If you are deciding to vote for Rathje or Blum...take this into consideration. From the Gazette endorsement on Sunday. Steve Rathje The three-way Republican race in the 1st District includes two candidates who have previously sought elective office in Congress but didn’t make it past the primary election. Rod Blum of Dubuque lost in the 2012 primary for 1st District, while Steve Rathje was on the short end of a 2008 run for U.S. Senate and a 2010 bid in the former 2nd District. The third opponent is Gail Boliver, a Marshalltown attorney and the moderate in this race whose focus is debt reduction. Both Blum and Rathje are successful businessmen who have conservative approaches on federal spending, taxes and immigration reform. While the differences between these two are relatively small, Rathje gets our endorsement. He’s much about supporting entrepreneurship and tax reform — sorely needed reform, we agree — and he lays out specific ideas. His long-range preference is to see the current tax system replaced with a Fair Tax but he’s realistic enough to know that won’t happen any time soon. He offers an interesting interim proposal that would involve tax holidays and tax rate reductions for both businesses and individuals. He projects that the plan would stimulate much more business investment, small business entrepreneurship and consumer spending that would generate more than enough new tax revenue to offset the rate changes and exempt periods, while expanding jobs for Americans. His ideas on health care and immigration reform aren’t as innovative. However, Rathje strikes us as someone who won’t be shy about pushing conservative, free market-oriented ideas while being open-minded about some reasonable compromises that don’t betray his conservative base. We think Rathje has earned a shot in November.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 21:46:09 +0000
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