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LWV League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
Santa Clara County, CA June 5, 2012 Election
Smart Voter

Jay Blas Jacob Cabrera
Answers Questions

Candidate for
United States Representative; District 19

 
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The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund and asked of all candidates for this office.
Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

Questions & Answers

1. In this time of high unemployment, what are the most important steps that should be taken to improve our nation’s economy?

Step 1) Re-Instate Glass-Steagall to regulate activity of traditional Bank involvement in gambling on Wall Street.

Step 2) Only give 0% interest loans from the Federal Reserve to Banks that are ONLY allowed to directly loan to money for actual loans to corporations, small business and individuals. This will finely alleviate the credit crunch and NO BANK SHOULD GET 0% INTEREST LOANS TO GAMBLE AWAY ON WALL STREET!

Step 3) Massive paid training programs for business expansion with huge tax incentives for companies that hire employees. This can be done in conjunction with one time tax breaks from bringing money from off shore corporate bank accounts. This in turn will create millions of jobs.

2. How should the federal budget deficit be addressed, now and into the future? How should budget priorities for defense and domestic programs be adjusted?

Short Term: Continue with high deficit spending to get us out of the Great Recession. Pass laws requiring that during good times taxes are spent on paying down the debts and liabilities of the US Government.

Long Term: Incorporate the FED into the United States Government. Limit all low % rate loans from the FED to Banks to only be used for loans to individuals and businesses. All loans from the FED that are used on anything else besides direct loans to individuals and businesses should have a minimum of 4% interest.

Defense and Domestic Budgeting:

Integrate Participatory Budgeting into the US Federal Budget Decision Making Process so that everyone has the chance to participate in creating budget priorities, not just lobbyists and representatives.

Create Peoples Grassroots Community Budget Review Boards where each Review Board will directly audit a 5 million dollar chunk of the Federal Budget, and create as many Review Boards it takes to Audit the entire Federal Budget starting with Defense spending and Domestic Programs.

Decrease Global International Imperialist spending and pay full or increased UN and NATO collaborative Security and Defense Organizing.

Increase our domestic spending especially on Education for everyone, including adult education programs. Focus on Jobs and Economic spending to stabilize and build active security systems for jobs and our local economies.

3. What are your priorities with respect to our nation’s energy policy? Should there be an emphasis on clean energy and reducing carbon emissions, and/or on reducing our dependence on foreign sources?

YES we must ground our energy future in clean sustainable energy systems. For me sustainability is diversity in the same way that Nature builds stability through replication and diversified organisms. Our energy policies must include use and long term strategic implementation of all energy sources from renewable to fossil fuels. We must focus incentives and innovation in short term transitory sources, and long term renewable sources that can create low cost abundant distributed access to energy as a foundation to our civilized human evolution. This could include geothermal, solar, wind, and water.

We must directly reduce our carbon emissions as well as all other pollution sources by database and registering all sources of pollution including individual small scale sources. We need to know exactly how much and of what is being polluted, and then we need to charge clean up feels on an individual level to address the real cost of pollution.

To reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy our priority should be to subsidize and give incentives for renewable sources of energy including solar, wind, and water. We will still need to diversify our energy sources including nuclear power in limited and controlled ways. This would include decommissioning all old nuclear systems any only allowing the most state of the art systems with no grandfathered plants. We can also explore national fossil fuel supplies, but those will not do a huge amount to decreasing our foreign dependency on energy in the long term.

4. What, if any, changes should be made to federal health care policies or programs?

Single Payer National Health Care Program.

5. What, if any, changes should be made to federal rules on campaign financing?

Publicly Financed Elections.

No Corporate $ in elections for the people's representatives.

No use of personal fortunes in candidate campaigns.

Free and equal access to media through long term public air wave contracts.

Equality in elections regardless of money or political affiliation.


Responses to questions asked of each candidate are reproduced as submitted to the League.  Candidates' statements are presented as submitted. References to opponents are not permitted.

Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

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Created from information supplied by the candidate: May 7, 2012 18:22
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