Arthur Purves' Issue Positions (Political Courage Test)
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Arthur Purves has provided voters with clear stances on key issues by responding to the 2019 Political Courage Test.
Virginia State Legislative Election 2019 Political Courage Test
| Pro-life | a) Do you generally support pro-choice or pro-life legislation? | ||
| Yes | b) Should abortion be legal when the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape? | ||
| Yes | c) Do you support the prohibition of public funds for organizations that perform abortions? | ||
| Each abortion is a tragedy. How can someone who is pained at seeing children separated from the parents at the border be indifferent to separating a child from the mother's womb? We should love children. We are committing demographic suicide because of our low birthrate. We need more children, but they should be born to committed, married parents. We need to restore the ideal of marriage and children as life's greatest source of happiness and the raising of children as the parents' top and most rewarding priority. | |||
Budget Stabilization:Indicate which proposals you support (if any) for balancing Virginia's budget.
| No | a) Do you support a state regulated and taxed sports gambling system? | ||
| Yes | b) Reducing state employee salaries AND/OR pensions? | ||
| No | c) Instituting mandatory furloughs AND/OR layoffs for state employees? | ||
| No | d) An income tax increase on any tax bracket? | ||
| Would not reduce salaries. Would reduce pension benefits because the Virginia Retirement System has a $5.8 billion unfunded liability and is vulnerable to market fluctuations. When the VRS was established, the retirement age was 70. Now you can retire at age 50 with 30 years of service credit. | |||
| No | a) Do you support a limit on campaign contributions to state candidates? | ||
| No | b) Do you support the regulation of indirect campaign contributions from corporations and unions? | ||
| Yes | c) Do you support the use of an independent AND/OR bipartisan commission for redistricting? | ||
| Yes | d) Do you support requiring a government-issued photo identification in order to vote at the polls? | ||
| No | e) Do you support automatic voter registration? | ||
| Voters do not have to prove their U.S. citizenship to register. They simply check a box stating that they are U.S. citizens. The Public Interest Legal Foundation found that there were over 5000 registered voters in Virginia that were not citizen. About 1800 had voted, which is a felony, and were not prosecuted. It is a disservice to make it so easy to commit a felony. There are probably thousands of non-citizens on the rolls. Va. Attorney General Mark Herring's 900-vote victory in 2013 out of 2 million votes cast was probably due to non-citizen voters. | |||
| Yes | a) Do you support capital punishment for certain crimes? | ||
| Yes | b) Should a minor accused of a violent crime be prosecuted as an adult? | ||
| Yes | c) Do you support the enforcement of federal immigration laws by state and local police? | ||
| No | d) Do you support the legalization of recreational marijuana? | ||
| No | e) Do you support banning the use of cell phones and other handheld communication devices while driving? | ||
| ICE detainers should be honored for felons only. Should not break up undocumented families who are otherwise law abiding. Colorado legalized marijuana, and court filings for organized crime tripled. Hospitalizations with possible marijuana causes increased a lot. There is a connection between marijuana use and psychosis, and it is a gateway drug. I would ban handheld comms while driving if I knew of an inexpensive and reliable cell phone mount. I tried one mount, and my phone kept falling off. | |||
| No | a) Do you support state government spending as a means of promoting economic growth? | ||
| Yes | b) Do you support lowering state income taxes as a means of promoting economic growth? | ||
| Yes | c) Do you support reducing government regulations on the private sector? | ||
| No | d) Do you support expanding access to unemployment benefits? | ||
| Yes | e) Do you support requiring welfare applicants to pass a drug test in order to receive benefits? | ||
| No | f) Do you support an increase of the minimum wage of Virginia? | ||
| No | g) Do you support requiring employers to provide paid family leave? | ||
| About 30% of a family income is spent on taxes, mainly for low-quality schools and poverty. Taxes plus childcare consume one parent's income. If taxes were low, a parent could stay home and paid family leave would be unnecessary. A Congressional Budget Office study of a $15 minimum wage found, while it would raise wages of 17 million workers, 1.3 million would lose their jobs. Most poverty is because public schools don't teach reading (they use "whole word" instead of phonics). | |||
| No | a) Do you support adopting federal education standards in Virginia? | ||
| Yes | b) Do you support state funding for charter schools? | ||
| No | c) Should immigrants unlawfully present in the United States who graduate from Virginia high schools be eligible for in-state tuition at public universities? | ||
| Could make unlawful immigrants eligible after the border is secured. Otherwise, all accommodations for unlawful immigrants will attract more unlawful immigration, which would include criminals because the border is not secured. Secure the border so we can let in law-abiding immigrants and keep out the gang members that the law-abiding immigrants are trying to flee from. American public schools were wrecked a century ago by John Dewey's "progressive education" that replaced phonics with "whole word", said arithmetic drill was evil, crowded out history with Social Studies, and replaced the Lord's Prayer in schools with secularism. His legacy is racial inequaltiy. | |||
| No | a) Do you support state funding for the development of renewable energy (e.g. solar, wind, thermal)? | ||
| No | b) Do you support government regulations of greenhouse gas emissions? | ||
| Yes | c) Do you support increasing state funding for clean drinking water initiatives? | ||
| Favor renewable energy where it's cost-effective. Dominion Energy gives me the option of paying for renewable energy, but it would increase my bill by over ten percent. Families are living paycheck-to-paycheck and cannot afford more tax increases. As a boy, I ice skated on the Potomac River. Can't do that now, so it is getting warmer. However Gore's alarmist predictions about an increasing tempo of hurricanes, droughts, extreme heat events, the melting of the polar ice cap by 2014, never materialized. In fact, 2018 was Virginia's wettest year on record. Also, after "Inconvenient Truth" there was a 12-year hurricane "drought." | |||
| No | a) Do you generally support gun-control legislation? | ||
| No | b) Should background checks be required on gun sales between private citizens at gun shows? | ||
| Yes | c) Should teachers be allowed to bring guns into the classroom? | ||
| No | d) Should a license be required for gun ownership? | ||
| We've had the second amendment since 1791 but mass shootings in only the last few decades. Most shootings occur in inner-cities and with handguns, due to family breakdown. A big reason for family breakdown is the failure of the schools' "whole word" reading instruction. Low-income boys never learn how to read in public school, so they can't get jobs, can't marry, don't father their children, and are trapped in crime and poverty. Fathers are the best form of gun control, and the Ten Commandments are the only gun control laws that ever worked. | |||
| Yes | a) Should the state government increase funding for treatment facilities to combat opioid abuse? | ||
| No | b) Do you support Medicaid expansion through Virginia's health care programs? | ||
| No | c) Do you support requiring individuals to purchase health care insurance? | ||
| No | d) Do you support legislation that grants citizens the right to choose to die through euthanasia? | ||
| Yes | e) Do you support eliminating religious exemptions for vaccinations? | ||
| Medicaid expansion subsidizes the problem and doesn't fix it. The recipients are still trapped in poverty and medical providers can still charge outrageous prices to the uninsured. And access to health insurance is not nearly as important to health as lifestyle. Most of the poor live in "nutritional deserts." How does Medicaid help them? Fix the schools so students can read and get good jobs and exit poverty. Subject medical providers to the free-market forces that keep prices down, by eliminating fixed-deductibles and co-pays and having patients by 5% of the cost, to force providers to post prices. | |||
| Yes | a) Do you support the inclusion of sexual orientation in Virginia's anti-discrimination laws? | ||
| Yes | b) Do you support the inclusion of gender identity in Virginia's anti-discrimination laws? | ||
| No | c) Do you support greater efforts by Virginia state government in closing the pay gap between men and women? | ||
| The 1964 Civil Rights Act mandated equal pay for equal work. Enforce that, if it be enforced. You can get statistics on pay but how do you report statistics on whether two people with the same job assignment are doing equal work? Raises are determined more by the threat of class-action lawsuits than by employee merit. | |||
| End racial inequality in Virginia public schools by bringing back phonics, arithmetic drill, history, and the Ten Commandments instead of tax hikes, busing, and police. A century ago a socialist atheist, John Dewey, developed "progressive education" at Columbia University. It swept the nation. He replaced phonics with "whole word", called arithmetic drill evil, crowded out history with Social Studies, and replaced the Lord's Prayer with secularism. Affluent children end up learning from their families; low income children never learn how to read and their economic futures are ruined by 4th grade. Dewey's legacy is decades of racial inequality. | |||
| Amend the Virginia constitution to end state control of primary and secondary schools. We pay $100M annually to the Va Dept of Ed to provide a quality education, but all it does is create racial inequality. Overall achievement is low, too, all because the Dept. of Ed embraces "progressive education." If local districts were unfettered by the state, maybe some school boards would adopt the traditional curriculum that worked for a century. True, Virginia scores are above that national average, but they're still low. If everyone else has an "F", you can have a "D" and still be the best. |
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