Cannon Fire

I thought that because I've laid out why I don't like John Jacob, I ought to say why I do like Chris Cannon. Sure, there's senority issues in Congress, but senority doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I realize that it's an important tool, but at the same time, in this age of the incumbent super-advantage (a bone to pick in another post) I want to do my part to eliminate that as best as I can. Nevertheless, Chris is my favored candidate for a number of reasons.
The first reason is his immigration stance. I know that it's not popular to actually be pro-immigration, but I am. This country was built on immigrants and we will continue to be so as the current group of citizens are de-birthing their way towards a welfare state. The biggest example of this is in Social Security. Right now there are about 3.3 workers for every 1 retiree, and that will fall to 2 by 2020. That means that the government's Ponzi scheme (don't let anyone tell you otherwise - if this was something like 12 Daily Pro, the SEC would be all over it like bears on vacationing celebrities) will start to run out of funding. The easiest way to get this fixed, or at least prolong the scheme by doing something other than killing people when they reach a certain age, a la the Charlton Heston classic Soylent Green, is to bring in more people. Any good Ponzi artist will tell you that.
Next is education. Did he make a bad decison on No Child Left Behind? In retrospect, yes. NCLB is a law that is trying to do something noble but proceeds to muck it up. It's unfortunate, but in a lot of cases that's what the government does. Cannon has said that he'd like to get rid of the Department of Education, which is a pretty good idea. We do need local oversight and tuning of education rather than federal because it has created a big bureaucracy that hasn't done anything to actually improve the education standards here in the US. We're still behind all the bogeymen of the 70s and 80s, and we have less money in our pockets to show for it.
He's behind a comprehensive energy policy that will do something. I'm all for that, rather than the bogus legislation that's being proposed now. He's talked of new and bigger refineries, expanded drilling areas, and working on alternative energy technology. That's all good policy. We can't just attack this in one area. In addition, it's good for Utah. Right now we have a company named Wolverine Oil who are working on a field that some project could produce 100,000 barrels a day of oil to people here in the US in Sevier County. There isn't anything that he could be doing back in Washington that would help our state's economy more than pushing to open BLM lands to more exploration and incentivising companies who will try new techniques to extract more oil here at home.
Finally, I think he gets it on health care. He did vote for the prescription drug bill (Medicare Modernization Act), but that isn't necessarily a bad vote. Newt Gingrich, who I think is pretty forward thinking in this area, supported it and he sees it as a way that we can actually get out of the Medicare morass that we are starting to find ourselves in where it will go broke before 2020. Anything that can prevent that is something worth doing, and I haven't seen any better proposals on the issue. I would explain Newt's ideas, but you're best served to go straight to the source on this one. If people can get past their Cannon antigonism, they might be able to see that there's a little more than just immigration with him and Utah would be well served to keep him in office.