Campaign Kickoff Reception
David Pan’s Remarks, General Election Campaign Kickoff event, June 9, 2024, Stanton, CA
I am new to politics, and so I will start by telling you a little about myself and my reasons for running. I was born and raised in Chicago to parents who met there after emigrating from Taiwan, after first leaving China in the course of the Communist revolution there. I went to Stanford for college and then to Columbia University for graduate school, specializing in German literature. Since then I have been teaching German literature and philosophy, most recently at UC Irvine for the past 18 years. I have also worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and Company in Los Angeles, and as a commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights at the US State Department.
I decided to run for Congress for three reasons.
First, I have devoted my life to education because it is crucial to the growth of our young people as well as the health of our nation. But I had become more and more frustrated at the university because of the increasing one-sidedness of political views. Though the country is fairly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, at our colleges and universities, Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans. As a consequence, higher education has become less and less a place of debate in a search for truth and more and more a place of indoctrination from one side of the political spectrum. As we have been seeing in the past several months of student protests against Israel and in favor of Hamas, the form and content of our education is crucial for our entire nation, affecting our political decision-making and our economic well-being. And right now, our educational system is not just failing but taking us in dangerous directions. It became clear to me that there is no way to reform colleges and universities from the inside because the overwhelming majority of faculty and administrators are resistant to change. The only way to reform our educational system is to elect new politicians who will replace universities trustees who in turn replace administrators who will then carry out the needed reforms. It is a long road, and we need to start now.
Second, I have a plan to reform our government that could only be implemented politically and not through academic discussions. For a long time, I have argued as an academic that we need to reduce the size and scope of our government. Since the New Deal and especially since the Great Society programs, the federal government has been intervening more and more in our daily lives, taking control over basic social issues like retirement, health care, schooling, housing, and our economic well-being. This shift was a fundamental change from the basic notion at our country’s founding that the strength of our system of government was that it would guarantee domestic peace but leave the management of daily affairs to the people at the lowest possible level, meaning families, churches, and local-level and voluntary organizations. Today that logic has been turned on its head, and we now have a federal bureaucracy that manages all of these issues from the top.
What are the consequences? We have a welfare system that traps people in poverty by punishing them for working and saving, we have a health care system that costs 50% more in terms of percentage of GDP than any other nation in the world while we rank 43rd in life expectancy. We have a government retirement system which its own trustees have declared will be insolvent in 10 years. We have a homelessness crisis that gets worse with every billion dollars that our government spends to solve it. Finally, the $4 trillion per year that goes into this system has created an administrative state that is replacing Congress with rules and regulations that are micro-managing our lives.
I have a very simple solution to all this, which is to phase out all of these government programs (while maintaining our commitments to retirees and those within 30 years of retirement) and return the $4 trillion per year back to the people. This works out to $16,000 per year for everyone 21 years of age and older for the rest of their lives as a permanent refundable tax cut, also called a universal basic income. It is an idea first proposed by Thomas Paine and revived by Richard Nixon as a negative income tax. The key is that the first priority is to reduce the size and scope of government. Once that is done, the enormous savings can be distributed back to the people. In this way, we can fundamentally change our government to put individuals and families back in charge of their destinies.
The final reason I am running is that, despite the polarization of our politics today, I still firmly believe, and have seen concretely in talking to voters, that nearly all Americans share a basic set of values. We believe in individual freedom to make our own life choices and also in the responsibility to bear the consequences of those choices. We believe in the idea that all of us are created equal and should be treated equally. And we believe that the greatest asset of a country is the character of its people and that our “small r” republican form of government is the most effective way to promote this character. We need to focus on these basic principles that unite us so that we can work against the ideas and actors who are trying to divide us, from protestors who support terrorists to countries like Iran, Russia, and China, who are hostile to liberal democracy.
