Transcription
Oh, hello everyone. How are you all doing today? This is Adam here again. I'm running for the second district, district in the second position for the second district. Um, while the primary was last week, uh, since there's only two of us on the ticket, I am, I'm still go for November. So, I, I definitely have been falling behind on things and I need to, um, address a lot of issues. I'm not going to be able to campaign, um, enough. I don't think I can go out door-to-door, and there are reasons why, uh, I can't just go out and just walk around different communities and try to get my name out there.
But, um, mainly because arthritis. Uh, yeah, I have a, I have a shot knee. Actually, both my knees are shot. Uh, but, you know, that's, that's what happens when, uh, you do certain things. I hate falling back on certain, uh, terms and and things like that. I like, uh, surprising people with things. But I also noticed in this last election, if you, um, if the only thing you're talking about is military service or, you know, a line here or a line there, you're not, uh, in the primaries, you're not going to win. All right? The people want more. They want plans, and I have plans.
Um, one of the things I did not talk about in my plans is because I only found out really about it since registering for office was the way we are taxed as a small business. As a small business, you're taxed on your gross income, not your net income. And I will promise you this, uh, being that I'm a manufacturer and in my industry, we don't make money for the first three years our businesses are around. Uh, either we have a negative net, uh, profit or we have a net zero, and that's just how it is. And, uh, but if the only thing, if the states can come say, "Hey, you owe us money still," that would, pardon me, that would absolutely ruin the chance anyone would will be able to start. And I think that's one of the reasons why everybody laughed at me because I found out finding this out and then making phone calls, they just were like, "Yeah, this is why we don't have a plant in Washington." So, yay. But that, of course, will be the one of the first things I'm going to try to change. Um, maybe on the down low or on the side.
But one of the other things that kind of have a direct effect on the consumer and the, in a way, in a lot of different ways that most people won't see is my hemp bill that I want to push for. Now, I know some people are going to roll their eyes and some people aren't. But the history of hemp is very straightforward. Hemp was the largest cash crop in our country until it was illegalized. It was illegalized mainly through or because of lobbying done by the wood pulp industry. Now, uh, wood pulp is in short demand. It is stretched too thin among too many industries, and with the wildfires and the droughts and other things like that, there are shortages.
So, um, I can kind of go into more detail in, like, I don't know, how should I put this? So, during the Trump administration, they opened up emergency, um, areas to be harvested and then they allowed over-harvesting. And those two things combined, and then Biden coming in, basically, Biden's like, "Okay, look, you can't over-harvest, and we're not going to open up the national parks anymore." And so they closed all that down, and everything gets quiet, and everybody goes, "Oh, wait, look, we don't have enough." And it's like, "No, really, you don't. You didn't think about this for longer than five seconds?" And then, really, most people didn't. And so now they're getting ready to go and harvest these, these stocks or fields that they have. And what I'm hearing from people are things along the lines of, because of the droughts, the trees aren't as large as they should be. Wide, I guess. Someone's telling me, explaining it to me, it's like they, they measure on, make sure that they're as wide as they're supposed to be, and if they're not, they have to kind of leave them for the next year to harvest. So at some point, they will be harvested. But if they're too thin or too short, there's no point. And then they, they were talking about there was this forest area in California and then one in Oregon, and I guess there's one up here as well, on the east side of the state, where the entire, like, they have all these areas and the entire stock is burned away. And now they're like, "We don't know what to do." So you're, you're losing a lot of this growth that you should have. And there's just nothing in many cases, uh, unless you're selling it to, um, you know, someone doing, uh, you know, unusual furniture, you're not going to be able to salvage anything.
So, uh, wood pulp, of course, is, is, and then wood pulp, which is used for paper products, but also for medical, uh, reasons. I'm not entirely all into everything that they use wood pulp for on the medical side, but I had a friend of mine who basically was in pharmacy and they were explaining it, and it's just kind of mind-boggling. But so those are the things going on with wood pulp right now. And so we have a shortage of stock and prices are going up. And there are things that we don't recycle. And I mean, you don't recycle paper towel, you don't recycle toilet paper, you don't recycle shipping labels, you don't recycle pizza boxes. And we, and even though a lot of people do recycle brown bags, they're getting hit with a tax. And that tax is directly affecting everybody's groceries. So even though it's like only, was it five cents? I think I know, I, I don't even use, I just, I put boxes in the back of my car, I go to the grocery store, I tell them, "Put back in the cart," and then I put everything in a box and I bring the box into the house. But that being said, you know, there are people I know who go and they get bags, they have to. And so now you have a problem. How do we deal with this? My answer is to say, we're going to go to hemp.
Now, like I said, this was the, hemp was the cash crop for our country for years. And, and it's kind of funny because I remember listening to friends talk about the fact that they have to buy hemp rope from other countries for the big ships because there are, there are other alternatives to hemp rope, like an aluminum rope, which you think to yourself, wouldn't that just be a cable? And I guess what it is, is the aluminum or aluminium is an alloy of some type. But I have seen people working the hemp ropes to pull them in, to bring the lines tight, and I've seen them do the aluminum ropes, and it's like, you, you're just, it's like it's crazy and it's insane, and you're like, "Holy smokes!" And I, I never thought I would see a metal stretched by the use of a hand. I mean, it's just crazy. Anyway, so, um, but everybody hates aluminum ropes, and hemp ropes are ideal. I'm sorry, I'm listening to someone about ready to go and bother me in the background. Anyway, the, um, so hemp, the hemp ropes and stuff, these are all things that we need. And then, of course, everybody thinks about the hippie, um, uh, where the ponchos that everybody wears, the hemp ponchos. Yes. But hemp paper was the number one selling paper in the country for a long time. And then there was cotton paper, and wood pulp was at the bottom of the barrel, which is why the lobbying group took over so much over there. On the shelf up there are three reams of paper. There's actually about five more in my closet, and they're all hemp paper. They're from the 1930s, and it was just, that's what it was. There's nothing illegal about having the hemp paper either. Um, so it's usable. It works great in my printer's laser and inkjet, and I'm like, "I don't know why we don't use it." And, uh, because right now, wood pulp has to be specially made for inkjet or specially made for laser. Uh, you know, there's all these little issues that occur. And if I was to run it, if I buy paper, it's like, I tell people what the final cut, the customer final thing is they want to do, and what we're doing to it to begin with, and then I have to have special stock made. Hemp, my understanding on hemp is, uh, they just make it. You know, I just don't know how else to describe it. It's like it's out the door and it's on its way.
So, um, the amount of, then this is where I'm going to start going to everybody. Probably heard how much toilet paper and how much, um, paper towels we use as this in this country. So what I want to do is, so you already have like an idea of how many acres we could save of trees if we use hemp. The other thing I want to do, of course, the brown bags, but pizza boxes can be made of hemp, and no one will care because again, you're not making, you don't even have to make the whole thing out of hemp if you wanted to. If, if there were something like, "Oh no, that's going to, the, the whatever chemical is going to leach in." Okay, so the inside the box has to be wood pulp, but the outside can be hemp, and the corrugated parts have to be, can be hemp. And then no one cares. You know, then it works because you're not touching, actually touching the hemp paper. Other things that you can do would be like the bags and the stuff that you get your McDonald's into, um, or get them in, you know, McDonald's puts their stuff into. Um, if I made those boxes for McDonald's, I, the ink we use for food, the food grade ink is made of ammonia. And people are going to be like, "Oh no, we can't, oh, you put hemp in there? Like you're already got ammonia right up against your pack, your your food." I mean, I don't know. I just, it's comical to me about things people don't know what it takes to make things. Um, but the glue, the glue for the boxes, the McDonald's boxes is cornstarch. That's, that's all the other fun part. But anyway, um, I laugh. I mean, it's just, you know, there's so much we can do. And but right now, my focus is the brown bags at the grocery store because once they get 100% hemp, there's no reason for us to be taxed on it. So that tax goes away, and now you can get as many brown bags as you want from the grocery store. Nobody's going to care. Toilet paper should be gone to hemp. That will actually reduce, um, the cost of toilet paper dramatically. So, uh, at that point, we will pro, we should see a drop in the cost. Um, paper towels is the same thing, and a pizza boxes as well. I, I think you, we have to be careful though on how much we want hemp at one time. But the final thing, of course, and this is something that everybody in the industry has actually been asking for, the industry that I'm in, anyway, which is printing, and that is hemp paper labels. We blow through, I don't know how many millions of acres of trees every year for shipping labels. I mean, just shipping labels, period. I, I, there was, I can tell stories. I mean, in a single day, we'll have skids set up and ready to run for a machine. It's 200 foot of rolls, and we'll run that in an entire day. So in 24 hours, we'll run in 200 foot rolls, 200 foot of rolls that are five foot tall. That's, those rolls are bigger than any one tree you're going to go and harvest. In fact, it's probably equivalent to, I don't know, 8 or 10 trees. And you got, I mean, again, 200 foot, that's 24 hours, that's one machine. I worked at a plant, we had four machines that did Amazon labels, and we did, we had to have a 200 foot length of skids, four of these rolls for each machine for 24 hours. That's a lot. And we were running, we run Amazon for about a month to two months. And when you start thinking about the fact that this is one plant, Amazon doesn't go to one plant. It is, how many plants were there? There were seven plants in Cincinnati that all had contracts for Amazon, and they all were producing labels at the same speeds, the same quantities, the same amounts. We just, they just have a truck, we put a truck in the on our dock, and we would take stock straight from the floor of the press room, put it on the truck, and then the morning they'd come by and they'd swap the trucks out so we can just start over again. And they take that truck over to the Amazon. And it was the insanity. I mean, it's just insane how much, uh, those orders were insane. I mean, I can't even tell you. I mean, they're like, we had, we had to build a section of a plant just once. We had to build a warehouse section in our plant just for the Amazon, and it was stacked so high, it wasn't even funny. So you've got those plants in Cincinnati, but that's how it is all across the country. Everybody's trying to do it. I was out here when I first got here, there's a plant talking about doing a job for Amazon, and I'm like, "Yeah, you, you don't have the capabilities to do it." And they're like, "No, no, we do." And I'm like, "No, you don't." Um, and like I was pointing out, like you don't have the warehouse space for the stock, you don't have the shifts to get it done, and you don't have the place to put it when it's said and done. And if you're, you're putting direct thermal or thermal transfer, no, direct, I'm sorry, direct thermal in a truck in 115 degree weather with no air conditioning and no cooling, you're not, you're going to have a return. They're going to return it. And they don't return one of the, the one or two flawed boxes, they return the entire order, and they expect you to redo it and have it ready the next day. So I'm like telling people like, you don't know, you don't know. Um, you know, and so you're looking at numbers like that, and it's like, yeah, you know, I have, I've associated mine down in California. And he says, "Yeah, they get stock in, they've got a massive warehouse, they have to pay huge amounts in taxes, uh, on the property, but they're running insane amounts of stock." But everybody's sitting there going like, "We know the wood, wood pulp is is short. So why don't we get hemp?" So yes, this is a little bit of my own industry thing. But farmers will start growing the hemp and they're going to be like, "Oh wow, look, we can sell this. We can harvest it." Uh, I think it's like three or four times a year. It's cash. And you know, it's just basically, let, let it do its thing. It grows. Let it do its thing. You know, and then you harvest it. And, uh, it's the easy one from what I understand from some of the guys who back in Ohio were telling me about it, that the old timers who did this, it was one of the easiest, easiest crops they ever grew. And they, it wasn't until they started getting corn and soy and all the other stuff that they had issues. And you can really, it's good for rotating on the, the fields too. So anyway, um, so in the end, yes, I want to do this bill. I want to be able to say, like, if we pass this bill, it'll say in four years, uh, you have to go to 100% hemp. So the first year it's 25%, second year's 50%, third year 75%, the last year it's 100%. Um, you, you won't be paying that grocery bag tax. You'll, uh, let me see, uh, we should see a cost cut, a price cut in, and like toilet paper, paper towels. Uh, if you're a pizza place, you're going to see, you should see a cost cut in the price for a pizza box, which is going to be a positive for you. Uh, that, that would be something that's less stress for you. And then, of course, there's the labels. Um, you're, for the people who are doing the labels, it's going to reduce the cost in the labels. It's also going to be more environmentally friendly. It's going to be better for the economy. So that's why I'm pushing for my, my hemp bill.
Thank you all for following me all the way through. I hope I haven't deviated too much or talked too much craziness to it. But, uh, again, it's, it's this is a small thing to do and, uh, I think it's easy enough to talk about. Anyone. You all have a good day and God bless. Bye.