WGVU’s Decision 2018 continues the countdown to the August 7th primary profiling the gubernatorial candidates. WGVU asks Democrat Dr. Abdul El-Sayed three questions.
Q: What is your plan for expanding the state’s economy?
A: “I want to build a Michigan that’s really focused on small business and focused on workers. What does that mean? We build into our education system. Our people are some of the smartest in the world. We’ve got to invest in them and that means being able to invest in universal pre-K. Making sure that every student coming from a household earning less than $150,000 a year gets to graduate debt-free from either a two year or a four year educational program. It means investing in our teachers and our school buildings again, and then we have to build our infrastructure out.”
Q: What is your plan for improving the state’s educational outcomes?
A: “Public school I believe needs to stay public. So what do we need to do? We need to fund more. Right now, we are just not meeting our funding requirements for basic education and opportunities for folks. Number two, we’ve got to fund differently. We’ve got to invest in our teachers again. They’ve taken a pay cut every year for the past five years. We’ve also got to make sure that our young people get to walk parallel paths. So you should graduate high school with some context of what pre-calculus is, but also you should know your way around a tool & die shop and we can be doing both at the same time.”
Q: How would you improve and fund the state’s infrastructure?
A: “Michigan can be a leader if we are willing to invest. Pure Michigan Infrastructure bank provides us the mechanism for being able to invest, to be a lot more thoughtful about investments, to bundle investments across the byways and the piping and the energy infrastructure, and to do it in a way that ends up actually empowering the state to make money because we’re investing, we’re bringing private capital in, and for those projects, like renewable energy, there’s actually money that comes back from the harvesting.”