Name: Tim D’Annunzio
Party: Republican
Occupation: Entrepreneur, Body Armor Business, Sky diving business, Real Estate Owner, Wind Tunnel owner
Years in District: Not in District 4, was re-districted into district 7
Endorsements: N/A
Amendment 1: I don’t want to say much about NC issues. My personal position is marriage is between a man and woman. I don’t believe government should be involved in marriage in any way. I don’t think they should be involved in marriage whether it’s between a man and a woman or anyone else. It’s not the government’s business to be endorsing what is actually a religious bondage.
What do you think is the central issue for this election?
The obvious answer is the economy and the economy as it relates to individual’s jobs, the everyday pocket issues, rising prices. How are people going to keep up with that? And then what do we do about the people who have fallen victim to the bad economy.
We’ve got to turn the economy loose. I’m a business guy. I know the things that hinder business creation or job creation and growth, which is what we need. Those things are regulation, the availability of capital, all those things that the government has crept into with over-regulation and financial regulation that hinders that. But then beyond that, what we’re talking about now is only a symptom when we’re talking about the economy and we can do things to put it back on track.
The problem is the underlying. That is the main part of the actual problem, is what allows us to get here. That basically boils down to falling victim to demagogues and people always being told by politicians that ‘if you just let me do this for you,’ or trying to direct them to a superficial problem and telling them ‘if you allow me to fix this for you, by whatever means.” Whether it’s providing more money from the treasury or providing a new regulation that makes you feel safer. All those things are the things that people fall prey to and they put people in power who keep using this tactic against them. It’s this ever-increasing, never decreasing type of system.
Once it grows to a point the answers are never there. Those politicians keep coming back with that same solution and we create this leviathan, this monster that at some point has to be turned back… There are moral issues here that are the base moral issues that we’ve turned away from as a nation. Until we address those—those moral short falls in the population and in the politicians—we’ll never truly have a long lasting answer.
What are the specific issues that face District 4?
North Carolina has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the nation. The issues all across the country are the same. How do we create jobs? How do we create economic growth within our state. [For instance] the governor has just had a big turn of opinion on fracking. Exploiting all our natural resources here and removing regulations that get in the way of that [is one thing we can do.]
We have a great environment here. When I started businesses here, I did it. And all things that made it bad, made the state situation bad at that time… They can be presented as advantages. We have a lot of empty buildings here… The Fourth District, probably more so that most, has a lot of really educated people in it. As you move further south it becomes the old south again… We haven’t had such a bad economy down this way as other parts of the state I think and it’s mostly because of the military here. Again, we just need to remove regulation on a national level. It’s not necessarily something that can be done at the state level. We need tax reform.
Why should the constituents of District 4 elect you to this office?
I know that I understand why this country was founded the way it was, what principles it was founded on and what geniuses the founders were. If we would just go back and understand that. If the people understood it. And if we would teach it again. This is what I see this as an opportunity for. Not just to go and be a lawmaker, but to along the way try to educate people to what the nation was founded on. Those basic principles. Once you understand that, you understand the need and the reason to get back there. I’m willing to fight for that. When I say fight, I mean I’m willing to use all my intellect and time and effort to get us back there. It worked. When we actually did it that way it worked… [Back then] it wasn’t our material wealth that created our ideas. We’ve kind of reversed that these days. We believe that our material wealth is who we really are.
What do you think were the biggest accomplishments and the biggest failures of the last two years in the US Congress?
[Looking at] the last three years, the first couple of years, I don’t see it being anything but failure, because there was an acceleration of spending, an expansion of budgets, an expansion of governments, the expansion of health care, bailouts. All those things were failures.
The biggest accomplishment has probably come in the last year, when Congress has attempted to hold the line. Even though they haven’t… they increased the debt limit, which I don’t think they should’ve done. There’s not a lot you can do when you’ve got a president who’s not going to sign legislation, which is what they’ve had in this latest congress. I would say, the best thing they have done is not forward the progression of socialism. Prior to that, those two years were probably the greatest expansion of socialism in the history of this country.
What’s your guilty pleasure?
That’s such a broad question… I like to lay on the couch on a Saturday afternoon and watch TV. I’m a pretty big sports fan … To be honest, I don’t feel guilty about too much of what I do.
