7 Key Issues

Click for the details behind each:

1) REBUILDING MANUFACTURING
For policies that allow American workers to compete on a level playing field. This means enforcing fair-trade provisions, creating domestic tax and regulatory policies in line with our peer nations, and a domestic industrial strategy that cultivates key industries.

2) ENERGY SECURITY
For comprehensive energy solutions that create American jobs, improve our trade imbalances, preserves the environment, and stops enriching parts of the world hostile to our interests.

3) HEALTH CARE REFORM
For reform that reigns in costs, improves access & consumer choice, prevents insurance companies from only covering healthy patients, and fixes our long-term budget deficit.

4) FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
For a bi-partisan deficit commission that is empowered to make across the board recommendations on revenue & cost solutions that result in an up/down vote. Our legacy to future generations must not be crippling debt due to Washington irresponsibility.

5) FINANCIAL REGULATION
For dramatic regulatory reform that brings back Glass-Steagall, limits leverage, and turns “too big to fail” into “too big to exist.” We must put Main Street ahead of Wall Street to protect American taxpayers.

6) LEGISLATIVE REFORM
For full transparency in legislating and bringing reform to campaign financing, lobbying, and the earmark/filibuster process. We need a Washington that works for the people.

7) INFRASTRUCTURE RENEWAL
For improving our failing infrastructure through a national bank that would ensure that spending reflects priorities and not backroom political deals.

THE DETAILS

1) REBUILDING MANUFACTURING
To get America back on track, we must rebuild manufacturing by ensuring that our workers are able to compete on a level playing field. Manufacturing plays a critical role in our nation’s health as it ensures a stable base of employment, helps balance our trade accounts, and through linkages to R&D, creates high-value knowledge economy jobs.

Our current 17% un/under-employment rate (U-6) is symptomatic of the structural issues of our economy. Our recent debt bubble and the consumption mania it fueled hid our true employment issues. If we do not rebuild our manufacturing base, we will have a new permanent unemployed class, a crippled US dollar due to ballooning trade deficits, and face the loss of high-value R&D, finance, and design jobs that are linked to production.

This means:

• Enforcing fair-trade provisions with other countries
• Creating domestic tax and regulatory policies in line with our peer nations
• Crafting a domestic industrial strategy that cultivates key industries

Our willingness to invest and make the tough decisions necessary to rebuild manufacturing is essentially a referendum on our future. Are we willing to put up with unending budget deficits, growing trade imbalances, structural unemployment, and an external dependence for basic goods that creates a national security issue? Rebuilding our manufacturing sector creates a solid foundation for us to address the rest of our national challenges.

2) ENERGY SECURITY
Despite a situation where we send massive amounts of money to parts of the world hostile to us, and despite knowing that the resources we use to run our economy grow scarcer and more expensive by the day, we lack a national energy plan. Our foreign economic rivals are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the technologies and industries that will simultaneously create jobs and secure their national energy interests.

We must act with clear vision to spur the R&D investment necessary to develop the comprehensive solutions we require. This means investments in diverse solutions such as: wind, solar, geothermal, advanced battery/fuel cell, nuclear, biofuels, wave power and efficiency.

However, simply providing the right federal support through incentives and credits is not enough. We must ensure that it is not just the initial research, subsidized by our tax dollars, that is done is in the US, with the multiplier effects of manufacturing done overseas. This would be a double-theft of taxpayer investment. First, it would mean that we would eventually also lose our advanced high-value jobs to foreign countries as they collocate closer to production. Second, we would once again be dependent on foreign nations for our energy needs.

It’s essential that we lay out a clear next generation energy plan and follow through for a brighter, more secure future for all Americans.

3) HEALTH CARE REFORM
The status quo in our health care system promises to:

• Bankrupt the federal government in a few decades
• Drive thousands of small businesses into bankruptcy
• Force increasing numbers of large manufacturers to move remaining jobs overseas
• Continue to waste money on care that doesn’t result in improved patient outcomes

Over the last fifty years, three presidents—Nixon, Carter, and Clinton have all tried, and failed, to reform a deeply flawed health care system. Today the signs of crisis are everywhere. To reform our health care system we must cast a wide net and be forward-thinking in our solutions.

• Delink insurance from employment. A remnant of WWII wage controls, the employer based system today places American workers at a significant export cost disadvantage and costs our economy jobs. It also threatens our social stability as the average job tenure plummets and workers increasingly find themselves with holes in their coverage.

• Put consumers closer, not farther, from their health care dollars. In every other part of our lives, the trend has been towards improved products, at a cheaper price, and usually with added convenience. Health care has not followed that trend. This is partially due to cost of care, amount of usage, and relative benefits being invisible to the patient/consumer. If consumers were in control, we would see a shift towards bundling, which aligns incentives between the provider and patient.

• Broaden the risk pool to put an end to rescission and ban pre-existing conditions. The behavior of some insurance companies is almost borderline criminal. Today they compete based on how well they can cherry-pick the healthiest of patients, how efficiently they can deny/delay payments, and how quickly they can cancel insurance on sick, expensive patients based on technicalities. We can ban these unconscionable policies once we broaden the risk pool of patients.

• Leverage data-driven medicine through comparative effectiveness studies and electronic medical records (EMR) to drive down costs and improve outcomes. Comparative effectiveness studies ensure that a treatment is superior to the current (usually cheaper) solution before authorizing it. Through EMR’s, quality of patient care will increase immediately and we can then, in aggregate, determine what treatments are performing the best across our medical system. This will result in only standardizing around treatments that are driving results.

How can we accomplish these goals? By creating a functioning marketplace for consumers where insurance companies actually compete based on price, selection, and quality (like every other part of our economy). A similar plan already exists: the Wyden-Bennett ‘Healthy Americans Act.’ It delinks insurance from your employer, creates true national exchanges, and allows consumers to keep savings (driving down costs). Regardless of whether it is Wyden-Bennett or the current proposal—doing nothing is not an option. Without action, too many families will go bankrupt, too many small businesses will close with jobs lost, our government will face insolvency, and we will continue to waste billions of dollars needlessly.

4) FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
Since the beginning of the decade, our fiscal trajectory has been completely unsustainable. We are on pace for a national debt of well over $50 trillion dollars in just a few decades. The only thing both parties can agree to is to continue to kick the can down the road to future generations. Before our situation deteriorates further, it’s important that we right the ship.

• Discover what we’re getting for our money and make judgments based on results. We must increase accountability in government to bring spending under control. By bringing full transparency to all budgetary programs—creating objectives, metrics and deadlines that will be publicly tracked for every taxpayer program, we can then see what is performing and what isn’t. Failing programs will be restructured or ended.

• Appoint a bi-partisan panel to make recommendations to save entitlement programs. Social security (-$6 trillion) & Medicare/Medicaid (-$35 trillion) face massive budget holes that will mean that the programs will not be there when millions of Americans need them the most. A bi-partisan panel can make recommendations on both the cost and revenue side to sustainably fund these programs for generations to come. Passing some kind of health care reform to get costs under control is a must.

• Pass a constitutional amendment for PayGo (pay-as-you-go). Throughout the 90’s PayGo acted as a circuit breaker from irresponsible policies that would either spend too much or cut revenue too deeply. This prevented massive deficits. At its expiry in 2002, tax cuts and massive expansions of government resulted in continued chronic deficits.

The decision to not bankrupting the next generation shouldn’t be a partisan issue in Washington. Bipartisan irresponsibility got us here, and only a shared commitment to tackling long-term budget deficits can right the ship before it is too late.

5) FINANCIAL REGULATION
The financial sector is made up of large casinos masquerading as banks. They do this to get massive public taxpayer backing in the event something goes wrong. But when things are going well, they pay themselves billions of dollars in bonuses. Unlike other, more controversial policy issues, financial reform is stalled only because of the power of their lobbyists. Over the past two decades, this lobby has donated more money to both parties than other sector. However, if we do not rein them in, they will be back to finish the job they started in 2008.

• Too big to fail = Too big to exist. The majority of the financial system is made up of massive institutions that are so interconnected that if one failed, it would trigger a wave of defaults that could bring down all firms. Given the complexity of the “financial innovation” in instruments that these firms use, effective regulation to wind down firms is not practical. We must limit their size so a single failure would be a flesh wound and not terminal.

• Bring back Glass-Steagall Act. We must separate out the casino-like behavior of investment banking and trading from that of everyday banking. The latter is the lifeblood of our economy and deservers federal guarantees. However, the former should not be allowed to capitalize on essentially interest-free taxpayer money to make massive bets that are used to pay outlandish bonuses in a time of national crisis.

• Limit leverage, regulate derivatives in transparent marketplace, and hold ratings agencies accountable. Banking interests were able to essentially write their own regulations since the late 90’s. Naturally, they repealed and resisted the policies that safeguarded taxpayers at their expense.

If we fail to act now we are bound to repeat the financial collapse and crisis of 2008. We are currently in the familiar phase of privatizing the massive gains in the forms of billions in bonuses. But we must not allow the next phase of socializing trillions in their losses to occur again.

6) LEGISLATIVE REFORM
As problems of massive scale mount around us, our elected officials seem unable to come together to create solutions. It’s no wonder that trust of Washington is non-existent. In order to implement the policies that can get America back on track, we must first reform the process and institutions that govern.

• Public financing of elections. Special interests hold a disproportionate influence on legislation, as it is their money that wins elections. To return government to the people, we must change the way elections are funded. A system of public matching once a threshold of number of small donor donations is met levels the playing field. The amount spent by taxpayers on this program is a drop in the bucket compared to the special interest welfare that is directly the result of their contributions. This is why I support the bi-partisan ‘Fair Elections Now Act.’

• An end to gerrymandering. The political process of gerrymandering to create safe districts across a state is largely responsible for the dangerous polarization in the country. Safe districts mean that politicians run from the center toward the fringes. This eliminates the conditions for compromise and bi-partisanship. We must get to a non-partisan, jury based system that creates common sense boundaries that encourages true representation.

• Comprehensive lobbying, earmarks, and floor reform.
o True reform means a lifetime ban on members of Congress becoming lobbyists and increases the difficulty in which staffers can immediately become lobbyists.
o Earmarks: Banning the use of earmarks for private, for-profit companies, bringing transparency to who is behind each request, and requiring those over $1MM to go to Appropriations.
o Reform the floor rules by eliminating anonymous holds, and ending the abuse of the filibuster to prevent true majority rule.

Senator Michael Bennett’s ‘Plan for Washington Reform’ is the best plan to truly reform our institutional corruption and encompasses many of these objectives and more.

7) INFRASTRUCTURE RENEWAL
National infrastructure is critical to a competitive economy for businesses and a high quality of life for its citizens. This is why it is so concerning that ours is rated a ‘D.’ One of the major reasons why our infrastructure has reached such a sad state, be they bridges, airports, dams, levees, energy grid, roads, or sewage systems, is that the process by which their maintenance is funded, is broken.

Infrastructure is currently funded in a haphazard nature without thought to the priorities and strategic implications of our investments. We must lay out a clear national master plan that prioritizes by importance to economic growth, quality of life, and danger of failure. Creating a national infrastructure bank would ensure that all spending dollars reflect true national priorities and not political deals and seniority. Infrastructure spending not only creates jobs today, but is also an investment in our future competitiveness as a nation.