8TH DISTRICT CAMPAIGN PROFILE: ZIMMER PUSHES FOR THIRD-PARTY REFORMS THROUGH NATURAL LAW

Five candidates are seeking to represent the 8th District in Congress. The Southeast Missourian asked all five candidates the same 14 questions, which we feel are major issues in this campaign. Their answers will appear in a candidate profile today through Friday. Ballot order was used to determine publication date.

1. What should we do to lower the national deficit? Should we cut taxes or cut spending, or both?

Zimmer: The Natural Law Party's very clear on this. We have put forth our own budget, our own numbers which are based on the Hoover Institute numbers out of Stanford University. We propose to start out with a 18 percent flat tax in 1997. It's on a sliding scale. It would be down to 10 percent by the year 2002 and we project using our numbers and these slight cuts that we figure where we can save money to have a balanced budget by 1999, and can throw money off there afterwards. Most of these things are able to be done through efficiencies gained in the administration and running of our government, that more so than cutting programs. We don't see taking anything away from anyone, but we believe that there are many places where, even in health care and crime and rehabilitation, there are huge savings to be gained. And we will institute new programs that will be not only effective in what they achieve, but also cost effective for our government.

It (a flat tax) will make it very simple to administrate and probably the most fair for all concerned. Anytime you change a tax code, the possibility of you paying a little bit more or a little bit less is there. However, everyone would pay their fair share. It's a $16,500 exemption for a married couple with no children and I believe a $4,500 exemption (per child). So for a family of four, I'm probably a little bit off on the math here, $25,000 and down would be no taxes, so taxes start at $25,000. Actually the size of the budget stays almost exactly the same, about $1.4 trillion. We believe actually through doing that and through the stimulation of the economy by lowering the taxes and things, you will create a larger tax base and eventually you will grow the economy and generate more funds.

2. Would you support a balanced budget amendment?

Zimmer: Yes, I think we would push and insist on a balanced budget amendment.

3. What is your stand on the abortion issue? Do you favor a constitutional amendment banning abortion? Do you support a ban on partial birth abortions?

Zimmer: No. 1, the stance of the Natural Law Party on abortion is very clear. No. 1, we don't think the government should be in the business of abortion either way. We think that the decision of abortion is really best left to the people that are most involved -- a mother, her family and her physician. At the same time, we also can appreciate other people's position on abortion so what we would like to see happen is we would like to see through education and not legislation, go to the primary cause of why we're having the number of abortions in the first place. We would like to greatly reduce the number of abortions in this country. We believe it's through education and prevention much more than legislation. When you try to legislate morality, you get much like what we got through Prohibition, which a huge underground market. I don't think alcohol consumption really went down at all during Prohibition. If you outlaw abortion, you will drive abortions underground and that also is not right. So we think the choice should be left for the mother, but we also think that the number of abortions should be greatly curbed. We also believe that the federal government should not fund any abortions and the shifting of paying for abortions should go from government to the private sector, charitable institutions and things like that for women who could not afford them. And in worse-case scenarios of rape, incest and things, only then as a very last measure would we ever support any type of federal funding for abortion. I don't think the Natural Law Party has any official stance on partial birth abortions. Truthfully, I would be against partial birth abortions.

4. Under the Medicare plan the Republican Congress passed but Clinton vetoed, did Medicare spending increase? What action or actions should be taken to keep Medicare from going bankrupt?

Zimmer: I don't know if the Natural Law Party has a position on that. I don't think the Natural Law Party criticizes the Republicans on that. We actually have a little bit different view of the whole thing on Medicare and Medicaid. The way I understood it, the rates which they wanted it to grow were different. I think the Democrats wanted it to grow at 9 percent, the spending, and I think the Republicans offered to grow it at 6 or 7 percent. Obviously the Republicans wanted to increase the rate of spending less than the Democrats wanted to, but they didn't want to cut Medicare or Medicaid, just spend less than the Democrats wanted to spend. But it's still an increase. The Natural Law Party position is that the huge funding of Medicare and Medicaid, which is in our national health care budget, we believe there are huge savings built in, and two things we'd like to do is: no. 1, we would like to have a medical savings account for the people who receive Medicare so therefore they get rewarded if they have good health. We place that incentive to it. Second thing we'd like to do is we would like to issue vouchers so people who receive the care would have the ability to choose the party from which they would like to receive their treatment in the medical field. We'd have a voucher system. So we give them complete freedom in being able to choose. Overall, though, I believe that the Natural Law Party would say that there are huge cost savings that can be realized in these programs. I mean, tremendous; we're talking billions of dollars. The Natural Law Party can cite research that says 50 percent of all deaths and 70 percent of all illness is self-inflicted. That means people make conscious decisions every day that harm their health. Basically the way we have our system set up now, we have a crisis-management-disease-carrying type of health system, which really the word "health" doesn't belong in there. We would like to shift it more to a preventive medicine to where the government would get into the habit of paying people or creating incentives to maintain health instead of designing programs to fight disease. It's estimated that you can save approximately $500 billion a year, if you would adopt programs like this even though the last bill that was 10,000 pages that went before Congress had nothing in it about preventive medicine or even alternative medicine. So we obviously have a big problem in this area with the current way that our health care system's administrated or disease care's administrated. We just need to educate people in such a way that there are simple, fundamental, early-to-bed, early-to-rise type things that we really don't do a very good job of today. We wait until they get to the hospital more and then we deliver a crisis-management type of disease care and the Natural Law Party says we should deliver prevention-oriented solutions to health care. We spend about five times the average of other industrialized countries on our health care, about 16 percent of our gross domestic product as opposed to 3 percent of other industrialized countries as a percentage of domestic product. We have a lot of room in there.

5. What is the most important issue facing 8th District residents?

Zimmer: Campaign reform. The Natural Law Party has a clear position on this and that position is we should eliminate PACs and we should also eliminate soft dollar spending. What this does to our whole system of government is that if you could just eliminate those things so we don't have a system of government that is bought and paid for by just a few people, you would see a major shift immediately in the type of legislation that our congressmen work on and pass. If we would go to publicly funded elections, and set up a simple criteria for how people can achieve ballot access instead of running, which is probably the most un-Democratic process in the world. If anyone has ever tried to achieve ballot access and is not a Democrat or Republican, they will know that we really set up the hoops and jumps and things for people to get through. We should make it easy for people to achieve ballot access. There should be some guidelines on receiving public funds. It could be easily done by people contributing $3-$5 per tax return. These are not my numbers, these are studies that have been published. And everyone gets a set amount of money to run their campaign. You would have congressmen and women spending a lot of time in their districts; they would be out there shaking hands with their constituents and the off shoot of this is that since they would also have to depend on the money that actually came from the people that they actually represent, the legislation would also take on a tone more of serving the people in their districts. Until you achieve that, you're going to have a hard time getting many reforms through our government.

Everybody gets a set amount of (campaign) money, the same money. You should be allowed to campaign for two months. Election day should be a national holiday so everyone has an equal and easy time of making it to the polls to vote, and make it very easy to achieve ballot access. Because the more and better ideas we have, the more and the better government we are going to be able to deliver to ourselves.

6. Do you support the nation's open trade policy?

Zimmer: Which open trade policy? I think we all know that the world is shrinking more and more and more. It doesn't do anybody any kind of good, especially the United States, to adopt any kind of isolationist attitude. I think that we need to build and strengthen our trade policies and develop other people's economies so we can create more trading partners and find that we should export our best resources which are entrepreneurial skills, and business management and give our foreign aid to those countries who can then produce products in markets where then we can establish them as trading partners. There should be an active policy to develop and create new trading partners.

7. Do you support the current farm bill?

Zimmer: The current farm bill is the Freedom in Farming Act. The direction to decrease or eliminate subsidies to farmers over the next seven years, we do think that's a step in the right direction even though the platform of the Natural Law Party goes a little further talking about agriculture in they believe we have to ensure that we never lose the small farm and the small farmer in the rural community. I think if the fair act is actually written and actually favors the large cooperative type farms and how they diminish the subsidies, I know it's a graduated thing and actually favors the larger (farmers) and I think the Natural Law Party would like to favor the smaller farmers.

I think we would be for eliminating subsidies and towards a free market economy. I also think we would be developing programs to make sure we develop sustainable agricultural programs in the sense that all of the programs, we would have, that's a key word that people sometimes leave out -- you can't get into programs that are band aid fixes so any programs that we would support, we would be able to look at them over a longterm and say this is good, not only for the farmer, not only for the farmer's economy, but also for the farmer's family and the farmer individually. I don't support embargoes ever. I'm probably a free trader. Would an embargo ever be needed? I really don't know. Our world seems to create every known situation.

8. Do you favor term limits for federal lawmakers?

Zimmer: I think it's important that we seriously address the issue of term limits and I think it's imperative for a successful form of government. I believe our founding fathers actually favored term limits. I'm not real good on my history, but when we originally wrote the Constitution and everything, there was hope that we would have citizen legislators that volunteered their time to serve a term or two and then returned to their district, and some other person could volunteer for a term or two. I think our founding fathers didn't want professional politicians and I do not want to be a professional politician.

9. Do you support making English the official language of the federal government?

Zimmer: I don't have a strong feeling either way on that. I don't think the Natural Law Party platform has anything. There is something in our platform about programs that end the divisiveness of a culture. It's obvious that in order to make any system work better, you have to have coherent consciousness within any society so any thing that is divisive and segregate other people's ideas from someone else's would not be good and we would support a much more cohesive type thing where people work together. And there's a part in our platform where we don't think it's good for international enclaves to segregate themselves and we believe much more in the melting pot theory of America.

10. Do you support manage health care? Should the federal government have a role in it? If so, what?

Zimmer: Basically, we think it's Ok for the government to be in this business but we need to shift our entire attention away from a disease-care delivery system to a prevention-oriented-solution-driven health care system. There are enormous savings. Ever since you were a small child, your mother's been saying to you, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." And let me tell you, your mother was a wise woman. And we all know this to be true and basically, if you can nip these in the bud through preventive medicine, alternative medicines that have been proven to be effective and cost effective, these are the types of programs we would like to see administered. It's an interesting thing because the Natural Law Party is actually for privatization of anything whereever we can privatize and also to downsize federal government and the shifting of the federal government responsibilities away from the federal government to the state levels. Any system we could get that was effective, cost effective and we could deliver and save money, it would be OK. But in general, we are for a smaller federal government.

If we could actually deliver a good product where we actually had healthy people and everyone saved money and it was effective, we actually delivered health, I don't think the Natural Law Party has a strong feeling on who really administers it. We do feel in places where you can introduce competition into any system it tends to drive the price down.

11. Do you support collective bargaining for public employees?

Zimmer: I don't really have a strong feeling. I know, I'm familiar with some of the collective bargaining snafus that you can get yourself into. I think you're into a case by case basis. Ronald Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers. He didn't think it was a good idea in that instance. It's an interesting thing because the Natural Law Party, one thing, we're really big into conflict-free politics. There could be good arguments on both of sides of any situation and anything we do in government can't always be black and white. You could run into situations where you would not support collective bargaining and you could run into situations where you might support collective bargaining. I don't think we're really hard and fast in this area.

12. Do you support school choice and a voucher system for public schools?

Zimmer: Yes but even to go a little bit further than that, what the Natural Law Party would like to see is they would like to see the Department of Education be renamed and converted to the Department of Education Excellence. What we would like to do is instead of having them in an administrative capacity, which they presently have, we would like to see them take a leadership and research role and we would like them to fund and build 12 model schools and these schools would represent all the different theories and ideas about education that we have learned to this day. They would have the money to do this and then what we propose is bringing in educators from the state and local levels and they attend these different model schools, and then they see what they think would work best back in the state and local area. They take these ideas. They can pick and choose what they want; they bring these ideas back to their own area and they construct their own schools. So you take the experimentation and guesswork away from the state and local levels; you let the federal government do the research to find out exactly, the models, construct the models and then give people the freedom of choice of what works in each person's area. We say that school vouchers increase school choice. They foster competition and improve educational outcomes.

13. Would you vote to extend the Brady Bill's five-day waiting period for purchasing guns?

Zimmer: We actually want to uphold the existing gun control legislation as an appropriate balance between public safety and the constitutional right to bear arms. We would like to institute programs that would eliminate the climate of fear and tension that causes people to sometimes use these guns in an inappropriate manner, which is really the essence of what the problem is in this country. It's not gun ownership, it's what people do with guns that sometimes drives people crazy. There are programs that have had scientific research done on them and they have found by educational processes, you can actually reduce the fear and tension and anxiety levels in people personally and the Natural Law Party is a big believer that you can modify and alter social behavior through certain scientifically proven programs. And we would like to administer these programs, whatever they are, but the research is very clear that they do have the effect. If we could institute these programs and get at the core fundamental problem and eliminate the need for the use and proliferation of guns in violent crime, that would go much further to eliminating this whole gun control issue.

Our whole penal system needs to be overhauled. Obviously, we have the highest percentage of citizens in the industrialized world, the highest percentage of people in prison. We have about 1.1 million people in prison, maybe 1.2 million. If you would tighten and be more strict, which I believe the Republican Party wants to get tough, you would elevate our prison population to about 1.7 million. That way no one in the whole world could ever catch us. I guess that's a type of oneupmanship. I made the comment that I recently heard the director of prisons interviewed and she was saying that Missouri just built three new prisons and now we no longer have to export our prisoners to other states; we can keep them here at home. And it made me think, I can see what our present policy is coming to. It's going to be a chicken in every pot and a prison in every community. And I really think that before we take that attitude and sleep walk into the 21st century, someone's got to stand up and say, "We can't have a prison in every community.' Pretty soon, we're going to be raising nothing but prison guards and policemen and won't have a need for many of the other sectors of our society.

The thing is you need to eliminate the root cause of crime, which is weak thinking on the individual's part. We believe that there is scientific research that can validate that you can actually strengthen people's morals. We believe in morals and strengthening of morals. We think that there's been ample research to show that there are education processes where morals can be strengthened and anxiety and depression lessened. I mean, the core unit is really the family. If you can keep the family together and keep them educated and provide an economic platform where people can succeed in the American dream, most of your other problems will take care of themselves.

14. Why should someone vote for you for Congress?

Zimmer: A very fair question. And very simply, a vote for the Natural Law Party and a vote for me is not a throw-away vote and I anxiously want people to vote for me. It is a positive vote and a vote that says we want new and better ideas for the administration of our society. On the other hand, a vote for either someone in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is a destructive vote. It is a vote that says, we approve of everything you're doing. We think you're doing a great job. Keep up the good work. If people really want to effect change in this government and like the ideas in my platform, then they should vote for the Natural Law Party. I may not be elected but it won't be a throw away vote. Most of the best ideas in current American political thinking came from third party candidates. The Natural Law Party has many good, effective and cost effective solutions that really need to be looked at by the mainstream candidates. And the voters owe it to themselves to vote for the Natural Law Party to send the message that we want change, we want things run better, we don't want a prison in every neighborhood.

TODAY'S PROFILE: DAVID ZIMMER

Age: 43

Residence: Cape Girardeau

Party: Libertarian

Education: 1975 graduate of Southeast Missouri State University with bachelor of general studies.

Occupation: President of MVP Communiciations.

Personal: Married to Karin.

Politica: First run for office.