"Hunt for a Hand Up, Not a Hand Out" ~ The Lamp Post

Photo Source: Andrew Hunt Facebook Page

By: Jessica Swords

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Third party candidate, Andrew Hunt, is running on the Libertarian ticket this election year in the Georgia gubernatorial race. He has so far been the only one of the three candidates to respond, let alone willing to accept an interview with the writers of The Lamp Post.

Andrew Hunt is a Georgia native, husband and father of five, whose children range from nine months old to 22 years old. While he resides with his wife and two youngest children, his three oldest children are creating and living their own adventures in the University Life.

Hunt’s educational background includes an undergraduate degree in Geology from Auburn University, a Master’s degree in Geology from Colorado School of Art, and a Ph.D. in Material Science and Engineering from Georgia Tech. After finishing his Ph.D., he started his own nanotechnology company, nGimat, which he has left in order to serve the citizens of Georgia and run for Governor.[1]

For his campaign, Hunt is focusing on putting businesses first, and education at a close second. He has offered creative ways to tackling these top two issues while attempting to maximize liberty and choice for the citizens of Georgia. He has come up with a new kind of solution to the minimum wage debates where he believes we can raise wages without government mandating and stripping liberties. His approach is to reward companies that pay full-time employees $11/hour or more with tax breaks. He foresees a sort of domino effect in how this will stimulate and regrow the economy.

“Our objective is to incentivize employers to create jobs that provide competitive pay for all Georgians. To bring a higher base pay to Georgians, the employment penalty tax reimbursement of federal payroll taxes will be for jobs paying $11/hour or more, and this will be indexed to inflation. Additionally, maintaining low unemployment will drive up pay for all, as employers will compete to get the staff they need. A strong free market economy yields great jobs! Thus, elimination of employment penalty taxes will bring higher pay and ensure fewer jobs with lower pay. When the People earn more, there is a stronger economy -which in turn helps all businesses.”[2]

As a businessman who holds three scientific degrees and three children in college, he places education as a top priority. As education being the second most important thing on his list, he sees it as being the foundation of decreasing poverty and the welfare program. One of the solutions he offered was giving more choices to parents on the type of education they want for their kids.

“Our most impoverished areas are also our areas that usually have our lowest graduation rate. Atlanta Public Schools is less than 60% graduation rate. Macon, in some of their areas, is only 50%. You have other areas that are lower. That’s basically criminal in my mind. You need to have quality schools in all areas, and that would be a big focus of mine to ensure that, and to make sure that families have school choice. You can do that through some new programs that are being tested in some of the other states. That’s what we need. We already have the Charter School Law, and it’s working in the few and rare instances where it’s being implemented.”[*]

While the mainstream parties are losing more and more support as the support for the Libertarian party continues to grow, we asked Dr. Hunt how he could gain more support from the general population that tends to focus more on these mainstream parties. His focus for them seems to be on education and healthcare, stating that he believes “the federal education, federal healthcare, and a lot of federal programs are actually unconstitutional. They need to be state programs.”[*]

Hunt believes that we need to “make sure people have basic health” as he offers more creative and liberty-driven alternatives to Obamacare:

“There’s actually been a Supreme Court ruling that the federal government can offer a plan, but states can adopt their own plans. Most of them don’t because it could be political suicide… I’m going to be willing to take the risk…So, we need to have a free enterprise-based healthcare system. It had gone away from that a long time ago with the major insurance companies and major healthcare corporations buying up all the small practices and everything. It’s a Crony Capitalist system as it is and Obamacare just levies on top of that because now it’s forcing people to buy insurance.”[*]

He gave Colorado’s co-op program as an example. He also talked about options that private healthcare providers were offering their patients, where the patient could pay the doctor’s office “directly a certain amount per month, ranging from $100-$160 per month depending on if it’s individual or family or whatever the situation is, and then they get basically almost unlimited visits—32 a year.” This seems to also fix solutions to long-term treatment expenses and testing, as “[The doctor] can see [patients] for an emergency... [gets] paid a lot more, the people have something that’s less expensive than insurance, and then [the doctor] has relationships with people who need chemotherapy, CAT-scans and other things, where the actual costs of the service is less than a lot of people’s deductibles.”[*]

In regards to malpractice, Hunt stated that “Minnesota’s malpractice insurance is one third that of Georgia.” He believes that doctors could save money if Georgia could adopt Minnesota’s model for malpractice insurance.[*]

So could those who no longer find comfort in the way of mainstream politics finally break free from voting “evil” into office? Can the life-long democrat or republican who are both fed up with the traditional lies, propaganda and broken promises of their parties finally come to a happy middle? Andrew Hunt tells us how to do this:

“In our elected positions and officials, generally around 50% of them or higher are attorneys. They are 1% or so of our population. That’s not a right ratio. What we have to do is elect our non-attorneys into office.”[*]

If one would guess the occupations of Deal and Carter before they decided to become career politicians, you would see that both of them are—you guessed it! Lawyers.

“Deal and Carter are both attorneys, and what do they do? When they write a bill or a law and they’re looking after themselves and their brethren… They craft these [laws] and they’re hard to read. We need plain language laws that people can read and understand. ”[*]

In all other issues that have not yet been expanded on in the campaign website itself, he declares that “rights and responsibility will be returned to citizens; size and scope of government will be reduced. Government will be for the people and by the people, with liberty and justice for all.”[3]

Hunt seems to be pushing for true political reform with sincere transparency. The one thing he has over the other two candidates, besides giving a prompt response and agreement to interview with us, is that he is not part of the political system as it currently stands. He is not a career politician. He is a businessman who understands a parent’s perspective on kids’ education, as well as seemingly having a love for liberty in his heart.

Lastly, as we await response from Nathan Deal and Jason Carter, we can only wonder what their thoughts are on having a third party candidate running in this election. However, please do remember, gentlemen: We are small time bloggers, but big time voters.