PRIORITIES • Protect Our Future • Policy to
Live Within Our Means
Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.
Every parent works to leave their kids a little better off than they had it. Right now, Washington is doing the opposite. We are running up a debt our children never voted for and handing them the bill — with interest. That isn’t a plan. It’s a quiet theft from the next generation, and both parties have their hands in it. I’m running to stop it, because the country my kids inherit should be freer and stronger than the one I got — not mortgaged out from under them.
Here’s where we are. Our national debt has passed $37 trillion. The interest alone — just the interest — now costs more than our entire military, and for the first time in history, more than Medicare. It runs to roughly $24 billion every week, and it’s nearly 10 times what we spend educating our kids. In just six years that interest bill has grown almost 190%. Three times in the past 15 years, the major credit-rating agencies have downgraded the United States. This is the most powerful country on earth spending more to rent money than to defend itself or care for its seniors — and the line is still climbing.
And understand who that money goes to. Every dollar of interest is a transfer — out of your pocket, and into the hands of the wealthiest bondholders and the foreign governments that hold our debt. The richer they get off it, the poorer and less free our country becomes. A nation this deep in the hole has fewer choices: less room to cut your taxes, less room to invest in your kids, less room to handle the next crisis or stand up to a rival abroad. Debt isn’t just a number. It’s lost freedom.
The establishment refuses to admit it: you cannot fix this by taxing alone, and you cannot fix it by cutting alone. The hole is too big and growing too fast. It takes both — and it takes leaders willing to make people on both sides uncomfortable. So let me be just as clear about the other half: we do this without touching the Social Security and Medicare you paid into your whole life, and we start by making the people at the very top finally pay what they owe.
Here’s what I’ll do — and why
Put Washington on a budget — a balanced one, over the business cycle. Every family and every small business in this district has to make the math work. Washington should too. I’ll fight for a balanced budget requirement measured over the full business cycle — room to respond in a recession or an emergency, but a hard duty to stop borrowing in good times, when there’s no excuse for it. Right now Washington borrows in the good years and the bad. That ends.
Lead with the cut — end the waste before we ask anyone for another dime. Before a single new tax, we go after the spending no one can defend: the duplication, the fraud, the programs that fail every audit, the pet projects bought with your money. The Pentagon alone still can’t pass a clean audit, and defense spending is pushing a trillion dollars a year with almost no one asking where it goes. Make every dollar prove its worth before we send Washington one more.
Make the tax cheats and the billionaires pay what they owe — not you. Here’s the honest other half, and I won’t dodge it: we will never balance this budget while the richest people and biggest corporations in the country pay a smaller share than the nurse and the electrician. That’s arithmetic. The ultra-wealthy hire armies of lawyers to skip the bill working families can’t escape, and some of the most profitable corporations in America pay next to nothing. I’ll fight to close those loopholes and make them pay their fair share — because a country serious about its debt starts at the top, not with the people barely getting by.
Never balance the budget on the backs of the people who earned their benefits. This is the line I will not cross. Social Security and Medicare aren’t handouts — you paid into them out of every paycheck, and they are promises this country made to you. The establishment always reaches for those first because seniors don’t have a lobby the way industry does. Not on my watch. We balance the budget on the tax cheats, the waste, and the wealthy who’ve dodged the bill — never on the retiree, the veteran, or the family living on what they earned.
What this means for Our District
For nearly 30 years, this district has sent the same man to Washington while the debt exploded — and he’s had a front-row seat to the whole thing. Our congressman sits on the Ways and Means Committee, the panel that literally writes the nation’s tax laws — and no Democrat on that committee has taken more corporate PAC money except one. That’s the trap in plain sight: the people who write the rules take the checks from the interests who benefit from them, and the bill lands on you. For three decades the spending has climbed and the debt has multiplied on his watch — after all that time, he isn’t going to start making the hard calls now. I take no corporate PAC money, no special interest money, and no foreign money — so when I say we’ll make Washington live on a budget, there’s no donor holding the other end of the leash.
The bottom line
We can fix this. This country has climbed out of debt before, in living memory, and we did it by growing, by making the wealthy pay their share, and by refusing to hand our problems to our kids. So let’s be the generation that stops the theft — that leaves our children a country with more freedom and more choices than we were handed, not less. Let’s put Washington on a budget, make the people at the top pay what they owe, protect every dollar our seniors earned, and give the next generation their future back. That’s just what responsible people do, and it’s long past time someone did it.
SOURCES
U.S. debt has passed $37 trillion; net interest now exceeds national defense and Medicare: U.S. Department of the Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement / Fiscal Data — fiscaldata.treasury.gov · Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook — cbo.gov
Interest ≈ 10× federal education spending; ~190% growth since 2020; ~$24B per week: Peter G. Peterson Foundation — pgpf.org · Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — crfb.org
Three U.S. credit downgrades: Moody’s Ratings (May 16, 2025); Fitch Ratings (Aug. 1, 2023); S&P (Aug. 5, 2011) — apnews.com
Pentagon has never passed a clean financial audit: U.S. Government Accountability Office — gao.gov
Rep. Thompson’s tenure and Ways and Means Committee seat: mikethompson.house.gov
Thompson’s corporate PAC ranking among Ways and Means Democrats: Federal Election Commission filings — fec.gov