WE CAN DO BETTER
When you sit down at the kitchen table with your spouse or friends and talk about things that matter, I bet that you often talk about solutions that our politicians never consider. 

It seems most of what they say and the little that gets done these days has more to do with their interest and less to do with ours  —  they never talk about having to stretch your paycheck, dealing with a long commute or juggling childcare with work.

There’s a quiet majority of people in this district, people who care more about paychecks than partisanship, who are fed up and frustrated. 

Well, I agree with you.
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All too frequently, the solutions they offer are a far cry from what I have worked for throughout my entire career.  We need solutions that help everyone, and solutions that build communities, not tear them apart. 

In my professional career, I worked as a Certified Public Accountant with many organizations, partnering with them to create viable, relevant and sustainable operations. Together we helped those organizations continue to grow.    

I’m a numbers person and I can tell you without a doubt numbers tell a story. 

Balancing our books meant finding out where we were making money, where we were losing money, and how we could invest in places that would grow the organization. Whether it's a small business, a corporation, a non-profit organization or a governmental entity, these basic accounting and financial practices were fundamental to our decision-making process and essential to an organization that intends to grow and thrive.   

I plan to take my experience with real budgets to Washington. I want to invest in our kids and our communities because each dollar invested returns tenfold. It’s not just the right thing to do, it's the responsible thing to do.    

We can and must invest in the things that matter to our common future. I know we can invest wisely even as we manage a responsible budget. . You can trust me because I’ve done it before as a CPA.  I know how to work with people who bring different ideas to the table because I’ve done that my entire career. When I grew up, community was central to our existence. We watched each others back because that’s what communities do.

WOMEN’S  ISSUES: 
Lenda Sherrell, a better voice and a better choice for women.

“Women have a right to quality healthcare, equal opportunity in the workplace and fair pay for a day’s work.” ~ Lenda Sherrell. 

QUALITY HEALTH CARE
Women who are healthy take better care of themselves and their families. Access to affordable and comprehensive health care, including family planning and preventative care, allows our sisters, daughters and mothers to become more engaged citizens, contributing to the economic security and emotional stability of their families and communities. 
Personally, I am prolife. I trust a woman to make the right choice in consultation with her health care professional. A woman’s health decision should be made in the privacy of a discussion with her doctor; politicians should not be involved in a woman’s personal medical decisions. I will defend every woman’s right to make those tough decisions on her own. 

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AND FAIR PAY
In Tennessee, 70% of women work. Two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women.  A woman’s earnings has now become central to her family’s economic well-being.  Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would transition a single mother with one child from just barely surviving to surviving, and it would help families who now have to choose between paying rent and utilities, or groceries and medication.

The Paycheck Fairness Act, which recently failed to pass in the U.S. Senate, would benefit women, families, communities and local economies. The act would require employers to show that wage gaps between women and men are based on factors other than gender, prohibit retaliation against employees who share salary information with each other, and impose harsher penalties for pay discrimination.

In Tennessee, a woman with a full-time job is paid, on average, $32,398 a year while a man who holds a full-time job is paid $41,828 annually – that’s a yearly wage gap of $9,430, or 77%. This gap exacerbates the proportion of female-headed households living in poverty in this state – 36%, or nearly 120,000 families. 
Over the course of their careers, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates working women and their families can expect to lose $250,000, while women with a college degree or higher can look forward to a loss of $713,000 in their lifetime.  
The Paycheck Fairness Act lays the foundation to put pay levels for men and women who are doing the same work on equal financial footing.

WOMEN IN PUBLIC OFFICE
Out of 435 elected representatives in Congress, only 79 are women.  Lenda believes that when women have an equal voice in government and have a seat at the decision-making table, we contribute to the conversation during the legislative process, and the outcomes will be better. We have raised families, balanced budgets, educated our children and worked in our communities. This puts us in touch with what our neighbors care most about, and we craft policies that make our communities stronger and our families more secure.   
OUR ISSUES
AGRICULTURE – rural communities
Agriculture is one of Tennessee’s largest industries with farming and forestry dominating the state’s landscape. I will always fight for Tennessee’s farmers by making sure agriculture gets the support it needs to continue to drive our economy.

ARMS – right as citizens
I am a gun owner and have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Like many in Middle Tennessee, my brother and I share fond memories of family trips and outings where my mother and father taught us to how to hunt and shoot.
I believe the majority of gun owners are law-abiding citizens who are extremely careful with their weapons and should have their constitutional right to bear arms protected. But I also recognize the need for legislation requiring adequate background checks for felons or people with mental health issues.

BUDGET – stop wasteful spending
Just as businesses adhere to a budget and Tennessee’s families balance their checkbooks, put away money for their children’s college fund and save for retirement, Congress should cut wasteful spending, conduct a review of each government program and eliminate wasteful and redundant programs, institute a fair and equitable tax system to ensure no one exploits loopholes that game the system, and ban special-interest groups from funding trips for elected officials.
If our taxpayers are expected to live within their means, Congress should be held accountable and elected officials should not get paid if they don’t pass the budget on time and should not receive pay raises until the deficit is paid down.

EDUCATION - affordability
The average four-year graduate accumulates $26,000 to $29,000 in student loans. Today, 37 million owe more than $1 trillion in student debt. Every payment made toward paying down a loan means less money for a downpayment for a house or car, savings, and retirement.
We need to reward schools if they help low-income students, keep costs low and work on getting large numbers of students graduating with degrees. Let’s not penalize our students and their families who are simply trying to improve their lives by getting 2- or 4-year degrees. At the very least, we should allow graduates with high-interest rate loans to refinance at lower rates.

HEALTH CARE – for every American
20 million Americans, including 151,400 Tennesseans, have health care through the exchanges. Nearly 80 percent of Tennesseans believe people should have access to health care. On a basic level people want a good quality of life. The number one reason people seek bankruptcy protection is because of unpaid medical bills.  No American should face bankruptcy while trying to stay healthy and bring home a paycheck.

IMMIGRATION – Congress has solution
A blanket, unilateral executive decision on immigration reform would be wrong; our country needs bipartisan comprehensive reform of our nation’s broken immigration system with strong and sensible legislation that aligns with the well-being and needs of our district.

MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY - protect
My promise to seniors is that I will protect Medicare and fight against any attempts at ending the Social Security guarantee, privatizing the program or raising the retirement age.

MILITARY – strong foreign policy
My highest priority is keeping every American safe. The United States cannot always act as the de facto law enforcement agency to the world and I am opposed to putting our troops on the ground and in harm’s way. But there are times when targeted military action is necessary to achieve stability and security while protecting U.S. personnel and interests, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world.

TAXES – same tax code
I want a government that doesn’t pick winners and losers but lays a foundation so that all of us have an opportunity to play by the same rules to realize the American Dream. I want our big corporations to play by the same rules as our small businesses, I want our wealthy and well-connected to contribute just as much as the teacher, farmer, postal work and grocery clerk. I just want our tax code to be fair so all of us are contributing equally.

TEACHERS – supporting our educators
No tests, no curriculum can replace a good teacher, and we have great teachers in Tennessee.  Last year, our students made the largest gains in the nation in fourth- and eighth -grade reading and math. We can continue moving up the education ladder if our students have access to qualified, well-trained and well-supported teachers in a learning environment designed for success. 
The path to great teaching and good schools lies in recruiting and retaining talented schoolteachers and providing them with the support, tools and resources they need to do what they do best – teach our children.  We need to let teachers teach, and allow them to be creative and innovative in the classroom.

VETERANS – benefits
I am deeply committed to our service men and women and to our veterans who have served our nation.  We owe it to them to help in any way we can as they transition from military to civilian life.  We must prioritize protecting the benefits they have earned by adequately funding veterans’ medical care and the VA.  I want to streamline the process of filing claims to prevent backlogs and get them the benefits they have earned and deserve. I will work on incentives that encourage businesses to hire veterans and improve access to education and job-training programs that help veterans translate the skills they gained in military service to jobs back home.
"We need solutions that make a difference in your wallet and at the kitchen table that help that quiet majority who are just trying to make ends meet, figure out how to balance being good parents and good employees, and how to live their lives with dignity and pride.

There is no question about it, we can do better. We must choose to do better. Choose to hold our elected officials accountable to us. And, choose to uphold those community values that unite us in common purpose and remind us that we all must look out for one another.

I believe we can make smart financial decisions, decisions that keep our families and our communities going and growing, decisions that make us stronger now and for the future.” – Lenda Sherrell