Gubernatorial candidate visits MHCC

By NICK NGO

Peter Sorenson, calling himself a “real Democrat,” says Oregon community colleges need to have lower tuition for students

Sorenson, Democratic gubernatorial candidate, visited students March 3 in the Vista Dining Center.
Sorenson said his concern is students not getting the accessibility they deserve due to tuition increases and decreases in sate funding for community colleges.

“We need more teachers, better facilities. What we’ve done in public education is we’ve taken out music, sports, libraries, counseling, and all kinds of services that actually keep kids in school. No we wonder why we got 25-30 percent dropout rates,” Sorenson said. “We need those parts of the system, we can’t just hack away at the number of days or the people who do these kinds of services. We’re stripping our schools of all these things. They’re really valuable, they keep kids in school.”

He also talked about disinvestment in Oregon’s health care. He says that he wants to provide more investments into education and Oregon’s Health Care.

Sorenson said 850,000 people are eating out of an emergency food box, 600,000 are people without health care, 75,000 people are thrown out of community college, and 75,000 people were thrown off Oregon health plan – all within the last three years.

He says we can fix this issue by raising tax that major corporations pay. He mentions that major corporations pay 5 percent income tax. According to Sorenson, back in 1973 major corporations paid 18 percent income tax.

“We have radically cut taxes on the corporations most able to pay, at the same time we throw people off the Oregon Health Plan and we jacked up tuition on people trying to improve themselves,” Sorenson said. “I don’t think it’s fair. If I thought if one of the other candidates was addressing this stuff in an intelligent way, I wouldn’t be running for governor.”

Sorenson said that all the other candidates are on the road of disinvestment; he says that they said, “We can do more with less and live within our means.” To him that means that it’s doing less with less.

He says, “Live within our means” is cutting taxes on the wealthy and major corporations, making people who’re trying to go through community college pay more in tuition.

“I think we’re going in the wrong direction,” Sorenson said,

Sorenson backs up his statement by giving example of the countries with high tax and low tax.

He says, “the countries who tax high has a good economy.” While the ones with low taxes don’t have a bad economy where they don’t have any tax department, street signs, roads, healthcare, police department and public college.

“The economies in the developed world, where they’re investing in education, are the economies that are the biggest and fairest,” Sorenson said.

The election is May 16. All 36 Oregon counties send in their votes through mail only.