Where we stand.

We propose universal catastrophic coverage as a legal floor, funded federally, that eliminates medical bankruptcy. Above that floor, private insurance and HSAs continue to exist for additional coverage. Hospital and drug prices become subject to federal negotiation on the Medicare model, applied across all payers. Employer-linked health insurance remains legal but is no longer tax-advantaged in the way it is today, decoupling healthcare access from employment over a fifteen-year transition.

This is not single-payer. It is a floor with market choice above it, which we believe is politically durable in American political culture in a way that full single-payer has never been. It is also not the status quo, which is collapsing under its own cost and complexity.

Each component has a specific policy response. Federal funding to states should be conditioned on local zoning reform — specifically, allowing multi-family construction by right in residential zones near transit and employment centers. Institutional ownership of single-family residential above a threshold (say, one hundred units per entity) should be taxed at rates that make it unprofitable, forcing divestment back into the owner-occupier market. The capital-gains exclusion for primary residences should be preserved; preferential tax treatment for investment residential should be eliminated.

Paired with this, we support direct federal investment in social housing on the Vienna model — housing built and operated by public entities, rented at cost, available to households across the income distribution. This is what functional European housing markets actually look like. The American romance with pure private ownership has produced a housing system that works for fewer people every decade.

We propose taxing capital gains and qualified dividends as ordinary income, with a small exclusion for middle-class investment gains (to protect retirement accounts and modest taxable brokerage accounts). The step-up in basis is eliminated. Estate tax rates rise, and the exemption threshold is lowered to levels that affect the truly dynastic-wealthy rather than middle-class family farms and businesses. A financial transactions tax, at rates low enough to be invisible to ordinary investors but meaningful across high-frequency trading volumes, funds the broader tax system and dampens speculative activity.

This works alongside the Tiered Profit-Ratio Tax on the corporate side and the 95% marginal rate on top personal income brackets above thirty times median household income. The integrated system is more progressive than any the United States has operated since the 1950s, and also significantly simpler — most Americans would file taxes in minutes.

A fourth reform follows from the first three: consolidation of existing social-program taxation into the Country Profit Sharing fund. The 12.4% FICA payroll tax for Social Security, the tax streams funding SNAP and TANF and SSI and EITC, and comparable federal spending on means-tested benefits roll into a single shared dividend pool. The tax base does not grow in the aggregate — it redirects. What Americans already pay into fragmented social programs becomes the funding base for a shared citizen's dividend paid out to everyone. The political effect is to convert a resented welfare apparatus into a shared inheritance system. The administrative effect is to collapse dozens of eligibility-checking bureaucracies into a single quarterly payment. Transition provisions guarantee that no current recipient receives less than their prior benefit during the ten-to-fifteen-year phase-in.

Layer one: the near-term workhorses. Modern fission, solar and wind at continued pace, transmission grid modernization, battery storage at utility scale, and a carbon price paired with a border-adjustment tariff. Fission carries the largest weight in this layer because it is the only zero-carbon baseload technology that has ever decarbonized a major economy at scale — France runs roughly seventy percent of its grid on nuclear, has done so for forty years, and produces electricity at emissions intensities an order of magnitude below the United States. We do not need a miracle to start decarbonizing. We need to deploy what already works.

The standard objections to fission have stronger engineering answers than the public discourse acknowledges. On spent fuel: the entire United States accumulation since 1957 fits on a single football field stacked roughly thirty feet high; the Yucca Mountain failure was political, not technical; and Generation-IV designs (molten-salt reactors, traveling-wave reactors) burn existing spent fuel as their own fuel, converting the waste problem into the fuel supply. On weaponization: modern small modular reactor designs use low-enriched uranium rather than weapons-grade material; sealed-reactor designs ship pre-fueled from the factory and return to the manufacturer for refueling, eliminating on-site enrichment entirely. The proliferation concern is largely a 1970s concern preserved by a public discourse that has not updated to the engineering of the last twenty years.

The carbon price's border adjustment is critical: without it, domestic decarbonization simply moves industrial production to less-regulated jurisdictions. With it, the rest of the world has to match our decarbonization or pay tariffs — which is the mechanism by which U.S. climate policy actually affects global emissions rather than merely re-shoring them.

Layer two: distributed generation. Every home should be a small power station. Rooftop solar combined with home battery storage is now mature enough that the bottleneck is policy, not technology — interconnection rules, net metering rules, and permitting delays do far more to hold back residential generation than physics or cost. Lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, the next generation of sodium-ion and iron-air storage, and vehicle-to-home capability (Ford F-150 Lightning, GM Ultium, Hyundai V2L) are turning the single-family home, the apartment building, and the small commercial property into producers of electricity rather than passive consumers of it. An EV in the driveway is roughly a week of backup home power.

The policy response is straightforward: standardized federal interconnection rules so homeowners can sell power back to the grid without state-by-state friction; restructured residential energy tax credits centered on storage capacity rather than just generation panels; federal R&D funding for residential hydrogen, long-duration batteries, and community microgrids; vehicle-to-home as a national interconnection standard; and permitting reform to eliminate the multi-month delays that currently follow every rooftop solar deployment. This is the fourth-settlement argument applied to energy: ownership distributed broadly rather than concentrated in a handful of regional utilities, with every household participating in production as well as consumption.

Layer three: fusion at Manhattan-Project scale. Commercial-grid fusion is realistically a 2040s technology. We say so honestly. We also say: that timeline is a funding problem, not a physics problem. The "thirty years away" caricature has held for fifty years because fusion has been funded as a niche research line, not as a Manhattan-scale strategic priority. That has changed in the last five years. The National Ignition Facility achieved net energy gain in December 2022. Private fusion companies — Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, Helion, Tokamak Energy — have raised over five billion dollars in venture capital. ARPA-E and DOE fusion programs have scaled materially. The federal government should match this momentum with a public investment that treats fusion as a national strategic technology, comparable to the semiconductor effort of the 1950s or the space program of the 1960s. A ten- to twenty-fold increase in federal fusion funding, sustained for a decade, would do what the underfunded prior fifty years did not.

The structural case for fusion's distinctive importance is straightforward. Fusion produces no long-lived radioactive waste — its byproducts decay in decades rather than millennia. Fusion has no weaponization pathway — deuterium and tritium fuel are not fissile and cannot be diverted into weapons. Fusion's fuel inputs are effectively unlimited; the deuterium in a single bathtub of seawater contains roughly the energy of three hundred barrels of oil. The technology that wins the second half of the twenty-first century will be the technology that pairs fission baseload now, distributed solar and storage everywhere in between, and fusion baseload later. The United States is currently positioned to lead that race. So is China. Whichever government commits the capital wins. We commit the capital.

The work that organized labor performs at the workplace level is work that statutory protections alone cannot perform. Federal labor law — OSHA, FLSA, the Civil Rights Act, the ADA, the FMLA — establishes minimum standards. The standards are enforced through individual complaint procedures that workers without representation cannot practically use. A worker without a union, faced with a workplace safety violation or a wage-theft incident, must choose between filing a complaint that may invite retaliation and accepting the violation. The empirical record on this choice is unambiguous: the substantial majority of federal labor-law violations go unreported and unremedied because the affected workers cannot afford the personal cost of enforcement. Unions provide on-the-ground enforcement infrastructure — stewards in the workplace, grievance procedures, legal capacity, collective response to retaliation — that no federal agency at any plausible budget can match. Removing this layer does not eliminate the violations. It only eliminates the enforcement.

Country Profit Sharing and the Tiered Profit-Ratio Tax address structural problems at the population and firm levels — baseline material security and capital concentration. Collective bargaining addresses the workplace-specific power asymmetry that the macro instruments cannot reach: who decides scheduling, working conditions, discipline procedures, safety practices, and the contract terms that define daily working life. Both are required. Norbert Wiener understood this in 1949 when he wrote to Walter Reuther proposing that organized labor preempt the cybernetic transition; Frances Perkins understood this in 1935 when she designed the New Deal labor settlement on the assumption that organized labor would be a coequal political partner in administering it. The platform's case for a fourth structural settlement against the AI transition rests on the same assumption. We do not propose to enact a generational economic restructuring without organized labor as a coalition partner.

Higher education suffers from a different problem: cost has risen far faster than inflation for fifty years, while federal student loans have financed the increase without any negotiating pressure on institutions. The federal government is the principal buyer of American higher education through the student loan system, and it has refused to act like one. We propose federal tuition-free access to public community colleges and public universities for residents, paired with aggressive cost-containment requirements on any institution receiving federal aid. Existing student debt above reasonable thresholds should be restructured; predatory institutions should lose federal-loan eligibility.

Parallel to this, vocational and technical education should be treated as a first-class path, not a consolation prize. German-style apprenticeship systems produce higher median wages and lower debt levels than the American default of "college for everyone." The American labor market of 2040 will need electricians, plumbers, medical technicians, and skilled trade workers at scale. Our education system should prepare them, paid for, honored as careers worth having.

The drug war has failed on its own terms. Full federal marijuana legalization, with expungement of past convictions, is long overdue. For harder drugs, we support decriminalization of personal possession paired with aggressive investment in treatment capacity and harm-reduction infrastructure (supervised consumption, needle exchange, naloxone availability). Trafficking enforcement continues. The target is the supply chain and the profit motive, not the person struggling with addiction.

Policing is a legitimate public function that has been underregulated in specific ways. We support federal standards on use of force, body-worn cameras, and accountability procedures — not a replacement for local control, but a national floor below which no jurisdiction may operate. Qualified immunity as currently interpreted should be reformed so that officers who violate clearly established rights can be held personally accountable. None of this is "abolish the police." It is the standard-setting that every other professional licensed activity in American life is subject to.

Universal background checks, including for private sales and gun-show transactions, produce measurable reductions in firearm homicide in jurisdictions that implement them seriously. Red-flag laws (extreme risk protection orders) allow courts to temporarily restrict firearm access when specific, documented evidence indicates risk to self or others — and the research on their suicide-prevention effects is unambiguous. Both are policies a large majority of Americans, including gun owners, already support when asked.

We support a renewed federal ban on newly-manufactured military-style semiautomatic rifles (AR-pattern and equivalents), with grandfather-clause protection for existing legally-owned firearms. The specific weapons this covers are responsible for a disproportionate share of mass-casualty events; the defensive use case they serve is handled equally well by other firearm categories that would remain available. Handgun rights for home defense, sporting use, and licensed concealed carry (with training requirements) are preserved and respected.

Access to contraception is a separate question and should be treated as basic public health. We support over-the-counter hormonal contraception, federally funded access for low-income women, and robust support for family planning clinics. The evidence on contraception access reducing unintended pregnancies — and thereby reducing the demand for abortion — is unambiguous. Parties that claim to want fewer abortions while opposing contraception access are not reasoning clearly.

We acknowledge that reproductive rights involve genuine moral complexity that many Americans take seriously. Our position is not that this complexity is fake. It is that the federal government should establish a floor of access below which no state may regulate, while acknowledging that regulation of edge cases (post-viability timing, parental notification for minors, specific medical procedures) can reasonably vary at the state level within that floor.

The line between private-sector data collection and government surveillance has effectively disappeared. Federal and state law enforcement agencies purchase phone location histories, identity documents, vehicle travel records, and behavior profiles from commercial brokers — data that would require judicial authorization under the Fourth Amendment if collected directly. This is the "data broker loophole," and it has reduced the constitutional warrant requirement to a paper constraint on a system designed to route around it. Employers and insurers use opaque scoring systems built on this data to make decisions that individuals cannot appeal because they cannot see the inputs that produced the decision.

Europe's General Data Protection Regulation is imperfect but demonstrates that strong privacy law is compatible with a functioning digital economy. Our framework is stronger than GDPR on several specific dimensions: a universal right of access to any data held about you by any entity; rights of correction and deletion; mandatory purpose limitation (data collected for one purpose cannot be silently repurposed); mandatory retention limits with two years as the default; prohibition on the sale of the most sensitive categories (location, health, biometric, children's data); a private right of action so individuals can sue for privacy violations without waiting for an overworked FTC; and closure of the data broker loophole through explicit warrant requirements for government acquisition of commercial data. Indefinite retention — the current default across most commercial systems — becomes illegal.

Surveillance technology in public spaces receives particular attention. Facial recognition, license plate readers, gait analysis, cell-site simulators, and comparable systems deployed by state and local law enforcement are subject to federal oversight and warrant requirements. Commercial deployment of facial recognition in non-consenting public spaces is restricted. Biometric data — fingerprints, facial geometry, iris scans, voiceprints, gait signatures — receives the same protections as genetic data, because for practical purposes it functions the same way: unique to the individual, impossible to change, capable of being used against the individual for the rest of their life.

This is not how democracies are supposed to work, and for most of American history it is not how American democracy did work. The Tillman Act of 1907 banned corporate contributions to federal campaigns. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 extended the ban to unions. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 created contribution limits, expenditure limits, and public disclosure requirements. These statutes reflected a shared bipartisan understanding — sustained for a century — that concentrated wealth's unlimited participation in elections is structurally dangerous to representative government. The Supreme Court's reinterpretation of the First Amendment to undo these protections is a policy outcome we intend to reverse.

Our framework has four layers. First, a constitutional amendment clarifying that (a) spending money is not protected speech for purposes of campaign finance regulation and (b) corporations and other legal entities do not possess speech rights equal to natural persons for political purposes. Second, statutory dismantling of super PACs — political committees permitted to accept unlimited contributions and make unlimited expenditures — through both contribution limits and coordination-rule reform. Third, a shift to public financing of federal elections through small-donor matching at high multipliers (six-to-one or greater) and democracy-voucher programs modeled on Seattle's successful experiment, scaled to the federal level. Fourth, real transparency: end dark money by requiring disclosure of all political donors above a modest threshold within forty-eight hours of contribution, for every entity that spends on elections.

Alongside campaign finance, we target the revolving door directly. A five-year cooling-off period between federal service and any lobbying activity becomes mandatory for members of Congress, senior executive branch officials, and senior congressional staff. Former officials are barred from lobbying on behalf of foreign governments indefinitely. Publicly-traded corporations are prohibited from making political expenditures, because the shareholders whose money is being spent almost never consent to specific political uses and have no practical recourse when the corporation acts against their political interests. Non-publicly-traded corporate political spending requires documented shareholder approval.

We support ranked-choice voting for federal elections, which allows voters to rank candidates by preference and eliminates the strategic-voting dilemma that currently suppresses third-party support. We support independent redistricting commissions in every state, removing the gerrymander from the hands of whichever party controls the state legislature. Automatic voter registration at age eighteen, paired with a robust national voter ID (issued free, accessible through multiple channels), replaces the current patchwork of registration rules and voter ID requirements. Election Day becomes a federal holiday.

Other electoral reforms follow the same principle: remove the design features that reward manipulation, preserve the ones that reward participation. Same-day registration in every state. Universal vote-by-mail availability. Ballot drop-off infrastructure at adequate density. Meaningful federal protections for election workers against harassment and intimidation. A consistent federal floor below which no state's election administration may operate. Campaign finance — the other major structural issue in American elections — is addressed separately in Position 10.

We propose substantial expansion of legal immigration pathways — both skilled (H-1B and green card expansion, especially for STEM graduates of American universities) and unskilled (seasonal and year-round work visa programs that match actual labor market demand). Alongside expansion, we support mandatory E-Verify for all employers nationwide, funded federal enforcement capacity at the border and at workplaces, and a one-time path to legal status for undocumented residents with substantial residency and clean records. The legalization is paired with the enforcement, not offered in place of it.

American demographic structure requires immigration. The native-born population's fertility rate is below replacement; the Social Security and Medicare systems depend on a growing working-age population. The question is not whether to have immigration but whether to have it legally and functionally or chaotically and illegally. We choose legally and functionally.

Our first commitment is to alliance maintenance. NATO is the most successful military alliance in modern history and should remain the anchor of European security. The U.S.-Japan, U.S.-South Korea, and U.S.-Australia alliances play the equivalent role in the Indo-Pacific. Alliances are cheaper than unilateral capacity and better at deterring aggression than any single nation acting alone. Abandoning allies is both morally bankrupt and strategically foolish.

Our second commitment is to domain-appropriate investment. Twentieth-century defense was conventional military hardware. Twenty-first-century security is increasingly cyber, intelligence, space, and technology capability — with conventional hardware as a declining share of what actually determines outcomes. We reallocate accordingly. Our third commitment is to diplomacy before force. Diplomatic capacity has been hollowed out across multiple administrations; rebuilding it is cheaper and more effective than the military alternatives it replaces. Regime-change operations are off the table.

Broadband should be treated as regulated utility infrastructure, not optional consumer entertainment. Universal-service obligations, price-transparency requirements, and competitive-access rules apply. The internet is as foundational to twenty-first-century civic life as electricity and telephone were to twentieth-century life, and should be regulated accordingly. Children's online safety receives particular protection through strong age-verification regimes designed to protect minors without surveilling adults.

On artificial intelligence, our position is set out in detail on the platform page. The short version: AI systems are regulated according to a tier structure (specialist tools receive safety regulation; frontier general systems receive additional welfare-consideration frameworks because the moral-status question is open). The economic transition produced by AI is addressed through Country Profit Sharing and the Tiered Profit-Ratio Tax. We neither accelerate nor prohibit AI development; we direct it, with guardrails appropriate to the kind of system being built. Privacy and surveillance are treated separately — see Position 10 for the full framework, which we consider the most urgent technology-policy priority.

The patent problem takes several forms, each serious. In pharmaceuticals, large firms acquire patents on competing drugs and shelve them to protect revenue on existing products; "evergreening" extends patent life through trivial modifications; pay-for-delay settlements pay generic manufacturers to stay out of markets; orphan drug designations meant for rare diseases are routinely exploited for common conditions. In technology, non-practicing entities — patent trolls — extract rents from genuine innovators through litigation threat. In agriculture, a handful of corporations control the genetic basis of the food supply through patents on plant varieties and seed sterilization technologies. In every case, the pattern is the same: public knowledge is fenced off, not to promote progress, but to extract economic rent from people who cannot access what their tax dollars often helped fund.

The copyright problem is different in character but similar in structure. The original Copyright Act of 1790 provided fourteen-year terms, renewable for one additional fourteen-year period — twenty-eight years maximum. Subsequent extensions pushed terms to life of the author plus seventy years for individual works, and ninety-five years for corporate works. The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act — widely known as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" for Disney's central lobbying role — locked up vast swaths of twentieth-century American culture, orphaning works whose owners cannot be located and whose cultural use is therefore legally hazardous. Research on copyright term extension consistently shows near-zero incentive effect from extending terms past several decades. The extensions are rent extraction, not progress promotion.

Our reform framework has five components. First, a working requirement on patents: if a patent is not meaningfully developed or licensed within five years of issuance, it enters compulsory licensing at reasonable royalties or expires. Patent shelving — the specific pattern of buying competing innovation to suppress it — ends because holding without using is no longer permitted. Second, pharmaceutical-specific reforms: ban pay-for-delay settlements; restrict evergreening through stricter inventiveness standards on patent extensions; limit orphan drug designations to their original rare-disease scope; mandate use of the federal government's existing march-in rights under the Bayh-Dole Act when drugs developed with federal funding are priced above developed-world benchmarks. Third, copyright term rollback: fifty-year cap on corporate works, life of author with no added term for individual works, and an automatic public-use system for orphan works after ten years of no commercial activity. Fourth, software and method patents: raise inventiveness standards; reduce term from twenty to twelve years given rapid iteration cycles; require actual practice of a patent as a standing requirement to sue. Fifth, restrict patents on naturally-occurring gene sequences and their direct derivatives; expand the public-knowledge commons through federal investment in open-source alternatives to critical patented technologies in medicine, agriculture, and foundational software.