Episode #2223- Hammer and Nigel Full Show"

**Nigel** (0:00)
Hammer and Nigel.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
You believe these characters?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:02)
They're weirdos.

**Nigel** (0:05)
My name is Nigel, Jason Hammer, right over there. I do like it when elected officials like get everybody together and talk about stuff that we're on board with, like the big ones, like eliminating property tax. And that's exactly what Indiana rep JD Prescott did at his town hall last night.

**Hammer** (0:24)
But the problem is, and I hate to be Debbie Downer here, but it's like rooting for the Colts, okay? I'm rooting for the Colts, like I'm rooting for JD Prescott here.
But I'm not overly optimistic on both.
Like I love, love, love both of those things, right? The possibility of the elimination of property tax and having it replaced with something else. I'm all right with that. And I love the Colts. But the realist in me says, there's a better chance that I'm going to replace Messi in the World Cup. That's not going to happen either. So we retweeted this earlier from the Indy Reporter account, and he had a good breakdown of what took place at this town hall where Prescott is once again trying to roll out his plan to eliminate property taxes.

**Nigel** (1:21)
And the key word there is plan. It's not like he's just calling town halls willy nilly, I want to eliminate the property tax. Thanks for coming.

**Hammer** (1:28)
Right. So to understand what we're talking about here, roughly $10.6 billion annually comes from property taxes at Indiana. 45% of that funds schools, 20% counties, 20% cities, and the remaining 15% funds townships and libraries and other things, airport authorities. So if you eliminate the property tax, you clearly have to replace it with something.
So he's proposing a 7% sales tax on service, 7% sales tax on service, including business to business services, while continuing exemptions for education, health care and anything already exempt.
So, in his proposal, he specifically says that data centers should not receive special treatment. They would pay sales tax on services. And the sponsor also intends to remove their sales tax exemption on goods. And his timeline is set up to where 2027 would be the final year of assessment, 2028 would be the last year property taxes are paid, and sales tax on services would begin July 1st, 2028 And basically, it would come up to the same math. The 10 points, whatever it is, 6 billion annually, approximately would be the same if you did the 7% sales tax on services with business to businesses and data centers involved.

**Nigel** (3:16)
Well, as they say in the A-Team, I love it when a plan comes together. Let's do it. Come on.

**Hammer** (3:22)
But, keep in mind, he has proposed a plan like this in the past, and it's fallen on deaf ears. The only reason there's any sort of optimism right now is that the midterm primary here in Indiana where so many Republican butt sniffers lost, those that had their nose so far up Rod Bray's hiney, you couldn't tell where their face began and his ass ended. Many of those folks lost their job.
So there's a little momentum here thinking if you can remove Rod Bray from his leadership position in Indiana, who I have said for a long time, is the reason why we can't have nice things as taxpayers at the state of Indiana. If you can remove that guy, then you might have a chance.
Chance is the key word here. It still sounds like it's a long shot. But another implementation here from Representative Prescott's proposal is this would kind of put a moratorium on referendums as well. So if this indeed happens and they're getting the same amount of money, schools don't get to say, please help us, here's Tiny Tim. That stuff goes away.

**Nigel** (4:46)
Going back to your cult analogy, it's like, that's kind of like saying, you know, talking about removing Rod Bray, it's almost, you know, the likelihood of that, the cult saying to themselves back in the day, you know, if we could just remove Tom Brady from the New England Patriots, then we could have a shot at this thing.

**Hammer** (5:05)
If we could just keep Andrew Luck healthy, we're going to make a run at this thing.

**Nigel** (5:11)
Nope.

**Hammer** (5:11)
Nope. Not happening.
Great news, though, in terms of inflation, earlier today, the inflation report came out, the largest decline in over six years, Nigel. Now take this with a grain of salt. That should tell you how bad the inflation was.

**SPEAKER_7** (5:30)
Yeah. Yeah.

**Hammer** (5:31)
Just like we talk about with the crime members here in Indy. Crime is down. Yeah. From the record.