The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions. Ralph's fresh for everyone.

We've locked in low prices to help you save big storewide. Look for the locked in low prices tags and enjoy extra savings throughout the store. Ralph's fresh for everyone. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

A major component of financial freedom is lowering expenses, and today we tackle one of the categories of expenses that seems probably the most difficult to do anything about, which is taxation, with a special focus on local taxation. My guest is Paul Doerr from RollbackLocalGov.com. And Paul, I have often wondered if there's any way to actually affect taxes, but when I started, when I found your website some months ago, I started to realize, well, if there is a way, probably the way that you're doing it is the way we should go about it.

Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. I'm glad to be with you, Joshua, and I'm hoping that we're doing just that. Well, we are doing that in many states and trying to give people a set of tools on how to do this on a continual basis in their local governments. There are lots of things we just haven't done over the years.

We let them run over the top of us from all the PR campaigns, all the phony needs, and all the rest of it, guilt trips, et cetera, and leaving us somewhat exposed to this rapidly exploding taxes at the local level. So I spent some time studying it, analyzing it.

I'm a former banker, former bank analyst. I got disgusted with the whole monetary system, but I used those same tools to start looking at local government, and it's been fun. We've started to really help people at the local level. Then on your website, it says that your clients have defeated nearly 80 percent of their funding proposals that they've gone to.

So obviously not 100 percent victory, but you've racked up some significant victories and reigned in local government for many clients. Nine states, anywhere from 1.2 billion down to 5 million dollar proposals, and nearly 80 percent of them. We can't win them all, but we're mobilizing a base of apathetic people who've hitherto for, I've just said, kind of given up apathetically and say, "Nothing you can do about it," and they keep coming back.

"What can you do?" Well, there is stuff, and so there is a lot of good things you can do, and we seem to be pioneering some processes, but again, it's a lot of fun. Well, what gives me hope – and it's fitting that we record this on the day after the first Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton debate for the presidential campaign last night.

But what gives me hope is that it seems like with what you describe and what we're going to talk about today, there are strategies that individual people can actually employ and actually make a difference. And I get so utterly overwhelmed at the insanity of national politics that I've completely given up hope that it even matters.

But I have a tiny little glimmer of hope about local politics, and so I'm hoping you can fan that flame. So is it possible that you and I as individuals can make a difference in local politics? Yes, it is. It's not only possible. It's very doable. And the thing to remember is that all that corruption – I share the same sentiment, by the way.

I've given up on federal stuff because much of the training ground of our Marxist-Keynesian system, the people who get into power administratively, judicially, and particularly legislatively, most of them are trained at the local level. They started off as city managers or school personnel or county administrators, those sort of things.

So much of what they've perfected at the federal level started back here at the local level. My long-term goal is to – as we train up a young generation to oppose them at the local level, that they may in fact mature to become the sort of people that would represent us at the state capitals and maybe one day in Washington.

But trying to fix our system by starting with Washington, I quit that. I came out of federal politics retirement in 2008. I'd given up back in the '90s, in 2008 when Ron Paul asked me to work for him for his campaigns in Iowa and South Carolina and Minnesota. So I did work for a while because of the principles that Ron was going to be advocating and got to be in on the early days of that whole explosion.

But I became convinced after it was all done that the battle is at the local level. And yes, the individual can have a lot of impact. You wrote an essay on your website called "Why I Defeat Government School Bond Levies at the Ballot Box and Do It for a Profit." Softball pitch to you.

Why do you choose school bonds as seemingly a primary issue for you to focus on? The – probably the most base reason of all is that they're messing up a whole generation of children if nothing else. They're messing them up when it comes in terms of how to manage their money.

There's a lot of other arguments we can sit here and make, but when it comes to managing money, the schools and the examples they set have done a tremendous disarm to children. We have a lot of kids now coming up in this system where all the palace of facilities that are available, all the accoutrements that come with it, and they look at government.

They don't have any idea where it comes from, most of the kids, and they grow up in this environment. Then they head off to college and they're told to get four years of party/education. They get buried in student debts, credit card debts, auto debts, but ten minutes out of college, they have no way to get a job.

Many of them are very unemployable. They end up back at home and they can't start families because the potential spouse is going to be buried the same way. So I focus on the schools because for decades, they've been telling us they've been doing this for the children, and it's a con.

It's been for massive contractors, architects, construction managers, vendors of all kinds feed off of this system all in the name of the children, and it's the children who are truly getting hurt by their examples. So I like to go after the schools to say let's really do something for the kids.

Let's teach them how to be better stewards of the assets and the properties that you already have. Teach them a lesson by example. You have them most of the waking hours of the day anyway, so why not give them good illustrations of managing properties better and not show that these kids, they can go borrow and spend themselves into bankruptcy because the government is different.

They can just keep taxing. When they get in financial trouble, they keep taxing. I just told a client this morning as I've been telling my clients for years, successful business people make miserable – most often make miserable political clients in these environments when they go up against the schools because I said you think like a successful businessman does.

I've got to maximize my revenue, minimize my expense, build my base with the market so that people respect and like my products and services and so forth, and schools do not think that way. So don't approach the schools with a good common sense approach of how to manage the money.

If that's your opening line, the schools will just respond with, "Yeah, but it's for the kids." And so business people can't process this. They don't understand why doesn't this government school superintendent – why doesn't he see this? I said because he's trained not to. He's trained to spend it as fast as he possibly can and get more.

And that's the first mindset that – they know this stuff is in Washington and their state capital, but it takes them a while to process it. The very same mindset is right here in your county administrator's office, your city administrator's office, your school administrator's office. It's the same thing.

I think I can justify this discussion of talking about rolling back local taxes as a – in the context of radical personal finance, especially just given of lowering expenses. But I have to admit it's small on an individual basis for any of us in terms of the actual amount of an increase of a school bond and how much that's actually going to increase our local tax.

It's more of one of those areas of worldview where if you want to make a difference, this is one of those areas. But is schooling the low-hanging fruit especially for somebody to be able to make an impact on local government or is there something else that's potentially easier and has a bigger effect, especially on our own personal finances?

Well, they're all equally low-hanging fruit when the city or the county or the school comes along with some outrageous proposal, some event center, some rails program, some rail-to-trail thing, something that's going to have no market use effectively. It's not going to be of any real value to the community.

Those are all low-hanging fruit. I mean there's plenty we can do on all these proposals at any of these levels. Schools just happen to be the most – in my experience, they happen to be the ones that are issuing the debt and raising the taxes just as fast or faster than any of them.

Keep in mind that state and local government bonded indebtedness in the year 2000 in this country was right at $1 trillion. It's now touching right up to $4 trillion in 16 years. In 16 years, it's nearly quadrupled. So the property taxes are going through the roof and I would probably differ a little bit with minimizing that additional increase when people on a typical home and so forth.

I get lots of people in metros and stuff saying, "I bought this home. It was $1,200 a year for property taxes and now I'm paying $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 a year in annual property tax," on up. I've seen even much more in the case of small businesses or people who have a business that has – they need real estate, i.e.

farmers and ranchers and so forth. I'm dealing with a client right now that's in a rural area that is looking at a $50,000 a year increase in one year for the next 25 years on his land tax if this thing passes. And so if your business is real estate heavy, these things are very onerous to your bottom line.

But even in residentials, the pain – because of this trend the last 16 years, the pain is becoming very real for more and more households. So there's a ready market and I often tell my clients they have all the PR. They have all the local media. They have all the systems in place telling their story how underworked and overpaid and how wore out their facilities are and all this stuff.

And so that PR message pounds away in these communities across the nation daily. But the one thing we have going for us is that when people hear all that, they kind of concede it. Then the next day they get their property tax statement or their escrow notice from the bank that's gone up this much more dramatic increase for property taxes.

They're saying, "What do they mean underpaid, underfunded? Where is this money going?" And so it's a – the leverage and the taxation that's increasing so dramatically is becoming very readily available for us to get to the community. And when we start articulating a message up against the propaganda machine that they have, we can relate – people can relate to what we're saying.

Yes, this is my household budget. I'm seeing this. I'm feeling it. We can get a lot of political support that way. It's interesting because I've always wanted to see a politician who would actually take on the education system. It just seems like from left and right, everyone kind of buckles under.

It's got to be for the kids. Exactly what you said earlier. It's for the kids. We're doing bad. So automatically because we're doing bad, we've got to spend more money. And it's hard for me to believe that people in general will actually see through that and will actually – again, on a broad basis, will be open to a different model.

Go ahead. Well, and the fun part is when I can take a comprehensive annual financial report – I used to audit banks and so forth. So I can take the CAFRs from a government entity. And two things now, the GASB, the Government Accounting Standards Board, as of June 30, 2014, now require these local governments to disclose fully what their unfunded pension liability is that none of the local politicians are talking about.

They're also requiring them to disclose that they're using this bogus 7.5 percent interest rate on the actuarial fund. And then they tell them to disclose how much the liability will be if you're not meeting that target of 7.5 percent. And then finally they make them disclose what the fund is actually getting.

So they're getting 4 percent and they're saying they're – I looked at one the other day that said they were – well, there's several I looked at. But there's one that's $240 million unfunded liability in a county in South Carolina. But when we got done with the actual interest rate on the fund and took it down to what the market was earning in this district, it was $410 million in unfunded liabilities for this one county government.

And so we bring this out to the community and we say, look, they're saying the state is going to manage the retirements. They're going to take care of all this. And we talk to state treasurers and they say that's not on our financial statement. That's on the county's financial statement.

We manage the funds, but the liability is theirs. They entered into the employment contracts, the benefits contracts. They have the liability. When the state finally can't come up with the money and those checks are coming in, that's when the major tax increases are going to be coming or they're going to have to renegotiate the defined benefit contracts.

That's one area. The other area is with the standard of CAFRs now, Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, they're required under the CAFR standard to put in lots of statistical data in the back end of the audit, the annual audit. And that saves a lot of work for the local taxpayers.

I can take their general fund expenses per student, for example, if it's a school. I can go back 10 years and say here's where it was back then. Here's if it grew by the CPI adjusted for the type of demographics you are and they grew that general fund expense for that school district by the CPI per student for the last 10 years.

Here's where they would be. And we show this in a graph, a colorful graph. And then we show the actual spending and it's often double. It's way above, way above. I have taxpayers look at that and they say, "They've been telling us how underfunded they've been for all these years.

This is outrageous." There's a PR gimmick that's been going on for decades covering for these people and often we get a shell shock. People can't quite believe what we revealed to them when they first see it. That's why we have here's the link. Go look at the financial statement yourself.

Here's where we get the CPI, etc. And that's where we start to get people's attention because now all of a sudden the reality from their own financial statement starts to parallel their own business tax rates or their own household tax increases. Now it starts to make sense. And that's where you can start to cast real doubt upon the do it for the kids idea.

Paul, my selfish reason for interviewing on Radical Personal Finance is I want your free consulting services. I'm just letting my audience listen in for their benefit. Happens all the time. So here's the situation. I look at my local government and I'm not politically active very much on a local basis for a reason I'll get to in a minute.

Well, I mean the reason is I just feel a little bit hopeless. But I'm considering areas of more of increasing political involvement especially for two things. Number one is my schedule. I'm working to get my schedule more opened up in the coming years and also with my children. I have two young children.

I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old. So they're a little bit young. But I intend to be very involved in the home education community here locally. And when I look at home-educated students, I kind of see this army of – this vast underutilized army of students who are intelligent, who are well-read, who can be helped, and who can be guided.

And I look at a local political establishment and I just think, "If I can work and organize some of the local home-education students," and we put in a few hours a week into working to keep the local community accountable and keep the local politicians accountable. I mean I've got huge ideas of what could be done.

And I've studied some of the local political watchdog groups around the country to see kind of what they're doing. And so over the next decade or two, I kind of have this little dream that possibly I'll be able to affect something here in my local area. So that's the background.

And the consulting question for you is this. If you were talking to somebody like me saying, "I'm looking at my local system and I want to make a change. I want to pull back costs. I want to roll back the local government," what would be my first steps? How would I analyze the problem and what would I go about actually doing in order to start to lay the groundwork for a political movement?

First thing I would do is connect up with someone who's a financial analyst who can crunch accounting statements and so forth and build yourself a knowledge base of what these governments have been doing for the last 10 or 15 years. Get to understand their trends, where they're going, what's happening.

Always doing linear trends over time starts to focus. You can start to see here's the ones that are really out of control. Here's the low-hanging fruit. Here's the target we can start with. Second of all, if you show up out of nowhere and you show up at public budget hearings and say, "You guys are spending excessively," and blah, blah, blah, and they're going to say, "Who are you?" You know, "OK, thank you very much.

See you later." The way you prepare yourself by analyzing and studying and seeing where they're at and keeping press clips, links of news sites, stories of promises of we're going to watch our costs and all these things. Start building a file of collecting this stuff so you can demonstrate to people three years later, two years later, 10 years later, they promised us when they passed this tax they would never do this and here they're doing it.

So build a data file. Keep clips. Keep links. Do various stories. Start analyzing the financials of the districts. Watch them each year when they update and so forth. I gave a workshop here in Texas a while back and I stood in front of some homeschool kids and I said, "Go get some training at the community college or the state university in Keynesian economics and finance.

Don't believe the crap. Just understand how they work. Get these kids to look at – and also in finance. Understand the math and the nature of finance and so forth. Don't buy into all the debt leverage and all that stuff but understand the nature of how these systems work so that when the time comes, you can then engage them with knowledge and understanding." With that said, I think one of the most underutilized and I make a claim misdirected army in this country has been the homeschool movement.

I think a poor eschatology, if you will, a poor view of Christ's kingdom and kingdom advancement and engaging the system has been prospered for a long time. I have many, many homeschool families that could do so many powerful things in their communities and they sit in the sidelines convinced that we don't want to upset them.

We're there – Romans 13 says to obey the civil authorities and yada, yada. They won't engage. The flip side is when I have a family, a father who gets it like I have in Coles County, Illinois, father of nine homeschool children and they understand the money system. They understand the debt system, the central banking system and they've trained their children accordingly.

When it comes time to take on the system, I've never seen a more powerful tool than this family in Coles County, Illinois and to the point that the homeschool boys will be so emboldened that when they're holding an informational meeting at the public high school, why this new tax, why this new spending proposal is so needed.

Those boys will stand out in front of the front doors as homeschool boys and passing out flyers showing the offset and why they should vote no to everybody going into the school's meetings and they will go up and down the streets. They'll pass out flyers door to door. They'll say we'll be back in a half an hour.

If you like a yard sign, just give us a thumbs up. They'll go at 6, 8, 10 blocks down the street and you've got 16, 17, 18-year-old boys doing this and all of a sudden the community is getting introduced to homeschool kids. They're polite kids, polite, intelligent young men standing on my porch or at the back door and they hand out a one-page flyer and at the very bottom it says if you like a yard sign, we'll stop back in a few minutes.

They'll double back and they'll go right back down the street again and they'll put every second or third property, they'll put up a no sign. That's just the beginning of what a homeschool army of young people could do and they then get to see the corruption with their own eyes as they're engaged in the fight.

They get to see a whole lot and then as young people, it doubles down their resolve as to why they need to engage. So start by analyzing what's going on. Get to their CAFRs. You go to the local government agency and you look at the departments. You look at finance and you look at audits and you find the CAFRs.

From there, look at those and the unfunded pension liabilities and start building a knowledge base. You're leading up to the point when you have a knowledge base, the way you gain credibility in the community is when they then call for some voter-approved funding levy or a bond they need to issue or something that your state statutes require them to vote of the people.

Then you arrive on the scene and you engage them and you run a campaign and if you win or give them a good, healthy fight, all of a sudden you went from a nobody out in the wilderness. You now have political credibility that people see your professional message, your professional approach, your what I call gracious aggressiveness.

We're very kind but we're very bold. We don't back down. When you tie the two together, all of a sudden people in the community are saying, "Who are you people? Where did they come from?" Now you got the seed foundation for a growing movement. So you spend most of the research time doing that privately and just compiling your own files and then only after you pick a battle, whether it's a bond issue or whether it's an election or if there's an amendment of some kind, only after you pick a battle that you decided is going to be your initial battle do you go public?

Is that what you're recommending? Yes, yes because if you want the experience to go to the public hearings on the budget and testify and so forth, all these tax groups have done this for years. It gets a little news in the paper and then they go ahead and do what they're going to do and it goes on.

Initially when I started all this, some of the strongest opposition was from the local tax watch groups. "Oh, we've tried all that. You can't do that. We know what they're doing. You can't stop that." I said, "Oh, really? Okay, well thanks anyway." I've had some places where the – one of them at the time 10, 15 years ago, Douglas County, Nebraska, Omaha, the head of the Douglas County Tax Watch Group was a state employee.

I get very nervous when I see government employees running the local tax watch groups. Not that they can't be concerned but most often their loyalties are to the system. So I have not had a lot of good experience. They're out there, I'm sure, but a lot of them will not engage on the political side when it comes time to fight them.

So building the base and then going to their hearings and testifying and so forth, that would be good experience. They're not going to listen to you. The only time they're going to listen to you is when they know that you can deliver the political punch to stop them. At that point, they'll start to respect you.

I'd love to hear some more stories. You mentioned that family that you're connected with in Illinois. Share with me some other victory stories, your own family. I know your sons were recently involved in Missouri with a significant political move there. Share with us some more stories of victory. I don't like to – it seems like I'm boasting.

We believe this – my wife and I have believed this vision for 25 years. We kind of went out in the wilderness to train up a generation of kids in our family. We've been blessed with 11 children. My wife back in 1982 won the National Newspaper Association's first prize award in spot news category for the weekly editions.

There were 750 papers nationwide that were entered, and she won first prize in this category. The day she was supposed to be walking across the stage in Phoenix, Arizona and receive her award, she was bearing our second son into the world, who is now down in Missouri here recently.

She decided to set aside her career and teach our children, home educate our children. I handle Bible and math and so forth, but she handles the writing. She's taught our children how to write very well, and they're now using those skills out into the world politically, within their churches, culturally, wherever.

Our children – we have seven of our 11 are now married. We have our 20th grandchild that we just heard last week is on the way. They're all being homeschooled and taught the same faith we hold to, a very optimistic, forward-looking eschatology, a kingdom-advancing eschatology. So we've taught our kids – when our youngest was – when our oldest was 12 and our second oldest was 10, they got to get arrested the first time with their dad sitting in front of an abortion clinic.

I'm an old operation rescue activist as well. So they got to spend the weekend in juvenile detention and come out with great big wide eyes, but all of a sudden, the system doesn't frighten you near so much. Been there, done that sort of thing. So they grew up leaflet dropping, publicly protesting, picketing, wickedness at every level, institutionally, government and even churches and colleges.

And so training your children – people have asked me that many times. How do you do this? I said, "Take them street side when they're little. Stand for righteousness. Stand for Christ. Stand against the darkness, whatever it is. And do it and let your children watch as you have to contend for what's – against what's wrong and for what's right." And so along the way, it's – I've had a campaign, one in a town of – a small town of 25,000 here in the Midwest.

The committee was five men. Two of them were retired businessmen. The other three were active businessmen. The first time I've ever had an all-man committee. And they took on the entire establishment. Even the republican state senator was coming out for this $5 million a year new tax on top of all the rest they're paying.

They also took on a local banker who owned a bank that's worth about a billion and a half dollars. They took on the Daily Paper, the Weekly Paper, the weekly radio station. They took on the Chamber of Commerce, the economic development. Everybody opposed them. The entire system was against them.

And these five men stood firm and they worked with me and we took on the fight. And in the end, not only did we defeat them, we handed them like a 69 percent no vote. And after it was all done – I never had one of these before, but the committee called – the committee chairman called up and said, "Two nights from now, we're going to hold a victory party.

We'd like you to drive back down. We'll buy your gas. Come on down." Okay, I'll come. Never done one before. I walk in the room. There'll be 85 people there around banquet tables. And I walk in and they all stand up and start applauding. And I said, "Sit down.

Sit down. Right now. Sit down." I said, "After tonight, I'm out of here. This is your town. These five men sitting down here in front, they're going to take the hits. If there's going to be any hits in this community, they're going to take the hits." But I said, "On top of that, to the extent that you appreciated my passion, my skill, my intellect, my communication abilities and so forth, I'll be real blunt with you.

I give complete honor and glory to the Lord Jesus Christ for that. Apart from him, I would not have the courage or the skill or the ability to do what I do." And I said, "On top of that," I then turned to the old folks and I said, "All you whorey heads sitting there in the audience, you white hairs, the Bible refers to that whorey head as a term of endearment and respect." I said, "You're all thinking about the legacy you're going to leave behind.

You're going to leave a legacy of cash and property and large assets and estates here because I know a lot of you." I said, "Think of another legacy. Think of a legacy of repentance that you sat by so silently for so long. You watched the culture. You watched the political system.

You watched your church and families unravel. You know what your parents and grandparents, what their culture and civilization was like, and you know we've all sat by and let it happen. Leave this legacy. Stand up in front of your family, your spouse, and your church and repent. I've been quiet too long.

Sins and crimes by government at all levels have been going on with our own families. Start speaking out. Stand up and say no. Say this is the right way. Go this direction. I said, "Let them 25 years after you're buried in the dirt, let them sit around at family reunions and say, 'My goodness, whatever happened to Grandpa those last 10 years, was he a changed man?'" I said, "That's a legacy you want to leave behind." The crowd was very, very silent.

It's doable. It's there for us to do if we have the courage. The number one issue I deal with is courage. I can sell skill, talent, access, professional message, everything, but if I don't have local courage and that comes from faith, if the courage is not there, my clients will lose.

That's where that 20 percent of my losses, most of them will be the first to admit it comes from their own lack of courage to fully engage the system. How do you develop courage? Practice. Start small. Start small and just build it. It doesn't come suddenly, but if we don't start, it will never come.

The very first time I tell this to my sons for years and my daughters, the very first time I was driving to Sioux Falls, South Dakota to lead an operation rescue effort, I knew a lot of people were going to come. I was the point man. I was the leader.

I was the one who called them out and called them to be there. I knew that I was going to be getting arrested and be hauled off to jail and all the rest of it. I stopped three times at convenience stores on the way to Sioux Falls to stop and use the bathroom.

Every time I was like – my flesh, my whole body said, "Don't do this. You're crazy. What are you doing? You're going to get in trouble." My spirit was right with God, at peace with God. I said, "Where am I wrong? What's wrong here? They're going to kill babies.

I've got to go." And I went. I'd already done it once in Atlanta, Georgia. I spent a weekend in the Fulton County prison farm, so I kind of had a little idea of what jail time was like, but it all comes with little bits of practice. I'll say this too, that if you're involved in a Christian church and your elders and pastors and leadership in your church have not ever done anything like this, they're going to soon not like you because your courage is going to reflect implicitly back upon them.

So I caution people, get ready that if you start taking these – start standing up, that's where the Eliabs or the Eliabs in 1 Samuel 17 when David was heading down and looking at Goliath and looking at the army and paraphrasing here. He said, "Who is this blasphemer standing here before the God of the army is the living God?" And his brother Eliab looks at him and says, "Oh, I know you, David.

You're down here to come see the whole thing and you're here abandoning dad's sheep. What are you doing here?" The accusation was vanity and irresponsibility. And get ready, within Christian civilization, once you start standing up against this stuff, you'll get a lot of the Eliabs who will have the same accusation against you.

And David's response is, "Is there not a cause?" I think it's in 1 Samuel 17 verse 27, somewhere in that area. He's pointing to this giant who's blaspheming our living God and he's saying, "Is there not a cause? How much do we have to put up with this?" And so there's a lot of your culture and community – and I'll be real blunt about how I've been able to do this for 25 years.

If my wife was not dedicated to this vision and understanding what we're called to do and supported me through this, I'd have been out of this a long time ago. A man has to sit down and have this talk and share this vision and get his spouse on board.

She's got to be completely on board. She's going to be frightened and she's going to see things along the way. But in time, she starts to see the blessings that are very, very real. And in time, they will build up their courage as well. But I've seen too many people head on off into the fight and leave their spouse behind, figuratively speaking, not abandon them, but not engage the vision with them.

And pretty soon there's real tension and those people often get taken out and come, "That's it. We're done. I've got to keep peace in the home." So it takes practice. It takes a biblical understanding. It takes a vision. And it takes a spouse that says, "I will stand with you." And God blessed me with all of those.

And apart from any one of them, I would have been out of this a long time ago. Now today, the school administrator associations hold workshops in Minnesota and Iowa and I think in Nebraska and various states. One of them some years ago in Minnesota was called the Public Finance Election and the Pall Door Factor.

Get ready to get defeated. And I hear from retired school board members who come from – who just retired and stepped down and say, "I've got to call you. I've been to state school board conferences and so forth." Oh, do they hate you with a pure passion? They are afraid of you.

Well, in fact, in 2007, I was in a radio studio with some guests on behalf of Ron Paul over in eastern Iowa and the phone rang. It was a reporter from WCCO, the largest media outlet in Minnesota. It's the CBS affiliate. And she said, "Mr. Doar," she said, "I'd like to talk to you.

I'm attending a conference today with the Twin Cities, the Metro School Superintendents Association. It's having a meeting. It's about the crisis in public funding of public education." I said, "Okay, so why are you calling me?" And she said, "Well, the first hour and a half of the session was devoted to you." I said, "Me?" I said, "What are you talking about?" She said, "They're angry with you.

They're afraid of you." And I said, "How do you respond to that?" And I said, "Afraid of me?" I said, "Ma'am, put this in perspective." I said, "They're a 150-year-old enterprise, multi-billion-dollar enterprise. They have unions and vendors galore feeding at their trough. They have political power beyond all measure.

The legislature gives them whatever they want, however they want. The courts of Minnesota rule on their behalf on a regular basis. You folks in the media are just a house organ. You tell their story in a positive note all the time." And I said, "All of that system is up against a guy who has a remodeled garage for an office up against a cornfield in Nowheresville, Iowa." And I said, "You're telling me I'm their number one fear?" And she paused and she said, "Well, yeah, when you put it that way." I said, "I know what it is, though." She said, "Well, what is it?" I said, "I'll be real blunt with you.

It's the taxpayers. They're pissed off. They've had enough." And I said, "All I do is I help bring voice to their anger. Can I quote you on that?" And I said, "You bet you can. I can guarantee the editor there in the newsroom will nix it. He will not let you use that quote." You're right.

He won't. It never went on the air. You stole the next question out of my mouth. What is it about you or your message or your methodology, what is it that makes you successful, being David, going up against Goliath? Empathy. Understanding of how much people are hurting by this system.

Looking at--since I was a boy, I always--I could never stand the bullies. In the playground, I could never countenance. I picked many fights with bullies. I'd walk up to them and say, "Enough. You're done picking on this kid," or whatever. They'd say, "What are you going to do about it?" I'd say, "Well, I understand as a Christian that I can't take the first punch, so you hit me first so I can take care of the rest of this." I'd stand them down most often.

I'd just get tired of bullies. I'd get tired of--I just had the same with putting my life between the baby butchers and the babies. Little babies. I just--God is not going to continue this society, this debt-driven sexual revolution that's just devouring everything. He's not going to stand by it.

This nation is not long for increasing dramatic judgment. I said, "To the extent that you give me the resources and the ability, Lord, show me how to step in between these bullies and these little people." So that's my driving motive. When you have senior citizens and fixed-income people and small farmers and small businesses come up to you with tears running down their face and say, "I never thought we could ever do this.

I never thought there'd be someone like this." I look at how much there is--they're waiting for Christians to lead in how much the cause of Christ could go forward if we would just set aside our own material desires and wants and gains and engage the system. So that said, Josh, I don't remember exactly the nature of your question, but that's my motive.

That's what presses me on. Then I guess what adds to my success, I guess you could say, is that I've learned--I used to be--like I said, I used to be a bank analyst. I used to own a part of a bank. Then I worked back in the troubled '80s throughout the upper Midwest dealing with troubled banks and failing banks and picking through the carcass of failed banks.

I got to know how corrupt the comptroller, the FDIC, the state banking department, how the whole entire government regulatory system of our money system is just evil. In fact, I sat across the desk one time from a chief field examiner for the FDIC examination team, and I said--we're looking over the same examination.

He issued their preliminary report. I said, "You know, they ought to rename you guys the Poor Bank Management Protection Company because that's really what you do. You're not doing an honest assessment of any of this stuff." So I saw the corruption of the money system from within, and I saw it take families and just bury them in debts.

I saw the tension grow in the marriages and the families and so forth. I watched all this, and I said I was given a lot of skill financially at that time how to analyze things and see where they're going. I could pick out--if we're looking at a bank that was in trouble that maybe was up for sale, I'd lead a team of two or three other guys come in with me, and we'd go analyze the bank.

Later, the president of the bank would say, "Nobody caught the hidden liabilities like your team did." He'd tell my shareholders I was working for. I just had this sense that I don't believe that man by nature is good. The Bible tells me that man by nature, myself included, has created evil and that through the regeneration and the saving grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we can become redeemed.

But when I look at things and people want to make me all kinds of promises that they're going to do this and this and this with their money and their debts and their property and so forth, I start off with, "Well, until you've earned the respect that you're a redeemed sinner and that you're faithful to your word and so forth." When you do, you start to trust them more as a banker, as a lender.

But when I'm initially looking, I assume that a man is evil by nature, and if this is not a regenerate Christian or he's a totally compromised Christian, I will look hard, and I will not assume the best light. That serves me well when I look at government financial reports now.

I can find a lot of things real fast. It takes a lot of other people a long time, but I was trained in it. I know what to look for as well. So I've been given a gift to analyze and to look carefully and see it. And then also, through a lot of help from my wife, who was the journalist, we've learned how to communicate these things simply to voters.

Paul, how old are you? 60. I'm trying to decide which of the two questions I want to ask you. So you – tell me more – when you came out of banking, tell me more about why. Because I have a tremendous – and the reason, so it's – I have a tremendous challenge.

Many of my listeners are involved in finance, and finance is so fraught with ethical dilemmas, and it's very challenging to know the proper course through the maze. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about your story and the decisions that you made when confronting ethical dilemmas.

I went in with a real zeal and a desire as a Christian young man trained in this area to try to bring reform and righteousness and justice into the money system. And I fought zealously for several years, three, four years into it. I started my career. The old gentleman who owned the bank I was working for came and said, "I'd like to sell you half the bank." And we ended up doing that.

We set up a holding company and so forth. And I liked working in small-town Iowa because the ethics were rather clear and you could do these things. But the more I worked with the government system, I began to see what was the bigger problem. In time, he decided to retire and I had another partner and we decided not to stay together, so I sold my portion out and then formed a corporation to go out and offer consulting services.

This was in the very troubled '80s. I got into a lot of banks in three or four states here in the upper Midwest. And the one thing I saw over and over and over again was the regulators were just lying to everybody. They're looking at black and calling it white.

And that's when I began to look at the larger system and I knew that I was pushing for reforms. I was publishing things in banking journals and so forth. I was calling for – talking to the state banking department and saying, "You guys got to start doing this and this and this." And I began to see in time that they had no – the system had no interest.

And then I – that's when I began to study Austrian economics. I knew a little bit about what was out there but then I started delving deeper into it and I – that's when I began to fully understand the whole central banking fiat money system. And in a matter of a few more years, I realized that the rules of the system are set up to basically enslave the public and the Christian families into a servitude that would take away their liberty, their freedom, their righteousness, their inability to stand up.

I saw it real time. I saw Christian families start to do things that they knew were wrong to keep the banker happy and compromise in various areas because I got to make – I want the new piece of equipment for my business. I want the new set of – the banker appeased their vanity instead of dealing with it, instead of helping them see through it.

You don't need to do this now and pay – keep paying this down for a few more years and get ahead of it. I said – one of the first jobs I got after I left this local community was I was working for NorWest. It's long ago sold out to Wells Fargo.

But they're an upper Midwest banking chain and I sat in a lending conference room with a bunch of lenders from around the whole region came in. We sat around a board table and they're talking about the auto portfolio for all the banks in the NorWest system in southern Minnesota.

They were talking about the average age of the loan of the car is this long and so forth. I remember sitting there saying, "We just got these people through. They're mostly paying interest. They're just starting in their principal. Why don't we let them go a while? I want these people –" They were talking about getting out and pushing them to get a new car, a new vehicle, that sort of thing.

This was back in the '80s. It's all routine stuff now. It's just blown way past that. But I sat there and said, "These families can have a little breathing room. If the vehicle is working fine, let's let them get into principal and get ahead on some equity and so forth." The whole room looked at me and said, "What business are you in?" I said, "I'm not in the business of just destroying families just so we can have a higher interest margin and so forth." I knew soon thereafter that the nature of our FIAT system is designed to enslave the population.

What hurt me worse is that the propaganda behind it all appeals to even Christian families to start living beyond their means and the vanity and the temptations and all the stuff that's pushed upon them. As I started to try to show this to Christian families, they would kind of humor me for a while.

Then someone would just leave and take their account somewhere else. They'd go to another bank where they could get the big loan. There was still always a base in the agricultural rural areas. There's always a base of the old school people who aren't going to get fooled like that.

But a large growing number of the younger ones have and do. So I can't answer your question with real clear answers other than do all you can to stay out of debt. If you get into debt, double down on making the payments as fast and as hard as you can.

Then go for a few years or a season where you're just debt-free. Get used to the freedom that comes with that. Then if you want to look at another asset, something for your business or your family needs something and you don't have the savings and you need to borrow something, do it on reasonable terms and get into no long-term debts and pay your stuff off.

But the ethical dilemma is with the fiat money system, fiat money fundamentally alters the supply of money. It fundamentally alters the pricing of money, that is the interest rate. Fiat money fundamentally alters the demand for money. So we have a fictitious economy that's just following around the flow of Federal Reserve money wherever it's pouring into something.

This is not sustainable. We've got about 7 minutes here so I just want to ask a couple of quick questions. I think we've done a good job on the political consulting thing and a couple of personal questions. How on earth did you afford to have 11 children? One of the blessings that I talked about my wife is that she agreed that if we had to live a meager lifestyle for a long time, that we would do that.

So I've lived in an old home and a lot of sewn clothing and hand-me-downs and we just lived a very, very meager lifestyle. A lot of things a lot of families have. Normal families have old vehicles, this sort of thing. For a long time we didn't have medical insurance of any kind and then the last five years or so we've gotten involved with Samaritan Ministries and that's been a real blessing.

If you're aware of Samaritan Ministries. I'm a member. Okay, all right, yes. I purposely lived in a small town in Iowa to let our kids grow up in an agricultural culture. They could work on farms. They could work for friends of mine. They could go hunting and fishing. The boys could be boys, the girls could be girls and the cost of living was way less than anyplace else.

So it was all by design and forethought that we just sat down 25 years ago and said we need to prepare our children for a day that many don't see coming but they're going to need to lead. And right now our two oldest sons, all of our kids are leading in some capacity wherever they're called to but the highest profile ones right now are in the political Second Amendment arena and they are extremely successful at it.

And they were the ones behind the entire Missouri law that got passed. That's wonderful. And it's once after we got connected and I looked at the picture that you have on your Facebook header of your cover photo of your entire family. I mean just pictures like that. I look at that and it's very inspirational to me as a young father.

It's similar to even what my own -- I'm the youngest of seven kids and 12 grandkids. My parents have 12 grandkids and we have a similar photo. And photos like that have always gripped me because when you think about the power and the wealth that is in people, it can -- in my mind I'll trade in any day.

I'll trade in a fat retirement account for a table filled with children and grandchildren. Amen. And I tell people over and over, go back to Exodus 1, reread Exodus 1 when the oppression was on God's people and Pharaoh was increasing the burdens and the taxes. I think one of the Hebrews' words does -- one of the burdens is taxes.

When all the oppression is on, what do God's people do? They go back home and have more babies. And eventually they take all the wealth from the Egyptians. Exactly. Exactly. And I say to Christians, you say, oh, I can't afford this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're going to die with the whole system.

You're going to have no heritage, no future, no nothing. What did God's people do in the times of great oppression? Look at Exodus 1, everybody. It's there for us. So last question, just because I know we're short on time. Last question I want to ask you here is on politics.

And the question is, is it worth it? I live in West Palm Beach, Florida. And Palm Beach County, Florida is massive. It is -- it's just huge. And when you start looking at the waste, I mean it's like where do you stop? And then it's also incredibly liberal. It's incredibly entrenched politically.

And it's exactly -- it's a farm system just like you described where the mayor moves on to become the congressperson. And it's just -- and then being here in the seat, I mean Donald Trump lives in Palm Beach for crying out loud or theoretically does. So when I look at it, it's tough for me to believe that I could make an impact there.

Do you think that -- I mean what would you say to somebody like me? Would you say, yes, dig in no matter where you are? I mean these people are making a difference in Illinois. Or do you say go somewhere else where you can actually make a difference, gather your forces and get some small wins?

How would you approach such a problem? Sam Walton started off in the hinterlands of Arkansas before he went national and so forth. So cutting your teeth, it may be better in a small area. But I can tell you that in what you just described, there's still large numbers of people who have given up, who are apathetic and are just bearing their burden over their shoulder, just trudging through, carrying this system.

They're out there and they can vote. So picking a fight with this system on terms that they've never run into before, that they've never seen anything like this before, that's part of the fun of what we do is I fight them on their terms and we go back at them in a way that they're not used to.

They don't know what to do. So I'm saying the answer is both. You may want to go into the small area and start there and learn it, but I've done some on the east side of St. Louis, a $1.2 billion proposal, and we kicked its tail. And so, I mean, it can be done.

And I would first start by assessing the various government jurisdictions and where they're at and then wait for the opportunity to engage the fight. And you'd be surprised. I've got people going now. I've trained them to do this. They're going to big city council meetings and they're taking -- during public hearing time, we're not going to have a dialogue or discussion.

You can just public comment, present your comments. We'll take them into consideration and go from there. They'll find somebody on the board that agrees with them. They're all alone on that board. Everybody else is going against them. And they're going to ask questions of the board of some outrageous tax or cost or something that's out of control.

They'll summarize it and they'll say, how many of you here are willing to cut this program back or cut this tax back or deal with this unfunded pension fund by not sticking it to the taxpayers but asking the city employees to take a cut? If you're willing to do this, whatever the question is, make it a narrow question.

If you're willing to do this, we know you can't speak back to us, but at least at this time raise your hand high. One of the council members raised their hand and their camera pans and the rest of them are looking down eating their notes. And one community in South Carolina, they tabled the meeting for a bathroom stop and three of the council members came down and said, what are you going to do with that video?

Oh, you'll see. It turns out my cameraman was so nervous he blew it. He didn't have the camera running. But there's all kinds of videos and stuff we can start doing now and post it on Facebook for 50 bucks, boost it into the county and watch the fun begin.

So I'm training people on a lot of these sort of things now that we can do that are there. So the answer is both. You have to make your own assessment of where you're at. Well, the good thing about being in a big city, if you talk about homeschool students, you go to a rural town and you might have dozens or potentially hundreds.

Here where I live, I have thousands, I would say tens of thousands. You talk about retirees and mobilizing the army of retirees, you go to a rural community, you might have hundreds, perhaps thousands. I've got hundreds of thousands. That's your market. You just identify them, homeschool kids and retirees.

They're the ones that will be the boots on the ground. The problem is our homeschool leadership has not trained their parents right. There's so much more these homeschool kids could be doing. I've seen it when they engage, it is powerful. They're sitting on the sidelines in most cases. They get involved in state politics and that sort of thing.

But local level and boots on the street, they're not doing it. Also retirees too. I can't stand how we put people out to pasture right when they're in the prime of their lives. I just saw a story this last week of a man in Orlando who is an older man who goes out to the local abortion mill every day and he does sidewalk counseling.

I think the story was that he had saved over 400 children over the years that he's doing that. I can't stand seeing people sit on the sidelines and waste their lives. Where did retirement come from in the 1950s? The insurance industry. There was never such a thing before this.

You diminished in your capacities. You were called to your calling and you stayed at it with your diminishing capacities as you got older until you were too ill. But the whole idea of parking your life at 65 is unbiblical. It came from the money boys again. So anyway, you're absolutely right.

Seniors can go to these meetings. They can run video cameras. They get some training. I got stories I could sit here for two hours but we're now starting to overhaul the county government here in Iowa because of one senior citizen running the video camera. She brings me the raw footage and I make the political videos and we turn them on into the county and people are angry.

When they see the corruption because they listen to the paper in the radio station all for decades and they think everything is business as usual. When they see the corruption on video on Facebook in their local city council or county commissioners or whatever it is, all of a sudden they realize that the system has been lying to them and they get angry.

So there's a lot you can do. We live in a wonderful time for being able to do that stuff. Awesome. Well, Paul, I know you got to go and I'm up on my next interview. Tell us. Your website is rollbacklocalgov.com. Any other websites or other action steps perhaps anyone in my audience would like to hire you for your consulting services?

What would be the next follow-up that you'd like people to make? They can email me at ccs@iowatelecom.net. That's ccs@iowatelecom.net. But go to rollbacklocalgov and spend some time. A lot of my clients say I learned so much on how to fight by just reading all the articles and following your links and so forth.

So spend some time there first and then if you have more direct questions, there's a contact form on there or they can just email me directly at ccs@iowatelecom.net. I got a lot of links that can help them nationally on how they can prepare themselves. Paul, thanks for coming on and keep fighting the fight.

We all want lower taxes and I'm glad to see that some people are actually doing something about it. Glad to be on with you, Joshua. God bless. Oops. Need a winter holiday escape? Forget your cares in Fiji. White sand beaches and scuba diving are calling. Your tropical paradise getaway is just one nonstop Fiji Airways flight away.

With round trip fares starting at $899 from LAX or SFO. Or check out great fares to Australia and New Zealand with seamless connections via Fiji. Book now at FijiAirways.com. From here to happiness, flying direct with Fiji Airways.