Karen Handel and Liberty, Part 1: Introduction, Economy, Education, and Transporation

Note on the following: All views expressed are my own unless explicitly stated otherwise.

KarenHandel.com now has text in addition to the video on the issues page, so now it is time to begin ‘Karen Handel and Liberty’.

As with ‘John Oxendine and Liberty‘, I will go point by point on the Issues page. (For the record, he has since removed the pages I referenced in ‘Ox and Liberty’.)

Karen Handel is clearly a Statist, and there is only a whisper of theocracy on her Issues page – specifically as it relates to abortion and marriage, and even then no particular religious belief is explicitly mentioned, but we’ll see that in a later post.

Beginning with ‘Economy’, we find this:

While addressing these infrastructure needs, Georgia’s next governor must continue Governor Perdue’s record of attracting diverse new businesses to every corner of our state, including businesses from the manufacturing, service, technology and logistics sectors.

Karen believes we need to work hard to retain the current major businesses and corporate headquarters that have already come to Georgia and continue efforts to recruit more. Karen also believes that we need a new focus on attracting and helping small and medium-sized businesses to Georgia. Small business is the real economic backbone of Georgia and the true key to job growth.

As I asked Mr. Oxendine, when did it become a legitimate function of government for the State to do selected private organizations’ marketing for them at the expense of the entire State? No, the best way to attract new business is to reduce the size of government and thereby reduce the spending of said government so that taxes can be lowered as much as possible. This combination of low taxes and high freedoms will then attract both people and business to the State without any active involvement in recruiting by the State government. Furthermore, nearly every small businessman I talk to consistently raises two points: taxes and regulations. Reduce those, and you help him FAR more than any ‘benevolent’ new program would.

Moving to Education, we find:

As Governor, Karen will work with parents, teachers and community leaders to develop programs and innovative approaches to attack the problem of the still unacceptable drop-out rate for our children.

My ‘Separation of School and State’ proclivities are pretty well documented on this forum, so on this one I simply ask why can’t the parents, teachers, and community leaders work together on their own without State micro-management? After all, it was the front-line grunt in Vietnam that first found that putting a condom on the front of an M1A1 assault rifle would prevent water from getting down the barrel and spoiling the weapon. Why can’t we trust the ‘front-line grunts’ in the education battlefield?

While doing everything we can to keep our children in school through graduation is a priority, so is preparing them for life after high school, whether through continuing education in college or technical schools, or through entering the workforce.

As a former teacher, I can honestly tell you that sometimes the best we can do both for the individual student in question and for the class as a whole is to let the student fall flat on their face. If this means dropping out, so be it. In the absence of removing itself from education altogether, the State should at least allow the individual (or, in the case of a minor, his parents) the right to decide when he has had enough schooling, and should not force someone to attend school just because the State thinks it is in their best interest. I can tell you from first hand experience that such a student will do nothing but terrorize everyone in their classes and be a severe detriment to the learning of everyone that the State has forced them to be around against their will.

Too many of our children are graduating from high school lacking the skills to be successful in college or in a job. In college, too many of our students are having to take remedial classes because they lack the skills to enter basic college classes.

Granted. But what do you plan to do about it, Ms. Handel? Will your solution include even more regulations for teachers and schools, who really have no control over this, or will it instead put the onus where it truly belongs – on the student, and to a lesser extent, the student’s parents? Even the best teachers out there – and I have had some AMAZING ones in this state – cannot FORCE a student to learn.

Karen wants to expand and grow the number of Charter Schools in Georgia so that parents and students have choices for their education. Thanks to recent changes in the law, the process for approving Charter Schools is now easier and less cumbersome. We must take advantage of this and grow the number of these schools in Georgia.

In the absence of complete separation of school and State, this at least begins to give the locals a bit more control, so I do like this better than the current system of State level dictatorship in education. Thank you.

Now on to ‘Transportation’, where we find:

Transportation is a key issue for all Georgians. Residents of the Atlanta area are most concerned about congestion, while rural Georgians need the economic development and safety that comes with more paved roads.

This is, for the most part, an accurate assessment of the overall condition of the State here – though I would also include the Regional Cities as being worried more about congestion, since in my experience there tends to be fewer dirt roads in the immediate vicinity of a Regional City than in genuinely rural areas. One example of this is the intersection of Nottingham and Ledo here in Albany.

We are one state, and Karen believes we need a statewide solution to our transportation challenges. … When it comes to funding transportation projects, Karen supports a comprehensive statewide approach rather than a piecemeal regional approach.

In other words, Karen Handel supports the House plan of a statewide sales tax increase rather than a regional sales tax increase. I have yet to find anyone who can explain to me why Dalton should pay for Albany’s roads, why Atlanta congestion is a concern of the citizens of Grady County, or why the citizens of Leesburg should be forced to pay for building a bridge between two mountains outside of Blairsville, but I welcome any attempt by Ms. Handel to make the case here. While I prefer no tax increase or at least the Senate’s regional one if one must happen, I’m honestly open to considering such a statewide tax increase, but I have to be convinced of it and so far none of its proponents have been successful with that.

The recently passed bill on the governance of transportation spending was not all that it could have been, but it does represent at least a step in the right direction.

Honestly, with its sweeping changes to the structure and governance of a Constitutionally mandated organization, I’d personally wait until I heard from the GA Supreme Court on the constitutionality of this particular legislation before I began singing its praises. Overall, I OPPOSED the bill due to its politicizing of transportation in this State, but like I said, I’d also be interested in seeing a GA Supreme Court ruling on its constitutionality.

Also, this is the second time (the first was under ‘Economy’) that Ms. Handel has tied herself pretty closely with the sitting Governor, but that is something we will be exploring later. Just wanted to go ahead and point it out.