Pulse On Policy: Texas 21 Congressional Forum With Video

On Wednesday, May 2, the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Austin Chamber Commerce to host and sponsor a forum for the Texas 21 Congressional runoff candidates…

On Wednesday, May 2, the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Austin Chamber Commerce to host and sponsor a forum for the Texas 21 Congressional runoff candidates.

The four candidates hope to replace Congressman Lamar Smith. Smith was first elected to Congress in 1986. He announced his retirement from Congress in November 2017.

He currently serves as Chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee and continues to serve on both the Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security Committee. He is the former Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Ethics committee.

Democratic candidates Mary Wilson and Joseph Krosper, as well as Republican Candidates Matt McCall and Chip Roy, attended the event to discuss issues from the recent Tax Reform bill to immigration and education.

The date for the primary runoff election is May 22; Early voting begins Monday, May 14, and ends Friday, May 18.

• QUESTION 6:  It’s currently at $21 trillion and as we’ve mentioned earlier, the new tax bill is estimated to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade.
  
  How serious is the threat, is the national debt to the U.S. economy and if elected how would you work to reign it in and accomplish that?

MATT MCCALL (R): I think the national debt is the number one threat to American national security and to the nation.

And if interest rates go back to be normal, five to six percent; folks, we’re sunk. It’s exploding.

We must cut the size of government, and we must work on our entitlement problem. It’s out of control, and it hasn’t yet been, exploded the way it is about to with the baby boomers retiring. And Medicare costs.

And with all the transfer payments. And social security is said to be $17 to $44 trillion underfunded on the infinite price, and it’s much worse for Medicare.

When this whole system was set up, we were supposed to…we had a life expectancy of 60. When you get a check, it’s 65.

And so we have to work on these issues ’cause it’s gonna crush our children and our grandchildren. And that’s why I’m running and that’s why I’ve run twice before. I ran against Lamar Smith, and it was time for the next generation to get into the fight.

And I want to go and fight and work on these issues and go home. But the national debt isn’t something that we can just ignore because today the economy’s doing well.

This can’s been kicked down the road so long, and now we’ve gone from $2.2 trillion in debt thirty years ago to $21 trillion, and we are looking at trillion dollar deficits in more, as far as the eye can see.

If we don’t cuts, then grow the economy. So it is the number one threat to us. We don’t have to end up like Venezuela or Greece.

But history teaches very strong lessons that if you continue this, you do end up like that. And we are America. We’re the greatest country on God’s green earth, and we right our wrongs.

And we have to fix these things. Thank you so much.

JOSEPH KOPSER (D): Yes, the debt is a very serious problem. We need to take it very seriously, but I am trying to make the point this morning that the best way to go about that is to make sure that representing you in Washington D.C. is someone who actually understands the fixes and has done it.

So for instance, one of the very first things we have to do is make sure that we continue to grow the economy in order to have the resources to pay off this debt that’s just been increased by $1.5 trillion.

One way to do that is to create jobs. And you need to ask who has the experience actually building a company, and creating jobs.

Secondly, we have to reduce the spending of government. One of the ways is to reduce the amount of inefficient spending. One of the biggest forces is the Department of Defense.

I have created, after seeing 20 years in the army, of the opportunity for improving our systems, I’ve created a non-profit called the National Security Technology Accelerator.

It’s in it’s fifth year now, and what it seeks to do is to find innovators, who have new ways, new business models and new technologies to reduce the cost that the Department of Defense spends while not sacrificing one minute of our security.

Thirdly, it’s about taking Americans and plugging them into the economy to make sure they are contributing in jobs. One of the greatest natural resources we have among people are our military veterans who are leaving the service.

We trained leaders and organizers, and now we have a chance to plug them into the economy. Both in Austin and San Antonio, I am proud to have co-founded an organization called The Bunker. That takes veterans who want to start companies, who don’t want handouts, who don’t want a help-up. They want you to give them the tools and understanding of the business community, and then just get the hell out of the way and watch what they can do like so many of us have done.

That is how you get this debt back in control, through innovation, through creating jobs and creating workers of the 21st century.

I’ve done all three in my career, and I want to make sure that in Washington we’d create laws and legislation that facilitate that and make it easier for more Texans to take part in this economy.

CHIP ROY (R): Well, we talked about job creation. I think it would be great if Joseph keeps creating jobs in the private sector, because the federal government doesn’t create jobs.

The federal government needs to get out of the way so that the American people and the American entrepreneur and the businesses and the American communities can create jobs.

That’s what we need to do in order to grow the economy, create the kind of growth that we need to do to grow out of our debt.

The level of debt we have today we’ve only had one time before relative to the size of our economy and that was 1946. After World War II when the one time expense to save the world from fascism and evil.

Today we have that debt because we allow the social welfare state created in 1965 in a sense, to outpace our ability to pay for it. We’ve got to get back on top of that and return the decision-making to the American people.

Return the ability to the American people to take control of their lives through states and local government activity as opposed to the federal government and to get the federal government out of the way.

If we want to unite this country, we can unite ourselves around the idea that we can agree to disagree and let Texas be Texas and let California be California.

Making sure that we leave decision-making to the local governments and to Texas. And if we do that, we can get back to a united front as the United States of America and grow this economy. Get ourselves out of the debt that we’re in but respectfully, nothing that I’ve heard would actually reduce spending.

If you want to get focused on reduced spending, then the five year balance budget that was set up by the president last year that was laughed out of the halls of Congress, needs to be supported.

Get back to the point. We can balance our budget in five years if we want to, you just have to have the willpower to do it, and it takes serious proposals to do that.

By the way that proposal didn’t touch entitlements, even though entitlements need to obviously be dealt with, given the extent to which their $70 to $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities behind our entitlement.

Responsible leadership will go and look at the problem immediately in Washington and stop the talking points out of D.C. saying they’re gonna give show votes for balanced budget amendments instead of actually doing their job and use debt-ceiling votes. And to do what they need to do to balance the budget and pacify your balanced budget and that’s what I’ll do if I’m representing the 21st Congressional district in Washington.

MARY WILSON (D): So one way to eliminate this $1.5 trillion debt is to simply undue this tax bill that caused it in the first place. I mean, ’cause it’s a corporate cash giveaway and the corporations are being able to runoff with money that is causing my children, my grandchildren in the future to have to pay for their wealth.

And I think that we simply undue the tax bill, and that would be a great start to reducing that debt.

Secondly, where do jobs start? They start with people getting a quality education and that’s what I’ve been doing. I spent 20 years in the classroom, so I know that in order to get people into jobs, they have to have some training.

And if we were going to continue to gut our public school systems and so that those who are on the lowest economic ladder, lowest rung of the economic ladder, are no longer going to have a quality education, then they are not going to be able to enter our workforce and be part of our economic society.

So, where do we start? We start with education. We start with funding our public schools; we start with paying our teachers, and I would argue that our teachers across the country are showing that education is a civil rights movement of our moment.

Making not our entire time, but at the moment ’cause teachers are striking all over the place, and they’re saying enough is enough. One, we need to be paid, but even more than that our students deserve good facilities; they deserve good textbooks and they deserve good supplies.

When teachers can no longer deduct the supplies that they have put into their classrooms from their taxes, then we are missing…we are missing the point and we are missing where we are going to begin to drive our economy.

And we’re going to begin to drive our economy is with our education system. Having spent the bulk of my career teaching mathematics at Austin Community College, I know that our community colleges are gems of the system.

And that they can partner with their local communities, which the thing to do is to provide jobs. And if we don’t fund our public education systems, then we are not gonna have any workers skilled enough to enter into the economy.

It starts with education and then for the debt, undue the tax bill ’cause that’s what preempted it in the first place.