Politics & Government
Goldstein underscores inflation as top issue in congressional primary
Fourth District Republican says he supports trimming capital gains taxes to spur investment
Michael Goldstein Jayme Stevenson Donald Trump
Joe Biden Jim Himes Michael Gerson
By Scott Benjamin
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GREENWICH – It has been said that politics can be like a train ride away from yourself.
For months, Michael Goldstein, an eye doctor and attorney, has encountered hurdles and invested countless hours in his pursuit of becoming the congressman in the Fourth District.
Find out what's happening in Brookfieldfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
He announced early this year that he would seek the Republican nomination. Incumbent Jim Himes of the Cos Cob section of Greenwich captured the seat in the 2008 – the first Democrat to win an election there since 1966.
The Sabato Crystal Ball rates the district as “Safe Democratic” for the November 8 election. Democratic leaders in the district have lauded Himes' constituent service.
Goldstein took just 18 of the 174 delegates at the Republican convention in Fairfield in May – well below the 15 percent needed to automatically qualify for a primary.
In 32 days, along with 15 volunteers he amassed 3,700 petition signatures – of which 2,400 were valid, putting him past the 2,067-signature threshold needed to qualify for the August 9 GOP balloting in the 17-municipality district, which stretches from Oxford to Greenwich, where Goldstein lives. He will face Republican former Darien First Selectman Jayme Stevenson in the only U.S. House primary in Connecticut this summer.
“Nobody has gotten signatures like that in recent memory,” remarked Goldstein supporter Joseph Bentivegna, an eye doctor from Fairfield who briefly sought the Republican nomination in the Fourth District in 2014.
“Goldstein is a good retail politician,” said Bentivegna in a phone interview with Patch.com
Now he has to attract support from voters in midsummer, when people are focused on afternoons at the beach and vacations to everywhere from Las Vegan to the Pennsylvania Amish Country.
“It’s a fairly difficult task,” Goldstein said in an interview with Patch.com.
Plus, campaigns often become little more than start-up operations. There is no five-year plan, and perhaps not even a two-year plan. You have to scramble.
However, Goldstein says it has been worth it.
He said his “philosophy” is that you can “ignore, complain or do something.”
Goldstein said, if elected, his prime goal is to do something to heal an economy that is beset with a 9.1 percent inflation rate – the highest since 1981.
“The economy is becoming more of an issue,” he commented, noting that heating oil has soared from $2 a gallon to $6 a gallon.
“That’s a huge change for someone’s household income,” Goldstein declared.
He said the Federal Reserve Board’s decision to increase interest rates 0.75 points is “a positive step” in fighting inflation.
In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Richard Vigilante who writes The Next American Century stated that a reduction in capital gains taxes would help tame higher prices.
Goldstein agreed, saying, “You want to encourage investment.”
“Raising taxes will not solve the problem,” he added. “It might exacerbate it.”
Goldstein said he “would agree” with British financial official Charles Goodhart, who told The Wall Street Journal recently that due to a demographic shift what had been a labor surplus has become a labor shortage, which will make it more difficult to maintain lower prices than had been the case during the last generation.
Himes told Patch.com recently that, “Our economic indicators other than inflation are very good,” noting that the national unemployment rate is 3.6 percent, just one-tenth of a point higher than it was in February 2020, before the pandemic, under Republican former President Donald Trump.
However, Goldstein noted that in Bridgeport, the largest city in the district, the unemployment rate is 6.1 percent.
Himes recently said in an interview with Patch.com that, "The primary sources of inflation, of course, is the devastation that COVID reeked on the world supply chains. As we speak, there are huge ships stocked up outside New York Harbor and outside Los Angeles Harbor. There's not enough people to unload them."
Goldstein countered, “Supply chain issues have been there for a couple of decades and should have been addresses earlier.”
On another topic, he said that he supports the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that in effect reverses the Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973 on access to abortion.
Goldstein said the 6-3 vote is “returning power to the people” by putting it “in legislative bodies.”
He said that he doesn’t “think it’s going to make that much of a difference” in the campaign.
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson recently wrote that President Joe Biden didn’t even mention abortion rights in his 2020 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Goldstein said he disagrees with Himes’ call for reversing the life appointments for U.S. Supreme Court justices to 18-year terms. The congressman said it would “stop the demographic roulette by president by president."
You “would have to change the Constitution,” Goldstein explained. “I don’t think his idea is going to go very far.”
Regarding a report last year that the Social Security Trust Fund would be depleted by 2033, Goldstein said, “You can’t have a system go bankrupt,” he said. “That would be a disaster.”
He said he would consider increasing the current Social Security retirement age.
“That makes sense to a certain extent because people are living longer and are healthier,” commented Goldstein.
Goldstein said his days are now filled with meeting voters, compiling data bases, phone banking and canvassing.
“We’re running a good grassroots campaign here, which she [Stevenson] is not,” said Bentivegna.
In a prepared statement to Patch.com, Stevenson wrote “We recently opened our first office in Fairfield and have been receiving excellent reception by voters who seek us out for information and Jayme Stevenson for US Congress promotional materials to show their support with yard signs and bumper stickers, as well as the residents and local business owners that we meet in each community.”
The district includes four of the nine most-populated municipalities in Connecticut.
For example, Goldstein said Greenwich – which ranks ninth in population and first in state income tax revenue in Connecticut – has “everything from mega mansions to low-income housing” and is “a more diverse community than people give it credit for.”
Trump easily captured the Connecticut Republican presidential primary in 2016 but was defeated handily in the state in the general elections of 2016 and 2020. Some observers have blamed Trump for turning more suburban women to the Democratic column in recent elections.
Goldstein embraces the 45th president.
“I’m a supporter of Trump,” he remarked. He said he agrees with Victor Davis Hanson of the Herbert Hoover Institution at Stanford, who wrote a 2019 book on the former president’s platform - that Trump was one of the few presidents who accomplished what he had said he was going to do.
Among other things, Goldstein pointed to increased energy production, tariffs against China’s exports and calling on the NATO countries to pay for more of the military costs.
“We had better policies than we have now,” he said in making a comparison to Biden.
However, Goldstein said that while collecting petition signatures this spring a number of Republicans offered opinions at each end of the spectrum.
He related that there are “two groups of people” - those who “like” Trump and those who “don’t like” him, and “not a lot of people in between.”
Resources:
https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/himes-says-congress-more-polarized-any-time-his-service
https://www.courant.com/politi...
https://patch.com/connecticut/across-ct/ct-income-tax-town-town-who-pays-most
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/1...
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bridgeport_ct_unemployment_rate#:~:text=Basic%20Info,month%20and%2010.90%25%20last%20year.
