What We Should Measure
Policy arguments have a way of collapsing into dueling claims about motives and intentions. A better public argument starts by agreeing on what we are going to measure. People can disagree about the means and still use the same scorecard to compare proposals and judge results.
The measures below are my proposal for that common scorecard. They are not sacred. If a competing proposal reaches the same goals more fairly or more reliably, it deserves consideration. The point is to make success concrete enough that supporters and skeptics end up arguing from the same evidence. Before public release, each baseline has to carry a fixed definition, a source, and an as-of date; the retirement-readiness measure is pinned to a published model.16
The target is not 435 competitive House seats. Geography will always leave some districts one-sided. But if roughly a third of the House were genuinely in play, members would have to answer to a great many more voters.
The immigration target has to be reached through legal status for established residents and control of future unlawful entry, not through mass removal. The two retirement measures belong together as well, because a token account balance does not by itself add up to an affordable old age.
The detailed definitions, legal mechanisms, cost estimates, and unresolved questions belong in Fix the System — Policy Design and Implementation. The scorecard belongs here, because the public should be able to judge this proposal, or a better one, without first having to become policy specialists.
Nobody will close a deal that lets the other side win too
| Measure | Now | Target | Done? |
|---|---|---|---|
Long-term residents without legal status | About 11M | Under 1M | |
Cents of each federal tax dollar eaten by interest | 19¢ | Under 10¢ | |
Americans over 50 with no retirement savings at all | 20% | Under 5% | |
Americans on track to keep their standard of living in retirement | 61% | 90% |
Most of us never vote in the election that decides who represents us
| Measure | Now | Target | Done? |
|---|---|---|---|
States with both an open primary and formula-drawn maps | 0 | 50 | |
House seats where November is genuinely in doubt, of 435 | 18 | 150 |
Self-dealing is legal, and failure has no consequence
| Measure | Now | Target | Done? |
|---|---|---|---|
Members of Congress and covered family trading individual stocks | Legal | Banned | |
Budgets passed on time, of the last 20 years | 0 | 20 |
The same table lives on its own page, with each baseline’s source and as-of date, so it can be checked without reading the section around it: The Scorecard.
SOURCES AND NOTES FOR THIS SECTION
- 16.Scorecard source mapping in the approved technical control is: state election offices and Ballotpedia for the combined election reforms; Cook Political Report for competitive House seats; congressional ethics law and filings for stock trading; Congressional Research Service for appropriations timing; DHS and Pew for long-term residents without status; CBO and Treasury for the interest share; AARP for retirement savings; and the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College for model-based retirement readiness. Baseline as-of dates were fixed at website synchronization (August 7, 2026) and appear with each row on the Scorecard. The retirement-readiness measure is the Center for Retirement Research's National Retirement Risk Index: the 61 percent baseline is the 2022-SCF vintage's 39-percent-at-risk finding, inverted; the 90 percent target is the author's goal. Source record S28