More Than Medicine
More Than Medicine
Interview with Josiah Magnuson: Shaping South Carolina's Legislative Future
Uncover the legislative priorities shaping South Carolina's future with our distinguished guest, Josiah Magnuson, the representative for District 38. As a committed member of the Freedom Caucus, Josiah brings a wealth of insights into the pressing issues of the upcoming legislative session. From the personal joy of expecting his second child to the serious business of policy-making, Josiah guides us through his vision for the state—starting with the moral imperative to protect unborn children and the critical need to reduce the tax burden on residents. He emphasizes aligning with the South Carolina Republican Party platform to drive meaningful change for constituents.
Join us as we unravel the complexities of budgetary reform and fiscal transparency in South Carolina. Josiah passionately addresses the challenges of earmark waste and advocates for zero-based budgeting to ensure every taxpayer dollar is justified. We discuss the state's higher-than-average government spending, particularly in infrastructure and law enforcement, and how smarter fiscal policies could lead to more efficient public services. Discover our collaborative efforts with the Legislative Oversight Committee to hold state agencies accountable and explore forward-thinking reforms in higher education funding. This episode promises to leave you with a deeper understanding of the policies that could transform the landscape of South Carolina governance.
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Welcome to More Than Medicine, where Jesus is more than enough for the ills that plague our culture and our country. Hosted by author and physician, dr Robert Jackson, and his wife Carlotta and daughter Hannah Miller. So listen up, because the doctor is in.
Speaker 2:Welcome to More Than Medicine. I'm your host, Dr Robert Jackson, bringing to you biblical insights and stories from the country doctor's rusty, dusty scrapbook. Well, I'm privileged to have in the studio with me today not online, but in the studio Josiah Magnuson, who happens to be my representative. Josiah, Welcome, Welcome to the studio and I'm glad to have you as my guest.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Dr Jackson. It's such a privilege to be here with you again and you have always such a beautiful property and it smells wonderful here the day before Thanksgiving when we're recording and it's just great to be with you here at your home.
Speaker 2:Tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and your family, and I think there's an impending newcomer to your family as well. Tell them all about that.
Speaker 3:Yes, very imminent arrival here, so we have our baby girl, Jolie, and she was born on Christmas she was six weeks early in 2022, and we have a little baby boy who is now on his way. Due date is December 6th. We think that he may come sooner than that, so maybe he'll be a Thanksgiving baby to match his big sister's Christmas baby status. But, yes, we're looking forward to healthy delivery and so looking forward to that blessing of another little one.
Speaker 2:Congratulations to your family in advance.
Speaker 3:Thank you, sir.
Speaker 2:All, right, now you represent District 38?.
Speaker 3:Yes, okay.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:District 38 in the South Carolina House.
Speaker 2:My listeners know what district you represent. Now here's the topic of the day of the day. I've asked you to come and share with us the legislative priorities for the Freedom Caucus for the upcoming legislative session, and I know you have a number of these that you want to run through very quickly. So I'm going to turn it loose and let you run through these and, if you need to stop and explain any of them or say anything about any obstacles that you see in the way, I want you to take your time for all of that, but I'm going to turn it over to you.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you, doctor, and you feel free, too, to jump in if you have questions or things that you think your listeners may be interested in. So the Freedom Caucus we started this is back now two or three weeks ago with about 19 priorities for the coming legislative year, and we said we can't have 19.
Speaker 3:That's a lot of priorities to make everything the central focus. So we narrowed it down to eight that we think are really important issues that need to be dealt with right away. That we think are really important issues that need to be dealt with right away, and on the list that we have you'll see all of them reference the South Carolina Republican Party platform. These are all issues that the Republican Party agrees upon. These are policy points that are conservative issues. It's not about trying to make a name for ourselves or trying to get the credit more than somebody else. It's about advancing the things that the grassroots and the people of South Carolina have been telling their legislators that they want for years now, and we need to get these things done. So these are very strong issues. I think most of your listeners will agree with every single one of them.
Speaker 2:All right, let's go through them.
Speaker 3:Wonderful. So I'm going to start with the—I'm actually going to go back to front on the—as they're on the list here. It's no particular order, but I'm going to start at the bottom because I think this is the most important issue to me, as I know it is to you protecting every unborn child.
Speaker 2:Yes, sir, that's, so important.
Speaker 3:That is something that unfortunately was not mentioned in the House Republican caucus agenda items this year until we made a stink about it. We called them out and it was in the newspapers and then they were able to put in somebody got in there just the word pro-life. So I guess it does mention it technically, but we don't know what exactly bills that they're going to be pushing. But I would support, of course, the equal protection at conception for every unborn child. Innocent life needs to be defended at every stage. That's part of, again, the Republican Party platform. It says that we recognize the 14th Amendment requires equal protection for every person, beginning at conception. So that's something that's very huge for me and it will continue to be. We have the heartbeat bill in South Carolina. I'm grateful for the progress that's been made, but the reality is the heartbeat bill has so many loopholes and exceptions and it is needing a lot of work, to say the least. That's correct, so we're going to continue to address this.
Speaker 3:Secondly, reducing the South Carolina tax burden Fiscal policy issues are something that you don't see a lot of movement on, necessarily in the House. All the time South Carolina has reduced our income tax rate and I was part of the original push for this in January of 2020. We got a group of conservatives. Even prior to the Freedom Caucus being officially formed, we got a group of conservatives to sign a letter to House leadership to ask them to prioritize income tax reduction. So we've seen the income tax reduced to I think it's 6.2% I want to say something like 6.3%, I believe, this year and they're saying that they want to reduce it further. But what they, I think, really mean, from what I can tell, is that they want to kind of shift the shells around, make some movements to look like that they have a reduced tax rate, not necessarily decrease the spending in the budget. We think that in the Freedom Caucus we think we can actually cut somewhere around $1.5 billion.
Speaker 3:That's a lot of money but, it's something that we think we can do eliminating the state agencies that don't really serve a good purpose and then also cutting waste and abuse in the system, as well as cutting a lot of the pork that gets doled out to legislators' district that we don't need, that doesn't actually serve core functions of government. If we cut that spending we can reduce the income tax to about 4.5% and ultimately we would like to eliminate the income tax altogether for South Carolina. But we think we could immediately, if we had the political courage, if the House would do it, to cut a little bit of spending, we think we could get to a tax rate of 4.5% Go for it.
Speaker 2:You got my support. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 3:So then, another thing I know we've talked about on your program in the past priority is to stop DEI. In South Carolina, we still have our colleges and universities pushing a lot of the wokeism the, you know, requiring statements, requiring students to attend classes that indoctrinate them with the gender identity, you know, propaganda and what I would say is racism, you know, basically making decisions based on the color of their skin versus the content of their character. Those are all things that we need to stop immediately in South Carolina, and the Freedom Caucus has really, I think, elevated this issue. What I'm hearing is that some of the House leadership is going to be pushing a bill this year finally to address this, so we'll look forward to getting behind that if it's something that we feel is strong. If it's not a strong bill, then certainly we'll try to make it better, but the hope is that we'll have a strong bill in South Carolina that passes not just the House which we did pass the House last year but we need it to pass the House and the Senate both.
Speaker 2:Well, they should pay attention. If John Deere and Walmart can get rid of DEI, well then certainly our universities and government institutions can do the same.
Speaker 3:A hundred percent. And we're seeing other states. I think Georgia just got it out of the state government and state universities last week, so other states are sitting up and paying attention and South Carolina needs to follow along at least, if we're not going to lead on the issue Exactly. Then we have fixing the roads. Of course, this is something near and dear to our hearts.
Speaker 3:On the campaign trail probably this is the number one thing as we knock doors that people brought up, and so I certainly wanted for this one to be part of our Freedom Caucus agenda for this year.
Speaker 3:The way that we state this is make SEDOT directly accountable to the people, and so this goes into structural reforms. It's possible that we could solve it by making it a cabinet agency. That's something that conservatives have advocated for a long time, but another way that we could address this that I've proposed is to actually make the lieutenant governor in charge of the Department of Transportation eliminate the position of secretary of transportation, which actually would save taxpayer dollars about $200,000 a year just by eliminating that position and then giving the lieutenant governor something to do, because right now that position isn't really tasked with anything in particular and what it would do is it would give the people a vote when there's a gubernatorial ticket, give them a vote and you might say well, that's a high ranking position to be over something like infrastructure and transportation, but I believe that it is that important for our state right now.
Speaker 3:It is that important of an issue. It should be something that would. I think the people should have a vote on. So it's one proposal that I've put forward, but there may be others. We're open to you know different solutions, but we would like to see the DOT more accountable to the people versus the bureaucracy that's already in place in Colombia. So then we also have here's a really important one that we're going to be prioritizing is closing the primaries.
Speaker 3:The Republicans need to be able to vote for Republicans, democrats vote for Democrats, not switch that up. We've put up amendments and gotten bills on the floor to do this. Unfortunately, we haven't actually gotten a bill through the normal process. There's not been a hearing. From what we can tell, this bill has been put forward for over 20 years and it's never gotten a hearing. So the leadership in the state Senate and the state House does not want closed primaries. We've been able to sneak things in and put amendments up on the floor, but we haven't been able to get leadership to allow a hearing on a bill as a standalone issue.
Speaker 3:So, unfortunately, that's unfortunate because, again, this is a Republican Party platform. That's unfortunate because, again, this is a Republican Party platform. You can go to the SCGOP platform, page number seven, if you want to look that up. Page number seven it says this that we, as Republicans, want registration by party and we want closing the primaries. So we only vote, so we select our nominees in the general election, and this is something that, again, I think the people of South Carolina support and certainly Republican voters support, and it's just really ridiculous that we haven't been able to, as a legislature, to get this done. But the reality is a lot of the ones that are moderate Republicans that don't necessarily vote conservative but they want to sound conservative, they don't want to vote for a closing the primaries bill because that could, in theory, stop Democrats from voting for them and it might mean that they lose their jobs.
Speaker 2:So that's, we all know that challenge yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, we've got about three left here, so we're down to education freedom for all. We're down to education freedom for all. This is a school choice agenda item, and you know we, of course, support the school choice idea. What we want to be careful of is that there's not strings attached to money that's coming down. That's a very complicated issue. I know there's a lot of different positions there. The way we state this is families should direct their tax dollars to their children's education, not government, and so we would like to see more ability for families for homeschool families, private school families to pay for their own students' education rather than having to pay into a system that they're not going to use. So that's something that we're going to continue to support.
Speaker 3:We want to end the insurance crisis, ending joint and several liability, and to make South Carolina insurance rates competitive again. This is something that affects a lot of our small businesses, and we've had a lot of folks have to close because they're under threat of lawsuit. So really we need tort reform. But there again, a lot of the attorneys in the legislature tort reform, but there again, a lot of the attorneys in the legislature aren't necessarily a fan of putting forward a bill to end joint and sever liability. They want to continue to profit there, so that's going to be an uphill battle. But then one more that I think everybody can support is ending benefits for illegal immigrants. We don't want our state taxpayer dollars to be used to prop up people who are in our country having violated the law, and so this is something that you know. We feel like we can do a better job of stopping them from getting welfare benefits and the things that services from taxpayer dollars that they're currently able to get.
Speaker 2:Now listening to that list, josiah Magnuson. The rank and file voters would look at that list and they would be hugely supportive of everything on that list. Which of those items you think will get the most pushback from moderate Republicans?
Speaker 3:So I think that there's a few of them that will get pushback.
Speaker 3:I think the tort reform piece will get a lot of pushback because we have so many that are attorneys that benefit off of the way that it currently is structured.
Speaker 3:I also think, though I guess I would have to say, if I had to choose one of the list, the one that probably gets the most pushback is the fiscal piece reducing the tax burden and cutting state spending, because that's kind of the holy grail of the way that things work in Colombia. You can speak out on social issues, you can speak out on a lot of different issues, but what they really get hairy about, what they really almost ostracize you about, is if you speak out against the earmark process and the waste in the budget, you're not supposed to mention those things. You're supposed to just let it go and allow the process to play out and not really address any fiscal policy to cut spending in state government. And you want to cut the waste and make sure your taxpayer dollars are being used effectively. That is the main thing that we have to put up a fight about is in the budget process, and all that goes into that.
Speaker 2:So my listeners need to be contacting their legislators about transparency in the budget process, their legislators about transparency in the budget process, cutting pork spending and this whole idea of trimming the income tax.
Speaker 3:Absolutely yes, please.
Speaker 2:And closing the primaries.
Speaker 3:And closing the primaries is one that it's an interesting piece because if we vote on it on the House floor, I think that we will have a majority.
Speaker 3:They've kind of used technicalities to keep it from winning in the past when we've put up amendments on this, but I think if a standalone bill came to the House floor through the committee process and was allowed by leadership to come to the House floor, I think that we would win at least in the House and probably now in the Senate. So their tactics are more to protect their own power structure and really I think the most effective thing is if we could get the rank and file of the legislators the sort of middle-of-the-road Republicans who don't like to rock the boat a lot if they would be willing to talk to their leadership and to say we need this bill to come to the floor, we've got to get it done, the people are asking us to do this. Then I think that puts more pressure on the leadership and I think that the weight of that pressure is going to win the day in the end.
Speaker 2:Yeah, All right. Now you have these legislative priorities for the Freedom Caucus. Are there other priorities for you personally that you'd like to talk about?
Speaker 3:Yes, so great question. So I do have some other things that I've been working on. One example would be I'm a member of the Legislative Oversight Committee in the House. The Legislative Oversight Committee is, fortunately, is kind of one place that has been a little bit insulated from the back and forth and some of these things that we've found that happen on the House floor and I don't know how long that may or may not last, but it's been something that's been allowed to sort of work and do what it needs to do, and so I've been privileged to be part of that. One of the things that we found last year as I was working on the there was a subcommittee where I was part of this. Adam Morgan was part of it.
Speaker 3:Higher Education had squirreled away $152 million from lottery funds that were supposed to be used for the lottery to pay for college educations, but it was just sitting in a bank account. They weren't appropriating it and they was sitting on millions of dollars that could have been used for college educations. But it also points to the fact that we need zero-based budgeting in South Carolina. That's right. The crazy thing is that state law already requires zero-based budgeting. It requires for the House Ways and Means Committee to go in when the budget is approved and justify every dollar. That's what zero-based budgeting means, but they don't do that right now. They only justify. For most of the time, they only justify the new spending that's being proposed. Here's why we need new dollars for new projects that we're starting. It goes without saying that everything else is already being used effectively and efficiently. That's just not always the case. So this is an example of where we, if we followed the law, we would be doing better as the state, and I think that we would actually be able again to cut quite a bit of spending.
Speaker 3:One thing while I'm on that topic I want to not miss for your listeners is that South Carolina, just in terms of raw data, you can look at what other states are spending across the board on their state governments in comparison to other industries as a percentage of GDP. So, whether it's real estate, whether it's manufacturing, whether it's tourism, south Carolina government is something like 12% of our GDP, whereas the average for the Southeast is somewhere around 8% or 9%. So we're significantly more than any of the surrounding states in terms of how much money we're spending on state government, and the other thing is we're not even spending it on the right places. A lot of it goes to K-12 education, a lot of it goes to public health and things like this.
Speaker 3:Where does it not go? Where are we below other states in the southeast? We're below other states on our infrastructure and road spending and we're below other states on our law enforcement. I know that surprises probably a lot of people that South Carolina is significantly behind what other states are spending on corrections and on law enforcement, but that is the case from the data that I've seen. So we really need to get our fiscal house in order, I believe.
Speaker 2:Man, that is amazing. Well, I'm glad to know that, because that's something we need to start talking about Exactly.
Speaker 3:Yes, sir. So those are some priorities that I have. The legislative oversight committee we're going to keep trying to look into state agencies and and make them as effective and efficient as they can be. On that commission on higher education we've come, we've come up with some proposals for ways to reform that and and trying to address our colleges, our state colleges and universities. It goes a little to the DEI piece, but there's more to it than that Just reining them in in a lot of different ways. That needs to continue.
Speaker 3:And then I also don't want to miss another education piece, which is that I've submitted and I've been working on this for a number of years, but we finally got it officially approved as of three or four weeks ago, I guess now.
Speaker 3:But there is a study that the Legislative Audit Council is doing I guess they're conducting it as we speak, from what I understand whether the federal dollars that are coming in for K-12 education in South Carolina are worth the cost, the burden on our teachers and on our students and parents of compliance with the mandates that follow those dollars. So we're going to see if the strings attached are worth it. If we come back that it's about the same or potentially even more, which is what has been theorized is that it actually costs us more in dollar amount to take the money than not to take the money. Then that should be an open and shut case that we need to just let the Department of Education go abolish the Federal Department of Education as it regards to South Carolina and not take that federal dollar amount for our schools, so that then we're also free from the mandates, the woke agenda, the transgender bathrooms and those sorts of things that they're trying to put down our throats.
Speaker 2:When will you know this?
Speaker 3:So we should get—the last thing they had told me was they wanted to get it done this summer, but somehow they couldn't do that. But it is now in progress. To get it done this summer, but somehow they couldn't do that, but it is now in progress. My hope is that it will be done by beginning of February, something in that ballpark. I would like to have that information by the time this budget season rolls around in March. So we'll see. I don't know that, but that is my hope and I will keep pushing for them to get that done.
Speaker 2:You need to come back and let my listeners know. I would like to know. My listeners would like to know. That would be a fascinating discussion.
Speaker 3:I think it would be, and I think we'll really dive in and we'll get a lot of information that will enlighten us on what are the mandates that are coming down, what are we having to deal with and what the burdens are and just how impactful it would be to cut that loose. I think is really going to be enlightening.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it will be All right. We're running out of time. Any last words?
Speaker 3:I just look forward to serving the people of my district again, yourself and so many others. I'm very grateful for the opportunity. I was reelected. Of course, I won the primary with 64%, if I'm recalling, in June, but then I won in November the general election with 82 percent against a Democrat which is the highest margin of any state legislator in South Carolina that had a Democrat opponent, so I'm very grateful for the support.
Speaker 3:I feel like I have a mandate to keep fighting for these common sense, conservative solutions and I'm going to keep doing my best to honor God and to serve the people in this position.
Speaker 2:Well, I want you to know. People in this district love Josiah Magnuson. We appreciate you, your strong Christian convictions and how much of a bulldog you are for conservative principles down in Columbia. We really value and appreciate who you are and what you stand for.
Speaker 3:Thank you, sir. That means a lot.
Speaker 2:So I'm interviewing Josiah Magnuson, representative from District 38 in the upstate of South Carolina. You're listening to More Than Medicine. We appreciate you listening in. We'll be back again next week. Until then, may the Lord bless you real good.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to this edition of More Than Medicine. For more information about the Jackson Family Ministry, dr Jackson's books, or to schedule a speaking engagement, go to their Facebook page, instagram or their webpage at jacksonfamilyministrycom. This podcast is produced by Bob Sloan Audio Production at bobsloancom.
