Candidate profile: Jon Mangin

The first thing you notice about Jon Mangin, in addition to his youth — at 25, he’s the youngest candidate in the five-member cohort seeking to unseat the 79-year-old incumbent, Howard Coble — is neat habit of dress (single-color blue dress shirt tucked into slacks, not a wrinkle in the ensemble) and an unfailingly positive manner of speaking that may have something to do with his devout Catholic faith.

The first two minutes of conversation reveal something else: a sense of intellectual consistency, a curious mind and an informed sense of passion. We spent more than an hour together this morning at Old Battleground Road Starbucks coffee shop this morning.

“I don’t see it as running against Coble,” Mangin said. “I see it as running on a couple issues that I don’t think are getting enough attention.”

Then he proceeded to lay out the issues for me — reforming tax policy, addressing economic inequality, reforming trade policy, sustaining entitlements, cutting military spending and Just War theory — in a way that was straight-forward and logical. Maybe that’s to be expected from someone who loves history, studied economics and works as an information technology trainer.

Mangin said he favors a “flat-er” tax, as opposed to the flat tax promoted by opponent Cathy Brewer Hinson. His description suggested a progressive flat tax.

“You have to have a floor level,” he said. “The first $50,000 of earned income should be tax free, and then from there you should have a couple lower marginal rates.”

This brought Mangin to the subject of widening income disparities between the top and bottom earners in the United States, which the candidate characterized as a “chasm.”

“It’s important in any country, and especially if we’re going to be a republic, that we can’t continue to have such a disparity of incomes. We’ve had continued consolidation, so that if we keep going in this direction we’re going to have a handful of CEOs in the United States managing a large number of workers in China. It’s not sustainable. We’ll move towards a plutocracy. You can say, that couldn’t happen in a democracy. It happened in ancient Greece, where most citizens were not enfranchised.”

Mangin told me he does not subscribe to laissez-faire free market ideology, and favors some measure of economic regulation because “a worker does not have the bargaining power of a corporation.”

“This gets to my faith as a Catholic,” he said. “It’s very important not to fall into a trap of profit being the absolute end. Then people become just parts in a machine. I think that’s terribly dehumanizing.”

Before I get too far, if you’re like me, you might wonder why Mangin isn’t a Democrat. He told me he considers himself a paleo-conservative, and someone who supports the principle of limited government. As a Catholic, he’s naturally pro-life, which situates him comfortably on the conservative side of the ideological ledger. But consistent with his pro-life stance, he also believes in taking care of the elderly and in fair and decent treatment of workers — both traditionally liberal positions.

Entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare are in trouble, Mangin told me. Hence the need for reform.

“I see a very hard situation for the country,” he said. “With the state of unemployment and the unwillingness to diagnose and treat the level of stable jobs, we’re not going to have as much tax revenue,” he said. “If tax revenue goes down, we can’t continue spending.”

Government does have an obligation to provide public assistance for those who are unable to take care of themselves because of age, disability or lack of employment, he said.

“This might be a little Pollyannish,” he said. “It’s my responsibility as a Christian to help those in need…. We know if we have a lot of excess we should do that.”

Mangin said he believes many public assistance and social welfare programs are best administered and funded by states and municipalities. He described himself as a strong supporter of the 10th Amendment reserving for states those powers not delegated to the federal government. (For the record, he also recognizes the value of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, and the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which describes the federal government’s role in regulating interstate commerce.) The candidate also said he supports the notion of “subsidiarity,” articulated as, “The most competent local authority should be empowered.”

The candidate’s prescription for maintaining revenue for entitlement programs is supporting workforce development, based on a recipe of “lowering the tax burden for enterprising, hard-working Americans” and trade reform, including strategically deployed tariffs.

“China, for example, does not have environmental protections,” Mangin said. “It has a ridiculous minimum wage. It does not have basic worker protections. Those are subsidies because they don’t have much regulation. I don’t want to have yellow rivers again here. To have free trade, China has to match our laws and regulations, or we match them with a tariff that makes up for the added cost of production.”

Mangin is somewhat rare as a candidate who forthrightly acknowledges that cutting taxes requires a corresponding reduction in spending to avoid increasing the national debt. And he named the place where he would look for fat to cut.

“There’s a lot of corporate welfare,” he said, “and a lot of it is hidden in the military budget. Republicans treat that as sacrosanct. It’s a question of how many new weapons systems do we need to develop at one time. Republicans will yell when you try to cut the military budget that you’re undermining the troops, but then through some bureaucratic nightmare, soldiers don’t get the care they need when they leave the theater of combat, but contractors are making huge profits. With the deficit at $1.4 trillion, it’s going to have to come from somewhere in the military budget. What’s the budget for biological and chemical warfare? The only legitimate development should be response. We should never have developed chemical weapons in the first place, but we should not now be developing chemical weapons, and we shouldn’t be maintaining a stockpile of chemical weapons. How much money is spent on developing VX gas?”

Mangin said he regrets that many modern Republicans have displayed what he called “a predilection for war.” As a Catholic, Mangin believes in Just War doctrine, which holds that war should be undertaken only as a last resort.

“If I were to say we should be gung ho and attack everyone, I shouldn’t be running for office; I should be participating,” the candidate said. “A lot of pundits who are very pugnacious today, they didn’t feel that way during the Vietnam war. They found other things to do.”

Mangin has taken exception to one vote made by the incumbent. Following a raft of panicky phone calls from constituents in October 2008, Coble voted to authorize the Troubled Asset Relief Program to bail out the financial sector.

“It was such a mistake to have the bailout because it shifted the risk premium from financial institutions and it rewarded bad behavior, it rewarded speculation. It will happen again. It didn’t address the fundamental problem of distressed mortgages. Government had to do something. What they ought to have done is had a renegotiation of mortgages and reset those interest rates at 3 or 4 percent, and then let the people who were engaging in speculation by flipping vacation houses eat the loss.”

Still, Mangin said he sympathizes with Coble’s dilemma. After all, there was a “potential for a complete lockup” of credit, and only a small window for action.

“We can’t change the vote,” he said. “We can make sure financial institutions are lending to people. And we can stop the ridiculous mortgage interest rates, and the restrictions on credit.”

CORRECTION: Due to my own error, I quoted Mangin as saying that the deficit is $12.5 trillion. He actually said that it is $1.4 trillion. ($12.5 trillion is the national debt.)

Triad Elections '10