On the Issues...
My platform?
TRANSPARENCY * ACCOUNTABILITY * LIBERTY
1. Medicare for All/Universal Healthcare, because Healthcare is a human right
2. Establish a living wage standard of at least $20 an hour and attach it to inflation
3. Ban Congress from Trading and pay them based on the same living wage standard that we all have to live on and establish a lifetime prohibition for any member of Congress or their staff from being able to become a lobbyist
4. Get Money out of Politics (more on this later) and establish public financing for campaigns
5. Pass the PRO Act to strengthen the right to organize
6. Repeal the Trump 2017 and 2025 Tax Cuts for the Wealthy, and go further by gradually raising taxes on the top margin back to pre-Reagan levels (billionaires should not exist)
7. Restore Glass-Steagall to strengthen the regulations created in the wake of the Great Depression
8. Codify Roe v. Wade
9. Establish public funding for colleges and universities to create tuition-free options
10. Pass the Green New Deal and work to get the rest of the world on board with addressing climate change
11. Legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana at the Federal level while exonerating all nonviolent federal marijuana offenders
12. Permanent extension of the child tax credit
13. Explore options for UBI (I am open to adopting this, but just need convincing that it won't create runaway inflation)
14. Fully funding public education and eliminating standardized testing
15. Defunding any aggressive nation-state, including Israel, and pushing for a two-state solution, as well as the prosecution of war crimes committed
16. Abolishing ICE, granting conditional amnesty to productive undocumented migrants, complete with a fee and an expedited/modernized path to citizenship (full amnesty to all undocumented children)
17. A bipartisan audit of every federal department to ensure that our tax dollars are spent effectively and efficiently, complete with a thorough report with recommendations to Congress and the American people for how to improve government functions
18. Eliminating the cap for payroll taxes to fully fund Social Security and work to make the program solvent for generations to come
19. Improving programs like SSI to ensure that the disabled are not barely holding on, including making sure that the impoverished are not punished for having additional income (I can explain further, if you want)
20. Comprehensive action to address gun violence with at least the bare minimum of truly universal background checks and adopting federal red flag laws (I know there's far more to this issue, but these two are literally the least we can do, with proven effectiveness)
Back to the issue of money out of politics, it is clear that we need a constitutional amendment, and I have a compromise.
For decades, I have adamantly opposed term limits, because I see them as inherently undemocratic. Moreover, term limits alone do not address the issue of corruption. Corruption is found by tracing the money back to the wealthy interests and their financing of campaigns and lobbyists.
So, my proposal is that an amendment be adopted establishing universal lifetime two-term limits for EVERY elected official in the country, effective immediately, a ten year term limit for every judicial appointee, and an overturn of the 2010 Citizens United ruling which clearly states that "money is not speech" and that "corporations are not legal persons".
I have other ideas to strengthen our democracy, but this is a start.
This is NOT a complete list of everything that I want to be able to do when you send me to DC. Feel free to ask me about anything that you want to know!