Bavda came in after Brad Schneider. He shook hands, but I did not get to speak to him before except to tell him that the two of us were the only IL-10 residents in the room.
Vivek made a pleasant opening speech. His story sounds a bit like that of Sheyman, both are immigrants whose parents brought them over as children, hoping they would have a better life. Bavda has just lived more of his than has Sheyman.
Bavda is an attorney. He went to John Marshall Law School and now works in general practice. His path to attorney went through Northwestern economics and poli sci, an internship at the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank and Teach for America,. Hes' supported Clinton, Durbin, Schakowsky and Gore before interning for Senator Barack Obama.
His goals for office are to create jobs, reform No Child Left Behind and breaking up too big to fail financial institutions.
Bavda's jobs plan centers on local infrastructure improvements. He feels that his opponents' national infrastructure plans are too grandiose to pass through the divided congress.So, he's just looking to improve Chicagoland, things like widening 90/94 to the airport and to Tower Road. He's also for a federally funded smart grid and not a utility rate increase which he likens to a new tax. Seems to me with our new district, he should take the thing all the way up to Waukegan and not just stop at Tower.
Bavda wants to increase federal aid to state and local government, but limit their needs in the future by requiring them to make deposits with the federal government during good times with growth rates negotiated between federal government and the various state governments, and reported by the Federal Reserve. His fix for those chronically low income and employment areas is to build in some sort of multiplier.
At the session, he spoke about a WPA like project as well.
When asked about Congress' role in formulating foreign policy, Vivek answered that the President's role is that of having the one voice for the nation in international situations is important. He feels the role of the Congress is oversight through legislation, monitoring of federal agencies and the appropriate appropriation or denial of funds.
I found Vivek's answer on Afghanistan interesting. He pointed out that while the capture or killing of Osama Bin Laden, and dismantling of al Qaeda were necessary, both were better done with small special operations forces. One factual error in his answer, that the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden, when in reality they offered him up on fairly reasonable terms, was followed by an admonition with which I agree: we cannot declare war on a tactic and we cannot invade every country that has a terrorist in it.
Unlike Brad Schneider who appears to agree with trickle down economics, Vivek Bavda's answers indicated that he is a demand-sider. He said:
As we are in a recession where aggregate demand is not great enough to meet our productive capacity, investments in infrastructure by the government are critical to creating jobs in the short term and growth in the long term.
He did scare me a little bit with his comments on Social Security. I felt his Social Security response granted a bit too much to the Republican notion that Social Security is destined to go broke. His first answer was better. He wants to remove the cap on the amount of wages subject to the payroll tax. However, then he went on to support chained CPI. Here's why I think that's a bad idea.
Vivek supports full funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He would like to see the rules written under the Dodd-Frand legislation increase accuracy in Good Faith Estimates already required be given to borrowers by mortgage brokers and lenders, demand lenders keep a stake in their loans, and tie compensation of loan originators to the solidity of the loans they makes. He believes mortgage brokers should have an explicit and not just assumed fiduciary duty to homeowners.
Unlike Schneider, Bavda supports single payer health care reform pointing to reduced health care costs, universal access, no arguments over deductibles, co-payments and premiums. He wants to decouple employment and health care to give workers more employment freedom and reduce the complexity of the tx code. While for Single Payer, he is "completely behind the implementation of the Affordable Care Act."
He is pro-choice and supports repeal of the Hyde Amendment and supports the right to obtain reproductive health care and contraception.
Coming from Teach for America, Vivek is against school voucher and tax credit programs to allow parents to use federal funds for private or parochial school, and has a lot to say about No Child Left Behind. He wants to institute several detailed reforms including:
1. Testing more than just math science and language arts.
2. If teachers are going to be teaching to the tests, he feels the test need to be worth teaching, to promote critical thinking, and the test should be self-auditing, test in multiple ways to corroborate that a student as learned a particular concept.
3. Use of actual test scores rather than statistical confidence intervals.
4. Use a linear model of progress, requiring equal improvement over the time period rather than saving most of the progress for the end.
5. Changing the incentives. Now, we ignore the high achievers and the low achievers and work most on students close to passing. He proposes a growth model that credits schools with each year of learning rather than one passage score.
6. Giving failing schools more tools to impact student performance, pay higher salaries to teachers who agree to work on an at-will basis at the discretion of the principal. (I'm not sure how this would help preserve the teacher's union.)
He also proposed expanding access to and funding for Legal Services Corporation for legal services for the poor and supports the Clinton-Bush Scholarship for 1000 young immigrant adult based on world population representation and selected by the US embassy in the country.
Vivek is against oil drilling in Alaska and other protected wilderness areas, for cap and trade, for lower national carbon emissions goals, against coal liquification, against increased use of nuclear power, and for incentives for businesses to develop alternate energy systems and tax credits for individuals to implement sustainable and renewable systems in their homes.
He is for a more progressive income tax, against a flat tax, national sales tax, taxing capital gains at the same rate as earned income and reducing or eliminating estate tax. He is for eliminating the mortgage tax deduction and against elimination of the income tax credit for dependent children.
He supports repeal of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. He also supports the constitutional amendment to regulate campaign financing and reverse Citizens United.
He is against capital punishment, mandatory sentencing and criminal prosecution of juveniles as adults. He supports electronic eavesdropping with judicial oversight. He supports repeal of the Military Commissions Act and a statutory ban on the use of extraordinary rendition and secret prisons. He supports repeal of the Patriot Act. He also supports the DREAM Act.
All in all, Bavda seems more of a Democrat to me than did Schneider. In fact, he seems to me to be your basic north suburban Democrat. He's running on basic Democratic principles and an effort to break the gridlock in Congress one smaller project at a time. He has no illusions that he will be able to change the minds of House Republicans over major policy any time soon. My only major disagreement with him was over chained CPI for calculating Social Security payments.
Just a few minutes later, Ilya Sheyman was given a brief, softball question telephone interview while he attended a volunteer event in his office in Highland Park. I received no access to Sheyman's IVI-IPO questionnaire answers as he provided only a couple of copies.
John Tree and Aloys Rutagwibira did not apply for IVI-IPO endorsement and that's not necessarily important first because I doubt that many in the district know anything about IVI-IPO, and also because it appeared to me anyway, that its endorsement decision was pre-ordained before the session even started.
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