Cruz Campaign Press Release - ICYMI: Adam Carolla: I love me some Ted Cruz

HOUSTON, Texas – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, joined the Adam Carolla Show – the number one podcast in the world – to discuss tax reform, patent reform, and his presidential race.

A full transcript is below.

The Adam Carolla Show

Friday, April 17, 2015

CRUZ: Great to be with you Adam.

CAROLLA: Great to be with you, man. Thank you so much for calling in and thank you so much for wanting to eliminate the IRS. It's driving me nuts.

CRUZ: Well, April 16th is a day when a whole lot of folks, you know, moving to a simple flat tax and just padlocking the IRS — I think that is a powerful populist issue. And today is a day when it's on people's minds.

CAROLLA: Well if you want to talk about an issue, and here we are always talking about, you know, gay rights, or immigration, or whatever it is, the transgendered community or something, fine, but that doesn't impact the entire country.

BALD BRYAN: Literally everyone.

CAROLLA: This impacts hopefully literally everyone who's born into this country so it is a good place to start in terms of policy. Senator, you tell me. It seems weird when politicians get really caught up in nothing, and they're missing sort of the big picture. Why do they do that?

CRUZ: Well, a lot of times what politicians are trying to do is distract the voters with smoke and mirrors rather than talk about the issues that really matter to their lives.

CAROLLA: So what would you do, and I always hear about the flat tax and all that kind of stuff. And of course we should, everybody should champion this cause because the poor people are saying hey man, I'M tired of rich folk not paying their fair share or even paying taxes. Can I tell you, by the way, Senator, as a rich folk, I am devastated. I grew up my entire life with poor people going, well you know as soon as you're get rich you just buy a windmill and write it off and you don't pay a penny in taxes. I get reamed for taxes quarterly. Like, it's not once a year. Four times a year I just get punished and pummeled. I had no idea it was going to be like this.

CRUZ: Well, and the sad reality is much of the political rhetoric you hear is just not true. So for example, the Democrats love to say the Republicans are the party of the rich. But here's the truth of the matter. The rich do just fine under big government. Big business does fantastic under big government. It gets in bed with big government, has armies of lawyers and lobbyists and accountants. The people who are getting hammered are the people who are struggling. Right now today — this is an astonishing statistic — the top 1 percent, the millionaires and billionaires that the president loves to demagogue, earn a higher share of our national income today than any year since 1928. The rich have done well under big government. But you know who's getting hammered?

CAROLLA: I gotta vote Democrat. Sorry, who's getting hammered?

CRUZ: But the people who are getting hammered are young people, they're Hispanics, they're African Americans, they're single moms. They're people who are struggling to achieve the American Dream. They're people like my dad who 57 years ago, fled Cuba with nothing. Couldn't speak English. Had $100 in his underwear, and washed dishes making 50 cents an hour. Those are the people getting hammered right now.

CAROLLA: Well, what's different back, versus then versus now. Versus your father's America when he came here from Cuba. How'd he get here from Cuba? You could do it back then, right?

CRUZ: He came legally, he came on a student visa. He had fought in the Cuban revolution. He actually fought with Fidel Castro. Now he didn't know Castro was a communist and none of the kids fighting did. They just knew Batista was a cruel and oppressive dictator. When he was a teenager, Batista's thugs threw him in prison and beat him halfway to death. And he fled to go to the University of Texas in 1957.

CAROLLA: So what is different between your father's America and our America in 2015?

CRUZ: Well if you look to American history and American economic history, you can see a clear cause and effect. Every time the federal government pursues the policies of out of control spending and taxes and regulations, the result is economic stagnation, and misery and malaise. The result is people who are struggling find it harder and harder to achieve the American Dream.

On the flip side, every time we pursue the policies of tax reform and regulatory reform — lessening the burden of Washington on hard working Americans — the result is incredible economic growth. That was true in the 1920s, it was true in the 1960s, it was true in the 1980s.

What we've got to get back to – you know, you think of the young people right now are coming out of school and they're up to their eyeballs in debt, and they're scared, are they going to get a job. Are they going start getting skills towards a career or are the going to work part time as a barista at Starbucks?

We've got to get back to an environment – an environment like my dad saw as a teenager coming out of the University of Texas where young people can come out and have two, three, four, five job opportunities. Begin building skills to build a career. And the way you do that is getting Washington off of the back of small businesses so they can create jobs and opportunities so young people can have a better future.

CAROLLA: Well, I know especially living here in California and so many businesses fled to your state of Texas because it just becomes impossible to tell everyone – the Joel McHale – you know, I don't like to namedrop, Senator, but Joel McHale, friend of mine, from The Soup and many movies. He's from Washington State – I think is where he's from – but he bought a house up in the Hollywood Hills and he knows I'm a former contractor and he said 'Hey, I'm putting a pool in the back yard. I'm gonna put a pool in the back yard.' And I just said, 'good luck.' And he said, 'What do you mean?' And I said, 'next time I see you in a few months tell me how that's going.' And he got back to me a few months later and I said, 'how's that pool going?' And he's like, 'Ah g**d**.' I said, 'What?' And he said, 'A soils report, an environmental impact report, tests' and kept going and going and going.

He said, I couldn't afford a $400,000 pool in my back yard. And I said, 'Well, what are you doing?' And he said, the kids use the neighbors'. There's a gay couple across the street. They use the gay guy's pool.' And I said, 'Good!' The contractor doesn't get the work. The guy who manufactures the rebar doesn't get the work. The guy who makes the Gunite doesn't get to work. The pool man who's going to be servicing that pool weekly does not have a gig. Everyone's lose-lose. And I drove Bryan Cranston to the airport. He's shooting Breaking Bad in New Mexico. Supposed to be in Riverside. He's leaving. Pool guy's leaving. Everyone's leaving. So should we get some more regulation going?

CRUZ: Well, I guess you can be glad that at least Cranston didn't bring the Mexican drug cartels to shoot up Riverside.

CAROLLA: That's good.

BALD BRYAN: Speaking of government helping small business, Ted Cruz, you know what you guys can do, especially in Texas, is patent reform. Cause you know that is where all the patent trolls go to take people to court because it is very favorable for them. What is your take on that?

CRUZ: You know, I think it is very important to do two things at the same time with regard to patent reform. That number one, we need to limit abusive litigation. And I've long been an opponent of trial lawyers abusing the system to enrich themselves at the expense of job creators.

CAROLLA: Thank you. I got sued. Yes.

CRUZ: But two, I think it's important to protect intellectual property. And so you've got to make sure innovators — people who are inventing and designing new technologies have the ability to protect their IP. And so it's a balance in terms of how you reform it. And you want to do both at the same time.

CAROLLA: Well, where do you come down, and then I'll ask you about taxes and let you get on with your busy day, which I'm sure is very hectic, but I want to know. I feel, Senator, that we make rules, and then they get away from us, and we end up hurting ourselves with our rules. It's like you go through the airport. You see the 68 year old elderly woman going through the metal detector having to be carried because we can't push her wheelchair through it and at some point somebody yells at her to take her shoes off and put them through the scanner, and it's like, why are we doing this to ourselves? Why?

Yes, there should be rules that protect innovation. There shouldn't be guys who hang their shingle in Lubbock, Texas, and sue everybody around them to just get paid off for the threat of taking them to court. Why? Can we let common sense start trickling back into the land that is built on common sense?

CRUZ: Well, I think we need to and part of the problem is, the way Washington works right now, is that Washington is fundamentally broken. That we've got — I've said a lot of times I think the biggest divide we have politically in this country is not between Republicans and Democrats. The biggest divide we've got is between career politicians in Washington in both parties, and the American people.

And I think the central issue that's going to be facing this country in 2016 and in the elections is do you want Washington playing a bigger and bigger role in your life? Or do you want more freedom, more opportunity to get back to the Constitution and get Washington out of our life? And part of the problem when legislation on patent reform or anything else comes up, is right now the way Washington resolves it, it's a battle of the lobbyists, whoever has the most lobbyists ends up getting elected officials rushing to hand out special favors. We need to make government less and less relevant in our lives and have as much decision-making as possible being made by individual citizens, by each of us, rather than some unelected bureaucrat in Washington.

CAROLLA: I concur. And you know, you've got Hillary Clinton on one side, you got Jeb Bush on the other, what do you think of the two?

CRUZ: Oh look, I like Jeb Bush, I think he was a good governor in Florida. I think people are going to have to make a choice of whether they want to elect someone who's going to continue business as usual in Washington, who's going to continue to grow government, grow government spending and power and debt, or whether they are going to have someone who's going to stand with the people and who's willing to stand up to both parties in Washington. You know, if you want someone who will go along to get along, there are a lot of choices in this election...

CAROLLA: Jeb Bush being one of them, perhaps?

CRUZ: You know I'll let the voters figure that out and assess the record of each of ours. But I'll tell you my time in the Senate, what I've tried to do more than anything else is number one tell the truth and number two, do what I said I would do. And for that reason, you know when we launched our campaign for President three weeks ago, the New York Times explained that 'Cruz cannot win because the Washington elites despise him...'

CAROLLA: That's the greatest compliment ever right?

CRUZ: There you go that's the central point of our campaign. If you want the Washington elites, go with someone else, but if you want to change things, then we've got to be willing to stand up and say 'this doesn't make any sense.'

CAROLLA: This just in, Hitler and Charles Manson, not a fan of Ted Cruz. I don't know if you know that. Put that on the bumper sticker. TedCruz.org is where you go if you want to support Ted, I want to support Ted, I love me some Ted Cruz and I just finally want to ask, I've heard all about the flat tax, I just don't know how it would be implemented and what the rate would be and how it would work, so could you coach me up just a little bit?

CRUZ: So, I have laid out broad principles, we have not yet rolled out a specific tax plan, we are developing it right now so we will be rolling it out in the coming months. But what I've said is that we should have a simple flat tax that is fair, that lets every American fill out his or her taxes on a postcard. So it's a simple rate that applies to everyone. And, which would enable us — number one, it would reduce hundreds of billions of dollars of compliance costs that people are paying all across this country. Number two, it would produce enormous economic growth. But number three, it would enable us to abolish the IRS — to get government out of our lives in a very fundamental way.

And the most potent reason to support a flat tax is it reduces the power of Washington politicians. Right now, where lobbyists in Washington focus the most is on special tax exemptions and loopholes. There are more words in the IRS code today than there are in the Bible. If you've got a flat tax that applies to everyone, that means politicians have less power to extract favors and to extort the private sector. It keeps power where it belongs, with the American people.

CAROLLA: That is a very good note to go out on. TedCruz.org is where you go if you want to know anything about Ted and contribute, and find out about him. Very impressive background, by the way, very impressive story. Senator, thank you very much for phoning in.

CRUZ: Thank you my friend, God bless you.

CAROLLA: God bless you. Senator Ted Cruz, everybody.