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Bartlesville Radio spoke with Senator James Lankford on our monthly podcast with him. He talked about the Big Beautiful Bill and his part in the bill to remove an unfair tax on the companies when it came to drilling.

Also in the podcast, Lankford said, "We're not in session in August so we get a chance to be in our own states and get a chance to be able to travel around see people this year We've still got a lot of nominations to do."

Lankford was asked how the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill will work for Oklahoma? Lankford responded, "For your farmer and rancher, the people are finding out that half of the farm bill was actually done in this bill. We dealt with the estate tax, which is terrible for farmers and ranchers where it literally takes away family farms when someone passes away The next generation has to sell the farm to be able to pay taxes. We dramatically increased the limit on estate taxes to be able to help farmers and ranchers be able to maintain their family farms."

As for other tax deductions,Lankford said, "I've worked on really hard dealing with the nonprofit donations For several years now if you donated your church or nonprofit you couldn't write that off on your income tax anymore Only the top 9% of Americans were able to write off their stuff on their income tax for their nonprofit donations. I got that changed in this bill. Now individuals are able to write off a thousand dollars of their nonprofit donations A couple is able to write off $2,000.

Lankford said The Big Beautiful Bill flattened out the tax rates. He said, "Democrats were fighting really hard to be able to raise every Americans tax rate. What was funny was they kept saying this all about millionaires and billionaires, but every single tax bracket was scheduled to go up on January the 1st, and Democrats were fighting tenaciously to make sure that every single tax bracket in America went up. We were able to stop that just keep tax rates where they are right now."

We also spoke to the senator about recissions. He said, "Not a lot of people know that this was the first time rescissions passed through Congress in more than 30 years." He explained, "A rescission is when the White House says 'I don't want to spend this money' and he asks Congress to not spend it. The White House sent over nine billion dollars in requests saying 'I don't want to spend this money.'" He added, " A lot of it is foreign aid and some of it was for NPR and for PBS."