Chase Geiser On The Race For Congress In GA-10 With Mike Collins | OAP #49
Chase Geiser is joined by Mike Collins.
Mike was born and raised in Jackson, Georgia. He credits his first job at age 12, sweeping floors in his dad’s shop, for instilling in him the value of hard work and an appreciation for the American Dream. That strong foundation and his entrepreneurial spirit spurred him to found his first business at age 25.
For the past 31 years since, Mike has successfully owned and operated several small businesses. Since then, he’s grown his trucking business from just one semi-truck to a fleet of 115. Collins Trucking hauls millions of metric tons of freight throughout the nation each year and employs more than 100 hard-working Georgians.
Mike graduated with a business degree from Georgia State University and married his high school sweetheart, Leigh Ann. They have three children and three grandchildren and still reside in Jackson, where they are actively involved in their community. They attend Rocksprings Church.
And tonight I am honored and pleased to have the guest, Mike Collins, with us tonight.
Mike Collins is going to be the next congressman representing the District 10 of Georgia.
And I'm very excited to have him and very pleased that he agreed to come on the show.
How are you doing, Mike?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me on, Chase.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
I like your logo on the back.
I did a little bit of research on you before you came on the show.
And I noticed that your kind of claim to fame is that you have 100 employees that are in Georgia and you started a trucking business.
Is that right?
We do.
My parents were in the trucking industry.
We started out.
We hauled logs out of the woods.
And, of course, I took over their business when I was 20 and saw that was not going to feed all of us.
So my wife and I, we started our own trucking company.
I think I was around 23, maybe 22, 23 years old.
Wow.
How'd you get your first 18-wheeler?
Believe it or not, that is a wild story.
I had a person that I knew, and he let me lease the truck.
And he said, as you can afford the payments, we'll swap it over.
And another guy did the same thing with the trailer.
And as I just kept building, they kept honoring that agreement.
And it was nice.
It was a great way to get started.
I don't know why they did it, but regardless, it's been very, very, we've been very, very fortunate in what we've been able to do.
I heard that there's been a major shortage in truckers.
Have you experienced any of that struggle?
Yes, everybody's have.
And that's been a struggle for a number of years.
When you think about it, a truck driver, you can't start that career until you're 21.
Now, you graduate from high school at 18.
You go to tech school at 18, get out at 19, but you're still not able to drive a truck until you're 21.
So it kind of puts us at a very bad disadvantage.
And then, you know, you take last year especially when COVID hit.
The Motoring Public was fantastic, but the shippers and the Constantines, you might take a load 1,100, 1,200 miles and the shipper or the Constantine's closed because somebody had COVID, but they didn't call anybody.
So you've got a driver that's sitting there.
You don't know how long.
So, you know, it got to where it was a frustration factor.
And a lot of our drivers are older.
A lot of your older drivers, 65 plus, they drive because they love it.
It's who they are.
And when the frustration set in, they thought, well, I've got a wife, kids, grandkids at home.
I'll go home.
And then you throw into the mix the fact they closed the truck driving schools.
And so you've just got a perfect storm.
We can't hire you without two years' experience.
Even though I run, operate 115 trucks, we just can't hire you because of insurance.
So we're in kind of a holding pattern.
You know, I've got 20 trucks sitting out there on the fence.
So is that a state law that drivers have to be 21 or is that a federal law?
That's a federal law.
And some of them are changing.
I see no problem with an 18-year-old driving.
Maybe I'm a unique situation.
I started when I was 16, but the trucks are so much safer now than what they used to be.
Incredibly safe.
Everything from collision mitigation to lane departure.
So rollover.
Safe for the driver, but if you get ran by one of those, you're in trouble if you're in a Nissan Versa.
Well, you know, you go back to that collision mitigation.
It actually, if you come up on a vehicle, it will slow that truck down tremendously.
Yeah.
Artificial intelligence stuff.
What do you think about some of the work that Elon Musk has been doing in terms of the electronic cyber truck that he sort of brought out a couple of years ago?
You know, I'll wait and see.
You know, I've always loved technology.
Anything, we run solar panels on our trucks now.
So we run solar panels with an electric APU or auxiliary power unit to run the truck at nighttime.
And that's great.
It works out great.
So, you know, anything that makes it more technologically advanced, safer, more efficient, better for our drivers, for all of us to make more money, then certainly I'll take a look at it.
Got no problem with it.
Well, I'm all about the green energy approach, but it seems to me that if we're still making electricity with fossil fuels, then if you have an electric car, you're not exactly saving the environment.
You're just burning coal to make the electricity, right?
Yeah, you know what my problem with it is.
You've got the EPA, and this is through all bureaucracies.
I just know the trucking side of it, but you could pull me out and you could put a plumber in, an electrician in, even a painter.
It doesn't matter.
They don't really know the industry, but yet they're able to regulate you and demand that you put everything on the equipment that they think that needs to be so that if, Chase, if you want to go up there and put your mouth on the muffler and breathe in the exhaust tomorrow, you'll be okay.
Now, I don't recommend it, but you'll be okay.
But it doesn't make any sense at the expense that we did to get to that point.
You know, you take, we had trucks that used to get eight, eight and a half miles to the gallon.
When they got through with us, we're back down to five, five and six miles to the gallon.
You know, and the oil change intervals are so much more.
So we got through a lot more oil and diesel to do what they want you to do, but they really don't understand the total cost of what they're putting you through.
You get a truck.
Most of the trucks you see sitting on the side of the interstate, they're derated.
And that means that the truck has shut itself down.
And most time it's because of some sensor instead of letting you be able to limp to the next truck stop or something.
So just there's just a lot of stuff.
It's called federal government interference.
And it's one of the biggest pet peeves I have, regulations.
And a federal government that is way too big, way too intrusive.
And we need to get them out of our lives.
Yeah, it would have been a lot easier to prevent the expansion than it is to reverse it, I imagine.
That's one of the concerns that I have.
And I'm an optimistic person, just generally speaking, but it's alarming how, like, how do you, how do you untangle the unchecked nature of the intelligence community, right?
Sometimes on my Twitter account, I call the intelligence community the unchecked fourth branch of government.
And that, you know, they're not really accountable to anybody if, you know, if the FBI or the CIA breaks any law, they do an internal investigation, right?
There's not like an external branch of government that really checks on them.
I mean, technically, Congress could do investigations, but with the top secret nature of these intelligence communities, they can't even tell politicians secret information unless they have need to know or they specifically ask.
And so I'm really concerned long term about how some of these, the way that we've allowed our government to get so big, but particularly with the intelligence community, I'm concerned long term with how that's going to play out in terms of the tyranny versus liberty kind of dynamic.
Oh, I think I just lost you.
You muted for some reason.
I'm not sure what happened.
Okay.
Am I back on that?
I can get you back.
You're back.
You're back.
Hey, Chase.
Okay.
I had an echo in the background.
I was trying to just trying to correct it there on my side.
But, you know, it's not just the law enforcement or the CIA or the FBI.
Yeah, a lot of that needs to be looked at.
You take a look at what's happened to Trump over the past four years.
Now, if people don't think that we need to really look to see what's going on in our federal government just from that standpoint, then they're not really paying attention.
But it's in all bureaucracy.
And the problem is that they're not accountable.
You take a lot of the, and this is not with the CIA or the FBI, but you take with the regulations and the bureaucrats.
And the fact that they've been trying to pass this Reigns Act, and it's still in Congress today, just so that Congress has the power to either say yay or nay over a regulation that's over a certain cost.
And the fact that they should be able to bring those regulations in every so often and say, hey, do we still need this regulation?
Because without that, there is absolutely no check and balance on those people up there.
Yeah, well, I think that the original intention of the structure of government was that the states would kind of hash out the specifics and the federal government was sort of provide for the common defense, make sure no states are violating individual rights like we see in the bill of rights.
And so, you know, it's just one of those things where over time, it seems that the federal government has garnered more and more power.
And I think a lot of it has to do with how dependent the states are financially on contracts and grants from the federal government.
So there's sort of a leverage there.
You know, well, let's break it two things.
You take the bill that just got passed with HR4 in there.
Now you've got a federal government that is going to take over the elections in every state.
Now, that's not explicitly unconstitutional.
It's amazing.
Yes.
But it's a systematic approach.
And it's been this way for a long time.
You know, you go back as far as any social program you can think of, even the social net programs that were basically set up as a safety net, be it Social Security or Medicaid, and how over the years the government has gotten you into a dependency, whether you're older.
And every time something happens with Social Security, man, they're right there on top of it.
And they paid into the system.
Don't get me wrong.
They deserve their money.
But that's part of the dependency that the government has systematically processed and put us through to where you take your faith and everything that guides you off of God and then you move it right over to government.
And you can go right on down the line.
You take the middle class or middle-aged people and there's Obamacare, healthcare.
Let the government take care of it for you.
And now we are on the children with CRT, the mask mandates to make you conform.
To where everything that they're going to start doing, these children, they want them to say, what does the government think that I need to do?
Have you seen the numbers on how many children under the age of 18 have actually died of COVID this whole pandemic?
No, I haven't seen it.
It's only about 360.
I thought it was less than 400.
Yeah.
And if you look at the numbers of children without COVID who died of pneumonia, it's over double that.
So if you're advocating for masking children to save them from COVID, then you should have already been mandating before COVID to protect them from pneumonia.
It's sort of this pneumonia consistency going on.
Right, right.
So there's so much.
It's just very bizarre.
That makes sense.
There's so much.
I hate to use the word stupidity, but you almost wonder what do they really think we are?
Do they think we're that crazy?
That we're that stupid?
I can't figure out if they believe it or if they're just if they're just lying.
That's what I can't figure out.
Do they actually think that masks are going to save kids?
Is that what's going on?
I think that I don't even think they care about the mask.
I think that it is just a point to where, and people get to that point to where they just say, man, okay, hands up, forget it, whatever, whatever you want me to do, just leave me alone.
Just tell me what you want and then leave me alone.
And that's where they want you.
To me, it really doesn't have anything to do about mask.
I am totally against these mask mandates.
I'm totally against the vaccine mandate.
If it helps you, go see your doctor.
Y'all discuss it.
Not the government.
That's just another part of this, this whole process.
And I tell you what, Chase.
So did you decide to get the vaccine?
No, I've not got it.
I actually contracted COVID December 31st.
So I got to bring in the new year and quarantined.
Yeah, I was actually watching.
There was probably two or three days that were a little bit, I know I made some phone calls that I don't remember.
And I was drive my V. No, I never had a fever.
I knew I had it when I lost my sense of smell and taste, but I would drive my truck to my office and sit out in the parking lot and make all my phone calls and watch what's going on and see what was going on.
But it was, I was fortunate.
I didn't have anything bad happen.
But I feel like I still got the antibodies.
So, you know, I haven't even checked out on getting the vaccine.
I'm glad they approved it.
It was one of those things that I think is really interesting.
And I can't get to the bottom of it.
It's that, you know, one of one of Trump's greatest accomplishments was being able to get a vaccine for this illness in record time, right?
Within a year.
And it was, you know, it was really a Trump thing with warp speed.
And it's, I don't understand why it totally flipped.
And you see sort of like a lot of hesitance and reluctance from the right to actually take the vaccine.
And you see the left really pushing it.
And it's like, I never imagined that I would see the left pushing something that Trump did.
You know, it is kind of it is kind of strange, but you know, and I, in all honesty, I had a good friend of mine, he had he got COVID probably two weeks before I did, and so he went and got the vaccine back in March or April.
But he has had tremendous headaches, and that's what I had while I had COVID.
Man, I had headaches like you wouldn't believe.
And so he's he had headaches so bad after he took the vaccine that they have they have not figured out yet why he cannot get rid of them.
And so there's that's the reluctance that I've had.
Uh, just thinking that, well, maybe he still had the antibodies.
I don't know.
I'm not a doctor.
But when I decide to really take a hard look at it, then I'll go to my doctor and see what see what we need to do.
But to me, that's still a personal decision.
So you ran in 2014 for the first time.
Is that right?
I did.
I did.
What made you decide to do that?
I saw that we need business people in Washington.
And to me, I thought that it was a good time for me to step up and run.
I've never run for office before.
I've never been in elected office and came pretty doggone close to winning that election.
No, half a point.
It was, well, I lost about 4,500 votes at the end of the day in the runoff.
The primary, we were pretty much tied.
But I was running against, I was running against a second-time candidate.
Congressman Heiss had run before.
He's the pastor of a fairly large church, probably 3,000 to 4,000 people.
And so, you know, I had a, I knew I had a little bit of a hill to climb, but anybody that's ever worked around me or worked on our team knows that, man, we run night and day.
We run wide open.
And so we, we, I really thought that I was going to take that election last time, but, you know, it didn't.
It turned out it's probably the right decision that I didn't win.
You know, you look back hindsight and it's always 2020.
I got to, you know, I got to spend five good years with my dad before he passed away.
And I probably wouldn't have got to be able to do that.
And I know that's sorry you lost your dad.
Yeah, it was about two and a half years ago.
So, you know, he was, he was, he was one of my biggest mentors and I learned a lot from him, you know, and that's okay.
We'll see him again one day.
But this time around, I am telling you, Chase, I'm not coming in second place again.
We'll do what it takes to win.
We've got the right message.
And especially after Donald Trump four years showing that a business person, an outsider, and what he was able to do.
And the whole time, just think the whole time, four years, they had his head underwater trying to drown him to death.
And look at what he was able to accomplish.
Man, if he'd have had, if we wouldn't have had Paul Ryan as the speaker of the house, just think of what we could have done.
So this time around, I think people, Chase, everywhere we go, and I would say for the last two weeks, everywhere I've spoken, we've had standing room only.
30% of the people in these meetings, especially these monthly meetings we go to, are brand new.
They've never participated.
They've never been to a meeting.
They may have started in January, February, or they may have just came in that night.
And every one of them had the same meshes.
I have no idea what to do.
I've never been here before, but I'm here because we got to do something.
And that's what's incredible.
Man, that's sweet.
What do you think about the state of the Republican Party?
I've been a Republican voter for my entire adult life.
I'm 30 now, but I'm feeling somewhat disenfranchised with the party, not because my views on policy have changed, but because I feel like a lot of the existing leadership within the party is sort of coasting.
And I don't know if that's a sentiment that you share or if that's something that you hear, but I feel concerned that there's not the hustle that is needed in order to beat the Democrats because as much as I despise them, they know how to win.
You know, you're right on, you're right on the money.
And the reason is, is that most of these people up here go up there for a career.
But there's a good group now.
The Freedom Caucus guys and ladies, they're hustling.
You know, you've got those political prisoners from January 6th.
You've seen them there.
They're trying to get them to a trial.
They're out there pushing, trying to make sure everybody understands how we're getting messed over with this budget resolution and this infrastructure bill.
But you're right, you've got a number of them up there.
You've got a lot of Republicans that like spending your money just like Democrats.
Sure.
And you're going to, if you go to Washington today, you better be willing to fight the people on the left, the wacko liberal leftists.
But you better be willing to fight those rhinos and those establishment people.
Yeah, I noticed that in your campaign ad.
It's Rhino season two.
It is.
Whoever wrote that ad did a really good job.
Well, I appreciate it.
I can't take credit for writing it, but that's been our message the entire time.
And the red truck you see is my campaign truck in there.
That's an 06 Peterbilt extended hood.
So she's going to go out on the road with us as soon as we manual or automatic.
Oh, no, man, that's a manual there.
It's got 13 speed in it.
You know, that's awesome.
We have a lot of automatics now.
No kidding.
I had no idea.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I would say probably 75%, 80% of our fleet now is automatic trucks.
So with this government spending thing, you know, I used to get bothered about it because I'm a big capitalist guy.
I read a lot of Milton Friedman growing up, a lot of Ayn Rand.
And, you know, I used to be concerned because it's like, hey, they're spending my money.
But, you know, as I've looked into it, and I could be misguided, but as I've looked into it, it's not even really the spending that's the problem.
It's the fact that they have to sell bonds in order to pay for it.
And it seems like the inflation that comes from the spending is what's really hurting poor and middle-class people disproportionately and sort of kind of making the political class richer.
Because if you have your money in the market, inflation, you know, grows your portfolio value.
But if you're too poor to put money in the market because you're a paycheck to paycheck person, then inflation is really detrimental because every dollar you have loses value.
Well, and you know, you younger crowd, and I've been in it since 2017.
I think that's why there's such an interest in crypto.
Yeah.
It's such a hedge against inflation, and it has nothing to do with the dollar.
But that's a different story.
I mean, but I think that's why there's such a push from younger people to go towards cryptocurrency.
But you talk about just bonds or selling off our debt, and you look at who has our debt.
You know, the number one country that hates the United States the most is China.
You know, and I hate to refer back to Trump, but that's what he always said.
He just would say China.
Look at what they're doing now.
And you may have heard of it by now, but I read it a week ago where China closed down the world's third largest port.
So all your cheap Chinese crap that you buy for Christmas is not going to come because of one coronavirus.
They found one coronavirus.
That tells me that they really aren't interested in the economic side of it.
What they're interested in is breaking you.
They're sitting there saying, we've got control of every bit of your economy.
And we've got to get that back.
And we've got to do that in a couple of different ways.
And getting that debt down is one of the most important ways that we can do that.
You've got people up there that don't understand debt and credit.
They run that place off the seat of their britches with an open checkbook.
And anybody in business understands that won't do nothing but get you.
You'll go broke pretty dang quick.
Yeah.
And I think one of the things that people don't understand about China is that it's a communist dictatorship.
And yes, they use capitalism in order to gain revenue and profit, but it's really a communism at its heart.
And what that means is none of the officials in leadership are accountable to constituents.
They're only accountable to who's a top-down system, not a bottom-up system like democracy.
And so when you see things like what happened in between 1958 and 1962 in China, that was the great leap forward when Mao tried to move all the agricultural workers into the cities to industrialize China and make it this tech hub.
And what ended up happening was they had tremendous famine for four years because nobody was farming and harvesting food.
And they, you know, there's some studies that say that up to 100 million people starved to death in that four-year period.
And so people don't understand that, you know, something like that would never happen in the United States because there's bottom-up accountability and the people, everyone would lose the power.
But in China, they don't care about the pain that the people feel.
So they're willing to do things like, you know, make people suffer financially or make people get sick, you know, because of like a bioweapon.
You know, I'm not saying that COVID's a bioweapon for sure, but my point still stands that they don't care how much it hurts their people to hurt us.
Like we sort of kind of had this like, hey, you know, they're never going to do anything to us because they need us just as much as we need them.
But that's not really true because they don't care about the pain that the people feel from economic strife.
You know, Newt Gingrich said it best, and he said this over 10 years ago.
He said that the Chinese are beating our socks off in math and science.
And if the United States doesn't get their act together, we're going to be in a world of hurt.
Wouldn't that fast forward?
What has been going on with these H1 visas?
They've been bringing the Chinese in because corporations can't find anybody to help them produce their products.
So they bring these people in, and then, what, six months, a year later, all of a sudden, boom, they're gone.
They're back in China.
They're not just back in China.
They're back in China producing your product.
And then you're sitting over here producing your product with all these regulations that are, some of them are not worth paper they're written on, but you're having a, you're at a disadvantage already.
And now you have people that say, well, I just want to buy the cheap stuff.
And there is a national security there.
Well, just look at it.
Look at what's going on today with China and the fact that they've got those container ships over there sitting there and they're not loading them.
And then, what, two days ago, they closed down the airport there at Shanghai with the air cargo.
So you think you've got a few empty shelves now and you think inflation's bad now.
It's coming.
So are you familiar with Eric Weinstein at all or Brett Weinstein, the Weinstein brothers?
It's okay if you're not.
Yeah, I've heard their name, but I don't know anything about it.
Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and he came to prominence because he was involved in that Evergreen State University controversy where a number of years ago they had a day on campus where they said, listen, if you're white, don't come on campus.
This is like a solidarity day for minorities.
And he showed up anyway because he's like, that's racist.
And so there's a video of him that went viral and that's how he kind of came to prominence.
His brother, Eric, works for Teal Capital in a very high capacity, brilliant physicist, brilliant mathematician.
And he believes that what really happened with the H1 visas is that not that the corporations actually needed the engineers.
He believes that those needs were exaggerated so that the universities could get the free labor from the foreign students coming over.
And so I don't know if it's true or not, but he can frame it in a much more sophisticated manner than I. But if you're an ambitious head of an engineering department at MIT and you're trying to accomplish these studies and you're trying to kind of be groundbreaking and you can have a whole team of 10 foreign students helping you with the research and doing all the work for free that maybe Americans wouldn't just because of the cultural differences or whatever,
he claims that that was actually an effort for us to import free labor for research and then we just sent it back and it ended up being a national security crisis.
But I mean, think about it.
How many engineers graduate and can't find a job?
You know, it's like, is there really a shortage of engineers in the United States?
You know, either way, we're in the same position.
Yes, right.
You're right.
So there's so much going on in DC.
It's so much happening at one time that you find yourself talking in four and five different directions, just trying to keep up with what's going on up there during the day.
These last two bills that just got passed through the House, boy, I tell you, we need to, I encourage everybody, I encourage all you listeners, they need to be on the Senate.
You need to be calling a senator.
I don't care if it's your senator or any senator.
They need to understand that the American people are awake.
We're not woke.
We are awake.
And the day of reckoning is coming soon.
I believe, Chase, I'm telling you, I believe that there is going to be such a huge red wave coming in this midterm elections.
Now, y'all are going to pick up two seats in Congress because California is giving them to you.
So, that's going to be net there.
That's going to, and then, and then you pull one out of New York, put it in Florida.
We can, we will take the house.
It's just a matter of how much we're going to take.
I think it's going to be huge.
And there's going to be a day of reckoning coming.
And the Republicans and the Senate need to understand that because we've got some over there, they need to be looked at.
They need to go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got to clean your own house too.
It's, you know, it's not just about the left.
So, you know, I want to ask you, and if you don't feel comfortable talking about it yet, that's fine.
But what are your thoughts as far as cryptocurrency?
Because I know there's a lot of concern.
I'm someone who's invested in cryptocurrency fairly heavily.
There's a lot of concern about regulation on crypto.
What's your position on it?
And it's okay if you don't have one yet because it's a complicated thing.
My two sons are 28.
So they're fairly close to you.
And they introduced me to cryptocurrency in 2017.
That was a good time to get in.
I've been fooling around with it for a while.
Congratulations.
I used to use Binance when it was in Korea until we got forced out by the United States.
So the funny thing is, you look at a lot of what the Fed say about cryptocurrency and they really don't understand it, but yet they're wanting to regulate it, but they don't know what to do or how to do that.
But to me, it's a group of people that do software and they don't want to be paid in any monetary system that's out there in anybody's currency.
And so that's why they use the digital currency that they use.
Sorry, you can't pick it up.
And for all those people that think that hackers are able to ransom you with the Bitcoins and all that, transactions are public.
You can see it out there.
It's what's called the blockchain.
What you can't see is the password to get it out of there.
And so it's not a complicated system.
It's just people that do software work and are building these programs and they just want to get paid in a different form.
It's almost a form of bartering.
And sure, I mean, I love it.
I enjoy it.
I've got, you know, I've been invested in it for a while.
That's great, man.
So what's it like running in?
Obviously, it's the beginning of the campaign season, but what's it been like running so far?
I mean, how do you, how do you convince your family to agree to go through that?
You know what?
So the neat thing is, you take seven years ago, I had two sons.
We've got twins.
They were in college.
My daughter just turned 16.
So it was kind of my wife stayed at home a lot.
And so now, fast forward seven years, my two sons are married.
I got three grandkids.
And two years ago, I divided up all my job duties.
So as of about a year and a half ago, they've been running the place.
They run our day-to-day operations.
And our daughter has graduated from college.
Thank the good Lord.
And, you know, it's just a fantastic time.
I'm able to take my wife with me everywhere we go.
You know, and she's a big plus.
I know we were at a fundraiser about a month ago, and I had four or five people around me.
I looked across the room.
She's got like 10 over around her.
Sounds like you picked a good one.
Yeah, yeah, she's got her opinion.
Better watch out.
She might run against you.
Hey, I tell you what, man, step aside.
But we just don't do anything halfway.
You know, it's either we're running wide open or we're sleeping, you know, and then we're ready to get up and go again the next day.
And so whether there's nine months, which there actually is left in this election or there was two weeks, we're going to run it the same way.
And that's, we're going to do everything we can to get our message out, to let people know whether you're in this district, what we stand for, if you're not in a district, the opportunities that we have in this country to set this country on the right path in a midterm election and be ready for Trump when he comes back in 2024.
Could you imagine the success and the way we could get this country back on path with him in the White House and with a true Republican majority in the House and the Senate of good, true Republicans?
Right.
And you've got some there now, but boy, they need they need some help and we need to add to the fold.
And we're going to.
Who's your favorite?
Who's your favorite Republican in the House or Senate?
Oh, McConnell.
Yeah, a lot.
She may get mad at me about this, but a lot of people compared my comments and the way I talk to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
You know, I'm not going to vote for Kevin McCarthy.
And if that costs me a committee assignment, so be it.
You know, I'll put it this way.
I honestly believe that the fundamental process of Congress will be changed because so many people looked at it from a got to have this committee, got to have that committee.
You know, I want to be on the subcommittee of the dinosaur bones or whatever, you know.
And I think people like Congressman Marjorie Taylor Green are showing that no, that's not really the way you have to do this.
And you can be more effective.
But, you know, you take a number of them, Andy Biggs or Banks or Jordan or Gates, you know, they all have different roles.
I had breakfast with Congressman Cat Kmack last week.
They all have their different roles, but they're all good at what they do.
And any number of those people would be good people to follow and latch on to.
Do you think Gates is guilty of those allegations against him?
That's a tough question to answer as somebody running for office.
I'm not trying to put you on the spot.
No, but I will.
Yeah, I have no idea.
But I will say this with a heavy dose of skepticism.
If you're in Congress today and you're effective, look at what they said about Jim Jordan.
You're a target.
And you're effective.
You're right.
You're a target.
And you're a target from everybody up there that wants to get rid of you because you are rocking the boat and they don't want that.
So, you know, until you show me proof, then, you know, I'd put it over in National Inquiry.
Yeah, I'm with you there.
So what's the first thing you're going to do when you get into office?
You know, well, your first thing you do is going to vote for Speaker to House.
But what I tell people is you take a look at this crazy budget resolution that just came out today.
Everything was increased from your personal income tax all the way up to a state tax.
And what we're going to have to do is take a hard look at everything that they have done and then start passing bills to get rid of that and push this stuff back down.
That's going to be your major thing.
The other thing you've got to be able to pass and get through Congress things like this Keystone Pipeline to where it's just not things that Trump was only able to executive order, we've got to make sure that we put into law.
And then we've got to start limiting the federal government.
We've got to start lowering, getting rid of some of these old regulations.
And then we've got to just make people look and be responsible for themselves.
It's just an individual responsibility.
Now, yeah, I've got a few pet things that I'd like to see done too.
I think litigation is huge.
That's a huge problem right now.
And it's getting worse.
What do you mean?
It's just hyperlitigation, people getting sued all the time.
Oh, yeah.
Nuclear verdicts, everything.
Until you get some true tort reform, I mean, and this is getting way in the weeds, but until you get true tort reform, you're going to continue to see these runaway verdicts.
And you're going to see insurance be a very tough issue for small businesses.
And that needs to be addressed.
That was on Trump's hit list.
He just didn't have the people or the time to do that.
You know, obviously higher education costs and debt are a huge issue.
A lot of people want their debt to just be erased.
It seems to me that the cause of the debt is the fact that the government's willing to spend so much on tuition.
I mean, we saw tuition costs rise dramatically in the last 50 years in the United States.
I mean, there was a time when you could be a waiter or a waitress and you could pay your way through college and not have debt when you were done.
And so, you know, it seems to me that if that is the case, then the real solution is to cut off federal funding for tuition and loans.
But that's like a political suicide to do something like that, right?
I mean, you just get totally break through the coals if you cut off funding or lending.
You don't think so?
You think you can get away with it?
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think you need to go to private funding for colleges.
Yeah.
The other thing you need to do is get out of this mentality that everybody deserves to go to college.
Not deserve.
What is deserves to go to college?
It should be an option, an option along with technical school.
My goodness, look at the shortages and the needs in technical school.
And just because you go learn a technical school trade, man, I got plenty of buddies earned a whole lot of money.
They've done well.
And it doesn't mean you don't own your own business and you're not an entrepreneur.
It's just a different route.
But, you know, this theory that everybody's got to go to college and then you've got all these liberal arts degrees that won't get you anything.
It certainly won't get you a job.
You're just putting people through four years of something.
And then when they get out there at the end, they don't really know what they're going to do anyway.
That to me has been a bigger problem.
The federal government getting into the loan business is a problem.
But we just need to encourage people to get back into the high school side of the economics or the shop class and see if that might be an avenue for them.
Well, maybe one solution is, and I'd be interested to hear what you think about this, but maybe one solution is that federal funding or lending for education is variable based on what major you pursue, right?
So if the United States, for some reason, needs engineers, then, hey, if you study engineering, then we'll help you out more than if you study basket weaving, right?
And so I don't know if that's practical or not.
I'm just a layman here.
But it seems to me that there's creative ways to solve it.
Yeah.
I'm a free market guy.
If you can keep the federal government out of my life, it's best.
And that's in anything you do.
If you start to lean and depend on the federal government for anything, then eventually that's going to be you go to.
And that's just not me.
That's just not who I was made to be.
And so I always, goodness here, I want to go up there and join.
But I'm skeptical of anything they do.
I'd just as soon go up there.
Somebody asked me the other day, said, Mike, what would be the first thing you want to do when you go to Congress?
Honestly, I'd like to go up there and turn the lights off closed door and then we all go home.
Absolutely nothing.
Yeah.
I promise if I'm elected, I'll do absolutely nothing.
Put the shovel down.
You've dug enough.
It's time to stop.
I dug our way all the way to China.
So I want to ask you a little bit because I started, I started, I have an advertising business and I started my business in 2016.
And I remember in the beginning, there were months where it was like terrifying.
Did you ever have that experience as a small business owner where you're just like laying awake at night, like, how the hell am I going to make this work?
A number of times.
You go home on Friday night and you made the payroll, but you didn't get paid.
Yeah.
There's been a and the thing is, and my dad always told me, he said, son, you make all the money in the world.
But if it's sitting in receivables and it ain't in the checkbook, you can go broke quick.
And sure, you know, that cash is keen.
And yeah, there's been a number of nights, man.
You're sitting there wondering, did I make the right call?
Did I make the right move?
So, I mean, yeah, yeah, but we worked our way through it.
Well, when people talk about, you know, raising corporate tax rates, I think everybody in their head imagines like taxes on Amazon or Google or Facebook or one of these giant companies that's just, you know, very, very cash rich.
And I don't think they realize that the vast majority of corporations are LLCs or incorporated just small inks, you know, sole proprietors.
And the amount of discomfort or risk you have to put yourself in in order to start something new is another level of stress beyond the sort of typical stress that you have as an employee.
And I've been an employee and I've been, I've worked for myself and I've had employees and that it's, it's another level of stress.
I wouldn't trade it for the world because I value the freedom that comes with it.
I always say that I, you know, I get to choose which 20 hours a day I work.
Right.
And that's why I like it.
So so, you know, I wouldn't trade it for the world.
I'm just kind of built that way.
I have that disposition.
But I really wish that as a culture, we still had an understanding and an appreciation for that the blue-collar man, you know, that that's that's a small business owner and that these corporate income, these corporate tax hikes impact that person because these major corporations find the loopholes, they don't care, they work around it, they offshore their money.
But when you, you know, when you're a small business owner and you're just trying to find a way to bring home 10 grand in a month or something, it's like and you're getting hit with 36, 30% tax.
That's a big deal.
You know, I always tell my wife, you know, it's like, if you, if you want to buy something for five grand, you got to make 10.
You know, you, you are singing my song.
You know, you, you can take what you just said and in a small business, especially a small business is trying to grow.
And they, their cash is, is there, but it's not a lot of cash.
But you have you have income that's not really able to be shown as far as dollars and cents.
It's on the books.
Right.
And then when you raise that tax rate, like what they did today, and now they're talking about going back and making it retroactive to April, you really don't have that cash sitting there.
Okay, so now you don't have the cash.
So what's your options?
You're going to go to the bank to get a loan, right?
So I need an asset-based loan.
I need a line of credit.
Today's world with everything from Dodd Frank, what's left of it.
And God, I wish I hadn't said that because the Democrats want to put it back in force, full force.
Even back to Sarbanes Oxy.
You look at the amount of paperwork you have to fill out.
Now, if you're a small business person and you're out there working hard every day, in and out, every day, you don't have time.
You don't have that army of accountants like you were talking about with the large corporations.
That's all they do.
You've got to do that at night.
And then you've got to figure out what it is they want.
And then by the time you turn that in, it's over 90 days.
And oh, guess what?
We got to start over again because now your paperwork's all.
That's the type of mess that is hampering and just squeezing on these small businesses.
And that's the type of mess that I'm going to go up there and I'm going to fix because you're right.
This country was built on small business.
And do you realize in the trucking industry what the average trucking company is truck-wise?
98% of the trucking companies.
How many trucks?
I would, well, I'm going to say, because I kind of see where you're going, I'm going to say three.
98% of them are 10 trucks or less.
95% are five trucks or less.
Those big mega JB Hunts of the world that you see right now, they make a CEO driving the truck.
Yeah, they make up less than 2% of the total trucking industry.
It is the small mom and pop people out there that make this country work.
And they are the ones that got hammered today.
They're the ones that got hammered when Biden cut that Keystone pipeline off and raised their fuel prices.
They're the ones that are getting hammered because your milk is now $5 a gallon.
And they're the ones that need help.
And by God, we're going up there and that's what we're looking to do.
Well, I think it feels different too.
If you're an employee and your taxes are automatically withheld, it's a much different feeling than writing quarterly checks.
You know, because you've been looking at that money in your bank and you have it in the savings account because you know it's taxes, you know, if you're doing, if you're being responsible, but it's, you know, it's painful.
I mean, I wrote a check and this is this is not much money to many people, but to me, it was a lot.
I wrote a check for $30,000 in income tax.
And that's, you know, that's like writing that kind of a check is like, that's a, that's a new beamer, man.
Like, that's what I was going to say.
You can ride this.
That's one year for my kid in college.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There you go.
There's, there's my taxes.
It's sitting over in the lot.
You know, yeah, I agree with you 100%.
Yeah.
And the other thing about the social security side of it, you know, you take somebody, even my age, and I'm 54, so I'm a little bit older than you.
We never talk about social security because we don't even think it's going to be there.
You know, and you're so used to not really seeing it in your paycheck anyway.
So you don't really count it.
You don't think, oh, well, I'm paying $30 a week towards whatever.
You don't even think about that.
So you're right.
But at the end of the day, nobody my age or younger is probably even looking at Social Security to be there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and it's just amazing what you could do with that money if you just put it in an index 500.
It would be so much more than whatever the payments are going to be.
No kidding.
Yeah.
That's a high-risk, high-yield situation, though.
It's like playing the slots, man.
Only only play with what you're willing to lose.
Yeah, going to the craps table.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I like how we talked about, you know, running into 2014, running again in 2020 here, what it was like to be, you know, a small business owner in struggle.
I really want to touch on that because I don't think, you know, people realize that the heart and soul that goes into it.
What do you think our country is going to look like in 10 years?
I think that a lot of the midterm elections will change the focus of this country because right now, if we stay on course of what we're doing, then I think you're going to have a true federal intrusion into every part of your life.
But with the amount of people that I see waking up today and wanting to help and move the needle, I think, and then we get Trump or somebody in that position that understands how much we need this thing run like a business.
I think in 10 years from now, we could be blowing and going.
We could be just wide open again.
The other big thing that I like to tell people is, Chase, it's so hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
Yeah.
You take the last four years.
A lot of people coming in through that door that are saying, I'm here for the first time, they may not really know what's going on.
They may not really understand what's happening.
They know they're paying more for gas.
They know they've been paying more for their groceries, but they really don't have a true because they've never fooled with it.
But they do know what it felt like three years ago when they get home and they say, honey, you want to go out to eat?
Yeah.
And you go out to eat and you see lines of people.
And then you see people buying new cars, going on vacation, buying houses.
That's what Trump always said that you'd never get tired of.
And that's winning.
And man, they were winning.
All of us were employees and employers.
And you look at it today.
I'm telling you, people want that back.
You can even take that down to Cuba.
Those people got a little taste of it.
There are more Americans in Cuba than Portland.
Yeah, probably.
You know, Kylie, don't get me started.
What is the deal with this?
Now, we are a nation of laws, if I remember right.
Yeah.
And here we have whole blocks of cities out there that are being run by these thugs.
Now, why do we not take care of that using our current law?
If we don't, if we're going to become a mob rule, it really doesn't matter what they do up there in Washington.
Right.
Well, the reason you need a government is to protect the individual rights from the mob.
That's the whole point of government.
It's a third party that can protect individual rights from a mob.
It's straight from John Locke's second treasure government.
This is the foundation of our whole entire government.
And if the government doesn't honor that duty, that's when the people are supposed to, you know, take matters to their own.
Rise up and replace them.
Right.
And so, you know, there's right now we're in a position in the United States where we can do that peacefully and legally and aggressively.
If we get some consensus on our side and rally, we can replace these people that allowed it to happen.
And, you know, I voted for Trump both times enthusiastically.
I love Trump.
I disagree with a lot of things he said, a lot of things he did.
But generally speaking, I like him because everybody I hate hates him.
And the fact of the matter is I was disappointed in how he led last year.
And I know that it was difficult because it was an election year.
And if he did anything controversial, like really hammering down on these cities, it would have looked tyrannical.
I don't know.
It would have looked racist.
And I think that he held back thinking, I'll be able to take care of it after the election.
And the lesson that I learned from that is you just have, you have to lead the whole time.
You can't put leadership on pause for an election.
I think he did a little bit.
You had Fauci.
That blame Fauci reminds me of a squirrel crossing the road.
It's like a mouse.
He's running over here and over there and over here, back over.
He doesn't know which way.
And usually those type rodents, they get run over and they get squished at some point.
But we've got a great opportunity this time around and we're going to take it.
I can feel it coming.
There's a huge momentum.
There's a huge momentum that we've seen behind us.
And that's been really neat as well to see the amount of people that come out.
I'm not going to say that sometimes I don't get fired up.
And I tell folks every night, if I say a bad word, I just point at my wife.
She taught me all those bad words.
They come natural.
So, where can people find you to support you?
You know, please do.
They can go to mikecollinsga.com.
And you can use MikeCollinsGA and you can go all across all the social platforms from Rumble to YouTube to Facebook and Twitter.
And we post stuff all the time.
We put videos out there.
Today was a twofer video.
I did two videos today.
I was dead blame, fed up with some things that I saw.
But yeah, I'd love for them to go check us out because I encourage people, no matter where you're at in this country and no matter what you do, look to see who is running for everything.
I don't even care if it's your homeowners association, because if you think about your homeowners association, they're the people that won't let you fly your flag.
Yep.
So you need to be looking at homeowners association, city council, board of education, mayors, state races, all the way up to the president of the United States.
And if you don't have partisan elections, I encourage you.
You need to go back to partisan politics in elections because these beauty contests, they're not working.
Hey, look at this little block here.
There's like three good looking people in Congress.
Rand Paul, McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi, like everybody else.
But we need to know where these people stand from a basic standpoint.
Are you on the team of less government, more individual responsibility?
Are you on the team of big government?
We'll take care of everything.
And then you need to get involved.
And we tell people every day, get involved.
You may not be the candidate.
You may be a candidate.
You may be helping fundraising poll watching, whatever it is, but get involved and check us out as well.
Because there's a lot of folks running in this race I'm in.
Check us all out.
And then if you can help support us, I'd love to have you support.
If you're living in the 10th district of Georgia, I want you to vote.
Because by God, I'm telling you, y'all send me to Washington.
Man, we can fix these problems.
And then we'll take our country back.
And then term limit myself for six years.
I'll come on back to Georgia.
You know, I'm kind of like the old SEC football, man.
You get four years of college football and it's time to go.
Yeah.
There'll be somebody else come along.
There's some, there's, there's good people coming along.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
It's really been an honor and a pleasure to have you.
