Steve Larchuk loves books. He loves to read them and he loves to write them. As the 61-year-old Franklin Park resident was preparing to launch his campaign to take on Republican U.S. Rep. Keith Rothfus next year, he released a book he co-authored called Fifty Questions Your Congressman Should Answer If They Want Your Vote. The first question in the book is, “Can the U.S. Government bounce a check?” The answer — “Only if it wants to” — is one that Larchuk, an Internet and health-care-law attorney and businessman, has made the cornerstone of an economic plan that he says will rebuild the American middle class and strengthen the economy. The widower and father of two calls himself a practical Democrat: socially progressive and fiscally conscious. He doesn’t believe the U.S. needs to raise taxes to solve its problems. But continuing on its current path, he says, will spell doom. “There’s another way to do things,” he says. Larchuk talked to City Paper recently about those plans, why he’s running, and his opponent.
You’re an attorney by trade, with one previous run for Congress under your belt. So what brought you to this point challenging one of the most conservative members of Congress?
Everybody complains that the people who ought to run for Congress, don’t. I was just like the rest of those fellas complaining about government, but focusing on my legal career and my renewable-energy business in the U.S. Virgin Islands. But here I am at age 61 and I have the financial ability [Larchuk has loaned about $90,000 to his campaign so far] as well as the business and legal background … that qualify me to be an effective Congressman. I decided that given who we have representing the 12th District now, it’s tremendously important that we replace him with someone who goes to Washington with the best interest of the voters in mind instead of the donors that finance his campaigns.
You do have some campaign experience, right?
I ran for school board when I was 19 after I graduated high school and I lost by seven votes. My platform was I was the only person running who’d actually been through the school system. In 2004, frustrated with the absence of any discussion of health-care reform, I ran as an independent and committed to only talking about health-care reform. And it was tricky because the media couldn’t understand why someone would run and only want to talk about one thing. At the time, we were at the beginning of the Iraq war and I was often asked, “Isn’t it terribly important that we lost 1,000 soldiers in Iraq?” And I said, “Of course it’s important, but are we scoring the importance of things based on how many people die?” Because if we were, at that time about 18,000 people per year were dying because they didn’t have access to health care. So, if that’s how we keep score of these things, then health care is 18 times as important as the Iraq war.
So, you weren’t trying to win, you were trying to start a conversation?
Oh, I knew I couldn’t win. The incumbent at the time was Melissa Hart, the darling and rising star of the Republican Party. The important thing was to restart the dialogue if I could in my own tiny, microscopic way. In 2004, no one was talking about health-care reform because in 1994, Bill and Hillary Clinton had their blowup with health care and the Democrats lost control of Congress and blamed that issue. So, the Democrats refused to talk about it and the Republicans dared them to talk about it because they could eat them alive again if it came up. So I thought someone who could speak freely ought to get out here and talk about how the cost of health care was rising above all common sense and how employers were cutting back on health-care insurance. It was a crisis that was being ignored and pretty much overwhelmed by the war in Iraq and other issues. And all of those issues were important, but I thought if you had to pick one that was most critical to the average American, it was full access to health care. On election night I got 1 percent of the vote and I certainly had hoped for better than that. I went back to work and one day my phone rang and a woman was on the phone just weeping and I said, “What’s wrong?” And she said, “I thought you were going to win.” Well, at that particular moment my guard was down, so now both of us are crying on the phone. So I knew then I couldn’t turn my back on health-care reform or any other progressive issues that people care about. I decided that if I ever had the chance to give it a serious run again, I would run.
So you decided now was the best time?
It’s been more than 10 years since I last ran, and things have gotten worse. We’ve made some progress with the Affordable Care Act. It’s still not where it needs to be, but it’s a substantial start. But in terms of wealth disparity … we’re in serious, serious trouble in this country, and with everything that the [Federal Reserve Bank] has tried to do to pull us out of the recession, they’re out of ideas. They think the only way to fix the economy is by dumping more money into Wall Street, which is absolutely not correct. The financial sector is only a tiny part of the economy, an important part, but only part. The Fed has essentially ignored the rest of the economy. When you start to study why incomes haven’t gone up in 40 years for most people, and you ask yourself why is it 42 percent of the national wealth is in the top 1 percent of the population, you begin to realize what the problem is. There’s been this huge hemorrhaging of capital from the rest of the economy. It’s floated to the top, where it’s being essentially hoarded by the wealthy, and at the same time we’ve had this persistent trade deficit. So when you add up the money that has gone overseas, and floated to the top, you begin to realize that the problem with the economy is that monetary supply has not been properly managed by the Fed. They’ve been obsessed with the financial sector to the detriment to everybody else.
You mentioned the word “progressive” a couple of times. It’s hard to get politicians to use that word. And a lot of the time those who do don’t actually hold traditionally progressive ideals.
I like a different P-word: practical. I’m a practical Democrat. I’ve never been on unemployment, I’ve paid all my college loans and I’ve paid for my own health insurance most of my adult life. Those are pretty mainstream, practical attributes. We use progressive because the Republicans have so skillfully turned the “liberal” into an unusable word. And now they’re working on progressive; they want to ban that from the dictionary, too. As a person running for office, you can either fight that or, frankly, trump it by speaking on a more practical level. I don’t have the slightest interest in going down to Washington and perpetuating the food fight that passes for government these days. My job would be to go down there and start to build coalitions, with people that typical Democrats don’t even talk to.
For example?
Look, I think most of the people who run for Congress do so with the proper motives. They want to help the country, but they’re beholden to their donors. You have people that want to keep their money, and according to the Supreme Court, the wealthy class is permitted to spend as much as it wants to elect whoever it wants. So, you can either knock your head against a wall and just scream to the moon how unfair it is, or you can say, “OK, it is what it is, let’s talk.” One thing I know is that the wealthy class understands that if the economy fails, they’re just on the top deck of the Titanic looking down. Their turn will come. So what we need to do is comfort them that nobody’s out to bankrupt them. The objective here is to try and grow the entire economy. The financial sector dominates all of the equity and capital in our country; meanwhile, we have decaying infrastructure with no plan at all to rebuild the roads, railroads and dams. There are all sorts of things that we could be doing, and were not doing it because the Federal Reserve is not infusing cash back into the economy — the trillions of dollars required to resuscitate the United States. Instead the money they’ve injected has all gone to the Wall Street banks and has bailed them out. Look at history for the past five years, who has succeeded? Who has done well? The financial sector. I don’t begrudge that, that’s fine. As a matter of fact, we learned a lesson from that: We can infuse substantial new capital into our economy and not have raging inflation while the dollar remains strong and, frankly, six years nobody thought that was possible. Back when the quantitative easing started, people took it for granted that we would have raging inflation and the dollar would lose value against other currencies. Well that didn’t happen. We’ve had historically low inflation, and the dollar is stronger than it’s ever been. And when you start to think about that, you begin to realize that that’s the solution for the rest of the economy, for what I call the working economy, the 99 percent. If we started to seriously inject new money into the economy from the Federal Reserve — I’m not talking about raising taxes. I’m not talking about cutting social programs. I’m talking about doing exactly for the greater economy what the Fed did for Wall Street. Its job is to create new capital and then inject it, not through the Wall Street banks this time, but through an infrastructure bank, or an education bank or a small-business and small-agriculture bank. You do that, you inject money into the middle class and the economy starts to grow from the middle out, not the top down.
So how do you talk to and convince those sitting at the top of the food chain to consider something that they’ve never wanted to listen to or acknowledge before?
Well, I don’t think they’ve ever been presented with the idea before. Typically when people talk about this for example, an infrastructure bank, they want to fund it by raising taxes or taking state highway money or by cutting social programs. But that’s not even a drop in the bucket; it’s totally inadequate and unnecessary. The other choice is to do what I just described and have the Fed convert its quantitative-easing program to fueling the broader economy. The usual response is, “Oh my God, you’re just printing money, we’ll have raging inflation and you’ll need a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread,” and that usually stops people in their tracks. Well, up until five or six years ago, there wasn’t any evidence that that wouldn’t happen. But when the Fed ran out of ideas to resuscitate the economy, they broke the glass and did the thing they thought they would never do — create trillions of dollars out of thin air and infused it into Wall Street. Call it printing money if you want to, but that’s what the Fed is supposed to do: manage the money supply in exactly that fashion. That money went to Wall Street and the rest is history. We have a robust stock market, the banking sector is fully recovered, the loans that were given have been repaid with interest to the United States. It worked, and you didn’t have massive inflation.
What makes you the guy to sell this message to Democrats, Republicans and the special interests?
First of all, the message often depends on the messenger. I come from a personal background where I’ve paid my taxes. I’ve paid for my own health care. I’ve built businesses and I’ve employed people. I’ve actually gone into my personal savings to make sure that payrolls recovered so that other people could feed their families. This gives me some credibility that your average run-of-the-mill progressive doesn’t necessarily have. I’ve walked the walk. I actually understand what it’s like to be in business, and that puts me in a whole different category. I believe that more than a majority of the house members, whether they are Republicans or Tea Party or Democrats, are there for the right reason. The message to these people is, there’s a way to fund all of this without exploding the federal debt. We have a financial crisis in this country that I call “monetary famine.” All of this capital has been sucked out of the economy and not replaced. And just like in any other famine, the people at the top will always eat and the people down below will starve. And if starving sounds like an exaggeration, how many people do you know that have anything saved for retirement? How many people are deeply in debt? It’s a big crisis that’s about to get worse if we don’t do something.
In order to do any of this, you have to get elected. When Keith Rothfus faced Mark Critz in 2012, there was more dark money — outside spending — in this race than almost any other in the country. And if you get to D.C. there are more conservatives just like him who are also beholden to special interests. You really think you can make headway with this plan?
There’s social conservatism and there’s economic conservatism. I don’t think the Koch brothers really care about Keith Rothfus’ social conservatism. Just recently, we saw the darling of the social conservatives, Scott Walker, go down in flames. His support was a mile wide and an inch deep. The same is true of guys like Keith Rothfus. The people that are supporting him all have the same agenda. They want to keep the money they think they’ve earned. When you have Bernie Sanders, who I agree with on almost everything, going around talking about new taxes, it’s a red flag to the people that support conservatives. If you’re thinking you’re going to have a big liberal movement to change all that, you’re kidding yourself, you’re just not paying attention to history. That’s not going to work. Every major social reform in the history of the U.S. happened because people who had some money decided it was time for it to happen. That goes from the revolution through abolition to women’s right to vote to civil rights. It wasn’t because a bunch of people barely getting by living paycheck to paycheck decided to do something; it was because enough people with the financial stability to be secure went ahead and did the right thing. It’s time for that again.
The support for the radical right isn’t nearly as strong as people think it is. What keeps it looking strong is that the Democrats keep throwing more and more liberal candidates into the field thinking that’s going to fix the problem, and that only makes it worse. You take this class warfare and you turn it into a way of life, which is how it’s been for the past 20 years. This only changes when you start electing people who refuse to play by those rules and who want to solve the problem. I’ve never met the Koch brothers, and I have no ambition or desire to, but if I did, I bet we could have a pretty good conversation about what it’s going to take to rebuild the economy. And I think they’d be more in favor of restoring the liquidity of the middle class then you might think. Why not? Because the money will start to do what it’s done for the past 40 years and that’s float to the top. The rich will get even richer, but in the meantime we will have rebuilt the middle class. Economists have recognized this problem for years. They know it exists, but they’re not legislators. They don’t take the next step to get elected and fix the problem. They say somebody needs to do something. Well, I want to be the somebody who does something.
And you don’t believe your opponent is interested in fixing the economy?
Do you? Keith is one of the Gang of 28 who [are] doing their very, very best to try and shut down the government again, this time over Planned Parenthood. They’re totally immune to the facts, they just love the issue and are perfectly happy to try and shut down the government to try and make a cheap political point. This is the second time he’s tried to do this. The first time, he linked arms with Ted Cruz and they went off to battle to try to prevent the Affordable Care Act from going into full effect. He’s constantly talking about the ACA and what a horrible thing it is, which is maddening because he talks about repeal and replace, and I’ve never seen a suggestion of what he would replace it with. Before you start throwing 15 million people under the bus, maybe you should have a plan for what you’re going to do. But he’s not about substance — he’s about trying to tear down what other people have spent generations trying to build. Recently, he’s very upset that the National Park Service banned plastic water bottles from sale in the parks. That really has him in a lather. Well, I doubt there is one voter in the 12th district that gives a damn about that.
Where do you stand on social issues?
I’m all for universal health care by expanding Medicare to cover everyone. I’m completely in support of organized labor and the right of people to collectively bargain. I’m amazed that guys like Scott Walker were able to convince average citizens that unions are bad. And I think a lot of that is because most people aren’t in unions and haven’t seen their wages go up for 20 years. I’m unapologetically pro-choice. A woman has the right to control her body. Keith Rothfus has voted against the Violence Against Women Act, and he hasn’t lifted a finger for paycheck equality. I’m obviously pro-marriage equality. I was happy to see Kim Davis go to jail for violating her oath of office to treat everyone equally. We need to amend the Civil Rights Act to provide a prohibition against discriminating on the basis of gender and sexual orientation.
What about entitlements and social programs?
A lot of social conservatives are upset because some Americans are dependent on entitlements like food stamps. What they ought to be upset about is that so many people have to be dependent on food stamps. It’s a symptom of a problem, it’s not the problem. We need to fix the problem so more and more people can support their families. That includes raising the minimum wage. I think a minimum wage should be $15 an hour at least.
But the biggest entitlement in this country is the entitlement of the wealthy. They think they’re entitled to have the rest of us protect their wealth. This isn’t the first time in history that this has happened. In the 1860s, somehow plantation owners and slave owners were able to convince hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t have slaves or [their] own plantations that it was in their best interest to go and put their lives on the line to protect the plantation owners. Now, that is world-class spin, when you can convince people to go and die at the end of a musket ball so you can keep your plantation and your slaves. We have a very similar phenomena happening now where a lot of ordinary working people have been persuaded that it’s in their interest to make sure the wealthy can keep their wealth. It doesn’t have to be this way. But we have to have a better Congress, and that starts with better Congressional representatives. And people like me who can run have a moral duty to do so.
This article appears in Oct 7-13, 2015.
