Where I
stand.

What I believe: a young family should be able to afford a home in the state where they grew up. That used to be the default in America. It still can be.

What's in the way: we made building illegal: minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, discretionary reviews that drag on for years. This isn't market failure. It's rules, written decades ago for a different world, that reward whoever can afford the lawyers to fight through them.

What I'd do: use federal dollars as the lever: tie transportation and infrastructure money to zoning that allows starter homes, duplexes, and apartments near jobs. Streamline environmental review so it protects rivers instead of vetoing neighbors. And fund a serious trades pipeline, because legal homes still need framers, electricians, and plumbers to build them.

What it gets you: kids who can stay, towns that grow instead of gray, and paychecks in the trades that don't require a four-year degree.

What I believe: seeing a doctor shouldn't require a six-month wait, and a hospital bill shouldn't be a surprise. Every other rich country manages this. So can we.

What's in the way: we froze the pipeline of new doctors with residency funding caps from the 1990s, let hospital systems merge until whole regions have one provider, and built a layer of middlemen whose entire business is keeping prices unreadable so you can't shop and can't fight back.

What I'd do: unfreeze and expand residency funding so we train the physicians we obviously need. Review and unwind the mergers that killed competition. Require every price and every rebate to be published. And build a public option whose job is to keep the market honest: a plan that can't be bought, can't be merged, and sets the floor everyone else has to beat.

What it gets you: shorter waits, bills you can read before you owe them, and competition that works for the patient for once.

What I believe: government should be allowed to act, and should answer to you when it does. Neither is true today, and both parties have made peace with that, because the current rules protect whoever's already inside.

What I'd do, sequenced honestly:

Most politicians blur the difference between what a senator can vote for in year one and what takes a constitutional amendment. The blur is how nothing ever happens. The filibuster goes first because it's the load-bearing wall: homes and healthcare don't survive a 60-vote Senate.