Rafael Wolf

I have written an extensive essay on this matter here: https://vote3p.com/the-straight-dope-on-abortion - In short, we must examine the 14th amendment as it has something to say about the rights of born, and consequently not-born, children: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Legally, according to the 14th amendment, an unborn child within the womb has no legal rights as a US citizen, and no legal rights in its home state. Therefore, simply, and at face value, the state, whether an actual state or under the jurisdiction of the federal government, has absolutely no right to determine what a person can or cannot do with a pregnancy, regardless of belief if the fetus or baby is considered a separate “life.” Unborn children within the United States have no legal protections as citizens on US soil, because, as one can clearly read above, an unborn child does not attain the rights of a US citizen until it is born. Under the first amendment, however, which protects the freedom of speech, you can talk about it, protest it, burn copies of it all you like, but it doesn’t make a difference! The cold, hard truth of the matter, is that the abortion issue, according to the 14th amendment, really isn’t an issue at all. The government should neither make abortion legal nor illegal and should be a personal decision for every family to work through with the assistance of medical professionals. This issue has been used as a culture war wedge issue to divide the country and quite frankly, we have bigger problems to solve than this. We should let individuals solve their own problems concerning this matter.

Strongly Disagree

https://opa.hhs.gov/grant-programs/title-x-service-grants/about-title-x-service-grants: "For more than 50 years, Title X family planning clinics have played a critical role in ensuring access to a broad range of family planning and related preventive health services for millions of low-income or uninsured individuals and others. Title X is the only federal grant program dedicated solely to providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and related preventive health services."

Strongly Agree

If you disagree with things like "death with dignity" or "aid in dying" then I'm certain, if you find yourself in that situation at the end of your life, you will wish you had supported it. I believe we should let individuals choose. The simple definition is "An easy or painless death, or the intentional ending of the life of a person suffering from an incurable or painful disease at his or her request. Also called mercy killing." - it is humane and moral. In find "euthanasia" to be misleading.

I have written an essay on this: https://vote3p.com/the-straight-dope-on-taxes - taxes are complicated and do not only include "income tax" but this is likely what you thought of when seeing this question. The fact is, annual tax revenue is 4 trillion per year, average spending is 7 trillion and the country or state you live in deficit spends. The goal of taxation then is to burden the public with bond holder obligations at an interest rate transferring wealth from the bottom to the top while properly redistributing it. In the future, perhaps now, you will always get more taxation from the establishment duopoly and less services from your government. Taxation is part of a neo-feudalistic world in which half or more of the country toils in the field known as "the economy". You pay taxes and die (Benjamin Franklin). I think the first thing to tackle are massive inefficiencies in how government is run, what the role of government is and how we fund it as laid out in my essay. Citizens at all levels pay far too much in taxes. It is not a matter of whether we should or should not pay taxes, it is a matter of how those dollars are allocated to the things that are most important or efficient. For example, medicare and medicaid are spent in one of the most expensive and inefficient systems in America, the healthcare industry. That means you are paying even more and propping up this inefficient system. To fix the spending in those two government programs you need to fix the health care efficiency and price problem. It can be done, but it is complicated and "the system" would feel pain. Health care is 20% of GDP so anything you do to make it "more efficient and cheaper" will have an effect on GDP which can be viewed as negative even if care is better or we have better outcomes in a more efficient system. You will not get talking points from establishment duopoly candidates like this. For them, status quo is how business gets done.

At the state level, in Michigan, the police (state, and local), the prison industrial complex and the courts take up about 1/3rd of the budget. There is much to be had here again, to make the way this works for the citizens, efficient and optimized. These systems do not work, they are expensive and inefficient and often not just or serving justice. Not only are they costly but they are oppressive in many ways. I touch on this point in the taxation essay but I may release something in the future on this matter. It is an important one to touch on. The state is about 60 billion in debt to bond holders taking the financial capacity of the state away and making the state vulnerable in an economic downturn. Federally, the military is the #1 expense and can be cut significantly, perhaps more than 50%. The military is, as noted in my Ukraine essay (https://vote3p.com/the-straight-complicated-dope-on-ukraine) and noted by many authors, is not a mechanism of the U.S. to "defend" the United States but rather, to protect their markets and economic interests around the world. In lock step with the State Department and the CIA, these are globally oppressive pieces to American Imperialism that do more harm than good. They need to be defunded significantly. The whole "balance the budget" is a bit of a myth when you look at how the dollar is used globally, not just domestically. The US Dollar is the "worlds reserve currency", it is now used as a sanctions weapon and there's a reason why the US runs trade deficits or does things like "send aid" in the form of money to other countries, among other "tools" it uses with respect to the dollar. The dollar is financial liquidity in foreign markets and when you look at the economics of U.S. debt and something called "the EuroDollar" you care less about balanced budgets because providing liquidity, allowing countries to use your currency for commodity trading gives your country's dollar a "special status". Sure, 30 trillion dollars in "debt", that is a big deal but the U.S. could pay this debt down except, it does not want to. It should but it would rather inflate the debt away or debase the currency. These matters are not easy to understand, discuss or problem solve. The budget is NOT in any way shape or form the same thing as your household budget, that is something called "reductionist thinking". You can learn much of this information that I am discussing here: https://www.eurodollar.university - "Jeff Snider & Emil Kalinowski guide you through the realm of monetary science." Yes...science. They talk about many of the myths in our understanding of economics from a certain perspective of contrarianism. Your problem as a voter is that, your government spends money but they do not spend money on the services you expect. They do not serve the people, they serve the business elites. I discuss much of this at my website and I do not have enough room here, unfortunately. Please visit https://vote3p.com/issues to see a list of issues including economic issues.

Neutral

I am neutral on this issue. College is not for everyone and the k-12 education system is "broken" for the most part. I have written an essay on this matter also. https://vote3p.com/the-straight-dope-on-education - here, you learn about the history of education in the U.S. and how it has evolved. Students do not all learn the same way and I think we need a dynamic education system in the state and the U.S. that are all well funded.

Neutral

If you are in the public market place where anyone in the public are welcomed as patrons, I don't know why you wouldn't want to serve those customers regardless of your religious beliefs. It seems absurd to me anyone would, for example, not want to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Baking a cake for a gay couple who can legally marry is not a biblical sin or immoral. This question is part of the divisive culture war.

I do not think churches should have any special status in the U.S. They in fact should not be tax exempt either and should be treated equally like any other business. That is what churches are and what religion is, a business. Some argue that "the separation of church and state" are what makes churches tax exempt but I disagree with that assumption. I think the government could close a church for any number of reasons, including structural building problems that may endanger the people who attend the church services. Perhaps this question is about the COVID lock downs and in that case, churches were treated like any other business at the time.

None of these options, A, B, C or D match my view exactly. Healthcare is so inn inefficient and expensive there is almost no solution. It is 20% of our GDP and a massive liability costing at least twice as much as any other developed country. The entire thing needs to be undone but nobody is sure how to do it. There are so many problems unrelated to health care but tied into it like, obesity rates in the U.S. where 36% of the country is considered obese thus putting extra pressure onto the health care industry. We can pay for health care if we cut the military industrial complex but even then, you still have catastrophic obesity rates. You also have a "marketplace" full of regional monopolies who have no competition to incentivize them to provide better care at cheaper prices. I see this problem as being a multi-tiered issue with a culture of unhealthy lifestyles at the bottom that trickle upward into a part of the economy, healthcare, that is not a "free market" with competition. I also see government regulation putting pressure on prices. Healthcare costs rarely, if ever, go down, they only go up. To solve this problem we need to promote or incentivize healthier living, allow for a market to work, potentially breaking up regional health care monopolies, and possibly get the insurance middle man out. There is a current need for medicare and medicaid. You can not get rid of that at the moment but as the system would evolve in positive directions, unwinding things like regional monopolies, allowing for competitive markets, perhaps the cost of health care would come down for a change. You also have drug costs in the mix. Again, pharmaceutical monopoly protected by patents and copyright pushing prices higher claiming it costs a lot to research when the majority of their profits are spent on marketing and not research. These are the complexities we have to unwind and untangle. There is no easy answer here, no A, B, C or D answer.

Public health is a complicated matter. I suppose there is no circumstance they should mandate a vaccination however, they could mandate, for you to physically attend an institution, that you have all your vaccinations and proper proof of such. Otherwise, you can attend but attend in only remote forms. Public health is a complicated matter and if more of the population wants to go vaccinated, then that puts the burden on the CDC and local health systems to monitor for diseases that could break out among the vaccinated population. So, there is a role for the CDC and public health offices or institutions to ramp up disease outbreak monitoring and responses. I think vaccines are fairly cut and dry, they are a good thing and not a bad thing.

Much of Islamic terrorism is a result of oppressive US foreign policy on the Islamic world and the fact that the U.S. supports Israel and occupies large portions of the middle east thus, making the U.S. an enemy of the Islamic world. Why do you think Islamic terrorism exists? Because of American Imperialism. This is pretty cut and dry. The propaganda from the military industrial complex is that Islamic terrorists hate America because of freedom, we are rich or because they hate Christian nations but none of that is true if you know your history. The U.S. needs to get rid of 750 military bases around the world and stop oppressive behaviors both using financial sanctions and using U.S. military might to occupy foreign lands.

Neutral

This is a complicated matter but Israel is an independent country. Israel has been used by the U.S. to muck around in the middle east for generations in all kinds of ways even as a weapons and war proxy. Israel should stand on its own two feet and the U.S. should pull all material support of their country dealing with them like any other trading partner.

Neutral

"Physically secure" in this question seems to be begging me to answer a "wall" issue. The border is not secure and no wall will make it that way. This is another complicated issue. The root cause here is that the U.S. economically oppresses the global south keeping countries poor so they can be used as plantations for the U.S. Why do you think you can buy a $2 pineapple in the middle of winter in Michigan? We could use other tech besides a wall to secure the border.

Anyone who applies should be allowed to immigrate as long as they can be productive members of society. Most of the U.S. does not even realize how bad immigration policy is. For example, if an H1B Visa people are abused by their employers with lower pay, they pay higher taxes (6% more on their income) and they can not own a business in the U.S. H1B Visa's are there for corporations to further abuse foreign labor at home. These are just a few things of note. Immigration is good not bad but it is somewhat used as another culture war issue. The most entrepreneurial people I know are all immigrants!

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