Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast.

I'm Ashken Kazarian.

On today's show, we're going to talk about vaping and what's going on around the United States with regulation and laws that are trying to regulate vaping.

Joining us is an expert on that and many other issues, Paul Blair. He's Director of Strategic

Initiatives at Americans for Tax Reform. Paul, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Paul, before we dive into the fascinating world of vaping, what does

Americans for tax reform, ATR, do for people outside of DC or in DC who are not in this space?

Sure.

So what we're probably most famous for is something called the taxpayer protection pledge,

which is a written commitment that we ask everyone running for office, federal and state

to sign committing to not raise taxes, put their no tax rhetoric in writing.

That's kind of the base level for our engagement on a wide range of regulatory and public policy issues.

Kind of our general theory on government is that if you prevent government from growing by stealing people's money,

whether they're businesses, families, individuals, you force reform.

And so whether that's in the healthcare space, the transportation space, the tech and telecom space,

the best way to ensure that we force politicians to reform government to make it work better

is to prevent them from stealing more people's money because if the government can provide a service

or arguably do something that the

private sector creates as a product, if you can prevent them from doing that, we allow for more

innovation, we allow for more entrepreneurship. And so asking politicians to not raise taxes,

requiring them to do so, is our principal project. And that's a project that we've been asking

candidates for office assigned for over 20 years. But certainly to the extent that we work on

...