Q&A: Flaccavento talks issues pertinent to students in upcoming election

Tuesday, November, 6, 2012; 9:28 AM | 22 | | Print

by Donal Murphy, News Staff Writer

How would you help to create these small businesses or create incentives for them?

You direct investment. The US Department of Agriculture, US Department of Commerce, US Department of Energy, all have a variety of grant programs that will help a business go from an idea to implementation. Start up grants, small amounts of capital, many community organizations then have micro loan programs…

We've seen, for instance in our area, where we built a packing and grading facility that allowed small farmers access to big markets that they could not possibly have gotten into on their own, Virginia Tech being one of them as a matter of fact, as well as supermarkets.

With all these grants, how would you, at the national level, help deal with the national deficit?

The reason that we would not increase the deficit is that I would fight for closing the loopholes. Right now we spend dramatically more money on subsidizing big national corporations, well over $50 billion a year, $5 or 6 billion a year on the oil companies alone. Those companies are not creating jobs, they're not reinvesting in communities. The money the we spend on start up entrepreneurs, small businesses, sustainable farms, it's a tiny fraction of what we give to these companies who are not creating jobs....

So I would close those loopholes, reduce or end those subsidies, and take some of that money, not all of it, and use that for investing in the things we just talked about: the small business, the family farm, the community capital.

You have 3 children of college age. Has having them put a perspective on the issues faced by college students?

They all have debt actually, all 3 of them... I see both the challenges they face and just how real it is...

But I also see the opportunity, because 2 of the 3 kids, what they’ve done is they’ve worked in community work, they've worked on farms, they've sort of taken advantage of the fact that they're not walking immediately into the career of their life and so they've done some interesting things that have broadened their skills... So I'd say it's not great times, my kids know it, but they've kind of made the most of it and I think that's what young people have to do.

Anything else you'd like to put in that affect college students that you can affect at the national level?

My wife Laurie taught public school for 32 years in Washington County

...

I think that the challenges college students face actually start early because our K-12 is not adequate to the times. We need to be preparing young people to live in a different world, a world that requires us to be more innovative, more frugal, more self-reliant. And that should be starting in elementary school, middle school, high school, not just college.

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A version of this article appeared in the Oct 2 issue of the Collegiate Times.

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