Chad Prather: Property taxes are a moral issue

SAN ANTONIO (KTSA News) — Gubernatorial candidate Chad Prather called into the Ware & Rima Show on Feb. 15, 2022, ahead of the March 1 Republican primary election.

You can listen to the full interview above. Below is a transcript from the Ware & Rima Show. 

Trey Ware: And my next guest is Chad Prather. He’s joining me back here on KTSA … welcome back to the show, man.

Chad Prather: Hey, Trey, hope you’re doing well, man. It’s a blessing to hear your voice. Great to be back.

Trey Ware: Same here … I’ll just dive right in. A friend of mine has got a ranch out west of San Antonio a little ways. And he just sent me some photos from 4:09 this morning on his ranch of here’s a bunch of illegals walking across his ranch again. … This is just one. I get pictures and photos like this from guys all the time that have these ranches. Our borders [are] just completely wide open. What is Governor Prater do about that?

Chad Prather: Well, one of the first things we’ve got to do is we’ve got to disincentivize the reason they’re coming.

I mean, they’re coming because they know that we’re funding health care and welfare, education and housing for illegals, we’re not turning them back. Got to deter this. And the way to do it is not just detaining but a significant plan to deport as well as defend and, you know, title eight code 1324 says that you can’t aid, transport, or hide illegals in the United States. That’s exactly what we’re doing.

We’re seeing the federal government doing it, we’re seeing our Texas National Guard doing it by helping them out of the river and into the state. And what I’m consistently said is we do need, we do need physical barriers where it’s geologically and geographically possible. But we need a human wall. And that human wall consists of law enforcement  and military all the way down the citizens. We need all hands on deck in this situation, this border can be shut down, the border can be shut down easily. We control 25 bridges that come over that river, we can control not only the commerce, but the traffic that’s coming across. But that’s not the issue. In my opinion, the issue is exactly what you just mentioned: the people who are traipsing across ranch lands, who were coming across private property, and the citizens are sitting there with their hands tied nobody to call and they know they do, nothing’s going to be done about it. We’ve got to enforce these laws that are on the books. And it’s not going to be a politically correct solution, Trey.

You know, this is a humanitarian crisis on both sides of the border. We share 12,054 miles with an unstable nation. We’ve got to stop this and make it impossible for illegals to be doing business in Texas. … I think we need a 12 to 14% transaction fee at banks for any illegals that are trying to make transactions and that money goes into Texas.

There are so many different things that we can do to make it harder and disincentivize the reason that they’re here, and at the same time, make legal immigration a great thing again,

Trey Ware: Knowing that a year ago the border was getting under control. It was not totally there, but Donald Trump had it headed in the right direction and had it much more under control than it is now. Upon his first day in office last year, Joe Biden completely did away with that [and] opened it wide up and was proud about saying, we play the soundbite often here, where he says not one person, not one will be deported under a Biden ministration. He’s almost pretty much lived up to that to the point Chad, where we have criminals that have been kicked out of this country coming back and re-offending, sometimes killing and raping people here in this country, things that are completely and totally unacceptable. So knowing that as governor, you would be fighting against the federal government in the Joe Biden administration, how do you deal with that?

Chad Prather: We know that target on the back of Texas, this administration is not coming to our aid. And you’re correct.

… Joe Frank Martinez, who is Democrat in Val Verde County, when I visited with him, he said, you know, the last administration … I didn’t like them, but they had it under control this administration does not.

We definitely have to remind people of our constitutional rights of the state of Texas.  When we know that the government’s not coming to our aid, Article four section seven of the Texas Constitution says that the governor of Texas now becomes the commander in chief to repel invasions and that’s exactly what this is.

He has the right to call up the state guard. We’ve got to empower and equip our state guard as well as utilize the National Guard and the full human and material resources of the of the Texas DPS.

I remind people constitutionally we have militias. We have civilians as well as veterans who are well trained and able to do this job. We need to employ those folks. And you know, I remind people that article one section ten of the US Constitution says the same thing. You know, we have the right to defend our border, we have the ability to do that. Again, it’s not going to be politically correct. And there’s going to be some naysayers there who say you can’t do that. But that’s the beauty of having state sovereignty. And Texas, of course, is one of the biggest. We have the greatest in terms of fires and leverage against Washington D.C. to hold their feet to the fire and actually get this job done. I remind people that America needs Texas, and Texas has a lot of power and leverage to make D.C. act, but it’s not going to act we’re going to do it ourselves.

Trey Ware: … Chad, back to the inflection point for you. Because you’re not a politician. You’re not out there wanting to be a politician. You felt like this was necessary for you to do. And I just want to go back to that moment. What happened? Or was it something that built up to a point where you made that decision that I’ve got to get in this thing and do something about it? Was it one thing that the governor did wrong in your mind? Or was it just a bunch of different things along the way?

Chad Prather: Well, yeah, Trey, you and I are blessed in that we get to run our mouths for living, right. It’s very therapeutic and in a big way. But like you, I have a large platform and a great reach. And I said I can continue talking politics and being bothered and criticizing politics, or I can do something about it.

So July 2, 2020, I was in South Dakota and I was enjoying the freedoms of South Dakota. There was no mandates waiting on Donald Trump to come speak at Mount Rushmore, and I was with Don Trump, Jr. when my phone went off, and it notified me that there were more shutdowns in the state of Texas and I went to Twitter. I’ve been joked saying this because I was with a Trump that I went to Twitter, and I and I tweeted that I was gonna run in this primary.

… The Texas economy, we were 19th in the nation under Rick Perry, we went to 28 under Abbott in 2020, put 3 million Texans out of work and bankrupted over 10,000 small businesses, and we bottomed out at 38th in the country financially. We know that spending has increased by $48 billion … totally on our budget spending under this government. That’s an increase in 19% in the last seven years, while populations have only grown by 5.4%.

So I know that government’s gotten bloated, it’s gotten big, but then when it became a dictatorial and unilateral bully, and started telling people that they were not essential, they couldn’t go to church, weddings, couldn’t go to funerals, couldn’t go to the gym. Trey, I don’t want to go to the gym, but I have a contract that says I can go to the gym.

And … there is a clause in the Constitution that says, you know, the government can’t step in and violate. … We’ve seen almost 18 constitutional violations on the part of this governor in the last 18 months. And I said enough is enough. We’ve got to get government out of our lives. We believe in small government. Let’s make that a reality.

Trey Ware: … Let’s talk about mandates for just second Chad, because I hear a lot about this from our listeners, that they would like another special session to deal with this issue and codify that into law that there will be no mandates — mask, vax or any other way — going forward that the state government will have no power, nor shall the government to mandate any of this stuff. What are your thoughts on that?

Chad Prather: Well, people have got to stop relying on executive orders. They think that the border has power, it’s not worth the paper that it’s written on until you pass the legislative session. So we knew that Donald Trump gave an endorsement to Greg Abbott on the basis of him holding a session for election integrity. He’s not done that.

Our elections are not secure here. But then we need to have the mandate discussion in our legislative body — only 19 out of 103 Republicans in Austin have called for that special session. Only 19. That tells me that the remainder in the majority of those Republicans are following the lead of Greg Abbott who’s not interested in that.

We’ve not only got to pass legislation, it’s got to be legislation with teeth. So if these global and worldwide companies want to do business on Texas soil, so we’ve got to make sure that there are penalties in place, if they’re going to mandate medical rape for our citizens who are going to work for those companies. We’ve got to defend our citizens priorities, violating the sanctity of their body.

We’ve talked about the southern border, how much more sacred is the border of your body, and that governmental overreach is going to make you have a medical procedure as a term of employment just to go to work. That’s got to stop and it’s got to happen to the legislative process. It’s got to be legislation with teeth on it. I’ve proposed numerous things that would that would be exactly that and we’re going to make sure that people are pretty tected and free again you know. The Constitution wasn’t written to keep you safe or healthy. The Constitution was written to keep you free and right now people aren’t free, our kids are messed up, we’ve got judges, we’ve got people on the local level who are defying the order. We’ve got to make sure that that law is in the books and people are protected

Trey Ware:  … Very well said. Let me ask you one more thing about one more topic, because I get this asked to me all the time. One of your opponents Don Huffines [has] based his entire campaign on eliminating property taxes in Texas, what are your thoughts about property taxes? What to do about it? I’m guessing also, if you want to say something about maintaining a position of absolutely no state income tax, how whatever your positions are there, love to hear.

Chad Prather: Sure. You know, when you know, constitutionally, we’ve got to maintain a legacy of no state income tax. And I truly believe in that. You know, Texas is by-and-large, a low tax state, but our property taxes, which in my opinion, are the most immoral tax, you can put on somebody, they don’t ever own their land on their property.

You know, Texas legacies are about wealth, global power in terms of energy, but also law owning land, we’ve lost our heritage with farming and ranching, but just home ownership, you never own because of property taxes. Everything that you see out there is being taxed and owned by the government.

People have been priced out of their homes, we’ve got to take the state surplus buy down property taxes. I’ve consistently said that we need to slightly increase the sales tax and the gas tax, maybe by half a percentage there  until we put ourselves on a path to a  consumption tax … and that’s got to be kept as well. We don’t want that to get out of control because right now we’ve become a sinkhole state.

We haven’t fiscally taking care of ourselves and we’ve gotten ourselves into major problems. And we rank very low in terms of our fiscal responsibility. Let’s take the money that’s there. Let’s take the wealth that’s coming in. Let’s stop giving, you know $900 million tax breaks to South Korean companies like Samsung, stop subsidizing Facebook, Amazon, Google, Tesla that are coming here and turning Austin into another Silicon Valley. Stop doing that.

Let’s protect Texas landowners, homeowners, and make sure that immediately people 65 and older, no longer pay property tax, veterans are no longer paying property tax. We’ve got the money that’s there. The resources are there. Let’s buy it down. I remind people we don’t have a state. Property tax that ended in 1982 it’s handled on the local level.

As long as we’re putting immoral people who do not handle $1 properly — and they know it’s your dollar so they don’t care. We’ve got to stop putting immoral people in those positions of power to dictate over us do things such as reward ISPs that keep a low bond and penalize those that keep it high. There’s so many things that we need to be doing. But we’ve got to remember, this is a moral issue, Trey, property tax is a moral issue. And I tell people, you know, Israelites 6000 years ago to figure out a way we read in our Bible, you know that they had no property tax. So that’s the promised land. If they could figure out a way around property tax, surely the most economic fiscal conservative minds in Texas can figure out a way to get around it today. It’s a moral issue. We’ve got to get rid of it, no doubt.