Credit card companies are running one of the most exploitative businesses in America. They advertise “rewards” and “points” while quietly charging interest rates north of 25–30%. That’s not lending, that's legalized loan-sharking.

For context, the average credit card interest rates in the 1980s hovered around 12–15%. Today, us working families are paying double that just to survive. When groceries, rent, and utilities go up faster than wages, people turn to credit cards. The banks know it.

We can fix this by capping credit card interest rates, and slashing them roughly in half. This would immediately put money back in the pockets of working families, reduce household debt, and prevent financial emergencies from turning into lifelong traps.

Hard work and bad luck shouldn’t be punished. Especially not with compound interest.

According to a recent report, Artificial Intelligence will take up to 50% of the jobs in our country over the next 25 years. We see it starting already. None of us ever voted for this. We are being sold A.I. like we don’t have a choice, but we do.

1. We need an immediate moratorium on the further development of artificial intelligence until congress and experts can build in common sense safeguards against a technology that one senior developer said has a 30% chance of ending human life. 
2. Limited military application: we need to pass laws assuring that A.I. will never make decisions regarding our nuclear weapon systems, military targeting, or putting civilians or our troops in harm’s way.
3. As A.I. is already taking jobs, we need to make sure that people are not left hanging in the wind. That’s why I believe in a universal basic income for every American, but especially those who lose their jobs due to technological advances.

Healthcare in America is broken. People routinely go bankrupt over medical bills, big pharma has far too much power, and we have some of the worst health outcomes in the entire world. 

1. We need to transition to a health model that works without breaking our economy in the process. I believe we should have a strong public option, allow states to build their own universal coverage systems, and eventually transition to a Medicare for All model.
2. One of the worst aspects of Obamacare was that it allowed big pharma to set drug prices. These corrupt companies spend billions on lobbying Congress to get what they want. We are one of only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical advertising on television. They have made a ton of money off insulin, a medicine that was designed to be free over 100 years ago. Big pharma has a history of getting Americans hooked on pills they don’t need and shouldn’t have. They don’t care. All that matters to many of them is their quarterly profit margin. This needs to stop
3. The truth is that transitioning to a Medicare for All model won’t make a bit of difference if we don’t get chronic disease under control in America. This means fitness standards for our kids. It means reformulating our diets around healthy, whole foods and not the overly processed garbage that takes up 90% of our supermarket shelves. It means banning chemicals like glyphosate from our food supply. 

I believe strongly in Medicare for All, but it won’t do us any good if we don’t get our $40 trillion debt under control first. 

Nearly every family in Maine knows someone who has struggled with addiction. This is personal for me, I’ve lost two of my closest friends to heroin addiction. Now, crystal meth is taking over the streets of Portland and quietly infiltrating our small towns. The police are doing their best, but we need recovery systems that treat people with dignity and give them a real path forward. No slogans. No half-measures.

I support testing a new model of addiction recovery centers in high-risk states like Maine. These centers would provide residential living, accountability, and group discussion like many traditional recovery centers. However they would be built around giving people purpose and community, two of the most important things in recovery. These would be working centers, pairing recovery with responsibility and job training.

Participants would split their time between treatment and skill-building exercises. That could be culinary training with an on site restaurant. It could be built around the trades, where patients would learn basic carpentry, plumbing, or electrical work and be guaranteed entry into a free two year community college program if they meet certain criteria. The center could be a working farm. It could begin people on a track to become teachers, or paramedics, or maybe even recovery specialists.

Recovery works best when people have purpose, stability, and a future to work toward. We can save lives and rebuild communities by investing in both. If done right, this could be cost neutral.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has existed for over two decades, but has become a very different organization over the past twelve months. They have followed, chased, detained, harassed, and arrested American citizens and those authorized to be here. They wear masks, carry military grade weapons, and routinely detain people without showing identification. Many of their newer hires are underqualified and undertrained. There have been dozens of recorded interactions where they point their guns at peaceful protestors, kick detainees in the head on public streets, break windows, cut seatbelts, tear gas families, pull people out of cars, racially profile, lie to gain entry, and engage in general brutality.

Now, they have targeted Maine. At the very least, we must mandate that they:

• They show identification
• Take off their masks
• Stay away from schools and hospitals
• Not walk the streets with semi-automatic weapons
• Not engage in racial profiling
• Be held accountable for their actions

We need to rebuild our immigration enforcement system from the ground up. We need qualified, well trained agents. We need to end this carnage before it gets worse and more people die.

We are Americans. We need to act like it.

Congress was never meant to be a lifelong career. Yet Susan Collins has been working in the Senate now for 50 years. Another candidate has called for term limits while saying he could see himself serving 30 years. Enough of this bullshit. 

1. I believe that the U.S. Senate needs a two term (12 year) limit. No one should be allowed to serve longer than two terms. I’m also putting my money where my mouth is. If elected, I will not serve or attempt to serve more than two terms. To be honest, I don’t trust anyone who likes Washington D.C. that much.
2. We recognize that a teenager does not have the ability to serve in Congress, so why do we think that someone in their 80s or 90s does? A few years ago we all watched as one senator in her 80s experienced dementia and was told how to vote by her staff. We’ve had presidents experience senior moments and noticeable cognitive decline while in office. This isn’t a partisan issue. We need an age cap on those who can serve. No person over 75 years old should be able to serve as a U.S. Senator.

Too many of the political leaders of our country are corrupt and double dealing. This has to stop.

1. We need an immediate trading ban for members of Congress on all financial instruments including stocks, futures, derivatives, and crypto currency.
2. Every member of Congress should place their financial assets in a blind trust for the length of their time of service. 
3. We need major campaign finance reform that bans all anonymous political donations, lowers the amount of money people are allowed to donate to candidates and parties, and bans most large political action committees (Super PACs)
4. I promise to partner with reformers regardless of their political party. I promise to build the kinds of relationships across party lines that actually get things done and fix these problems.

We live in a country that is dramatically less free than it was even 25 years ago. There are cameras on nearly every traffic light. There are more than 50,000 low-orbiting satellites that can track us pretty much anywhere. Law enforcement officers routinely use military grade hardware. There are over 200,000 warrantless searches of Americans email every year. And Susan Collins has voted for all of this.

1. No more warrantless searching of the emails of American citizens
2. No more warrantless wiretapping of American citizens
3. Israel, China, and other countries are already enhancing AI-powered robot dogs with military style hardware. In the United States police departments have begun purchasing this same hardware. This should be banned from American streets
4. American law enforcement does not need and generally should not have military grade hardware. Law enforcement should be judiciously used and always unmasked.
5. American citizens have an enshrined right to protect their families. I will not take that away.

Our national debt is quickly approaching $40 trillion. If we don’t stop this, our credit will soon be further downgraded. It will trigger a currency crisis. There will come a point where we cannot inflate our way out of it. Over the past couple decades, dozens of countries with high debt have found themselves in that position, and we have come to rescue them. Who will help us?

None of the ideas I’ve outlined in the other sections will be possible if we don’t get our debt under control first. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you or does not understand the economy.

1. Restructure our relationship with Poland Spring Water. They take a billion gallons of our water every year, package it in plastic bottles that aren’t really recyclable, and pay almost nothing for it. Why? So billionaire hedge fund owners can get even richer while our wells go dry. This is unacceptable and needs to stop.
2. We have some of the highest electricity bills in the entire country. We need a community owned power company in Maine and we need it now.
3. Ticks barely existed in Maine thirty years ago. Now you can’t go into the woods without being covered in them. Lyme and other tick borne diseases are destroying our lives and our politicians barely do anything about it while more Mainers suffer every year. 

It is beyond question that Maine used to have a very good education system and now we don’t. This doesn’t stop at our state border. The truth is that for most of the 20th century American intelligence and ingenuity were the envy of the world. Now Our kids I.Q. Scores are dropping for the first time in 100 years. They are getting dumber and there are ways to stop it.

1. A major part of the problem is the dramatic rise of ADHD in children. They are spending too much time doing unnatural things in unnatural environments. We need to ban smart phones for kids until they are 16 and ban social media for kids until they are 17. 
2. We need a larger focus in education outside the classroom. That means spending a larger part of the day outside—either learning about the natural world or engaging in educational play.
3. We need an emphasis on what works. We need to return to kids reading and doing non-technology based work. Writing with a pen and paper, reading actual books. These help train the mind and lengthen attention span. We need mandatory education for all high school students that cover democracy, the responsibility of self-rule, and the meaning of things like justice. We need them to graduate with some degree of financial literacy. We also need them to have addiction awareness training. This shouldn’t just be for addictive drugs, but things like internet porn, which is brainwashing generations of kids starting as young as 10 or 12 years old. They need to understand how it’s changing their attitudes toward relationships, dating, and love.

For too long America has spread havoc all over the world. While our businesses shuttered and our jobs went away, we spent trillions we didn’t have in deeply misguided wars all around the world. We need to emphasize a culture in our country of peace, not war.

1. End our direct and indirect involvement in nearly all foreign wars.
2. Stop planning, funding, and executing coups of others countries, especially when it doesn’t affect us directly.
3. We must not weaponize (or allow other countries to weaponize) space.
4. We need to refocus on ending nuclear weapons. There are over 12,000 of these currently in the world and one of them could destroy civilization as we know it. The very existence of so many of these weapons makes the odds of one of them being used in our lifetimes very high. We must form a new international organization to control and guard these. The risks are just too great.
5. We must approach other countries with dignity and respect. We must not be belligerent or assume we know all the answers. If we continue on the current path we will continue to make our country increasingly less safe.