Campaigns have become very negative and in many cases misleading.
I served this area as state senator for 11 years and I was the Senate chairman of the Joint Committee on Finance for many of those years. Every budget and program proposed and developed by Governor Tommy Thompson had to be approved by the Joint Committee on Finance. I was there helping to approve of Tommy’s tax cuts. He cut income tax rates, cut capital gain taxes, cut taxes on Social Security and Estates, reduced taxes on corporations and through all of this he built an atmosphere where businesses grew and added thousands of jobs to Wisconsin.
His Welfare Reform helped move people from the endless cycle of welfare to productive jobs. The rest of the country then followed Wisconsin’s examples. As governor, Tommy Thompson’s budgets were always balanced. We surely need him in Washington where the Democrat-controlled Senate has not passed a budget for years and yet allows spending of trillions more than the government receives in revenue. We are selling our future to China and the Mid-East oil Sheiks and Tommy is committed to stopping that disastrous cycle.
From a cost standpoint, Tommy knows our health care system, including Medicare and Medicaid, is unsustainable. We spend more on health care than other developed countries and yet rank low in health care achievement. Even with all our health care spending, we have millions of people without access to health care and poor reimbursement for providers.
ObamaCare will not fix our system and Tommy will vote to repeal it. However, he knows we need health care reform including incentives to encourage people to take care of their own health through wellness programs and early diagnosis. He knows we need to encourage more coordination of care by providers, especially for the chronic illnesses which account for the majority of our health care spending. Tommy knows how to do this and still keep the private sector involved so individuals and families many choose their health care provider and keep the government out of health care decision making for all of us.
I know what Tommy Thompson has done and what he could do for us in Washington because I served with him as Secretary of the Department of Health and Family Services for five years.
I am voting for Tommy for U.S. Senate in the primary on Tuesday, Aug. 14, and I urge you to vote for Tommy Thompson.