Laurence Verga is one of seven candidates seeking the Republican nomination for the congressional seat held by Democrat Tom Perriello in Virginia’s Fifth District.

The Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner spoke with Verga on May 1 at the Fifth District GOP convention at Hampden-Sydney College near Farmville. All of the candidates were present and addressed the delegates formally. Verga chatted about the issues informally before the gavel fell.

Asked what are the top three issues he would emphasize during the general election campaign, Verga, a real estate investor by profession, replied:

Reduce Taxes

“The top three issues will be reducing taxes, which would include the corporate income tax, the small business tax, the capital gains tax,” which he would like to abolish along with estate taxes.

Verga would also like to “repeal and not fund Obamacare,” the health care legislation passed by Congress in March. Related to this, his third issue would be to “stop everything possible that President Obama will try to do to further build government and raise taxes.”

Talk to Rivals

In terms of uniting the Republican Party behind him after a possibly fractious primary with multiple candidates, Verga said that he would “sit down with all the other six candidates and spend some time with them and talk to them about the positive things I like about them personally or their campaign and ask for their help.”

He added that he will “be very happy to talk to anyone” who supported one of the other candidates, to find out “what they want to see in me” as well as to “listen to what they feel that they needed that they were getting from that other candidate.”

Verga would also remind candidates and their supporters that “that we did win, because of my background in building businesses and my leadership in the business community and how I can bring that to Washington, D.C.”

In looking at how to bring the different elements of the Republican Party together – social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, and others – Verga suggested that focusing on one key issue will do the job.

'Jobs and the Economy'

“What needs to be done,” he said, is to look at “unemployment in this country, real unemployment of over 17 percent and millions and millions of people out of work.

“What we need to do to bond together,” he continued,” is to “realize that this election in November and the presidential election two years later and all the other elections are about jobs and the economy, about jobs and the economy, and about jobs and the economy.”

Focusing on taxes, Verga said, is the way to go.

“We need to do everything we can,” he said, “as Republicans and conservatives, independents and conservative Democrats, to get people back to work by all supporting drastic tax cuts. Eventually what I’d like to see is a change of the IRS system and a Fair [Tax] or a flat tax, but I think we’re a few years away” from those possibilities.

Making a comparison, Verga said that “this election reminds me a lot of 1980, when Reagan came in and the country galvanized together in reducing taxes and trying to make government smaller and less intrusive in the lives of all Americans. It’s happening again.”

Verga’s historical comparison echoes that of Cato Institute scholar John Samples, who made a similar claim in an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner on April 28.

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