Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Ron Estes (R-Kansas)
U.S. Congressman Ron Estes (R-Kansas) joined Inside the Beltway to discuss representing the fourth district of Kansas, the historic provisions secured in the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, and more. Listen on YouTube, Rumble, and Spotify.
On the ongoing government shutdown, triggered by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Democrats:
“It’s unfortunate that we’re at this point in time, 23 days now, with no funding on the government. The Democrats are continuing to filibuster and the disappointing thing about it is that they’re filibustering on a clean continuing resolution that they’ve actually voted on before.
“I mean, these exact same spending levels [from] last spring and last fall, as well. So it’s disappointing we’re here. My understanding is that today or tomorrow, the Senate will have a slightly different motion to talk about making sure that we paid the military and that we pay the folks that are working, the border patrol agents, the TSA agents, the air traffic controllers, the folks that are actually having to work through this process and we’ll see whether that passes or not. But, in the meantime, it’s just sad that we are where we are. The counter proposal that the Democrats are holding the funding the government hostage on is really a non-starter.
“They talk about taking money away from rural hospitals and giving it to illegal aliens and using it to spend for electric vehicles and other programs in other countries. I think we ought to be focused on how do we make sure that we support Americans first.”
On the COVID-era Obamacare enhanced tax credits expiring:
“Well, the problem is the Obamacare has subsidies built into it. I mean, that base level of Obamacare has subsidies built into it. During COVID, it was decided when the Democrats were in the majority in the House and the Senate and President Biden was in office. They decided to add additional subsidies tied to that. And that’s what they set the expiration date of December of this year, and now that it’s expiring, they’re realizing how bad Obamacare really is … It’s one of those things that we’ve got to address: the problems with Obamacare.
“It was promised to lower premiums. It was promised that people could keep their doctor, keep their insurance. And it did provide some insurance for some folks that were previously in low-risk pools or in high-risk pools or other areas, or did not have insurance. But we’ve seen premiums continue to increase, and we can’t keep going forward like this.
“But the distraction from funding the government is the talk about the problems with Obamacare. I mean, we need to focus on getting the government open so that we can address all the issues that we have to address as a country and make sure that we’re moving forward.”
On how the Affordable Care Act was never really affordable, a fact the Washington Post admitted:
“At that point in time, you don’t have an insurance program that provides you good health care. I mean, if you’re spending $27,000 a year in combination of premiums, and then you add the deductibles on top of that, you’re spending thousands of dollars whether you’re on a private plan or whether you’re on one of the subsidized Obamacare plans. It’s thousands of dollars out of your pocket before you actually get any benefit from that insurance.
“And so there’s a major problem with the so-called Affordable Care Act. As you said, it’s no longer affordable. It never was really affordable. It’s just gotten worse. And through that process, it didn’t improve care any. It didn’t increase the number of doctors or didn’t increase the number of people that could keep their old good insurance that they liked.”
On the provisions included in the One Big, Beautiful Bill and the work House Republicans put into making it possible:
“Obviously, as you talked about the One Big, Beautiful Bill or the Working Families Tax Cuts Act that we focused on, we wanted to make sure that we helped the economy grow. I mean, we saw after 2017, the economy took off. And, you know, instead of the old “new normal” process that President Obama talked about and economist when President Obama was in office, we looked at how do we grow the economy?
“A lot of the things that we put into One Big, Beautiful Bill, we made permanent because we saw the positive things after 2017. And so a lot of those are in place moving forward, whether it’s the corporate rates and the individual rates, whether it’s looking at things like, how do you deduct research and development costs in the year that you incur them so that we can continue to be the biggest innovation in our country. We did so much. I mean, there are some things that we continue to look at.”
On addressing international tax issues in the One Big, Beautiful Bill:
“One of the things we did with the One Big, Beautiful Bill was push back on the international tax scheme that had been developed with the Biden administration and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and basically it was creating a tax that would be on primarily US businesses and increase their costs. What we recognized there was that that wasn’t going to work. The process that we started when President Trump came into office was the administration’s been very active in negotiating. How do we address this moving forward?
“There’s continued work on that international tax aspect. I’ve had several meetings in the last couple of weeks talking with folks not just U.S. businesses, but also from the European Commission and as well as from Global Business Alliance, and the individuals that are that are affected by some of those provisions, and I think we all agree that there’s there’s a whole host of problems with this Pillar 2 international tax scheme that they’d come up with. We’ve got to address that and we’re going to continue to focus on that, making sure that we look at and utilize the American tax code to be a level playing field for a business, whether you’re based in America or whether you’re based in another country and you have operations in America. And we’re going to continue on that.
On the Congressman’s priorities for the rest of 2025:
“There are some other provisions for the year end of 2025. Chairman Jason Smith, on the Ways and Means Committee, talks a lot and wants to do a bipartisan tax bill. There’s some smaller provisions … tied to production costs for the entertainment industry for one of the things that I led [which] was helping songwriters be able to write off their demo cost, but that expires at the end of this year. There’s several other different provisions at the end of the year that we want to address. And then there’s probably an opportunity, although it may go into next year, of looking at, okay, what’s the next thing that we do? What do we focus on in terms of how we make sure we keep good economic growth?”
On addressing the future of Social Security and potential insolvency:
“One of the things that was set up 40 years ago, when they saw Social Security was running out of money at that point in time, and the projections into the future were pretty dire, when you were looking at the baby boomers who were entering the workforce and recognizing that when they retired, there would be a large number of retirees.
“There were some provisions and changes made in the eighties to actually build up the trust fund a little bit while baby boomers were working. And now as we look to the future, we’re seeing that trust fund run down, like it was designed to do, as the baby boomers [have] retired. We’ve got to come back and do a very similar process to look at what we do for the future. You know, the Social Security program is designed to help all Americans. But what it’s designed to do is that it only pays out in benefits what the trust fund has in income.
“And so on any given year, as individuals have lived longer and as innovative ideas and new technologies have made it easier for workers, the same or fewer workers to actually produce the same economic output, we’ve seen fewer workers per retiree. It’s down to less than three now workers per retiree where it was over six or seven decades ago. And so there’s obviously less money going into the trust fund as retirees are pulling it out. So we’ve got to address that.
“Obviously it’s a great program that people really value as retirees in terms of supporting them. And for folks that are your age, one of the things I do want to remind everybody is that a percentage will still be paid out to anybody. It’s just that when the trust fund runs down in … less than eight years, it will have only be a percentage of what the current calculation is.
“So, right now that percentage is about 77 cents on the dollar. So, everybody will receive less money, which makes it pretty imperative that we start working now to be able to address that so that we can we can protect not just the current retirees, but also folks into the future, whether they’re in their forties or fifties or whether they’re in their twenties and thirties as well.”
On representing the fourth district of Kansas:
“It’s South Central Kansas, centered around the city of Wichita, and it includes of course the big urban areas in Wichita, but also a lot of rural areas as well.
“We call ourselves the Air Capital of the World because of the amount of aviation footprint that we have there … roughly sixty percent of the planes that are flying today have, if not made completely in Wichita, have huge components that come out of Wichita.
“Particularly when you look at general aviation and a lot of the commercial aviation. Every 737 starts in Wichita with the cockpit and fuselage made there. And then it’s sent out to Washington to have the wings and the wheels added onto that. Textron, Beechcraft, Cessna, Bombardier, Spirit AeroSystems are all located in Wichita and make a lot of aircraft every year that we all use and value around the world.
“The other thing in my district is we have a good footprint of oil and gas, in terms of production. Kansas does produce a fair amount of oil and gas, but it’s very low volume producers. You don’t get the big gushers like you see in the movies that come out of a well.
“So, obviously being able to produce energy, whether it’s hydrocarbons, we have a lot of wind farms as well in our state and actually produce much more wind energy than we utilize in the state and about half of what we produce is shipped out of state.
“On an agricultural footprint, we have a lot of farmers that focus on making wheat, making corn, soy beans, ethanol, and a big support for not just Americans, but around the world as well to make sure that people have food to eat as well as energy from ethanol and being able to use that.
“I really focus a lot within my district on how we make sure that we support our rural areas, support rural hospitals, make sure that we support the property rights for land owners, and making sure that bad regulation doesn’t come out of Washington, whether it’s regarding use of water. Because that’s a big thing in Kansas, particularly in my district in the western part of the state, in terms of making sure that we have sustainable water now and for the future.
“And also making sure that we’re smart on things like the Endangered Species Act. I mean, we’ve had some issues over the last few years, starting back with the Obama administration in terms of looking at some species like lesser-prairie chicken, where they wanted to list it as endangered because they counted the number of prairie-chicken the year after a drought came through.
“In Kansas, it rains more some years than it does others. And you have to just take that into account and figure out what’s the long-term trend and how do we make sure that we have sustainable habitat ongoing into the future.”
On why the Congressman got involved in politics and his desire to represent Kansas in Congress:
“It’s kind of a passion for both my wife and I. We actually met at a Young Republican National Convention and she’s currently serving as a state representative in the Kansas legislature. We focus[ed] on, not only early in our marital life, we helped a lot of other people run for office.
“And I wanted to get more involved in helping run for office as well. So, I first ran for a county treasurer and then for state treasurer. I served six years as Kansas State Treasurer. One of the things I saw when I was state treasurer was that there was a lot of bad policy, bad legislation coming out of Washington that we actually spent a lot of time as treasurers being able to talk about, instead of focusing on how do we do best practices within our offices, is how do we how do we adjust to what’s coming out of the federal office?
“It kind of motivated me to run for Congress and actually focus on how do we come up with good policy, good legislation that helps not just make government processes run smoothly at the federal level or the state or local level, but also helps make individuals, whether you’re Kansans or whether you live somewhere else in the United States, we want to make sure that there’s good policy out there, that we actually approach and help folks live the lives that they want to live without an overbearing big government that’s focusing and directing and mandating that they do a lot of things. So it kind of incentivizes me to come out and look at how we come up with some of those best practices?”
On Democrat hysteria over White House construction and the history of White House construction:
“I think it’s a distraction from the Democrats not focusing on funding the government and not being willing to vote for that. There is not a big ballroom on the White House grounds. I mean, there’s not a big room in there.
“My wife and I have been to the White House for Christmas parties. If you invite all of Congress, House and the Senate, obviously everybody doesn’t go, but even if you have events like that or state dinners or state events, it’s just not a huge facility to do that. So, being able to build a ballroom which is being funded by private donations. It’s not taxpayer money that’s going into it. I think it’s a good addition to the White House.
“If you look over the years, a lot of presidents have done remodeling and improvements and enhancements. Whether it’s actually the West Wing was added as part of an enhancement into the White House. Whether you look at [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt], whether you look at President Truman or President Carter or even during President Obama and President Clinton’s term[s], there were changes made to the White House and adjustments.
“I think this is one of those things that you take a snapshot which I’ve seen on some of the memes out there of some of the construction activity and and it makes it looks like a like a bad picture, but in reality, I think it’s going to be a very positive thing for the White House to be able to to have a facility and a venue there that they can use for state dinners and other events.”