I am an America First, Constitutionally and fiscally Conservative Republican.

My career has mainly been spent in the financial industry, working to protect and grow investors’ assets at multi-national institutions.

I have an AB degree in Mathematics from Reed College and an SM from MIT in Finance.

Unlike my Democrat opponent, I am logical, methodical, data driven and fair-minded, which is what the US Congress needs. I am running for US Congress because:

• The citizens of Pennsylvania Congressional District 5 deserve better

  representation.

• I want to help unite our citizens to protect our Republic from dissolution.

Issue 01 - Fiscal Responsibility & the Federal Deficit

The federal deficit is growing faster than the economy — a trajectory that is mathematically unsustainable.

Outstanding Federal debt has grown from 52% of GDP to over 120%, since 1990.

Whether it was because of fear of bank failure contagion in 2008, COVID-19 in 2020, misplaced hope when enacting the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, or reacting with “sympathy” after creating an immigrant wave of record proportions, Democrats in Congress have used emotional arguments to explain the history of bad decisions.

If the current way of doing business is not sustainable, it must change, or it will lead to a national bankruptcy. While the charts are shocking as they are, they do not include off-balance sheet liabilities, such as Social Security, Medicare, Railroad Retirement, or Black Lung, among others.

Mary Gay Scanlon regularly voted to increase Federal spending, leading to over $2 trillion annual deficits for most years since her election until the beginning of Trump’s second term. My support:

• Working across the aisle on a credible path to balance the budget and for long-term solvency

• Demanding rigorous oversight of all federal disbursements to close fraud

  loopholes

• Requiring both cost/benefit analysis before passage of bills and audits of

  expenditures post-passage

• Opposing new entitlement expansions that widen the structural deficit

Issue 02 – The Cost of Living

Everyone is hurt by inflation.

From the beginning of 1990, it took over 29 years for prices to double. Since April 2019, prices are up almost 29%, 21% of which happened during the Biden Administration, and approximately 4% in Trump’s second term so far.

Apart from the blame game, it is important to recognize that prices in the US do not typically go down once they’ve gone up. If prices don’t go down, the typical cure proposed to make living more affordable is to raise inflation-adjusted income.

That’s a good start, but it is a solution that assumes all else is unchanged. Another factor that has made life less affordable in District 5 is that local and state taxes have been going up quickly while general inflation has been rising.

While Pennsylvanians are dealing with times of general inflation, it is shocking that the Council of the county where most of the citizens of District 5 reside has decided to ignore the economic difficulties those citizens are going through and to add to their difficulties by increasing their cost of living, and housing specifically. In Delaware County the real estate taxes have gone up 38% in two years. Whose income has gone up at that rate?

Pennsylvanians need public servants that respect them, not abuse them.

Issue 03 – America First Means Avoiding Foreign Entanglements

The nation was promised no foreign wars, and no forever wars. So much for that.

The Iran Excursion is a war of opportunity. Iran was having economic problems and had a population that seemed ready to attempt an uprising. Iran was in an historically weakened state and deemed unlikely to survive an uprising when President Trump authorized an attack.

I hope the excursion is of short duration and that the loss of human lives is minimized, but I am not convinced that this was a necessary conflict. However, the US Is now in this fight. Our military is very good at blowing up high-value targets, but it has not proved itself good at ending engagement in a timely manner and creating a peaceful international partner as the end-state.

I support funding current operations to improve the odds of a peaceful resolution. Nonetheless, I hope this situation can be quickly resolved through a negotiated settlement of hostilities. Mary Gay Scanlon has voted against increased funding for the Pentagon during her term as Congresswoman.

Issue 04 – America First means protecting Americans

Americans are becoming victims in places where they should be safe, like the street, stores, and public transit. Every day there are more incidents, some more well known than others, but none of which needed to happen.

Throats cut. Elderly men pushed in front of trains. Young women raped. People killed, with suspects seen on cameras, arrested and released by courts over and over. Many of those in action on video were recently given entry to our country with little to no vetting. Those and others have been offered a way to self-deport and avoid interactions with the legal system and ICE by using the CBP app. Many have not.

Mary Gay Scanlon opposes using the Federal employees of ICE and Customs and Border Protection from enforcing the laws enacted by Congress to remove such perpetrators from within our country. She regularly opines about the perceived evils of these law enforcement agencies but ignores the harm done by those here without documentation. She boycotted the State of the Union address to “protest” the activities of thousands of Federal agents who are working to protect we the citizens.

I support ICE’s continuing efforts to remove criminals and to reduce the amount of fentanyl entering our country. ICE, working with the FBI, have located over 150,000 children who were trafficked into America during the Biden Administration. Removing criminals and locating trafficked children should not be controversial. Now that there are military actions overseas in countries set against us with hostile intent, ICE and CPB operations have become even more important.

Issue 05 - Equal Rights & Equal Treatment Under the Law

I believe the laws of the land should be applied evenly to all citizens based on shared, inalienable rights. I am distressed that certain district courts seem to be making biased judgements dependent on the theory that certain alleged perpetrators are in fact the victims of society at large, based on Critical Theory. They have been favoring the alleged criminal, based on extra-legal, government imputation of categories of “oppression” to the criminal for his benefit while ignoring actual harm to the victim.

Courts should practice blind justice to protect and provide remedies for people harmed physically or monetarily in the course of crimes. Congress has the power to modify the structure of the courts. I support impeaching judges who free offenders with multiple previous convictions that go on to commit murder.

Issue 06 – Education

The Gov. Shapiro’s budget proposes over $200 million for public schools in southeast PA. While this will generally be reported as good news, and it may be, we must reflect on what strings come with those funds.

In the current environment, parents of students in public schools must be diligent in monitoring the curriculum and texts selected by the school administration. That is a challenge equivalent to having a second job and will result in the uncertainty that they may have missed something about choices their children are making at school, books added to the school library, or pedology that exalts practices of marginal groups. Parents’ rights should include having access to funding the school district allocates per child, whether for use in homeschooling or in private schools, perhaps with caps related to parents’ income percentile.

Another issue with public education in the Commonwealth, but also nationally, is that the boys and young men are often treated as if they are inferior to girls and young women because they have different requirements from a learning environment. This has long lasting effects, with those young men lagging in entry into higher education, and from there into well-paying professional careers. Too many young men feel alienated from the economy and hopeless about the future. This is an institutional problem that must be addressed in the school system, and funds from the budget allotment should be used for that.

Issue 07 – Nullification

Both Philadelphia and Delaware County have passed laws precluding local law enforcement officers from coordinating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security. While I understand that the office holders may have their own opinions about immigration laws, local authorities have no role to nullify national laws.

Issue 08 – Energy Policy

Pennsylvania is blessed to have huge reserves of hydrocarbon-based energy resources. Despite that reality, Gov. Josh Shapiro entered into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) which hampered the ability of Pennsylvania energy companies to sell to the region and nation. It shackled the US to international sources for “green” energy technology such as fragile imported windmills and China-sourced solar panels.

I think America can do better by using its oil reserves wisely in the near-term while developing next-gen nuclear energy plants as recommended under the Reactor Pilot Program to provide a low-carbon source of abundant power for homes and industry, whether thorium fueled reactors (which are safer than those that are uranium-fueled), water-cooled fission reactors with higher enrichment levels than designs approved in the 1960s, reactors cooled with liquid sodium, and to continue development of fusion reactors. SE Pennsylvania needs an all-of-the-above energy policy.

Issue 09 – Environmental Policy

My view on environmental issues has been shaped by growing up in the country in Chester County. The air was clean. The water came from a well. While I support developing Pennsylvania’s petrochemical resources, I also support setting requirements and monitoring drilling, fracking and transporting these resources carefully.

Along with the development of new power generation technologies, comes the need to deal with the spent fuel in greater quantities. Restrictions on agricultural run-off should be maintained and evaluated for adequacy. Protection of flood zones and riparian barriers around flowing water is necessary to provide a safe environment for our citizens and our aquatic neighbors.

Issue 10 – Insurance Is Not Healthcare

There were problems with the provision of and payment for health care before the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA). Despite the disruption of the entire healthcare industry, those same problems remain. Instead of fixing the issues that were extant, the ACA led to doctors shutting individual and group practices and becoming employees of major hospital systems.

The hospital systems are even more concentrated in densely populated areas than the doctors’ practices were, leaving rural residents underserved. The ACA set reporting requirements for services provided has led to imbalanced growth in personnel between the ballooning of administrative jobs and under-investment in doctors who are now limited to patient visits of 15 or 20 minutes. The relationship of knowledge and trust between patients and doctors has been shattered.

I am not a health insurance expert, but I can see that giving patients more control of their healthcare spending in free markets would go a long way to allocating resources more efficiently.