Tara Anura

Healthcare Everyone has the right to make informed private decisions about their body and their life. Together, we'll protect Medicare and Medicaid. We deserve a single-payer system and affordable medications. Let's put our health over the profits of Big Pharma and private insurance that denies vital care. Let's address the rural suicide and addiction crisis by offering incentives for health care providers to open bigger mental health and rehabilitation facilities. Education Missourians value high-quality public education; apprenticeships and trade school. We value our teachers and will retain them with better wages. Let's make sure the students are fed and have the supplies and technology they need. Let's fund and protect our schools so we can enjoy their concerts, theater, and sports for years to come. Criminal Justice / Public Safety No matter where you live in Missouri, the root causes of crime are the same: a lack of community recreation and engagement along with drug addiction and poverty. Addressing these basic issues is central to any conversation about crime. Our communities are stronger when residents finish their sentences and return to their communities with the resources and skills they need to succeed. That means they need to be healthy and job-ready. Too often Missouri facilities are dirty, inhumane, and unsanitary. People are released with debilitating injuries, illness, and trauma and not ready to reintegrate into our communities. That helps no one. Criminal Justice / Public Safety Missouri has an incarceration rate of 735 per 100,000 people (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), meaning that it locks up a higher percentage of its people than any democracy on earth. (PrisonPolicy.org) Our prison system isn't making us safer. A just reformation system will. Let's focus on court-mandated addiction rehabilitation, detain hardened criminals for our immediate protection, and offer sanitary conditions and reentry assistance for our long-term protection. Economy Let's create policies that support local businesses that provide good jobs in our state and keep our economy growing. We need well-paying, stable jobs that always put workers’ interests before the special interests of large corporations. Economy A strong economy works for everyone. We'll stand up for those who truly increase our economy—our workers—for the wages, benefits, and protections they deserve. I’ll support investments in educational opportunities to support a 21st-century workforce. Environment / Energy We can't survive with dirty air, dirty water, and toxic spills. Let's preserve our natural resources. Let's protect the local people, land, and water that provides our food. Big agriculture has shut local farmers out of the larger market and the State government takes way too long to grant family farms a license to sell their goods. Buying locally means fewer supply chain shortages. Civil Rights Let's build a Missouri that welcomes people regardless of physical or mental ability, race, religion, gender, age, or sexual orientation, and protects all people from discrimination. Equity is having sidewalks and buildings made so anyone who is blind, deaf, or physically impaired can move around. We need affordable public transportation so we can still get to work and run errands when we are unable to drive. Missourians should not have to fear losing their jobs or being denied housing for who they love, their religion, or disability. Guns Rural Missourians hunt, and defend their animals, family, and themselves. We also learn how to drive, test to prove that, and get a license. We don't want untrained drivers going at highway speed and we don't want untrained shooters walking around in our stores. We have to register our vehicles. No one has come around to collect everyone's guns. I don't want that to happen and it's not going to. We can have background checks and registration. Gun sense and gun regulation are proven to keep us safer.