Candidate Interview: Mark Baisley — U.S. Senate

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• Transcript

  Hello my name is Mark Baisley and I am running for United States Senate from Colorado. I’m looking to fulfill the challenge given us by Benjamin Franklin, as he was emerging from the writing of the Constitution, and he was asked by someone in the crowd, hey, what kind of government have you given us? And he said, A Republic Ma’am, if you can keep it. So keeping the Republic is a challenge, and we’ve pulled it off so far in this first 250 years. I’d like to see it continue for the next 250 years as well. So keeping the Republic is my goal. And that’s that’s trying to adhere to those American founding principles established in the mission statement, as I call it, the founding document of our country, which is the Declaration of Independence. The perspective that I bring is one of having an international upbringing. Having lived outside of the United States much of my life, Puerto Rico and South Africa, and that’s what made me realize the exceptional nature of, the United States. And then from a professional standpoint, I’m an aerospace engineer by by profession. So I can bring that. Aerospace is a big deal in Colorado. Hundreds of thousands of jobs and a lot of big businesses are resident in Colorado. We have a lot of of military bases. And so that’s an important representation for Colorado to have in Washington, DC. You know, there’s a a monument to my hero, my political hero in Washington, DC. Monument to Thomas Jefferson I keep a little mini statue, about nine inch bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson on my state Senate desk in the in the Capitol in Denver, and one of the panels at his memorial back in Washington, D.C., says that, hey, we should educate the common people on those American founding principles. And I think we do a really poor job of that. Now. I think, you know, there’s there are three branches of science generally recognized: the natural sciences, the formal sciences and the social sciences. We we know, after all these many years of governing ourselves, trying every kind of government there is, and there’s over 200 countries now or about 200 countries now in the world, and you can look at all the cause and effect. How well do people do under the different types of governments? And I don’t think we do a good job of educating why our form of government is an excellent form of government. And so educating the common people in that manner, as Thomas Jefferson challenged us to, that would be my my biggest goal and how to get that done. Just trying to get that in the curriculum of K-12 and giving a whole bunch of speeches on that topic. Okay, the undo would be the annoying one of charging everybody $0.10 a bag when they get out of the grocery store, and that’s not a big one. But but it’s a reach into our daily lives that I find annoying and not just annoying, but it is outside of the purview, outside of the role of the government. So that, again, that founding document says that government derives its power from the consent of the governed. And I don’t recall the governed saying, hey, I’ll tell you what, prevent me from from using a bag from the grocery store or from the, the supermarket, the big box store. Yeah. Charge me for that. Charge me $0.10 so that to punish me for using a bag. Anyway, I think that’s an overreach. So I would get rid of that one. The one that I would defend. Property taxes went shooting up like crazy a few years ago. And that was because of what I think is a basic mistake, a fundamental mistake that we tie property taxes to the property value. So when the property values went racing up high, then all those property taxes went racing up high. I introduced a bill to remove property values from the formula for calculating property taxes. Now, the Democrats killed that bill, but I intend to reintroduce that bill at the national level in the United States Senate. If the people arm me with this position, because it would apply to most states across the US. You know, I have a thousand things come to mind on this one. But I think the biggest one is that policy that’s on the books is health care. The, you know, the government’s involvement and the partnership between and it’s not a good partnership between the providers, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry. All of those together create a bureaucracy that has not been good for for patients. It’s not been good for the citizens. So this was really emphasized, really codified with the Affordable Care Act. And as I started looking into how would I address that as a United States Senator, I discovered that United States Senator Rick Scott from Florida had already introduced a bill to address this very thing, and he introduced it just this past November. So I visited with him recently, and he and I said, hey, help me get elected and I will be another vote in your favor on this one. He calls his solution the More Affordable Care Act. And what it does generally is it puts market forces back into health care by giving more choices to the patient so that they decide where they get their imaging and so on. And I think it would really improve and would just leverage the all the natural forces of the free market in health care and would that would be the first big step. So there’s that. Another real quick one student debt. Student debt is $1.85 trillion. We have a student debt. And that came about because in the Obama administration, President Obama federalized student loans. And so you almost can’t get a private student loan since then. But what happened, the result of it, it encouraged the higher-ed to balloon their costs and to the students because they had all this, this very easy to to access loan money. And so these students are now saddled with enormous amounts of debt. It was just not a good thing for the students. So I have a plan not invented by me, but introduced to me by a very smart person who presented this idea. And I said, I love this. And that is to go lean on the endowments of all these universities that benefited so greatly from that, get them to help those students pay down that debt, get them out from under that burden so that they can go buy their first home and live a good life. Yeah, that strikes a nerve for me. You know, the specific error that I made was talking to employees, prospective employees before having the funding in my company to hire them. So I had in my first company, I’m running my second small tech company, trying to become a big tech company. My first company, which I grew up and sold, we were we were working on a spin off of that company, and I talked with two people that I was very enthused about coming to work for that company and launching that little spin off. They were so excited that they both quit their jobs just in anticipation of being hired by my company to do to take off. And we weren’t ready for that. And I realized the impact on their lives, and I felt this sudden burden of, wow, I’ve got to somehow hustle up the funding so that they can keep their houses and so on. So that was a painful lesson for me. We pulled that off. We we got through that for for those two folks. But it should not have happened in the sloppy way that it did. So what I’ve adjusted for in employment going forward is I don’t even bother interviewing or even saying, mentioning that I have an opening until I have the funding for that job so that I can make a decision right away and put people to work. So yeah. Painful lesson. I guess I’m going to say my mantra, which is smaller government. Thomas Jefferson, my hero, said in his first inaugural address that what we need is a wise and frugal government. So I love that because it acknowledges that there is a role for government, but it should be a wise role. The the role primarily is to secure the people’s rights, but we also appropriately give government the role of of developing infrastructure to facilitate commerce, like good roads and good airports and air traffic control, those things that don’t make money, but it facilitates cargo, the moving of people and cargo and and liberty like that. And so there’s that good side. But then on the other side, the biggest reason that we have affordability challenge is because government keeps growing bigger and bigger and bigger. It creates more and more regulation, which creates costs. And it taxes more and more. And the taxes. You know, first they the taxes go to provide worthy things, worthy services like court systems and that sort of thing. But then after a while, the bureaucrats start realizing. The legislators start realizing, see, I can tax the people to move money from them to someone else in exchange for their vote, so that all of these things just add up to a ballooning of government. And I mean the state, since I’ve been in the Colorado state legislature for eight years now, the budget has gone, the annual budget has gone from 33 billion to 46 billion, meaning it’s grown by 1.5 billion every year. So the point is answer to your question is reduce government, make it smaller, reduce the footprint of government in everybody’s lives. And that is a very hard thing to do, because legislators get addicted to all that cash and they love to to exchange it for votes. But that’s going to be my biggest effort is to try to find areas everywhere that I can reduce the involvement of government in our lives and the size of it. You know what, I just love Colorado, and there’s nothing more fun to me than sitting in a mountain stream and even in a lawn chair. I actually keep a lawn chair in the back of my my SUV that I drive around in and water socks. So. And just to sit in a mountain stream with a cigar and enjoy the river and all that nature. Nothing’s just more refreshing than flowing clean Colorado mountain water. And so that’s my favorite thing to do, hiking as well, you know, hiking around. And I’ve got seven grandkids that I love to go spend time with. And I’ll take them hiking around with me as well. So that’s it. Just enjoying everything that Colorado is, on top of all of the tremendous job opportunities in high tech. So it’s a it’s a great combination in the state. I love this place.