Recently I read an essay where billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen basically said that the fear of job losses from new technology (meaning AI) has been a recurring panic for hundreds of years, dating back to the mechanical loom. The word “loom” is hyperlinked to the Wikipedia page for the Luddites. He says every major new technology in history has produced more jobs at higher wages and then closes the paragraph by saying “And yet, it never happens.”

It’s interesting that he specifically mentions the Luddites, because the history of that group actually proves the exact opposite of what Andreessen is trying to say.

People also often make the point that the Industrial Revolution largely made physical strength unimportant, economically speaking, while the AI revolution may make cognitive ability similarly irrelevant. But people like Andreessen will point out that even though some jobs did disappear during the period between 1790 and 1840, even more jobs were eventually created, so the end result was net positive. While that is technically true, it ignores the experience of the people who are most relevant to us, the individuals who actually lived during the Industrial Revolution.

Broadly speaking, two things happened to Western economies during this period. First, everyone became far more productive. Economic growth became dramatically faster than in any previous period in history. Up until 1840 basically every civilization had suffered from the “Malthusian Trap,” which meant that any increase in productivity was nullified by an equivalent increase in the birthrate (population). This meant that even if a civilization was able to make more food, for instance, the vast majority of people would still be living right on the edge of starvation, because the number of mouths would increase relative to the number of dinners. The Industrial Revolution broke this trend (at least in developed countries) and we have not returned to it since.

The second effect that the Industrial Revolution had was to greatly increase income inequality, as the vast majority of the new wealth generated during this period went to, well, wealthy people. Despite the fact that workers became, on average, 46% more productive between 1780 and 1840, their wages essentially remained flat. Thus this stretch is often called “Engels’ Pause.”

Of course, as you can see, eventually the productivity gains started to trickle down to workers post-1840, but as people who are living through a technological revolution the first 50 years of the Industrial Revolution are in my opinion the most relevant.

In more individual terms, a huge number of skilled artisans were displaced by mills and factories that could suddenly do the things they were trained to do far more efficiently. This wrought havoc on their living standards. For instance one veteran artisan testified that while his weekly earnings in 1797 were between 26 and 27 shillings, by 1834 his weekly earnings had fallen to about 5 shillings 6 pence despite working two additional hours per day. That’s really bad!

And that brings us back to the Luddites, the group that Andreessen was attempting to smear in his essay. In the modern day the word “Luddite” has literally been defined as someone who hates technology, and laypeople who know about the historical group generally assume that they were just anti-progress reactionaries. But if you look into it at all it becomes pretty clear that their primary motivation was economic.

One of the better-known Luddites was a guy named George Mellor. He was a literate, skilled cloth finisher (cropper) who worked at a workshop in England. He had been able to make a good living performing the skilled work of using heavy hand shears to trim the raised nap of woolen cloth to a smooth, even finish. Then the mechanized shearing frame was invented, and a child could perform the work ten times faster than Mellor did.

Incensed, he organized Luddite resistance in the West Riding of Yorkshire, leading a secret group of artisans in a series of nighttime raids against mechanized mills. They used heavy sledgehammers made by a blacksmith named Enoch Taylor to destroy factory machinery. This was an intentional choice, because Enoch Taylor was the man who had actually built many of the machines. Their famous rallying cry was “Enoch made them, and Enoch shall break them.” Which was meant to mock him, but also has a very cool Old Testament-y vibe to my ear.

A couple of historians have noted that these attacks on machines didn’t come from a hostility to technology, but rather that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers. Before the Luddites even began to take part in vandalism they first petitioned parliament to enforce the existing laws that restricted the use of machinery in their trade. But the British government did the opposite, repealing those laws in 1809 and intentionally deregulating the industrial sector in a way that led to even more economic displacement.

You have to remember that not only was this before legal unions, in England this was before democracy. So violence and vandalism were literally the only recourse given to workers at that time. The historian Eric Hobsbawm said that the Luddites’ actions were “collective bargaining by riot.” So had the massive productivity gains from the Industrial Revolution been better shared with workers, the Luddites likely never would have existed.

The resistance to data centers has been well covered by now, so I won’t delve too deeply into it, but I think it’s important to note that when you interview the people who are showing up to local government meetings, complaining about big tech intruding into their neighborhoods, they almost always give economic reasons. They don’t want their energy bills to go up, they don’t like that the majority of these facilities provide almost no new jobs to their communities, they worry about ceding land and resources to companies with dubious intentions.

These protests are often characterized by the press as being anti-technology. But really it’s more accurate to say that they are pro-worker. It’s not that these people specifically dislike data centers, it’s just that data centers, like the machines the Luddites smashed, are simply the most accessible node of the supply chain. People are worried that they’re going to be economically displaced by progress, and for good reason. So they have no choice but to fight progress.

So how do you solve this? Well, if you look at the Industrial Revolution, the eventual solution they came up with was a combination of government regulation and worker organization. Governments came up with laws that prevented things like child labor or the poisoning of rivers by factories (to a certain extent). Labor unions increased workers’ negotiating power and thereby increased the labor share of income.

In an essay for the Boston Review, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu wrote the following:

“The direction of AI development is not preordained. It can be altered to increase human productivity, create jobs and shared prosperity, and protect and bolster democratic freedoms—if we modify our approach.”

And I think that pretty much sums it up. The progress of technology is not some law of nature; it responds to decisions made by human beings. Whether or not we can pull our government together fast enough to actually make a positive impact in that arena is a different question entirely, but that should be the goal.

Made another video for ya’ll! Had a lot of fun talking about this even though the subject is pretty dark. Hope you like it!

In this video I’m going to give you the full history of what I consider to be the most American company. Enjoy!

If you press a labor historian to point to one moment to signify the beginning of the end for the American middle class, many of them would choose the 1981 failure of the air traffic controllers strike (see, for instance, page 519 here). The basic argument is that PATCO’s demise led to a collapse in union membership across professions, which in turn led to the erosion of wages for normal workers.

The bad guy in this story is Ronald Reagan, which is not a surprise to anyone who knows anything about Ronald Reagan. He ruthlessly crushed this strike, and basically created the blueprint that corporate America would use in labor disputes afterwards.

The crazy thing is that while he was campaigning Reagan actually wrote a letter to the air traffic controllers’ union, where he promised “a spirit of cooperation” with them. And because of that they were one of the only unions to endorse him over Jimmy Carter.

This is even more hypocritical because Reagan got his political start as the head of a union, the Screen Actors Guild. And while he was the union head he led the first ever strike against the major movie studios. So PATCO had very good reason to believe he wouldn’t stab them in the back, but he did.

So in 1981 PATCO rejects the government’s final contract offer by a huge margin. 95% of union members voted it down, clearing the way for a strike. Then Reagan goes out to the White House Rose Garden, and gives a speech basically calling the strikers criminals, saying that if they don’t report for work in 48 hours “they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.”

That might not sound that crazy now, because in the modern era the practice of permanently replacing strikers is common. But back then it was almost never done, and the fact that a President was threatening to do it was nuts.

So the 48 hours pass, and only about 1,300 of the 13,000 striking workers report back to work. So Reagan fires 11,345 people that day, and not only that but he also permanently bans them from ever working for the federal government in any capacity.

That last part was especially cruel because most of the PATCO people were Vietnam Air Force veterans who generally did not have any other high-level skills, and could not hope to find meaningful employment elsewhere. He was taking thousands of people who had fought a war for their country and damning them to a life of poverty. Just a brutal, brutal decision.

Many of the strikers committed suicide. There was also an especially high divorce rate, because now these guys had no way of supporting their wives and children anymore. They just got royally fucked over, but unfortunately the press mostly sided with Reagan, and average Americans at the time didn’t really have much of a problem with it.

So like I said, this basically created the playbook that the corporate world would use to break strikes for the next 45 years, as it became increasingly common to permanently fire and replace striking workers. For instance during the Phelps-Dodge Copper Strike of 1983 executives canned their entire workforce, and replaced them with new miners who had to be escorted in by the national guard. The CEO of this company was gleefully quoted as saying “"Suddenly people realized, Hell, you can beat a union." The same thing was done with Hormel's meatpackers, Greyhound's bus drivers, the paper workers of Georgia Pacific, Boise Cascade, and International Paper, plus employees of Continental Airlines, TWA, and the Chicago Tribune. Reagan's own OPM director, Donald Devine, reported that numerous private-sector executives told him they were able to cut fat and adopt more competitive work practices "because of what the government did" in handling PATCO. As you can see in the chart below, after 1981 the number of strikes per year plummeted, and never recovered.

So now in the modern era workers have lost their bargaining power, and that has had a direct effect on income inequality. A bunch of economists have found strong evidence of a causal connection between the two, demonstrating that as union membership goes down, inequality goes up.

So what can we do about it? Well there’s a big change that would fix these problems that I’ll talk about in a second, but first the good news is that right now in America unions are historically popular. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans approve of unions which is the highest number since 1965.

The problem is, the piecemeal system of labor organizing America has used so far (called enterprise bargaining) is deeply flawed. Union membership peaked in 1954 at roughly 35%, and even though this was definitely very beneficial for workers, it still left the majority of them with no collective bargaining power. Unionizing workplaces one by one is a slow, dangerous process that requires huge risks and constant vigilance from organizing workers. Luckily, there’s a better system, which is very achievable and has already been successfully implemented at a smaller scale in some places: Sectoral Bargaining.

The idea is that instead of unionizing workplaces one by one, workers from entire industries elect representatives to negotiate wages across all companies. This process is facilitated by government boards, who act as middlemen between the bosses and the laborers.

I’ll illustrate this with an example. In the current system if Starbucks baristas organize a union then that’s great for them, but cafe workers at places like Pete’s or Cafe Nero receive no benefit. And in fact, given the way Starbucks is set up, you actually have to organize store by store, meaning workers have to continually risk their employment for little gain. As I said before, this is dangerous, inefficient, and generally happens too slowly to keep up with the rate of change in the economy. Even if you manage to organize your workforce, you are still forced to compete with other, non-unionized sites, and implicit threat these businesses carry reduces your leverage. This is the current state of affairs under enterprise bargaining.

With sectorial bargaining, instead of Starbucks workers unionizing and negotiating with the CEO of Starbucks, all coffee shop employees (or more likely, all service workers) “unionize” together, and elect a group of representatives to negotiate with the CEOs of all of their companies. Not only does this give workers more leverage, but it also means that when new companies spring up they automatically get slotted into their corresponding “sector” of representation. This helps you, because you are not forced to compete with a new, non-union company, and it helps the workers at that new company because they automatically get representation.

This is the system that many European countries already employ, and it has led to greatly reduced inequality and better pay for workers. In California they did a version of this with fast food workers, and it led to a huge increase in wages with no reduction in employment. It’s the right way to go, and serious economists agree.

In order to do this we would basically need to amend the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which established enterprise bargaining as the law of the land. That would probably require a Democrat controlled congress that’s willing to repeal the filibuster. The folks over at Clean Slate for Worker Power have come up with a more detailed plan if you’d like to dig into the wonkish details.

Finally, I’ll just note that if you’re reading this you’re likely a well-educated person with decent employment options (so goes the Substack community). If you’re an American, that might mean that you think of unions as being something meant for more working-class type people, not really for you. But it’s important to remember that unless you’re a member of the 1% (or more likely the .1%), you too have been robbed. Decreasing income inequality in America would almost certainly mean raising your wages as well. And building collective bargaining power is one of the best tools we have to do that. So hop on board the solidarity train!

I’ve been talking about LVTs for a while now because they’re an incredibly simple way to change the way housing works in America. This is a bit wonky but it’s super important so lock in!

In 2026 the financialization of the American economy has essentially destroyed the institutions we once treasured.  Private equity owns the hospital you were born in and the old folks home your grandma will die in, and has made both more expensive and less efficient. They have cornered the market for veterinary care to exploit people’s love for their pets.  They have made it impossible for Americans in some states to afford housing.  The world around us has been looted by frat boy bankers in $10,000 suits, how did this happen?  

In the 1960s the hero of our story, Michael Milken, was a student at Berkeley, but he wasn’t taking part in the drug fueled bacchanals that most 20 year olds in Northern California were enjoying.  No, our boy Michael preferred to hang out in the library and read obscure economics textbooks. 

 
One night while he was locked away among the bookshelves he discovered a text by former president of Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland W. Braddock Hickman.  This text noted that a portfolio of high risk “junk bonds” actually outperformed portfolios made of safer, investment grade bonds.  In other words, if you took more risks, you could make more money.  

Flash forward to the mid 1980s and Milken had become one of the richest bankers of all time, primarily by serving as a middleman dealing junk bonds.  Some of his largest buyers were the bankers in charge of “Savings and Loans” accounts, which were basically just aggregations of normal people’s deposits, and were secured by federal deposit insurance.  This meant that if any of these risky bets failed they would be covered by taxpayer money. 

I know this probably sounds like a bunch of financial gobbledygook, but to make a long story short, essentially Milken was taking advantage of the recent deregulation of financial institutions to do shady stuff that prioritized short term gain over long term profits.  This eventually contributed to a collapse that required a 124 billion dollar government bailout, but not before Milken and his friends got really fucking rich.  

That’s not even the worst part.  Milken used the huge pools of money this generated to sponsor things called “leveraged buyouts”.  Essentially he would look for healthy organizations that paid their employees well, had low amounts of debt, and invested a lot into research and development.  He would then find a “partner”  who could use debt to buy these companies, strip them down, fire employees, cancel research and development, and then profit from the fast cash this destruction caused.  

Let me give you an example to show you how this functions in practice.   In the early 80s Goodyear Tire company was a solid organization.  They employed 120,000 people and had very low debt.  They invested heavily in research and development.  They were the industry leader and they were set up to stay that way.

Then a French-British Industrialist named James Goldsmith took out close to a billion dollars of debt (made possible by Milken’s junk bond “innovations”), and threatened a hostile takeover so that he could loot their assets.

Goodyear didn’t want to be bought, so the company’s board defended itself by cutting research, closing multiple plants, reducing their employment by more than 7000 people, and taking on 2.6 billion dollars of their own debt.  All of this just so that they could buy back their own stock.  Essentially they had to preempt the shortsighted reforms that Goldsmith would have made by making those exact same changes themselves.

They managed to prevent the takeover, but when asked about it later a Goodyear executive said that he felt that that period they had actually destroyed wealth, rather than creating it.  

Now after the 80s there were a couple of minor legal reforms to junk bond trading, but the structure that allows for takeovers (“leveraged buyouts”) essentially remains untouched.  More recently people like Mitt Romney have become very rich doing it.  The threat of these takeovers has permanently changed the way American companies operate, forcing them to focus on ruthless financial “efficiency” rather than the wellbeing of their workers or the development of new technologies. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  In fact, during the 50s and 60s, New Deal era legislation made all of this stuff practically impossible, and coincidentally this was also the most prosperous time in American history.  The deregulation of the stock market in the 80s made way for the quasi-religion of "shareholder value," and has shifted gains away from workers and toward investors and executives.  This has been caused directly by legislative “reforms.”  For instance stock buybacks were treated as illegal market manipulation until the SEC changed this rule in 1982.  Since then, corporations have spent trillions buying their own stock instead of raising wages or funding research.

The good news is that we already know what the answer is.  It’s possible to make the economy work for normal people again, simply by re-instating the New-Deal regulations we followed in the first half of the 20th century.  I’ll be writing more about this in future articles, stay tuned for that!

A couple weeks ago I started looking up polls that measured support for liberal/progressive policies among members of the Republican base. My feeling was that many of the party’s voters opposed the left for cultural reasons, and that their positions on actual legislative priorities might be less adversarial. Even with this initial expectation in place I was shocked to discover the level of support conservatives express for laws that are really only being pushed by the democratic party.

Below are some of the stats I found. Every poll I’m using is from the “Trump Era” with the most conducted in the last 2 years and the earliest one dating back to 2020. It’s also important to note that if you change the language of the poll questions to remove political buzzwords (for instance “Medicare for all” or “Citizens United”) the support among Republicans increases further, as shown by this study conducted by Maryland’s School of Public Policy. Here are the numbers:

• 80% of Republicans support universal background checks for guns

• 61% of Republicans favor building more green energy in the form of solar farms

• Almost half of Republicans (43%) support raising taxes on the rich and big corporations

• 76% of Republicans support criminal justice reform with 63% saying we need to reduce the number of incarcerated people

• 56% of Republicans support a public option for healthcare

• 50% of Republicans said they would cut defense spending to fund healthcare and education

• 87% of Republicans support banning congressional stock trading

• 53% support repealing Citizens United

What in God’s name is going on here? Are we really supposed to believe that these issues have majority support among members of the Republican voting base? Are these polls full of shit?

The reason why these numbers might be surprising has to do with a well documented social optical illusion. As shown by a couple interesting studies (1, 2), both Republicans and Democrats generally tend to underestimate public support for progressive issues like climate change or gun control. 66-80% of Americans support these policies, but when asked they’ll estimate public support to be roughly half that, between 37-43%. The authors of these studies conclude that most Americans are living in a “false social reality” where they assume the people around them are more conservative than they are.

The result is a kind of self-reinforcing loop, where an individual conservative who, say, supports green energy, assumes that they must be alone in their beliefs, and self-censors. There may be members of their friend group who share the same views, but nobody’s saying anything because of the perceived social risk. So we get a kind of emperor’s-new-clothes scenario where someone might be pretending to have certain opinions in order to win the approval of others who are also only pretending to have those opinions. Of course this almost certainly happens on the left as well, but that’s not my subject here.

Politicians themselves are not immune to this phenomenon. In one study researchers found that congressional staffers systematically overestimated how conservative their constituents are on popular issues like health care and minimum wage (source). The reason for this distortion is that district-level polling is difficult, expensive and time consuming, so government reps often lean on special interest groups to provide them with information. Predictably, these special interest groups generally offer numbers that are skewed towards their own ends. So the problem goes all the way to the top.

If you’re someone who supports left leaning policies all of this should be good news. Many Republicans are worried about the same things you’re worried about, and endorse similar solutions. That’s not to say we agree on everything, we certainly don’t, but we also don’t disagree as much as you might have thought. Similarly, some politicians who are currently voting against issues you care about may be under the mistaken impression that they are representing the views of the people who elected them, having been duped by slick lobbyists and deceptive data.

The solution is simple: measure people’s political opinions more accurately and get loud about the results. Studies suggest this strategy works in both situations. For instance in 2011 a team of researchers gave state legislators accurate data about voter preferences, supplanting lobbyist misinformation, and it actually changed the way they voted. (source). Perhaps more importantly, it has also been shown that simply correcting someone’s misperceptions can increase active support of liberal issues. There have been a number of studies that demonstrated this finding for domestic American issues (source), but the most famous example actually comes from an experiment conducted in Saudi Arabia. Quoting directly from the paper:

[T]he vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support women working outside the home (WWOH)... while they substantially underestimate the level of support for WWOH by other similar men - even men from their same social setting, such as neighbors. We then show that randomly correcting these beliefs about others increases married men’s willingness to help their wives search for jobs… Four months after the main intervention, the wives of men whose beliefs about acceptability of WWOH were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside of the home. (source)

So informing the men in this study that their peers generally had more progressive views increased the chances that they would act progressively themselves. This is actually relatively intuitive, in my opinion.

I don’t want any of this to be construed as a whitewashing of the values of the MAGA base. They have endorsed absolutely heinous policies that have caused irreversible damage to both our democracy and our economy. But it seems that beneath the smog of propaganda that sits atop their collective consciousness there remains a certain humanity. It’s possible that focusing on this undercurrent of reasonableness could lead to progress, and perhaps even some defections in their ranks

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The best way to solve America’s housing crisis is building a new city entirely from scratch in the middle of nowhere. I’m dead serious, hear me out.

There are a number of areas in America where basically no one is living that have the natural resources to support a city of millions of people. For instance you could purchase an area of land the size of San Francisco in the Mississippi basin for about 150 million dollars, which is almost nothing relatively speaking.

Building this city, which I’m going to call Megalopolis, would create hundreds of thousands of new housing units, effectively lowering the cost of living not just there but everywhere in America. Of course it would be better to just add housing and improve public transit in existing cities, but this is politically very difficult, due to the fact that most of the landowners in existing cities benefit economically from keeping the supply of housing low.

Building a new city from scratch might sound daunting, but there’s quite a bit of historical precedent. China does it all the time (with some successes, and other failures). Also, in America we’ve actually already been doing it, kind of. In the last five years places like Austin and Nashville have added about 100,000 units to their housing stock, more than enough for a mid-sized American city. Construction in Megalopolis would be faster and cheaper than either of those places, partially because of lower land costs and partially because of the loosened permitting constraints that come with greenfield development. Plus the rise of remote work means that it would be relatively easy to convince people to move if you could make the new city attractive enough.

All of this combined would make it incredibly cheap to live in Megalopolis, we’re talking maybe a couple hundred dollars a month for a nice one bedroom in the middle of a thriving, walkable downtown. Maybe less.

And because we’re building the city from scratch it would also be an opportunity to build the most efficient, well-planned subway system known to man. Right now it’s incredibly difficult to build public transit in American Cities because you have to plan around the existing residents and construction laws (and also use more expensive methods of construction). But obviously that’s not the case here, so we could construct a high speed underground rail system for a fraction of that cost (including freight lines to carry construction materials) then design the city itself around the backbone that transit system creates. This would make the city even more affordable by allowing people to live without cars. With less personal vehicles comes a reduced need for parking spots, opening up a bunch of green space and making Megalopolis a beautiful place to live.

Now, if you’ll let me get a bit utopian for a second, I think that this city could also help to solve another one of America’s (and really the world’s) major problems: technology addiction.

Cellphone usage relies on something called the network effect. Even if you want to quit using social media you can’t because everyone else is on there. If your entire friend group coordinates their lives using an app, leaving means isolating yourself. Yet people generally report that if their friends stopped using social media they would happily join.

If there was a city that had areas designed to function without the internet you could reverse the network effect by getting enough people in one place that live their lives offline. Here’s a couple of ways a local government could create that environment:

1. Providing tax breaks for apartment complexes that only rent to individuals who willingly exchange their smartphones for “dumbphones,” creating built-in communities. These apartments could be clustered together in certain districts, further increasing the effect.

1. Providing tax breaks for businesses like bars, gyms, or performance venues that operate phone free environments. You already see businesses across the country doing versions of this, providing an economic incentive would just add momentum to a trend that’s already occurring.

1. Continuing in the vein of #2, the city government could create phone-free public spaces like parks and town squares. You could even create phone free cars on public transportation.

1. Eventually, entire portions of the city would become areas where cellphone use is rare, causing private businesses to adapt. Hopefully it would become culturally normal for employers not to expect individuals to be on their phones/computers during off hours.

This is just a broad overview, I’m going to go more in depth in later posts. Each of the bullet points below will link to articles (mostly already written) describing my ideas in detail. Topics include:

• How to fund the purchase of land and construction of the city in a way that allows individual residents and small investors to retain primary ownership (rather than big banks or corporate landlords).

• How to roll subway tunnels, energy distribution, water treatment, and information/internet infrastructure all into one, extremely efficient underground network that will make maintenance and expansion of these systems orders of magnitude less expensive.

• How to use city design to allow people to break technology addiction.

• How to incorporate modular housing to allow the city to efficiently and organically increase its housing stock to meet demand.

• How to avoid the mistakes of past planned cities (hint, it’s by “planning” as little as possible)

• How to design the permitting, zoning, and property tax system in a way that would allow the cost of housing to remain extremely low.

• Potentially more!

It’s gonna get weird, stay tuned!

Five months ago I took every issue that “polled above 80%” among Americans and combined them into one bill.

I want to talk about a new partnership, and I’m also going to go over all the issues and their corresponding poll numbers, but first I have a bit of an apology/confession to make. When I first put all this together my understanding of polling was very basic. Since then I have talked to a lot of people who are more knowledgeable about this stuff than I am, and they have suggested more accurate sources. Due to this, some of the issues are now slightly below 80%. The majority are still well over this threshold, but a couple have dropped into the 70s.

Also, Gerrymandering, banning Wall Street from buying single family homes, and restoring congressional war powers authority have all been politicized in the last couple of months, causing them to become more contentious. None of these issues have dropped below 70%.

I’m keeping the list the same because all of the issues are still massively popular, supported by a majority of both democrats and republicans, and I think things would get too volatile if I kept changing it with public opinion.

Here are the issues in the bill with corresponding polling support numbers:

1. Ban congressional stock trading: 86%

2. Ban dark money donations in elections: 85%

3. Allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices: 85%

4. Universal paid family leave: 84%

5. End gerrymandering: 71% (Recently politicized)

6. Force the Pentagon to successfully pass an audit: 80%

7. Ban Wall Street from buying single family homes: 70% (recently politicized due to Senator Warren’s bill)

8. Increase taxes on the ultra-rich: 79%

9. Close tax-haven loopholes for the ultra-rich/corporations: 73%

10. Mandatory police body cams: 89%

11. Ban congresspeople from becoming lobbyists: 73-92% (depends on length of ban)

12. Congressional term limits: 87%

13. Require congressional approval for war: 70% (Recently politicized by Iran War)

14. Release the full Epstein Files: 86%

15. Ban corporate PACs by overturning Citizens United: 79%

16. Mandate disclosure for all organizations who donate in elections: 85%

17. Ban junk fees: 83%

18. Fully fund social security: 86%

19. Establish common sense data privacy laws: 83%

20. Enshrine the right to repair: 84%

The videos I posted about this got a lot of attention, and I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a number of sitting Congressional Reps about the ideas in them. At first it was a bit overwhelming. I am not a politician, and it was never my goal to become one. I’m a standup comedian who made a video on a whim, never expecting it to blow up the way it did. But I’m also really excited about the potential to make a positive change here.

One thing I’ve learned from all of my conversations is that the main obstacle to getting something like this passed is money. There are large corporate interests who oppose each of these issues. They’re the ones who prevent public opinion from translating into law.

That might sound discouraging, but there’s good news too. Since I started the 80% Project a couple months ago I have discovered that there is a whole network of people who have dedicated themselves to fighting corporate power. And in many cases they’re winning.

A great example of this is the Political Integrity Project. You might have seen the videos they make from their @stocking_the_capitol instagram account. They’ve convinced over 132 candidates running for the House and the Senate this election cycle to take a pledge promising four things: 1) Refuse all corporate donations, 2) Ban politicians from trading stocks, 3) Ban politicians from becoming lobbyists after they leave office 4) Vote to repeal Citizens United. Many of these candidates are favored to win their races; it is almost certain that this time next year there will be elected officials who are not beholden to the Billionaire Class. This is a relatively new phenomenon.

Moving forward, I’m going to be partnering with groups like PIP to work on the 80% Bill and other projects that will hopefully make America a fairer, more democratic society. If you’d like to support me in this endeavor, the best thing you could do is become a paid subscriber here, which will help me pay for food and rent.

Thanks,

-Jack