Rauschenberger cites experience in race for U.S. Senate

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DeKALB - Running against a field with deep pockets but little government experience, U.S. Senate candidate Steve Rauschenberger showed off his policy wonk side during a visit to the Chronicle Friday and argued that the popularity of his millionaire opponents in the March 16 Republi-can primary is waning. Other than former state Rep. Jonathan Wright, Rauschenberger is the only person in the eight-man field who has held major elective office. "You should have tested yourself at something," said Rauschenberger, a three-term state senator from Elgin, especially at a time when the Illinois Repub-lican Party is at a crossroads and needs nominees who can win general elections. He pointed out that he has a 12-year voting record in the General Assembly and that his background already has been thoroughly vetted by state Democrats looking for any exploitable personal or political weakness. Who knows what a well-funded Democratic opponent could turn up about any of the other GOP candidates between the primary and the November general election, he asked. Although he said he would have voted for the congressional resolution to invade Iraq and generally supports the president's tax cuts - although he thinks they should be made permanent - he calls the No Child Left Behind law a "disaster" and takes issue with a handful of other Bush administration positions. He said that instead of trying to offer prescription drug coverage to all seniors under a Medicare reform bill passed into law last year, he would have let the states determine who really needs help paying for drugs and offered federal money to help cover just those people. He criticized No Child Left Behind as a system that punishes poorly performing school districts instead of offering incentives - such as more federal money or greater flexibility in spending it - to encourage educational innovation. As to how best the federal government can go about encouraging the creation of jobs after some 2.8 million manufacturing positions were lost in the last three years, Rauschenberger suggests that a radical change in federal tax policy could be part of the solution. Instead of the federal government relying on personal and corporate income taxes, he advocates taking a look at enacting a national sales tax in their place. "Just because we've done this for 70 years doesn't mean it will work for our kids," he said of the current tax system. To make a national sales tax more progressive, it could be structured to take effect only after a certain total dollar amount is spent. Rauschenberger also called for changes in trade agreements to make them fairer to the American economy and labor force, especially when agreements are entered into with totalitarian regimes such as China that can manipulate the markets to its benefit. "We need fair-trade agreements not just free-trade agreements," he said. He's not sure if fair trade necessarily means ending subsidies for American farmers, at least not those who work on "family farms," a concept he said "America still holds dearly to." He is against crop subsidies for corporate farms and was glad to see the steel tariffs enacted by the Bush administration in 2002 removed in December. Chris Rickert can be reached at crickert@pulitzer.net.