Commitment to Our Military and Veterans
Illegal Immigration
Taxation
Energy
Healthcare

Commitment to Our Military and Veterans

We must do everything we can to secure our country and protect Americans from the threat of terrorism. In doing so, we must never forget those who have sacrificed with their commitment to ensuring the security of our country by serving in our armed forces.

As a State Senator I have proposed legislation:

• Providing funding to our troops in Iraq for personal protection and GPS equipment to help locate the enemy.
• Eliminating state income taxes for those serving on active duty.
• Offering low-interest loans to members of the armed forces (or spouses) serving on active duty.
• Proposing tax deductions for military pensions.

I have been a strong supporter of our troops and our veterans throughout my 20 years serving in the State Senate. I have always questioned why Congress doesn’t make the armed forces’ health, safety, and security the country’s number one objective. In Congress, their support will be my first priority.

Illegal Immigration

The federal government has permitted the problem of unchecked illegal immigration to develop. Failed amnesty programs, the inability to secure our borders, and gridlock is all that we have seen. The federal government needs to fix this problem by taking actions to close our porous borders that now are open to criminals, drug smugglers, terrorists, and diseases — and it must address the effects of illegal immigration on our over-burdened economy. These costs are essentially an unfunded mandate.
Citizens of this country pay the price of illegal immigration with:

• Funding overcrowded schools and programs that were not developed to educate students who arrived illegally from different cultures and who don’t speak English;
• Skyrocketing healthcare costs inflated by free healthcare provided to illegal aliens;
• Burdening law enforcement, jails, prisons and the courts, which are taxed beyond capacity;
• Allowing illegal drugs to enter our country across our borders from all over the world;
• Tasking employers with screening and compliance, but without a way to verify residency.

As a State Senator I have opposed our Governor’s legislation that has given driver’s licenses and tuition assistance to illegal aliens. As a member of the Finance Committee, which is responsible for creating our state budget every year, I have confronted the pressures of balancing a budget burdened with uncompensated costs for healthcare and education. I have also sponsored legislation asking President Bush to pardon Border Patrol Agents Ramos and Compean, who were imprisoned for shooting an illegal alien drug smuggler.

I propose Real Immigration Reform. To do this we must:

• Secure our borders. Build a combination of actual and virtual fences, and employ other technology and additional manpower that would prevent anyone from entering our country except through secured entry points.
• Ensure that illegal aliens don’t get hired. Enforce existing laws against hiring illegal aliens, and with a method ensuring employers can determine with 99% accuracy whether the applicant has legal status so that small businesses aren’t unfairly burdened attempting to comply.
• Tighten the visa process. Fifty percent of illegal aliens in the USA arrive here through a work, student, travel, or other visa. Many of these aliens remain after their allowed time period lapses and there is no tracking of them once they arrive. We don’t know who has left because all passports and visas aren’t checked when people leave this country. We need stricter controls and monitoring systems in place that allow us to confirm the validity of a visa applicant, and track and monitor all foreigners entering this country and know when they leave.
• Deny taxpayer benefits to illegal aliens. This would include all types of benefits. The only exception to this would be emergency healthcare to adults and general healthcare to children.
• Refuse illegal aliens enabling documents. Giving a driver’s license to an illegal alien is only giving away the “keys to the kingdom.” It enables an illegal alien to acquire apparent legal cover, which allows for many potential security breaches, such as access to our airlines and other fraudulent activity. This type of practice must stop.
• Improve our diplomatic and business relations with Mexico. People need the ability to earn a good living in their home country. The United States and Mexico must promote ventures within the business communities of each country in industries that can provide profound benefits to all of its citizens, such as energy and agriculture.

Taxation

As a State Senator I have spent 20 years proposing tax cuts and fighting tax increases, as well as signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). Also as a State Senator, I was a vocal supporter of the Republican Congress’s now forgotten “Contract with America,” which included cuts in taxes and government spending. I believe we need to:

• Make tax cuts permanent. To allow President Bush’s tax cuts to expire is the same as having a tax increase. In fact, it would be the largest tax increase in American history. We must keep as much money as possible in the “people’s pockets.”
• Adopt real tax reform. It is past time for a true overhaul of this country’s federal taxation system. The effects of the income tax on our economy, and the other burdensome costs such as accountants, legal advice, and time spent compiling and preparing tax reports for the IRS, cost this country billions of dollars every year. Solutions that replace the income tax with a national sales tax, based upon consumption, need to be examined and debated. I support the FairTax, which is a consumption-based sales tax centered upon fundamental economic principles found in the Constitution, ensures that everyone actually pays taxes, and provides a way to refund the tax paid on necessities to all Americans.  True tax reform will relieve the burden now shouldered by working families and unleash the power of our free market economy.
• Cut government spending. It doesn’t seem that Congress pays much attention to how much waste there is in the federal budget, but we know that the more the government spends, the more it must either tax our citizens or go further into debt. America’s debt level is one of the tragic ‘untold’ stories of our economic situation. We have $9 trillion in short-term debt, and $75 trillion in long-term liabilities. We currently pay $232 billion per year in interest alone on our debt.
• Provide regulatory relief. Eliminate unnecessary regulations and bureaucracies that impede economic growth and job creation. These “regulatory taxes” hurt small businesses exceptionally hard.
• Eliminate capital/job-destroying taxes and encourage savings. Taxes on interest and dividends – savings that have already been taxed – make no sense and are counter-productive. Capital gains taxes should be reduced further to decrease the economic-distorting and tax-avoidance mechanism of holding an asset merely to avoid large taxes on its disposition. Ceilings on retirement accounts, e.g., 401ks, should be raised substantially. And, we need to abolish the death tax, which gives the government a windfall of assets that have already been taxed and usually affect those in small businesses. We have become a debtor nation, and our policies must be changed to further encourage spending.

Energy

As a State Senator I have served on the National Energy Council, which through its state members and Congressional contacts helps formulate national energy policy. My experiences, both nationally and internationally, meeting with members of OPEC and visiting production facilities from Alaska to Venezuela, have enabled me to broaden my understanding of global energy concerns. I have also served on the National Council of State Government’s Solar Energy Institute. To get our country moving in the right direction, I believe that we should:

• Increase domestic production. The USA contains estimated oil reserves of several trillions of barrels of oil or oil-equivalent. We have proven coal reserves equivalent to 2-3 trillion barrels of oil. We must allow our country’s energy firms to explore for energy on federal lands and develop the resources discovered there. But this must only be achieved in an environmentally-friendly way to protect our lands, decrease our dependence on foreign oil, and have the states gain royalties to offset the increasing costs of government.
• Provide true incentives for renewable energy to decrease domestic demand for fossil fuels. The federal and state governments need to provide more individual incentives to encourage private citizens to use renewable energy options such as solar, thermal, and wind power. Our future needs include alternate ways to provide power, and as a national security issue, the federal government should substantially increase spending on research and development in areas that hold promise for diversifying our energy supplies and increasing energy efficiency.
• Expand energy infrastructure. We haven’t built a new oil refinery in 30 years or an LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) terminal in over 25 years – although several of the latter have been approved. The lack of refining capacity causes bottlenecks in the oil production and distribution process, leading to shortages at peak-demand times. We need more capacity to meet demand, and not continue to permit the supply and demand of the marketplace to work against the consumer.
• Promote nuclear technology. Nuclear energy is the cleanest fuel source and one of the cheapest over the long-term. I believe that we should seek to substantially increase our nuclear capacity. Over 75% of France’s electricity comes from nuclear sources. The United States has been limited to 20%, causing our electrical capacity to be stressed by increasing consumption, and consequently, the costs to individual consumers and businesses have increased substantially.

Healthcare

As a State Senator, I have proposed many different aspects of competitive healthcare reform, and opposed those “reforms” that were nothing more than disguised socialized healthcare. Though it is obvious that the costs of healthcare are skyrocketing, a large percentage of these expenses are due to increased bureaucracy in the healthcare industry caused by additional government regulation. Doctors and nurses are in critical demand. Health insurance is becoming unaffordable at a time when businesses are cutting back on healthcare coverage for their employees. My ideas to address this critical issue include the following:

• Encourage HSAs and provide healthcare incentives. All healthcare expenses should be tax deductible and the amounts individuals can contribute to Health/Medical Savings Accounts should be increased.
• Allow state innovation and deregulate health insurance markets. Encourage states to eliminate the bureaucratic insurance regulations that only serve to protect in-state firms and increase costs and keep providers out of the market. Insurance firms should be able to market their products nationally, thereby increasing competition and innovation.
• Advance prevention. Modern healthcare has evolved to be almost totally treatment-oriented. We need to provide incentives to the healthcare industry to study, teach, and practice preventative medicine.
• Adopt Medicare reform. Prices are rising at three times the rate of inflation, and private-sector solutions are needed to keep costs from spiraling further out of control, and to allow seniors to continue receiving first-rate treatment without the fear of losing access or benefits.
• Investigate waste. While bureaucracy, supply and demand, the shortage of medical personnel, and uncompensated care all contribute to the increasing final bill for healthcare, the federal government must remain diligent in its investigation of corruption, collusion, and greed in the healthcare system.
• Implement FDA and drug patent reform. The Food and Drug Administration takes much too long to approve new drugs, resulting in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths per year. Our drug companies spend tens of billions of dollars each year researching new drugs. They receive a patent at the beginning of this process, but routinely don’t get FDA approval until about a decade later. Instead, the start of the patent period should not occur until the drug has been approved. Firms shouldn’t be punished because the FDA bureaucracy takes a decade to approve a drug.