ON THE ISSUES

Our schools are not always preparing our children to really advance in life. Parents should have the information they need to make decisions about their children’s education, and they should have access to all the educational options in their community. I support charter schools and school vouchers to allow all parents to choose the best education for their children.

Rising crime is endangering our families and neighborhoods. To make our streets safe again, we need to recruit more police and enforce our laws.

Our open borders have allowed in drugs, criminals, and terrorists and prevented us from having a serious discussion about immigration. To regain control over our future, we need to secure our border so that we can develop a consistent immigration policy.

Small businesses struggle with high costs. Reducing taxes and regulations on small businesses will create jobs and renew our communities.

The United States has a debt problem. In 2000, our national debt was half of our GDP. Today it is twice that much and rising, primarily due to the steadily increasing costs of our welfare and entitlement programs. We cannot solve our debt problem without reforming those programs, and my plan to do this will save over $1 trillion per year, leading to long-term financial stability.

I am running for Congress because I want to change the way we relate to our government. My plan is to phase out all of our current welfare and entitlement programs and return this money (over $4 trillion per year) to the American people. Whether or not you agree with all the details of this plan, we need to engage in this discussion. The current system is unsustainable. You can find more details about my plan below.

As a professor for over 20 years, I have seen the deterioration of higher education. The irreproducibility crisis has undermined academic research, leading to false claims that have driven public policy in the wrong directions. The left-wing bias at colleges has become so extreme that few conservative professors remain, creating a form of groupthink that has suppressed real debate. We need to create new guidelines for government funding of higher education that demands more accountability from researchers and more diversity of perspectives.

In our current welfare programs, people lose benefits such as food stamps, Medicaid, and housing vouchers when they start to earn money on their own or begin to build up assets. This system discourages people from working and saving because working people receive few benefits. At the same time, the large bureaucracy is expensive and difficult to navigate. One of my main priorities will be to reduce this bureaucracy.

We all know that the Social Security Administration is headed for insolvency, but few politicians are willing to address the problem. Moreover, the current solutions on offer to either raise taxes or reduce benefits are not very appealing. My plan would guarantee existing benefits for everyone 37 and older, while introducing a sustainable system for the next generation.

Healthcare costs in the U.S. have spiraled out of control, consuming 18% of our GDP, while no other country in the world spends more than 12%. The basic problem is that the people receiving health benefits have no incentive to consider the costs. This situation leads to the dominance in the healthcare sector of health insurance companies and government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, rather than the doctors and nurses providing care. We need to bring back the centrality of the doctor-to-patient relationship, without the corporate and government bureaucracies getting in the way.

I support a Constitutional amendment to prohibit government agencies from providing benefits to some people and not to others. With this change, we will take the wind out of the entire lobbying process. With no special benefits for the government to hand out, there would be no point to having lobbyists for special interests. Ordinary Americans would be in control of their government again.

-All welfare and entitlement programs would be phased out, and the money saved would be enough to return $16,000 per year to every citizen 21 years of age and older. Of this money, $12,000 per year would be a direct tax cut, and $4000 per year would be in the form of a health insurance voucher, to be used on the private market, thereby creating universal coverage in a totally private system.

-Those who are within 30 years of retirement may choose to stay with the existing system of Social Security and Medicare according to the current rules of those programs.

-This plan is inspired by Charles Murray’s book, In Our Hands.