Early this month, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft announced his run for Governor. He joined The Show on KMOX to talk about some of the issues, and what he hopes to accomplish if elected. He started off by talking about the purpose of the government.
“I think we really need to decide, is government there to serve the people, to create an environment where the people can be successful, where they can be free to make their own decisions? Or the people here to serve the government?” Ashcroft said.
He said the state’s current budget — $56 billion — is “unsustainable,” and that he hopes to return to a number similar to the one Missouri had in 2016, when the budget was $27 billion.
As for what a smaller government looks like in his eyes, Ashcroft said he’s an advocate of local control in most cases, specifically in education. “The most local control is Mom and Dad or Grandma and Grandpa unit, parents being in charge,” he said.
But his desire for local control and getting government out of schools could strike some as a contrast to other policies he supports. One of those policies would require libraries to have a certain certification if they receive state funds. Ashcroft pushed back, saying the policy still supported local control.
“It says you cannot use the state portion of your funds — which, generally, it's going to vary by library, I think, when I was in Kansas City, they said it was around 1% of their budget, some of our libraries, it may be more like 3% of their budget — you cannot use those funds to buy materials that are defined as obscene or pornographic under Missouri law,” he said.
He added, “When you're taking money from someone when they're saying, ‘Hey, would you like this money,’ it's their right to put strings on it. That's not about local control.”
The Show also talked with Ashcroft about how he would address gun violence, especially when children are victims of it. A 2022 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that firearms are the number one cause of death for children. Ashcroft said he didn’t agree with that fact.
“Guns do not kill people, people kill people,” he said. “The idea that an inanimate object, a gun, is going around killing people is ridiculous.” He said the issue is that our society is “devaluing life.”
Chris Rongey and Amy Marxkors talked more with Jay Ashcroft about gun restrictions, red flag laws, what it means to support the Second Amendment, crime in St. Louis, and more. Listen to their full interview here:
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