Alex Balekian's Issue Positions (Political Courage Test)
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Alex Balekian has provided voters with clear stances on key issues by responding to the 2024 Political Courage Test.
California Congressional Election 2024 Political Courage Test
| Pro-choice | Do you generally support pro-choice or pro-life legislation? | ||
| No | Do you support the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade? | ||
| As a physician, I would like to expand not only access to pregnancy planning for women who do not wish to get pregnant, but also affordable child care services for women who want to get pregnant but need help juggling the responsibilities of family/work/education. I prefer focusing on prevention rather than punishment. It is not the government's role to insert itself within the doctor-patient relationship. | |||
| Yes | Do you support expanding federal funding to support social safety net programs such as Social Security and Medicare? | ||
| Yes | Do you support a decrease in income taxes in order to balance the budget? | ||
| No | Do you support a wealth tax in order to pay for public programs? | ||
| Our government should focus on securing the public safety, public health, and public wealth (in that order) of its own citizens before helping other nations. The federal government has plenty of tax money that it wastes unnecessarily; we should not entrust it with MORE of our tax money if it cannot prove to us that it can operate efficiently on the tax money that we ALREADY give it. 40% of our defense budget involves arming other countries. We can reappropriate most or all of that money to bolster programs like Medicare and Social Security that benefit OUR OWN citizens; that still leaves the 60% of defense spending that we use to bolster OUR OWN army and secure our own borders. | |||
| Yes | Do you support the regulation of indirect campaign contributions from corporations, unions, and individuals? | ||
| Dark money is a scourge on our elections; I do not accept corporate PAC or dark money. My opponent, Laura Friedman, accepts dark money from the Tides Foundation through it subsidiaries, including the California Voter Education Fund, the Resources Legacy Foundation, and the Leage of Conservation Voters. | |||
| Yes | Do you support protecting government officials, including law enforcement officers, from personal liability in civil lawsuits concerning alleged misconduct? | ||
| No | Do you support increasing defense spending? | ||
| As I said previously, 40% of our defense budget is for foreign countries. We can redirect that the majority of that towards domestic programs (eg Medicare, Social Security) and still be able to redirect that foreign funding towards our domestic defense budget and still increase resources in the event of a threat to our national security. | |||
| No | Do you support federal spending as a means of promoting economic growth (e.g. grants, tax incentives)? | ||
| Yes | Do you support the federal government increasing funding for affordable housing programs? | ||
| Yes | Do you support the federal government taking action, beyond those of the Federal Reserve, to alleviate inflation? | ||
| Fiscal responsibility and BALANCED BUDGETS will do more to alleviate inflation rather than Fed Reserve actions. BOTH parties have irresponsibly raised the debt ceiling, and the ballooning national debt is the primary cause of inflation. I will NEVER vote for deficit spending, regardless of whether the budget is introduced by a Republican or Democratic president. | |||
| No | Do you support the forgiveness of federal student loan debt? | ||
| We can have targeted forgiveness to recruit for in-demand jobs. For example, there is an epidemic of mental illness an drug addiction in this country, and we have a national shortage of social workers and therapists to manage this epidemic. We could foster the education/training of more social workers and therapists by forgiving their loans if they commit to 10 years of service in addiction and mental health counseling. | |||
| Yes | Do you support requiring a government-issued identification in order to vote at the polls? | ||
| No | Do you support government funding for the development of renewable energy (e.g. solar, wind, geo-thermal)? | ||
| Yes | Do you support the federal government allowing permits for drilling on public lands? | ||
| Private corporations will develop efficient/cheap technologies if the market wants it. When the government gets involved, it artificially props up unnecessarily expensive/inefficient technologies. For example, Obama gave massive subsidies to Elon Musk to develop an electric car for the masses, and then he produced a $60k Tesla that ended up being a status symbol for rich people. These people aren't buying Teslas unless there is a government incentive offered, and the average middle class person isn't driving a Tesla. The iPhone was developed and perfected without government subsidies. The functionality that it added to people's lives led people to buy the phones without any government subsidies. The iPhone is not restricted to upper class Americans. Therefore, if a shrewd company sees an opportunity in the market and is able to develop a good product, the population will eat it up without any government help. | |||
| No | Do you support a government-run (e.g. single-payer) healthcare program, such as Medicare-for-All? | ||
| Yes | Do you support expanding paid family AND/OR medical leave benefits (e.g. maternity leave)? | ||
| No | Should the government be able to regulate the cost of prescription drugs? | ||
| Medicare for All is a great idea, but the federal government has shown us with the Veterans' Administration Healthcare system that it is TERRIBLE at operating an efficient system that meets patient needs. **Doctors would be excellent people to run a hospital and healthcare system, but Obama's Affordable Care Act actually OUTLAWED doctors from owning/operating hospitals in order to appease the hospital corporation lobby. This part of the ACA is a well-kept secret and needs to be repealed so that doctors like me (who know where the inefficiencies of a health system are) can operate a hospital for the needs of patients and not for corporate profits. As far as regulating prescription drug costs, the real culprits are Pharmacy Benefit Managers, which control the availability and pricing of drugs. The PBMs are owned by the health insurance companies, not the pharma companies. They also intentionally make newer, brand name drugs more available than older generic drugs because the profit margin is higher. Right now pharmaceutical companies are peddling newer cholesterol meds (like Crestor) when older generic medicines (like generic Zocor) do the EXACT same thing. They have never shown that the newer, more expensive drugs are better than the older ones, but doctors prescribe the newer ones because of availability that is dictated by PBMs. Rather than regulating the cost of prescription drugs, Congress should state that Medicare enrollees should have equal access to the different medications within a specific class (ie equal access to Crestor and Zocor), and then they should incentivize doctors to prescribe the equally-effective generics. When the doctor incentive is less than the cost difference of the two drugs, the health system saves money, the doctors are happier with slightly higher pay, and the patients get equally effective drugs without being bankrupted by their co-pay. | |||
| Yes | Do you support increasing security along the southern US border? | ||
| Yes | Do you support requiring immigrants to return to their country of origin before they are eligible for citizenship, regardless of their immigration status? | ||
| Documented immigrants should be able to stay in the US as long as their documents are valid. I have a proposal for a transparent, points-based immigration system that gives people a ranking on a list based on younger age (eg being able-bodied for work), job skills needed by our country, and English-language proficiency. Even people who are here illegally will be allowed to apply within 60 days in a no-fault system. They will not be penalized for their undocumented status. They will be invited to apply just like everyone else and then wait in the last country they were in before entering the US. This also allows asylum seekers to wait in the country that they arrived from (eg Mexico) while they transparently watch their place on the rank list. | |||
| No | Do you support economic intervention as a means of resolving international conflicts? | ||
| No | Do you support the US providing increased offensive military aid to Ukraine? | ||
| So long as we have a ballooning national debt, we should not expand our offerings to foreign countries for their armed conflicts. An ingenious way to kneecap Russia and Iran and other state sponsors of terrorism (e.g. Qatar) is to drive down their primary money-making source: the price of oil. If the US uses more of its own oil and decreases its oil imports from other countries, then the price of oil will decrease internationally, and Russia will have no more budget to fund its war with Ukraine. This way, we can force Russia to the peace table without ever firing a single bullet. | |||
| No | Do you generally support increased regulations on social media companies (e.g. Tik Tok, Facebook, etc.)? | ||
| The first amendment gives us the right to free speech. The government has no role in muzzling anybody. People need to be more savvy as far as their informational sources. We were all taught not to accept candy from strangers; why the hell are we accepting at face value something that a stranger says online? Common sense and basic intelligence have gone out the window. | |||
| 1) Homelessness: As a physician, I will significantly decease homelessness nationwide by treating it as the mental illness and drug addiction that it truly is. It is not simply a housing issue. We must reopen federal mental hospitals for the severely mentally ill until they are ready to be discharged for outpatient follow-up in their home communities; we need to disband the tent cities and reunite mentally-ill and drug-addicted homeless people with their families because the medical literature has shown that family-involved mental healthcare and drug counseling have superior outcomes when compared to rehab without family (the tent cities and the state governments are not an adequate support system). Finally we need to secure the border and our ports of entry to stop the flow of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs coming from Mexico and China. 2) Home ownership: I will introduce a bill to change the tax laws to eliminate the maximum 401k/IRA contribution limit, and I will also allow individuals to withdraw the entirety of their retirement account penalty-free and tax-free so long as they purchase a home. When they sell that home, they have up to one year to put it in another home or else deposit it back into their retirement account without having to pay taxes on it. Why is our money being held separately from us until we are 60, and why are the stock-trading funds and banks able to gamble with our money and buy up homes with Real Estate Investment Trusts? People should be able to bank away their money in a home because that is how the middle class grows their financial worth. 3) Public Safety: Because Progressive District Attorneys like George Gascon refuse to prosecute petty criminals who steal with smash-and-grabs, I will pass legislation to make it a FEDERAL CRIME to steal from a small business with 50 employees or fewer. This way, if a small business that is robbed cannot get justice from people like DA Gascon, then the owner can go to the FBI and the DOJ to take up the case and prosecute the criminals. For funding, we can use the 40% of the defense budget that is given away to foreign countries; this still preserves our safety by maintaining the 60% of the defense budget that is spent FOR US. |
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