to, let’s just call it, conversion?
Tapscott: Let’s be realistic about, uh, the congressional staff. There are about 20,000 of them overall. Um, the majority of them come from, um, and it’s a pretty smart group. I mean, they come from the top schools in the country, and they tend to be mostly liberal.
They tend to have a very secular outlook, and in many cases, they’re very hostile to anything having to do with spiritual things and particularly with Christianity because they view it as, a manifestation of white privilege. So right off the top, you’re looking at probably 30 percent of the total who are believers or they come from a still very much Protestant Christianity kind of culture, mainly from the south.
Leahy: Exactly. Let me ask, uh, uh, and we wanna hear more about that at some future time, but tell us about this budget, this, this ridiculous tax and spend budget that, uh, the Biden administration’s dropped. What’s in it and where’s it gonna go?
Tapscott: Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve been in D.C. as a journalist, and the other things that we talked about, since 1976, Jimmy Carter, or actually Gerald Ford was president when I first came up here. And I’ve tracked budgets by every president since then.
And I have to tell you, the one that Biden unveiled yesterday is by far the worst from the standpoint of the negative impact it’s gonna have on millions and millions and millions of Americans. It is full of tax increases, literally trillions of dollars in new taxes. It projects the biggest spending in American history in one year, $6.7 trillion.
It adds over the next 10 years if it’s approved about $19 trillion more to the already record level of national debt that we have. It’s gonna spend $10 trillion in the next 10 years just paying the interest on the national debt, and that’s more than we will be able to spend on defense and Medicare.
Carmichael: Why didn’t Biden bring this budget a year ago when he had control of the House and the Senate and he could have passed it?
Tapscott: Well, you know, we were still, and that’s one of the interesting things. That’s a really good question. This budget, if, you know, if it’s approved and it won’t be, it’s dead on arrival. But if it were approved, um, the, the annual spending would be $6.9 trillion. And that’s higher than it was; it’s about 55 percent higher than it was in 2020. This is a massive spending and taxing explosion that Biden is proposing.
Carmichael: My answer to my own question is that this budget is not a serious budget. It’s a political tool.
Tapscott: Oh, absolutely.
Carmichael: I don’t think that Biden would’ve brought this budget, uh, to the, to the Congress if the Democrats were in charge because the Democrats don’t wanna vote for it. Especially the so-called moderate Democrats are the ones that are in swing districts. Would it serve McCarthy’s interests at all to bring this budget to a floor for a vote and have just enough Republicans on the fence where Democrats are forced to vote yay or nay on this budget?
Tapscott: Boy, wouldn’t that be an interesting situation? (Chuckles)
Carmichael: Republicans need to be able to say that there’s bipartisan opposition to this stupid budget. Well, the only way to have a bipartisan opposition is to force some Democrats in the House to vote. And then now they’re on record either for it and they have to defend it. Or they’re against it and which gives the Republicans leverage.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
