Most American suffering comes from systems built to extract rent: healthcare, housing, education, banking. Not from genuine resource limits. My thoughts here are about reducing artificial scarcity, greed, and exclusionary tactics that only serve the richest 0.1% of the country.
Economic & Labor
Negative Income Tax. Replace the welfare maze with one refundable credit that phases out as earnings rise. A household with no income gets a floor, and every extra dollar earned still pays, so nobody is trapped by a benefits cliff. The cost lands in the range of $200 to $400 billion a year depending on the floor and the phase-out rate. A universal check at $1,000 a month would run $3.1 to $4.6 trillion, more than all federal discretionary spending combined. Same goal, a tenth of the price.
Maximum Work Week. Mandate 32 hour/week as full-time with overtime protections kicking in after that. The productivity gains of the last 50 years haven’t translated to leisure time. It’s time to fix that.
Ban Non-Competes and Non-Solicits. These are labor market restrictions that suppress wages. Make them unenforceable nationwide.
Healthcare
Single-Payer Healthcare. Medicare for All, immediately. Eliminate the employer-based insurance trap, negotiate drug prices aggressively from all sources, and remove the profit motive from essential care. Healthcare is a right, not a commodity.
Medical Debt Forgiveness. Wipe existing medical debt. It’s mostly held by collection agencies who bought it for pennies on the dollar anyway.
Democratic Reform
Ranked-Choice Voting. Replace first-past-the-post or plurality voting nationwide. This breaks the two-party duopoly and lets people vote for who they actually want without spoiler effects.
End Gerrymandering. Mandate independent redistricting commissions in every state with algorithmic standards for compactness.
Campaign Finance Overhaul. Public financing for elections, ban all corporate and foreign PAC money, and require all political spending to be transparent as possible.
Overturn Citizens United. Pass a constitutional amendment reversing Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and establishing that corporations are not people and money is not speech. Two amendments are already drafted and waiting for a vote: the We the People Amendment, H.J. Res. 54, which does both and adds mandatory disclosure of election spending, and the narrower Democracy for All Amendment, S.J. Res. 51, which gives Congress and the states explicit authority to limit contributions and spending. Either one needs two thirds of both chambers and 38 states, and once ratified it becomes the law the current Court cannot overturn. Then write the campaign finance statute the Court will not allow today.
Move Election Day to Sunday. Or make it a federal holiday. The Tuesday-in-November thing dates from when farmers needed Monday to travel by horse. There’s no excuse for weekday voting in 2026.
Criminal Justice
End the Drug War. Full federal legalization of cannabis, decriminalization of personal possession for all substances, and mass expungement of drug convictions. Treat addiction as a health issue.
Prison Reform. Eliminate private prisons, mandate rehabilitation and education programs, and drastically reduce sentences for non-violent offenses.
Police Accountability. End qualified immunity, require professional liability insurance for officers (bad cops become uninsurable), and mandate independent civilian investigation of police misconduct.
Housing
Zoning Reform. Override local NIMBYism to legalize dense housing construction nationwide. The housing crisis is fundamentally a supply problem caused by artificial scarcity.
Vacancy Taxes. Punish speculation and empty investment properties.
Taxation
Wealth Tax. Add a 2% annual tax on the net worth of individuals and corporations making above $50 million, and 3% above $1 billion. We can’t have a functioning democracy with this level of wealth concentration.
Financial Transaction Tax. Small tax on stock trades to curb high-frequency trading and raise revenue.
Education
Free Public College. Return to the model where public universities are actually publicly funded, not debt factories.
Trade School Investment. Equal funding and prestige for vocational training.
Transit & Connectivity
High-Speed Rail. Actually build it. The US is embarrassingly behind on intercity transit.
Municipal Broadband. Preempt state laws blocking public internet and fund fiber to every home. Internet is essential infrastructure.
Energy & Environment
Nuclear Build-Out. Fast-track permitting for next-gen reactors (SMRs, etc.). Solar and wind are great, but you need baseload power to actually decarbonize the grid. France did this in 20 years; so can we.
Carbon Fee-and-Dividend. Tax carbon at the source, return all revenue as equal checks to citizens. Poor and middle-class families come out ahead, and it lets the market find the cheapest emissions cuts.
Right to Repair. Mandate that manufacturers provide parts, schematics, and software access for everything they sell. Planned obsolescence is environmental vandalism.
Extended Producer Responsibility. A surcharge aimed at two polymers just moves manufacturers to a third one. Make producers pay the end-of-life cost of all the packaging they put on the market, with fees scaled to recyclability and toxicity. The EU and several U.S. states already run this model. When disposal costs land on the producer, the cheapest package becomes the one that is easiest to recycle.
Immigration
Skill-Based Visa Reform. Expand H-1B and create a startup visa for founders, but attach a hard wage floor of $150,000 before an employer can use the visa. Without a floor the program subsidizes body-shop arbitrage, where Infosys and Tata import below-market labor and wage suppression is the product. With a floor it does what it was meant to do, which is hire people you cannot find here.
Pathway to Citizenship. For anyone who’s been here 5+ years, working and paying taxes, grant automatic permanent residency. The “illegal” immigration problem is mostly a paperwork problem caused by quotas that don’t match labor demand.
Financial Sector
Postal Banking. Let the Post Office offer basic checking/savings accounts. 5% of households are unbanked, paying predatory fees to check-cashing places. The USPS already has branches in every community.
Executive Pay Reform. Buybacks and dividends are the same transaction: capital returned to owners who can reinvest it elsewhere. The problem is not the payout, it is paying executives in equity on a quarterly clock. Require multi-year holding periods on executive equity grants, claw back pay when a restatement or a debt-financed buyback hits the balance sheet, and stop tying vesting to short-term price targets.
Credit Score Reform. Medical debt and student loans shouldn’t tank your credit. Create a public credit registry as an alternative to the Experian/Equifax/TransUnion triopoly.
Family Policy
Universal Childcare. Subsidized care from age 0-5, modeled on the military’s CDC system which actually works well. This pays for itself in increased maternal workforce participation.
Paid Parental Leave. 6 months minimum, split between parents however they choose. Use-it-or-lose-it incentives so men actually take it.
Foreign Policy
Defense Budget Audit. The Pentagon has failed audits for years. Cut 20% of military spending and redirect it to State Department diplomacy. You get more influence per dollar with soft power anyway.
Tech & Competition
Break Up Big Tech. Vertical and horizontal separation. Amazon can’t own the marketplace and compete on it. Google can’t own search and the ad exchange. Apple can’t block competing app stores.
Data Ownership. You own your personal data. Platforms must pay you to use it, or delete it. GDPR-style portability rights nationwide.
Algorithmic Transparency. Social media companies must open-source their recommendation algorithms. If they’re shaping public discourse, we get to see how.
Judicial & Legal
18-Year Supreme Court Term Limits. One term, staggered so each president appoints two justices. Ends the death-watch politics and keeps the court fresh.
One-Way Fee Shifting. Loser-pays is a gift to deep pockets. A tenant suing a slumlord or a worker suing for stolen wages would face a corporate legal bill just for speaking up. Make it asymmetric instead: any party with more than $5 million in annual revenue pays the other side’s fees when it loses, while individuals and small businesses do not. Patent trolls and nuisance suits still die, because the troll is always the big party, and ordinary people keep their day in court.
Public Defender Funding Parity. Public defenders get the same budget as prosecutors in every jurisdiction. You can’t have justice when one side has investigators and experts and the other has a caseload of 500.
Monetary Policy
Fed Accounts for All. Every citizen gets a digital dollar account at the Federal Reserve. Instant payments, no bank fees, direct stimulus delivery in crises. The banks hate this, which is how you know it’s good.
End Tax-Exempt Status for Mega-Nonprofits. Harvard has a $50 billion endowment and pays no property taxes while the city around it crumbles. If you’re sitting on billions, you’re not a charity, you’re a hedge fund with a side hustle.
Land Use & Streets
Eliminate Parking Minimums. Mandating parking subsidizes driving and makes housing more expensive. Let the market decide how much parking to build.
Congestion Pricing. Charge for driving into downtowns during peak hours. Works in London, Singapore, Stockholm. Use revenue for transit.
Legalize ADUs Nationwide. Accessory Dwelling Units (granny flats, garage apartments) are illegal in most suburbs. Override local zoning; more housing supply without changing neighborhood character.
Pedestrian-First Street Design. Federal standards that prioritize walking/biking over car throughput in urban areas. Narrow lanes, protected intersections, raised crosswalks. Cars slow down when the road feels dangerous to speed on.
Food & Agriculture
Food Labeling Reform. Actual honest labels. “Natural” means nothing. “Organic” is mostly marketing. Require disclosure of antibiotics, precise added sugar content, and environmental impact scores.
Break Up Meatpacking Monopolies. Four companies control 85% of beef. That’s how farmers get screwed and consumers pay more.
Farm Subsidy Reform. Corn and soy subsidies are making us sick and destroying the Midwest soil. Move that money to regenerative farming and crop diversity, and give big agribusiness nothing: no payments to operations big enough to absorb their own bad years. Commodity subsidies reward volume, so they were never a small-farmer program to begin with. The point should be keeping family farms on the land, not making cheap corn cheaper.
Research & Innovation
ARPA-H and ARPA-E Expansion. DARPA-style high-risk research funding for health and energy. Government should fund the stuff too risky for VCs but too important to ignore.
Open Access Mandate. All federally funded research must be freely available immediately. No more paywalls on taxpayer-funded science.
Governance
DC Statehood. 700,000 Americans with no voting representation. It’s colonialism in the capital.
Ranked Choice for Primaries. Also eliminate party-controlled primaries. Open top-four primaries with ranked general elections. Let coalitions form naturally instead of through party machinery.
Civil Service Protection. Make it harder to fire career bureaucrats for political reasons. You want expertise, not patronage.
Civics Education. Make a semester of practical civics a graduation requirement: how a bill becomes law, how local government spends money, how to read a ballot, and how to tell a real source from a fake one. Test it in school the way algebra is tested. A citizen who understands the machine is worth more than a poll worker turning people away.
Media Literacy Curriculum. Require media literacy in every year of K through 12, not as an elective. How to identify a source, how to spot a fabricated image, how recommendation algorithms decide what you see, and how to check a claim before sharing it. Finland has taught this for a decade and ranks at the top of European media literacy indexes. The skill belongs in the same category as reading.
Voter Information Packets. Mail every registered voter a plain-language guide 30 days before each election: every race, every candidate, every ballot measure, with the official arguments for and against and who paid for them. California and Oregon already send voters guides like this. Someone who cannot find out what is on the ballot is not uninformed by choice.
Universal Voting with None of the Above. Pay people to vote instead of fining them. A small refundable tax credit, $50 on the return of any citizen who casts a ballot, costs about $8 billion in a presidential year at current turnout of roughly 157 million ballots. Australia fines non-voters and clears 90 percent of registered voters; a credit is harder to call voter suppression and easier to defend in court. Keep a none of the above line in every race, and if it wins, the seat stays vacant and a fresh election is called. Make the credit claimable at the polls or at registration, not only on an IRS return, because the people least likely to vote are also the least likely to file.
Sunset Clauses on All Laws. Every law expires after 20 years unless actively renewed. Forces Congress to actually review what they’ve done instead of piling up cruft for centuries. The Code of Federal Regulations is 180,000 pages. Most of it is dead weight.
Uncap the House. The House has been frozen at 435 seats since 1929 while the population tripled, so the average member now represents about 760,000 people. Grow the House with the population using the Wyoming Rule, where the smallest state sets the ratio, so every member represents roughly the same number of constituents. No constitutional amendment, and no small state volunteering to give up power. A simple statute does it.
Consumer Protection
Airline Passenger Bill of Rights. Mandated compensation for delays over 3 hours (like EU261). Force airlines to refund cash, not vouchers. Require seat size minimums; if you can’t fit a 6′ person comfortably, it’s not a seat.
Subscription Cancellation. One-click unsubscribe for everything, modeled on the FTC’s “Click to Cancel” rule but with actual teeth. No more “call during business hours to cancel” dark patterns.
Right to Delete. Any company holding your data must delete it permanently upon request, with criminal penalties for “anonymized” retention that can be re-identified.
Professional Gatekeeping
Occupational Licensing Reform. Hair braiding doesn’t need 1,500 hours of cosmetology school. Neither does interior design. Sunset licenses that don’t protect public safety. Use registration and bonding instead.
Certificate of Need Repeal. States where hospitals need permission from competitors to expand. It’s pure protectionism that raises healthcare costs. Ban it federally.
Utilities & Water
Stormwater Fees. Charge property owners based on impervious surface area (concrete/rooftops). Incentivizes green roofs and permeable pavement, reduces flooding.
Grid Interconnection. Actually build a national high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission backbone. The wind is always blowing somewhere; the sun is always shining somewhere. We just can’t move electrons across state lines efficiently.
Water Rights Reform. “Use it or lose it” laws encourage waste. Allow water rights trading and incentivize efficiency in agriculture (drip irrigation subsidies).
Daily Life Quality
End Daylight Saving Time. Pick standard time and stick with it. The health costs and traffic fatalities from the transitions aren’t worth the marginal evening daylight.
Legalize Lane Filtering. Motorcycles filtering between stopped cars reduces congestion and rear-end collisions. Legal in most of the world; banned in most of the US for no good reason.
Intellectual Property
Copyright Term Reduction. Back to 28 years plus one renewal. Current life+70 is absurd. It’s stealing from the public domain to benefit corporations that bought rights from dead creators.
Patent Thicket Clearing. Make licensing mandatory for standard-essential patents at Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) rates. End the smartphone patent wars.
Veterans & Military
VA Healthcare Expansion. Let any veteran use any hospital, not just VA facilities. The VA backlog is a capacity problem; buy capacity on the open market.
Housing-First for Homeless Veterans. Just give them apartments. It’s cheaper than emergency room visits and jail stays. Salt Lake City proved this works.
Mental Health Issues
Involuntary Commitment Reform. Make it easier to get people care before they become dangerous, but with actual due process protections and quality facilities (not warehouses).
Psychedelic Therapy Coverage. The FDA has stopped being the obstacle. It issued National Priority Vouchers to three companies in April 2026, and Compass Pathways is targeting an NDA submission in the fourth quarter of 2026. The remaining gap is payment. Require Medicare and VA coverage for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression once approved, and fund the therapist training pipeline, because a dose without a trained guide in the room is just a drug.
Conclusion
Seventy-five items is a long list, and a long list invites the accusation of scattergun thinking. Read them together and the repetition is the point. A zoning code that forbids homes, a license that forbids work, a patchwork thicket of patent laws that forbids building, an insurer that sits between a patient and their doctor, a credit bureau that regulates worthiness between a borrower and a lender, a primary, 2nd or 3rd tier contractor that exists between taxpayers and defense spending. Different industries, same shape and form of greed.
The single test for any policy on this page: does it reduce the number of people who get paid for standing in the way? If yes, it belongs. If no, it may still be a good idea, but it needs a different argument.
At some point we hit diminishing returns on “more policies” and need actual execution. But the US government has accumulated decades of laws with temporary patches layered on temporary patches. Sometimes you need to burn it down and rebuild clean. We now have that opportunity in the coming months and years to do just that.
Let’s finally build the country we all know we can be.