18th District Candidates: Priorities

Our question: What specific issues would be a high priority for you if you were elected to Congress?

Aaron Shock: I serve on the Ways and Means committee, which deals with tax reform. So, taxes, simplifying our tax code. We have a 70-thousand page tax code right now and we've been spending the last year focusing on fixing that. Democrats and Republicans agree that we should simplify our tax code. Having the highest corporate tax rate in the world is not something we should be proud of. And so Democrats and Republicans have come together and come up with a solution to lower the top tax rate to 25-percent and really simplify our tax code. Beyond that, we have to deal with our debt. We can't continue to borrow money the way we are and so I would say continuing to reduce our spending. A part of that is entitlement reform. You can't really fix the debt if you don't fix social security and medicare. So I would say those entitlement reforms along with tax reform would be my major focus in the new term.

Steve Waterworth: I'd say the highest part is the foreign trade deficit. That's wealth and jobs that are leaving America at approximately 2-billion dollars a day. That hurts our state, that hurts our local economy and certainly it hurts our national economy. We've just gotta do something about this. We've gotta bring these jobs back to America, for Americans. It's not sustainable. Over the short time, it was probably okay. But we've reached a point where we just have to do something about it.