Deficit Reduction
The federal deficit, the annual gap between what the government spends and what it collects in revenue, is a genuine long-term challenge that demands serious, honest attention. But deficit reduction achieved by gutting social programs, cutting education, or undermining the safety net is not fiscal responsibility; it is the transfer of costs from the federal budget onto the backs of ordinary Americans. True deficit reduction requires a combination of responsible spending, fair taxation, elimination of waste and fraud, and economic growth that expands the tax base.
How We Do It
- Implement the tax reforms outlined in Pillar 2, closing loopholes, taxing unrealized gains of the ultra-wealthy, eliminating corporate tax shelters, and establishing a genuinely progressive income tax system, as the primary revenue-side mechanism for deficit reduction. A tax system that works as intended is the single most powerful tool available for closing the deficit without cutting services.
- Conduct a comprehensive audit of all federal spending to identify waste, fraud, redundancy, and programs that are not delivering meaningful results. Eliminate or consolidate programs that are duplicative or ineffective, redirecting resources toward programs with demonstrated impact.
- Establish a federal budgeting framework that requires long-term fiscal impact assessments for all major legislation, ensuring that policymakers understand the full cost and benefit of proposed spending and tax changes over ten and twenty year horizons.
- Reject austerity measures that cut essential social programs in the name of deficit reduction, recognizing that the long-term economic costs of untreated illness, uneducated workers, unstable housing, and poverty far exceed the short-term savings of cutting the programs that address them.
The Tax Gap: Collecting What Is Owed
The IRS estimates that the annual tax gap, the difference between taxes legally owed and taxes actually collected, is approximately $600 billion per year. Over a decade, this represents roughly $6 trillion in legally owed revenue that the federal government fails to collect, primarily because the IRS has been systematically defunded to the point where it lacks the capacity to audit high-income returns at meaningful rates. The top one percent of earners are responsible for an estimated 28 percent of all unpaid taxes. This is not a problem of tax law; it is a problem of enforcement capacity, and it is one of the most straightforward fiscal improvements available to the federal government.
How We Do It
- Restore IRS funding to levels sufficient to audit high-income and corporate returns at rates comparable to those achieved a decade ago, targeting enforcement resources at the income categories where the tax gap is largest and where the return on enforcement investment is highest.
- Fully implement the IRS funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act and protect it from legislative rollback. Every dollar invested in IRS enforcement capacity returns an estimated six to twelve dollars in additional revenue.
National Debt Management
The national debt represents the accumulation of decades of deficit spending, tax cuts that were not offset by spending reductions, and the extraordinary expenditures required by national emergencies including wars, financial crises, and pandemics. Managing the national debt responsibly requires a long-term strategy that stabilizes debt as a percentage of GDP, reduces the burden of interest payments over time, and ensures that future generations are not saddled with an unmanageable fiscal burden.
How We Do It
- Establish a bipartisan National Fiscal Commission, insulated from short-term political pressures, tasked with developing a long-term debt reduction strategy that balances fiscal sustainability with the protection of essential programs and investments.
- Prioritize stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio as a primary fiscal target, recognizing that economic growth is as important as spending cuts in achieving long-term debt sustainability.
- Eliminate the debt ceiling as a political mechanism, replacing it with automatic stabilizers and mandatory fiscal review processes that address debt growth without creating artificial crises that threaten the full faith and credit of the United States.
GDP Growth & Economic Expansion
A growing economy is the most powerful long-term tool for fiscal health. When more Americans are working, earning living wages, starting businesses, and participating fully in the economy, tax revenues rise, safety net expenditures fall, and the capacity to service the national debt improves. Economic growth is most robust and most sustained when it is driven from the bottom up and the middle out: when working and middle class Americans have the purchasing power, education, and opportunity to participate fully in the economy.
How We Do It
- Pass a comprehensive infrastructure investment program covering transportation, broadband, water systems, energy grid modernization, and public facilities. Infrastructure investment creates immediate jobs, reduces long-term maintenance costs, improves economic productivity, and generates returns that far exceed their initial cost.
- Expand access to small business loans, reduce regulatory burdens for small businesses while maintaining meaningful consumer and worker protections, and establish federal procurement preferences for small and domestic businesses. Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy and the primary engine of job creation.
- Invest in workforce development programs that connect Americans with the skills needed for the jobs of today and tomorrow, including the trade training pipeline outlined in Pillar 3 and the educational investments outlined in Pillar 4.
- Invest in basic and applied research, STEM education, and public-private innovation partnerships that drive technological advancement and create the industries and jobs of the future.
Eliminating Waste, Fraud & Abuse
Every dollar lost to government waste, fraud, or abuse is a dollar that could have been invested in American families, infrastructure, or national security. Fiscal responsibility demands not just wise spending decisions but robust systems for identifying and eliminating wasteful and fraudulent use of public resources.
How We Do It
- Establish a permanent, independent Office of Federal Fiscal Integrity with the authority to audit all federal agencies and programs, investigate credible allegations of waste and fraud, and publicly report findings with specific recommendations for corrective action.
- Modernize federal financial management systems, many of which are decades old and lack the capability for real-time tracking and anomaly detection that modern technology makes possible.
- Conduct regular sunset reviews of all federal programs, requiring affirmative reauthorization based on demonstrated effectiveness.
- Strengthen the False Claims Act and other whistleblower protection and reward mechanisms to incentivize the reporting of government contractor fraud.
Federal Reserve Independence & Monetary Policy
The Federal Reserve is the cornerstone of American monetary policy, responsible for managing inflation, maximizing employment, and maintaining the stability of the financial system. Its effectiveness depends entirely on its independence from political pressure. A Federal Reserve subject to political interference is a Federal Reserve that cannot do its job. The consequences of a politicized Federal Reserve would be felt by every American in the form of inflation, financial instability, and the erosion of confidence in the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
How We Do It
- Codify the independence of the Federal Reserve in federal statute, establishing clear legal protections against presidential interference in monetary policy decisions, interest rate setting, and the appointment of Federal Reserve leadership.
- Establish rigorous qualification standards for Federal Reserve Board appointments, requiring demonstrated expertise in economics, monetary policy, or financial regulation.
- Strengthen the Federal Reserve's transparency and accountability to Congress through regular reporting, testimony, and audit mechanisms, while maintaining its operational independence from political direction, ensuring that democratic oversight does not become political interference.
- Engage in international monetary cooperation through the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and bilateral central bank relationships, recognizing that global financial stability requires coordinated monetary policy and that American monetary policy has profound consequences for the global economy.
Social Security & Medicare Long-Term Solvency
Social Security and Medicare are the foundational pillars of retirement and healthcare security for tens of millions of Americans. They represent a social contract between generations: a promise that Americans who work hard and contribute throughout their lives will have security and dignity in their old age. That promise must be kept. Both programs face long-term funding challenges that demand honest, serious attention, but those challenges must be addressed in ways that strengthen these programs for future generations rather than cutting benefits for current or future recipients.
How We Do It
- Address the long-term solvency of Social Security by eliminating the payroll tax cap, currently set at approximately $160,000, ensuring that higher earners contribute proportionally to the system rather than stopping contributions above an arbitrary income threshold. This single reform would extend Social Security's solvency for decades without cutting a single dollar of benefits.
- Reject any proposal to cut Social Security benefits, raise the retirement age beyond current levels, or privatize any portion of the Social Security system, recognizing that these approaches transfer risk onto the most vulnerable Americans while solving the solvency challenge on the backs of those who can least afford it.
- Address Medicare's long-term funding challenges primarily through healthcare cost reduction, including prescription drug price negotiation, administrative simplification, fraud reduction, and the transition to value-based care models that improve outcomes while reducing costs, rather than through benefit cuts or eligibility restrictions.
- Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care, recognizing that these are not luxury healthcare services but essential components of overall health that disproportionately affect the elderly population.
Trade Policy & International Economic Relations
America's trade relationships profoundly shape the economic opportunities available to American workers and businesses. Trade policy must be developed and executed with a clear-eyed understanding of both the genuine benefits of international commerce and the real costs that poorly structured trade agreements have imposed on American workers and communities.
How We Do It
- Develop a comprehensive national trade strategy that explicitly prioritizes the interests of American workers alongside corporate interests, establishing clear criteria for evaluating trade agreements that include labor standards, environmental protections, intellectual property safeguards, and national security considerations.
- Establish a genuine Trade Adjustment Assistance program that supports workers and communities displaced by trade with meaningful retraining, income support, and economic development assistance, rather than the inadequate and poorly administered programs that have historically failed to deliver real help to trade-affected communities.
- Address the national security dimensions of trade dependency, particularly in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, rare earth materials, and advanced technology, through domestic investment, allied reshoring, and strategic trade policy that reduces dangerous dependencies on adversarial nations.
Free Trade Agreements with Allies: A Middle Class Standard
International trade can be a powerful engine of shared prosperity, but only when trade agreements are designed with the interests of working people at their center rather than the interests of multinational corporations. The history of American trade policy since the 1990s is a cautionary tale: agreements that promised prosperity delivered deindustrialization, suppressed wages, and hollowed out communities that had no political power to resist the consequences. A new generation of trade agreements must be built on fundamentally different standards, with enforceable labor protections, genuine environmental standards, and binding requirements that the benefits reach the workers of all participating nations, not just the shareholders of their largest corporations.
How We Do It
- Negotiate and establish free trade agreements with close allied and partner nations that meet a binding middle class standard: agreements shall only be ratified if independent economic analysis projects net benefit to working and middle class Americans in terms of wages, employment quality, and purchasing power. Agreements that benefit corporate shareholders while suppressing wages or eliminating jobs for American workers shall not be ratified regardless of their macroeconomic projections.
- Pursue a successor agreement to NAFTA and USMCA with Canada and Mexico that strengthens and fully enforces labor standards across all three nations, eliminates the wage suppression mechanisms that have historically allowed corporations to play American and Mexican workers against each other, invests in the border communities most directly affected by cross-border economic activity, and includes binding environmental protections with genuine enforcement mechanisms. The goal is not to eliminate trade with our closest neighbors but to ensure that trade serves the people of all three nations rather than only their wealthiest residents.
- Expand trade relationships with South and Central American nations through a comprehensive Western Hemisphere partnership framework that ties preferential trade access to verifiable progress on labor rights, democratic governance, environmental protection, and anti-corruption standards.
- Address the root causes of migration from the region by investing in the economic conditions that give people a viable future in their home countries, recognizing that trade and development cooperation are the most sustainable long-term approach to managing migration flows.
Infrastructure Investment as Economic Strategy
Infrastructure investment is among the highest-return investments a government can make. Every dollar invested in public infrastructure generates multiple dollars of economic activity, creates immediate jobs, reduces long-term maintenance costs, improves productivity, and enhances quality of life. Yet American infrastructure has been chronically underfunded for decades, resulting in a deteriorating physical foundation that constrains economic growth and compromises public safety.
How We Do It
- Pass and fully fund a comprehensive, long-term national infrastructure investment program covering transportation, broadband, water and wastewater systems, energy grid modernization, public buildings, and green infrastructure.
- Establish a National Infrastructure Bank that leverages federal investment to attract private capital, multiplying the impact of public investment.
- Prioritize infrastructure investment in communities that have been most underserved, including rural areas, low-income urban neighborhoods, and tribal lands.
- Establish lifecycle cost accounting as the standard for infrastructure investment decisions, ensuring that long-term maintenance costs are fully considered alongside initial construction costs.
- Integrate climate resilience into all infrastructure investment decisions, ensuring that new and upgraded infrastructure is designed to withstand the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events driven by climate change.
The Economic Case for Social Investment
The most powerful argument for the social investments outlined in this document is not moral, though the moral case is compelling; it is economic. A society that invests in healthcare, education, housing, nutrition, and opportunity is a society that reduces its long-term costs dramatically. Preventable illness treated in emergency rooms costs multiples of what preventive care costs. Incarceration costs multiples of what education and opportunity cost. Homelessness costs multiples of what stable housing costs. The false economy of cutting social programs to save money is one of the most expensive mistakes a government can make.
How We Do It
- Establish a federal framework for measuring the long-term return on investment of social programs, moving beyond simple cost accounting to capture the full economic value of healthier, better educated, more stably housed Americans.
- Require that proposals to cut or eliminate social programs include a comprehensive long-term cost analysis that accounts for the downstream economic consequences of reduced investment.
- Communicate clearly and consistently that social investment is not a drain on the economy; it is the foundation of a productive, prosperous, and growing one. The nations with the strongest social safety nets consistently rank among the most economically competitive and fiscally stable in the world.
A Fiscal Framework for Reform: What It Costs, How We Pay for It
Intellectual honesty demands that any comprehensive policy blueprint confront a direct question: can we actually afford this? The proposals in this document are not free. The answer is yes, but only under specific conditions, in a defined sequence, and with transparent accounting of both costs and revenue that policymakers and the public deserve to see before a single vote is cast.
The major revenue proposals, if fully implemented, would generate an estimated $1.1 to $1.7 trillion in additional annual federal revenue from five sources: closing the tax gap through IRS enforcement ($500 to $600 billion per year); progressive tax reform on income above $1 million ($300 to $500 billion); carried interest closure ($100 to $200 billion); estate tax reform ($100 to $150 billion); and corporate tax reform ($100 to $200 billion). These are conservative estimates based on existing congressional scoring.
The major spending proposals would require, at full implementation, an estimated $2 to $4 trillion in additional annual federal outlays. The largest item is healthcare: $1.5 to $3 trillion annually, offset by elimination of private insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. Universal childcare: $500 billion. Free public college: $80 to $100 billion. Paid family leave: $200 to $300 billion — this figure represents the gross federal cost of a national paid leave insurance program covering all American workers, not federal employees alone, and would be substantially offset by employer and employee payroll contributions into the program fund, similar to how Social Security and unemployment insurance are financed. All other proposals combined: $300 to $500 billion annually.
Three things make the gap between revenue and spending manageable. The first is phased implementation: IRS enforcement, tax gap closure, and progressive tax reform could generate $800 billion to $1 trillion within the first five years without a single new social program. Spending programs are then phased in over ten to twenty years, beginning with the highest-return investments: early childhood education, childcare, and primary healthcare access.
The second factor is economic multiplier effects. Early childhood education returns an estimated $7 to $13 for every dollar spent. Infrastructure generates $1.50 in GDP per dollar. Universal healthcare reduces emergency room overutilization and allows workers to change jobs without fear of losing coverage. These are documented outcomes from comparable investments in peer nations and from domestic programs at smaller scale.
The third factor is the cost of inaction. Childhood poverty costs an estimated $1.03 trillion per year in lost productivity, crime, and healthcare. The $600 billion annual tax gap subsidizes tax evaders. Infrastructure deterioration costs $1 trillion annually. The investment case for these proposals is not merely defensible but affirmatively compelling.
This document proposes the following fiscal discipline: revenue measures enacted before or concurrent with spending measures; CBO scoring of each major program before enactment; spending programs phased in leading with highest-return investments; and five-year reviews against actual outcomes. This is not the fiscal framework of a blank check. It is the fiscal framework of a serious, evidence-based, long-term investment that treats the public's money with the respect it deserves.
Space Exploration & Scientific Research
Investment in science, research, and exploration is investment in the future. The discoveries of today become the technologies, medicines, and solutions of tomorrow. A nation that defunds scientific research in favor of short-term interests is a nation that surrenders its future to others. [462]
How We Do It
- Restore and increase federal funding for NASA, with a renewed commitment to space exploration, planetary science, climate monitoring, and the long-term goal of sustainable human presence beyond Earth. Establish public-private partnership frameworks that leverage private sector innovation while ensuring that discoveries made with public funding remain accessible to the public. [463]
- Increase federal investment in basic and applied scientific research through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, with funding decisions guided by independent peer review rather than political considerations. [464]