The Three Repairs

Three repairs would make those bargains possible. Repair One changes the machinery of government itself, so that politicians have stronger reasons to close a deal and face clearer consequences when they don't.

Repair One: make politicians answer to voters and results

The first repair does five things. It makes more elections competitive, opens the decisive vote to every eligible voter, removes financial conflicts, forces broadly supported bills into daylight, and attaches a consequence to budget failure.

Fix A: End partisan gerrymandering. Politicians should not draw the districts they run in. Instead, a public formula should draw congressional districts from Census geography and population alone: equal population, contiguous territory, the fewest split counties, then municipalities, then census tracts, and then the most compact shape. Election results, party registration, incumbent addresses, and any demographic data beyond head counts stay out. The one exception is where federal voting-rights law requires them, and every such exception gets published and can be reviewed in court. The code is public, and it is identical in every state.⁹

Fix B: Replace closed party primaries with one open approval primary. Every qualified candidate goes on one ballot. Every eligible voter may take part, whatever their party registration, and may mark every candidate they would accept. The two with the most approvals advance to a head-to-head general election.

Approval voting is the best mechanism I have found so far for meeting four tests. The permanent commitment is to the tests, not to the mechanism:⁸

1. 1.Every eligible voter can participate in the election that effectively decides the seat.
2. 2.Supporting one acceptable candidate does not hurt another through vote splitting.
3. 3.The final winner receives majority support in a head-to-head election.
4. 4.The ballot is understandable, practical to administer, and auditable by hand.

Approval voting is not sacred. If a better method meets the four tests more completely, we should use it.

Fix C: End investment conflicts in Congress. While a member is in office, the member, their spouse, and their children should be limited to broad-market funds, Treasury securities, cash, a primary home, and similar nonconflicted assets. Individual securities, options, conflicted sector funds, and anything that amounts to a hidden version of those should be prohibited.

Fix D: Give bipartisan bills a vote. A bill with meaningful bipartisan sponsorship should get committee consideration and a recorded floor vote on stable text. Party leaders should not hold a silent pocket veto over a bill that has cleared an objective threshold.

Fix E: Make Congress answer for budget failure. Politicians should not be able to reject a compromise and then use a shutdown as a negotiating tool. Neutral automatic funding should protect the public first. Congress should then face a mandatory conference and protected votes on the same final package. If a chamber still fails to pass it, the proposed backstop is a special election for that chamber within 90 days. That consequence is deliberately severe, because the public has carried the cost of missed deadlines and lawmakers have not. Congressional terms are fixed in the Constitution, which means this backstop would take an amendment.¹⁰

Repairs Two and Three put that capacity to work on two sources of national fear, an uncontrolled border and an unaffordable old age. They are proof cases, and they are a new baseline.

Repair Two: control the border and earn legal status

The immigration bargain is straightforward:

1. 1.Control future immigration and shape lawful entry around prosperity and keeping families together.
2. 2.Give peaceful, established residents a rigorous earned path to legal status.

Both halves must begin in the same law. If either side must wait for a later promise, the bargain will collapse.

Common sense: a peaceful resident who has lived and worked here for years is not the same case as a recent unlawful entrant, a person convicted of serious violence, an organized-crime participant, or a genuine security threat.

Fix A: Control the system. Fund enough officers, judges, adjudicators, technology, detention alternatives, and working ports to decide cases promptly and fairly. Enforcement should focus on recent unlawful entry, fraud, final removal orders after due process, and serious public-safety threats. The law itself should define those categories so an administration cannot expand them at will.

Fix B: Create lawful channels that match the country's needs and values. Expand immigration based on scarce skills, verified labor demand, entrepreneurship, and job creation, and keep the two commitments this country has always made: immediate families stay together, and a refugee program continues that is vetted, capped, and set by Congress. Employer sponsorship can demonstrate demand, but workers must be able to change jobs and report abuse without losing their legal status.

Fix C: Let established residents earn their way in. Someone who has lived and worked here peacefully for years can earn legal status, not be handed it. The path:

1. 1.Come forward, register, and pass identity and background checks.
2. 2.Prove years of residence and work, and settle any taxes owed.
3. 3.Pay processing costs and a $1,000 penalty, payable over time and waivable for hardship.
4. 4.Stay law-abiding through six years of provisional status.
5. 5.Then permanent residence, and then the same citizenship process as everyone else.

Work starts on day one: from the first day of provisional status, people work legally, on the books, paying full taxes. Federal benefits do not: general benefits phase in only after five years or permanent residence, whichever comes first. Emergency care, public-health protection, children's services, and disability protections remain available from the start, because those protect everyone.

A common worry is that legal status means millions of people drawing on public resources. The record points the other way: undocumented immigrants already paid an estimated $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, including $25.7 billion to Social Security and $6.4 billion to Medicare, programs most of them cannot collect from.¹¹ Legal status brings more of that work and taxpaying into the open. The honest caveat stands: benefits, administration, and state costs still must be accounted for, and the plan says so plainly.

Funded control, lawful channels, targeted enforcement, and provisional registration begin together. No later declaration that the border is “secure” can be allowed to postpone the earned path indefinitely.

Repair Three: keep honest books and build wealth broadly

The first two repairs fix how Washington decides. The third fixes what it has been deciding badly for fifty years: the country's books and its promises. Three moves: cap the debt, tax fairly, and turn retirement from a promise politicians manage into property Americans own.

Common sense: keep honest books, help every American build wealth that funds a real retirement, and tax a dollar the same no matter how it is earned.

Fix A: Put a speed limit on debt. Outside a declared emergency, federal debt should not grow faster than the economy. This is not a balanced-budget gimmick that forces brutal cuts in a recession. It is a speed limit, measured over five years.¹² CBO keeps the official score. GAO audits the process. Break the limit, and Congress must vote on a correction, on the record, by name. Real emergencies get real borrowing, but the authority expires after two years unless three-fifths of each chamber extends it and publishes a ten-year path back.

Fix B: Tax a dollar like a dollar. A dollar earned by working and a dollar earned by owning should face the same schedule: wages, capital gains, and carried interest alike. And end the oldest trick in wealth planning: borrow against assets you never sell, live on the loan, pay nothing. Once that kind of personal borrowing crosses $1 million in total, the untaxed gain behind it becomes taxable. Ordinary mortgages and genuine business credit are untouched. Sell later and you are not taxed twice. At death, the remaining gain is finally settled, with protection for spouses, charities, and continuing family businesses and farms.

Fix C: Every American retires with money of their own. Shift from Social Security as an ongoing, unfunded retirement tax to seeding investments that each person owns.

Every child born in America starts life with a $10,000 investment account. At the market's historical return, it grows to roughly $800,000 by age 65, about $2,700 a month while barely touching the principal.¹³ And the money is theirs: to spend, to keep growing, or to leave to their children. Social Security never let anyone do that.

Markets don't make promises, so the country makes one instead: a floor. If markets underperform or a working life gets interrupted, insurance fills the gap up to $1,700 a month after a full career, with years of caregiving, military service, and disability counting toward it.¹⁴ The floor stands behind the account's standard low-cost fund, which automatically gets safer as retirement nears; take bigger risks on your own and the gains are yours, but so is the extra loss.

And everyone already working keeps every promise made. If you are 45 or older, nothing about your retirement changes: you get full Social Security, on schedule. The plan closes the program's funding gap by having high earners pay Social Security tax on all of their pay, the way everyone else already does, so the checks actually clear.

If you are under 45, your retirement comes from two sources that always add up: an investment account the government seeds for you, and a Social Security check. The younger you are, the more your account carries, because it has more years to grow. The older you are, the bigger your Social Security share stays. Together they always equal at least what you are promised today. Nobody's retirement goes down.

Most future retirees will have at least $2,700 a month from money they own. No one who works a full career will retire on less than $1,700. And once fully in place, it costs the government about $40 billion a year in seed deposits, plus a limited insurance backstop, instead of Social Security's $1.4 trillion.

Read the bottom row left to right: that is the transition, ending in a system where a full retirement costs the government $10,000 per person, paid once, at birth.

Now the part that sounds impossible: the government can afford this because most retirement money will be invested and compounding, the way the wealthy have always done, and the government is only the guarantor.

Compounding does the work taxes used to do. The transition has a real price: catch-up accounts for everyone under 45, roughly $140 billion a year for ten years, plus the benefits already owed to today's workers as they phase out. Every number gets published, not promised. But it is a bill that ends. The one we have now never does.

And as the old rolls shrink, the retirement payroll tax shrinks with them, from 10.6 cents of every earned dollar toward two. Workers stop renting their retirement from the government and start owning it.

This is a baseline, not the whole agenda. A country with honest books, broad ownership, and a secure old age has room to take on healthcare and everything else, instead of lurching from one inherited crisis to the next.