Healthcare:
Barr voted many times to get rid of protection for Pre-Existing Conditions. I will work to expand healthcare and make it truly affordable . The answer is not Medicare For All. We need a Public/Private Partnership. We must protect rural hospitals and clinics. Healthcare is a right and should not depend on your zip code
Social Security:
A Social Security Check is a Promise. It’s not an entitlement, we pay into it. Raise salary cap and add non-wage funding sources that don’t add to our out of control deficit.
Veterans:
We need to protect and care for our veterans. Twenty veterans commit suicide a day. Hundreds of others go without much needed healthcare, especially mental health care. We must do better than this. Our veterans risked their lives to protect us and this is how they are being repaid. We must put an end to the VA’s horrible policies and lack of care.
Budget and Economy:
We must balance our country’s budget. Our Deficit in 2019 was almost one trillion dollars. We need to grow our economy and lower the deficit. We do this by taxing the corporations who get millions in tax cuts a year. They get more tax breaks than the average American. The middle class should be paying less taxes than these multi-million dollar companies. We need massive tax reform. We need to make the temporary individual tax cuts permanent and prioritize Small Businesses Corporate Tax Cuts. We need to roll back the permanent large corporation tax cuts that they used to buy their own stocks back to heighten management compensation. Andy Barr said the huge tax cut would pay for itself with capital investment, building new factories, increasing workers pay and benefits. On the whole that did not happen. Some companies, AT&T for example, took their giant tax cuts while also firing thousands of workers. This corporate tax cut has added from one and one-half to two trillion dollars to our National Debt. We should be working to decrease the National Debt not increasing it.
Education:
Our country cannot continue to lag in the world competition, particularly in Math and Science. Our federal government role must encourage that. We need to continue to fund public education and actually pay our teachers what they are worth. We need to reduce student debt and promote higher education. Students are coming out of college with several thousands of dollars of debt, which they expected to then repay within a short amount of time. Getting your degree should not put you in a lifetime of debt.
Criminal Justice Reform and Drug Policy Reform:
Our country wastes huge amounts of money on imprisoning a huge human resource, especially when we are crying for workers. This is closely tied to much needed drug policy reform. We need to work with addicts to prevent them from reentering the prison system by expanding drug courts and proving needed resources. We need to take on the Opioid Crisis head on and help the people who are addicted rather than throwing them in jail and hoping for the best.