5th District Candidate Bill Stevens on ISIS, the Economy and Immigration

Third of a four part series written by Scott Benjamin

Regarding the threat posed by ISIS, Fifth Congressional District Republican hopeful Bill Stevens of Newtown said he would be more aggressive than Democratic President Barack Obama has been in fighting the enemy.

“We’re at war. They have declared war against the West. It just hasn’t been declared in Washington. We should go over there and kill the enemy,” Stevens said.

However, Fox News media analyst Howard Kurtz stated U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) was the only presidential candidate recommending that 20,000 troops be sent to attack ISIS and it did little for his campaign.

Kurtz wrote that many Americans are reluctant to take that step following the long conflicts in Iraq and the War on Terror that began under former President George W. Bush and stretched into the Obama Administration.

On another topic, Stevens said securing the border to stem the tide of illegal immigrants would be another of his priorities.

“We have an unsecure border. We have thousands of people coming in. Who are they?” Stevens said. “Does the Obama Administration know who they are? Homeland Security is a joke. If we don’t have a secure border, then we don’t have a secure country.”

On the economy, he said he supports lower taxes and less spending and believes the broad Kennedy, Reagan and W. Bush tax cuts were successful, but their impact was partly negated by excessive spending.

“Tax cuts need to be followed spending cuts,” he said.

However, Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson wrote that the 1964 Kennedy tax cut, signed by President Lyndon Johnson about three months after the assassination, is probably the worst domestic policy decision in the United States since World War II. He stated is was largely responsible for rampant inflation and four recessions between 1969 and 1982 and set a standard that deficits were tolerable.

According to Samuelson, since the Kennedy tax cut, there have been 47 budget deficits and only five surpluses, the last of which was in the budget submitted by former Democratic President Bill Clinton in October 2000.

Stevens called the current national unemployment rate of 5.0 percent “a bogus number.”

He said the unemployment rate doesn’t indicate the underemployed who have low-paying jobs or part-time positions. He doesn’t expect the economic climate to improve in Connecticut since many businesses find it unattractive as a result of its high taxes.

Stevens insists that the free market is the best system and that there is no reason for the federal government to provide home mortgages as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have done.

Now, eight years after the subprime mortgages crisis, The Washington Post reported that government sponsored enterprises do about 75 percent of the new mortgages.

Stevens said he supports “free trade as long as it’s fair trade.”

He said his own business experiences with China confirm that it devalues its currency in relationship to the dollar and steals intellectual property rights from foreign companies.

Stevens lived in Japan from 1988-1996 with his wife, a native. Stevens said Japan has been plagued over the recent years by its consumption tax, too much government oversight and too much emphasis on exports. He said the three arrows economic plan deployed by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over the last three years has been ineffective. The package included economic stimulus, monetary changes and structural reforms.