MONTGOMERY COUNTY- Dan David is no stranger to tough choices. His stock market research firm, GeoInvesting, “exposed over 50 billion dollars worth of fraud on foreign markets,” he explained.

“What I’ve found. . . [is that] you couldn’t get anything done on a bipartisan basis. You and I can talk to each other, citizens can speak to each other and get things done, but it seems like Democrats and Republicans don’t want to do that,” continued David. “I asked to reform laws about trade with China, [where defrauding American citizens isn’t a crime]. . . just to get that passed, nobody would work with me.”

Instead of discouraging him, though, this perpetual disenchantment with the Washington political machine motivated David to run for office. In his own words, “most of our federal members of Congress have a very local experience, and they understand where they’re from. . . [former Speaker of the House] Tip O’Neill said 30 or 40 years ago that all politics are local, and I agree with that. But in this world, and in this day and age, all local politics are global. . . I’ve learned that a few private citizens, and that one person, can make a difference.”

His thoughts on why high school students should vote?

“High school students are our future, and how they prepare, and how they succeed, is what our country will be. [They] matter a great, great deal. . . you may not think about this as much today, but you likely will have a family you need to take care of. And it’s going to matter to you a great deal then . . even if you don’t have children, you still have family; you have parents, you have brothers, you have sisters. And you want to be able to see their quality of life be a good one. You should care about your quality of life. I get knocked all the time about always talking about money, because I’m a finance guy. . . we are the representation for Montgomery and Berks county, not just to the United States, but to the world. . . it’s important for you to vote, it’s important for you to vote now, it’s important for you to know who and why you’re voting for.”

Dan David on the issues, in his own words:

Healthcare

“Healthcare falls into four different buckets. . . cost, quality of care, outcomes, and accessibility. . . and what Obamacare did is it dealt with accessibility without dealing with cost. [We must make sure that] in dealing with the costs, the quality of the care and the outcomes don’t change.”

“We have 3.2 trillion dollars we spend a year on healthcare, 700 billion of it is overprescribing services, up to and including prescriptions. . . I do suggest a cost oversight process of the entire medical field [to deal with overprescription and administrative costs].”

Education & Student Loans

“What should matter most to our high school students is getting out there and getting a life experience. . . I think more technical training should be involved. I mean, look, plumbers, electricians, computer skills, software engineering. . . that should be taught more in high school in preparation for technical schools. . . there’s a great demand. . . for skilled labor [that does not require a college education].”

“A crushing, crippling [student loan] debt that you’ll carry with you for the next 30 or 40 years is unacceptable, and we need to reform that system. . . for one thing, we could have lower interest rates.”

“Right now the federal government only contributes 8% of the budget to education. And 92% of it does come from the states. So the federal government contributes 8% of the money and they cause 92% of the problems. So if the states are going to pay 92%, they should have much more to say about it.”

“I think my issue with Common Core is it seems to have been conceived so that most students can pass something. And while that’s well and good, it doesn’t challenge our best and our brightest. And we need a curriculum that challenges those who can take on those challenges.”

“One of the things that we’re most admired for by other countries, like China and Russia, is how innovative we are, and when we have these standards that stifle innovation, I think we fall behind.”

Small Businesses & Environment

“People confuse regulation with big regulation. Listen, I’m born and raised in Flint [Michigan], for the first 22 years of my life, and you know, I’m a believer in the EPA, I’m very saddened to this day; my family still lives in Flint, and we deal with that water issue. It’s not solved. . . people are still sick. I have people in my family that are affected by this.”

“[I visited] a small business in Chester County, and [the owner has] 9 organizations he has to report to for any kind of inspection or test. . . what we have. . . is an adversarial relationship between [federal regulatory agencies] and business, because how are [the agencies] funded? They’re funded by fines.”

“We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of regulations that need to be re-looked at. It doesn’t mean that we don’t need clean water; of course we need clean water. . . it doesn’t mean we don’t need clean air. Of course we do. I’m not a climate denier by any stretch; I believe in climate change. I happen to believe it’s man-made.”

“When you look at coal, and you look at gas, and you look at oil, these are our low cost energy leaders. When you look at wind and solar and hydro, they cost a lot more. We need to invest in the latter group and bring those costs in parity with coal and gas and oil, and then we can start switching over. Because if you knock out your low cost leaders, the things that cost more now will go up even more.”

“[Revolutionary changes] of course, never happen because economies can’t absorb revolutionary change. You have to evolve to it.”

Opioid Epidemic

“First of all, opioid addiction is a disease. And we have to start treating broken minds like we treat broken bones. . . both can be fixed.”

“It costs nothing, almost nothing, to get addicted to opioids. . . when you’re addicted, to get off the opioids [is] not covered by your medical insurance. So you’ve got to come up with two to five hundred dollars to go see a pain addiction specialist, or an opioid addiction specialist. . . addiction should be covered by insurance as well, so that we can get them off the drugs. And then we need to know where it comes from and how it’s happening. The accountability has been nowhere.”

“Medical cannabis [helps with] chronic pain, but it’s not as addictive [as opioids].”

“Instead of treating the drug-addicted like criminals, let’s treat them like who they are: people that are struggling with a disease that need help. . . drug dealers, and drug distributors, need to go to jail. But drug users really, they’re suffering from self-inflicted wounds.”

Public Safety & Mental Health

“There’s no pretty way to talk about school security, but we need more of it.”

“When we start talking about taking an individual group of guns away, we’re missing the point that most crimes are committed with handguns. . . nobody’s talking about banning shotguns and revolvers. So if you don’t ban those as well, which I don’t think we should do, we still have a school safety issue. [Mental health is] the root of the problem.”

“We treat mental health as something that we don’t want to see, that it’s some kind of disease that’s contagious. . . mental health needs to be compassionately looked at.”

“When people were being bullied when I was in school, they could go home and possibly have a safe space. Now people go home and their phone attacks them. . . we need to bring together a bipartisan group of experts in the medical field, in law enforcement, in the mental health field, and in social media [and allow them to present their findings in an open hearing]. . . and when we have these experts come together and say, this is how we should be treating violence in schools. . . then I think we could come up with a pretty good roadmap.”

“People my age didn’t understand what [vaping] was. . . I think education, in this case for adults, is what’s needed. [Here’s] a situation where we don’t just need to educate the children on the harms and the ills of vaping, but we actually need to educate the adults and the parents.”

“Sometimes we need to shame Congress into doing things.”

Dan David (R) is running to represent Pennsylvania’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Visit his website to read more: https://dandavidforcongress.com