Tanner looks to limit taxes

BONNERS FERRY — Steve Tanner remembers the days competing in high school and college sporting events against teams better prepared and more experienced.

He remembers the feeling of determination, and the inkling of the results.

The Bonners Ferry resident and District 1 senate candidate who faces Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, in next week’s primaries sums up his chance of victory as bleak.

“Slim and none,” Tanner said.

That will not keep him from the stump, however, because Tanner, who has worked in the Boundary County timber and construction industry for decades, believes in his message.

It seems radical to many, he said, but it is important nonetheless.

“My hope is that we can begin to speak about these issues,” he said.

  As the president of the loosely organized Boundary County Property Owners Association, Tanner’s message to District 1 voters is similar to what the group stands for, he said.

“We oppose higher taxes and more government control,” he said.

What it boils down to, he said, is justice.

Tanner enumerates his stance by putting justice in the foreground.

“Justice means protection of the innocent and punishment of the guilty,” he said.

That includes protection for the unborn, he said.

The idea extends to capital punishment.

People who take lives should be executed, he said, which would reduce incarceration rates and prison budgets.

If elected, he would work at reducing education funding and putting the Bible back in the classroom, he said.

“Books that would honor God and teach creation, not humanism,” he said.

The public education system focuses on humanism, which teaches people that they are God, instead of instilling a fear in God, he said.

“Most people in government want to play God,” he said.

Tanner believes that a monetary system based on paper currency has historically failed, and that the Founding Fathers adopted a silver and gold currency to assure a strong economy.

“The Federal Reserve is a private banking institute that is in control of our monetary system,” he said. “Only a system with gold and silver coin should be used in payment of debt.”

An advocate of state’s rights, Tanner said the federal government’s ownership of large tracts of land in places such as Idaho, where it owns 64 percent of the land mass, is an economic drain and keeps the land and its resources unavailable as an income producer.

“We need to reclaim the land,” he said. “It should go into people’s hands and be made productive.”

The same goes for government, he said.

“Is it a big brother, or mother?” he said. “Or is it an institution to establish justice?”