In January 2018 local political blogger Jason Booms posed “Seven Questions” to Howard County candidates:.

With the Maryland filing deadline fast approaching for those who are (or are considering) seeking public office in the 2018 election cycle (February 27, 2018 to be precise), this blog is once again considering what questionnaires (if any) to send out to various campaigns. …

While we can discuss specific policy proposals all day long ($15/hr federal minimum wage, Medicare for All, etc…), I like to return to exploring “first principles” to understand how candidates think about underlying issues.

This was a pretty interesting approach to try to take candidates out of the “talking points” mode of political campaigning, and I thought it would be fun to supply my own answers to his questions, even though I wasn’t running for anything. Here are the questions and my answers, one per post:

  1. Wealth inequality
  2. Social democracy (plus a bonus fun post “If-by-socialism”)
  3. Racial equality
  4. Liberty and equality (and baseball!)
  5. Class warfare
  6. Gender equality
  7. LGBTQIA equality

I also had some final thoughts after publishing the last post, going back and revisiting some of the issues I’d previously discussed.

I intended these posts to be primarily “think pieces”, with some actual policy suggestions sprinkled here and there. In the end they constitute a good overview of my political beliefs circa 2018.

A final note: I am a registered Democrat and have been all my life. However, I tried to be as non-partisan as possible in writing these posts, in the hope that they may be of interest to you no matter your political affiliation.

For further exploration

I created custom graphs for some of the posts. For the code and data used to produce the graphs and related material, see my seven-answers code repository.