HOME RULE & STATEHOOD
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THE NATIONAL DEBT & TAXES
Taxes are the money that we should all pay according to our means to fund projects and activities that benefit all of society with the public projects and investments we cannot afford as individuals.
Taxes are treated as a dirty word, and there's a good reason for it: when government spending is driven by things that do not benefit We the People, when corruption is rampant and unpunished, there's no reason we should be happy to pay taxes.
We need to change the way we think about, collect, and use taxes. It's time to start the conversation with what we expect from our government, and then discuss how to pay for it together.
We live in a world where the national debt is over $39 trillion dollars. In 2025 we paid $1.2 trillion dollars in interest on our debt while collecting $5.3 trillion in taxes. Nearly 23% of the taxes we paid last year were used to pay interest on our debt. There is no sane reason we should be passing tax cuts for the wealthy while running up debts so large we cannot even afford to spend money on the things we most need to improve – our aging infrastructure, health care, and education – until we get our debt under control.
It's time to close tax loopholes and make it easy to pay the taxes we owe ourselves. It's time to ensure that everyone in America – especially the wealthiest – is paying the taxes they owe to us all.
EDUCATION
I taught English for two years in Europe, and I taught as a substitute teacher in elementary, middle, and high school in America. The differences in the educational experience were stark.
We have built a system that funds schools on property taxes, which is a phenomenal way to reinforce and to grow the wealth gap. When we choose to not fund schools for all children equitably, we are giving up on the future of some children.
I have had neighbors leave the city because their kids didn't get into the school they wanted. That begs the question: does anyone benefit from shortchanging some kids by having a system where schools perform so dramatically different?
DC has learned quite a bit about the wrong way to fix our public schools. It's time to work on fixing them through other means. We need to ensure equitable funding, equitable opportunities, and providing the services that individual students need while they are in school. We need an education system that graduates successful young men and women with the skills to excel in the modern economy.
The benefits of an excellent school system are for everyone. Let's make it happen.
HEALTH CARE
I am one of the millions of Americans who have health care thanks to the Affordable Care Act. I have been a beneficiary of the ACA since 2014. I have had the same health care plan since 2021, and since then, my premium has increased 84%. I suspect you have seen your health care costs skyrocket the same as I have.
The relationship between patients, government, insurers, and health care providers is broken.
It's long past time to build a single-payer health care system. We need to ensure our health care providers are providing health care instead of fighting with insurance companies about what care to provide their patients. We need to ensure we have enough health care workers to serve our growing population. We need to ensure that all Americans have access to the health care they need.
We can build a system that works; and now is the time to do it.
PRIVACY & CONSUMER RIGHTS
One of my classes in business school – in 2013 – included visits to tech start-ups to understand how they operated and earned money. We visited a small company that was creating a chat app. I asked them, what was the point when there were already so many chat apps?
They responded by explaining to me how they could map out a network of connections between people with just a small fraction of a city's population as customers. Each customer gave the app access to their contacts. As long as 2 or 3 people who knew me signed up, the app would be able to learn enough about me – even if I didn't sign up – to sell data about me without my consent.
I was horrified, and I immediately started paying attention to online privacy.
Today things are so much worse. It's practically impossible to live disconnected from the Internet and smartphones. It's impossible for you or for me to prevent companies from harvesting our data and selling it without our explicit consent.
When my washing machine broke a few years ago, I waited for a holiday sale, purchased the most affordable model with the least connected technology that I could find, and I brought it home. After completing the installation, I opened it up to find a piece of paper saying that by purchasing and using their equipment, I was automatically agreeing to a binding arbitration agreement.
The fact that it's nearly impossible to buy a good or service today without accidentally agreeing to give up various rights or your private data is a policy choice. Guess who pours money into PACs, Super PACs, and political campaigns, and then benefits from Terms & Conditions that no person could possibly have time to read.
It's time for common sense limits on what rights companies can force you to give up just for you to buy something. When companies can collect and sell our data with few limits, they have no incentive to protect our privacy. We give up our rights most times we sign up for something, click "I agree," or navigate to a website.
It's time for a national privacy law. It's time for common sense consumer protection laws.
INFRASTRUCTURE & WATER
Washington DC is one of the few major cities that has a single source of water. We saw this year just how fragile our infrastructure is when between 240 and 300 million gallons of sewage spilled into the Potomac between our main water intake and our back-up water intake.
After acting as if the situation were under control for months and that no risk remained, DC Water in June told us that there are 3 other emergency spots in our sewage infrastructure, at least one of which is upstream of all of our water intakes.
In a warming world where we expect more droughts and heavier rainfalls, we need infrastructure that is up to the challenge. We are nowhere near that today, and urgent action is needed to keep us safe in the present and to move us forward.
THE FUTURE, AI & DATA CENTERS
Technological advancement is what brought us to a world where we can pull a small box out of our pockets and within seconds talk to a loved one by video feed. Technological advancement is why we have GPS, the Internet, modern medicine, and so many more things we take for granted.
The US government has been and should continue to be a key investor in the technologies of the future. We should also expect the government to protect us from the worst side effects of advancement.
- →There is no reason our power bills should spike because of private investment in data centers in Northern Virginia. Data centers should be paying for the additional energy capacity they need.
- →There is no reason that DC, a city with a single source of water, should see that water evaporated to cool data centers even as we see infrastructure failures threaten our water supply.
The future is what we make of it, and we should work to continue leading the charge in both innovation and the production and providing of novel technologies.
It's time to innovate responsibly, and to the benefit of everyone. A system where you and I subsidize multi-billion-dollar companies but don't share in the profits is a broken system. Let's fix it!
The nations that lead the way to the climate-resilient economy of the future will reap the economic benefits. We, the taxpayers of the United States have funded a lot of the research that will turn into the technology of tomorrow. We should capitalize on those innovations and be the ones who produce and benefit from that technology. We need to remove the barriers to innovation implementation, and we need to incentivize researchers and private industry to take the right risks to build the leading businesses of tomorrow here, at home.
ENVIRONMENT & ENERGY
We are already living the consequences of the greatest global challenge facing humanity today: climate change is not going away without action, yet the legacy industries whose pollution brought us here are pouring so much money into convincing us to ignore the evidence that we are dragging our feet right into disaster.
It's past time to take the obvious steps toward revamping America's energy strategy toward the future. Solar cells were invented in America, yet we are not manufacturing the majority of the panels on the market today. We are slow to invest in the energy sources of the future because the entrenched money of past energy sources is so powerful in government.
We need to break away from the past, invest in our future, and work immediately to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
Climate Change Denial might be fine for the elderly whose wealth is tied up in oil and gas and who will be long gone before the worst impacts of climate change hit us, but it is not fine for you or for your children. We need to work with all nations in the world to lead us into a future, climate-resilient economy.
FOREIGN POLICY
The United States was once the leader of the free world. Right now we are threatening our allies and cozying up to nations whose interests do not align with yours or with mine. We are attacking countries and abducting foreign leaders because … I'm not entirely sure why. We are starting new wars that do nothing to improve our national security and cost us billions of dollars.
These wars are not for you or for me. We can do better.
We need to return to coalition building. We need to work with our allies to build a strong network of democratic nations that want to build a better future for you, for them, and for us.
We need to cooperate with our allies in order to solve the biggest issues we face.
- →Tax loopholes that enable corporations to avoid paying taxes that will only be closed with international cooperation.
- →We live in a warming world, and global cooperation is the only way we are going to solve the climate crisis.
- →Our prosperity depends on peace. Starting wars costs us lives, money, and friends. It reduces our readiness in the event that someone attacks us, and it creates enemies of people who could have been friends.
We must look toward friendly, productive relationships with every nation with which it is possible. Peace brings prosperity to everyone, and there is no reason we should seek anything less.
BUSINESS & WORKERS
Businesses drive the American economy, and have made us the wealthiest nation in the world. These days, for most of us, it just doesn't feel like we're all that wealthy.
We need to recognize the difference between touting stock market highs and GDP growth against the income we take home and the cost of living.
The disparity between our national GDP and what we are able to put on the kitchen table is a choice that we make every election. We elect politicians who inevitably cater to the needs of their donors. It's time to shift toward politicians who will cater to your needs. It's time to shift to policies that mean you don't have to choose between paying a medical bill, paying a power bill, or paying for rent and food.
National laws must shift to protect the unions that enable workers to bargain for their fair share of wealth creation.
We must equitably tax the wealthiest in recognition of the fact that their wealth is a direct result of public investments in America. American businesses thrive in the environment created by American infrastructure. They sell to American consumers. They take advantage of American tax policies and subsidies. They should pay their fair share of taxes to ensure the American business environment remains the best place for success in the future.
It's time to ensure that we all prosper from our common investments.
HUMAN RIGHTS
I want to be very clear: if you hear a politician define a group of people based on who they are and then talk about how that subgroup is bad, they are attacking your rights.
All humans have the same rights, and efforts to divide us into subgroups are exactly that: efforts to divide us and to distract us from the issues that really matter. We are living the economic consequences of decades of poor policy. We are living in a warming world that impacts everyone. We are being distracted by culture wars for no reason other than to make us angry enough to vote based on fear instead of on where we want the country to go.
I will defend the rights of every human. I will not entertain the idea of attacking this or that group of people based on who they are.
It's time to drop the culture wars and focus on a common, prosperous future.
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