One of Eddie Garcia’s priorities in his November bid to unseat incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Richmond, is meeting as many people as he can “to hear them, hear their concerns, understand the cultural environment in which they live in.
“Virginia is so diverse in its culture between the Southwest, between Hampton Roads, Northern Virginia, the Valley, and Richmond itself,” he said while in Stuart last month at a GOP committee meeting.
Garcia said the southwest is a vital, important area. “I believe that too many federal politicians, or people running for federal office, disregard the Southwest, they disregard the rural areas of the Commonwealth.”
Garcia, who grew up in rural America in a town of about 1,000 people, said he knows rural towns are full of good people with concerns that aren’t shared by city dwellers.
“Their voice is just as important as anyone else’s, and I think any leader would tell you that you’ve got to understand an organization or a people or a population” in as much detail as possible, he said.
Garcia also believes being present in the Southwest is important as rural areas are being left behind by the current government.
“If we don’t have a voice to champion their concerns, it’s going to continue to go in a way that is not positive for these communities,” he said.
If elected, Garcia said he wants to focus on rebuilding small-town Virginia and “rebuilding some of these Downtowns that have been hollowed out because of businesses that have long been gone.”
He also wants to improve the quality of the education system and public schools, especially in areas where there’s only one school, to incentivize people to show up and rebuild the communities over the long term.
Education
Garica supports universal school choice.
“Having the power and the control of the money in the hands of the parents to make their decisions on where to send their kids to school, how to educate their children – whether it’s homeschool, charter school, private school, or public school – that’s important,” he said.
Retirement Account Taxes
Garcia believes taxes on retirement accounts should be eliminated “to help our seniors stay in their homes by keeping more money in their pockets, and not taxing Social Security. Helping our veterans by not taxing their retirement.”
He also believes this will help encourage young people to start early in investing in a retirement plan because they will know the government won’t tax them afterward if they’re on a fixed income.
“We’ve got to start thinking about the future,” he said.
Term-Limits
A supporter of term limits, Garcia said limiting the number of years someone can serve in public office will help eliminate lifelong career politicians.
“Lifelong career politicians that continue to get rich off of the system, continue to raise money perpetually, and making it almost impossible for an outsider like myself to compete,” he said.
Energy
Garcia supports the construction of an all-American energy program.
“With nuclear energy as a prime solution for cheap energy across the nation, and most importantly, job growth across the nation,” he said.
Garcia believes a new grid that’s built with pipe fitters, construction workers, repairmen, and cyber security is needed.
“We can do these things as a country if we have leaders that want to help us move forward and grow these jobs and opportunities,” he said, adding the country needs all the options it can get.
“If wind works, if solar works, if oil and gas work, I mean we should be pushing every avenue that we can to reduce our energy costs and to make our energy grid more resilient in case of emergency outages,” he said.
While he is not against the idea of solar, Garcia is skeptical of mass solar farm corporations buying farmland or forestry to install non-American-made solar panels which may have toxic chemicals.
Garcia added he hasn’t seen any data that shows mass solar farms drive energy costs down in the long term.
Immigration
There’s currently an immigration crisis in the US, Garcia said. “Our border has been dilapidated for 30 years. There’s been no meaningful legislation on it since Ronald Reagan in 1986, and we’re still looking at the problem, not solving it.”
Garcia said he believes too many people in Washington, D.C. are trying to punt the issue to the other side or to the executive branch.
“The truth of the matter is we need to secure our border,” he said. “We need to increase asylum judges so that we can rapidly process anybody coming through ports of entry to determine who they are, what their intentions are, where they’re from, and if we are going to accept them into the nation or if we are not.”
Garcia said he wants to solve these problems to make it easier for legal immigrants, “and immigrants that we need in positions that we need in this country” to enter. He noted there are about 1,000 different counties, mostly rural, that do not have primary care physicians.
“These are problems that need to be solved. There are ways that we can use a smart immigration policy to incentivize those types of workers to come here legally. At the same time, we have to be able to keep the bad actors out,” he said.
