1. Clear the Wreckage
We are already in recession. It started with the poorest of us three years ago. More people feel it now — even big companies know, because their customers either stop coming, buy less, or get displaced by higher-income customers trading down. Presidents don’t typically cause recessions, but they can delay the onset or make them worse.
This isn’t abstract. In 2025, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and stripped the safety net down to the frame:
- ACA subsidies — gone since January 1. 7.3 million people already losing coverage. Premiums doubling for 20 million more.
- Medicaid — $715 billion in cuts over the next decade. 8.6 million people losing coverage. New work requirements starting end of 2026.
- SNAP — gutted after the election. States forced to share costs that were 100% federal. Expanded work requirements. More bureaucratic hurdles between families and food.
- Medicare — $536 billion in cuts triggered through 2034.
- CHIP — restricted. Immigrant children losing eligibility starting October 2026.
- VA healthcare — privatized by redirect. 75% of all new VA medical funding is going to private corporations, not the VA itself. Community care budget jumped 67% in one year. The system built specifically for veterans is being hollowed out while corporate chains capture the revenue.
- CDC, NIH, education, housing assistance — 23% across-the-board cuts to non-defense spending.
People in FL-3 are already living this. Rural counties with thin healthcare coverage just got thinner. Families who were barely making it on SNAP just lost ground. Seniors on Medicare are watching the math change under their feet.
2. Fight to Restore What Was Taken
Day one, I’m pushing for votes to restore these programs. ACA subsidies. Medicaid funding. SNAP as it was. And 100% federal Medicaid funding — remove the 10% state match that gives governors an excuse not to expand, which hollows out rural areas and creates healthcare deserts. If enough new blood comes into office in 2026, we can get it done.
3. Build Locally
But I’m not going to sit around waiting for the votes to line up. Whether restoration passes or not, I’m going after every federal grant, every existing funding stream, every dollar that’s already authorized to build the programs FL-3 needs: mobile clinics that bring care to people who can’t get to a doctor, local food systems that cut out the middleman between a farmer and a family, housing fixes that keep people in their homes when the insurance market fails them.
If the safety net gets restored, these programs become even stronger — federal funding plus local infrastructure working together. If it doesn’t, then the grants and the local systems have to do the heavy lifting on their own. Either way, we build.
4. Consequences with Teeth
In 2008, the economy collapsed and we bailed out the companies that caused it. But nobody went to prison. Not one major Wall Street executive was held accountable. The public paid $700 billion and got zero consequences for the people who broke it.
The people who caused the collapse designed the recovery — and surprise, they designed it to benefit themselves. That’s how you get a recovery where the stock market doubles while wages stay flat for a decade. And they rebuilt the same disaster that is going to be worse and hurt us even more. It is like Lucy with the football and we are Charlie Brown. We cannot let them get away with it again.
Next time — and there will be a next time — there are consequences. If we have to stabilize the system, fine. But the people who broke it answer for it. Bailouts come with prosecution, not bonuses. You don’t get to crash the economy and then sit at the table writing the rules for the rebuild.
Accountability isn’t revenge. It’s what makes the bailout legitimate. Without it, you’re just rewarding the people who caused the wreck — and giving them a reason to do it all over again.
5. The Blueprint
Clearing the wreckage and writing the tickets matters. But it’s not enough. If we rebuild the same road with the same design, it’ll collapse again. We need a blueprint for something better.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. It’s not finished — it’s a draft, and it needs to be discussed, tested, and shaped by the people who’ll live with the results. This is a long-term vision that requires national conversation and consensus-building, not first-term legislation. But I think it’s worth putting on the table now so the conversation can start.
Why This Keeps Happening
The plan above addresses what’s broken and what to build. The sections below explain the deeper pattern — why the economy keeps knocking people down, and why the usual fixes never hold.
The Ratchet
Every recession takes your job. That’s the constant. But the newer ones don’t just take your job — they eliminate your entire career field. You don’t get to go back to what you know. You start over in something new, while the savings and equity you put aside for the future disappear at the same time.
In 2001, people lost their 401(k)s. In 2008, they lost their houses, their careers, and their retirement plans all at once. There is a segment of a generation from 2008 who were too old to make a full recovery. They never came back. They’re still behind.
COVID actually gave us a taste of what a real safety net could look like. For a short time, instead of qualifying for a dozen programs, people just got checks. No means test, no bureaucratic gauntlet. You could spend it however you needed to. Did some people waste it? Sure. But many others paid down debt, improved their credit scores, caught up on rent. For people who never recovered from 2008, it was the first breathing room they’d had in twelve years.
But there was no cop. PPP money got looted. Prices got gouged. And so people look at the stimulus and say it was a waste of money — not because the idea was wrong, but because nobody was held accountable for the fraud around it.
Then the assistance ended. And the drowning started again. By late 2022, the 2008 crowd — the ones who never fully recovered — went back under first. Slowly, it’s been climbing. Today it’s hitting six-figure households.
You hear people talk about a “K-shaped recovery” — some going up, some going down. That’s not what this is. This is more like an E. The bottom rung got wiped out in 2008. They’ve been underwater ever since. COVID let them come up for air, but they’ve been going back under for over three years now. The middle rung is getting wet. And at some point, even the top rung can’t keep the economy afloat on its own.
This isn’t a cycle. It’s a ratchet. Each recession tightens the grip. The recovery never fully loosens it. And every time you get knocked down, you start over from further back than the last time.
I’ve been knocked down in most of the recessions in my adult life. It doesn’t just take your money — it takes your momentum. You spend years climbing back to where you were, and by the time you get there, the next one hits. You’re not starting over from where you fell. You’re starting over from further back.
I’m not running because I have all the answers. I’m running because I know what it feels like when the system treats you like you’re disposable — and I know it doesn’t have to work that way.
This Has Happened Before
Three thousand years ago, the entire Mediterranean was globalized — Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Mesopotamia, all connected by trade networks and mutual dependence. When it collapsed between 1200 and 1150 BC, it wasn’t one cause. It was a cascade: drought, supply chain disruption, internal rebellion, failed leadership, and invasion — all hitting a system that looked strong but was fragile underneath.
Archaeologist Eric Cline ranks the aftermath: The Phoenicians thrived — small, flexible, no empire to defend. The Mycenaeans lost their palaces, their writing system, their political organization. Took 400 years to rebuild. The Hittites disappeared entirely.
The pattern: the societies most central to the old network were most vulnerable when it failed. The ones on the periphery — smaller, more flexible, with local capacity — came through it best.
Look at today: trade wars and tariffs disrupting supply chains. Wars and proxy wars displacing millions. Drought and famine driving migration. A shrinking middle class squeezed between a small elite and growing poverty. Fear, suspicion, finger-pointing — blaming the people fleeing the collapse instead of the conditions that caused it. Three thousand years ago they blamed the “Sea Peoples.” Today we blame immigrants. Same pattern, same misdirection away from structural failure.
Not everyone is seeing this for what it is, but I am. That’s why I’m working to make our district flexible, so that we will come through it. And provide a model for the rest of the country when they are ready to see what’s happening.
I’m not coming up with a radical new plan. I’m dusting off an old plan from thousands of years ago and putting a modern twist on it. Let’s not reinvent the wheel — let’s improve it for today’s challenges.
Every society that ever collapsed thought it couldn’t happen to them. The ones that survived weren’t the biggest or the strongest — they were the ones that kept their people fed, their systems flexible, and their leaders honest. Phoenicians or Mycenaeans. Butterflies or caterpillars. The choice is the same one it’s always been.
That’s the frame for what I call the butterfly economy. The caterpillar economy is the Mycenaean model — centralized, extractive, fragile. Everything flows to the center, and when the center breaks, everything downstream dies. The butterfly economy is the Phoenician model — local production, local circulation, local resilience. Not isolation. Connection that serves the community rather than extracting from it.
Here is the key difference from the Bronze Age: we have technology that works at small scale and worldwide instant communications. Back then, news took weeks to travel. A country could change hands before word got back. Today we know instantly. AI for health diagnostics. Solar for distributed energy. 3D printing for local manufacturing. The periphery now has tools that don’t require national scale. The Phoenicians had to figure it out with what they had. We have options they never dreamed of — if we choose to use them.
History does not have to repeat exactly. We still have good will and instant communications. We can help people where they are instead of making them come to us. Coming to us stresses them out and stresses us out. Back then, the rule was win-lose. Today, we have the ability to make it win-win.
The Strait Jacket
First it was oil, then fertilizer, now helium? Every time I turn around there’s another thing that’s more expensive for us and life-threatening to the rest of the world.
The Strait of Hormuz isn’t just an oil chokepoint. Before the February 28 closure, 144 ships per day transited it — and only 37% were oil tankers. The rest carried the raw materials that keep modern life running. When the strait closed, the downstream cascade hit everything:
- Fertilizer: roughly 50% of globally traded urea and 45% of sulfur come from the Gulf. Urea prices are up 50% — and it’s hitting at spring planting season. The southern hemisphere is already panicking because their planting season is only a few months away.
- Plastics: 85% of Middle East polyethylene exports transit the Strait. Polymer prices up 41%. That hits diapers, IV bags, food packaging, medical supplies, even soccer balls.
- Propane: 28–30% of global seaborne LPG exports blocked. Rural FL-3 homes using propane for heating and cooking are getting hit directly.
- Helium: 33% of world supply comes from Qatar. There is no substitute in semiconductor manufacturing. 14% of capacity is permanently damaged — a five-year repair timeline.
- Aluminum, synthetic rubber, naphtha — it compounds. Each shortage feeds the next.
The FL-3 compound effect: fertilizer up, fuel up, propane up, plastics up, auto repair up — all hitting simultaneously in a district with below-median income, no public transit, and an agriculture-dependent economy. These aren’t disruptions that resolve in weeks. Repairs take three to five years.
We have many of these resources domestically, but a global shortage raises all prices — including ours. And this is hitting at a time when people have already dropped to cheaper stores, cheaper versions, are using buy-now-pay-later because credit cards are maxed and bank accounts are empty. Meanwhile, people in parts of the world will starve. Not enough fertilizer means fewer crops, which leads to famine, which makes countries poorer, which in this global economy pushes everyone toward fiscal crisis. A domino effect. And the gutting of USAID only makes it worse.
And here’s the strategic inversion nobody in Washington wants to talk about: China is insulated. They have coal-to-ammonia capacity and domestic helium production. Russia is the world’s largest fertilizer exporter. The crisis hands leverage to the exact adversaries it was supposed to pressure.
We went to war to project strength. The result is that our adversaries are more self-sufficient and we’re more dependent. That’s not strength. That’s a strait jacket.
This is exactly why local resilience matters. Communities that depend on a single distant supply chain are Mycenaean — one break in the line and everything falls apart. Communities with local food systems, distributed energy, and flexible networks are Phoenician. They bend instead of breaking.
Right now we’re feeling the effects of decisions made hundreds or thousands of miles away. My plan to reinvest locally is about reducing those effects — so we call our own shots instead of reacting to someone else’s. Your electric bill is going up because of decisions made in other states — here’s why and what we do about it.