National Priorities

Health Care

Though the Health Care Bill has been passed there are still issues of concern to those of us here in Central Washington. Facilities like the Wenatchee Valley Medical Clinic and others like it in the 4th district must be protected. This bill is not the final answer to the cost of health insurance. As the manager of a small business I am very aware of the impact ever escalating medical insurance premiums have on small businesses. The first place to begin to control the cost of medical care is to control the cost of medical insurance. Neither the taxpayer, by way of the Federal Government, nor the private sector be made to pay ever escalating insurance premiums so that insurance company executives can draw multi-million dollar salaries. I also will support legislation for tort reform to assist in controlling the cost of medical malpractice insurance.

Protect Individual Rights

As outlined in the first 10 amendments – all 10 – These are individual rights, they don’t belong to corporations, in spite of what the Supreme Court recently ruled.

Energy Independence

Within this Decade. If America can put a man on the moon within the decade of the 60's we can become 100% energy independent within the next 10 years!! The values of American ingenuity, industriousness, and creativity can succeed again. We made atomic energy a reality. We put the first man on the moon. We created the assembly line and made the automobile the world changing invention of the last century. We invented an airplane that could fly and created the modern reality of air travel, as we know it. It was our innovation, inventive genius, and industrial strength that made America the giant of the modern world. We can recover that vision again. In 2008 we imported $338 Billion dollars worth of foreign oil. This is unsustainable and dangerous to our economy and our independence. If we removed this one source of the imbalance of trade just imagine how it would improve our overall economy. This one change, alone, would almost eliminate our trade imbalance.

We must set a goal of eliminating the imbalance in trade within the next decade.

We must preserve and expand the middle class.

To do this we must address the challenge of imports coming from countries where the average hourly wages are a very small fraction of what is paid here in the U.S. We cannot place the entire burden of "productivity" gains on the backs of the American worker. That is unsustainable. And we cannot continue to see erosion in wages and living standards that have made the American Middle Class the engine of the world's economy and the beacon for downtrodden people worldwide. We are currently on a trend to make America into a second world country. Should that happen, the American Dream as we know it will have been lost forever.

We must enact a law limiting the ratio between CEO to lowest wage earner pay within each public company to a maximum of 200. (An internal pay equity law) Currently some CEO's earn more than 300 times the wage of the lowest paid workers in the company. (For example a worker making $20,000 per year compared to a CEO making more than $6,000,000) By way of comparison in 1965 the average ratio in the United States was 44 to 1 (the CEO earned 44 times the wage of the minimum earner in the company). By linking the CEO pay and the minimum worker pay we are emphasizing the reality that every person in a company is an important and integral part of that company. It is important to note that other industrial countries like Germany and Japan have significantly lower ratios than is current in the U.S. (under 100). We cannot ignore this gap and maintain our position as a leading industrial power.

We must peg the national minimum wage to inflation and raise it to $10.00. The minimum wage is the tide that floats all wages above it.

We must protect Social Security

The first and simplest step to take to do this is to make all income subject to the Social Security tax. If all of those (90%) Americans who earn less than $106,000 per year can pay Social Security Taxes on 100% of their incomes, then those Americans making over $106,000 per year can also afford to pay Social Security taxes on 100% of their income. We must re-establish fairness to the tax code and this is the first and easiest place to begin. If elected, I will voluntarily pay this tax on 100% of my income.

We must protect small business.

We must redefine what a small business is. A small business should be defined as any business grossing less than $5,000,000 annually (this figure would be pegged to the inflation rate).

Small businesses must be allowed to pay their Federal tax obligations on a quarterly basis, not weekly, as currently required.

If a small business is late making a payment the I.R.S. will be allowed to only charge interest (based on prime plus 5%) and a penalty of no more than 10% of the amount owed.

We must maintain our defenses.

America is only as strong as our manufacturing base. We won W.W. II as much in our factories as on the beaches of Europe and the Pacific. We must not loose this important resource, simply because it might be cheaper to make things in China or India or some other location of excessively cheap labor. We must honor the industry of our fathers and their fathers and not let the world's industrial engine move somewhere else.

We must require that American companies manufacture ALL (100%) of our military equipment here in the United States. To do otherwise is to create vulnerabilities in our national defenses that others can and will exploit.