Taxpayer Protection Pledge

I’ve spent 20 years working for a paycheck, and I hate seeing my tax dollars go to endless wars, rampant fraud, and corporate giveaways. I’m upset that my congressman, Brad Finstad, voted for a bill that gave massive tax breaks to his donors, cut healthcare funding in rural Minnesota, and increased the national debt by over $4 trillion. We need new leadership. Here’s how I’ll make the math add up for working families again.

1. Get the fraud money back

• Require cuts to government spending and taxes that are equal to the amount that was stolen, so that we get our money back.

• Require mandatory prison time for everyone who broke the law in connection to these massive fraud cases.

• Reinstate truly independent watchdogs in Washington to find and root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

2. Stop the runaway national debt

• Vote against raising the debt ceiling until the budget is balanced.

• Run a serious effort to find and cut wasteful spending and inefficiency in the long term, unlike the failed effort that Elon Musk led.

• Modernize government tech to reduce spending and make government work better.

3. Make the tax code fair for working families

• Undo Finstad’s tax giveaways for billionaires and big corporations.

• Close corporate loopholes that allow American companies to outsource jobs and hide those profits overseas.

• Close loopholes like the Carried Interest Loophole that allow hedge fund billionaires to dodge paying taxes the rest of us pay.

4. Stop politicians from getting rich on our dime

• Ban elected officials and their spouses from trading and owning individual stocks and from betting on prediction markets.

• Don’t pay Congress when the government is shut down.

• Ban the use of taxpayer dollars for first class flights.

5. Prevent corporations from buying politicians

• Take no money from corporate PACs.

• Work to overturn Citizens United.

• Ban politicians from ever becoming lobbyists or foreign agents.

6. Make representatives actually represent us

• Put term limits on elected officials.

• Require representatives to hold at least one in-person town hall per term. (And to be clear: I’ll hold 21 of them every term.)

• Require the FEC to conduct timely investigations and impose meaningful penalties for campaign finance violations.

7. Stop spending on giveaways and wars

• Require research grants and federal contracts to be awarded based on merit and performance, not politics or favoritism.

• Oppose taxpayer-funded bailouts for foreign countries like Argentina.

• End the Iran War, and focus on bringing costs down at home.

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You can read more about my pledge to you here.