A family should be able to live on one paycheck again.

Safe streets

Safety comes first. Violence isn't tolerated, sidewalks and parks aren't anyone's permanent campsite, and the border is controlled. Once that floor is in place, each city can run itself however its residents want.

A big reason people with severe mental illness end up living on the sidewalk is a 1965 Medicaid rule. For adults aged 21 to 64 it won't pay for care in a psychiatric hospital with more than 16 beds, and the exceptions added since are narrow and short-stay. States closed their hospitals and nothing replaced them.

Wages and immigration

Every institution can only absorb so much change at once, and immigration is the clearest case. We want a pause on large-scale immigration, long enough for wages and communities to catch up, while staying open to new technology and new ideas.

When employers say they can't find workers, it usually means they won't pay what the job takes. When the cheap labor stops, some jobs pay more and some get replaced by machines. Both are better than a wage held down for the Americans already doing that work. The penalty belongs on the employer who breaks the law, because he is the one profiting from it.

Houses a family can live in

We build policy around the household, which is often three generations looking after each other. On most residential land in America the only thing you can legally build is a single-family house, so a house sized for that family, or a small unit in the back yard for a parent, usually needs special permission. Housing has also turned into an investment everyone expects to keep rising, which is good for people who already own and hard on young families trying to buy.

Own your tools

People should own the things they work with. A farmer who pays $600,000 or more for a combine should be able to fix it, and to buy the diagnostic tool he needs to do it. A business that runs on AI should be able to run its own model, instead of renting from three companies that can raise the price or cut it off. Open models, which anyone can download and run, keep that ownership spread out.

Build big things

The country should be building reactors, ships and the whole computer-chip supply chain, including the machines that make the chips. Nuclear power is expensive here mostly because every plant is a custom job. France built its 56 reactors from a handful of standard designs in three sizes, one after another, while the US has built nearly every plant as a one-off.

Big projects also have to outlast the president who starts them. Apollo was cut back as soon as it reached the moon. The Interstate took 36 years to finish because it had its own trust fund paid for by the gas tax, and contracts in nearly every congressional district, so every member had a reason to protect it.

Jobs without the degree tax

A college degree has become the entry fee for a middle-class job, even for work that doesn't need one, and it's a weak predictor of how well someone will actually do the job. Employers didn't choose this. In 1971 the Supreme Court made aptitude tests legally risky, and a 1991 law closed the main workaround. The degree was what was left. About two-thirds of job postings for production supervisors ask for a degree that only one in six people already doing the job have. About one in five workers needs a government license to do their job.

Real food

Americans didn't get heavier in one generation because they got lazy. The food changed. In a 2019 NIH study, people ate about 500 more calories a day on an ultra-processed diet than on an unprocessed one, even though both diets offered the same sugar, fat, fiber and salt. It was a small study, but the difference was large. Washington pays billions a year to grow the corn and soybeans this food is made from, and food companies can declare their own additives safe without telling the FDA. Before anyone taxes food, the government should stop paying for the ingredients.