The number of possible Republican challengers for Senator McCaskill has increased to three with the addition of Frontenac businessman John Brunner. But he appears to be short on solutions to the problems likely to be major issues in the campaign.
Brunner used to head the company that makes Germ-X hand sanitizer. He joins Sarah Steelman and Todd Akin in the Republican field. He says the federal government is suffering from a lack of direction. But when it comes to the specifics of his own platform, Brunner is vague about his own direction.
If he was a member of the Congressional super-committee that’s supposed to find more than one-trillion dollars in budget savings, what would he do? “The most important thing is to get across a table…and you have to set your priorities,” he says. ”
He says he would not favor cutting Medicare but he is vague about how he would solve the program’s problems. “You bring all the people around the table and you say ‘we gotta treat this now serious and we gotta find a way to maintain our promises to our seniors and take care of the problem.'”
Long-term Social Security sustainability? “You gotta lay it on the table, pull the people around the table and say, ‘Okay, what do we need to do?'”
Increasing taxes is definitely not on his agenda. Cutting the budget is. Reducing business regulations definitely is. Replacing the federal income tax with a so-called “fair tax,” a nationwide sales tax, is worth looking at. He says he wants to bring common sense business skills to the federal government.,