Representative Kevin Hern of the great state of Oklahoma joins the podcast this week to discuss his journey to Congress. Turns out, it is possible to go from hog farmer to congressman. We cover the issues small businesses are facing today, including the struggle to fill jobs, and what the short- and long-term impacts of the Build Back Better Act are on the economy.
U.S. Rep. Kevin Hern is a Republican representing Oklahoma’s 1st District. He was born on an Air Force Base and gained an early appreciation for the sacrifices that military families make. In high school, Kevin earned an Architectural Drafting Certificate at a Career Technology school, which he used to work and pay for his Engineering degree. Later in life, he earned his MBA. He went on to work as an Aerospace Engineer for Rockwell. Then began saving to purchase his first McDonald’s Restaurant by starting and operating small business ventures: writing computer programs to automate tasks for businesses, real estate, and even hog farming. Kevin Hern was sworn into Congress on November 13th, 2018, serving the remainder of Congressman Jim Bridenstine’s term. Kevin and his wife Tammy live in Tulsa and have three children.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
Welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, Representative Kevin Hern of the great state of Oklahoma joins us to discuss his journey to Congress — yes, it is possible to go from hog farmer to congressman — while also delve into the issues small businesses are facing today, including the struggle to fill jobs and what the short- and long-term impacts of the Build Back Better Act are on the economy. But before we bring him on, just a reminder for our podcast listeners that we’ve expanded to video. Just go to IWF’s YouTube channel and subscribe, and of course, you can still listen to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and Acast.
Now, to our guest: U.S. Representative Kevin Hern is a Republican representing Oklahoma’s first district. He was born on an Air Force base and gained an early appreciation for the sacrifices that military families make. In high school, the congressman earned an architectural drafting certificate at a career technology school, which he used to work and pay for his engineering degree. Later in life, he also earned his MBA. He went on to work as an aerospace engineer for Rockwell, then began saving to purchase his first McDonald’s restaurant by starting and operating small business ventures, writing computer programs to automate tasks for businesses, real estate, and yes, even hog farming. Kevin Hern was sworn into Congress on November 13, 2018. He and his wife Tammy live in Tulsa, and they have three children. Congressman, a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Rep. Kevin Hern:
Beverly, it’s great to be with you.
Beverly Hallberg:
Now, there’s a lot we can unpack in your bio. You’re a businessman, you’re now a congressman, but you started off as a hog farmer. Give us a little bit of your background and how you went from hog farmer to Washington, DC.
Rep. Kevin Hern:
Well, I’m one of those country-to-Congress-type stories. I like to believe my story is what a lot of Americans have out there, which start with very humble beginnings. Actually, my family grew up on food stamps. I had an unfortunate situation where I had a parent that didn’t like to work very much, so we experienced the necessary hand-up that this country is so good about helping others, and as you mentioned about my education, vocational school, didn’t go to college till two years after high school because I needed to save my money to go to school, paid my way through college, got an engineering degree, and I believe education changed my trajectory.
As I worked for Rockwell, the space shuttle Challenger blew up and changed that industry forever. A buddy of mine owned McDonald’s restaurants in Little Rock, and I went into the franchising program, but I didn’t have any money, so I worked 10 years to save $100,000 to get my first restaurant, and that included writing the software that you alluded to, flipping houses, and building a hog farm that I had for nine years and literally sold that farm to buy my first McDonald’s restaurant in January 1997. That was the last time that I ever worked for anybody until I came to Congress, other than working for the customers that came through my 24 restaurants, ultimately, and all the other businesses that I started and ran and hired thousands of people over the 35-year career in business before coming into Congress in November of ’18.
Beverly Hallberg:
What really made your decision to run for Congress? You were doing well, you had worked hard, you’d done all these things, and doing well financially, I assume. What made you say, “I’m going to throw my hat in the race and run for Congress”?
Rep. Kevin Hern:
Yeah, most people thought I was crazy for doing this, including former Senator Tom Coburn and others, a person that got me started in politics. He said, “You’re going to hate it because it’s one of the most non-productive places you’re ever going to experience,” and what we’ve seen the last four years, at least my time in Congress, it certainly feels like that. But I ran on the idea that we get government out of the way, let aspiring entrepreneurs… It didn’t matter your background, your ethnicity, what you believed, that you could go take an idea, a little bit of money, and a lot of hard work and have the opportunity to experience your American dream.
I saw through my career a growing impact of federal government competing with small businesses in America, so it’s a very fractional-type world in small business. You really just want to be left alone. You’re not very political. But what we’ve seen lately is a all-out attack on small businesses that represents some 99% of all businesses in America, people that have varying sizes, but even going back to the Affordable Care Act, trying to bifurcate business by 49 employees to 50 employees, some of the things in the reconciliation bill, like paid family leave based on employee size, and it’s continuing to fracture that industry, or the small businesses in America. I wanted to be the voice for the voiceless, and I’ve done that religiously. I mean, every single day I get a chance to share the message, I do that. I served on Small Business two years before getting on Ways and Means this year, my second term.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, as somebody who’s a small business owner myself, I’m always thankful for people like you who are fighting for us, so thank you for all that you are doing. And I know you’re doing this for the roughly 32 million small business owners that we have in this country, and they faced a lot of challenges in the past couple years. I want to talk about what COVID has meant to the small business industry. First of all, when COVID hit, there was the shutdown of business. First of all, do you feel that small businesses have recovered from that initial hit? We know a lot of them went out of business, but how are the ones who managed to survive doing? And do you find that this government is making it even harder for them to continue to operate their business?
Rep. Kevin Hern:
Well, as you know, as a businessperson, what you look at is how can you find an opportunity and fulfill that gap that’s out there with the consumer? I think doing that from the pandemic going forward, what you find, there’s certain industries that were strong before the pandemic that are now absolutely destroyed. Many are gone.
I can use small commercial real estate as an example, people trying to do that, but supply chain is really damaged a lot of ability for people that were resellers to come in and do the things they needed to do to service their customers. It’s been very problematic. Obviously, employees, the willingness of the government to incentivize people not to work or to change their jobs but not have a pathway to education to do that has made it very difficult for a lot of businesses that relied on a lot of labor to be able to thrive going forward. As I said, I spent 35 years at McDonald’s, so the restaurant industry, the retail industry, is a perfect example of that. We all know that our economic model for the last 20 or 30 years has been service, which requires a lot of people.
Beverly Hallberg:
We do know that the unemployment rate, or at least the job openings, are fairly high. I think most of us, wherever we live, we see the “help wanted” signs on so many businesses. I know that it’s a multifaceted reason, but when you look at all these job openings in the businesses, small businesses, struggling to be able to have enough workers to fill the times that customers want to come in, what are some of the reasons for that, and do you think that there is something that the federal government or the state government can do, whether that’s investing in technical training, certificate programs as a means of attracting younger workers, or do you think that this is a far larger issue?
Rep. Kevin Hern:
No, Beverly, I think you’re right. As I mentioned, even 50 years ago when I was growing up, or 55 years ago, and we had assistance from the government to be able to eat, to keep the gas on, and to have the ability to get back and forth to doctor and things like that. We have that today. We have over 92 programs. I serve on the Ways and Means Subcommittee, Worker & Family Support, which basically covers everything from foster care to Medicare from a funding standpoint, and we have some 92 federal programs in America that spend almost a trillion dollars a year in helping people get out of a really bad spot. What we have to make sure is that we help them get out of a bad spot and into a good spot. We have a lot of disjointedness, if you will. Where these funds are located, a lot of times people spend the entire month just chasing around the different agencies that supply these. I’m a huge advocate of something that Ben Carson started, where you can go into one facility and apply and then the rest of the month, you can be looking for a job and how you get your kids into a proper preschool so you can go to work.
Beverly Hallberg:
How much are you hearing from businesses in Oklahoma, where you are representative in the first district, about the government mandate, the vaccine mandate? Has that really put undue pressure on businesses as they are trying to already retain employees? They may find that if they adhere to this mandate that they’re going to lose even more employees.
Rep. Kevin Hern:
Yeah, it does. In fact, I joined a lawsuit with the Job Creators Network to prevent the administration doing an executive order forcing private industry to vaccinate their employees. If a CEO of a company or an owner of a company knows their employee base, how close proximity they are to one another, the sensitivity of their employees to getting ill or possibly getting ill, that’s their prerogative to incentivize their employees, understanding what employee loss they’re going to have, being willing to understand the impact on their business.
But for the federal government to extend that overreach through an executive order, not a law, that borderlines some of this march towards socialism that we’re seeing talked about a lot. In fact, if you look at the very definition of socialism, it’s owning all means of production, so basically owning businesses. When you start mandating what employees can do or have to do from the White House, you’ve made that linkage. I’ve been very adamant, speaking out against it. I will continue to do so. Obviously, we’ve seen some favorable rulings from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Sixth Circuit, so we’ll see if this extends. We’re probably going to see any day — I think we may have seen this today or heard about it — that they’re going to stop the mandate on healthcare workers as well, so we’ll see where this goes, but I think we just have to be conscious about impact it has on our economy.
Beverly Hallberg:
There are a lot of people pushing back. I think as we take that lens out and we zoom out and take a look at the ways that government is impacting small business, I think we could say on a very base level, there’s the tax component, there’s the regulation component. Certain industries are regulated more than others. Then you have what COVID brought and the shutting down of businesses, and you have the vaccine mandates; and you have so many aspects of this that it makes it extremely difficult for businesses to know what’s next; and now you have a new controller who would be controlling the currency, somebody who is up for nomination by the Biden administration, who is headed even more towards this march towards socialism, saying that the government needs to be in charge of the capital and the assets, capital that businesses would want to borrow. So what do you make of this new nominee?
Rep. Kevin Hern:
Well, obviously, just in her bold statements, I don’t think she’s left any ambiguity in what her desire will be, should she get past the Senate hearings. Very unfortunately, a lot of times we see people go before the hearings that are very well-skilled in what they say and not saying anything that would be an affront to our free economic model, but she has been very just outspoken about what’s going on.
I think another thing is when you look at what is going on with the reconciliation bill and $80 billion price tag to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to take the data that banks would provide on the average-day American that has $10,000 a year going through their checking account, which is about $28 a day; and all of that information being provided to IRS — those are families, farmers, small businesses. Those aren’t the large corporations that my Democratic colleagues are lambasting every single day, so we just have to be careful. We got to continue to push back. I know it’s not going to be very popular in some of the far-left media, but we have to continue to fight every single day, and I will do so on behalf of not only small businesses in American, but I think all Americans, regardless of party.
Beverly Hallberg:
I know that we are going to be facing more taxes, potentially increased costs of goods, not only as inflation increases, but as we are moving forward to the passage of the Build Back Better Act. I just want to get your thoughts on it. We are talking about a massive bill. What do you think this will do to the inflation that is an increasing concern in this country?
Rep. Kevin Hern:
Well, first of all, I think you have to look at Fed Chairman Powell, who we all know is a Republican that’s served under a couple of administrations that just recently got renominated, will most likely fulfill that job of that role one more time, but when you look at what he’s saying, it went from temporary to transitory to this is going to be bad until it gets better to — what we’re hearing last couple days — that it’s probably going to linger on into next year, which is going to probably accelerate the need to raise interest rates, and so you’re seeing the market reflect, which is pretty pure in its prediction of the future as far as the behaviors and the market.
Then you start seeing the impact on the inflation on the supply chain and then you hear the administration basically going after businesses, saying, just about five weeks ago from the press room, saying, Jen Psaki said, “For businesses to take increased backdoor cost and pass them on to their consumers in the form of higher prices is both unfair and absurd,” which tells you right there they have no idea how business actually works, that the cost of goods affects the price that you charge your consumers in order to make a profit, so we have a real problem where we have administration that doesn’t clearly understand how business actually works, and finally, we’re hearing the treasury admit that what we’re seeing in these reconciliation bills is increased spending is affecting inflation, unlike what the president said, “We do need to pass the reconciliation bill so people have more money in their pocket to pay for the inflation,” not knowing that he’s actually generating the inflation.
Beverly Hallberg:
It seems like they played a lot of wordsmithing, to start with calling it “transitory” and then continuing to move in the narrative of how they’re referring to it. It seems like they’re listening to the polling now and realizing that people aren’t buying their narrative because people see every day how much things cost and they’re not here to say, “Oh, no big deal that my gas costs more. No big deal that my Thanksgiving meal costs more, my everyday groceries cost more.” These are ways that people do really get up in arms and are unhappy with the direction of the country. Do you think that Democrats, and have you seen this just with your Democratic colleagues, that they are concerned about some of the policies of this president, and how that’s going to fare for them in midterms?
Rep. Kevin Hern:
Yeah, actually, I visited with a lot of corporations, I would say even Fortune 50 corporations in the last couple weeks. I won’t name them, but I know their leadership. I’ve known some of their leadership for a long time that I know to be Democrats, and when we’re privately walking down the hallway, they’re saying to me privately, “Please tell me that this reconciliation bill is not going to pass.” These are Democrat leaders in these large corporations that are saying this because they know the impact that it’s having, not only on their companies and their increased pricing that they’re having to do their consumers, but also the impact that it’s having on their employees.
No successful person in business has ever been successful without taking care of the employees that work with them, and so a lot of these CEOs, whether it’s a large company or a smaller company, are very concerned about the impact on inflation that it’s having on their employees. The very nature of inflation is the taxation on the least of those who can afford it, so the CEOs are not being impacted. They’re paying a few cents a gallon or dollar a gallon more for gasoline, which is a very small percentage of their income, but the person that’s working, trying to save a few bucks for a special vacation or a special event with their family, this inflation is taking that ability to do that away from them.
Beverly Hallberg:
Just final question for you before you head off today is: What do you think this means about the creation of future small businesses? I often refer to, many do, that small businesses are the backbone of this country, and it seems like they are fading away to our detriment as Americans. First of all, would you encourage somebody to start a business today, and do you think that we need to remove some of the burdens that government has put on small business in order for us to have a thriving small business sector?
Rep. Kevin Hern:
Well, first of all, I’m an eternal optimist. I think people have great ideas and will find people like me over the years to invest in ideas and people who work hard, and the people who will succeed will always overcome. I think there’s no other nation in the world that has the ability or the opportunity and a framework to allow that to happen than the United States of America. I will fight every single day. I want all of your listeners to know that it’s not just me but others that will fight every single day to pass laws, to impress upon my colleagues the importance of small business.
I think it’s really important, Beverly, for us all to remember: we don’t have a business in America of any size at all — you pick any business — every single business in America started as a small business, whether it was Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google, all the ones that are being demonized right now all started as small businesses with an idea, a few bucks, some kids quitting school, started in dorm rooms, garages, backyards, bedrooms. We can never stop that from happening. We’ve got to make sure we keep that out there, the excitement of that opportunity.
As an example, I assure you, having worked very closely with Walmart over the years, they never in their wildest imagination thought 10 years ago that some little guy running a small bookstore online in Seattle, Washington would ever be passing them the way they have. This is what makes this country great is the idea that you can come from anywhere, be anyone, regardless of who you were born to and what part of the country you live in, that you can be the greatest person from a business standpoint in the world, and you can only do that in the United States of America. We all need to work together to protect that.
Beverly Hallberg:
Just for clarification, are you then encouraging young people to quit school? Is that the message?
Rep. Kevin Hern:
I have not done that, [inaudible 00:19:25], but I will tell you that it’s a humbling — having done that as a senior in high school because I thought school was kind of boring, I realized after one day of looking around, seeing people using picks and shovels on building a bridge, nothing wrong with that, but it motivated me to go back to school the next day and finish my degree and get an engineering degree and an MBA. Again, this is the greatest country in the world. We all need to be happy for it, not try to change it every single day.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, as I like to say, when it comes to young people, look at the career you want to have and figure out how to get the training you need to get there. Sometimes that’s a formal education, sometimes that’s more on-the-job training, so I think there’s a lot of ways we could look at preparing for a future career. But we’re so thankful that you are standing up and fighting for small business. Representative Kevin Hern from the great state of Oklahoma, thank you for joining She Thinks today.
Rep. Kevin Hern:
It’s great to be with you, Beverly. Thank you so much.
Beverly Hallberg:
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