League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
	Santa Clara County, CA June 5, 2012 Election
	Candidates Answer Questions on the Issues United States Representative; District 19

The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund and asked of all candidates for this office.     See below for questions on Economy, Budget, Energy, Health care, Campaign financing Click on a name for candidate information.   See also more information about this contest. 1. In this time of high unemployment, what are the most important steps that should be taken to improve our nation’s economy? Answer from Phat Nguyen: First of all, the fraud and abuse in the visa programs (H-1B, L-1, B-1) for foreign guest workers must be eliminated. These programs allow companies to replace American citizens with foreign guest workers. Secondly, corporate tax loop holes that allow companies to send American jobs overseas must be eliminated. Third, new federal investments to improve American dilapidated infrastructure such as high speed rail, education, new technologies should be made. Answer from Jay Blas Jacob Cabrera: 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? Answer from Phat Nguyen: I like Dr. Paul Krugma's (Nobel Prized Winner in Economics) approach in regard to our federal deficit. A huge federal spending program in short term to address the economic crisis is recommended despite the federal budget deficit. Longer term, we need to consider addressing it by making significant reduction in our defense budget. I would also favor eliminating corporate tax loop holes that allow companies to pay little tax. I do not favor cutting social security and medicare programs. Instead I think we should raise the ceiling of the maximum taxable earnings amount. Answer from Jay Blas Jacob Cabrera: 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? Answer from Phat Nguyen: Having lived in Europe and visited Japan many times, I think the U.S. can learn a great deal from these countries regarding energy policy. They do it through a combination of new technologies and regulations, particularly making the tax codes favorable to those companies that use clean energy and reduce carbon emissions. I also think the U.S. also urgently needs to reduce our dependence on foreign sources. It's a national security issue. Answer from Jay Blas Jacob Cabrera: 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? Answer from Jay Blas Jacob Cabrera: Single Payer National Health Care Program. Answer from Phat Nguyen: I actually favor a single payer system similar to the programs in many European countries. The U.S. spends twice as much as these countries but get much worse results. For example, healthcare takes 16% of the U.S.'s GDP vs 8% for France but the healthcare outcomes for France is much better. A single payer system eliminates a lot of waste that currently exists in the American system. Having lived in both systems, I think the European system is much better than our current system of healthcare. 5. What, if any, changes should be made to federal rules on campaign financing? Answer from Jay Blas Jacob Cabrera: 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. Answer from Phat Nguyen: In the public interest, federal campaigns should be funded by taxpayers. Right now, corporations have too much influence over the campaign. Politicians are literally bought by corporate interests. I favor changing federal rules to make it much more difficult for corporations to buy our politicians. 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. The order of the candidates is random and changes daily. Candidates who did not respond are not listed on this page.