Gov. Mike Braun Joins In-Studio!

**Jason Hammer** (0:00)
My name is Nigel, Jason Hammer, right over there with a very special In-Studio guest.

**Nigel** (0:04)
The governor of the great state of Indiana is Governor Mike Braun.
You had a big announcement earlier and had to do with the gas tax. For those who may have missed it, walk me through it.

**Mike Braun** (0:16)
Well, we did it for three and a half months based upon what happened in Iran.

**Jason Hammer** (0:21)
You suspended it.

**Mike Braun** (0:23)
Suspended it for three and a half months. And it has to be based upon a particular emergency. That is kind of ebbed and flowed since then.
Couldn't renew it based on it. And the thing that came up that's aggravated it even further would be the disruption of oil supplies due to the Russian-Ukrainian War. And some supplies being disrupted due to wildfires up in Canada. So for us to do it, it had to be based upon a different set of circumstances. And we viewed that as being aggravating already.

**Jason Hammer** (1:03)
Is that why you didn't call a special session?

**Mike Braun** (1:05)
Yeah, because I wouldn't have done that unless both the House and the Senate and the Attorney General agreed with it that you could do it.

**Nigel** (1:14)
Because we were told that you couldn't extend this anymore. That was like the groundwork that had been laid.

**Mike Braun** (1:19)
It had to be based upon what would you can, if you're in an emergency situation, it has to have the merit to do it. And you've got latitude. And this was based on similar circumstances, but different. So we cleared that with House, Senate and the AG.
And they gave it the OK. And to me, it has been the most direct involvement on anyone in the country on affordability. Something you're dealing with weekly. And we don't know when it's going to end, based upon the ebb and flow of what we're seeing in the Mideast. And then when you've got this, it's a complicating factor.
We felt it justified it. We did it. And I'll look at it every 30 days, just like I did on the other one.

**Nigel** (2:09)
OK, so you mentioned that you don't know when it may end. It depends on a lot of things.
I look at what's happening in my community, right? Roads are still having construction workers. The sky is not falling. We've been OK without having this top five in the nation gas tax being thrown upon us here. Any chance we could get rid of this thing as a whole?

**Mike Braun** (2:35)
So when you talk about roads and bridges, which everybody complains about if they're not in good shape, the last time we addressed it was in 2017 I actually was in the legislature. And that was a long term road funding plan that built out 69
Also gave us some of the ability to do community crossings and stuff that we do to help more rural counties, smaller towns. That's been probably the most popular thing we've done in any state law that was in 2016 So when it comes to how you pay for anything, that's a valid discussion. And then you got to make sure what you're doing is being done efficiently. And the only reason we could entertain doing this to give a holiday is because in a year and a half, this is uncharted territory. Our unemployment rate has dropped from 4.4% to 3.3.
We're generating about a billion dollars more in revenue due to the economic development policies based upon regionalism, seeing that benefit across the state. And we're running government more efficiently by the tune of about a billion dollars a year. You don't see that in mainstream media because last thing they're going to ever praise is an entrepreneurial conservative.

**Nigel** (3:59)
Right.

**Mike Braun** (3:59)
So we're getting stuff done the way you need to do it. Then it gives you the benefit of lightening the load, whether you do it through a gas holiday, whether you tackle something more substantively like you're talking about, whether you go further on property tax reform, which that's out there is a live issue. And look at how much has changed in a short period of time in terms of the wet blankets on all of that.

**Nigel** (4:26)
Governor, let me just intervene here. There's a lot of people and I think to be honest, I may be in this category that say the state of Indiana has got a surplus. I've always been taught that if you've got a surplus, you've been overtaxed.

**Mike Braun** (4:42)
Right.

**Nigel** (4:43)
So if we've got a surplus and we're still doing OK without this gas tax in a state that's a very heavy Republican majority, a top five gas tax in the nation, a lot of people have a hard time with that.