August 12, 2023, by Brian Frydenborg
Greetings all! It’s one month and one day since I filed my paperwork and paid my fee in Annapolis, and I have been busy with a number of personal and professional developments lately, but wanted to update you all on ideas I am bandying about in my head as I come up with concrete, detailed policy proposals. I already have some of these proposals up on my Policy Central section, with many, many more on the way. Such proposals are far more detailed than anything any of my fellow Democrats competing with me in the primary have released, which tells you about how I am valuing substance over style and taking you, the voters, seriously, respecting your intelligence and discernment.
A potential voter contacted me and asked me about linking something like Andrew Yang’s take on the universal basic income idea (UBI, the idea that all American would at least have a basic income to survive even if they did not have a job) to a tax on a percentage of stock IPO (initial public offering) profits.
I am not considering linking IPO percentages as a funding mechanism for something like UBI. I am thinking about how something like Yang’s UBI could be implemented and funded nationally, as to whether that is the right way to go, or if supplementing existing programs is a better option, or perhaps a combination. I am not Bernie Sanders acting like I can get Congress to pass $6 trillion-bills, so am still thinking about how and what to prioritize.
What I am developing: strong new regulations on big businesses, including setting maximum ratios of the salaries of the highest compensated employee at a company and the lowest (U.S. is a rampant outlier with a giant gap), higher reserve requirements for banks to make our financial system less speculatory and more secure, looking at easy to improve/expand programs supporting poor/working class folks (my national renters’ tax deduction is one of those plans), including trying to find ways to get poor folks the equivalent of Medicaid in states that have denied Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
I am also planning relatively soon to release plan to improve policing and maternal/infant mortality, especially for African-American women.
Some ideas related to all of this is: my plan to expand the Supreme Court by two justices (total of 11) and to add Puerto Rico and DC as states. With Republican stealing a Supreme Court nomination from Obama and having a major gerrymandering edge AND the Senate favoring rural Republican strongholds to the point that Democratic senators represented about 41 million more people than the same number of GOP senators before the 2022 midterms, we have to fight harder to even the playing field.
I am just getting started, so be sure to stay tuned. I am going to create a newsletter and have already set up ways for people to donate to the campaign—please do donate!—but am still just getting on my feet. I think we can do better than a businessman millionaire-turned Congressman and two county-level officials, though David, Angela, and Will all seem to be excellent public servants as far as I can tell, folks who seem to be good allies in our causes and good in their current roles. But I think I have the visio