Congressman Andy Biggs joins the podcast this week to answer questions about the latest coronavirus developments, including Congress’ efforts to mitigate the spread of this disease and support the economy. He also discusses a bill he’s introduced called the Freedom for Families Act, which is a free-market alternative to federally-mandated paid family leave.

Congressman Andy Biggs is an Arizona native and currently serving his second term in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a retired attorney and Congressman Biggs served in the Arizona Legislature for 14 years – the last four as the Arizona Senate President. He was awarded “Champion of the Taxpayer” from Americans for Prosperity for his cumulative service in the Arizona legislature, and has been honored numerous times by the Goldwater Institute as a “Friend of Liberty.” He lives in Gilbert with his wife of 35 years, Cindy. They have six children and five grandchildren.

TRANSCRIPT

Beverly:

And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg and it’s an honor to have Congressman Andy Biggs on today’s episode. He’s going to answer a few questions on the latest developments with the coronavirus, including Congress’s efforts to mitigate the spread of this disease and efforts to support the economy. We’re also going to discuss a bill he’s introduced called the Freedom for Families Act, which is a free market alternative to federally mandated paid family leave.

Before we bring him on, a little bit more about the Congressman. Congressman Biggs is an Arizona native and currently serving his second term in the US House of Representatives. He is a retired attorney and has served in the Arizona legislature. He served for 14 years, the last four as the Arizona state president. He’s been awarded champion of the taxpayer from Americans for Prosperity, and he has also been honored numerous times by the Goldwater Institute as a friend of Liberty. He lives in Gilbert with his wife of 35 years, Cindy. They have six children and five grandchildren. Congressmen, a pleasure to have you on today.

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Great to be with you. I’m happy to be with you. Thank you.

Beverly:

And at the time that we’re recording this, it is Wednesday evening. There has been so much going on in relation to the coronavirus. I’m curious from your perspective as a representative, you represent Arizona. What is it been like to be their representative during such an historic time? In a time where we frankly don’t quite know what to expect in the upcoming months or weeks?

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Well, it has been very interesting. It has been quite frankly like a run on the bank. I don’t know if you remember the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, where George Bailey’s going off with Mary on her honeymoon and then they see all this kind of hysteria and panic and he says, “It looks like a run on the bank,” and they go back. It has kind of been like that, and a fire hose of information coming out trying to discern what is accurate, what is inaccurate, what we should do that would help restore calm and order, and still protect the people that country, both now in the future because I mean, decisions we’re making now, could either build on the good foundation we had prior to, just three weeks ago we had this phenomenal economy, and we can build back on that or we can actually tear down the structure, that foundation, in the months to come. It’s been very, very interesting and something, I don’t suppose anybody in this country planned on this type of thing happened so quickly.

Beverly:

Not at all. One of the questions I have for you, which I don’t think there is a definite answer to, but I think what I’m hearing from so many of my friends and family members, we want to know how long we expect life to be different. I think it’s going to be different for the foreseeable future. But the extreme we’re seeing right now where people are working from home, businesses are shut down. Is this something we’re going to have to be in for the long haul to see this type of closures economically?

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Well, I certainly hope not. Look there’s some quick advances. There’s so there’s some medications that were available during SARS, which the Chinese have indicated that they seem to provide both a pre-coronavirus mitigation and also once people got it, it actually slowed the disease down and helped to cure people. So that particular medication has been a phase one tested already, and it’s just if we can get that out.

So you want to move that stuff to the front and try to move calmness to the front and get some kind of normalcy there because this, just what you described where people are saying, “What’s going to happen? Are we going to be like this a week? Are we going to be like this a year? What is this?” It’s that unknown which is really driving some of the emotion and worry and concern that people have. We’ve got to try to get a handle light to help quell that fear that people have.

Beverly:

Well the president has been holding daily press conferences as of late. He called himself a wartime president today. We saw that the Senate did approve a multibillion dollar emergency aid package on Wednesday, that passed the House as well. But you have concerns with this emergency aid package. What were some of your main concerns? Especially since what we’re hearing is this is supposed to help people who were forced to go home, whether they needed to take care of their kids who were off of school or they had no job to go to because their job was shut down?

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Yeah. The way this worked out is, you’re not treating all businesses the same, which is always a bit of a problem. But leave that aside and move into this and just say, what we’re doing is there’s a segment of society, in fact, it is where the vast majority of our businesses are and they’re going to get crushed because they have to provide the upfront capital to make sure that everybody’s getting all of the unpaid leave or the family leaves or the medical leave that this bill has mandating on them. Their only recourse will be quarterly tax mitigation through the payroll tax process. That’s a problem.

The other aspect of it too is that we were given 12 minutes to read the bill before we voted on it in the wee hours of Saturday morning. It’s about 115 page bill. Something in that neighborhood, and the technical corrections were longer than that. So there were some major problems with what they gave us Saturday, and they were trying to get them fixed on Monday. I’m not sure they did get them all fixed.

Beverly:

And this something you’re concerned about as a whole during this emergency time where things are rushed through because people are desperate for help that we end up creating more government that’s permanent and not just temporary solutions for people?

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Well that’s for sure. I mean, so I always say a bad process makes for bad policy and that makes for bad politics. So what we’re doing is, in that bill, we basically expanded at least a half a dozen programs and they supposedly are to be temporary mandates. But my experience, when you expand a government program, you create a new constituency. You create a new constituency, it’s very difficult to ratchet back that program. This bill, by the way, that just came out, they’re calling it phase two of the relief packages. Phase two, we have no score, we have no idea how much it’s going to cost. But it looks like on the low end, you’re going to do looking somewhere from $200-250 billion on the low end that package.

Beverly:

So we’re talking obviously about a lot of money and I think you hit the nail on the head just a little bit earlier is, what does this mean for businesses and employers? So if they are the entity that’s supposed to take up the burden for employees who need time off, just as I like to share with people, I’m a small business owner incorporated in DC, and DC automatically takes money out of my small business for a paid leave, which is a burden for my small business, it only has three employees. So and none of us have needed to use it as of yet, but yet, we have money taken out of my small business for that.

You have … this then brings up a bill that you have introduced prior to us knowing anything about the coronavirus pandemic and that is an act that you introduced called the Freedom for Families Act, which addresses paid family leave saying, “Look, we need to make sure that people are covered if they need time off for wide variety of reasons.” I think the question comes down to who pays for it? So you’ve come up with a solution, a bill for that. Why don’t you tell us about your solution to this problem?

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Yeah, thank you. I mean what I saw and the reason I think we needed it is because we have people who want to be responsible, they want control of their lives, they want to take care of it, and the HS or the health savings accounts were under utilized, they were overly regulated, overly constraints. So we said, “Well, what can we do to make this more beneficial to Americans who might need it for family leave, who might need it when they’re adopting a baby, or when they have a birth,” or in situations like we’re seeing today, which is exactly what you’re talking about with the coronavirus issue where if they had a health savings account and they got laid off this bill would kick in.

The idea behind it is to provide a very broad use of this money and make it tax favorable to the person who’s creating the account. That’s what it’s all about. If we had that already in place, I think that would be very helpful for many, literally millions of Americans today that have access to health savings accounts. Quite frankly, you could probably expand this to get benefits in an emergency like this beyond my bill into IRAs, whatever other types of retirement savings we’ll have so they get to access it without getting penalized. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Beverly:

This was a bill you introduced in 2019, so last year. Less than a year ago, you did introduce it. You had a lot of conservative support, but you didn’t have many of your liberal colleagues get on board with this act. What is really the reason why liberals don’t see this as a way to provide people with more choice and more opportunity. Why do they think that it has to come from an employer and that government needs to mandate it?

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Well, that is the $64 million question because in reality they do think government is the better place to do this than the business and the individual. I want to empower the individuals. I want to empower the businesses to make these choices. They would prefer to keep that power centralized in the government. I don’t know why that is. I have my suspicions, but the reality is, I think we’d be better served if you … I mean, talking about the [inaudible 00:11:04] law that requires you to … where you’re losing some, some funds directly because of their law.

It seems to me, you’d be better served, incentivized to work with your employees as the owner of the company, how can you best satisfy your employees needs as well as your company’s needs? Instead of letting the government, who quite frankly, everybody says, “The government feels this way.” The government never feels. It’s like a couch where it can hurt you, and couches feel, we feel, people feel, and business owners feel, and employees feel, and they think and they can rationalize and come together and work out these problems far more efficiently and effectively than in my opinion, big government.

Beverly:

Yeah. It came as a complete shock to me where I saw the payroll company that I use just automatically was taking more money out of our account every six months to pay for this and I was like, “Wait, I didn’t know this was going to happen.” So it came as a shock to me. So I wonder with the coronavirus and what we see this bill going forward, do you think the fact that now paid family leave is part of the discussion again? And it has been, but this definitely brings it to the forefront. Does this give you a huge opportunity to try to push forward the Freedom for Families Act or because people are looking as government as a solution to this, is this making it harder to have health savings account be the way that people can access funds when they need it?

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Well you’re right it’s going to make it a little bit harder. But this group of folks can have been talking with and working with within the last few days trying to put together alternatives for phase three that would include stuff like this, Freedom for Families Act because we really want to let people have more control over their lives. But what I see happen two bill, which is one oppose and so many of us that oppose it, is that it actually centralizes power in the federal government and takes it away from individuals.

Every time we do that not only creates constituencies, which makes it harder to eliminate this program or tear them back down. But it also kind of sets into place, like concrete, this notion that you should be going to the federal government to resolve all your problems and all of your issues every time, it’s really, the net worth collected back over to the American people divest some of the power and centralization of power that you see in DC. Get it back to the people, get it back to the states and to get the bureaucrats in Washington out of your life and out of the lives of the American people.

Beverly:

Just a final question for you, and this is, I realize a broad question, a bigger question, but since you’re talking about the centralized power of government and federalism, is it the states? Is it the federal government who should be involved in issues such as paid family leave? I think the question comes up with what is the federal government’s role in a situation like coronavirus. I’d see people debating what the federal government should decide when it comes to what should be closed in certain States and what should be left open. How do you balance the federal side and the state side? And how would you say president Trump is doing on that balance so far?

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Well, I think President Trump has really tried to get this right and I’m not sure that everybody’s trying to get it right. I think President Trump tried to get it right, recognizing that governors and states really have … either they’re more in tuned to what’s going on. So for instance, in Arizona where you have maybe a dozen coronavirus cases, six of those in the same household, I mean this governor here is going to have a better vision of what needs to happen in Arizona than say in Washington State that has had such a tough time of it, or Florida, or anywhere else.

So I view it this way, it’s real simple in some ways, and maybe more complex in others, but the Constitution’s very clear that power’s supposed to rest of the states. If you have interstate commerce that’s where the federal government can come and regulate. So it could regulate, I mean, oddly enough, it could regulate domestic flights or something like that because those are in interstate commerce.

But when you’re not in interstate commerce, the intrastate issues are meant to be at those state levels and that’s, it’s a balance, you’re right. It’s a tough balance and so many of my colleagues choose to overstep it, but that’s, we’ve been 80 years wandering down this pathway where the federal government keeps getting more and more power, and that’s one of the concerns I have when, is whenever you have a crisis or a big event like this, the federal government takes more power instead of divesting power to the people who are closest.

Beverly:

I think that is a major concern. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on that. Also coming on to talk about the Freedom for Families Act. Again, a free market alternative to federally mandated paid family leave. A really important topic right now as we’re talking how to help people due to the coronavirus. Congressman, thank you for your time and do stay safe out there.

Rep. Andy Biggs:

Thank you very much. Have a great one.

Beverly:

And thank you for joining us. I wanted to let you know that if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, we’d love it if you left us a rating or a review on iTunes, it does help, and we’d love it if you shared this episode to let your friends know where they can find more She Thinks episodes. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for listening.