| WS: Jared, Joan, and I had a good... they aren't really debates but they are forums at Press Club in Boulder.
TBTH: How did that go?
WS: It was good. It's the standard where... well, it was also standard where they tell you that you have ten minutes to talk, and then you show up and they say, "All right, the candidates each have seven minutes," and it's like, "Wait a second, we have this in writing. It says ten minutes," and they change it on you at the last second. So, I'm up there, I'm third so I have a few minutes to kind of weed out a few things in my head, and actually I think I was about six minutes and they didn't have to bug me. Both Joan and Jared got cut off, so I felt that I at least won over the moderator.
TBTH: Good reaction from the crowd?
WS: Oh yeah. I think we all have our relative strengths and weaknesses in those forums.
TBTH: What do you see as your relative strengths?
WS: I think I do especially well in the Q&A. For some reason I feel more comfortable and more open. The prepared statement just feels a little more stiff to me. I can do it fine. It depends on the crowd and the setting, the location, but the Q&A has a more of a human to human connection, and I seem to do better in those.
TBTH: Well good, I have some questions for you.
WS: Let's do it. I can give you my stump speech if you like. [laughter]
TBTH: No, actually I am going to try to move away from that. Well, maybe a lot of it will be in your stump speech, because a lot of people want to know where you are on a range of issues, so a lot of my questions are going to be about issue specific questions, but I am going to start off with a couple of campaign questions.
WS: Great, great.
TBTH: You seem to be running a fairly lean campaign. How many paid staff do you have on your campaign?
WS: Let's see, today we have Lynea, Kevin, Gabe, and Trey...
KM: Blake starts next week.
WS: Yes, there is going to be a new person coming on in a week or so.
TBTH: So there are four people?
WS: Yes, I think it is four. So, we have four paid staff, and then we have some consultants, a research person, a media person.
TBTH: Do you feel that your staffing is sufficient to match up with your opponents?
WS: Up to now. We're getting ready to staff up, though, Were getting ready to do that. I talked to a lot of people about this, Aaron, in terms of... a lot of other politicians, I should say; Bill Ritter, Mark Udall, John Hickenlooper, and Tom Strickland, the first three being successful and the last one not, but they all said the same thing which was... and Ken Salazar actually was the strongest voice on this, "Raise a lot of money, and don't spend very much until after the first of the year."
TBTH: And the Polis campaign has already gone on television.
WS: Twice. Two buys. One right now, and one...
TBTH: So that seems to be running counter to that advice.
WS: But at the end of the day, and Jared has made it clear, (I am not revealing any state secrets) but he made it clear he'll spend what it takes, and he has the resources to fall back on when his fund raising dollars run out. I don't have that.
TBTH: I've looked at the financials through the 3rd quarter of all the candidates, and you're pretty much on par with individual contributions, but Jared does have that personal cushion that he is drawing on, shown a willingness to draw on, and Joan has a lot of PAC dollars. Is there any intentionality with you around not taking PAC dollars, or is that just how it has shaken out so far?
WS: Well, I've received a total of six thousand dollars of PAC money through the end of the year. One thousand in September and another five thousand this quarter. The PAC dollars Joan has been getting is mostly union, labor endorsements, and those are endorsements I fully expected her to get, having been the President of the Senate - being actively involved in those issues. I have not made any statement that I won't take PAC money. I decided early on that that would be hypocritical of me to say that because I have given money to PACs over a long period of time; environmental PACs. I recognize the value that they have in the system. People who want to contribute fifty dollars to a PAC to be bundled with fifty other people so somebody can give twenty five hundred dollars. That's a meaningful amount of money. If you are calling individuals to send fifty dollars, it is probably not going to work. No, I don't have a particular aversion to that, but it hasn't been something I have gone after aggressively. I think there is a chance that I will have access to some of the environmental PACs that have not endorsed or have not gotten in the race yet, but in no case do I envision PAC money being a meaningful part of my financial resources.
TBTH: If Jared Polis puts in more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars then you can triple the limit of your fund raising, and you have a sizable number of donors who have maxed out. You mentioned Strickland, and as of the third quarter there are between fifty and sixty others who have maxed out. Is that what you are seeing as a possible reservoir to catch up and keep pace, or are you going to be appealing to a broader range of grassroots voters? How do you see that money coming together?
WS: I think that I can't count on Jared hitting the three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If he does that, that will certainly at that point will open it up. I remember when Pete Coors did it, and my friend Jim Kelly (who's maxed out to me also) called me up and said, "I just got the strangest phone call from Ken Salazar. I didn't realize what he was asking me until I hung up." The millionaire's amendment had kicked in. But you know, that happened at the very end for Ken. I think it was sometime in late October. It was late in the race. So, I'm not going to count on that. If it happens then I will definitely go back to those people that have helped in the past to help in a bigger way, but my strategy from the beginning, Aaron, is to continue to grow my circle. I know a lot of people who are willing to reach out to their friends and family in Colorado and elsewhere to support my campaign. I also think I have a competitive advantage within the conservation and environmental community. I have been working on those issues for twenty seven years. I have a national network of relationships around the country, people I work with. My membership and chairmanship of the Land Trust Alliance board exposed me to people from all over the country, and they think it would be a really great thing to have somebody of my background, experience, and accomplishment.
TBTH: Let's talk about that. Let's talk about Great Outdoors Colorado and the issues you have been involved in there. Has that given you legislative experience, through those organizations, that you feel might be useful?
WS: Sure. Good question. I'll just go back, broaden your question a little bit, and go back to the very beginning. My first job out of college was with the Colorado Office of Energy Conservation, I did that for part of a summer after graduating college in 1980, and then I moved back to California where my girlfriend was living; which you know is the most important thing, you know at the time. You guys both know about that, you both have them. I worked at first with something called the California Association of Resource Conservation Districts, and then I went on to head up a regional AFTA group called the American Farmland Trust for eight years. In that capacity I actually had to register as a lobbyist in California, because I was working on state legislative matters, trying to pass a two hundred million dollar bond measure for farmland conservation, changing the way the California Environmental Quality Act works, working on getting more money for farmland and soil conservation issues throughout the state. I was registered for six or seven years as a lobbyist, and the rules there are not that much different. The bar is pretty low. If you have five contacts with legislators you have to register as a lobbyist. I was also working since then on helping cities and counties pass ordinances around conservation land use planning. I actually served on a local planning commission. Through that capacity we worked on some state issues that improved state laws around planning, growth management, and then I was also working on the farm bill and other federal laws that effect agriculture. The 1980 farm bill was something that I got involved in after the fact on the implementation, but in '85 and '90 and since then I have been pretty actively involved in the farm bills. And at GOCO and the Conservation Trust I had to be a registered lobbyist because at GOCO I had to be over at the Capitol a lot, both defending the program from people like Norma Anderson and Tom Norton and others who were trying to take the money away, and also trying to make sure that good things happened, like the conservation tax program that we'll talk about later. That was an idea that I brought to Lois Bradley.
TBTH: Let's talk a bit about that. In 2001, $2.3 Million dollars in tax credits were given for people putting land into conservation trusts. By 2006 that was up to $85 Million. Now the Colorado Department of Revenue wants $15 Million of that back, because there has been a lot of scandal involving possible over-valuations. Tell me something about that affair.
WS: Its a great example of a good idea that in my view has not been properly administered by the State of Colorado. The idea behind it is that land owners voluntarily forgo future subdivision and development on their property to do something that is in the public interest, that will generate a public benefit, either wildlife, open space, recreation, agriculture. There is an opportunity to provide a financial incentive for people to do that. When it started out people didn't know much about it. What made it grow was in 2002 or 2003 the credit became transferable. In other words it was no longer just Farmer Jones putting in his property and taking advantage of the tax credit. The reason the number is so low initially is that most people who put these on their property are land rich and cash poor. They don't have an income on which to take the tax credit. Do you follow me?
TBTH: Yes.
WS: When they made it marketable, in other words a very land rich cash poor farmer could sell their tax credit to someone who has the income to do that, sell it at a discount. They got all their money 85 cents on the dollar or something, the other tax payer pays 90 or 95 cents on the dollar, if they are paying a $100,000 tax bill in Colorado (which is not an issue that I have myself) then they are saving five thousand dollars on their income tax, so it is a good deal for them and a good deal for the farmer. What happened at that point is the word started getting out and more people started doing easements because they knew they were going to be getting paid up front, and more people were interested in buying the credits because they knew they were getting a discount. It took a while for the system to get primed, but many of us in the conservation community had strongly encouraged the Department of Revenue to establish pretty strict oversight rules. When I was Director, what I did the very first time we made a grant for open space in 1994 we put in a process by which we didn't just take the word of every applicant on what the value of the property was. We actually had a process by which we would do spot audits on the valuation. You never knew when you applied to GOCO if you were going to be audited, but you knew there was a pretty good chance you were. We created a system of accountability where we did our own appraisals. We did what we called a 'review of appraisal'. We looked at the appraisal to see if they were following the standard, if it passed the smell test. Early on with some of these deals we were like, "Come on. There is no way this property is worth X. It is worth 1/5 X. Every other deal in the area is worth 1/5 X." We would throw it out. We wouldn't fund it. The Department of Revenue didn't do anything. They didn't administer. They didn't ask. The basically relied on the Internal Revenue Service to catch any bad actors. The IRS is generally working three or four years after the fact, so by the time the IRS tuned into what was going on in Colorado, they were auditing 2002 deals and it was 2006. It was way after the fact, and meantime we have had another three or four bad years and nothing's going on. For those of us who really care about this program and really care about conservation, we were very disappointed about how that all worked out. In the meantime there are people who have been getting away with more and more every year. I think the Department of Revenue is probably right on. What did you say? There were fifteen million dollars?
TBTH: Fifteen million. Now, last year House Bill 1361 put a bit of transparency into the process.
WS: It did
TBTH: Did it go far enough? I understand that finding out about the appraisal still requires a subpoena.
WS: I think it didn't go far enough, but it went as far as we knew last year. This is unraveling, in a way, and we are learning more and more all the time. I think that the leadership of Alice Madden and Jim Isgar has been really important, and they are taking the recommendations from the task force they put together to look at this. It was made up of a lot of people from the conservation community as well as local government and legal and appraisal professionals to really wrestle this thing onto the ground so the public can have confidence that every one of these transactions can have public benefit and the appraisal is correct
TBTH: Let me move away from environmental issues, and talk about some of the ones facing us. The war. You have said, "It is critical that we bring regional and global parties together in an effort to stabilize Iraq and to keep the violence in Iraq from spreading." Can we do that without keeping troops there?
WS: Whose troops? Our troops or any troops?
TBTH: Our troops or any troops.
WS: I think there are two questions there. I would like us to get to the point where our troops don't have to be there anymore, but I do think there will need to be an international peace keeping force. If you would like to call those troops than those are troops; what we have in Bosnia and the Balkans right now. There is still an international peacekeeping force on the ground in the Balakans and it seems to be working, and it has been bought into by the diverse parties in the region. I think that's the same kind of solution that we need to have in the long term security of Iraq. I don't think it is going to happen tomorrow. The surge is working in terms of there is a reduction in casualties, but in my view the surge isn't working. The surge was designed to create space for a political solution. There are lots of reasons the violence has slowed down; Al Sadir has called off the dogs, and there is an alliance between the United States and the Sunnis over here to get Al Qaida and some of the balkanization of Iraq has taken place. A lot of the neighborhoods in places are no longer Sunni and Shiite combined. They are one or the other. So other than Baghdad, where there is that mixture, a lot of the violence has slowed down for a lot of other reasons. I continue to believe that setting a timeline for our withdrawal is going to be the only way that Iraqi people and their government can take seriously that we're going to leave, and they have to get their act together and create a political solution; whether that is partition or some other form, they have to figure that out.
TBTH: Do you see political results coming from the surge in terms of the de-Baathification resolution? Did you see that as representing any sort of political solution on the horizon?
WS: You know, I think that, to be honest with you, I don't know if that's going to make a huge difference or not. I just know that the bigger outcome that the administration and others who supported the surge were hoping to achieve, we aren't really any closer in that way, I believe.
TBTH: Now when you say 'regional' interests is Iran part of that formula?
WS: I think it should be.
TBTH: Is Syria?
WS: Yes, absolutely.
TBTH: What role do you see for Iran and Syria?
WS: I think they need to be at the table because, in some ways, they have, among other countries, the most at stake. They are neighboring countries. They are adjacent to Iraq, and Syria is certainly feeling the effects of the refugee population, and so I think they ought to have a seat at the table and a part in going forward. I know the administration would think it would be taboo to talk to Iran, but they are a part of the region and we should absolutely engage them in whatever way we can. Turkey and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia ought to be part of the solution both in terms of being a part of an international peacekeeping force and paying for some of what's going forward. I'm not sure we're going to get Iran to pay much for it, but they ought to be part of the conversation.
TBTH: The Revolutionary Guard in Iran was recently named a foreign terrorist group in a resolution that looked a lot like the authorization of force in Iraq. Are they a foreign terrorist group?
WS: I wouldn't have voted for that. That was a Lieberman resolution. Wasn't Joe Lieberman pushing that? I think he had a hand in that.
TBTH: I know that Senator Clinton voted for that.
WS: I think it was the wrong thing. I think it was just more saber rattling and a way for America to justify doing what we did in Iraq. I think for lots and lots of reasons we shouldn't be doing that. I don't think there is any justification for it. I mean, we have certainly learned since the intelligence report came out that Iran did not have the nuclear capability that we were worried that they might have. That was the basis for a lot of this going on, and determining that the Revolutionary Guard was a foreign terrorist organization was just another way for us to have our stake in the ground there, which I completely disagree with.
TBTH: Now, tell me about what you see as the balance between security and civil liberties. What was your take on the Military Commissions Act, for instance?
WS: Remind me of the specifics of...
TBTH: The Military Commissions Act established the tribunals at Guantanamo... it actually all could rise back... we could talk about the Patriot Act, which creates National Security Letters, but just generally your ideas on security and civil liberties.
WS: I think, number one, we have gone way too far in Guantanamo and the PATRIOT Act. The PATRIOT Act was some huge number of pages, I don't know the number. It wasn't all bad, but there were parts of it that were really bad. I think what we need to do is strategically go in and surgically remove those things that are bad and keep those things that are fine. On the military commissions, the way we went about the torture and the investigative tactics we used in Guantanamo was fundamentally wrong. It does not fit our country and what we have stood for in our lives. We were one of the major parties in drafting the Geneva convention and it seems to me that we were in direct violation of that. What we stand for in the world is freedom, justice, that's how people in the world see us. I saw that movie about Danny Pearle the other night: A Mighty Heart. Have you seen that?
TBTH: I haven't seen that yet.
WS: They had some photographs, some footage, of Guantanamo, in that. And it was part of what the Pakastanis were saying, "We're going to treat Pearle the same way you treated our people in Guantanamo." It's a slippery slope when you start doing that, when you see what the effect is going to be. I think it's time to shut down Guantanamo. I saw something in the paper about that today too. It has gotten to be such an icon of what is wrong. Holding people against their will; habeas corpus should be adhered to. It's about letting people have a right to a hearing, not about freeing them if there is no good reason, but if there is no reason for them to be there then they shouldn't be incarcerated.
TBTH: You said that there were problems in the original PATRIOT Act. When it was reauthorized in 2005, when the sunset provisions were kicking in, Senator Kerry and others went in and did what they felt was surgically taking out those most egregious parts. Is the current form of the PATRIOT Act viable, or is there still stuff in it that needs to come out?
WS: There is still stuff that needs to be done, and I have to apologize, I have a set of notes on this and there were specific sections that I have to get back to you that I know still need to be fixed, and I can call you about that later. There are very specific things.
TBTH: Let me ask you about Energy. You said on your website that as part of a comprehensive national security program we had to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. You said a diversified energy portfolio should include ethanol, wind, hydroelectric and solar. What about nuclear?
WS: I am not prepared to support nuclear at this point. There are too many questions on that. I think number one the environmental questions about its disposal are still unanswered. The Japanese and the European countries are saying that don't really have a long term solution. So that is number one, first and foremost. We have all the national politicians posturing about Yucca Mountain, and these other places. Where are we going to put this stuff? If we are going to have it be a really meaningful part of our energy supply we have to think it through and I don't want to just go launching into it knowing we don't have an answer to that. I am not willing to trust it. Second is that you know that the nuclear power of the future is going to be more small scale. We built these huge facilities in the past but our future is more around smaller facilities, and frankly that subjects us to a higher level of potential terrorist impacts. The security that will be required to protect those facilities, the waste around them is a lot, and we have to ask ourselves if we want to expose ourselves to that. The other thing is that I think we need to look at every thing we do through a carbon lens. Everything I have learned about nuclear power is that once its up and going its pretty low carbon intensive. To produce it, mining the uranium, producing it, the life cycle costs of nuclear power is very front loaded carbon. At a time when we are trying to reduce our carbon output, going after more nuclear is awful.
TBTH: I am going to go out on a limb and just guess that you think America should sign Kyoto.
WS: Yes. That is a big limb but you got it right. We should have signed it about eighteen years ago.
TBTH: The next step: How do we bring industrializing countries and China in line with the belief that we need to be lowering carbon? It is easy as an industrialized country to say we're willing to turn off the tap. How do we get them to stop?
WS: First and most important thing we have to do, is that we have to start walking the talk. Actually, we have to start talking the talk and then we have to start walking that talk. We haven't even signed Kyoto, so we haven't even pretended to talk the talk. We have got to do that. We have to start showing the rest of the world that we are serious about this, and behaving in that way; not having our carbon emissions continue to go up but having them start to go down. That's going to require some bold leadership and some innovative ideas, and it's going to require the country to have a call to action like we had around the moon shot. Were going to have to bring the kind of resources to the table like we did on the Manhattan Project. A very different kind of goal there, but it is amazing what got accomplished in a relatively short period of time. That's the kind of innovation and ingenuity that were going to have on global warming and climate change and on new energy supply. That is the first and most important thing. Then I think we need to share the technology. We know a lot more about how to do this then the Chinese the Indians and other countries. I saw that India now has a car that is twenty five hundred bucks or something. It came out last week, did you see that? That's going to mean a lot more cars on the road, a lot more fuel consumed, even though it gets sixty miles a gallon. Still, its going to open up the market more. We've got to really get serious about sharing our technology and supporting them, and I also think that in terms of our treaties and our trade agreement we have with China we have to figure out ways to link behavior on environmental issues, and labor issues for that matter, to those agreements; to not miss out on those opportunities to leverage the behavior of our partners in the world.
TBTH: Looking more locally, your children went to public schools. Do you support vouchers? Do you support other school choice?
WS: I don't support vouchers, no. I think we should invest all the money that we have back into the public school system. I think the investments outside aren't justifiable. We have to get more creative. I think that what Michael Bennett is doing in Denver is really good in a whole number of ways; kind of shaking up the public school system. Closing down Manual was a really risky and hard thing to do, but the jury's out on what's going to happen. We've got to be willing to try things like that before we consider giving our public dollars into private education. My own children were for a time in a charter school in our school district. My son and daughter enrolled when it wasn't a charter school, and the school district essentially forced them to become one because they wanted too many waivers under district rules. We were a part of that, and I see the value in school choice it was a great experience. I don't have a blanket of "we ought to have choice everywhere", because that could cause some problems. I think that one of the challenges that I saw that that was apparent and very active in the Boulder Valley school system and that was the communication between the school district and the neighborhood schools and the choice and charter schools was not great. There was a lot that they could learn from each other, but there seemed to be a lot of unnecessary division, and that is what I worked very hard to bridge. I was appointed to a lot, seven or eight or nine different districtwide committees since about 1995, and my role on those committees was often to be someone who happened to have kids in a charter school, but who was a really constructive voice for trying to bring people together around common solutions. That was an interesting position because there were a lot of people who automatically didn't like me because my kids went to a charter school. I could feel it walking into the room, that they had made up their mind, but over time you can break that down and people can realize that we all want the same thing. We all want to have the best education for our kids. The degree that we could figure out ways for communication and figure out best practices for education, I think we can get a lot more done.
TBTH: Now on that, No Child Left Behind: Do we fund it? Do we scrap it? Or something else?
WS: I don't think we scrap it. You know, it is located in the middle of the Education Act (I don't exactly the name of it.) It is a provision in there. I think that parts of what it stands for are a good idea around accountability. How they tried to go about accountability was the problem. The did latitudinal testing. If you know the lingo. We need longitudinal testing. My wife has been a teacher in the Boulder Valley school system and she talked about this because of the pressure of, "The CSAPs are coming out, what are we going to do?" Her response is that the crop of kids that she inherited from the class before had a lot more to do with the performance of her kids then whether or not they were doing well in her class. She would do as much as she could to take a kid from where they were to where they need to get. Kids would arrive in her classroom at various places on that continuum. The longitudinal testing is a much better idea. We should be tracking kids, not classrooms, not schools, but kids so we can help kids get from where they are to where they need to be. That is one thing we can do other than No Child. The second thing is that part of the philosophy of No Child Left Behind is to take these schools, that in my mind ought to be kids, that were really failing and to help them improve and help them get better. What happened was that the money dried up. There wasn't any money and now it has become punitive. There's no money to make them better, and if you don't reach a certain level of proficiency by a certain date then your supposed to close down. You get your funding cut off. That's ridiculous. It is absolutely the wrong signal in my view.
TBTH: Health Care: I know you're for universal health care. Are you for single payer health care?
WS: Let me talk about this for a second. I think that we ought to have... and our society is so wealthy that the idea that people are going without health care is embarrassing, and something that we really need to do something about. I think that in America everybody should have access to affordable quality health care. If I fall into the universal health care umbrella with that statement then so be it. I happen to believe, Aaron, that the best way to get there is to start out by giving every child in America access to health care. I think that is the easiest thing we ought to do. It's a no brainer. Congress tried to get there most of the way this time, and Bush vetoed it a couple of times, but fully funding S-CHIP is something we ought to do. We also ought to make sure that people at the end of their lives have the kind of health care they need as well, and that may be expanding Medicare and Medicaid in order to accomplish that. We need to do more around prescription drugs, both filling the donut hole and figuring out ways to import safe drugs from Canada and elsewhere. Then I think we need to offer something in the middle for those people who are still slipping through the cracks. Some sort of plan that is affordable. It may not be the gold plated plan, but it is something that will provide basic health care. There are two other things about that. One, I spent some time recently around our community health centers in our district; the Clinic Campesina and the People's Clinic in Boulder, and those are really great facilities that our country needs to have more of and that our district needs to have more of. Are you familiar with these things at all?
TBTH: Yes.
WS: Have you been over there?
TBTH: I haven't.
WS: You ought to go over there and take a walk through. Kevin and I did it, and its fascinating. It is all electronic records, number one; something that everyone is talking about. They're doing it. They serve a population of people that can't otherwise afford health insurance. Pete Leibig, their Director seems to think they are probably covering almost everyone in Boulder. Longmont's under Salud, which is a different program, but in Thorton, Federal Heights, Louisville and Lafayette there are a lot of people who don't have access. There is a big long waiting list. There is an opportunity to provide a safety net within our system in a very effective way. So I think expanding those... and philosophically where I come out on this issue, and I should have started with this at the beginning, is that I think that a fundamental flaw in our health care system is we focus too much on treating sick people. Some huge percentage of the money we spend on health care is treating seven diseases, almost all of which are preventable in a significant way. Diabetes, heart disease, these things that can largely be effected by diet and exercise and lifestyle choices. If you're an active person, if you eat healthy and exercise then you are much less likely to get them, and yet there is no incentive in our system to do them. In fact, many many health insurance companies do not provide any kind of reimbursement to a doctor who give a fifteen minute talk about, "Stop smoking, Aaron," or "You need to get out and walk three days a week," "You've got to cut out the sugar and the fat in your diet." You don't get reimbursed for that. As a consequence many of them just don't do it. I think that we need to have a major shift in focus. Even Mike Huckabee, the guy lost a hundred and something pounds and he created a real health consciousness in the State of Arkansas around school lunches and things like that. That's the kind of leadership we need to have in Washington; send a signal to all of Americans that we don't have to be this way. That would really turn things around dramatically if we got on that band wagon.
TBTH: Ok, let's send you the bill for all of this. You've got more resources to health care, more resources to education, more resources to energy policy. If we end the war we are not spending money we don't have, but that's not the same as having money. Do we work it out through taxes? Greater deficits? How do we pay for it?
WS: When I would get there, I would have the opportunity to either extend or not extend the tax cut of 2001 and I would vote to not extend that. That's a chunk of money. I would be in favor of phasing out most, maybe all, but most of the tax credits and benefits that the oil and gas industry has been getting for years and years and move those into renewable energy. I think that we need to have more of our public resources on research and support for the renewable energy side, so that could be a straight offset. I think that we need to have a national conversation about our military spending. Even before Iraq and Afghanistan we spend more on our military budget than every nation combined. That is just astounding.
TBTH: Elizabeth Dole recently entered a bill to set a baseline for the Department of Defense at a baseline of four percent of GDP. Is that too much? Is that too little?
WS: I don't know what that number translates into, all I know is that we're spending... there was an authorization this week that talked about $698 Billion. I don't know if that is all from this year, or some of it from last year. I don't necessarily like that, setting a base. I think we need to rethink our base. I think we have other priorities. Going back to what I said earlier when you quoted me in terms of our role in the world, we need to really engage our other partners in the world to help shoulder some of the load, on international security, on global warming, on world health. These are issues that don't obey national boundaries. If because of global warming, malaria comes back, and lots of other diseases like West Nile Virus and start spreading, not just in our country but worldwide, then it is in our interest to do something about that. We are not really engaging like that in the world right now. I think that's what we have to do. I think that on international security we have to get other people to start footing more of the bill for what were doing. We can't be the world's cop like we have been on an ongoing basis. It's costing too much. It's costing my kids too much in terms of the debt we're passing on to them. I also, by the way, am a big fan of Pay-Go. If we want to create a new program we should pay for it.
TBTH: Do you support a line item veto?
WS: I don't support a line item veto at this point. I want to understand that more, but I think at the Federal level I think that the separation of powers that we have right now is working pretty well. Frankly, I really worry about what George Bush would have been doing with his line item veto. All of the things that I care about could have been excised out of the budget without a two thirds majority of Congress to override - which they couldn't have gotten.
TBTH: On your website you say, "Immigration reform is a vitally important issue." Is it? How so?
WS: Absolutely. I think it is really big for this district. I hear from lots of different employers; business people, agriculture, high tech, the hospitality industry, saying that they don't have enough workers to fill the jobs they need. Those usually come from guest workers. The guest worker and immigration process isn't working. There are not enough visas that they are willing to grant to fill the jobs that need to get filled. So, immigration is a big issue and we need a vigorous guest worker program that's going to deal with it. I also think that from a moral standpoint that its the right thing to do to provide the people who are here, undocumented at this point, a path to citizenship. They deserve to come out of the 'shadows of our society' as some people have said and become a part of our community in a formal way. One of the cool committees I sat on was called the Stratification Task Force and we looked at the stratification of different schools around the Boulder Valley school district. There was an elementary school in Boulder that had something on the order of 80% Latino students, and a very high percentage of Spanish speakers. I was in there helping to participate in that discussion, and I was hearing from them about how these kids were born here so they're citizens but these people weren't. I think that's wrong. They're paying taxes. They're performing important jobs in our communities. Their kids are going to our schools. I think that critical. I think its important, and its going to be tough to tackle, but its something that's going to come up.
TBTH: The question I'm going to end on... I'm going to ask you about the "Right to Work" act and the place of organized labor in Colorado and nationally. What are your views on organized labor?
WS: I think that organized labor has been an important part of the evolution of employment and our economy of this country. We had to figure it out at some point when the workers were being so poorly treated that they need to have a right to organize and create unions, and they have done that. They have evolved over the years, and there has been an ebbing and flowing. On a lot of the issues (I have been filling out a lot of these questionnaires) what I came to appreciate is that a lot of the issues they care about are the issues you and I care about; education, social security, health care, the war in Iraq because of the resources and so issues and cares of working men and women in this country are very similar to the very issues you and I care about. I think that what has happened in my view is that the pendulum has dramatically swung in the direction of management. Particularly the NRLB is now stacked with people who are totally on the side of business and management and not on the side of the worker. There are lots and lots of decisions coming up in there that are not in support of the worker. The fines aren't stiff enough. The process is way too slow, so there is nothing but an incentive for business to do whatever they need to do to squash down workers ability to organize. I think first and foremost we have got to get a new President, because nothing's going to happen on this guy's watch. We have got to turn that around, and where we need to change the laws to make it more favorable for workers to have those kinds of rights, we should do it. Again, I think that's not going to change with this President, and I don't know even if its going to change with this Congress, but in 2009 there's a chance it will do that.
TBTH: Well, all right. Thank you for making this time. Hopefully the recorder will work.
WS: We got a little Louis Armstrong in the back ground. It was good to have more of an extended conversation than between box breaking or weed pulling or can collecting or the other things we have done.
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