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7th Congressional District candidates weigh in on local and global issues

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Three candidates are vying for the 7th Congressional District seat that represents Springfield and southwest Missouri.

Eric Burlison is the Republican incumbent U.S. representative, now in his first two-year term. His challengers are Democrat Missi Hesketh and Libertarian Kevin Craig.

An official U.S. House of Representatives bio points out that Burlison has 20 years of private-sector experience as an investment adviser and software consultant. He previously served in the Missouri statehouse, representing the 20th Senatorial District, including Christian and part of Greene counties, and the 133rd Missouri House District.

Hesketh is a teacher with over 20 years in the classroom and also serves as the mayor of the city of Forsyth, according to her candidacy website.

Craig is the founder of the nonprofit organization Vine and Fig Tree, which he founded in 1988 to pursue a Christian, pacifist mission, according to his campaign website. According to Ballotpedia, he has run for the 7th Congressional District seat multiple times, beginning in 2012.

The following interview was conducted by the Informed Voter Coalition, a voter education consortium of which Springfield Business Journal is a member. The candidates responded to five questions, and three of their answers are given here. Their responses are presented in the order they were interviewed.

Videos of the complete interviews are available at SBJ.net/election2024.

What issue is most important to you that you’d carry to Washington, D.C., from southwest Missouri?

Hesketh: For me, in my capacity as mayor and being on City Council, it is evident to me that there is a lack of funding available for municipalities to invest in their communities, to prepare for the future. You know, I’m thinking a lot about what’s going on in the Carolinas and Tennessee and Florida and Georgia after the hurricane that just went through and devastated a lot of those communities. If we don’t get assistance, if we don’t have a representative who is fighting to bring back federal monies to help us get into a better position ahead of situations like this, we won’t be able to recover from those in a timely way to keep people in services. So, I think that’s one of the biggest problems is that our small communities do not have the resources that they need to innovate and keep the young people there locally. You know, in 2022, Mr. Burlison was asked the same question, and he said that supply-side economics work in increasing prosperity for people. And I do not think that that is the case; he has not done anything for southwest Missouri. He has not asked for earmarks in 2023, nor in 2024. And as a mayor of a small town, I know that we cannot afford to leave any money on the table if we want to make improvements in our communities.

Craig: Thomas Jefferson said that the job of – my job – is to bind the government down by the chains of the Constitution. There are two ways to look at the Constitution. The founders intended us to see the Constitution as a document of enumerated powers, which means the government can’t do anything unless we, the people, say you can do this and specifically this, that or that. The other view is government can do anything it wants as long as the Constitution doesn’t say you cannot do this, in which case we have lawyers for that, but the idea is that we would cut all the unconstitutional agencies, which are taxing us at an exorbitant amount. If you abolished all unconstitutional agencies like the real Republican Party has been promising to do for decades, such as the Department of Education, Department of Energy – they have a long list in their political platform – you could save trillions of dollars, literally trillions of dollars, which would mean as a broad estimate $10,000 for every man, woman and small child in southwest Missouri – that they would be able to buy more stuff, improve their standard of living – and the government isn’t doing that. It’s not improving our standard of living. What I’ve learned from the last 400 years of human history is that capitalism or a free market raises everyone’s standard of living, and socialism, communism and fascism – violent imposed order on people – always brings mass poverty and mass death. So, the first thing I would say is eliminate the unconstitutional agencies, return the power and the money to the people, and I think that would drastically improve everyone’s standard of living.

Burlison: I think that our fiscal crisis is probably the biggest issue that we have. It’s even our military brass; they’re saying that, testifying that it’s the biggest national security threat that America faces. It’s $35 trillion, the debt; to each taxpayer, that’s $250,000 that each taxpayer shares of the pool of national debt. Just imagine how much money, how much income you’re gonna have to make before you pay in $250,000 income, and that’s just to get us back to even, not to pay for all the future obligations. So, it’s a crisis, and I think that it’s something that we have got to pull back; we’ve got to start cutting the spending and be more responsible, even grow in economy – and hopefully, we can grow our way out of this.

The rising costs and lack of child care services in the United States have created a challenge for many working parents. What can the federal government do to help working families with these child care challenges?

Hesketh: If there is child care available, increasing the child tax credit would be optimal to help families afford it. I do know from just being in my own small community and then speaking to others within the 7th district that there is a shortage. I did see where a congresswoman from, I think, the northern part of Kansas just brought back $2 million for her district in order to help families receive child care. So again, having a congressional representative who would actually dig in to find those solutions would be the first step in fixing that problem.

Craig: The Libertarian Party believes in the separation of school and state. If we abolish all contact between the government and schools or means of education, the cost of education would go down tremendously; for example, it costs maybe $20,000 a year for the average public school student but costs much less for a private education because capitalism and competition always improves services and lowers the cost. So parents, who are – well, first of all, they wouldn’t be having to have two jobs to pay the taxes that the government is imposing on them, so that would leave more freedom for them to take care of their children on their own. But also the cost of education would go down. They would have more money for child care or other ways of doing things – for example, they could help subsidize elderly or extended family members with all the savings that they would have because we were abolishing all these unconstitutional bureaucracies. There would be a lot higher standard of living and a lot more money to expand our standard of living, including day care, education, taking care of children. That’s a real easy issue for me: Abolish unconstitutional agencies, lower taxes, increase the amount of disposable income that people have, and our families would be much stronger as a result.

Burlison: I’d like to say the tax code is something that we can look at, making sure that there’s a deduction that’s available. I think that one of the issues that we’re facing in Missouri is because we overly regulated that industry. For example, at one point in time, when my wife and I, when we sent our daughters to child care, we experienced all three versions. You have in-home care providers or an in-home provider and then you have a licensed, larger one that’s home care, you know? And then you have more of an institution, a larger facility, and, you know, frankly, the one that we used that was an individual who was unlicensed in the home, who had a very small group of kids, was probably the best one that we had during our child’s upbringing, but that is no longer possible today. When that law was put in effect, it eliminated thousands of options for parents across the state of Missouri, and I think that that’s one of the reasons why we have the crisis.

What should America’s role in the world be, and how would you as a member of Congress help guide U.S. foreign policy toward that vision?

Hesketh: America needs to take care of Americans first, and I think that we do a good job of that. Some of these situations that are happening around the globe, from Ukraine to Israel, every situation needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. You know, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Burlison said that Ukraine is not a bastion of freedom and that our money would be better spent elsewhere. Ukraine is indeed a bastion of freedom. They are indeed fighting for their way of life. So, it is incumbent upon the United States to protect countries like Ukraine, who butt up to our NATO allies. Poland was just speaking the other day about how they are fully behind Ukraine, as is the rest of Europe. And those are our allies, so we should be supporting countries like that. When it comes to situations like are going on with Israel and Palestine and that is spreading outwards, I think that we should be cautious in the amount of money and materials that we supply to organizations that are not necessarily following the most humane approaches to preserving their freedoms. So, helping those who need help but ensuring that those people are being humane in their approaches would be my stance on American politics there.

Craig: That’s a really important question. I was born in the year of Sputnik; that was the Russian satellite that kicked off the space race, which started the Cold War. After the Soviet Union fell, the Russians realized communism didn’t work. Everybody was in poverty; it just was a system that was a massive failure, and they wanted at that point in the late 1980s to forget communism and join the Western world, join the capitalist world and become a trading partner with the United States. But within the United States, they have what we call the deep state, or the security state, and their view was that the United States must always be the most powerful nation on the Earth. We must have global hegemony, and each state said to Russia, no, we’re not going to allow you to grow. We’re not going to allow you to become a capitalist country. We are the only superpower on Earth, and we will crush any country that attempts to rival us. They want global hegemony, or as they call it full spectrum dominance. So the Cold War continued, even after communism was over, and then the United States, the deep state – I don’t mean to indict everybody in this room, but the deep state said we’re going to expand NATO and make it so that Russia cannot compete with us, and we will do regime change when necessary. So, the United States overthrew the government, the democratic and elected government of Ukraine and put in place an anti-Russian leader, whereas before, Ukraine wanted to be neutral between the West and Russia. But they put in a guy who was hostile to Russia. The Ukrainians began attacking Russians in the Donbas region, and now we’re facing, literally facing, nuclear war over this issue, and it’s because the United States wants to dominate – it wants a unipolar world rather than a multipolar world. They don’t want China, they don’t want Russia, they don’t want anyone to be stronger, to have hegemony like the United States does. And 500,000 Ukrainians have died in this conflict, which is completely unnecessary. We should just allow other nations to compete with us and to grow. China’s has grown a great deal because they’ve also abandoned Marxism. So, our foreign policy is one of hegemony, and it’s threatened the world.

Burlison: The tradition has been that we’ve tried to police the world, and I don’t think that we need to stick our nose into every country’s business. I think we need to set an example, and when there are abuses of, you know, humanity, any kind of horrific acts that a country might do, the United States should respond with tariffs; we should respond with sanctions and saying we’re not going to do business with your country until you correct what you’re doing. And I think that we need to be a lot more careful about getting involved in conflicts around the world. We need to reconsider the conflicts that we’re involved in, and I think that if we can pull back our aggressive actions across the globe, I think that we’ll see the temperature come down.

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