We fell short. We didn’t accomplish all that we wished to. But it only ends once. And this clearly isn’t that once. More to come. I just didn’t want to be that politician who stopped talking when there was nothing to gain and no votes to earn. I’m going to sleep and things will get clearer in the next few days I’m sure. Again, I can’t thank each of you enough for the faith, belief, and commitment you showed in me. I pray that I lived up to it.
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Welcome! Here’s how you can get up to speed in a few minutes:
1) Start with this video introduction.
2) Ready to learn more about my stand on the issues?
- Here from us directly! Watch us debate on 10/26 at this link.
- Here’s my policy platform centered around Responsibility, Growth, and Security.
- Here’s the most commonly asked questions I get through email.
- Here’s my commercial and a list of reasons why I’m asking for your vote.
- The latest articles and updates of interest are on my Facebook page
3) Ready to support our campaign?
- Donate
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Still have questions? Send me a note.
Thanks!
Surya
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I’ll continue to share these as they come out:
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Let’s acknowledge the real cause of high unemployment … and get to work addressing it.
It’s probably not wise for a candidate to pick a fight with a noted economist, but I had a strong reaction to a post this week from by Professor J. Bradford DeLong titled, “The Varieties of Unemployment” that I came across via Ezra Klein.
Prof. DeLong’s post is a bit technical. It addresses an academic debate among economists over whether our current state of high unemployment is “cyclical” or “structural.” In a nutshell, some smart people are arguing the issue is supply (not enough of a type of worker), a problem with the structure of the economy itself. Other smart people are arguing that the issue is demand (not enough employers seeking those skilled workers), which is a problem that comes and goes in cycles.
The big difference is the latter problem can be solved by pumping taxpayer-funded “stimulus” into the economy, essentially creating the missing demand. Prof. DeLong appears to be in the camp that thinks this would be an effective remedy.
Here is the key example Prof. DeLong uses to prove our 10% unemployment rate is not structural:
[S]uppose that you have many workers qualified and skilled to work in construction, but households have decided that their houses are more than large enough, and wish to fill them with manufactured goods …
In that case, we would expect to see construction [click to continue…]
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Sadly, each passing day brings with it more depressing economic news. Today’s latest is that housing sales dropped 27% in July, the weakest showing in 15 years. That the housing market remains a complete disaster, common knowledge to most of us, appears to still be a secret to those in Washington. This latest news reinforces that it is time to put aside the Washington “PR fixes” and get down to real solutions that address what is both a devastating crisis for many American families and a major barrier to any economic recovery.
To properly address the housing crisis we have to first stabilize the market. We can only stabilize the housing market by first stopping the downward spiral that it is currently caught in. What downward spiral? Today, each foreclosure, auction, and new house for sale puts increasing downward pressure on prices. As home prices drop, more mortgages become “underwater”, which leads to increasing cases of homeowners walking away and more bank foreclosures. This in-turn drives home prices down even further, and the cycle continues and continues.
To date none of the DC solutions have had a prayer of addressing this core problem; they were just band-aids. Not surprisingly, these DC solutions have only succeeded in allowing our politicians [click to continue…]
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It’s always darkest before the dawn. Given our current campaign finance system, we should hope that this is true. Washington Monthly’s article “Show Him the Money” looks behind the curtain at the process by which big dollars get in the door to the legislative process. Here are some of my thoughts on choice passages:
“In other words, a large part of what the Chamber sells is political cover. For multibillion-dollar insurers, drug makers, and medical device manufacturers who are too smart and image conscious to make public attacks of their own, the Chamber of Commerce is a friend who will do the dirty work. “I want to give them all the deniability they need,” says Donohue.
Wow. Shouldn’t it scare us that special interests– those who create, manipulate, and defeat legislation– would so readily admit the degree to which they manipulate the process? The truly sad part is that their confidence/arrogance is well-founded. If there ever was a formal battle between “organized greed” and “disorganized democracy” it was won long ago.
But while the Chamber has as legitimate a claim to representing this sector as any organization around—96 percent of its members have fewer than 100 employees—it is also beholden to a cadre of multinationals whose interests are often inimical to those of small business. In 2008, a third of its revenues came from just nineteen companies.
This feels like one of the most consistent patterns of Washington. Special interests hide behind the banner of a group that we all agree on/believe in– in this case, small businesses– solely for marketing purposes.
“The worst thing to happen to Tom is to have an issue resolved, even to his own favor, because then he can’t raise any more funds on it,” says John Schulz, a former editor at the trade journal Traffic World, who’s covered Donohue for twenty-five years.
Isn’t this exactly what is happening in government today as well? Both parties are more concerned with scoring political points and posturing for the next election than in actually solving problems.
Oddly, while Donohue casts himself as the voice of business, he has never worked for a corporation or any kind of for-profit concern—only for trade associations, nonprofits, and the federal government.
One of the biggest problems with Washington is that the vast majority of these people have never worked in a business or run a real business. They are career bureaucrats or politicians who know how to peddle influence, raise money, and tell people what they want to hear. They leach off hard-earned taxpayer dollars and borrow from our grandchildren. Of course we end up with out of control spending, poorly run programs, and abysmal oversight of regulation. They’ve never worked in the real world where if you do these things you get fired.
“The Chamber views itself as a shadow-government policymaking body,” a former Chamber economist, Lawrence Hunter, said.
Isn’t this the real cause for hope? After all this time, and having spent well over $3 trillion last year lobbying, can you really call this kind of behavior “shadow-government”? That’s quite the shadow. Now that the “shadow” is blocking out the sun, people are increasingly reading and hearing about how corrupt the ways of Washington have become. We legalized bribery, and now that they’re rubbing our faces in it, I have hope that we’re finally read to tell them we’ve had enough.
We have an opportunity here in the 2nd District to send just such a message. Our Congresswoman has taken over 1.5 million dollars in special-interest money. The banks donated to her. The big banks got her vote to bail them out and hand them hundreds of billions of dollars (TARP). Later the banks also got their protection from regulation as hundreds of Congressmen, like Rep. Jean Schmidt voted against and watered it down. Had enough yet?
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