Policy Platform

UBI distributes purchasing power across the country, with disproportionate benefit to hollowed-out rural communities that have been starved of economic activity. It creates a positive feedback loop: increased local spending leads to increased local tax revenue, which funds local services, which attracts more people and businesses.

More fundamentally, UBI gives everyone leverage. When you can say no to a bad job, employers have to offer better terms. When you can survive without selling your labor under duress, the labor market actually becomes a market instead of a coercion mechanism.

This is how we revive Main Street. This is how we empower workers without mandating it from above. This is how we make markets actually free.

In a healthy functioning economy with UBI, minimum wage becomes unnecessary. Workers will have the leverage to demand fair compensation because they can walk away from exploitative offers. The floor is already there — it's the UBI.

I'm libertarian about markets, but only when the preconditions for liberty exist. You can't have free negotiation when one side is desperate. Remove the desperation, and free negotiation actually works.

The national debt was always a scam. Instead of taxing the wealthy fairly, we borrowed from them — and paid them interest. Deficit spending was a mechanism to funnel money upward while pretending to fund public goods.

We will pay down the debt and functionally eliminate structural deficits. This isn't austerity — it's honesty. We'll fund what we need through taxation, not through borrowing from the people who should have been taxed in the first place.

This will also be necessary as the world increasingly rejects US hegemony and the dollar-based financial system. We cannot maintain infinite deficits when other countries stop buying our debt.

This targets institutional investors — the Blackrocks of the world who have been hoovering up single-family homes and commercial real estate. Portfolio-based progressivity incentivizes divestiture: it becomes cost-prohibitive to own vast portfolios, so assets get sold to people who will actually use them.

Primary residence exemption protects family homes while targeting absentee landlordism and corporate consolidation.

I'm not dogmatically attached to this specific mechanism. If there's a better way to achieve the same goal — breaking up concentrated property ownership and returning housing to actual residents — I'm open to it.

Tariffs coupled with intelligent investment can support growing domestic industries. They are a tool, not an ideology.

As for trade generally: I'm fine with trade conducted in a humane and non-exploitative manner. What I oppose is the current system, where trade agreements are negotiated by corporate interests to facilitate extraction and exploitation. Trade should benefit workers in all countries, not just shareholders.

Crypto has been a Ponzi scheme from the start — pump-and-dump manipulation, market gaming, and gambling dressed up as innovation. The underlying technology is interesting, but the implementation has been catastrophic.

The environmental cost alone is disqualifying: mining operations consuming enormous amounts of energy to produce nothing of value. If people actually used crypto as currency, that would be one thing. But it's purely a speculative asset — a bubble that will eventually pop, leaving ordinary people holding the bag while early manipulators walk away rich.

Under the current administration, it has become even worse: a vehicle for what appears to be direct emoluments violations, with foreign governments funneling money to political figures through coin purchases. This should be prosecuted, not celebrated.

The gig economy has genuine appeal — people want flexibility, autonomy, the ability to work on their own terms. That appetite is real and should be honored.

The problem is that the gig economy has been captured by corporations that extract value from workers while providing none of the benefits or protections of traditional employment. The "flexibility" becomes a trap when you have no leverage and no alternatives.

Under UBI, gig workers will have actual negotiating power. They can reject exploitative terms because they don't need the gig to survive. The gig economy will evolve naturally into something that actually serves workers rather than extracting from them.

The Fed's dual mandate — price stability and maximum employment — should be interpreted in favor of working people, not financial markets. Monetary policy has been used to protect asset prices for the wealthy while workers bear the costs of inflation control.

I don't have a specific restructuring proposal yet. This is an area where I want more input and collaboration. But the principle is clear: monetary policy must serve the people, not the banks.

The current system is extractive and counterproductive. A country benefits from having an educated populace. We should be paying people to go to college, not extracting wealth from them for decades after they graduate.

Where administrative costs have become bloated, they should be reined in. Universities should be institutions of learning and professional development, not engines of debt creation.

Concentrated corporate power is concentrated power. It corrupts markets, captures regulators, and undermines democracy. Breaking up monopolies isn't anti-business — it's pro-market. Competition only works when there are actual competitors.

Healthcare is not a market good. When you're sick, you don't have bargaining power. You can't shop around when you're having a heart attack. The premise of market-based healthcare is fundamentally flawed.

Single-payer eliminates the insurance middlemen who add cost without adding value. It allows the government to negotiate drug prices directly. It ensures that no one goes bankrupt because they got sick.

This is not radical. Every other developed country does this. We pay more and get worse outcomes because we've allowed the healthcare industry to capture the system.

A woman, as a thinking intelligent being, has a right to make decisions about her own body. That's foundational.

I also believe that in a more just society — with universal healthcare, accessible contraception, economic security, and genuine support for families — abortion rates will decline naturally. Desperation drives many abortions. Remove the desperation, and people will make different choices.

There must be a line drawn somewhere regarding late-term procedures, and I'm receptive to reasonable arguments about where that line should be. But the fundamental principle of bodily autonomy is not negotiable.

With single-payer healthcare, the government becomes the sole purchaser and can negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies. This is how every other country keeps drug prices reasonable. The current system, where Medicare is prohibited from negotiating, is pure corporate capture.

Mental health is health. The current system criminalizes mental illness because treatment isn't accessible. People who need care end up in jails and prisons instead of hospitals and clinics.

Universal healthcare with robust mental health coverage is the upstream solution. Treat people before they're in crisis, and you prevent cascading harms.

Addiction is escape from a cruel reality. People in despair seek relief. Criminalizing that despair has failed catastrophically — it fills prisons, destroys families, and does nothing to reduce addiction.

The solution is access to healthcare, access to treatment, and reducing the desperation that drives people to seek escape in the first place. UBI and universal healthcare will do more to address addiction than any enforcement approach ever has.

We should also work with our neighbors to address supply, and potentially work directly with producers. If they can manufacture for the black market, perhaps they can manufacture for the legitimate market. As exploitative trade practices ease, cartels will have incentive to go legitimate.

1. No chemical or surgical modification for minors
2. Free counseling available to anyone questioning their gender identity
3. For adults, if it's the right call between the patient, their doctor, and their counselor, it's acceptable
4. Possibly hormone blockers as early as 16, but this is tentative and I'm open to medical evidence and argument

The goal is protecting children from irreversible decisions while respecting adult autonomy and ensuring everyone has access to the support they need to figure out who they are.

In a healthy society, people wouldn't be pushed to choose death over medical bankruptcy. The current situation — where people end their lives rather than drain their family's savings on futile treatment — is a policy failure, not a personal choice.

With that caveat, competent adults facing terminal illness should have the right to choose when and how they die. Guardrails against abuse are essential, but the fundamental right should exist.

We pay more to treat people more inhumanely and produce worse outcomes. That's not a values statement — it's an empirical fact. The current system costs more per person than a college education, produces 70%+ recidivism rates, and inflicts unnecessary suffering that makes reintegration harder.

The graduated reintegration model treats incarceration as a spectrum: from intensive residential care for those who need it, through structured transitional housing, to supervised community placement, to full release. Most incarcerated people will return to society eventually. The question is whether we prepare them to succeed or set them up to fail.

High-security isolation should be the exception, reserved for genuine threats to safety — not the default we subject everyone to.

This is the rational approach. It happens to also be the humane approach. That's not a coincidence.

The Epicurean Paradox applies to police: if they can help and won't, they're malevolent; if they want to help and can't, they're impotent; if they can't and won't, why call them police?

Castle Rock v. Gonzales established that police have no constitutional duty to protect individuals. Legislative mandates to protect mean nothing if they're not enforced. "Shall" is a lie when no one enforces it.

I support ending qualified immunity, establishing clear accountability mechanisms, and reforming police culture. The goal is police who actually serve and protect communities, not occupy them.

We are wrong often enough that we have executed innocent people. That alone is disqualifying. The state should not have the power to kill its citizens when we cannot guarantee we're killing the guilty.

Incarceration is sufficient for the worst offenders. They can be held away from society while still having the opportunity to pursue exoneration if wrongly convicted, or to find whatever redemption is available to them.

This is not negotiable. I will not sanction the murder of innocents. Full stop.

If someone is a danger to society, they should be held regardless of wealth. If they're not a danger, they should be released regardless of poverty. Cash bail creates a two-tiered system where the wealthy go free and the poor rot in jail awaiting trial for minor offenses.

More broadly: crime will plummet in a more just society. The majority of crime is born of despair. Eliminate the despair, and you eliminate most crime. The criminal justice system we need is much smaller than the one we have.

The Second Amendment was always meant as a check against tyrannical government disarming and subjugating the population. If there were ever an argument for this, the Gazan resistance is proof that the double-edged sword cuts in favor of the Second Amendment. Venezuela's militia network has similarly served as a deterrent against US-backed intervention.

That means it is incumbent on We the People to engineer guardrails for this privilege — to protect ourselves from tyrannical government by force of arms if necessary, while addressing the epidemic of gun violence.

The problem between the pro- and anti-gun-control camps has always been that the anti-gun side was terrified the pro-control side would use any increase in regulation to demand more. The slippery slope argument was valid. What the pro-control side failed to do, spectacularly and self-defeatingly, was reassure the other side that that wasn't exactly what they were trying to do.

I can bridge this gap because I genuinely understand both arguments and see exactly where each side was right. I will not dictate what the solution looks like. I will work with all parties in an open and transparent manner to find a consensus we can all agree on.

Gun violence is out of control, and it WILL get better under a healthier society. Desperation, alienation, and hopelessness drive much of the violence we see. Address those root causes, and the crisis diminishes — without disarming the populace.

Drugs and addiction are escape from the horrors of a cruel reality. Remove the cruelty, and the problem declines. Criminalization has failed — it fills prisons while doing nothing to reduce use.

The public should be allowed to decide for themselves how to handle recreational substances. I favor more lax rules generally, though genuinely dangerous substances must still be handled with care.

Israel's occupation of Palestine has been illegal from the start. The establishment of Israel involved mass displacement in violation of international law, and every action since has been a continuation of that original violation. An occupying power cannot claim self-defense against the population it occupies — that's settled international law.

The path to legitimacy existed: Israel could have granted Palestinians full equal rights, allowed right of return, established a coalition government. They chose apartheid instead. Duration of occupation does not create legitimacy. You cannot squat on stolen land for 77 years and claim it's now yours.

I am not unsympathetic to Israelis born into this situation who had no part in the original displacement. But sympathy does not override legal and moral reality. The solution is a single democratic state with equal rights for all inhabitants — not continued ethnic cleansing funded by American taxpayers.

The genocide in Gaza is being conducted with American weapons and American money. That makes us complicit. It stops.

Unlike current leadership, I can actually end this war, because I'm willing to address Russia's legitimate security concerns.

NATO expansion to Russia's borders was a provocation. We would not accept Russian military alliances in Mexico or Canada; we cannot expect Russia to accept NATO in Ukraine. The solution is to commit to scaling back NATO's eastern expansion and guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality.

A Russia whose security concerns are respected has no incentive to continue the assault on Ukraine. We will rebuild and mend fences. Seventy years of Cold War hostility were not inevitable — they were chosen. We can choose differently.

The framing of China as an enemy serves the military-industrial complex, not the American people. China is a major economy, a nuclear power, and a civilization with legitimate interests. Treating them as an adversary guarantees conflict; treating them as a partner enables cooperation on shared challenges like climate change.

This doesn't mean ignoring genuine disagreements. It means handling those disagreements through diplomacy rather than saber-rattling.

NATO should be subsumed under the UN, as should have happened after World War II. The US committed to a rules-based international order and then immediately exempted itself from the rules. That hypocrisy undermines everything we claim to stand for.

Military spending will be reduced significantly. The military-industrial complex is a massive beast that will take time to untangle, but the direction is clear: an agile, defensive force rather than a global occupation force.

Much of the current military budget can be redirected to social programs. The military, ironically, already functions as a jobs program and provides the kind of universal services (healthcare, housing, education) that we deny to civilians. As we draw down, service members can transition to civilian roles in an expanded public sector.

We prop up authoritarian regimes in the Gulf to keep the region fractured and to maintain control over oil markets. This is imperialism, plain and simple. It generates terrorism, destabilizes the region, and makes us complicit in human rights abuses.

A foreign policy based on actual values rather than resource extraction would look very different.

Much of the immigration pressure we face is blowback from our own policies: sanctions that destroy economies, trade agreements that extract wealth, coups that destabilize governments, drug wars that empower cartels. We bear responsibility for the conditions we helped create.

Anyone seeking a better life is welcome, but the process must be orderly:

• Registration for permanent residency with a pathway to citizenship
• Capacity-based placement — matching arrivals to communities that have housing and work available, so we don't flood any single area
• Humane treatment throughout — no family separation, no indefinite detention, no cruelty

Border security can be achieved humanely. It does not require walls, cages, or dehumanization.

If you are born here, you are a citizen. If this is the only home you've ever known, you are a citizen. Attempts to revoke birthright citizenship are nativist attacks on the Fourteenth Amendment and should be rejected.

People who were brought here as children and have lived their entire lives as Americans are Americans. Their legal status should reflect that reality.

Everyone is an environmentalist at heart. We convince ourselves otherwise because there's no alternative, because we need to get by, because everyone else is doing it. But everyone else wants to stop too — we're just trapped in a game theory nightmare where no one wants to move first.

The fossil fuel industry is one of the most captured, monopolized, corrupted institutions of control the world has ever seen. They knew about climate change decades ago and chose to fund denial instead of transition. That's not a market failure — it's a crime.

We need:

• Massive investment in clean energy alternatives
• Intelligent phase-out of fossil fuels
• Recognition that some petroleum products can't be replaced, but that doesn't mean we need to pump millions of years of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere for energy

We have one planet. We must be good stewards of it. There is no economy on a dead world.

The right to vote is foundational to democracy. Every barrier to voting — voter ID laws designed to suppress turnout, polling place closures, purged voter rolls, gerrymandered districts — is an attack on self-governance.

Black women remain disproportionately disenfranchised in this country. That's not history — it's the present. The line from Dred Scott to Plessy to today is unbroken. We must break it.

Money is not speech. Corporations are not people. The current system, where billionaires can buy elections and politicians must spend half their time fundraising, is legalized corruption.

Public financing of elections would free candidates to actually represent constituents instead of donors. This is essential to breaking the capture.

The Court has become a partisan institution that issues decisions wildly out of step with both the Constitution's text and popular will. Term limits, expanded seats, or other structural reforms are necessary to restore legitimacy.

I'm open to various mechanisms. The goal is a Court that interprets law rather than legislates from the bench on behalf of the powerful.

Congress has abdicated its responsibility by delegating vast rulemaking authority to executive agencies. This creates an accountability gap: voters elect legislators, but unelected bureaucrats make the rules.

I support a framework where Congress retains decision-making authority while consulting with experts. Legislative commissions can collaborate with technical specialists to craft rules, but the actual authority remains with elected representatives. The executive implements; it does not legislate.

The line I propose: any rule that applies coercive force to individuals requires legislative authorization. Execution and implementation stay with agencies; lawmaking stays with Congress.

The Constitution we have is a product of 18th-century compromises, many of them morally catastrophic. The three-fifths clause wasn't an awkward necessity — it was foundational corruption. And the amendment process is so sclerotic that meaningful reform is nearly impossible.

A clean rewrite would preserve the genuinely good structural innovations — separation of powers, federalism, independent judiciary — while embedding strong positive rights rather than just negative liberties. South Africa did this in 1996. It's possible.

This is a generational project, not an immediate policy proposal. But it's the horizon we should be working toward.

The state has absolutely zero interest in dictating who can love whom. Outside of protecting those incapable of consent, what consenting adults do is none of the government's business.

Love is love. Marriage equality is settled and should remain so. Employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and all other forms of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination should be prohibited.

If you don't like LGBTQ+ people because they're "icky," grow up.

Affirmative action and DEI programs were noble in intention but flawed in execution. They were bandaids on a horrible system that never addressed the underlying disease. They attempted to catapult targeted groups to parity without fixing what made them unequal in the first place.

Worse, they had the side effect of scapegoating young white men for the sins of their fathers, telling them they deserved their diminished prospects because their ancestors had benefited. This was never going to build solidarity. It was always going to radicalize.

And it did. The alt-right pipeline is real. Young white men experiencing disenfranchisement, told they deserve it, were easy prey for demagogues offering someone to blame.

The solution to historic systemic disenfranchisement cannot be different disenfranchisement. It must be universal programs that lift everyone: UBI that helps all poor people regardless of race, universal healthcare that serves everyone, criminal justice reform that addresses mass incarceration (which is itself deeply racialized).

This is not a retreat from racial justice. It's an advance toward it by means that actually work and actually build the coalitions necessary to sustain change.

The answer to bad speech is more speech, not suppression. Deplatforming and content moderation have been applied selectively to protect establishment narratives while silencing dissent — as we've seen with Palestine solidarity content.

This is why I built UnitedWeRise: a platform outside corporate control, where ideas can be debated on their merits rather than suppressed by algorithms optimized for profit.

More teachers. More programs. More schools. More resources.

An educated populace is the foundation of democracy. Every dollar spent on education pays dividends in reduced crime, increased productivity, and stronger communities. The current system, starved of resources and attacked by privatization schemes, is failing students by design.

As addressed above: we should be paying people to go to college, not extracting debt from them for decades. Education is a public good that benefits everyone. Treat it like one.

You cannot address any other issue in someone's life — addiction, mental health, employment — while they're living on the street. Housing first, then services.

Phase in taxes on ownership of multiple residential properties until it becomes cost-prohibitive to own more than two or three. This frees up housing stock for people who will actually live in their homes.

No more lords holding sway over someone else's home. The word "landlord" tells you everything you need to know about the relationship.

If private development can't or won't build enough housing, the public sector must fill the gap. Housing is too essential to be left entirely to profit motive.

It's unconstitutional, and in a well-functioning democracy, unnecessary. Voters can decide if their representatives are too old. The problem isn't age — it's that our democracy doesn't function well enough for accountability to work.

Fix the democracy. The age issue solves itself.

The recent expansion of presidential immunity is corrupt and dangerous. No president should be above the law. At the same time, there are legitimate concerns about presidents being harassed by politically motivated prosecutions.

The solution is an empowered populace and a responsive legislature that can hold presidents accountable through political means, with criminal prosecution reserved for clear violations. The current system, where presidents can apparently commit crimes with impunity, is intolerable.

The January 6 pardons were likely appropriate for most participants — people who were swept up, manipulated, and made desperate by a system that failed them. Retribution against the foot soldiers while the architects escape is how injustice perpetuates itself.

Those with actual power who organized, funded, and directed the violence should face accountability. The people at the top, not the people at the bottom.

Political violence is a symptom of a broken system. Fix the system, and the violence diminishes. Prosecuting the desperate while protecting the powerful just breeds more desperation.

Consenting adults should be able to make their own choices about their bodies. Criminalization pushes sex work underground, making it more dangerous for everyone involved.

Legalize, regulate, tax. Provide health and safety protections. Treat sex workers as workers with rights, not criminals to be prosecuted.