Do you support privatizing Medicare?
Privatization” has to be one of the most politically charged terms out there. No one knows what it means. No, I’m not going to go out and privatize Medicare. I’d ask, how can we get market forces involved? Costs are skyrocketing with government oversight.
You’d like to cut back the IRS budget. Won’t that end up reducing revenue collection?
The tax code is nine times longer than the Bible. If we made the tax code simpler, we would not need the same number of people who work on it. We’ve got to simplify the system.
Do you favor raising the retirement age?
I would not raise it for those currently in the retirement system or near it. We do need to look at doing so for younger people, by gradually increasing it a month at a time over a series of years. I’m 43. We need to look at it for me, even.
How will you get buy-in from voters?
I run into very few people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who think Social Security will be there when they retire. And it’s not going to exist in the same way unless we make some changes.
Will you vote to raise the debt ceiling?
The last thing we want to do is just continue raising it with no assurance we’re ever going to work to bring it down. That’s my frustration with the president’s budget: I wish he would have taken some bold stand to bring down the debt, but he didn’t.