Floods, like fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, are broadly destructive and completely unpredictable.  I firmly believe that only the United States government has the economic strength and the depth of expertise to be the insurer of last resort when disaster strikes a community.  I will vote to strongly support the Federal Emergency Management Agency, providing the resources needed to staff the agency with accredited disaster relief specialists and providing funding for the repair and reconstruction of homes and businesses damaged by natural disasters.

Stem cell research, like atomic energy in the 1950’s, is a technology that has the capacity to heal and enrich our lives, and to devastate our society.  I cannot agree that every fertilized ovum is a living human being, so I cannot support outright bans on stem cell research using unneeded embryos created by in vitro fertilization procedures.  At the same time, I must insist that the practice of harvesting embryos from fertile women for use in stem cell technologies is not only wrong, it should be made illegal.

Preparing our children to make their own way in the world is a difficult and complicated task.  In a prefect world, local school boards would always make sound decisions which benefit every child in every classroom by empowering every teacher to succeed in this most important task.  In the actual world we live in, it doesn’t always work that way.  If the federal government has a role in education, it must be strictly limited to three important functions:  funding and disseminating the research which tells us how children learn, what children need to know and what instructional methods work; establishing national standards of learning outcomes which will enable us to maintain our leading role in the development of new knowledge and improved technology; identifying and ending discriminatory practices which prevent some children from receiving the very best education available.

By far the hardest thing I have ever done is to participate with my wife in the process of raising our three children.  I can’t think of anything more personal or more important than the decisions we made every day for twenty years as the babies we carried home from the hospital grew into fully independent and functioning adults with babies of their own.  In my estimation, the most personal and the most important of all those decisions involved deciding when to have our children and determining how many children we could care for.  I see no role for any level of government in those decisions, and I am opposed to legislation or regulation at any level of government which interferes with those two fundamental decisions of parents.

I believe that the two most basic functions of the US government are to provide for the common defense and to create and maintain a national transportation infrastructure.  I believe that the US government should be directly responsible for maintaining the roadways, interchanges and bridges of the interstate highway system.  I believe that the federal government should reinstitute a program of revenue sharing with the states to maintain the system of secondary roadways and bridges necessary to connect the interstate system to every private residence in the nation.

The vast majority of benefits in the current farm program are paid to a relative handful of wealthy farmers who raise three commodity crops:  wheat, corn and soybeans.  I would prefer to see a farm program which encourages the production of food staples that are consumed within 300 miles of the fields where the food is produced.  The most important components of such a program would include crop insurance and marketing programs that help smaller farmers deal with the risks they face in producing food staples for America’s tables.

Social security is a critical piece of the social safety net which assures that no American needs to live in abject poverty.  Current trends indicate that the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted by mid century.  If we begin now to gradually increase the retirement age, and to phase Social Security benefits into the taxable income stream for households with incomes above the median, we can continue to provide this commitment to future generations without burdening the economy we will leave to our grandchildren.

We are a nation of immigrants.  And, even during our current economic crisis, people from other nations still come to American in the hope of finding a better life for themselves and their families.  US Immigration policy should focus on identifying new arrivals to our country and integrating them into the legal economy, so that those who work pay taxes, and those who do not find work within a reasonable time after their arrival can be returned to their countries of origin.