Non-Negotiable

For several months now, we here at The Iowa Defense Alliance have been taking some heat for leaving US Senator Charles Grassley on our Wall of Shame. Our critics make the claim that we need to put party unity above petty internal squabbling. They claim that we need to put our personal values on hold to help the “team” win.

What these critics fail to understand about us is that we are a part of the new breed of voters inhabiting this state. We don’t put blind faith into candidates simply because they have an R beside their name. Instead candidates must work to demonstrate to us a reason for supporting them. Since it seems that this is a concept that is a tad bit hard to understand I will spell it out for the candidates.

1. We want smaller government. That is we don’t just want to stop the growth of government, we want to contract it. We want the candidates that we support to pledge a desire to shrink the federal state or federal workforce. We want the candidates that we support to pledge to eliminate and reduce the size and scope of the federal and state bureaucracy.
2. We want lower taxes. We understand that this would end up being a result of the implementation of number 1. However it would be foolish to not articulate this idea. We want any candidate that we support to pledge to work to lower the tax rates for citizens across the board without regard to their income or wealth. We believe in treating all citizen’s equally.
3. We want increased governmental transparency. With the ridiculous program enacted by Iowa Governor Chet Culver we have come to understand that transparency is more than just allowing the citizen’s of Iowa to have access to copies of government documents. It also means not enacting policies that would only serve to hinder the flow of information from the government and the population. Instead we should be working on policies that actually free up the passage of information.
4. We want a government that spends less. The only source of revenue for any government is to take it from its citizens. And we do understand that a small measure of taxation is necessary for a government to defend and protect its citizens. However we firmly believe that in the United States the tax rate is much too high, not to mention the fact that it is an unfair and regressive tax system. We want any candidate that we support to pledge to completely reform the US tax code in order to make it much more simple and fair.
5. We want a government that gets out of the business of picking winners and losers. This means that we oppose the usage of any and all subsidies. In our humble opinion a subsidy is nothing more than a form of bribery. In the case of a subsidy the government gives taxpayer money to another individual or entity to entice them to undertake a venture or project that they would not normally embark upon because it is not economically feasible. We want any candidate that we support to pledge to end the usage of subsidies at all levels of the government.

I could go on, but you should get the picture here. The Iowa Defense Alliance is not a rubber stamp. We will hold all candidates accountable to the same standard; Democrat or Republican; left or right. And because of this you will know where we stand. Our core beliefs and values are not negotiable. So I suppose that the message that I would like to convey to our critics is don’t blame us, we didn’t change, Grassley did.