47th House District: Adrian Plank
Party: Democratic
Age:45
Place of residence: Columbia
Occupation: Union carpenter
Education: University of Central Missouri
Political experience: none
Opponent: Chuck Basye
Recent state income tax cuts have been hailed by some as an economic jumpstart and derided by others as taking money that’s needed for social services and education. What is your opinion?
We’ve got a party that has super-majority and has ties to their donors. Those tax cuts are going to the larger corporations. When you do that, you lose funds. When you lose funds, you have to make cuts. Those cuts will come to social programs, education system has been cut hundreds of millions of dollars just because of the new formula which means they put the budget up in a smaller cup and call it full. We have a political system that represents the very wealthy and those wealthy don’t want to contribute and that’s a shame, because we do.
Voters will decide Nov. 6 whether to raise Missouri’s gas tax. Do you support raising the tax?
I do support it, but it irritates me because those corporate tax cuts means those taxes falls on the working class. We’ve seen that with the school cuts too, you have cities that are passing tax levies in their cities so they can fund their public schools.
All those tax breaks trickle down to the working class. I’d like to be against it, but we do need infrastructure.
Voters will also decide on whether to approve any of three medical marijuana proposals. What are your thoughts on the issue?
I’m with all three of them, I’m for yes on two. I think it’s the best one to go, it’s one thing that can’t be changed. It does allow you to grow up to six plants so your medical costs are down.
The other one is the Bradshaw amendment, that’s just a rich guy trying to control the market. I’m against that, we need to keep the market in the farming markets.
Our small farmers are disappearing and I think we can give their market back to make a living.
A political committee has attacked your fiscal managing skills over past bankruptcy saying you left taxpayers on the hook. How do you respond to these personal attacks?
It’s funny, I say that because my bankruptcy was a direct result of horrible economic policy. What I mean by that is, when I filed for bankruptcy there was a lot of companies that filed for bankruptcy. There were millions of people who lost their jobs and their homes. I could tell you right now that’s exactly why I’m running, it’s because bad economic policy put small businesses out of business. That’s a shame, and that’s my experience and that’s real life experience. We need people like me to run for office because they’ve been there and done that and we need people to fight for working people.
What other key issues do you see facing the state?
We really need campaign finance reforms, it’s out of hand. We see a lot of dark money coming in, especially with the previous governor, and those policies didn’t change. They didn’t hold him accountable. So, that dark money is still coming in. You can see the difference between the MEC reports and some of my campaign and some of my opponent’s. It’s ridiculous and it needs to be changed.
