Platform

Everything stands alone

A directed project gets its own line, its own sponsor's name, and its own vote. If a member cannot walk onto the floor and defend a project in front of the people paying for it, the project does not deserve to exist. Most of them would survive that test. The ones that would not are the entire point.

Programs expire on purpose

New spending programs get an expiration date and have to be renewed on evidence, not on inertia. Right now the easiest thing in Washington is to keep funding something that stopped working during a previous administration, because stopping requires a vote and continuing requires nothing at all.

Nobody votes on a bill they have not had time to read

Full text published, publicly, for a fixed number of days before a vote, with no exceptions for the end of a fiscal year. The deadline panic is not an accident. It is the delivery mechanism.

Same procedure, different building, two and a half times the money

Medicare pays roughly two and a half times more for the same outpatient service performed in a hospital outpatient department than in a doctor's office. Not a harder version of it. The same one. An echocardiogram running eleven or twelve hundred dollars in the hospital ran about three hundred in an office.

Pay the same rate for the same service regardless of the sign on the building. CBO scores that at roughly a hundred and fifty-seven billion dollars over ten years, and note what it is not: it is not a price cut, it is the end of paying two prices for one thing.

It also explains something you have watched happen in your own town. When the hospital system buys the independent practice down the road, the doctor does not change and the room does not change. The billing address changes, and the price goes up. That is the rule creating the consolidation, not the market.

Medicare Advantage, which nobody running for this office will touch

Private plans are paid a benchmark tied to what an average traditional Medicare patient would have cost. Which gives a plan a direct financial interest in documenting its patients as sicker than they are, and they have gotten extremely good at it.

CBO's numbers on this are the largest single figure anywhere on this website. Limiting the ability to upcode saves over a hundred and fifty billion dollars in a decade. Reducing the benchmark by twenty percent would, on its own, fully close the long-term solvency gap in Medicare's hospital trust fund.

Read that again. One correction to how much we overpay private insurers fixes a hole that every candidate in America describes as unfixable without cutting your grandmother's benefits.

This is not government waste in the usual sense. This is private companies extracting from a public program through a formula somebody wrote for them, and the reason you have never heard a candidate say so is sitting in the first bill on this site.

Drugs: the problem is the monopoly window, not the chemistry

Americans pay about two and three quarter times what thirty-three other developed countries pay for prescription drugs. For brand-name drugs it is over four times, and still more than three times after every rebate and discount is accounted for.

Here is the detail that tells you where the problem actually is: our generics are cheaper than theirs. Roughly two thirds of the comparison price. The moment a drug faces real competition, the American market beats the world. The gap is entirely inside the protected window.

So the fix is not price controls. It is ending the practices that stretch that window past its term:

• Patent evergreening, where a trivial reformulation restarts a monopoly clock that should have run out.
• Pay-for-delay, where a brand manufacturer pays a generic competitor to stay off the market. This is a cartel with a contract.
• Blocking reimportation of drugs manufactured to the same standard.

Every one of those is a government-granted monopoly being extended by people who bought the extension. Ending them is deregulation, not intervention.

The middlemen

Three companies decide which drugs are covered and what you pay for about eighty percent of American prescriptions. They negotiate discounts and then keep a share of them, and because their cut is a percentage of the list price, they make more money when the drug costs more.

That incentive is backwards and it is not an accident. Rebates get passed through to the patient at the counter, compensation becomes a flat fee for the work performed rather than a slice of the price, and the arrangement where the insurer, the benefit manager and the pharmacy are all the same corporation gets taken apart.

And the same antitrust argument as the cattle market

In a lot of the country there is one hospital system, it owns most of the practices, and it sets the price because there is nobody else to go to. Four packers, three benefit managers, one hospital system. It is the same shape every time.

I am not asking for a new agency or a new law. The laws against this were written a century ago and they are still on the books. I am asking for them to be enforced, which is the one thing a referee is for.

The people already here: sorted by category, not by slogan

Mass deportation of everyone is a fantasy with a price tag nobody who proposes it has ever costed out. Blanket amnesty tells every person who waited in line that they were a fool. Neither is a policy, so this gets triaged:

• Criminal record beyond the immigration offense itself: removed. This part is not complicated.
• Brought here as a child, raised here, no record: legal status, and they stop living one traffic stop away from losing everything.
• Long residence, working, paying taxes, clean record: legal status with a fine and back taxes owed.
• Recent arrivals outside that: removed, and the process moves fast enough to be a real answer instead of a five-year docket.

The employers

Here is the part both parties skip. We have spent forty years punishing the person who took the job and almost never the company that offered it, and that is not an oversight. Nobody crosses a border to sit in a field. They cross because there is work, and there is work because it is profitable to hire people who cannot call the labor board.

So: verification is mandatory, the penalty lands on the company, it scales with revenue so it is not a rounding error, and it reaches the executives who set the practice rather than the branch manager who carried it out.

Do that and the demand side collapses, which does more than a wall ever will. The reason it has not been done is that the people who would pay the fine are the people who fund the campaigns, which brings us back to the first bill on this site.

How many people we let in legally: I do not have a number yet

I would rather say that than invent one. The legal system does not look broken to me in the way the rest of it does, and I want to understand what the labor market actually needs before I put a figure on a page and defend it out of stubbornness.

All of them means all of them

No production credits, no depletion allowances, no solar credits, no wind credits, no electric vehicle credits, no ethanol mandate. Every one of these is the government deciding which energy wins, and every one of them was bought by somebody.

I run a company whose customers are contractors and plants along the Houston Ship Channel. Oil and gas is my client base and my neighbors' livelihood, and I am saying it about them too. If a source cannot stand on its own economics, propping it up with everyone else's money does not make it competitive. It just makes the bill invisible.

Beef, and everything shaped like it

Four companies control more than eighty percent of the fed cattle market. A rancher who wants to sell has a handful of buyers and no leverage, and the spread between what he gets paid and what you pay at the counter has to go somewhere. There is currently a Justice Department investigation into exactly this.

That is not the free market working. It is four firms and a set of rules written comfortably around them, and agriculture is only the example everybody can see. The same shape shows up in hospitals, in pharmacy middlemen, in the software my own industry runs on.

I do not want government setting prices. I want it enforcing the laws already on the books against concentration, which is the opposite of intervention: it is the referee doing the one job that makes a market possible. You cannot say you believe in competition and then defend a cartel because it is privately owned.

What minding our business means

• No nation-building. We do not have a good record at it and neither does anyone else.
• Congress declares war. If a deployment is long enough to need a rotation schedule, it was long enough to need a vote.
• Allies pay their agreed share, and the ones who do get an answer when they call.
• Trade hard, negotiate hard, and stop confusing a trade dispute with a security threat.

The line

A regime that would actually use a nuclear weapon does not get to finish building one. That is the exception, it is the only one, and I am going to be honest about the fact that it is a large exception.

Because here is the trap: every war of the last fifty years was sold to the American public as a narrow exception to exactly this kind of rule. If the threshold is not written down before the pressure arrives, it will be discovered after.

So the threshold gets written down first

• Weapons-grade enrichment plus a delivery program, verified by more than one independent source, and stated publicly before anything happens.
• Sanctions, interdiction, cyber and inspection regimes are exhausted on a published timeline, not skipped because they are slow.
• Any strike goes to Congress. If the case cannot be made to five hundred and thirty-five people, it cannot be made.
• Nonproliferation means a strike on a program, not an occupation of a country. When the program is gone we leave, and that is written into the authorization so nobody has to relitigate it later.

This is the hardest thing on the site to hold consistently, and I would rather show you the seam than pretend it is not there.

Your data belongs to you

Right now the record of your life is an asset on somebody else's balance sheet, and getting it back out is deliberately difficult because difficulty is the business model. One federal standard: you own your data, you can export it in a format something else can read, and deletion means deletion.

Breach notification becomes one national rule instead of fifty state ones. That is not more regulation, it is forty-nine fewer regimes, and the only people who benefit from the current mess are the lawyers who bill for navigating it.

AI is the next hundred turns of the same screw

I am not going to promise you I can stop it. Nobody can stop it, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. What I can tell you is that we have seen this before, we handled it badly, and the people who paid for it were never the people who decided.

Last time it was manufacturing and the response was a retraining program that existed mostly in press releases. This time it reaches accounting, paralegal work, customer service, entry-level programming, the jobs people took specifically because they were supposed to be safe.

The honest answer is that this is a transition and transitions have a cost, and the only question that has ever mattered is who carries it. I would rather plan for that now, out loud, than discover it afterward the way we did the last time.

Government technology contracts

Nobody runs on this because nobody cares, and it is billions of dollars. Federal systems are bought on contracts written so narrowly that only one vendor can bid, built on platforms nobody can migrate off, by companies who know that the cost of replacing them is the entire reason they get renewed.

I have spent my career inheriting exactly that arrangement from the previous provider. It is the single most boring item on this site and I would fix more real waste here than in every earmark in the appropriations bills combined.