I fix things for a living.
I own a small IT company in Deer Park, Texas. No party, no nomination, no career in politics, and no elected office ever held. I think that last one is a qualification.
My name is Solomon Peretz. I run a small IT company in Deer Park, Texas, keeping the networks, servers and email running for small businesses along the Houston Ship Channel. Machine shops. Contractors. Insurance offices. The kind of companies where forty people cannot work if one switch goes down, and where the owner is standing behind me while I fix it.
I built the company from nothing, in a town of thirty thousand people, one handshake at a time. I meet a payroll. When I spend money badly, the money is gone and there is nobody to appropriate more, which is a different education from the one you get spending someone else's.
What the job actually taught me
Almost every system I get called to fix was broken by someone who benefited from leaving it broken. A vendor who sold hardware that didn't fit. A previous provider who built something nobody else could maintain, on purpose, so they could never be replaced. Once you have seen that pattern fifty times you stop believing that incompetence explains most of it.
The other half of the job is telling people things they do not want to hear. Your backups have not run in eight months. That quote you got is for the wrong thing. The reason this keeps happening is the decision you made two years ago. Nobody enjoys that conversation and I have never once regretted having it.
Why I wrote the bill
I have watched the same meeting happen at a dozen companies. The annual increase gets held to two percent. A department gets right-sized. Everybody left absorbs the work of the people who are gone and it gets called efficiency. I have been in the room for that conversation more than once, and some of the time I was the one on the selling side of it.
What I have never seen, not one single time in my working life, is the man at the top announce that he is taking a cut too.
That is the whole thing. The screws get turned a quarter turn at a time on the people with the least slack in the line, and the people who decide where to turn them are never in the group that shares it. Do that for thirty years and the distance between the two ends stops being a gap and starts being a wall.
I do not think a president gets to tell a private company what to pay anybody, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to get your vote. But I know how that wall got built. It got built by people who could afford to buy the rules, in a town where the rules were for sale. That part a president can reach. That is why the first bill is the first bill.
Running with nobody's permission
No party. Not because I think I am above them, but because a party nomination is the first favor you owe, and a campaign built on not owing anybody cannot start by owing somebody.
My instinct is that government has no business doing most of what it does, and I will not be talked out of that. But I am not going to stand here and tell a man whose real wages have not moved in fifteen years that the system treated him fairly and he should be grateful for the opportunity. Both of those things are true at once, and the bridge between them is the only idea on this site: it got this way because the rules were bought. Cut off the sale and most of the rest sorts itself out.
Away from work
I am one of three founders of a barbecue cookoff team. We have not placed yet. We keep entering, we keep taking notes on what the judges said, and we keep changing things until it works. I mention it because that is roughly my whole approach to everything, and because anyone from around here will tell you it explains more about a man than his resume does.
Things I am not going to pretend about
I have no foreign policy experience
None. What I have is a rule about when we get involved and when we do not, and a commitment to hire people who know more than I do and to fire the ones who tell me what I want to hear. The alternative on offer is people with forty years of experience producing the record we currently have.
I do not have positions on everything yet
There are four things on this site. There are more than four things a president deals with. I would rather show you four I have worked through than forty I have skimmed, and I would rather say "I don't know yet" than manufacture an opinion to fill a page.
I am not a good speaker
I am an engineer. I am blunt, I interrupt, and I am considerably better in a server room than behind a podium. If you want polish there is an enormous supply of it and it has not worked out well for anybody.