Less than a week from now Goochland citizens will have the chance to cast their vote for their favored Congressional candidate.

Who will 7th District voters choose to serve us in the next House of Representatives?

To help you make an informed decision, The Goochland Gazette asked the three candidates to answer five questions; here are their unedited answers.

What do you believe are the most important issues facing voters in the 7th District?

Boosting the economy and getting folks back to work is the most important issue facing our district. We must ask ourselves why it is so hard to make an entrenched party leader in Congress, like Eric Cantor, stand up, take notice, and do something about our district’s problems. We can’t put our country back on track unless we reform the campaign finance laws to stop multinational corporations from installing prepaid politicians. Our current system makes candidates choose between taking money from special interests, lobbyists, and corporate PACs and having it spent against them on behalf of other D.C. politicians. Since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, outside groups have made unlimited contributions with little disclosure of the sources of their funds. We need real representation in order to fix our problems and work together toward our shared goal across our district. That is why we must have campaign finance reform, and why I am running for Congress.

What is the single most effective way to encourage the creation of jobs to reduce unemployment?

Voters are angry about the state of the country. I am too. With unemployment above 9% as a result of the recession, folks in all sectors of the economy have lost their jobs or seen their wages cut. Since the beginning of the Bush Administration, we have also seen our national debt increase at an uncomfortable clip. My economic plan includes policies that will create economic growth, reduce unemployment, maintain a stable national debt, encourage small business investment, and upgrade the skills of our children and workers through a combination of tax incentives and direct investment. We must invest in infrastructure to create jobs now and employment gains for years to come. I don’t mean just roads and bridges, though those should continue to get attention. We need to invest in the infrastructure that develops and supports intellectual and human resources including education, small businesses, and clean energy innovation.

What should be done to reduce the federal deficit - more taxation, reduction in federal programs or a combination of both? If taxes, which should be increased; if reductions in federal programs, which ones?

We face a serious dilemma brought about by the reckless regulatory, fiscal, and foreign policies pursued by George W. Bush and supported by Cantor.  With Cantor’s help, Bush spent trillions on wars overseas while botching their planning, and then created a gaping wound in the government’s balance sheet of trillions more by cutting taxes on the CEOs and Wall Street while they were turning America’s economy into a casino.  It was heads you lose, tails we win, at least for the country’s wealthiest and least responsible citizens. We need a structurally balanced federal budget. This means that we should be running deficits in hard times, but we should be running surpluses when the economy is booming.  We should keep a wide range of options on the table, but we must restore the budget to a state of structural balance while maintaining fairness and progressivity in the tax code. This is the lens through which we should view the federal budget deficits.  We need to restore structural balance rather than dogmatically attacking spending or taxes regardless of current macroeconomic conditions.

Do you favor extending the Bush tax cuts which are set to expire at the end of this year? If so, should these cuts be for all taxpayers or just for those earning less than $250,000?

It is a travesty that Eric Cantor and his GOP buddies—the same people who happily added trillions to the deficit by cutting taxes to benefit Wall Street and want to do it again—think we can’t afford to pay what is in relative terms a pittance for the sake of helping the hard-working middle class Americans.  This is a test of basic morality, and Cantor has failed. Doing so would add trillions to the debt.  And lest anyone be fooled by the argument that raising taxes on the richest Americans will hurt U.S. economic growth, recall that vastly fewer jobs were created during the Bush Administration after the so-called “pro-growth” tax cuts on the richest Americans in comparison to the Clinton Administration. We need a structurally balanced federal budget. This means that we should be running deficits in hard times and running surpluses when the economy is booming. We must restore the budget to a state of structural balance while maintaining fairness and progressivity in the tax code.

What is your position on the recently enacted health care bill?

The recent fight over Healthcare Reform clearly shows the choice we face in November. I would have voted for the current law: it is by no means perfect, but it is a start. If I could have started from scratch, I would have pushed Congress to consider the single payer models. This may be a political and structural challenge that we cannot overcome in the short term, but true universal coverage should be our lodestar. We need to control costs, and as your Representative I am going to work to bring then down, while Cantor is offering to get rid of it entirely. Do we want Cantor to let the insurance companies kick folks out of plans because they have a pre-existing condition? Do we want Cantor to once again stop kids 23-26 from staying on their parents’ plan, just before they start their careers coming out of college? Do we want Cantor to allow insurance companies to hike up their premiums without providing justification? Let’s get real.