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Wallyn Kanoelani Christian
Wallyn Kanoelani Christian (Republican Party) ran for election to the Hawaii House of Representatives to represent District 27. She lost in the Republican primary on August 10, 2024.
Biography
Wallyn Christian graduated from Leilehua High School. Christian earned an associate degree in business management and a bachelor's degree in justice administration from Hawaii Pacific University, and two degrees in theology from Life Christian University.[1]
Elections
2024
See also: Hawaii House of Representatives elections, 2024
General election
General election for Hawaii House of Representatives District 27
Incumbent Jenna Takenouchi defeated Margaret Lim in the general election for Hawaii House of Representatives District 27 on November 5, 2024.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Jenna Takenouchi (D) | 69.4 | 7,928 |
| Margaret Lim (R) | 30.6 | 3,501 | ||
| Total votes: 11,429 | |||
 = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Hawaii House of Representatives District 27
Incumbent Jenna Takenouchi advanced from the Democratic primary for Hawaii House of Representatives District 27 on August 10, 2024.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Jenna Takenouchi | 100.0 | 4,547 |
| Total votes: 4,547 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Republican primary election
Republican primary for Hawaii House of Representatives District 27
Margaret Lim defeated Wallyn Kanoelani Christian in the Republican primary for Hawaii House of Representatives District 27 on August 10, 2024.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Margaret Lim | 74.7 | 770 | |
 | Wallyn Kanoelani Christian | 25.3 | 261 | |
| Total votes: 1,031 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Endorsements
Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for Christian in this election.
2022
See also: United States Senate election in Hawaii, 2022
General election
General election for U.S. Senate Hawaii
Incumbent Brian E. Schatz defeated Bob McDermott, Feena Bonoan, Emma Pohlman, and Dan Decker in the general election for U.S. Senate Hawaii on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Brian E. Schatz (D) | 71.2 | 290,894 |
 | Bob McDermott (R) | 26.0 | 106,358 | |
 | Feena Bonoan (L) | 1.2 | 4,915 | |
 | Emma Pohlman (G) | 1.0 | 4,142 | |
 | Dan Decker (Aloha Aina Party) | 0.5 | 2,208 | |
| Total votes: 408,517 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii
Incumbent Brian E. Schatz defeated Steve Tataii in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii on August 13, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Brian E. Schatz | 93.6 | 228,595 |
 | Steve Tataii | 6.4 | 15,725 | |
| Total votes: 244,320 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Republican primary election
Republican primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii
Bob McDermott defeated Timothy Dalhouse, Wallyn Kanoelani Christian, Steven Bond, and Asia LaVonne in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii on August 13, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Bob McDermott | 39.6 | 25,686 |
 | Timothy Dalhouse | 26.4 | 17,158 | |
| Wallyn Kanoelani Christian | 14.6 | 9,497 | |
 | Steven Bond | 9.9 | 6,407 | |
 | Asia LaVonne | 9.5 | 6,187 | |
| Total votes: 64,935 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Charles Collins (R)
- John Roco (R)
Aloha Aina Party primary election
Aloha Aina Party primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii
Dan Decker advanced from the Aloha Aina Party primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii on August 13, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Dan Decker | 100.0 | 987 |
| Total votes: 987 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Green primary election
Green primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii
Emma Pohlman advanced from the Green primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii on August 13, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Emma Pohlman | 100.0 | 1,245 |
| Total votes: 1,245 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Libertarian primary election
Libertarian primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii
Feena Bonoan advanced from the Libertarian primary for U.S. Senate Hawaii on August 13, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Feena Bonoan | 100.0 | 515 |
| Total votes: 515 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Campaign themes
2024
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Wallyn Kanoelani Christian did not complete Ballotpedia's 2024 Candidate Connection survey.
2022
Wallyn Kanoelani Christian did not complete Ballotpedia's 2022 Candidate Connection survey.
Campaign website
Christian's campaign website stated the following:
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Campaign Platform “Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ʻĀina i ka Pono” “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness” The purpose of government is to serve the people. Government is charged with the responsibility to craft long-term solutions rather than short-term fixes. We have to hold our government accountable for securing the safety of our ‘Ohana, for expanding our economy, and for promoting fairness and justice for all the people of Hawai’i. “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government” -Henry David Thoreau Core campaign principles:
“Man is not free unless government is limited.” -Ronald Reagan
“We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.” -Ronald Reagan
The Hawai’i economy: “Reduce Hawai’i’s highest cost of living in the nation. Using FY2018 for reference in the five economic categories below, Hawai’i’s state gross domestic product was approximately $88 billion in 2018!”
Government: “Quality of government over quantity of government. Elected officials are public servants under oath to serve the needs of the people. The constitution and bill of rights were created to protect the American people against the danger associated with the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of a few. Government is wasteful and inept because it has grown to the point that it is too big to be adequately managed or overseen. Smarter legislation. Competition drives excellence.”
‘Ohana: “Ensure that our keiki, kupuna and community have every opportunity to thrive. Support our keiki in every way possible, they are the future. ‘Ohana is a crucial pillar in our community. It has been proven that the family structure, whether brought together in marriage, by guardianship or adoption, benefits both the individual and society. ‘Ohana enhances the cause of liberty by reducing the need for government in our daily lives.”
Native Hawaiian History, Culture, and Heritage: “Recognize and affirm the philosophy and efforts of Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, the first prince and native Hawaiian elected to U.S. Congress. In his 19-years of service he supported legislation for native Hawaiian rights to a land base for housing, farming and preservation of traditional and cultural practices. His dream was fulfilled with passage of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1921.”
Get Hawai’i Out From Under The Jones Act Bear with me on this complex issue that affects all of Hawai’i. If you’re looking for someone that will go the extra mile on important issues, I went the extra mile on this issue. In the lengthy discussion below, I layout all the facts as we know them from extensive research of published resources on the Internet. At the end of this discussion, I present a comprehensive systems engineering approach to resolve all the negative impacts associated with the Jones Act and how to move forward in growing the Hawai’i shipping industry presence in the global shipping environment. While at the same time, reducing the high cost of living for everyone in Hawai’i. A win-win for all the people of Hawai’i. “The Jones Act is an obscure 1920 regulation that requires that goods shipped from one American port to another to be transported on a ship that is American-built, American-owned, and crewed by US citizens or permanent residents. The goal of the legislation was to ensure the existence of a thriving US-owned commercial shipping industry so that in case of war there should always be a big supply of American-made, American-owned, American-crewed ships that could be counted on (and, if necessary, conscripted) to supply American commerce even in hazardous conditions.”-Vox “For most Americans, this isn’t a big deal — it enriches a small number of American shipowners while introducing some weird distortions into the overall pattern of economic activity in the United States. For the residents of the island of Hawai’i, though, the Jones Act is huge. Basic shipments of goods from the islands to the US mainland, and vice versa, must be conducted via expensive protected ships rather than exposing them to global competition. That makes everything in Hawai’i unnecessarily expensive relative to goods purchased on the US mainland and drives up the cost of living on the island overall.” -Vox “The goal of the legislation was to ensure the existence of a thriving US-owned commercial shipping industry, a topic that had become salient during World War I, when blockades underscored the close link between maritime commerce and warfare. One could certainly imagine an alternative universe in which the law was a smashing success. Protectionism for US merchant shipbuilding and US-owned and US-crewed merchant ships could have nurtured an infant industry and turned the United States into a globally competitive maritime powerhouse.” -Vox “That’s not what happened. Instead, global oceanic shipbuilding is dominated by Asian countries, with China, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan dwarfing American production. US output of merchant ships is even fairly tiny compared to combined European production. According to Daniel Pearson of the Cato Institute, US merchant vessels carry about 2 percent of the world’s cargo, far down from the 25 percent they carried 60 years ago.” -Vox “Rather than nurturing the creation of a global shipping powerhouse, protectionism for US shipbuilders has allowed the industry to survive despite being laughably uncompetitive in global terms. In most cases, that works out okay in practice because the United States has one of the world’s most robust networks of freight rail. The problem is that you can’t ship anything by train to Hawai’i. The result of all of this is that in Hawai’i, the cost of living is far higher than it needs to be.” -Vox “According to John Frittelli’s 2014 analysis for the Congressional Research Service, it costs about twice as much to operate a ship complying with the Jones Act as a typical ship used for international cargo. Drewry Maritime Research concluded in 2013 that US-built, Jones-compliant vessels cost about four times as much to build as comparable foreign ships. More expensive ships that are more expensive to operate add up to a situation in which Jones-compliant shipping is much more expensive than non-Jones shipping.” -Vox “The cost of shipping from Los Angeles to Hawaii has been higher than the cost of shipping the same product from Los Angeles to Shanghai. An absence of domestic port-to-port shipping is an occasional distortion for the US mainland, but it’s a systemic economic impediment for places like Hawaii. This raises the cost of living on Hawaii and makes Hawaii an unattractive place to produce goods bound for the US mainland.” -Vox “Debate over the act involves a tangle of contradictory claims with regard to labor unions, national defense, economic viability, international trade, the maritime industry, proper responses to emergencies and natural disasters, the future of the merchant marine, and the cost of living including the price of gasoline. Billions of dollars in potential profit are at stake in this fervent debate, as well as the future of the shipping industry and the idea of free trade itself. Opponents of the Jones Act see it as a significant burden on the American economy. But as one observer noted, the dedication of Jones Act supporters is ‘almost religious.’ ” -CRC “The support of unions is critical to the survival of the Jones Act—support from the Maritime Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (the Longshoremen), the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, the American Maritime Officers, the International Organization of Masters Mates and Pilots, the Seafarers International Union, the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association (MEBA, the oldest and largest maritime union in the U.S., representing both engine and deck crew members), and the Inland Boatmen’s Union (representing primarily tug and barge and ferry workers). The breadth and depth of this coalition makes it a formidable force. In concert with the shipping companies themselves, the unions work swiftly and decisively to oppose any Jones Act reform, even smaller changes that might serve as slippery slopes to reform.” -CRC “Economic evidence abounds that the Jones Act harms business and the U.S. economy. Nearly every independent study of the act’s effects finds it creates expensive barriers to trade. In 1995, a report from the U.S. International Trade Commission, an independent agency, found that removal of the Jones Act would lower domestic shipping prices by 26%. A 2013 report on global trade and its barriers from the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Bain & Co. and the World Bank, described the Jones Act as “the most restrictive of global cabotage laws and an anomaly in an otherwise open market like the United States.” The report called on the U.S. to set a global example in opening markets by enacting reforms, albeit mild reforms.” -CRC ” “It’s a simple situation where basic economic freedom and the good of the local economy go hand-in-hand,” noted Richard Rowland, president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, a state think-tank that supports repealing the Jones Act. “Greater competition in shipping would bring down prices and make the business climate more investor-friendly. Really, the only one being helped by the Act are the shipping interests.” Jones Act opponents in the non-contiguous states have long argued for a full or partial Jones Act exemption for their regions. Citizens and small businesses in Hawai’i have asked courts to void the act as unconstitutional, while a pending effort seeks support from Alaska and Puerto Rico for an anti-Jones lawsuit.” -CRC “Former U.S. Rep. Ed Case (D-Hawaii) has highlighted the problems the act causes for businesses in the non-contiguous states. “Even today, Big Island ranches must charter a weekly 747 out of Keahole Airport to get their cattle to the mainland because that’s cheaper than Jones Act shipping. There’s something wrong with that picture.” ” -CRC “Even the companies and unions that seem to benefit from the Jones Act may not be that much better off. That’s because—as often occurs in cases of protectionism, government subsidies, bailouts, and other forms of “crony capitalism”—the ultimate result is becoming dependent on government favors. The U.S. shipbuilding industry has been left dependent on Jones Act support. A 2001 Commerce Department study found that U.S. shipyards build only about one percent of the world’s large commercial ships, with few ships ordered from U.S. shipyards other than for cabotage. U.S. operators of ships in cabotage have an incentive to keep using old vessels rather than replace them with relatively high cost vessels built in the U.S.” -CRC “This brings us back to the contention that national security requires a strong maritime industry. The argument has a certain logic. Who will our nation rely on in wartime if not on our homegrown shipping industry? “The Jones Act … plays a critical role in protecting our national security by helping us maintain our ability to build, crew and deploy U.S. ships when they are needed,” insists U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa (D-Hawaii).” -CRC “But does it really? For protectionist legislation, the act has done an abysmal job of protecting that industry. Again, the U.S. shipbuilding industry represents only about one percent of the world market for ocean-going commercial vessels. By every possible measurement, the U.S. maritime industry has been in a long, ignominious decline. In 1946, there were more than 2,300 American cargo ships carrying nearly half of all imports and exports involving the U.S. Forty-five years later, there were only 360 such vessels in service. By 2000, there were only 250, hauling only three percent of American imports and exports. And in 2007, the U.S. ocean-going fleet was down to less than 200. Nor was this drop accompanied by a decline in international trade; quite the opposite.” -CRC “As for preserving those essential maritime jobs? The Jones Act battles in Congress during the ’90s demonstrated that the act hadn’t managed to prevent 40,000 longshoremen and 40,000 merchant seamen from losing their jobs. Nor were the shipyard workers immune; more than 60 American shipyards had gone out of business (with another 200,000 jobs lost). The U.S. International Trade Commission report at the time estimated that Jones Act repeal would affect about 2,450 laborers in the coast-wise shipping trade and would cost only 36 jobs in the shipbuilding industry.” -CRC “If our sea-power is really tied to the strength of our domestic maritime industry, we are in trouble. As Michael Perry, an engineering officer on one of the few U.S. flag ships, said in a 2001 Los Angeles Times report on America’s declining merchant marine, “We have the most powerful Navy in the world and one of the smallest merchant fleets…. How can we be so shortsighted?” ” -CRC “There is little comfort in the belief that those U.S. ships and shipyards are more technologically advanced than their foreign rivals. Jones Act defenders sometimes suggest that without its protections, commercial shipping would become the domain of rusty, dangerous ships, possibly manned by pirates. In truth, the greater concern is the state of the U.S. flag fleet. The high cost of repair and replacement under the Jones Act means the U.S. Jones Act fleet is among the world’s most aged.” -CRC “The Jones Act lobby is a rare case of industry and labor working a shared purpose—to defeat any attempt to reform the protectionism and subsidies the maritime industry enjoys. For years, this powerful lobby even enjoyed the advantage of its own Congressional committee (the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, which has now been absorbed into the House Committee on Natural Resources). Both unions and shipping companies have also benefited from the influence of generous political action committees. Merchant marine and longshoreman unions contributed over $2.4 million to candidates in the House and Senate between 2006 and 2012. (Some of the biggest recipients of their generosity include Sen. Hirono at $103,500; Rep. Bishop (D-N.Y.), $54,000; and Rep. Hanabusa, $51,500.)” -CRC “Finally, one more group with deep pockets and political clout wants to keep Congress from touching the Jones Act: lawyers. That is, personal injury lawyers who bring suits for seamen under Jones Act provisions. As Michael Hansen explains, these trial lawyers fear that reforming the act’s cabotage sections could also lead to re-examining the seamen’s rights provisions and thus damage the lawyers’ lucrative business.” -CRC “Perhaps the most sensible course is a series of reforms aimed first at allowing U.S. shipping companies to become more competitive in the global market and easing the pressure the Jones Act causes to American business—especially those in the non-contiguous states. The ultimate goal would be to render the Act unnecessary or moot, but unless the political climate changes substantially, the best strategy may be to carve out reforms that can lessen the economic damage caused by the act and put the U.S. shipping industry on a course toward real economic viability—viability, that is, independent of any special protection by the government.” -CRC The bottom line is that the Jones Act isn’t working and there are stakeholders on both sides that resist reform and compromise. Many economists estimate that the Jones Act accounts for 10% to as much as 30% of the high cost of living in Hawai’i. Approximately 90% of Hawai’i’s goods arrive in Hawai’i via Jones Act ships. These goods are not only end user goods, but goods that Hawai’i based service providers use in providing their local services. These goods are also used by our state and local governments in performing their services for the people of Hawai’i. The Jones Act cost impacts have broad compounded effects across the whole of our Hawai’i economic infrastructure. Service providers pass the increased costs to their customers. Government passes the increased costs to residents and businesses in the form of higher taxes. This effectively increases the cost of everything in Hawai’i including on the key issues of housing, education, infrastructure, and healthcare. Let’s look at what it might look like here in Hawai’i if the Jones Act were repealed. Say the economists savings estimates were a little high and the Jones Act only adds 10% to the cost of living in Hawai’i. How much would a 10% reduction in the cost of living save you on your annual spending? The 2018 state GDP is projected to be $88 billion and grow to over $100 billion by 2021. In a simplified analysis, let’s assess this from a viewpoint that 90% of our goods come to Hawai’i via Jones Act shipping and a 10% savings on the projected GDP of $88 billion this year. The repeal of the Jones Act would realize an $7.92 billion reduction in spending costs across the entire state economic infrastructure for government, state businesses, and private citizens. If we divided that $7.92 billion by the total number of residents, businesses, and government services in Hawai’i, approximately 1.45 million, we could project an average savings of $5,462 per resident, business, and government service. That’s over simplified in that the services and individuals that spend more will realize larger savings than those that spend less. But you get the idea, it’s a significant number. Here in Hawai’i, the Jones Act currently provides protectionism for about 23,000 jobs and local shipping businesses at significant negative impact to the remaining over 1.4 million residents and businesses of Hawai’i. We need to address the negative impact that those 23,000 people would experience if the Jones Act was repealed with no follow on action by the government. The US government bailed out the auto industry and the banking industry in the past 10 years to get those vital US industries through hard times of their own making. The US shipping industry is also vital. Due to the effects of Jones Act over the past 50 years, the US Government is the main underlying cause for the challenges that the US shipping industry faces in being non-competitive in the global shipping market today. Any repeal of the Jones Act must be accompanied by a US government bailout to help transition the US shipping industry back to being a competitive global player. If the savings in the cost of doing business are even a fraction of what economists predict, the State of Hawai’i could use state government spending savings realized from repealing the Jones Act to also subsidize those 23,000 Hawai’i jobs and shipping businesses until such a time that they are competitive again in the global shipping free market. And I will go even further with the new opportunities that will be realized here in Hawai’i with the removal of the overly restrictive Jones Act regulations. There will be a shipping industry paradigm shift with the removal of the shipping limitations resulting in significant new shipping routes. With local government support in partnership with the local shipping unions, we can leverage Hawai’i’s prime location in the Pacific to grow in our Hawai’i based shipping industries into a centralized Pacific global shipping hub. I will work to repeal the Jones Act and secure the US government support required to get the US shipping industry back to being a global player. We can reduce the cost of living for everyone in Hawai’i while growing our local shipping industries into the global shipping market. “We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.” -John F. Kennedy
Total health care reform covering the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, and eventually, the Veterans Health Administration The long-term vision is to provide an accessible and affordable nationally-guided quality health care system for everyone in the United States. The challenge is in how to reach this national health care vision and how to sustain it long into the future. It is going to take significant planning, preparation, and persistence to implement an effective comprehensive approach to achieve this vision. We’re not going to get there overnight and we need to approach this in a gradual, phased-in, step-by-step process. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is going to implode. ACA was rushed legislation ahead of a mid-term election cycle. It is over 2300 pages of an inefficient and ineffective legislation mess. It did provide insurance to many people who were previously uninsured, but with ineffective sustainability it rapidly became the Unaffordable Care Act. We need to take action to replace ACA as soon as we can. I have a comprehensive health care reform approach that takes incremental steps to gradually migrate the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, and eventually, the Veterans Health Administration into a unified nationally-guided health care system of private health care and health insurance providers covering all Americans. The following section is an excerpt from an article by Joshua Holland on “The Nation” that accurately describes the current state our health care system and the challenges we face in moving forward with a national health care system. I apologize for the lengthy excerpt, but this is an enormous complex issue that requires extensive discussion to achieve an effective plan forward. You can scroll down to read the proposed approach based on the the following discussion. Medicare-for-All Isn’t the Solution for Universal Health Care Achieving universal coverage—good coverage, not just “access” to emergency-room care—is a winnable fight if we sweat the details in a serious way. If we don’t, we’re just setting ourselves up for failure. The health-care debate is moving to the left. But if progressives don’t start sweating the details, they’re going to fail yet again. Within the broad Democratic coalition, it’s pretty clear that the discussion of health care has shifted to the left. Mainstream figures are embracing single-payer. Representative John Conyers’s Medicare-for-All bill currently has 115 Democratic co-sponsors in the House. And Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer recently said that single payer is now “on the table.” Assuming we have free and fair elections in the future, and Democrats regain power at some point, this is all very good news for single-payer advocates. But that momentum is tempered by the fact that the activist left, which has a ton of energy at the moment, has for the most part failed to grapple with the difficulties of transitioning to a single-payer system. A common view is that since every other advanced country has a single-payer system, and the advantages of these schemes are pretty clear, the only real obstacles are a lack of imagination, or irresponsible Democrats and their donors. But the reality is more complicated. For one thing, a near-consensus has developed around using Medicare to achieve single-payer health care, but Medicare isn’t a single-payer system in the sense that people usually think of it. This year, around a third of all enrollees purchased a private plan under the Medicare Advantage program. These private policies have grown in popularity every year, in part because the field has been tilted against the traditional, government-run program. Medicare Advantage plans must have a cap on out-of-pocket costs, for example, while the public program does not. Around one-in-four Medicare enrollees also purchase some sort of “Medigap” policy to cover out-of-pocket costs and stuff that the program doesn’t cover, and then there are both public and private prescription drug plans. The array of options can be bewildering—it’s a far cry from the simplicity that single-payer systems promise. At the same time, Medicare-for-All is really smart politics. Medicare is not only popular, it’s also familiar. Many of us have parents or grandparents who are enrolled in the program. And polls show that a significant majority of Americans now believe that it’s the government’s “responsibility to provide health coverage for all.” But from a policy standpoint, Medicare-for-All is probably the hardest way to get there. In fact, a number of experts who tout the benefits of single-payer systems say that the Medicare-for-All proposals currently on the table may be virtually impossible to enact. The timing alone would cause serious shocks to the system. Conyers’s House bill would move almost everyone in the country into Medicare within a single year. We don’t know exactly what Bernie Sanders will propose in the Senate, but his 2013 “American Health Security Act” had a two-year transition period. Radically restructuring a sixth of the economy in such short order would be like trying to stop a cruise ship on a dime. There has not yet been a detailed single-payer bill that’s laid out the transitional issues about how to get from here to there. We’ve never actually seen that. Even if you believe everything people say about the cost savings that would result, there are still so many detailed questions about how we should finance this, how we can deal with the shock to the system, and so on. Centrist Democrats will no doubt be one obstacle to universal coverage, but a more fundamental problem is that compelling the entire population to move into Medicare, especially over a relatively short period of time, would invite a massive backlash. The most important takeaway from recent efforts to reshape our health-care system is that “loss aversion” is probably the central force in health-care politics. That’s the well-established tendency of people to value something they have far more than they might value whatever they might gain if they give it up. This is one big reason that Democrats were shellacked after passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, and Republicans are now learning the hard way that this fear of loss cuts both ways. Remember how much trouble President Obama got into when he said that if you like your insurance you can keep it? For something like 1.6 million people, that promise turned out to be hard to keep. And that created a firestorm. Those 1.6 million people represented less than 1 percent of the non-elderly population, and most of them lost substandard McPlans which left them vulnerable if they got sick. The ACA extended coverage to almost 10 times as many people, but those who lost their policies nonetheless became the centerpiece of the right’s assault on the law. Trump and other Republicans are still talking about these “victims” of Obamacare to this day. Under the current Medicare-for-All proposals, we would be forcing over 70 percent of the adult population—including tens of millions of people who have decent coverage from their employer or their union, or the Veteran’s Administration, or the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program—to give up their current insurance for Medicare. Many employer-provided policies cover more than Medicare does, so a lot of people would objectively lose out in the deal. Some large companies skip the middle man and self-insure their employees—and many offer strong benefits. We’d be killing that form of coverage. If we were to turn Medicare into a single-payer program, as some advocates envision, then we’d also be asking a third of all seniors to give up the heavily subsidized Medicare Advantage plans that they chose to purchase. Consider the political ramifications of that move alone. And because some doctors would decline to participate in a single-payer scheme, which would come with a pay cut for many of them under Medicare reimbursement rates, we couldn’t even promise that if you like your physician you can keep seeing him or her. Don’t be lulled into complacency by polls purporting to show that single payer is popular—forcing people to move into a new system is all but guaranteed to result in tons of resistance. And that’s not even considering the inevitable attacks from a conservative message machine that turned a little bit of money for voluntary end-of-life counseling into “death panels.” Public opinion is dubious given that nobody’s talking about the difficulties inherent in making such a transition. It’s true that every other developed country has a universal health-care system, and we should too. But make no mistake: Moving the United States to national health care would be unprecedented, simply because we spend more on this sector than any other country ever has. For the most part, these countries were spending maybe 2 or 3 percent of their economic output on health care when they set up these systems after World War II. Most of them are spending 8 or 9 or maybe 10 percent of their output now, and this is 70 years later. In 2015, the United States spent 17.8 percent of its output on health care. The highest share ever for an advanced country establishing a universal system was the 9.2 percent that Switzerland spent in 1996, and they set up an Obamacare-like system of heavily regulated and subsidized private insurance. (They also spend more on health care today than anyone but us.) There’s a common perception that because single-payer systems cost so much less than ours, passing such a scheme here would bring our spending in line with what the rest of the developed world shells out. But while there would be some savings on administrative costs, this gets the causal relationship wrong. Everyone else established their systems when they weren’t spending a lot on health care, and then kept prices down through aggressive cost-controls. Bringing costs down is a lot harder than starting low and keeping them from getting high. We do waste money on private insurance, but we also pay basically twice as much for everything. We pay twice as much to doctors. Would single-payer get our doctors to accept half as much in wages? It could, but they won’t go there without a fight. This is a very powerful group. We have 900,000 doctors, all of whom are in the top 2 percent, and many are in the top 1 percent. We pay about twice as much for prescription drugs as other countries. Medical equipment, the whole list. You could get those costs down, but that’s not done magically by saying we’re switching to single payer. You’re going to have fights with all of these powerful interest groups. Single-payer advocates are mostly right about its benefits. These systems are simpler, they cut down on administrative costs, and they cover everyone. But the term “single-payer” is itself misleading. The truth is that many of the systems we refer to as single-payer are a lot more complicated than we tend to think they are. Canada, for example, finances basic health care through six provincial payers. Its Medicare system provides good, basic coverage, but around two in three Canadians purchase supplemental insurance because it doesn’t cover things like prescription drugs, dental health, or vision care. About 30 percent of all Canadian health care is financed through the private sector. Most countries have mixed funding schemes that vary in complexity, and the term “single-payer” may be giving some people a false promise. Conyers’s Medicare-for-All bill promises to cover virtually everything while banishing out-of-pocket costs, but no other health-care system offers such expansive benefits. Even people living in Scandinavian social democracies face out-of-pocket expenses: In 2015, the most recent year for OECD data, the Swedes covered 15 percent of their health costs out-of-pocket; in Norway, it was 14 percent and the Finns shelled out 20 percent out-of-pocket. Most countries with “single-payer” systems rely on some combination of public insurance, various mixes of mandatory and voluntary private insurance (usually tightly regulated), and out-of-pocket expenditures (often with a cap). They offer free coverage for those who can’t afford it, but the exact benefits vary from country-to-country. Germany’s “single-payer” system has 124 not-for-profit insurers participating in one national exchange. About 10 percent of Germans—the wealthiest ones—opt out of the national system and go fully private, and most of them buy plans from for-profit insurers. The Dutch system is somewhat like Obamacare in that everyone must purchase insurance for basic services from private insurers. But the similarities end there: Insurers are barred from distributing profits to their shareholders, and a separate, entirely public scheme covers long-term care and other costly services. Premiums are subsidized, but most Dutch people purchase supplemental insurance to cover things like dental care, alternative medicine, contraceptives, and their co-payments. The French system is often cited as the best in the world, and about a quarter of it is financed through the private sector. The French are mostly covered through nonprofit insurers in a single national pool, but most working people get their policies through their employers. Almost all French citizens either purchase government vouchers to cover things like vision and dental care, or are provided with them at no cost if necessary. The system is financed through a complicated mix of general revenues, employer contributions, payroll taxes and taxes on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. So the United States isn’t unique because it uses a mix of public and private financing—the big difference, as these OECD data show, is that we rely much more heavily on private insurance than any other wealthy country. Understanding that other countries’ schemes vary significantly in the details—and that in the United States, the cost of care would remain a serious challenge under any system—should lead to a different conversation among progressives. Rather than making Medicare-for-All a litmus test, we should start from the broader principle that comprehensive health care is a human right that should be guaranteed by the government—make that the litmus test—and then have an open debate about how best to get there. Maybe Medicaid is a better vehicle. Perhaps a long phase-in period to Medicare-for-All might help minimize the inevitable shocks. There are lots of ways to skin this cat. An obvious alternative to moving everyone into Medicare is to simply open up the program and allow individuals and employers to buy into it. We could then subsidize the premiums on a sliding scale. But recent experience with the ACA suggests that this kind of voluntary buy-in won’t cover everyone, or spread out the risk over the entire population. In other countries, you’re basically guaranteed coverage and then they figure out how to pay for it. Some of that money may come from you, some will come from your employer and some of it will come from general funds. We don’t have that approach. People who don’t have coverage from their employers have to figure out how to sign up—either for Medicaid, or through the exchanges. Yes, we had a penalty to encourage people to do that, but they still have to navigate this incredibly complex system. Maybe there’s a better way still that hasn’t yet been discussed. The fight for a universal health-care system in the United States is now in its 105th year, and if we don’t admit that financing any kind of universal system is going to be especially difficult given how much we spend, or acknowledge the role that loss aversion plays in the politics of reform, then we’re going to fail again the next time we get a shot at it. Anyone who tells you that the most expensive health care system in the world is going to undergo a sudden shift to highly efficient and low-price medicine has not been studying American medicine. Choosing the best approach moving forward Few countries have national single-payer health care systems. The national single-payer health care systems in existence today provide basic health care and reduce administrative costs, but they are significantly wanting in anything beyond that. It is analogous to “universal transportation” where everyone gets a automobile, but that automobile is a Yugo. I don’t know about you, but I definitely prefer my Toyota Tacoma. The single-payer health care systems that fare better are those of the Nordic model. In the Nordic model of Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, the health care system is single-payer, but it is not national, it is municipal. The municipalities collect the money, the taxes to fund health care locally, and the money is spent locally. This would be somewhat equivalent to a single-payer health care system where the states collect the taxes to fund health care in their states and spend the money in their states. The national health care systems that provide the highest quality health care and have faster access to specialists than the US health care system are those nationally-guided private provider health care systems of the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. The nationally-guided private insurance provider systems benefit from the competition between service providers in driving excellence of the health service available to their citizens. Of those three countries over the past decade, the Dutch health care system is repeatedly ranked as the best in Europe. Where to start in the US After reviewing the ACA framework in the over 2300 page bill, it would take less effort to start from scratch instead of trying to revise the ACA legislation. Of other US health care services, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHB) provides the best framework to serve as the basis for a unified national health care system to cover everyone in the US. The FEHB is a system of “managed competition” through which employee health benefits are provided to federal government employees, retirees and their survivors. Competition drives excellence. The government contributes 72% of the weighted average premium of all plans, not to exceed 75% of the premium for any one plan. The FEHB program allows some insurance companies, employee associations, and labor unions to market health insurance plans to governmental employees. The program is administered by the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM). There are over 200 plans participating in the FEHB program with about 20 plans that are nationwide or almost nationwide. The remaining locally available plans are almost all HMOs. It enrolls about eight million persons in total. While its enrollment is about one-fifth that of the nation’s largest health insurance program, Medicare, it spends less than one-tenth as much because most enrollees are below age 65 and cost far less on average than the elderly and disabled who constitute Medicare’s enrollees. The FEHB program relies on consumer choices among competing private plans to determine costs, premiums, benefits, and service. This model is in sharp contrast to that used by original Medicare. In Medicare, premiums, benefits, and payment rates are all centrally determined by law or regulation (there is no bargaining and no reliance on volume discounts in original Medicare; these parameters are set by fiat). Over time, the FEHB program has outperformed original Medicare not only in cost control, but also in benefit improvement, enrollee service, fraud prevention, and avoidance of “pork barrel” spending and earmarks. (Medicare Part D has also controlled costs far better than originally forecast through a competitive, consumer-driven system of plan choices similar to and modeled after the FEHB program.) One of the most prominent features of the FEHB program is the choices it allows. There are three broad types of plans: fee-for-service and preferred provider organization (PPO), usually offered in combination; HMOs; and high-deductible health plans and other consumer-driven plans. In the FEHB program the federal government sets minimal standards that, if met by an insurance company, allows it to participate in the program. The result is numerous competing insurance plans that are available to federal employees. The underlying legislation for the FEHB program is minimal and remarkably stable, particularly in comparison to Medicare. The FEHB statute is only a few dozen pages long, and only a few paragraphs are devoted to the structure and functioning of the program. Regulations are minimal; only another few dozen pages. In contrast, the Medicare statute found in title 18 of the Social Security Act is about 400 pages long and the accompanying regulations consume thousands of pages in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. The FEHB program has often been proposed as a model for national health insurance and sometimes as a program that could directly enroll the uninsured. Notable economist Alain Enthoven explicitly built a proposal for a system of “managed competition” as a national health reform decades ago, and has continued promoting the idea ever since. A version of this proposal was adopted by the Netherlands in their national health care reform in 2006. Ever since that major reform of their health care system, the Dutch system repeatedly maintains its number one position at the top of the annual Euro health consumer index each year. The Netherlands was also ranked first in a study comparing the health care systems of the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany and New Zealand. According to the Health Consumer Powerhouse, the Netherlands has ‘a chaos system’, meaning patients have a great degree of freedom from where to buy their health insurance, to where they get their healthcare service. But the difference between the Netherlands and other countries is that the chaos is managed. Healthcare decisions are being made in a dialogue between the patients and healthcare professionals. The proposed solution for an accessible and affordable national health care system One of the prominent proposals for health reform in the United States, the proposed bipartisan Healthy Americans Act (HAA) in 2007 and 2009, was largely modeled after the FEHB program, as were recent “Republican Alternative” proposals by Representative Paul Ryan. Senator Daniel Inouye was a co-sponsor of the Healthy Americans Act (HAA) bill in both 2007 and 2009. The HAA is a Senate bill that had proposed to improve health care in the United States, with changes that included the establishment of universal health care. It would transition away from employer-provided health insurance, to employer-subsidized insurance, having instead individuals choose their health care plan from state-approved private insurers. It sought to make the cost of health insurance more transparent to consumers, with the expectation being that this would increase market pressures to drive health insurance costs down. The proposal created a system that would be paid for by both public and private contributions. It would establish Healthy Americans Private Insurance Plans (HAPIs) and require those who do not already have health insurance coverage, and who do not oppose health insurance on religious grounds, to enroll themselves and their children in a HAPI. According to its sponsors, it would guarantee universal, affordable, comprehensive, portable, high-quality, private health coverage that is as good or better than Members of Congress had at that time. A 2008 preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office concluded it would be “essentially” self-financing in the first year that it was fully implemented. The HAA made employer-provided insurance portable by converting the current tax exclusion for health benefits into a tax deduction for individuals. The HAA provided for the establishment or identification of a “State Health Help Agency” in each U.S. state government which would administer the HAPI plans in each state, help its citizens evaluate the options available, oversee enrollment, and help with the transition from Medicaid and CHIP, among other responsibilities. Under HAA the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and State Children’s Health Insurance Program would be replaced and Medicaid participants are transitioned out of that program. Seven goals for health care reform reflected in HAA include:
HAA was characterized as “harnessing the Democratic desire to get everyone covered to the Republican interest in markets and consumer choice.” In my proposed solution, I go further in expanding the scope of the HAA to eventually include Medicare and Veterans Health Administration recipients. The funding sources for the Medicare and Veterans Health Administration recipients would initially remain unchanged to cover the health care services through HAA after the transition. Under this streamlined, unified nationally-guided health care system we will realize improved health care with cost containment resulting from increases in efficiency, effectiveness, and national participation. By sweating the details, we can achieve this vision of an affordable, accessible, and sustainable unified nationally-guided health care system for everyone in the United States.
As much as we can, we need to take money out of government politics. We need to take back control of our elections from lobbyists, special interests, and foreign entities. Our government is meant to be “of the people, by the people, for the people”…..not of the few, by the few, for the few, for the special interests, for the lobbyists. “Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.” -Ronald Reagan Our election process has become more about fund raising than about the issues. The lobbyist and special interest impacts in our elections have grown beyond the point where they can’t be properly vetted and candidates are unknowingly accepting donations from lobbyists that represent bad actors. Here in Hawai’i, both Senator Hirono and Senator Schatz accepted thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the Podesta Group. The Podesta Group was found to be lobbying the US government to legitimize former Russian-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Tony Podesta had to step down from his lobbying firm after it was found to be in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). And on FARA, we need to repeal the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA is a United States law passed in 1938 requiring that agents representing the interests of foreign powers in a “political or quasi-political capacity” disclose their relationship with the foreign government and information about related activities and finances. The purpose is to facilitate “evaluation by the government and the American people of the statements and activities of such persons.” There is “no” reason for foreign entities to have “any” influence over our elections. We have ambassadors and embassies for interacting with foreign entities. “There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.” -Ronald Reagan In adhering to my stance on campaign spending reform, I self funded my minimal campaign finances through the primary election and spent less than $2000. We prevailed in the eight candidate primary election race on a strong message, not by spending a large amounts of money. On September 26, I started accepting donations of up to $50 from private citizens that wanted to help financially support our campaign into the general election for the people of Hawai’i and to drive positive change in our government.
Constitutional Amendment – Change House of Representatives term duration from 2 to 4 years The short 2-year terms in the House of Representatives contribute to the divisive government environment with career politicians fighting for their careers each election cycle. Some spend as much as half their term in office running for the next term. When the Constitution was written, two years was a reasonable length of time for the House of Representatives term duration. In the information age of today, that is no longer true and it impacts the effectiveness of the House of Representatives. We propose increasing the the House of Representative term length to four years and stagger the representative election cycles for each state similar to the election cycle stagger in the US Senate for each state. This will allow the House of Representatives to focus more on passing efficient and effective legislation rather than rushing legislation out ahead of the next election cycle.
Constitutional Amendment – Term limits of 12 years for serving in Congress The constitution and bill of rights were created to protect the American people against the danger associated with the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of a few. Our government is meant to be of the people, by the people, for the people…..not of the few, by the few, for the few. We need to keep congress current, effective, and efficient by continuously bringing in new members with new ideas and new approaches. The average length of service by CEOs in US businesses, based on their ability to remain effective, averages to about 10 years. Congress needs the skill set diversity that will be realized through the continuous infusion of new members with their fresh innovations to improve our government. With the current lack of any real innovations in government, government tends to rely heavily on outside contractors for new technology infusion in their routine day-to-day operations just to keep themselves operating at all. We propose a term limit of 12 years covering combined service in both houses of congress. That is slightly longer than the average US business CEO term to hedge on the side of maintaining institutional knowledge in congress. The exact language would read, “Any member of congress that has served or will have served 12 or more years in congress at the end of their current term can no longer run for a congressional office.” The calendar for years of service would not start for any member of congress until this amendment is ratified. This grandfathers in existing members of congress to allow for a smooth transition to the new term limits. Once the term limits are fully realized with all grandfathered members having left congress, this will also reduce the maximum lifetime pension from just under $140,000 annually to a maximum of just over $35,000 annually based on current congressional salary structure. The goal is to foster a more efficient and effective congress to increase the likelihood of passing better and smarter legislation rather than focusing on getting re-elected. “Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.” -Robert F. Kennedy We realize that it is unlikely with the number of career politicians in congress to get the necessary two-thirds vote in each house to pass the amendment. So we have been in communication with the movement currently in progress to call for a Convention of States under Article V of the Constitution to get the amendment passed and moved forward for ratification.
What is line-item veto The line-item veto is a power granted to a chief executive to selectively veto certain parts of a bill without vetoing the entire bill. Many governors have this power but the Supreme Court declared line items vetoes for the president unconstitutional in 1998. Many supporters of the line-item veto believe its chief virtue is that it allows the president to eliminate wasteful spending provisions like earmarks from legislation. There is an initiative in progress for a “line-item veto with a twist” The initiative supported by the No Labels group supports giving the president the power of rescission – in which the president has to send each individual provision that he’d like to strip from a bill back to Congress for an expedited, up or down vote. Expedited presidential rescission authority already has broad bipartisan support in Congress from members who want more transparency and accountability in the legislative process. No Labels wants the same thing. Line item veto history While 44 state governors have line-item veto power, Congress has often refused to grant this power to the president out of fear that it will be used as a political tool to punish certain congressmen who refuse to go along with the president’s agenda. Bill Clinton was briefly able to use a straight line-item veto, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in Clinton v. City of New York in 1998. Why the straight line-item veto was considered unconstitutional In Clinton v. City of New York, the Supreme Court found that the line-item veto violated the Presentment Clause of the Constitution, which says that the president does not have the power to unilaterally amend or repeal legislation passed by Congress. How is what No Labels proposing constitutional By sending the rescinded part of the bill back to Congress for an expedited up or down vote, their “line-item veto with a twist” complies with the Presentment Clause of the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s ruling. Why “line-item-veto with a twist” is a good idea As stated earlier, it allows the president to eliminate wasteful spending provisions like earmarks from legislation. More importantly, this eliminates the underlying corruption inherent in omnibus bills. Omnibus bills cluster what usually would be many bills into one cluster to piggy back special interest and wasteful earmark legislation onto larger critical legislation that needs to pass Congress and get signed by the president for the best interests our country. The line-item veto eliminates future omnibus bills by giving the president the power to rescind the special interest and earmark portions back to Congress so that those items require an up or down vote on their own merits. This would have eliminated the recent 2200 page, $1.3 trillion dollar budget omnibus sending the US debt over the $21 trillion mark. This would also eliminate the current farm bill omnibus in Congress and force all the legislation under the farm bill omnibus to be passed on the individual merits of each bill. Line-item veto significantly limits the corrupt “quid pro quo” political practices that run rampant in Congress.
K-12 curriculum The current “common core” based curriculum in our K-12 classrooms does more for preparing the students for standardized tests than it does for preparing them for post high school education and careers. We can do a better job by focusing more on teaching the students how to learn, how to reason, how to problem solve, how to troubleshoot, how to research, and how to analyze. Those skills on the “how” will serve the students far better than the standard based test knowledge in whatever life paths they choose to pursue after high school. Better pay for our teachers Our keiki are our future. We entrust our teachers in shaping the minds of our keiki and guiding them into being contributing members of our communities. We need to support our keiki by providing them the best environments and opportunities to succeed in the classroom and beyond. If we want to draw the best and most effective educators, we need to pay the necessary wages for them to live without worry given the high costs of living in Hawai’i. If we successfully repeal the Jones Act, I would encourage using the state and local government savings to provide better pay for our teachers. Helping to close the post public education gap I have had multiple discussions with parents and students who feel that they are being under served by the current public education system in preparing the students for their post high school endeavors whether that is pursuing higher education or entering the workforce. I recently met several representatives from the Hawaii Job Corps that provides viable options in the programs they offer to help close the post public education gaps. They offer an educational component to achieve a high school diploma or GED or just improve math and reading skills. They also offer specialized career and technical training to prepare students for entering the workforce. Lastly, they provide placement services for advanced education and entrance into the workforce. The high costs of college education We need to address the affordability of a college education today and in the future. When looking at cost inflation from around 1990 to today we find that housing costs have gone up 50%, health care costs have gone up 100%, and college tuition+books have gone up 200%. There is something definitely wrong with the inflation of college costs and we need to perform a root cause analysis investigation to determine why. I think I have some ideas on the probable contributing factors, but I will hold my thoughts for now. We will perform more extensive research into the budgetary details from a reasonable sample set of colleges before drawing conclusions.
Make individual tax cuts permanent We need to revise the tax reform passed in December 2017 to make the individual income tax cuts permanent. They are currently set to expire at the end of 2025. We also need to address the mortgage interest deduction cap of $750,000. In July 2017, the average cost of a single family home in Hawai’i was over $795,000. The average size of those homes was only 1300 sq. ft. compared to an average size of over 2000 sq. ft. on the mainland. Other than Washington DC, Hawai’i has the highest price per sq. ft. ratio in the country. Hawai’i has the worst ratio of average housing costs per sq. ft. compared to average income in the nation. We need to revise the tax reform to take that ratio into account when calculating the income tax mortgage deduction caps for each state. Per CNBC:
An Energy Grid for a Better Future We need to migrate to a more distributed utility grid to help protect it from disasters and from bad actors. The recent lava flow that destroyed the Puna Geothermal Venture on the Big Island took out 30% of the island’s electrical power production. Through some early research, the most practical approach appears to be a transition to smaller neighborhood or community renewable energy farms that are manged from a central location. We need to protect the beauty of Hawai’i and respect our natural ‘Aina in the implementation of this approach. We would also like to promote other renewable utilities. We were recently introduced to a Hawai’i based company started by a young local entrepreneur that is founded on the renewable utility of creating clean drinkable water from the air. The company has been working with HEMA on the topic of emergency preparedness efforts in Hawai’i to provide clean drinking water in response to disasters that adversely affect clean drinking water availability. The company website is highlyinnovativetechnology.com.
Needs-Based Immigration Policy “When our forbears – yours and mine – came to America, they came because this country promised them something. It promised them an opportunity, nourished by education, not merely to grind for a bare living, but to strive for a good life.” -Robert F. Kennedy We need a more dynamic immigration policy based on government known facts. We work with our junior and senior high students on their career paths based on projected needs in the job market. We also know the size of the workforce that the current jobs market can support based on unemployment numbers. I propose a dynamic needs-based immigration policy that allows for a higher immigration rate when unemployment is low and a lower immigration rate when unemployment is high. I propose making the immigration process more like an application for those jobs where the market data indicates the need. I propose prioritizing the needs-based immigration in accepting immigrants from countries that are under represented in America’s population diversity over those that are more highly represented. I propose capacity based compassion for humanitarian immigration. This proposed needs-based immigration policy makes success more likely for the immigrants while filling needs in America’s job market. A win-win for America and the immigrants.
Topics soon to be addressed on this website: Government spending reform: Our federal government always takes the easy path of increasing taxes to cover increased spending. Government is responsible to balance the budget by eliminating waste and reducing spending before raising taxes. Before any law or regulation is enacted, the economic impact should be calculated fairly and publicly disclosed. Government should not burden future generations with excessive debt. We need to pass the Federal Balanced Budget Act. Global warming and the environment: To the extent that we can, we need to be responsible caretakers of the ‘Aina without causing economic hardships for anyone. We need to implement common sense changes in our daily life routines to eliminate the creation of problems like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Smarter legislation: Enforce ISO 9001-like accountability on our government. Constitutional Amendment: Electoral college votes for popular vote winner in presidential elections. Social Security reform: Ensure that Social Security is sustainable and tamper-proof long into the future. Farm Bill: Break up this Omnibus bill. Stop subsidizing the largest and most profitable farms and focus on the smaller ‘Ohana based farms. Missing persons: This has grown into a larger issue that needs to be addressed in Hawai’i and nation-wide.[2] |
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| —Wallyn Christian's campaign website (2022)[3] | ||
Campaign finance summary
Note: The finance data shown here comes from the disclosures required of candidates and parties. Depending on the election or state, this may represent only a portion of all the funds spent on their behalf. Satellite spending groups may or may not have expended funds related to the candidate or politician on whose page you are reading this disclaimer. Campaign finance data from elections may be incomplete. For elections to federal offices, complete data can be found at the FEC website. Click here for more on federal campaign finance law and here for more on state campaign finance law.
See also
2024 Elections
External links
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Candidate Hawaii House of Representatives District 27 |
Footnotes
- ↑ Wallyn Kanoelani Christian for Hawai'i, "Introduction," accessed July 29, 2022
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ Wallyn Kanoelani Christian for Hawai'i, “Home,” accessed July 27, 2022
