THE PROBLEM
Nearly nine in ten Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — think members of Congress shouldn't trade stocks in the companies they regulate. Last month the House finally voted on it. What passed still lets members sell whatever they already own. It got bolted onto an unrelated fight about voter ID. It split down party lines anyway. An idea almost everyone agrees on, and Congress couldn't do it cleanly. The obvious read is that they're crooks. I think it's worse: everyone in that story can defend what they did, nobody broke a rule, and the machine produced that result anyway — because it's built to. It does the same to everything else on your list.
We are not failing because Americans disagree. Both sides overestimate how extreme the other side is by roughly double. On most of what matters — corruption, budgets, the border, whether ordinary people own anything — there's a deal most of the country would take tomorrow. We're failing because the machinery between "most people want this" and "this is law" has one failure, and two mechanisms that manufacture it.
- Nobody will close a deal that lets the other side win too. This is the failure. On immigration, on the budget, on retirement, a bargain exists where both sides get most of what they want. It never gets made, because the fight is worth more than the fix to the people having it. The stock vote is that failure in miniature. The debt is that failure as a number.
- Most of us never vote in the election that decides who represents us. Eight in ten districts are safe, so November ratifies a choice made months earlier — at 10–20% turnout, by one party's most committed slice, in an election most people can't enter. Whoever wins knows exactly who put them there, and it wasn't you. So you're represented by someone you had no hand in choosing, who has no particular reason to care what you think.
- The system makes self-dealing legal. Officeholders trade stocks in industries they oversee. Leadership buries bills that would pass, without a recorded vote. Shutdowns cost a member nothing. In any other job most of that ends a career; here it's permitted in writing. Every one of those rules lowers the cost of refusing to close — which is why throwing the bums out never works.
I'm not after meeting in the middle — that hands everyone a third of what they wanted and leaves nobody defending the result. I want the deals where both sides win at once: the right gets a border that works and the left gets people out of the shadows, neither losing for the other to win. Those deals exist. We built a system that can't close them.
THE PLAN
Three repairs, and nothing else. Each one links to its full mechanism.
- 1. Elections and ethics
One primary ballot (approval voting, top two to November), independent redistricting commissions, index funds only in office, guaranteed floor votes for bipartisan bills. Miss the budget deadline and every member of the chamber that failed stands for re-election immediately; funding continues automatically meanwhile, so nobody can take the government hostage. Failing at the one job becomes the thing that costs you the job.
Repair 01 in full → - 2. Immigration
Control the border and fix legal immigration at once; more visas allocated by skill and demand; deport violent criminals only; end indiscriminate raids; earned path to citizenship.
Repair 02 in full → - 3. Money and ownership
Debt can't grow faster than the economy, and emergency authority expires; tax the same income at the same rate; give every American an investment account beginning at birth; insure only a defined floor under the default strategy; phase the change by age without breaking promises; address student debt through good-faith repayment and college risk-sharing, then stop recreating it.
Repair 03 in full →
None of this is hypothetical. Congress created seeded newborn accounts and a student-lending earnings test; a stock ban and shutdown-ending bill are live and bipartisan; two states run open primaries, four draw maps by commission. But the parts that would have actually fixed things got stripped every time.
“Would I still want this rule if the politician I trust least were holding it?”
Most people, most of what they want.
- PDF · 22 pagesON THIS SITECommon Sense Again — Short
The eleven chapters on this site, word for word. Start here.
- PDF · 44 pagesCommon Sense Again — Full
The unabridged pamphlet — the same argument at twice the length, with the Paine passages and both appendices in full.
- PDF · 31 pagesFix the System — the working argument
The policy memo underneath it all: every objection answered, the sequencing, and the full sourcing.