I trust you with your own paycheck more than I trust any government agency to spend it for you. That's not a slogan — it's the record. When conservatives took the NC House and Senate in 2010, the state income tax sat at 7.75%, the state was staring down a roughly $3 billion shortfall, and the rainy day fund held only $150 million. Since then, conservative budgeting has taken North Carolina to a AAA credit rating, a rainy day fund that's grown past $4 billion, and a personal income tax rate cut nearly in half — headed toward 3.49%. I've also lived the other side of the tax code as a small business owner. 

We pay sales tax when we buy office furniture, property tax every year just for owning it, and if we ever sell it, the government calls that income and taxes it again. That's not a fluke — it's the pattern. Buy a home and you pay transfer fees and taxes. Own it, and you pay property tax every year, even as rising values quietly hand local government a tax increase without ever touching the rate. Sell it, and you're taxed again. Being taxed once is bad enough. Being taxed three times on the same dollar is government forgetting whose money it is. 

I'll fight in Raleigh to keep spending disciplined, keep the rate coming down, and stop treating families and small businesses like a renewable resource for the next government program.

In just five years, the average age of a first-time homebuyer in America jumped from 33 to 40 — a sevenyear loss that falls hardest on young families just starting out. I have five daughters. If we don't change that trend line, they won't have the same shot at homeownership their grandparents had. 

Government makes this worse in ways that rarely get talked about at the local level: fees stacked on the purchase, property taxes that climb automatically as home values rise — even when the rate never changes — and a maze of permitting and zoning rules that slow down the very construction that would ease prices. 

Economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out for years that unaffordable housing in many parts of the country traces directly back to local building and zoning restrictions rather than a shortage of land or lumber. That's a state and local policy problem, and it's one I intend to work on. 

I'll push for property tax relief that doesn't punish families for rising values they haven't cashed in on, and for cutting the red tape that adds months and dollars to every new home built in Franklin and Vance

Families are leaving public schools, and the reasons aren't complicated: a loss of truth, a loss of structure, and a loss of trust. If we want families to choose public education again, the answer isn't a bigger bureaucracy — it's teaching what's true, teaching morality, and teaching skills our children can actually use. 

Economist and education researcher Thomas Sowell has spent decades comparing outcomes for students in traditional public schools against charter and home-schooled students — often in the very same neighborhoods and buildings — and found that the institutions defending the status quo are rarely the ones producing the best results for kids. Sowell's research consistently points to one root cause: a system that too often protects the institution and the people who staff it before it protects the child it was built to serve. That matches something I believe to my core: an individual — in this case, a child and their parent — is what an institution too easily becomes hostile to as it grows larger. The bigger any institution gets, the more its energy goes toward protecting itself rather than fulfilling its mission. Public education is not exempt from that pattern. 

As your representative, I'll fight for parental rights, curriculum transparency, real school choice, and support for teachers who focus on the fundamentals — because the goal isn't preserving a system, it's forming children who can think, work, and stand on their own two feet.

“Children are a heritage from the LORD, offspring a reward from him” (Psalm 127:3). That's not sentiment — it's the foundation my wife and I have tried to build our home on, raising five daughters here in Franklin County, the only home they've ever known. 

Scripture is clear that we're meant to train up our children and hand them a foundation that can't be shaken (Proverbs 22:6). That job belongs first to families, not to the state. When the nuclear family is strong, communities are strong. When it's weakened or replaced by government programs standing in for parents, communities weaken with it. My family has lived this conviction directly — we spent years as a foster family, walking alongside children who needed a stable, loving home. North Carolina has roughly 11,000 children in the foster system and only around 5,000 licensed foster homes, and that number of homes dropped sharply in recent years. That gap gets closed by families and churches stepping up, not by another government office. 

I'm running so that policy in Raleigh reflects what most of us already know from experience: a mom, a dad, and children raised with structure and faith is still the surest path to a healthy next generation — and I'll fight for policies that support that family, protect parental rights, and make it easier, not harder, to raise a family here.

An individual is the natural check on an institution. The larger an institution — or a government — grows, the more its purpose shifts from serving people to preserving itself, and the less any single person's voice counts. 

Our founding documents got this exactly right: “We the People… do ordain and establish this Constitution.” Government in this country was built to draw its power from individuals, not the other way around. I've seen enough of the world, from my time in the Marine Corps to mission trips abroad, to know that in most places on earth, the individual is not the focus of government — the individual is an obstacle to it. That is not who we are, and it's not who we should become. Milton Friedman spent a career making the same case from an economist's chair: a free society treats government as a tool that belongs to its citizens, never as a master to be obeyed or a patron dispensing favors. 

He also argued that the great advances of human history — in science, industry, and art — have never come out of a government bureau; they've come from individuals pursuing their own ideas and interests.

There's also a practical case for keeping government small and local: the individual closest to a problem is usually the one best equipped to solve it — fastest, cheapest, and best. That's not an abstract theory. It's why I believe in proximity, personal responsibility, and a government that gets out of the way of the people it's supposed to serve.

Why does it cost so much to run a government that keeps asking working families to do with less? Between property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, energy taxes, taxes at the pump, and taxes when you die, the appetite for more never seems to end — and regulation is often the quiet twin of taxation, adding cost without ever showing up on a receipt. 

I've felt this directly as a small business owner. Beyond taxes stacked on the same piece of property, regulation adds layers of cost and delay to nearly everything — building a home, running a farm, or opening a healthcare practice. In health care specifically, I want to rework North Carolina's certificate-ofneed process so doctors can treat patients instead of navigating a permission slip from the state, and so a more competitive, affordable healthcare market can actually take root. 

Milton Friedman warned that concentrated regulatory power doesn't become safe just because the people wielding it mean well. Well-intentioned rules still carry real costs — for farmers facing environmental mandates and water-use restrictions, for small businesses buried in paperwork, and for families paying higher prices because regulation limited supply rather than protected them. 

Our family farms in Franklin and Vance County are already under pressure from rising input costs and outside land acquisition; piling on more regulation doesn't protect them, it squeezes them out. I'll push in Raleigh to cut the red tape that strangles small farms and small businesses, protect private property rights, and put the burden of proof back on government to justify a regulation — not on citizens to survive it.