James Singer

James Courage Singer is a College Professor of Sociology at Salt Lake Community College
Education: Kearns High, SLCC, Westminster (BS & MA Community Leadership), Utah State University (PhD in progress - Sociology of Labor Markets and Social Policy).
Married with two small children, two years old and six months old.
Health care: Stop treating health care like a commodity where there are winners and losers. We should all be able to enjoy good care free at the point of delivery. Medicare works. It’s a program we can extend to all Americans.
Environment: I was brought up to respect Mother Earth and to exercise good stewardship. Finding the middle ground between development and conservation can be hard if both sides are fighting on the extremes.
What I want to do is prevent catastrophe and preserve our way of life. Scientific evidence shows that we must do something immediately to fix the problems we’re facing, such as reducing our carbon emissions, protecting half of land and water from development, and moving to non-carbon emitting energy.
I don’t to wait 20 years down the road when I am the same age as my opponent to work on this. By then it will be far too late.
Fiscal Responsibility: As voters, we have been letting our elected leaders give massive handouts to big corporations without any kind of oversight. Wages have remained flat for the bottom 90 percent of Americans for the past 40 years while the top one percent have seen their wealth skyrocket.
The recent tax break didn’t give much to most of us, while those at the top enjoyed massive increases. The distance between us is startling. The distance between poverty and “middle class” is much closer than the chasm between the middle class and the wealthy.
That isn’t responsible by any means. By cutting funding to our government protections and oversight, the ultra-wealthy and powerful have been able to pull off the biggest wealth transfer in our nation’s history, and they did so by saying it would help families.
That is incredibly irresponsible and as your Congressman, I will work hard to actually protect the middle class by using our government that is for us and by us to work for us.
Paid Parental Leave: Everyone can take unpaid time off from work for a few weeks by law for the birth of a child and know they won’t lose their employment. Every other advanced society has a system of paid parental leave, some as much as 50 weeks at 80 percent of their salary.
Even countries that are less industrialized than we are, provide this basic family protection. I propose that we secure 16 weeks of paid parental leave to make sure that parents can focus on creating the important bonds with their newborn.
If we care about families like I believe we do, then we use our collective resources to invest in our families. No one should have to leave their newborn after a couple of days to go back to work because they can’t afford to take the time off. 
Rural and Tribal Economic Development: Left to its own devices, the market does not see rural and tribal areas as places for business. It is the responsibility of our government to protect our communities by providing basic resources for businesses to flourish.
That means making it easier to get financing for start-ups, getting access to infrastructure like plumbing, electricity, internet, and cell phone coverage. And when needed, good-paying jobs with excellent benefits that the market may not provide, but that our communities need.