Our nation has always benefited from the immigrant’s work ethic. From the time the white man was the immigrant to now, when people still come to America to make a go of it, the immigrant’s mark on this country is as profound as it is long-lasting. Those who deny or dismiss the immigrant’s impact have either forgotten history’s lessons or never learned them in the first place.

Practically speaking, laws must reflect the way people live. If they don’t, they’re going to be ignored. This is what is happening with our immigration laws. If we change the laws to reflect the way people are actually living, the number of criminals goes down and the number of legal workers in this country goes up.

We favor letting those here illegally stay. Give them a national identity card and let them do the work they came here to do. When the work dries up, they will stop coming. They can pay taxes and buy homes and cars and generally make themselves useful here. Those worried about them taking jobs from Americans should bear in mind a couple of things. One, immigrants tend to take jobs held by high school dropouts, a segment of the population that is declining. Even it wasn’t, those who didn’t have the gumption to graduate high school deserve what they get. And two, they often take jobs our skilled and educated workforce no longer needs to take.

Those with national ID cards who entered America illegally will be entitled to everything except citizenship. That must be reserved for those who play by the rules. Practically speaking, this will deprive of them of a US passport, the right to vote and the right to have relatives join them in America. OK, that’s still not too bad a deal. Perhaps provisions can be made for applying for citizenship after certain number of years in this country or after reaching a certain age.

As a sovereign nation America has a right, indeed an obligation, to provide secure borders. But there is no reason to chase away those who merely want to build a life for themselves. It’s why the Pilgrims came here in the first place and was the foundation on which America was built.

Gaylon

I  currently do not exercise them, but I support our Second Amendment rights without qualification or restriction. The Founding Fathers wanted armed citizens, not only for service in the militia but to fight off the Indians whose lands we were stealing and to provide for food and personal defense. Perhaps most importantly, they didn’t want unarmed citizens going up against an armed government, something we feel remains a consideration today.

Let’s take a look at the Second Amendment. It’s only 27 words long and like a lot of our Constitution it is brilliantly ambiguous in its brevity:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Does the Second Amendment refer only to bearing arms in the context of militia service, or does it allow citizens to own whatever weapon they want? Taken in the context of the times that inspired the Bill of Rights and the English laws and customs that influenced them, I think the answer is both.

Now, eventually, a weary nation will want to discuss modifying or even eliminating the Second Amendment. It’s inevitable. We have suffered too much carnage from too many mass shootings for too long. Those of us who support the Second Amendment must be active participants in this discussion and not merely by blindly trotting out a copy of the Second Amendment.

Please, feel free to leave your comments below.

Gaylon

Friends, America deserves better than it is getting from our current tax system. The goal of my tax plan is two-fold: to simplify our tax code and to stop the government from taking too much of our money.

Our current tax code is currently over nine million words long and is so confusing the IRS gives out wrong information 25 percent of the time. This is insane. We are entitled to an income tax return we can fill out on a single sheet of paper.

I have long favored a flat tax of no more than ten percent, and ideally five percent, on individual incomes. I also favor eliminating the tax on corporate profits. I didn’t always. I once thought it appropriate for companies to pay something for the opportunity to make a fortune in this country but then a business owner said all taxes were were an expense he passed on to his customers. That made sense. There is no reason to saddle us consumers with what is essentially another tax on us.

A low-tax environment for citizens and businesses would produce a flourishing economy. Us citizens would have more money to spend and businesses would have more money to meet our needs. They would have more money for innovation and expansion and for hiring more workers and paying them better salaries and wages. And everyone would be freed from the cost of complying with our current tax code, meaning over $200 billion would be pumped back into the economy every year.

We deserve better than what we have now. So let’s demand better this November. We can send a message to the rest of our state, and to the nation, that we are demanding better than what the status quo is spoon feeding us.

As always, I look forward to discussing this with you. Please, leave your comments below.

Gaylon

My view is that the government must butt out of the abortion debate. It must not allow it and it must not prohibit it. It must stay out of it.

It’s important to note that us humans have been terminating pregnancies for thousands of years. This does not make it right and it does not make it wrong, it merely illustrates that criminalizing it will not eliminate it. It’s the way the world is built.

Now, I had 13 years of Lutheran schooling and I am familiar with and have the highest amount of respect for the views that prohibit abortion. Not only that, I was born six months after my parents got married, so I  was hardly planned. I ‘m glad my parents had me.

But this is a debate the government must stay out of. You may not personally favor abortion yourself, or you might, I don’t really care because that is your lookout and not mine. But it is not the government’s job to make the choice for us. It is the government’s job to leave its citizens alone.

This is as contentious an issue as I’ve come across on the campaign trail, so please keep your comments civil. I look forward to hearing them.

Gaylon

While running for the United States Senate in 2014, a group whose name I ‘ve forgotten sent out some robocalls that mentioned my name. Since these robocalls went out in the middle of the night, it caused a modest scandal. The voice on the call said Gaylon Kent was the only peace candidate on the United States Senate ballot that year.

True enough. I was and still am the peace candidate.

Friends, we have been at war every day since we invaded Panama in 1989. That is almost thirty years of non-stop warfare. It hasn’t worked. Three decades of warfare has not produced peace and it’s not going to, either. During past campaigns I said this every hour on the hour:

We are not going to have a peaceful world without a peaceful America.

A lot of the violence in this world is because of America butting in everywhere. We have been at it for decades and the only result is a world more violent than ever, except for our two world wars.

War does not produce peace. The only dividend war provides is more war. It will always be that way, too. Since no nation has ever been able to sustain perpetual war, eventually perpetual war will mean the end of our country. America will collapse, tossed aside the scrap heap of history along with the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union, probably before this half-century is out.

We deserve better. We deserve an America and a world at peace, but we will only get it if we demand it at the ballot box this November.

I say let’s go get it. The time has come for us to tell our state and our nation that we are demanding better this Election Day.

I‘m Gaylon Kent, and I ‘ll lead the charge. Let’s go!

Gaylon

In our column The Daily Dose we trot out a line after each mass shooting about merely cutting and pasting the last mass shooting column. It’s a sad commentary, of course, but an accurate one. Long ago the question went from if another mass shooting would occur, to merely when the next one would be. 

I‘ve always felt we have violent American citizens because we have a violent American government. Our nation has been at war every day since we invaded Panama in 1989 and a generation later we are feeling the effects. If America had been at peace every day since 1989 we wouldn’t be going through this. Among other things, the Twin Towers would still be standing, ISIS wouldn’t exist and mass shootings would be rare occurrences.

Violence has become the go-to reaction for our government, so it should be no surprise violence has become the go-to reaction for our citizens. I‘ve long said that we will not have a peaceful world without a peaceful America. Similarly, we will not have peaceful Americans without a peaceful American government.

Violence begets violence and the only dividend violence produces is more violence. As long as we have a violent American government we will violent American citizens. The carnage will not stop.

We deserve better. We deserve an America at peace with the rest of the world and with itself. But we must demand it at the ballot box this Election Day. If we re-elect the status quo nothing will change. The time has come for you and me – we the people – to demand better than what we have now.

So let’s go get the country we want this Election Day. I ‘m Gaylon Kent and I‘ll lead the charge.

Gaylon

I‘ll be honest, in past campaigns for the United States Senate and House of Representatives, I  didn’t find too much interest in this issue. Nobody asked me if I had a plan for getting the innocent out of jail or how I planned to stop having the innocent convicted in the first place. This is probably because this is not an issue that directly affects an awful lot of us.

It should interest every American, however, because we convict the innocent all the time. The long march of usually black men being freed from prison, and sometimes death row, is almost a revolving door and we are now seeing men released after 40 or more years behind bars for something they didn’t do. As I write this over 800 men have been released from prison for murders they did not commit and over 150 of them were released from death row. My own personal estimate, really nothing more than a somewhat uneducated guess, is that between ten and 15 percent of those currently incarcerated didn’t commit the crimes they were convicted of.

For a nation conceived in liberty, these numbers should cause all of us to go stand in the corner in shame. I don’t like crime any more than you do, but convicting the innocent in America is unacceptable. Even if we’re not in any immediate danger of being convicted of something we didn’t do ourselves, this is an issue we should all be concerned with.

We deserve better. We deserve an America that does not convict the innocent. We deserve an America we can be proud of.

So let’s demand better in November. The choice, as always, is ours: we can continue to accept the status quo or we can demand better. 

Gaylon