Johnny Michael Baucom Jr.

Candidate Bio

(For anyone wanting to skip reading through the bio the political stance and policy integration is in the 4th and 5th paragraphs.)

I was born in West Point, Mississippi to a wonderful mother. She did her absolute best for my brother, sister, and I to make sure we had everything we needed and a roof over our heads. I couldn’t have asked for a better mother to raise us into fine adults. I was taught the meaning of hard work from my grandfather, who would pick me up and take me to work on his land every once in a while. He was also a very respected figure in the community, and I was honored to have a Patriarch such as him to guide me into being a man. As you may have gathered, my father was seldom in the picture. Without saying too much, he left the responsibility of raising 2 other children. Which is understandable, as I was definitely not expected and he already had 2 other grown children. He is a very hardworking man and married my wonderful stepmother in Alabama after he had departed, but he never hesitated to help us when we needed it. He, too, is a blessing of a father.

You may wonder why I’m telling you any of this. It is to help you understand that I was raised under what I believe as fairly normal circumstances. Life is messy, and my life so far has definitely not been perfect. I had no silver spoon, opportunities handed to me, or a safety net. My mom was, and still IS my safety net. Even now that I have my own family. Even now I consider my life a fairly average one. I work 2 jobs on top of being a father, advocate, musician, gamer, and now US Representative for the great state of Mississippi. I wear many hats indeed. After my contracted ended with the ARMY I began working with a local corporate maintenance shop chain. They liked my work ethic and gave me an opportunity to run a shop in Louisiana. At the time it was just me, but about 2 weeks before I left Mississippi, I met the woman I would call my wife. We kept a long-distance relationship, and I’d pay for her to come down and visit, well one day she drove down and ended up staying. (After a going away party hosted by her family.) The rest of that story is now nearly 5 years of history. We had 2 big, beautiful, blonde, bouncing baby Baucom boys (the first words they hear come out of my mouth after they are born) and I love them all fiercely.

We ended up moving back to Mississippi about 3 years ago now, and I got a job as a maintenance technician at a chicken processing plant in West Point. I eventually moved on to being an Environmental Health and Safety Technician with specialty training in chemical handling at the same plant. The safety manager saw me doing the right thing even when no one was looking, later a position opened up in the office, and I put my name in the hat. He remembered how I worked and gave me a shot. This is what I’ve been doing since then. The world was getting harder and harder to live in though, prices going up everywhere. I picked up another job that I can say could have only been a blessing from God. I work as a millwright on the weekends at a Lumber Mill and absolutely love it. I, unfortunately, spend much less time than I like with my family, but at least they are well taken care of, and I can afford to keep my wife at home without having to stress too much about the bills and groceries. For a long time while we were living here, we’d go months without being able to afford groceries, sustaining ourselves off of my wife’s WIC benefits, and whatever spare money I had to get something here and there. With the mixture of ridiculously expensive rent, and grocery prices rising, it was hard to keep ends together. We had to leave our apartment and move in with my mom and her mom, separate for a few months. I was working nights and her mom’s house was full of my wife’s siblings, so I couldn’t sleep there. With the addition of the second job, we were able to get our own place again and are hoping to be able to afford a home by next year. Wouldn’t that be a huge blessing, we pray it is in God’s will for us.

Along this timeline I had always had an interest in the world and especially our nation. My wife and her mother tuned me into the Libertarian stance on the United States, and I felt like their interests aligned more with mine in a lot more things than a republican’s or democrat’s. As they believe in less government, regulation, and no taxation. The belief in the founding principles of this nation as the end all be all to all arguments of civil liberty and personal rights. That is something I can get behind. This opportunity came up to run for the seat in District 1 as a right place right time kind of happenstance presented to me by my mother-in-law. She has connections in the party and asked me if I would be interested in running. I thought, “well I may not win, but at least I can give the people a different choice other than the same old red versus blue.” I figured out what I stand for, and what I stand against, and built starter policies and stances around that based on my life as a regular citizen of the United States. I think the housing crisis is definitely avoidable and reversable, but it requires deregulation, removing some taxes, and renegotiating or terminating horrible deals we have made with other nations that cost us more money than we bring in from these countries. My main focus on lowering the cost of housing would be to make the materials for building these houses cheaper to buy and incentivizing the production of more houses through contractor friendly means. I would like to put forth a bill to make 1099 work tax exempt, if not in perpetuity, for at least 10 years. This will stimulate growth in the start-up sector, and the government can definitely make its money back in the sales of materials and equipment that will be needed for these new businesses to operate. Specifically ending the EUDR, and flooding our markets with lumber to lower the prices, or renegotiating with the EU to still sell them timber without the regulatory standards of other nations interfering with our industry, this is the preferable option so as to not cause a problem in the dock workers and shipping sector. We do this so that the industries have less overhead in the production of lumber. This will, in theory, lower the cost of lumber by at most 30 percent. My thought process is that if new homes are cheaper to build, due to the labor not being taxed, and materials are cheaper, then they will be cheaper to buy. If new homes are cheaper to buy, due to a flood of new housing, and the reduced cost of building the home, then older homes on the market will have their value adjusted accordingly to also be cheaper. It is a federal percentage increase proof way of keeping housing affordable for a normal American. My second policies will be centered around the descheduling of marijuana all together. As a veteran myself, I find that the medical use of marijuana to treat mental, and physical illnesses are paramount, and we need to open the gates to increased testing, documentation, and use. It is one of the most potent natural medicines in the world, and if used correctly, it can open many doors in modern medicine to help treat a huge list of disorders without exposing people to the horribly toxic medicines the pharmaceutical industry is pushing. While also keeping it in their sector to treat and maintain critical illness. If you do not agree with this, I recommend looking up the story of how and why the Charlotte’s web strain of marijuana was created, and you may come to agreeance. It is a multifunctional, and natural remedy of many known and unknown factors that needs to be explored further. Saying this, completely deregulating it will not be easy, and will take an unfortunate amount of what I will call sector separation. I’d like to keep an age restriction on buying it, unless it is in use for specific medical needs. So that their will equally be a recreational, and medical sector. Growing it yourself should also be legal, as long as you meet age requirement, and sustain local regulation that will remain transparent in methodology by state, as it will not interfere heavily with either market, but boost them in some regards to growth of understanding and research. If we are able to pass even a fraction of what I am trying to get through and keep a formal, bipartisan support for these policies we also will need to work on the mass incarceration due to the sale of these substances. Records will need to be expunged, times will need to be lowered, people will need to be let out of prisons and jails if they have no other charges than what related to the distribution of marijuana. I can also always promise to vote in ways that will reduce the power of government in people’s lives, and ones that reduce crushing regulation. I will always vote against anything I deem an overreach, or expansion of government power. In these ways I believe I have made a good road map to being a successful representative of the average United States Citizen.

Of course, saying this, these are just my policies and beliefs. I also want to push for congressional term limits, and upper age restrictions, as older career politicians have become heavily detached from the regular lives of the Americans. They simply cannot come up with policies and laws that attune to the needs of today’s citizen. Most of them grew up in a completely different United States. This goes out to anyone reading this, I will fight for us, the regular people. This party will fight for you, and if you don’t align fully with either the Democrats or Republicans you should consider finding your home here in the Libertarian party. Our representatives are just like you, and we will fight for your interests equally, because we share those interests.