The Policies – the renewal party

These policies, taken together, are our take on a good society that honors traditional American values.

1. Legislative Ethics and Compensation

While in Congress, legislators earn the same income as the median American worker. They must place all personal assets in blind trusts to avoid conflicts of interest. The government provides housing in Washington DC so legislators don’t face the financial burden of maintaining two homes. This pay structure ensures legislative service is about public commitment, not personal profit, while keeping legislators connected to ordinary Americans’ economic reality.

After leaving office, former legislators cannot accept money from businesses or special interests for ten years. This includes jobs, consulting work, speaking fees, corporate board seats, paid media appearances, real estate deals, or investment opportunities. The only exception: they can return to running their own business if they own at least half of it. Any deals or promises made while in office that pay off later are criminal violations, no matter when the money arrives.

To make this restriction workable, former legislators receive twice the median salary for ten years after leaving office, plus a final payment of six times the median salary. Breaking any of these rules means losing all payments and facing criminal charges. The system is straightforward: serve the public honestly and retire comfortably, or try to cash in and lose everything.

2. Deferred Stock Investment System

Stock exchanges batch all trades from the previous trading day and execute only those transactions where buyer and seller prices overlap, eliminating high-frequency trading and all forms of timing-based speculation. This system transforms stock markets from gambling venues back into capital allocation mechanisms, making technical trading strategies based on millisecond advantages or psychological manipulation both unfeasible and unrewarding. Stock exchanges return to their fundamental purpose as intermediaries matching investors with businesses seeking capital rather than facilitating extractive speculation.

Stocks sold within one calendar year of purchase incur a 2% short transaction fee to encourage long-term investment over speculative churning. This combination of deferred execution and short-term penalties eliminates the parasitic layer of financial intermediaries who extract value through speed advantages and market manipulation without contributing to actual capital formation. The system rewards patient capital that supports business development while discouraging the speculative trading that creates market volatility and diverts resources from productive investment into zero-sum wealth transfer.

3. National Service Program

Volunteers for national service are relocated at least 1,000 miles from their original location for the duration of their service term, receiving substantial compensation above subsistence level along with comprehensive organizational training and experience scaled to service length. Participants gain 360-degree exposure to institutional management, community development, and civic engagement while contributing to national priorities including infrastructure, education, conservation, and disaster response. Completion grants lifetime access to 50% tuition subsidies for any educational pursuit.

Service opportunities include national park management, agricultural assistance, urban services provision including police work and fire management, neighborhood redevelopment, and military service. The mandatory relocation breaks down regional insularity and creates cross-cultural understanding while ensuring that service participants experience different communities and economic conditions across the country. The substantial compensation and educational benefits make service attractive to young people from all economic backgrounds rather than creating a program accessible only to those who can afford unpaid service. The comprehensive training develops civic leadership capacity and institutional competence among participants who return to their communities with enhanced skills and broader national perspective, strengthening democratic culture through experiential civic education.

4. Supreme Court Term Limits and Selection

Supreme Court justices serve 18-year terms with one nomination opportunity occurring every two years, creating predictable court composition changes and eliminating the random influence of justice mortality on constitutional interpretation. Senate confirmation requires a two-thirds supermajority, encouraging presidents to nominate moderate candidates capable of attracting broad bipartisan support rather than partisan ideologues. The Chief Justice position is determined by vote of the sitting justices themselves after each new appointment, ensuring court leadership reflects judicial rather than political preferences.

This system eliminates the current dynamic where individual justice deaths create constitutional crises and strategic retirement timing that politicizes court composition. The regular nomination cycle prevents any single president from dramatically reshaping the court while ensuring that constitutional interpretation evolves gradually with democratic changes rather than remaining frozen by lifetime appointments. The supermajority confirmation requirement and internal Chief Justice selection reduce the court’s partisan polarization while maintaining judicial independence through fixed terms that insulate justices from immediate political pressure.

5. National Innovation Fund

The government maintains a national innovation fund for long-term, high-risk moonshot initiatives including nuclear fusion, advanced biotechnology, quantum computing, and other breakthrough technologies requiring sustained investment beyond private sector time horizons. The fund operates through grant allocation to research institutions rather than direct government research, with minimum annual funding of $60 billion. Government retains ownership of resulting intellectual property while licensing technologies to multiple companies for productionalization, preventing monopolization of publicly-funded breakthroughs.

The fund prioritizes cost recovery but acknowledges that high-risk fundamental research cannot guarantee return on investment, accepting that breakthrough discoveries may require numerous failed attempts. This approach enables pursuit of transformative technologies that private capital markets cannot support due to uncertain timelines and enormous upfront costs. Multiple licensing prevents successful innovations from creating new monopolies while ensuring that public investment in basic research benefits society broadly rather than enriching individual companies that happened to receive government contracts.

6. Public Investment Fund

Every taxpayer receives a virtual investment account credited with $500 annually from public funds, which individuals direct toward productive enterprises contributing to broad social good. Eligible recipients include businesses, cooperatives, research institutions, and community development organizations that serve general public benefit rather than narrow advocacy or political purposes. This system democratizes investment decision-making by giving citizens direct control over public capital allocation while maintaining focus on socially beneficial activities.

The fund creates citizen engagement in economic development while distributing investment decisions across the population rather than concentrating them in government agencies or private capital markets. Under normal circumstances, individual accounts grow over a taxpayer’s lifetime, creating investment bias toward stability-increasing, consensus-building initiatives rather than speculative or divisive projects. Citizens develop understanding of productive investment through personal participation while ensuring that public funds support enterprises aligned with community values and needs. The broad eligibility criteria prevent the fund from becoming a political patronage system while encouraging diverse economic experimentation and community-responsive development initiatives.

7. Legal System Reform

The government creates alternative dispute resolution mechanisms and competitive legal services to eliminate legal rent-seeking while ensuring accessible justice for all citizens regardless of economic status.

• Community Resolution Boards: Voluntary three-person panels of experienced professionals serving limited terms handle disputes beyond small claims but below complex litigation thresholds. Board members receive substantial compensation and interdisciplinary training emphasizing problem-solving over adversarial procedures. Cases can be heard within two weeks of filing, preventing ongoing harm from prolonged disputes while eliminating strategic delays. Unanimous verdicts allow no appeals, ensuring finality.

• Public Legal Corps: The government seeds and certifies organizations providing salaried lawyers operating on cost-recovery basis, competing directly with private practice in prosecutions, defenses, and civil representation. These attorneys undergo continuing education requirements to prioritize resolution over litigation tactics.

• Expanded Access: Small claims limits expand to 25% of median individual income, capturing routine disputes currently priced out of legal access. Parties may choose advocates from any professional background, with free representation provided for those unable to afford counsel.

• Fee Structure Reform: Contingency fees face sliding-scale caps preventing excessive extraction from large settlements, while punitive damages flow to public treasuries rather than enriching private parties.

• Accountability Mechanisms: Lawyers forfeit all compensation for specious or trivial claims and face full liability for opponents’ costs and wasted court resources. This creates financial incentives for merit-based case evaluation while discouraging procedural manipulation and frivolous litigation.

8. Senate Restructuring and Ranked-Choice Voting

The Senate becomes a national election where each voter gets five votes to distribute among candidates and parties however they choose. This creates proportional representation that reflects the actual diversity of American political interests and concerns. It ends the current system where Wyoming voters have 68 times more influence than California voters. The House keeps its geographic districts but uses ranked-choice voting, so representatives need broader consensus support rather than just winning pluralities in crowded races.

This restructuring addresses the fundamental disconnect between democratic principles and current representation while preserving federalism through the House’s continued regional basis. Ranked-choice voting eliminates the strategic distortions and extremism-rewarding dynamics of first-past-the-post elections, encouraging candidates who can build broader coalitions rather than appeal to narrow partisan bases.

9. Public Lobbying and Campaign Finance Reform

All lobbying interactions with government officials must occur in designated public forums with complete conversations made immediately available online, whether conducted in writing or broadcast live. This transparency requirement eliminates the private influence-peddling that currently dominates policy formation while preserving legitimate information exchange between stakeholders and representatives. Gifts of any kind from lobbyists to officials are completely prohibited, including meals, entertainment, travel, or purported “expertise loans” that mask compensation.

Political donations from corporations are entirely forbidden, while individual contributions are limited to one day’s median salary per candidate, with aggregate annual limits of five days’ median salary regardless of recipient number. This structure ensures that political influence correlates with citizen engagement rather than wealth concentration, while providing sufficient resources for legitimate campaign activities without creating dependency relationships between candidates and major donors.

10. Public Technology Infrastructure Development

The government funds competing foundations and non-profits to develop fundamental technological infrastructure including operating systems, mobile platforms, and interconnection standards, preventing private monopolization of essential digital architecture. Multiple parallel development efforts ensure against single points of failure while fostering genuine innovation through competition rather than market dominance. After initial seeding, the system operates on cost-recovery through royalties. The body that developed the willing standard will receive a 5% royalty on collected royalties for seven years, maintaining incentives for excellence while supporting continued diversity.

Products must meet strict standards for robustness, openness, and standards-conformance, with volume discounts prohibited to prevent large corporations from leveraging scale to crush smaller competitors. Swift decertification without prolonged litigation ensures that organizations engaging in corruption or monopolistic practices lose funding immediately. This approach treats technical infrastructure as a public utility requiring democratic oversight while preserving competitive dynamics that drive technical advancement and user-responsive design.

11. Standardized Software Licensing and Consumer Protection

Shrink-wrap software or service licenses are prohibited, replaced by standardized options from a regulated menu of protection levels and consumer rights that companies may select. Contract terms must be summarized by neutral third-party evaluators in plain language that clearly explains what rights consumers retain and which they surrender, eliminating the current system where incomprehensible legal documents obscure fundamental power imbalances. Licenses, once promulgated, cannot be revised, except through mutual, non-coercive agreement. This reform ensures that consumers can make informed decisions about software purchases while preventing technology companies from imposing arbitrary and one-sided terms through deliberately confusing language.

The standardized licensing framework preserves legitimate intellectual property protections while preventing the exploitation of consumer ignorance and the de facto elimination of traditional ownership rights that characterize current digital markets. Companies retain flexibility to choose appropriate protection levels for their products, but cannot manipulate legal complexity to extract rights that consumers would never knowingly surrender.

12. Size-Based Taxation and Anti-Monopoly Measures

Special funding and tax incentives support startup companies across all sectors, with standard rates applying to organizations employing fewer than 1,000 people and a 5%-of-revenue size tax assessed on larger entities to account for their disproportionate resource advantages and market influence. Companies controlling more than 30% of sales in directly competitive product categories face additional monopoly taxes, calculated regionally where markets remain geographically segmented. These policies actively encourage innovation and entrepreneurship while preventing economic concentration that stifles competition and reduces consumer choice.

This taxation structure recognizes that large organizations benefit from economies of scale, political influence, and market position that smaller competitors cannot match, requiring deliberate policy intervention to maintain competitive markets. The size and monopoly taxes fund startup incentives and small business support, creating a self-sustaining system that channels resources from dominant players toward emerging challengers and ensures continued economic dynamism.

13. Externality Capture Taxes

Manufacturing and extractive industries face process taxes that monetize their harm to public commons, including environmental damage, resource depletion, recycling costs, and projected excessive energy consumption. These taxes operate at “externality cost plus 20%” to create systematic bias toward non-harmful production methods while funding the investigative and certification infrastructure necessary to accurately assess and monitor industrial impacts. This approach internalizes costs currently imposed on society without consent, forcing producers to account for the full social price of their operations.

The 20% premium serves dual purposes: incentivizing genuine harm reduction rather than mere tax payment, and generating revenue for the sophisticated monitoring systems required to measure complex environmental and social impacts. This creates a dynamic where reducing actual harm becomes more profitable than accepting tax liability, while ensuring that remaining harmful activities fully compensate society for damages imposed. Industries maintaining harmful practices effectively subsidize both cleanup efforts and the development of cleaner alternatives through their competitors and successors.

14. Federal Ethics Monitoring Bureau

A specialized bureau monitors all federal public servants for corruption and arbitrary exercise of power, with this oversight function constituting its exclusive mandate – it cannot investigate or enforce any behaviors beyond corruption or abuse of power as commonly understood. Violations result in probation for minor infractions or permanent expulsion from public service for serious offenses, with immediate suspension pending resolution. The bureau operates non-adversarially, focusing on systemic improvement rather than punishment, while its own practitioners face identical levels of scrutiny and consequences as those they monitor.

This approach recognizes that power inherently tends toward corruption without institutional checks, while preventing the ethics agency itself from becoming a source of arbitrary authority. The narrow mandate prevents mission creep that could transform oversight into general behavior control, while the reciprocal accountability ensures that monitors cannot abuse their privileged position to harm those they evaluate.

15. Income and Wealth Caps

Annual income is capped at 50 times the lesser of mean or median national income, with total wealth limited to ten times that amount, including all property holdings. Revenue generated through these caps flows directly and exclusively toward retiring public debt rather than funding new programs. The policy preserves the American dream of exceptional achievement and compensation while preventing wealth accumulations that distort democratic processes and social cohesion beyond repair.

This represents wealth limitation rather than redistribution – successful individuals retain enormous earning potential relative to typical Americans while society prevents the emergence of economic royalty that undermines democratic equality. The debt retirement mechanism ensures that cap revenues strengthen overall fiscal health rather than expanding government spending, addressing legitimate concerns about government growth while maintaining focus on preserving democratic capitalism rather than replacing it.

16. 50-Year Naming Rule

No public asset or facility may be named after any individual who has not been deceased for at least 50 years. This cooling-off period prevents the politicization of public infrastructure through contemporary hero-worship while allowing genuine historical assessment of individuals’ lasting contributions to emerge. The policy eliminates the unseemly lobbying around naming rights and reduces the tendency to memorialize figures whose reputations may not withstand historical scrutiny.

17. Policy Analysis Bureau

A dedicated bureau provides prospective analysis of all proposed legislation and regulations, examining financial impacts, market effects, perverse incentives likely to emerge from clever workarounds, and potential structural blowback from new policies. This analysis assumes that regulated parties will actively attempt to subvert the intent of every regulation, forcing policymakers to anticipate and plan for such resistance. The goal is achieving policy intentions through light-touch, dynamic approaches that adapt to changing circumstances rather than rigid rules that invite circumvention.

This bureau serves as an institutional immune system against unintended consequences, forcing legislators to think systemically about how their interventions will interact with existing incentive structures. The analysis helps identify policies that can achieve their goals with minimal regulatory overhead while maintaining effectiveness against sophisticated evasion attempts.

18. Genius Grants Program

Annual grants of approximately $1 million support 1,000 leading innovative thinkers across scientific, social, political, artistic, cultural, and philosophical domains for up to five years, allowing pursuit of visionary goals without immediate commercialization pressure. Any income earned during the grant period offsets grant funding dollar-for-dollar, while royalties from resulting products or works remain in trust until grant completion or voluntary renouncement. This structure preserves the grant’s purpose of enabling pure research while preventing double-compensation.

The program recognizes that breakthrough innovations often require extended development periods incompatible with market timelines or academic publication pressures. By supporting diverse domains equally, the grants foster cross-pollination between fields while ensuring that recipients remain accountable for productive use of public investment through the income offset and royalty trust mechanisms.

19. End Corporate Personhood

Corporate personhood is eliminated except for the narrow right to own, accumulate, and transfer property directly related to standard business operations. Corporations lose special speech rights, representation rights, and other personhood privileges beyond those exercised by their individual owners and officers. This reform treats corporations as useful legal fictions for conducting business rather than entities with independent political standing that can compete with actual citizens for democratic influence.

The policy preserves legitimate business functions while preventing the constitutional distortions that allow concentrated capital to claim democratic rights equivalent to individual citizens. Corporate speech and political participation flow through actual human beings who bear responsibility for their positions, eliminating the current system where legal abstractions exercise political power without personal accountability.

20. Government Funding of Basic Pharmaceutical Research

The government directly funds pharmaceutical, genetic, and nutritional research through universities and certified foundations, retaining ownership of all resulting patents to recapture public investment in scientific discovery. This approach recognizes that basic research represents a public good while maintaining private sector involvement in product development and commercialization. Research funding operates on a cost-recovery basis, with the government licensing discoveries to multiple pharmaceutical companies under predetermined price controls and revenue-sharing agreements.

This structure ensures that life-saving innovations remain affordable while providing sufficient incentive for private companies to invest in development, testing, and production. By requiring licensing to at least three companies per discovery, the system maintains competitive pressure on pricing and quality while preventing monopolistic exploitation of publicly-funded breakthroughs. Revenue sharing allows the government to reinvest returns into additional research, creating a self-sustaining cycle of innovation that serves public health rather than shareholder profits.

21. Shortened Intellectual Property Terms

Copyrights will be limited to 20 years across all media, while patents receive maximum protection of 7 years, or twice the reasonable technology development time in exceptional cases. These dramatically reduced terms reflect contemporary innovation cycles and prevent the accumulation of dormant intellectual property monopolies that stifle competition and follow-on innovation. The current system of extended protection periods serves primarily to benefit large corporations and estates rather than incentivize genuine creative or technical advancement.

Patent criteria will be sharpened through advanced evaluation methods, potentially including AI-assisted analysis, to ensure that only substantive innovations receive protection rather than incremental modifications or obvious applications. This approach forces continuous innovation by preventing companies from resting on legacy intellectual property while ensuring that creators and inventors retain sufficient exclusivity to recover development costs and earn reasonable profits from genuine breakthroughs.

22. Health Care: Single-Payer, Multiple Provider System

The government establishes a segregated funding mechanism outside the normal federal budget to collect and distribute health care resources, while certified non-profit foundations and benefit corporations deliver actual care. This structure separates the universal guarantee of coverage from the diversity of care approaches, requiring at least five competing providers in every region to ensure choice and prevent monopolistic stagnation. Each provider organization may offer distinct philosophies, treatment priorities, and user experiences while meeting common certification standards.

Certification depends on measurable health outcomes, equitable compensation patterns, user satisfaction, innovation capacity, operational efficiency, and demonstrated absence of corruption. The government seeds new providers where competition is insufficient and maintains authority to decertify failing organizations without extended litigation processes, ensuring accountability while preserving the competitive dynamics that drive quality improvement and responsiveness to community needs.

23. Professionalized Bureaucracy

Policy implementation and governance operates through a highly-educated, professionally trained, stable bureaucratic corps similar to Japan’s or France’s civil service systems. Entry requires rigorous competitive examination and advanced education, while career advancement depends on demonstrated competence and institutional knowledge rather than political connections. Bureaucrats maintain positions across political transitions, providing continuity and expertise for complex policy implementation regardless of electoral outcomes. The professional civil service receives compensation competitive with private sector alternatives to attract top talent.

The bureaucracy faces identical ethical scrutiny as elected officials, with corruption resulting in permanent exclusion from civil service and public disclosure of violations. This creates strong professional incentives for integrity while building public trust in administrative competence. The system separates political decision-making from technical implementation, ensuring that complex policies like externality assessment, technology certification, and healthcare provider evaluation are managed by experts with long-term institutional perspective rather than political appointees learning on the job during short tenure periods.

24. User Data Privacy

Businesses that collect and store user interaction data—including social networks, streaming services, retail systems, and mobile applications—must comply with strict data protection and user choice requirements. Non-aggregated user data cannot be transferred to any other entity, including business partners or government agencies, preventing the current surveillance economy that monetizes personal information without meaningful user consent. Social networks and media platforms must provide ad-free subscription options priced at no more than 125% of the revenue generated per median advertising-supported user, ensuring that citizens can access digital communication platforms without subjecting themselves to manipulative advertising or behavioral tracking.

These requirements restore user agency in digital spaces while preventing the extraction of personal data for commercial or surveillance purposes. The mandatory ad-free option breaks the attention-capture business model that incentivizes platforms to maximize user engagement through algorithmic manipulation and divisive content promotion. Users can choose to pay for services directly rather than becoming the product being sold to advertisers, while the price cap ensures that ad-free access remains accessible to middle-class users rather than becoming a luxury available only to wealthy individuals. Platforms shall submit to annual independent audits, conducted by certified entities, to verify compliance with data handling restrictions, transparency mandates, and pricing caps. These audits will focus exclusively on operational integrity and not on user speech or content.

25. Civic Integration and National Cohesion

The government establishes comprehensive requirements for immigration and citizenship to ensure new Americans possess the linguistic, civic, and cultural tools necessary for full participation in American democratic life, treating shared cultural foundation as essential infrastructure for social cohesion.

• English Language Standard: English becomes the sole official language for government communications. Long-term visas require basic English proficiency, while permanent residence and citizenship require comprehensive competency sufficient for full cultural participation beyond mere transactional communication.

• Civic and Cultural Knowledge: Citizenship requires demonstrated understanding of American history, political institutions, and cultural traditions necessary for meaningful democratic participation and social integration.

• Democratic Commitment: Citizenship requires oath-based renunciation of beliefs incompatible with democratic governance, including support for death penalties for apostasy, group punishment for cultural violations, or parallel legal systems superseding American judicial institutions.

• Selective Immigration: Immigration operates on invitation-only basis prioritizing demonstrated commitment to American integration over geographic accident or economic optimization. Swift removal processes apply to unauthorized presence while maintaining due process protections.

This framework treats citizenship as valuable achievement requiring genuine investment in American democratic culture, strengthening national cohesion while preserving traditions of welcoming those committed to democratic ideals.

26. American Commons Trust

The government establishes the American Commons Trust to provide unified stewardship over public assets and environmental resources. The Trust determines remediation costs for externality taxation and sets pricing for:

Federal lands and natural resources
Electromagnetic spectrum allocation
Reciprocal intellectual property licensing for expired US patents and copyrights in countries with longer protection terms

The Trust also exercises oversight of existing commons management agencies including the National Parks Service and EPA, reviewing their performance against public trust principles while these agencies retain operational independence and domain expertise.

The Trust collects revenue from intellectual property licensing but has no other revenue collection or enforcement authority – all other fees flow to debt retirement, then the general fund: this separation prevents the perverse incentives that emerge when agencies benefit financially from the fees they impose. Civil enforcement remains with collecting agencies, criminal matters transfer to law enforcement, and international violations are documented and referred to diplomatic channels.

By consolidating pricing authority while separating it from revenue collection, the structure ensures accurate valuation of environmental harm and public resources rather than systematic underpricing that enables exploitation or revenue-maximizing assessments disconnected from actual costs and public benefit.

27. Deficit Constraint and Legislative Accountability

Any legislator voting to approve a federal budget deficit exceeding 3% of the budget becomes ineligible for re-election to federal office. If 100% of active legislators vote to approve the deficit, no penalty applies – unanimity among all voting members serves as self-evident proof of genuine national emergency. Legislators must vote yes or no on deficit measures and cannot abstain, while those formally suspended due to illness or incapacity do not count toward the unanimity calculation. The rule does not prevent surplus accumulation, encouraging contingency reserves ensuring fiscal strength for deployment during emergencies.

With federal debt service approaching 14% of the budget and most debt maturing within five years, interest rate increases could rapidly escalate debt service to crippling levels. Short maturities mean the entire debt stock reprices quickly during rate spikes, creating refinancing risk that could destroy governmental capacity. This constraint forces legislators to demonstrate conviction through personal cost when approving emergency deficit spending, addressing the demonstrated failure of voter discipline to restrain deficits exceeding $12,000 per taxpayer annually, effectively imposing a tax on grandchildren.