March 12, 2026 (last updated on March 13, 2026)
In a post-Trump world, there are a massive variety of actions to take and reforms to make. What follows is a little political manifesto of mine. In thinking about how those should be organized, I have divided them into “Crises”, which must be worked on, and “Supplementary Reforms”, which are good and necessary, but are simply not as pressing as the crises enveloping this country.
This administration is ruled by criminality and lawbreaking, both within the government and outside of it. We need to actually punish these people instead of letting them go free under the pretense of “maintaining partisan peace”. We should go after white-collar crime with gusto and end the explosion of scams in this country (cryptocurrency in particular). Those organizations and institutions who gave bribes and submitted to the illegal acts of the presidency must also be punished. The lawbreaking within sections of the government like ICE, DOGE, and the military must also be punished. DHS must be destroyed and new federal law enforcement must be built-up to never give the president a personal militia force again. Privacy laws need to actually be enforced, and those who broke them must be punished. We need to find a way to rescind the corrupt pardons given out by Trump to help his allies and friends and paymasters.
The filibuster and the Supreme Court have made it nearly impossible for Congress to actually pass anything substantive. The filibuster needs to be entirely removed, and the Supreme Court needs to be packed and regularized (i.e. term limits). The inability to pass anything encourages workarounds like government by executive order and court opinion, and removes accountability from politicians (if they can’t pass anything, their ideas never need to stand up to real-world scrutiny). A government that passes things that subsequently get rescinded is far healthier than the sclerosis we currently see in our government. Congress should be the heart of the Republic, but, in recent years, it’s been downgraded to alternate between a roadblock and a rubber stamp. And long-term, the amendment process should be made significantly easier - the super-high bar to amendments was a mistake.
After decades of cutting taxes and refusing to raise them, along with our aging populace and some truly stupid spending by the Trump administration, the federal deficit is becoming a serious problem; the Social Security Trust Fund is also nearly insolvent. Politicians have been talking about cutting “wasteful spending” for decades, but if you actually look into the spending in depth, it’s really hard to find much that’s truly wasteful. The truth is that our government spends money on a lot of useful, reasonable things, and are taxes are simply too low to fund those. The United States has very low tax rates compared to our peers, and we are very rich. We should lift the cap on social security payroll taxes, tax homeownership way more, get rid of the whole network of tax-advantaged savings accounts, end the stepped-up basis, go after the wealth of the ultra rich (likely through wealth taxes), raise capital gains taxes, raise payroll taxes, and add a VAT - these changes would likely pay for more than we need to fix the deficits, but there’s more that I’d like to fund.
I have written addenda below on unrealized capital gains taxes and tax-advantaged savings accounts.
The electoral systems in this country are ridiculous, out-of-date, and in desperate need of reform. We need to get rid of money in politics, ban gerrymandering, expand the house, and put down the festering corpse of the electoral college. We could also actually add DC and PR as new states (pending referenda). 48 states were added in the first 125 years of this constitution; 2 have been added in the following 114 years. Long-term, we need to figure out how to get rid of the Senate, and in the very long-term, we should work on getting rid of the presidency (I just prefer a parliamentary republic).
Government procurement in this country is truly broken. We cannot build anything in this country without it going wildly over budget and being delayed. From apartment buildings to railways to submarines to nuclear reactors, we have tons of stuff to build in this country and we can’t do them with the current broken procurement process.
Now, I honestly have no idea how to fix the process - I barely even know what the problem is - and I am sure that there are lots of very sympathetic, reasonable-sounding interest groups behind many of the delays (environmental groups and public-sector unions are prime suspects I fear), but we must actually balance their wishes against the harm of not being able to build anything.
The housing crisis in this country has gotten out of control. We need to build vast amounts of new housing (especially if we want to have more immigrants and more kids, as I do). I do not care about the mechanism that builds this housing. Normal builds for owner-occupiers, private equity building-to-rent, or public housing: I do not care. It must be built, and hopefully procurement reforms can make this easier. As a secondary goal, we need to wean Americans off of the homeownership-as-primary-investment model. Financializing housing creates some nasty incentives regardless of the size of the investor.
Heavily inspired by the People Policy Project’s Family Fun Pack, I think that we need a massive expansion of the welfare state to benefit children. A huge proportion of the poor in the country are poor because they don’t have enough income to spread amongst all their children. We provide massive support to seniors, why shouldn’t we also provide massive support to children? I think we should create a child benefit on the order of $1-2T annually. It’s fair, will combat poverty, and, who knows, maybe it’ll induce people to have more kids (I’m not a freak about depopulation, but it definitely worries me).
In this effort, we could also consolidate and rationalize our bizarre suite of half-assed welfare and tax credit programs: WIC, EITC, TANF, the CTC, SNAP, etc. The money for the child/parent stuff in there could be included in the child benefit payments, and the other stuff could be rolled up into a small, no-strings-attached UBI (Maybe using postal banking for the recipient accounts? And also using those recipient accounts for rapid stimulus in economic crises?) Just a thought (also basically copied from Matt Bruenig).
Immigration in this country is also deeply messed up. The populace hates illegal immigration, but they never want to deport the “good” illegal immigrants. We need to do amnesty and massively liberalize and streamline the immigration process. No one who wants to live in this country should be barred because there are “too many” people here. Work and student visas should be universally granted; as long as you have a place to stay and some means of financial support, you should be able to come to this country, get permanent residency in 5 years and then citizenship 5 years after that.
These core Bernie-era projects are both great and should absolutely happen. They’ll be expensive, but that’s what taxes are for. Nothing much to add that hasn’t already been said elsewhere.
Of course, there is an enormous number of smaller reforms that also should be completed, but these can probably be done independently, without a massive campaign or a comprehensive suite of policies.
Whenever a wealth tax or an unrealized capital gains tax is proposed (the same conceptual thing), a horde of "concerned citizens" on the right and in the center come in to chide proponents that this is a horrible idea. The worry is that the government will assess the tax, forcing people to sell their stocks, crashing the prices of those stocks, which would necessitate the sale of more stocks to meet the tax bill and hurt the overall economy. Sort of the inverse of a short squeeze.
Of course, if this is a regularly-assessed tax, this will all get priced in: savvy taxpayers will spread out their cash-outs over the year and buyers will hold off on purchases for the (diminished) tax-season supply glut. But even if you ignore that, there's an immediate, obvious solution: don't force people to sell the stocks. Have the taxpayer transfer the stocks directly to the government to form the nucleus of a proper SWF. Now, I know that technically, taxes must be paid in USD, but that's also easy to solve: create a government clearinghouse that will buy certain classes of assets at market value on the condition that the sellers immediately hand that cash back to the government to pay their tax bill.
The real issue with this kind of tax is how you assess the value of things without a clear market value; excluding real estate, collectors' items, and (especially) private companies seems like a straightforward path for tax avoidance. I can think of a few ways to solve this:
Most of my net worth is in these accounts, but I despise them. We are giving huge tax benefits to rich retirees (the people who least need tax benefits) for ... what reason? So that we can avoid having to maintain public pensions? The people that are getting the most benefit out of these wouldn't be relying on public pensions in any case (if they're rich enough to put a whole bunch of money into these investment accounts, they'd be fine without the tax benefits). "Encouraging savings" is just a way to justify victim blaming poor people, because "you should have just saved money". Also, they're just a mess; personally, I have a Roth IRA, a 401(k), an HSA, and two 529 plans - on top of my normal brokerage account.
I can already hear my uncle screaming about the US government "going back on its word", but I don't think my solution really does that. There's no need to claw back any past tax benefits, we would basically just force you to withdraw it all now (without early withdrawal penalties or penalities for spending it on the wrong thing), and then put it in a normal account where the capital gains tax applies with a new basis (note: you'd want to use the same direct stock transfer system instead of forcing sales). So for Roth IRAs, nothing would change on the surface. For things like 401(k)s and Traditional IRAs, you would have to apply a one-time surcharge during this transfer (likely the equivalent income taxes that you'd have to pay if you withdrew it over the course of five years, pretending that you had no other income). But I think this is fair and reasonable. Along with a capital gains tax hike, I think this would generate a lot of revenue from a pretty deserving source (old people's capital income).