Affordability

Tackling affordability is an enormous task, needing more than simple platitudes. Everything from ending illegitimate wars, revoking illegal tariffs, keeping inflation low, and securing strong labor protections and wages all impacts Virginian’s bottom dollar. We need to work to achieve real goals; you can’t wave a wand to lower prices, but you can write laws that ban the President from issuing arbitrary tariffs, set a livable minimum wage, and force an end to insane wars that cripple us with energy crises.

Protecting Virginians

We need to ensure that Virginians, and all Americans, can get paid a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, can access healthcare when they need it and not just when they can afford it, and can trust that their rights are protected. The saying goes that a penny of prevention is worth a dollar of cure, and we spend a great many dollars curing things we should have prevented. Protecting Virginians means prevention, not just crisis cures, and means we need to work to protect our rights in the face of government overreach.

Strong Business

Business thrives on certainty, on knowing your inputs, your outputs, and your market and using that information to target sales, goals, and growth. Everyone knows there are bad rules and regulations, I’ve encountered many in my own career that I know I’d like to change. But just like in baseball, or any sport while you’re at it, “no rules” only means the lowest of the low prosper while honest players suffer. Clear and uniform labor protections, sensible minimum wages, and fair rules ensure that honest businesses can predict their costs and know where they can grow, while guaranteeing that cheats don’t undercut fair practices.

Tariffs and Taxes

Tariffs are Taxes, and ALL taxes need to go through Congress.

We started the American Revolution because of arbitrary taxes by an authoritarian tyrant.  We need to act now to remove these illegal and unthinking tariffs.

Then we need to go one step further and ensure that NO President, at any time, can place any taxes on Americans without Congress giving approval.

Education

Education at the federal level needs to be reformed to fix the destruction of the last year while targeting actual fixes and not simple stopgaps.  National standards cannot be effectively enforced with blanket mandatory tests.  We need to step away from “teaching to the test” and take cues from the way audits are done elsewhere, with random sampling and spot checks.

We need to ensure that we keep in mind the three most important groups in education – the students, the teachers, and the parents.

Infrastructure

We have continually neglected our power, water, and transport infrastructure for more than a generation, and it needs to stop now.  While the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was a good start, we need to keep pushing.

Investing in infrastructure means that Virginians can go about their business without worrying that crumbling roads, insufficient power infrastructure, and bad water lines will prevent them from having a successful, healthy life.

Healthcare

We need to completely overhaul how medical care is provided to America as a whole.  We spend vast amounts of money, more than one and a half trillion dollars a year, on medicare and medicaid, yet more than half of all bankruptcies nationwide are related to medical debt.  In addition, figuring out healthcare for employees is an anchor around small business, crippling growing businesses while rewarding the multinational corporations.

We need to enact comprehensive, single-payer, nationwide healthcare, and use the vast amount of money we spend to prevent problems, not just offer crisis cures.

Workers Rights

Today in America, workers selling their labor have fewer protections than a supermarket selling apples.  We need extensive reform to protect the rights of workers, and ensure that Americans can expect fair deals.

Virginians need to know that an honest days work is paid an honest wage, not starvation rates.

Federal Employees

The past year of mismanagement, complete with arbitrary rules, illegal cancellation of bargaining agreements, and the nonsense of DOGE, has severely hurt federal employees and the federal government.  Crippling the workforce of civil servants is a sure fire way to harm all Americans.

In Virginia, an enormous part of our state economy benefits from the federal workforce in Northern Virginia and in Newport News.  We are all harmed by this administrations foolish decisions.

Unions and Labor Protections

I was a proud member of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and am strongly in favor of capable Unions and protections for workers rights, especially their right to organize.  With this administration’s arbitrary and illegal attempts to cancel collective bargaining agreements, against explicit court direction, we need representatives who will stand up and openly support Virginian’s and American’s right to organize.