Protect Social Security
- No privatization. Period.
- Set the rules fairly, so all Americans pay the same rate for the same guarantee, by scrapping the payroll tax cap. This means that high net worth earners, including millionaires and billionaires, would continue to pay into the system throughout the year.
- Update the cost-of-living formula to reflect modern day costs and index it to keep up with inflation.
Housing
Get Wall Street out of the housing market
- Strip federal tax incentives (interest and depreciation) from corporate entities, making it less lucrative for them
- Block federal financing and securitization (no loans from Fredie Mac or Fannie Mae), leveling the field for financing. I support the Executive Order Trump signed around this issue.
- 30-day First Look for individual buyers on foreclosed properties (generally sold in bulk to finance companies) giving individual home buyers the first chance to buy
Modernize the USDA Rural Development Housing Program
- Raise the maximum loan amounts and income caps so that more low- and medium-income families have access to the 1% interest rate
- Funding to digitize and speed up the application and approval process
- Raising the population limits in the Farm Credit System from 2500 to 10,000 so that local agricultural lenders can offer low mortgage options to more families in rural communities
Food
Stop price gouging
- Ban algorithmic surveillance and electronic shelf tags in large retailers (Algorithmic surveillance is the practice of using your shopping habits (web browser, app, loyalty card, etc.) and location (high net worth zip code, food desert) to determine not what a product is worth but how much you are willing to spend for it)
- Mandate margin disclosures and SEC sunshine rules which would require publicly traded companies to detail profits so that the public can see profit was used to cover higher input costs and what was purely to drive up the stock price
Regionalize the supply chain
- Removes the middleman along with artificial choke points used by large corporations to inflate prices
- Lowers the impact of fuel costs as food travels a shorter distance and arrives fresher
- Market stabilization in both the price to the consumer as well as a resilient baseline for the local economy as the money remains local (wages, farm equipment) retaining its purchasing power even in hard economic times
Fuel
Renewable Natural Gas for Commercial Fleets
- Removes the dependence on diesel which takes a huge burden off the petroleum market, lowering prices across the board
- Reduces both the amount and impact of agricultural waste
Temporarily suspend the Federal Excise Tax
- This immediately reduces the cost of gas by 18 cents per gallon and 24 cents per gallon on diesel.
War Profiteering Tax
- Temporary tax aimed at the mega oil companies of up to 50% of their war windfall (the cost of the drilling itself doesn’t change)
- Americans receive a quarterly “Gas Rebate” check quarterly as the money collected from the tax is returned 100% to the consumer
