The Economy
The free market has an unmatched ability to create, innovate,and spread well-being in ever-widening circles. I don’t want it shackled by government and I don’t want it shackled by those who want it to work only for the few. Corruption means making something impure, and impurities injected by the government or by a few insiders who want the economy to only work for those few has the impact of denying the rest of us the wonders that we, as workers, farmers, and ranchers, spend most of our lives helping to create.
We can end impediments to creating abundance, wherever theyoriginate, and extend the benefits of our incredible free market system to everyone who has helped it come to be.
Rare Earth Mining
A “rare earth rush” far more vital than the gold rush is at hand.The largest deposits of lithium are thought to be in Malheur County in the Second Congressional District of Oregon. Gallium of a higher grade than anywhere else in the world has been found in southern Jackson and Josephine County. Alluvial Deposits east of the Cascades from K Falls to Bend are promising locations for exploration for a wide range of rare earth deposits.
We need to be on top of it, to make sure it’s done right, to make sure it means employment and wealth for the surrounding region, including giving locals a fair chance at an ownership stake even for those who are typically excluded.
Affordability
We, the people, can restore affordability.
We lack power as individuals to make it happen, but united and working through our elected representatives, we can end impediments to building more affordable housing and tackle affordability at its source. We can end profiteering in necessities such as food, medicine, insurance, and housing. We can improve the supply chain and lower energy prices, creating abundance in foods and other products so that prices naturally come down.
But first, out an end to the dumb tariffs that put a tax on the fruits and vegetables our neighbors to the south grow for us, a tax on lumber, petroleum, medicines, wine and cheese, and thousands of other products made for us in Canada, Europe,Africa, and Asia.
Tariffs
There are smart tariffs and dumb ones. Smart tariffs require study, analysis, and a consistent, measured, targeted applicationfollowed by careful assessment to see if they need modification. What we have now is mostly dumb tariffs that hurt the people of CD2, in particular the farmers and ranchers and anyone who buys groceries, appliances, or any other product impacted by these dumb tariffs. It’s a tax and a particularly dumb one. It rarely punishes other countries directly but directly and egregiously punishes all Americans, particular the people of Southern and Eastern Oregon.
We need to restore the proper role and proper method of debating and deciding on tariffs, just as we do with any form of taxation. Only Congress and the people’s representative who face the voters every day have the power to take our money from us and give money to us. We must restore that sensible, tried-and-true system, starting with ending the dumb tariffs.
Corruption
We all suffer when there is corruption.
When those in a position of trust are indebted to a foreign power, they are highly likely to put the interests of the foreignpowers above ours. That’s why impeachment in the Constitution lists bribery alongside treason. Corruption anywhere undermines meritocracy which means we don’t get the best people, products, or outcomes. We need to overturn Citizen’s United, protect the independence of the Federal Reserve, diminish the evident partisanship that erodes faith in the Supreme Court, and restore the independence of the Department of Justice so that it is not an instrument of political retribution by either a Democratic or a Republican administration. We need to ensure that the playing field is level and that average folks have as strong a bargaining position in the daily negotiations of life as do those with more money, power, or station.
Corruption means introducing impurities. Everything works worse when impurities are introduced, whatever the source. We need to know that our officials are acting in our interests and only in our interests. That is what I will do as your representative and I’ll enforce the same standard wherever it needs to be, has been, and will be again.
Immigration
Let’s get emotion out of this discussion. The US population is aging. Social Security, Medicare, and the effective functioning of our economy need an injection of younger people. Until recently, that came from immigration. The recent crackdownuses massive valuable resources to make our average population older, to jeopardize the future of Social Security and Medicare.It makes no sense to spend so much of our national treasure on approaches that worsen our lives.
It’s also true that not all immigration is beneficial. We need to find the “sweet spot” where it creates benefits and not burdens.
There may be better ideas than I can propose to accomplish this. I suggest an independent Board of Immigration modeled on the Federal Reserve that can assess the impacts in each of 12 regions so that all of society can benefit from an appropriate level of immigration. Preference should be given to the millions of long-settled, law-abiding undocumented immigrants who can be provided a conditional path to legal status, while employers who exploit unauthorized labor and gain an unfair competitive advantage over ethical employers are prevented from continuing to do so and required to make amends for the wrongs they’ve perpetrated.
Innovation
We can’t solve our problems if we limit ourselves to the solutions that’ve already been tried. Any regulation or barriers to innovation that aren’t needed to protect health and safety shouldbe eliminated.
Problems that seem intractable can be surmounted through radical innovation.
Water Rights
Water rights are a life and death issue in much of CD2. Scarcitythreatens the livelihood and blunts the profitability of famers, ranchers, and manufacturers and limits the home building that can make housing more affordable.
The truth is there is no shortage of water. There is roughly the same amount of water on the planet as there’s been for millennia. The problem is that it’s not evenly distributed and not all usable. The solution is better distribution and water reclamation but that requires effort, organization, and (most of all) electricity to power those solutions.
Instead of continuing the fights predicated on scarcity, we need to engineer abundance. Congress can create and fund expanded power generation from ocean waves off the Oregon Coast, lighter and more efficient and affordable solar panels and wind generation technology that can power water reclamation and distribution. Americans and Oregonians are problem-solvers,and the solutions are well within our reach. I want to go to Congress to help make that happen.
Crime and Public Safety
Public safety is a civil right. I support evidence-based policing, accountability for misconduct, and adequate staffing to protect communities from violent crime.
We also have to address homelessness and the related mental health crisis that is impacting so many of our young people and veterans. Mental health teams can coordinate with police so that those who need services and not prison are respectfully treated and the entire community protected from harm. Innovative solutions that can help accomplish these goals are happening all over the country, such as supported clusters of tiny homes for the homeless. When those solutions work, they need to be adopted and adapted wherever they’re needed.
Foreign Policy
Russia’s attacks on Ukraine must end. We have as great an obligation to the well-being and security of Gaza residents as we do to Israel. We are stronger and safer when we are admired as a nation, when we support the aspirations of all peoples for democracy and liberty, and when we justify the faith and trust of our many alliances throughout the world, especially NATO. This isn’t being virtuous, it’s being smart. We double, triple, and quadruple our strength by bonding it to the efforts of other nations.
We must collaborate with our allies to restore the generosity we stupidly cut off without warning by shutting down USAID, which is predicted (in a recent peer-reviewed study published in the medical journal Lancet) to result in 9.4 million deaths by the end of the decade, a tragedy we helped create and which none of us want to see happen.
Fiscal Responsibility
Our current fiscal course is unsustainable and, if left uncorrected, will lead to long-term erosion in our standard of living. Interest payments on the federal debt will soon be the largest single item in the federal budget, squeezing vital services and public investments. Before anything else, we must secure the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, whose trust funds are projected to be exhausted by 2032. We need to enhance productivity and find other ways to increase funds available for the public along with making more rational spending decisions so that we can get this out-of-control freight train of a federal budget in hand.
What to do About D.E.I.? What to do About “Cancel Culture”?
Enough! I, like many Americans, am exhausted. There are only two standards most of us think appropriate: did we treat others as we would want to be treated and did our actions hurt anyone in a way that could or should have been avoided. Diversity is simply a biproduct of doing the right thing. That’s why America is the most diverse country in the world – and the best.
Sex and Gender
We can take into account biological sex at birth and still protect the basic rights of Transgender Americans in employment, education, housing, and public life so that their expression of who they are is given the respect it deserves. Where physical differences materially affect fairness, safety, or privacy such as competitive sports, the administering organization should be allowed to consider biological sex at birth when determining eligibility.
AI
Congress has done nothing to address the looming changes from widespread application of Artificial Intelligence in customer service, creative endeavors, and tens of thousands of entry-level jobs that will no longer be available. We can’t stop the future from coming but we can be creative and proactive so that it benefits us all. There are innovative ideas such as John Maynard Keynes prediction of 40-hour workweeks being shared by two or three 20-hour or 15-hour-a-week workers. Income has to be the same or better despite fewer hours. One possible way to achieve that is UBC (Universal Basic Capital) whereby every qualified citizen owns part of the AI economy through national investment accounts or public wealth funds that hold shares in AI companies, platforms, and infrastructure. Prototypes are already being tried in Germany and Australia, but we in America are the cutting edge of AI. We can create UBC or another similar project that every other country will want to imitate.
Funding the Arts
As a final point, if AI replaces repetitive jobs like coding, we need more opportunities to do what humans do best – be creative. The Arts enrich us all and we need to find ways to fund them far more broadly than we do now. Enhanced tax deductions for aid to arts organizations or other free enterprise ways to make more Arts more available as a way to make a living can be a broadly beneficial response to AI.
Peter Quince for Congress 