Two Years, Six Goals
Two Years, Six Goals
I will introduce legislation to stop private equity firms from buying up our neighborhoods and driving up housing costs.
The American starter home should not be destroyed to pad stock portfolios. Housing should be our foundation. It is one of the best ways to reach financial stability. But those stepping stones to financial freedom are being swallowed up by large private equity firms.
It is estimated that private equity owns 10 percent of apartment units and more than 230,000 single-family homes. That leaves about 1.6 million families paying rent instead of building equity.
These corporations should be making things, employing people, and investing in the real economy. Instead, they buy up homes, force prices higher, and trap families in rent with no way out.
The bullet holes are still in the glass at CDC headquarters.
For years, Coco worked on the Roybal Campus, her cubicle just steps from the shattered windows on the 10th floor of Building 21. Those bullet holes are not just broken glass. They are an assault on public health and education, the two fields Coco and I have dedicated our lives to.
My proposal is simple: bring a health center to every school. It is expensive work, but it must be done.
I will introduce legislation to repeal the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy to pay for it. According to the Wharton School, those cuts will cost $4 trillion from 2025 to 2034. In 2026 alone, the top 0.1 percent will get an average tax break of $330,475.
That money should go to public health. That money should go to kids.
We can prevent Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, which many believe are the first step toward a healthier society. Governor Kemp has done some good work here through his School Based Health Centers initiative. We need to expand it and keep this excellent work growing.
I will introduce legislation to end gerrymandering. Voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around.
We’re going to send a bill to President Trump’s desk, and we’ll see if democracy is really his priority. We’ll send it again and again, so the American people know exactly where he stands. Trump and his Fox News green room government fail the most basic test of loyalty to this country.
Politicians say this kind of reform is impossible, but the majority of Americans already support it. So who are they really working for when even the simplest anti-corruption measures can't get through?
I will introduce legislation to level the playing field for small businesses. If big corporations get tax breaks, your local shop should too. Big Tax Cuts for Small Businesses.
Y’all remember when Amazon came to town? The city of Atlanta was ready to rename streets Kindle Rd and Prime Ave, along with offering two billion dollars in tax incentives. Those same kinds of incentives should be available to small businesses. Right now, they don’t even come close.
If you create a job, whether it’s one or 1,000, you should get the same incentive. That’s just common sense. And this change has to happen at the federal level. Otherwise, states end up undercutting each other to chase job growth, and small businesses get left behind.
Social media has become one of the most destructive forces in our country, manipulating people individually through targeted ads, one-sided political news, and more. The challenge is that social media’s use of algorithms favors endless scrolling over truth. No other medium in history has been able to manipulate reality so completely for each user.
It is as if every one of us opens our own encyclopedia to the entry for the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the text changes depending on who is reading it: to one person, Custer looks like a hero, to another, Sitting Bull, a fight for the United States, to another a battle for Native American rights.
As a people, we cannot live in a world where “alternative facts” are presented as reality. That is why regulating these algorithms is necessary if we share a country with people who hold different opinions. If we cannot even agree on the facts of a situation, how can we possibly compromise on the solutions?
Trumpism is a scourge on the 4th district and our country. It has created divisions so deep that it may take generations to heal them.
From his inhumane treatment of immigrants who came here seeking the American dream, to vilifying federal workers, to implementing a tariff program based on ego rather than economics, Trump has done lasting damage to the fabric of this nation. He has strained our most vital international relationships, using the power built through generations of American sacrifice not to serve the country, but to pressure others into serving his personal agenda.
He has attacked the rule of law at every turn, twisting the Justice Department into a personal police force. Now he claims he was unfairly targeted and promises revenge. The truth is, he broke the law over and over again in his attempt to overturn our election. The people he wants to punish are the ones who followed it.
This has been enabled by a new wave of Trumpist media, where his daily whims are treated as law. Entire networks have formed to lie on his behalf because Fox News was not extreme enough. There are corners of the internet so tightly controlled that you can only participate if you pledge loyalty not to America, but to Trump.
Worst of all, he has taught millions to believe that people who disagree with him are their enemies. How many times has he said, “Democrats hate America,” simply because they refused to accept illegal behavior? He has turned on hundreds of his own supporters the moment they step out of line, unleashing mobs, online and in real life, to silence them.
How will I fight back? I will fight like hell, and I will listen more than I talk.
Democrats must understand that Trumpism did not spread like this without a Democratic Party that fell silent on the middle-class struggle and failed to speak to the majority of Americans. Politicians must listen to the people they represent. That starts here in Georgia’s 4th District.
Once we defeat Trumpism, the real work of making our country better can truly begin.