My Policy Priorities
Remedying the housing crisis
The most dominant driver of rising housing costs is the pervasiveness of private equity firms in the real estate and rental markets. Firms such as Blackstone Group, KKR, The Carlyle Group, and others buy up, land, apartment complexes, and single-family homes that they intend to use as rental properties and investment assets, driving up home prices and pushing everyday Americans out of the housing market and jacking up rent across the nation. Meanwhile, American families just want an affordable place to call home. If this is the effect that these financial behemoths have on the real estate market, it is impermissible to allow them to participate in it.
Term Limits for Congressmen and Justices
As a measure against corrupt and self-serving career politicians, term limits equating to 12 years each should be applied to the US senate and House. In order to maintain a more fair and balanced supreme court system, there should be 20 supreme court justices, each serving 20-year terms, with one new justice being appointed to replace an old one each year. I also believe that US representatives should have their terms extended to 4 years, so they spend less of their careers campaigning, and more of it legislating.
Investment in beneficial Industries and Technologies
From the mouths of politicians, we often hear promises to support legacy industries like big oil, be it through direct subsidies, tax breaks, or lax regulations, but the pragmatic and forward-thinking strategy is to aggressively support the development of the emerging cutting-edge industries that will improve lives and propel us into the future. This is doubly important for regions of the US that, with the right investment, could see new industries with massive growth potential replace waning industries that residents rightfully fear losing. Investments in industries like next gen nuclear energy, multi-story indoor farming, green energy manufacturing, and aerospace innovation can not only produce technologies that improve our lives but bring us economic prosperity through the export of the very same technologies and their associated manufactured products.
Removing Big Money from Elections
Many Americans don’t even realize we technically do have some fairly robust (although not totally sufficient) campaign expenditure laws on the books in the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. This is because Citizens United and other court rulings have thoroughly obliterated the intent of our written campaign finance laws. These decisions opened the doors for Leadership PACS (political action committees) to fund the frequently lavish lifestyles of favored candidates and politicians, and for Super PACS to collect and spend unlimited sums of money from wealthy parties to campaign for chosen candidates and policies. Just as long as they “technically do not directly coordinate with the official campaign.”
Legally, as things currently stand, we either require the overturning of these egregious court rulings, or amendment to the constitution to reinstate, and hopefully even bolster our existing campaign finance laws.