Independent candidate Ed Rabel said today that Democrat Nick Casey and Republican Alex Mooney have shown, dreadfully, that “they are nearly identical in their indifference to the issues that matter to the pocketbooks, the health and the future of West Virginians.”
“Both Mooney and Casey seem oblivious to the fact that, while West Virginia natural resources and labor produce prosperity for out-of-state corporations, they fail to do so for those of us who live and work here,” Rabel said.
Mooney and Casey appeared today at the West Virginia Business and Industry Candidates Forum at the Charleston Civic Center.
“Casey and Mooney both want to cut corporate taxes,” Rabel said. “They both want to reduce federal spending at a time when we desperately need to rebuild our infrastructure, spur funding for education, take care of our veterans, and improve programs such as jobs training, and care for our most vulnerable citizens. And they both want to gut the EPA. These archaic policies will make out-of-state corporations richer, West Virginians poorer, and our air and water dirtier and more dangerous.”
“We’ve already tried these policies in West Virginia,” Rabel said. “We cut corporate taxes and we got annual budget deficits, but no new jobs. We cut government spending and support for higher education and we got a hiring freeze and higher college tuitions, but no new jobs. And we work harder at suing the EPA than we do at enforcing the law, resulting in contaminated water and denuded mountains, but no new jobs.”
“Now Nick Casey and Alex Mooney want to do for America what’s been done to West Virginia,” Rabel said.
“They howl about the EPA’s new carbon emission rules. But the truth is that it’s competition from natural gas, solar, and wind that’s killing coal. The EPA regulations, far from being a threat to West Virginia, present us with an opportunity to develop new industries, new businesses, and new jobs.”
Rabel said that both Casey and Mooney “would have us waste millions of dollars fighting the EPA while doing the bare minimum necessary to meet the new requirements and, of course, doing everything we can to defend the coal industry.”
“If we follow that course, it will be business as usual and more of the same in West Virginia,” Rabel said. “Is that what we want or need?”
“We must insist that corporations pay their fair share of taxes and assume the enormous costs of reversing the damage to the environment and our infrastructure. The burden of funding public education through property taxes falls unduly hard on the small percentage of West Virginians that own property. Consequently, we have the 48th worst school system in the nation, while corporations take billions of dollars in wealth out of our state.”