Non-career politician needs to offer fresh solutions

Nationally, we have enough Republicans and Democrats running for president to field opposing football teams.

Locally, we’ve got one person actively running for governor, Lacey Lafferty, a Lewes-area woman who graduated from Cape Henlopen High School in 1979. A Republican, Lafferty has already introduced a professional-looking website and a billboard on Route 9.

Her political experience is limited to stints as a 40th District committeewoman and with Jane Brady’s 1994 successful run for attorney general.

Which makes running for governor look like a stretch. Lafferty does, however, offer a wide array of work experience.

She began as a vegetable and chicken farmer, expanded into trucking and, after receiving a criminal justice degree, worked as an investigator with the Delaware State Police.

Her biography also mentions that she graduated from the Barbizon School of Modeling, and was the first woman to drive modified stock cars on southern Delaware dirt tracks.

What’s not to like for Delaware voters?

Despite her obvious appeal, Lafferty will need to flesh out her campaign platform.

Nationally, Donald Trump has made a splash by offering simplistic solutions. Trade problems with China? Get tough. Illegal immigrants? Build a wall. And make Mexico pay for it.

Lately, though, even Trump seems to be making an attempt to be more substantive. Lafferty should do the same.

Lafferty’s campaign platform is: Patriotism, Principles and Prosperity. Hard to disagree with the three P-words, but I do have a quibble.

On her website, Lafferty says, “It used to be patriotism was a given.”

I’m about four years older than Lafferty, but I would think we would both remember a time when patriotism was far from a given.

America in the late ’60s and early ’70s was torn apart by opposition to the Vietnam War and by the Watergate scandal. Patriotism ebbed, even seemed to recede altogether.

A contemporary TV show, “M*A*S*H*,” mocked those most likely to mouth patriotic platitudes. It was the biggest show on television.

Patriotism soared in the ’80s, with the election of Ronald Reagan and the wildly popular ‘84 Los Angeles Olympics. (The Soviets boycotted; we won a boatload of medals.)

Today you can witness, as Helen and I did recently, the crowds who reverently walk around the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, reading and often touching the names of those who perished.

Americans, in general, are pretty patriotic, even those who disagree with you politically.

A minor problem perhaps, but it betrays an overly rosy view of the past, a tendency to look back.

That might be why Lafferty’s top policy prescription, cutting taxes, also seems rooted in the past. Sure, cutting taxes sounds great, but let’s look at the facts.

Delaware already has low taxes. Kiplinger named the First State the most tax-friendly in the nation. First out of 50.

A look at the Kiplinger tax map offers a graphic look at our present - and future - situation. Delaware is surrounded by states with much higher taxes.

The result? A demographic train wreck. Delaware in general and Sussex County in particular are turning into giant senior centers.

We’ve already played the low-tax card. Lafferty’s plan for still lower taxes is a vote for the status quo. In fact, it’s doubling-down on a strategy that hasn’t provided the vibrant economy and good-paying jobs that Delawareans say they want.

Einstein is often credited with defining insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

You don’t have to be an Einstein to predict what even lower taxes would bring. We’ll get more of what we’ve been getting the last 40 years, more retirees moving in and more development leading to low-wage service and retail jobs.

(One of the county’s growing career sectors might be called: Doing Stuff For Old People.)

Worse, overdevelopment could crowd out Sussex County’s other main industry besides tourism: agriculture.

Residential and agricultural areas don’t mix. This is already an issue.

What’s more, state revenue streams are under stress. Delaware has five main revenue sources: personal income tax, corporate franchise tax, abandoned property, casinos and lottery, and gross receipts tax.

Two of those face major problems. The state’s right to claim abandoned property faces court challenges. The faltering casino cash cow hit its peak years ago.

Still worse, this year the state plugged a $31 million budget hole by using money from a one-time cash settlement. If anything, next year’s budget looks bleaker.

Calling for a tax cut when the state’s already playing budget games makes a candidate appear out of touch. Lafferty’s claim that a tax cut will raise revenue doesn’t begin to wash.

It’s still early. Lafferty has time to bring her work experience to bear on ways to address the very real challenges we face. A non-career politician with her background should have much to offer.


Don Flood is a former newspaper editor living near Lewes. He can be reached at floodpolitics@gmail.com.