Congressman Stephen Lynch talks with constituents in Dedham

U.S. Congressman Stephen Lynch, D-Boston, stopped in Dedham on Monday as part of a 17-town tour of his district for a series of meetings with voters he called, “Congress on your Corner.”

Lynch, now in his fifth term as a Congressman, answered questions from Dedham residents at the Endicott Estate about health care, social security, foreign policy, financial inequality and the plight of the postal service.

Before taking questions, Lynch provided some updates from Washington D.C. He reviewed the situation with the national 14.3 trillion dollar debt limit being reached in August and the subsequent committee of nine that was formed to suggest 1.5 trillion dollars in cuts. If they are unable to agree on cuts, 1.2 trillion dollars worth of cuts will be made across the board, Lynch said.

Lynch himself voted in favor of $180 billion dollars worth of reductions to defense department cuts of programs the Department of Defense didn’t want. Congressmen in districts containing workers who construct weapons related to those programs fought against it, Lynch said.

“For every dollar we spend in government, we’re borrowing 40 cents,” Lynch said. “That’s unsustainable.”

Dedham resident Kelly Doyle asked what was going to happen with Massachusetts losing a congressional seat.

Lynch said that the redistricting map for Massachusetts would hopefully include communities of like interest staying together. Taking the example of the moderate area Dedham is currently a part of should be grouped with moderate communities nearby, whereas more liberal communities like Cambridge and Somerville would stay together.

In answer to a question from resident Bill Parrelli about what our interests in Afghanistan were, Lynch replied that the country did not want to see Afghanistan go back to being a harbinger for terrorists that it had been in the days before Sept. 11.

He also said he voted against continuing to spend money to support Pakistan because he believed that corruption was funneling the money away from the programs it should be used to support.

Lynch has traveled widely, visiting Iraq 13 times and also visiting both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Afghani government is not ready to run the country, he said, and he hopes that troops work quickly to stabilize things along the lines of a schedule approved by President Barack Obama.

Dedham resident Alice Fastov, a former teacher, asked Lynch what he was going to do about the devaluation of teachers in an education system with a misguided focus on standardized testing and about the rising cost of living for the aging baby boom generation.

Talking about how the No Child Left Behind Act had once been supported by Mass. Senator Ted Kennedy, Lynch said he doubted that the former senator, now deceased, would have supported the program now that it is clear it is not being funded the way originally promised.

“We can’t have one size fits all in education,” Lynch said. “The goal should be excellence in all schools.”

In Massachusetts, the law has had the effect of dragging down excellent schools, which were doing better before the law, he said.

Lynch lamented that education was not as much of a focus on the agenda this term, he said. Many of the issues in education were passed over as a result of fiscal issues, he said.

In terms of health care, Lynch voted against the Affordable Health Care Act signed into law last year because it gave insurance companies monopolies and allowed them to raise prices, he said. By removing the public option, the government lost its chance to compete with the insurance companies and drive down prices, he said.

Lynch said he thinks that everyone should pay some of their own health care costs in terms of copays, and in that way people will be steered toward cheaper forms of health care rather than expensive emergency care medicine.

In response to a question about closing post offices, Lynch said he used to chair the house postal subcommittee before Republican’s took charge of the house. He said some of the nation’s 37,000 post offices must close, but that he hoped that the ones that are less utilized would be targeted rather than the neighborhood ones that see lots of use.

“Comparing 2011 to 2007, we are delivering 40 billion less pieces of mail,” he said.

Ken Farbstein asked Lynch about what might happen if there was another financial meltdown.

“Big money got money for free and I think they are squandering it,” Farbstein said, referring to the recent Wall Street bailout.

Lynch responded that he voted against the bank bailout because they did not require the banks to make changes.

“I always wondered where the anger was at Wall Street,” Lynch said of the time following the bailout. “I was furious. Now you see these folks at Occupy Wall Street and I thing they’re getting it.”

Lynch said that the United States had to negotiate for better trade agreements and stop shipping jobs to other countries.

Lynch characterized himself as someone who operates between the space of the two extremes.

“I’m a moderate,” Lynch said. “I try to be a pragmatic member of congress, read the bills and use common sense.”

Staff writer Dave Eisenstadter can be reached at 781-433-8336 or deisenstadter@wickedlocal.com.