Wayne Lewis' Issue Positions (Political Courage Test)
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Wayne Lewis has provided voters with clear stances on key issues by responding to the 2019 Political Courage Test.
New Jersey State Legislative Election 2019 Political Courage Test
| Pro-choice | a) Do you generally support pro-choice or pro-life legislation? | ||
| Yes | b) Should abortion be legal when the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape? | ||
| No | c) Do you support the prohibition of public funds for organizations that perform abortions? | ||
| While I personally dislike the idea of many abortions, I fully respect a woman's right to choose. | |||
1) Budget Stabilization:Indicate which proposals you support (if any) for balancing New Jersey's budget.
| No | a) Reducing state employee salaries AND/OR pensions? | ||
| No | b) Instituting mandatory furloughs AND/OR layoffs for state employees? | ||
| Yes | c) An income tax increase on any tax bracket? | ||
| Unlike the federal budget, the state budget should be ballanced most years to avoid debt sevice. I see the best way to ballance budgets is to create increased generative activity in the state economy. Spending cuts, when needed must be made with a systemic eye to the future rather than austerity. I generally prefer strongly progressive taxation in cases where short term tax increases are required. | |||
| Yes | a) Do you support a limit on campaign contributions to state candidates? | ||
| Yes | b) Do you support the regulation of indirect campaign contributions from corporations and unions? | ||
| Yes | c) Do you support the use of an independent AND/OR bipartisan commission for redistricting? | ||
| No | d) Do you support requiring a government-issued photo identification in order to vote at the polls? | ||
| Yes | e) Do you support automatic voter registration? | ||
| I also support ranked choice voting and participatory governance by sortition for a wide variety of issues of public importance at both state and federal levels including,but not limited to, budget,money creation (federal),climate action,corporate oversight, and the fourth estate. | |||
| No | a) Do you support capital punishment for certain crimes? | ||
| No | b) Should a minor accused of a violent crime be prosecuted as an adult? | ||
| No | c) Do you support the enforcement of federal immigration laws by state and local police? | ||
| Yes | d) Do you support the legalization of recreational marijuana? | ||
| e) Other or expanded principles: | |||
| Yes | a) Do you support state government spending as a means of promoting economic growth? | ||
| No | b) Do you support lowering state income taxes as a means of promoting economic growth? | ||
| No | c) Do you support reducing government regulations on the private sector? | ||
| Yes | d) Do you support expanding access to unemployment benefits? | ||
| No | e) Do you support requiring welfare applicants to pass a drug test in order to receive benefits? | ||
| Yes | f) Do you support an increase of the minimum wage of New Jersey? | ||
| Yes | g) Do you support requiring employers to provide paid family leave? | ||
| I support public spending to support generative ( life serving purpose,stakeholder driven,community centered, biophysically circular) growth. I also support a universal dividend (UBI) as a stimulus, empowerment of labor force, transition to a reduced role for jobs as a technologically post scarcity paradigm. I also support a transition to neo Georgian taxation structure in which generatively earned income is not taxed, but land ownership, platform ownership, polution, and other forms of extraction from the commonwealth are taxed rather than work. Complex systems are counterintuitive, simple minded intervention like austerity almost always worsens percieved problem. | |||
| No | a) Do you support adopting federal education standards in New Jersey? | ||
| No | b) Do you support state funding for charter schools? | ||
| Yes | c) Should immigrants unlawfully present in the United States who graduate from New Jersey high schools be eligible for in-state tuition at public universities? | ||
| Generally, in the coming age of extreme turmoil we need a very different approach to education, an approach that fosters transdiscplinary collaboration and complex systems literacy. This would be an approach featuring frequent collaborative projects that are ecologically centered and properly motivate relevant deep dives into various disciplines. I do not support standardized testing as metrics for success in education. We are no longer training future factory workers, rather we must train future critical thinkers with non linear complex systems literacy. | |||
| Yes | a) Do you support state funding for the development of renewable energy (e.g. solar, wind, thermal)? | ||
| Yes | b) Do you support government regulations of greenhouse gas emissions? | ||
| Yes | c) Do you support increasing state funding for clean drinking water initiatives? | ||
| Climate change is the most well known symptom of a suite of existential risks we face all stemming from overconsumption and a broken relationship between man and the biosphere. A future consistent with life as we know it includes a rapid transition to Distributed renewable energy, a massive effort to regenerate damaged ecosystems( rainforrest, old growth, wetlands, aquatic, grasslands) , a shift to modern distributed agroecology farming, elimination of linear extraction/waste paradigm, and elimination of unnescesary global trade. whats light is global (information), whats heavy (physical production) must be local everywhere within biophysical boundaries. | |||
| Yes | a) Do you generally support gun-control legislation? | ||
| Yes | b) Should background checks be required on gun sales between private citizens at gun shows? | ||
| No | c) Should teachers be allowed to bring guns into the classroom? | ||
| Yes | d) Should a license be required for gun ownership? | ||
| while i generally support common sense gun control, I recognize that the gun violence problem is far more complex than availabilty of guns. A mass shooting is an extreme act of anti-social suicide and increases in these in recent years is symptomatic of profound sickness in the social fabric of our society. We have a great deal of work to do. A transition from spectator consumer society to participatory commons centric democracy as a network of self soveriegn ( food,energy,mobility,on demand production in maker spaces) will go along way towards improving this. | |||
| Yes | a) Should the state government increase funding for treatment facilities to combat opioid abuse? | ||
| Yes | b) Do you support Medicaid expansion through New Jersey's health care programs? | ||
| No | c) Do you support requiring individuals to purchase health care insurance? | ||
| Yes | d) Do you support legislation that grants citizens the right to choose to die through euthanasia? | ||
| No | e) Do you support eliminating religious exemptions for vaccinations? | ||
| I believe healthcare is a right and our healthcare system has many pathologies including an overfocus on reductionist pharmaceutical intervention for chronic illness, a lack of integral perspective, and many pathologies induced by using market forces where inapropriate. I support single payer healthcare free of " fee for service" tracking focused on whole systems approach to preventitive medicine with focussed reductionist intervention mostly in accute situations. I would eliminate most private insurance, and move RnD to university level. Pharma prices should be tightly regulated to modest profit over production costs. | |||
| Yes | a) Do you support the inclusion of sexual orientation in New Jersey's anti-discrimination laws? | ||
| Yes | b) Do you support the inclusion of gender identity in New Jersey's anti-discrimination laws? | ||
| Yes | c) Do you support greater efforts by New Jersey state government in closing the pay gap between men and women? | ||
| Yes | d) Do you support legislation that would hold parents liable for damages caused by their child's bullying offenses? | ||
| This last id qualify, i think we need to be very careful here not to create more pronounced pathologies than we have already, more research is needed. | |||
| My main priority, and my view of central governance is that it is my job as an elected official to make it easier for communities to help themselves and each other to gain local soveriegnty and resillience in a sustainable way. I believe our future is participatory, polycentric, networked and locally self soveriegn. | |||
| Id say my top priority is to facilitate the building of community wealth by providing tax incentives and low interest state guaranteed loans towards building ecosystems of local small and medium sized businesses around anchor institutuions in southern new jersey. This will not require a heck of a lot of funding. |
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