Election 2010: Where Colorado’s Senate candidates stand on business issues
Colorado's race for U.S. Senate — pitting Democrat Michael Bennet against Republican Ken Buck — is one of the most closely watched in the country.
Two late August polls showed Buck leading Bennet by several percentage points. Rasmussen Reports had the Republican leading 49-45 percent, while Reuters/Ipsos showed Buck ahead 49-40 percent.
Bennet, a former managing director of the Anschutz Investment Co., served as chief of staff to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and superintendent for Denver Public Schools. In January 2009, Gov. Bill Ritter appointed him to fill Colorado's open U.S. Senate seat. Though he's the incumbent, he's run as a businessman and political outsider, even as President Barack Obama stumped for him before the Democratic primary, in which Bennet defeated statehouse veteran Andrew Romanoff.
Buck has served for six years as the Weld County district attorney after working as an executive at Hensel Phelps Construction Co. and as a lawyer at the U.S. Attorney's office in Denver. The Greeley resident was endorsed early by conservatives such as U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey's FreedomWorks PAC, which helped him defeat former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton in the primary despite her more mainstream GOP support.
The Denver Business Journal interviewed Bennet and Buck separately in recent weeks and asked them five questions on business-related topics. Here are their answers.
Denver Business Journal: What is the most important thing that you can do as a U.S. senator to help businesses jump-start this economy again?
Buck: I think that what we need to do is, we need to encourage small businesses that account for 70 percent of the workforce in America to expand and hire new employees. We do that by reducing corporate tax rates, by giving small businesses some certainty with what their costs are going to be in the future. We need to make sure that they are not burdened by rising health care costs, rising taxes, inflation.
We need to make sure that we have a sound energy policy that isn't increasing costs on business. We need to move as quickly and responsibly as we can toward energy independence.
We do that by drilling for oil and natural gas in Colorado and other places. We do that developing a smart nuclear regulatory policy and encouraging nuclear energy in this country, by encouraging the kind of clean-coal technology that's on the horizon and developing our coal resources in this country. We do it by giving renewables every opportunity to compete in the marketplace.
You reduce the corporate tax rate. Rather than growing government and increasing the deficit, you give corporations the ability to expand their workforce by reducing the burden on corporations.
The way we could have stopped inflation is by not spending and not creating this deficit, and not printing the money to cover the expenditures in Congress. The way that we mitigate what's coming is we immediately stop the deficit spending, we return to a balanced budget and hopefully some surplus. And as the money supply shrinks, we will lessen the effects of the inflationary cycle that's going to hit us.
Bennet: I think that in the short run, absolutely the most important thing we can do is help small business get access to credit.
In the medium term, having an energy policy that would create energy independence for the United States and create jobs here would be enormously helpful to dealing with the structural issues of a recession where we saw a lot of job loss but a lot of productivity gains at the same time. Some of these jobs are never coming back, and we need to be inventive about how to create jobs in Colorado and across the country.
I think we should make some commitments to ourselves. One is that we should do everything we can to free our reliance from foreign oil. The second is to commit to the domestic production of energy that would create jobs here in the United States — and then to do it in a way that relies on cleaner technology and innovation that every day, people all across the country, and also in Colorado, are developing to meet our energy needs in a cleaner way. Those are principles that everybody ought to be able to agree on. And then the question becomes: How do we get there? And that's where we need everybody's best ideas.
The last thing I'd say is that education is just so critical to our long-term business success and the success of our democracy, and I've continued to work on those issues even though I'm no longer superintendent in Denver. First of all, we've got to understand the nature of the problem that we have, because the outcomes, especially for children living in poverty, are nowhere near what they need to be. On average, only about nine in 100 of today's ninth-graders living in poverty can expect to graduate with a four-year college degree. Only 15 in 100 of our eighth-graders that are living in poverty are proficient mathematicians. So, there's a huge gap there.
But the other problem is that if you look at the numbers, when the last administration came to Washington, we led the world in the production of college graduates. Today we're close to 15th in the world and falling like a stone, less because of what we're doing than because of what other countries around the world are doing. People are struggling to get their kids into college and to pay for it. We have made it harder to go to college while countries around the world have made it easier.
So, the three things on education that I would do is: We need to make a commitment to early-childhood education for kids zero to 5 so that when they get to kindergarten, they're ready to learn. We need to provide greater access to higher education and make sure that students that are prepared to go onto college do go onto college. And I think we need to acknowledge that we have not updated almost anything we do with respect to attracting teachers, and there's a reason why we're only keeping 50 percent of the people in the profession for the first five years. So what we need is a 21st century approach to human capital and public education.
DBJ: Small business has been faced with an inability to get loans or credit from lending institutions. What steps, if any, need to be taken to change that?
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