u/PresRun2028

The honest tax, the round trip we can stop making, and the house we hand down

Let me talk with you about the hard one. Taxes. This is the part of the plan where the knives come out, and I'd rather walk into that with you honestly than pretend it's simple. So pull up a chair. Tell me where you think I'm wrong. That's the only way any of this is worth doing.

Steve Forbes was more right than they let him be

Years back, Steve Forbes ran on a flat tax — one rate, everybody the same. He got attacked hard for it, and some of the hardest shots came from people who read his own magazine and trusted his economics. Here's what I'll say about that, plainly: on the fairness of the idea, Forbes was right. Everybody paying by the same rule is not the cruelty people made it out to be. It's the opposite of a rigged game.

Where his plan ran into trouble was not his heart. It was his vantage. Steve Forbes is an economist, and a good one. He looked at the flat tax and saw something fair, and he stopped there — because that's where an economist's road tends to end. I come at it from a different corner. I was raised by a couple of men rooted deep in how money actually works, but I ended up a philosopher who thinks about people first. That's an odd pair of eyes to have, and I don't pretend it makes me smarter than Steve Forbes. It just means I can see one step further down a road he opened. I'm not tearing his idea down. I'm building on it. He helped.

The round trip nobody should be paying for

Here's the step past the flat tax. Even if Forbes's number had worked — and I don't think his number carried the load — a flat tax with no floor does something quietly foolish. It takes money from the working poor, runs it up to Washington, skims an administrative cost off the top, and then hands it back to those same families to pay for the things the whole country already agrees are worth paying for. You taxed them, charged them a fee to process their own money, and returned what was left.

That is a toll on a circle. And you don't need to care about anybody's feelings to see it's wasteful — you just need to be able to count. So we stop making the round trip. Below a floor tied to what it actually costs to live where you live — the District Poverty Level — you pay no federal income tax at all. We don't take it, skim it, and give it back. We just leave it where it is.

You cannot waste money you never collected in the first place.

The one complaint every American shares

In all my years, I have never once heard an American, left or right, say the real problem is that we help people who genuinely need help. That is not the complaint. The complaint — and everybody, and I do mean everybody, shares it — is three words: waste, fraud, and abuse. The government wastes the money. Some people defraud the system. Others abuse it. Fair complaints, all three. So let's answer all three, on the country's own terms.

Waste, we answer here by not collecting the money in the first place — no round trip, no processing fee, nothing to waste. But understand this is one piece of a bigger job. Waste turns up in every department of the government, and we go after it everywhere — the way we lay out in other briefings, department by department. This is not a single clever trick in one column of the budget; it is the same discipline applied wherever the money moves. Fraud and abuse, we answer the way a nation of laws is supposed to: we identify the people who are cheating the system and we exclude them, using the laws already on the books. Notice what that is and is not. We will not punish the family who needs the help to get at the handful who game it. We go after the ones who are actually cheating — by name, under existing law — and we leave the honest people alone.

A dollar is a dollar

Above that floor, one rate. It opens at forty-five percent, and it falls toward about thirty percent as we pay the debt down. And it is the same rate on every kind of income — a paycheck, a dividend, a capital gain, money made overseas — because a dollar is a dollar. The person who earns hers swinging a hammer should not be taxed harder than the person who earns his while he sleeps. That's not envy. That's just the same rule for everybody, which is the thing Forbes had right from the start.

And here's the part that makes the floor more than kindness. When we exempt the lowest earners and kill off the hidden taxes they pay all year — the payroll bite, the gas tax, the little nicks — that comes to real money for a family living close to the line. These are rough figures from our own work, meant to start a conversation and not to be carved in stone: a floor somewhere in the range of eleven to fifteen thousand dollars, and hidden taxes eliminated on the order of four thousand dollars a year for those families. Now follow that four thousand. That's four thousand dollars we no longer have to turn around and pay back out in support to offset what we took. We didn't take it, so we don't have to give it back. The kindness and the arithmetic point the same direction.

This is one beam, not the whole house

I need to be honest about something, because a campaign that tells you one policy fixes everything is a campaign that is lying to you. This tax idea isn’t a solution by itself. It can’t be. This campaign started from a hard truth: if you think you've solved a problem, you haven't looked hard enough, because no problem in this country stands alone — every one of them is tied to all the others.

So this beam only holds because the others are going in beside it. That exempted family isn't paying for their health coverage either, because of what we do on health care. The spending gets cleaner, the debt comes down, the floor rises as the country heals. Pull any one of these out and the rest sag. Put them in together and they hold each other up. That is the whole design. It is slower than a slogan and it is built to actually stand.

The house we were born into

Let me close where I mean to close, at the kitchen table, honest. We built this debt over generations. Everyone from the end of the Second World War to yesterday owns a piece of how we got here. And everyone from today to the year twenty sixty is responsible for the repair — not because we did it, but because we were born into a house that needs work. You want to keep the house, you fix the house.

And understand what happens if we don't. A neglected house does not sit politely and wait. It gets worse. Live in it and refuse to repair it, and the thing your children inherit is not the house you got — it's a house that has fallen further down. Nobody comes out ahead. That’s not where I want to live, and I don’t believe it’s where most Americans want to live. We have always wanted better — for ourselves, for our kids, for our grandkids. That wanting is the most American thing there is.

I will tell you the truth about my own place in this. I am not likely to live to see this finished. My wife, younger than me by twelve years, most likely will not either. My children might live to see some of it. It may be my granddaughter who lives inside the better country we start building now — and her children who simply grow up in it, never knowing it was ever any other way. I will not cut a ribbon on this. I am planting a tree I will never sit under. I am at peace with that.

You do not fix a house that's been neglected for a generation in a single week. You start, because starting is the whole job.

Because here is the reward, and it is the honest one — the only one I can actually promise you. A hundred generations from now, let them look back and say the men and women of the Second World War were a great generation. And let them say the ones who took the old house apart and rebuilt it, right at the dawn of the twenty-first century — they were the greatest. That is worth more than seeing it finished. That is worth being the ones willing to begin.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN                                                                                                    

The honest tax, the round trip we can stop making, and the house we hand down

Let me talk with you about the hard one. Taxes. This is the part of the plan where the knives come out, and I'd rather walk into that with you honestly than pretend it's simple. So pull up a chair. Tell me where you think I'm wrong. That's the only way any of this is worth doing.

Steve Forbes was more right than they let him be

Years back, Steve Forbes ran on a flat tax — one rate, everybody the same. He got attacked hard for it, and some of the hardest shots came from people who read his own magazine and trusted his economics. Here's what I'll say about that, plainly: on the fairness of the idea, Forbes was right. Everybody paying by the same rule is not the cruelty people made it out to be. It's the opposite of a rigged game.

Where his plan ran into trouble was not his heart. It was his vantage. Steve Forbes is an economist, and a good one. He looked at the flat tax and saw something fair, and he stopped there — because that's where an economist's road tends to end. I come at it from a different corner. I was raised by a couple of men rooted deep in how money actually works, but I ended up a philosopher who thinks about people first. That's an odd pair of eyes to have, and I don't pretend it makes me smarter than Steve Forbes. It just means I can see one step further down a road he opened. I'm not tearing his idea down. I'm building on it. He helped.

The round trip nobody should be paying for

Here's the step past the flat tax. Even if Forbes's number had worked — and I don't think his number carried the load — a flat tax with no floor does something quietly foolish. It takes money from the working poor, runs it up to Washington, skims an administrative cost off the top, and then hands it back to those same families to pay for the things the whole country already agrees are worth paying for. You taxed them, charged them a fee to process their own money, and returned what was left.

That is a toll on a circle. And you don't need to care about anybody's feelings to see it's wasteful — you just need to be able to count. So we stop making the round trip. Below a floor tied to what it actually costs to live where you live — the District Poverty Level — you pay no federal income tax at all. We don't take it, skim it, and give it back. We just leave it where it is.

You cannot waste money you never collected in the first place.

The one complaint every American shares

In all my years, I have never once heard an American, left or right, say the real problem is that we help people who genuinely need help. That is not the complaint. The complaint — and everybody, and I do mean everybody, shares it — is three words: waste, fraud, and abuse. The government wastes the money. Some people defraud the system. Others abuse it. Fair complaints, all three. So let's answer all three, on the country's own terms.

Waste, we answer here by not collecting the money in the first place — no round trip, no processing fee, nothing to waste. But understand this is one piece of a bigger job. Waste turns up in every department of the government, and we go after it everywhere — the way we lay out in other briefings, department by department. This is not a single clever trick in one column of the budget; it is the same discipline applied wherever the money moves. Fraud and abuse, we answer the way a nation of laws is supposed to: we identify the people who are cheating the system and we exclude them, using the laws already on the books. Notice what that is and is not. We will not punish the family who needs the help to get at the handful who game it. We go after the ones who are actually cheating — by name, under existing law — and we leave the honest people alone.

A dollar is a dollar

Above that floor, one rate. It opens at forty-five percent, and it falls toward about thirty percent as we pay the debt down. And it is the same rate on every kind of income — a paycheck, a dividend, a capital gain, money made overseas — because a dollar is a dollar. The person who earns hers swinging a hammer should not be taxed harder than the person who earns his while he sleeps. That's not envy. That's just the same rule for everybody, which is the thing Forbes had right from the start.

And here's the part that makes the floor more than kindness. When we exempt the lowest earners and kill off the hidden taxes they pay all year — the payroll bite, the gas tax, the little nicks — that comes to real money for a family living close to the line. These are rough figures from our own work, meant to start a conversation and not to be carved in stone: a floor somewhere in the range of eleven to fifteen thousand dollars, and hidden taxes eliminated on the order of four thousand dollars a year for those families. Now follow that four thousand. That's four thousand dollars we no longer have to turn around and pay back out in support to offset what we took. We didn't take it, so we don't have to give it back. The kindness and the arithmetic point the same direction.

This is one beam, not the whole house

I need to be honest about something, because a campaign that tells you one policy fixes everything is a campaign that is lying to you. This tax idea isn’t a solution by itself. It can’t be. This campaign started from a hard truth: if you think you've solved a problem, you haven't looked hard enough, because no problem in this country stands alone — every one of them is tied to all the others.

So this beam only holds because the others are going in beside it. That exempted family isn't paying for their health coverage either, because of what we do on health care. The spending gets cleaner, the debt comes down, the floor rises as the country heals. Pull any one of these out and the rest sag. Put them in together and they hold each other up. That is the whole design. It is slower than a slogan and it is built to actually stand.

The house we were born into

Let me close where I mean to close, at the kitchen table, honest. We built this debt over generations. Everyone from the end of the Second World War to yesterday owns a piece of how we got here. And everyone from today to the year twenty sixty is responsible for the repair — not because we did it, but because we were born into a house that needs work. You want to keep the house, you fix the house.

And understand what happens if we don't. A neglected house does not sit politely and wait. It gets worse. Live in it and refuse to repair it, and the thing your children inherit is not the house you got — it's a house that has fallen further down. Nobody comes out ahead. That’s not where I want to live, and I don’t believe it’s where most Americans want to live. We have always wanted better — for ourselves, for our kids, for our grandkids. That wanting is the most American thing there is.

I will tell you the truth about my own place in this. I am not likely to live to see this finished. My wife, younger than me by twelve years, most likely will not either. My children might live to see some of it. It may be my granddaughter who lives inside the better country we start building now — and her children who simply grow up in it, never knowing it was ever any other way. I will not cut a ribbon on this. I am planting a tree I will never sit under. I am at peace with that.

You do not fix a house that's been neglected for a generation in a single week. You start, because starting is the whole job.

Because here is the reward, and it is the honest one — the only one I can actually promise you. A hundred generations from now, let them look back and say the men and women of the Second World War were a great generation. And let them say the ones who took the old house apart and rebuilt it, right at the dawn of the twenty-first century — they were the greatest. That is worth more than seeing it finished. That is worth being the ones willing to begin.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

Treasury, the IRS, and the office you've never heard of that decides when a law becomes real

Let me talk with you this afternoon about the plumbing. Not the exciting part of government — the pipes. Because there are three offices that handle every dollar you send to Washington, and if the plumbing leaks, nothing else in the house works. Push back where it doesn't sit right.

The Constitution is about as clear as it ever gets on one thing: Congress, and Congress alone, holds the power of the purse. The people's representatives decide what gets funded. But here's how it actually runs day to day — the Treasury collects the money, the IRS interprets and enforces the rules, and an office called OMB decides when and whether the money actually goes out the door. Three arms of the executive branch, all handling money that belongs to you and was promised by the people you elected.

The money does not belong to the agency. It belongs to the people — and Congress speaks for the people. The executive enforces. It does not invent.

The Treasury: a steward that drifted into a boss

The Treasury was built to do a plain job: manage the nation's money, handle the debt, mind the currency, advise on the economy. Somewhere along the way, the service job got overtaken by a policy job — deciding who gets a waiver, who gets a delay, who gets enforced against and who gets a pass. When an office that's supposed to keep the books starts handing out favors by discretion, some taxpayers get treated one way and some another. That is not what a steward does. We are going to put it back to minding the money, honestly and evenly, for everyone.

The IRS: fear where there should be function

Here is a hard truth about the IRS that most Americans feel in their gut. The tax code has swollen past seventy thousand pages. The agency's own help line is not even on the hook if it gives you wrong advice — you can follow what they tell you and still get penalized. So honest people who are trying to get it right end up hiring somebody just to avoid a mistake, while the biggest players hire armies of lawyers to make the whole thing disappear. The working family gets the audit; the giant gets the loophole. We have already laid out, in another briefing, how we replace this maze with one honest rate above a floor tied to the cost of living where you live — which makes most of this complexity simply vanish. Taxes go back to what they were meant to be: a visible contribution to the common good, not a trap built to catch the person who wasn't trying to cheat.

OMB: the quiet office that decides when a law is real

Now the one almost nobody has heard of. The Office of Management and Budget prepares the president's budget and reviews the agencies — fine. But it holds one power that ought to trouble you: it can decide when, or whether, money that Congress already voted for actually gets released. Think about what that means. The people's representatives pass a law, fund it, sign it — and one executive office can quietly slow-walk the money and, by delay alone, undo what the law commanded. That is not execution. That is obstruction wearing a technicality. We will hold OMB to being what it should be — a technical compliance office that makes sure the money goes where the law said, on time — not a political gatekeeper that can veto Congress with a stopwatch.

What we do about it

None of the fixes here are exotic. We set firm timelines so that money Congress appropriated goes out on a schedule, not whenever an official feels like it. We publish the Treasury's disbursement records in the open, so you and Congress can watch the money move in real time. We tie every spending decision to the actual text of the law that authorized it. And we put career professionals, not political appointees, in charge of tax enforcement, so nobody's audit depends on which party is in power. This is not the president micromanaging. It is the executive branch remembering it works for Congress, and Congress works for you.

This campaign will not govern with slogans. It will govern with receipts.

That is the whole of it. When you can see what you paid, what was owed, and what was spent, you can start to believe again. And when the people's representatives say fund this, it should be funded — not delayed, not diluted, and never quietly ignored by an office you were never meant to notice.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

Treasury, the IRS, and the office you've never heard of that decides when a law becomes real

 Let me talk with you this afternoon about the plumbing. Not the exciting part of government — the pipes. Because there are three offices that handle every dollar you send to Washington, and if the plumbing leaks, nothing else in the house works. Push back where it doesn't sit right.

The Constitution is about as clear as it ever gets on one thing: Congress, and Congress alone, holds the power of the purse. The people's representatives decide what gets funded. But here's how it actually runs day to day — the Treasury collects the money, the IRS interprets and enforces the rules, and an office called OMB decides when and whether the money actually goes out the door. Three arms of the executive branch, all handling money that belongs to you and was promised by the people you elected.

The money does not belong to the agency. It belongs to the people — and Congress speaks for the people. The executive enforces. It does not invent.

The Treasury: a steward that drifted into a boss

The Treasury was built to do a plain job: manage the nation's money, handle the debt, mind the currency, advise on the economy. Somewhere along the way, the service job got overtaken by a policy job — deciding who gets a waiver, who gets a delay, who gets enforced against and who gets a pass. When an office that's supposed to keep the books starts handing out favors by discretion, some taxpayers get treated one way and some another. That is not what a steward does. We are going to put it back to minding the money, honestly and evenly, for everyone.

The IRS: fear where there should be function

Here is a hard truth about the IRS that most Americans feel in their gut. The tax code has swollen past seventy thousand pages. The agency's own help line is not even on the hook if it gives you wrong advice — you can follow what they tell you and still get penalized. So honest people who are trying to get it right end up hiring somebody just to avoid a mistake, while the biggest players hire armies of lawyers to make the whole thing disappear. The working family gets the audit; the giant gets the loophole. We have already laid out, in another briefing, how we replace this maze with one honest rate above a floor tied to the cost of living where you live — which makes most of this complexity simply vanish. Taxes go back to what they were meant to be: a visible contribution to the common good, not a trap built to catch the person who wasn't trying to cheat.

OMB: the quiet office that decides when a law is real

Now the one almost nobody has heard of. The Office of Management and Budget prepares the president's budget and reviews the agencies — fine. But it holds one power that ought to trouble you: it can decide when, or whether, money that Congress already voted for actually gets released. Think about what that means. The people's representatives pass a law, fund it, sign it — and one executive office can quietly slow-walk the money and, by delay alone, undo what the law commanded. That is not execution. That is obstruction wearing a technicality. We will hold OMB to being what it should be — a technical compliance office that makes sure the money goes where the law said, on time — not a political gatekeeper that can veto Congress with a stopwatch.

What we do about it

None of the fixes here are exotic. We set firm timelines so that money Congress appropriated goes out on a schedule, not whenever an official feels like it. We publish the Treasury's disbursement records in the open, so you and Congress can watch the money move in real time. We tie every spending decision to the actual text of the law that authorized it. And we put career professionals, not political appointees, in charge of tax enforcement, so nobody's audit depends on which party is in power. This is not the president micromanaging. It is the executive branch remembering it works for Congress, and Congress works for you.

This campaign will not govern with slogans. It will govern with receipts.

That is the whole of it. When you can see what you paid, what was owed, and what was spent, you can start to believe again. And when the people's representatives say fund this, it should be funded — not delayed, not diluted, and never quietly ignored by an office you were never meant to notice.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

Treasury, the IRS, and the office you've never heard of that decides when a law becomes real

Let me talk with you this afternoon about the plumbing. Not the exciting part of government — the pipes. Because there are three offices that handle every dollar you send to Washington, and if the plumbing leaks, nothing else in the house works. Push back where it doesn't sit right.

The Constitution is about as clear as it ever gets on one thing: Congress, and Congress alone, holds the power of the purse. The people's representatives decide what gets funded. But here's how it actually runs day to day — the Treasury collects the money, the IRS interprets and enforces the rules, and an office called OMB decides when and whether the money actually goes out the door. Three arms of the executive branch, all handling money that belongs to you and was promised by the people you elected.

The money does not belong to the agency. It belongs to the people — and Congress speaks for the people. The executive enforces. It does not invent.

The Treasury: a steward that drifted into a boss

The Treasury was built to do a plain job: manage the nation's money, handle the debt, mind the currency, advise on the economy. Somewhere along the way, the service job got overtaken by a policy job — deciding who gets a waiver, who gets a delay, who gets enforced against and who gets a pass. When an office that's supposed to keep the books starts handing out favors by discretion, some taxpayers get treated one way and some another. That is not what a steward does. We are going to put it back to minding the money, honestly and evenly, for everyone.

The IRS: fear where there should be function

Here is a hard truth about the IRS that most Americans feel in their gut. The tax code has swollen past seventy thousand pages. The agency's own help line is not even on the hook if it gives you wrong advice — you can follow what they tell you and still get penalized. So honest people who are trying to get it right end up hiring somebody just to avoid a mistake, while the biggest players hire armies of lawyers to make the whole thing disappear. The working family gets the audit; the giant gets the loophole. We have already laid out, in another briefing, how we replace this maze with one honest rate above a floor tied to the cost of living where you live — which makes most of this complexity simply vanish. Taxes go back to what they were meant to be: a visible contribution to the common good, not a trap built to catch the person who wasn't trying to cheat.

OMB: the quiet office that decides when a law is real

Now the one almost nobody has heard of. The Office of Management and Budget prepares the president's budget and reviews the agencies — fine. But it holds one power that ought to trouble you: it can decide when, or whether, money that Congress already voted for actually gets released. Think about what that means. The people's representatives pass a law, fund it, sign it — and one executive office can quietly slow-walk the money and, by delay alone, undo what the law commanded. That is not execution. That is obstruction wearing a technicality. We will hold OMB to being what it should be — a technical compliance office that makes sure the money goes where the law said, on time — not a political gatekeeper that can veto Congress with a stopwatch.

What we do about it

None of the fixes here are exotic. We set firm timelines so that money Congress appropriated goes out on a schedule, not whenever an official feels like it. We publish the Treasury's disbursement records in the open, so you and Congress can watch the money move in real time. We tie every spending decision to the actual text of the law that authorized it. And we put career professionals, not political appointees, in charge of tax enforcement, so nobody's audit depends on which party is in power. This is not the president micromanaging. It is the executive branch remembering it works for Congress, and Congress works for you.

This campaign will not govern with slogans. It will govern with receipts.

That is the whole of it. When you can see what you paid, what was owed, and what was spent, you can start to believe again. And when the people's representatives say fund this, it should be funded — not delayed, not diluted, and never quietly ignored by an office you were never meant to notice.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

August 14, 2026

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

I. Equal Protection Does Not Have an Exception for Children

Special education is not a supplemental benefit. It is a civil right — one that lives inside the plainest promise the Constitution makes: equal treatment under the law for every citizen. That promise does not pause at the schoolhouse door, and it does not carry an exception for the students who need the most help to learn.

The logic is not complicated. If children are not educated equally, they cannot grow into citizens who are treated equally. And their parents are already, by definition, not being treated equally — because their children do not receive what everyone else's children receive. Unequal education is an equal-protection failure that lands on two generations at once. Answering it is not federal charity. It is the federal government discharging the responsibility it already owes: to ensure equal treatment under law to all citizens, including those being educated.

If equal opportunity is the promise of a republic, then access to education must be shaped not by circumstance, but by the certainty of support.

II. The Law Is Already on the Books

Special education was federally recognized as a right through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), but its roots trace back to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Courts have affirmed that students with disabilities cannot be separated from the broader promise of educational equality. The protections already exist:

• Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE)

• Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)

• Individualized Education Programs (IEPs)

• Due process rights for families

The problem is not that the law is missing. The problem is that it is unevenly kept — and that the money promised to keep it was never delivered.

III. A Promise Made and Never Kept

When IDE was enacted, the federal government promised to cover 40% of the excess cost of educating students with disabilities. It has never come close. Districts have been left to carry the gap, and the students who need the most have too often received the least. In some districts, resources fall to less than 15% of what a special-education student actually requires. Black and Indigenous children are placed in restrictive environments at disproportionate rates. And access too frequently depends on whether a parent can afford a lawyer or decipher a legal document.

When a child's educational future depends on a parent's ability to afford a lawyer or decipher a legal document, we have already failed the Constitution.

IV. How We Keep the Promise Without Spending New Money

This campaign has one operating philosophy above all others: nobody gets hurt — but when they do, we are prepared. Special education is where that philosophy meets the ground. We will keep the promise IDEA made. We will not do it by asking taxpayers for new money.

The Department of Education has grown the way bureaucracies grow — through inertia, and through the quiet splitting of single missions into two smaller ones that each expand until they cost more than the whole once did. With the same efficiency discipline this campaign applies everywhere else in government, we will go into that growth, curtail it, and reallocate. The dollars to fund special-education parity already exist inside the department. They are simply being spent on structure instead of on children. We will move them.

Alongside reallocation, the fixes that matter most cost little or nothing, because they are about access and honesty rather than appropriations:

• Establish Family Rights Navigators in every state — independent of school districts — to guide parents through IEP development and appeals.

• Simplify due process procedures and make them available in multiple languages.

• Publish a Special Education Bill of Rights, distributed annually to every family receiving services, so that no right depends on a family's ability to hire someone to explain it.

The federal role is not to run the classroom. States bear the entire weight of education — their departments define what education is within their borders. The federal government sets one thing: a minimum standard for how students are treated. And the standard is equal treatment.

V. Verifying the Standard — Without Taking Over the Classroom

A minimum standard means nothing if no one confirms it is being met. So Washington sets a recommended minimum standard and verifies it — through a graduation exam that becomes a federal credential. The exam is generated and paid for federally, through the Department of Education, so that its effectiveness can actually be measured. It is not a private company's test sold back to the public. It is a public standard, held to a public account.

This does not touch a single state diploma. States may issue high school diplomas to whomever they choose, and those diplomas carry exactly the weight they carry today. The federal credential is additional — a thing a student earns and can use to sit higher on an admissions list and lower on a cost list at the colleges of states that choose to participate. State sovereignty over education is preserved completely. What changes is that a student's equal treatment no longer stops at a state line. (The credential has its own dedicated briefing; here it matters only as proof that when Washington sets a standard, Washington verifies it.)

VI. Partners in a Nation, Not Strangers Across a Line

There is a fair way to think about who pays for what. If one state asks the citizens of another to help fund its schools, the citizens doing the funding get a say in how their money is spent. If Arkansas needs New York's help, New Yorkers get a voice; if California wants Oklahoma's help, Oklahomans get a voice. That is not overreach. That is what equality means — no one spends another's money without that person having a vote in it. Help for states that demonstrably cannot afford to meet the standard is real and available. It simply comes with partnership, not instead of it.

And when we have prepared every child to the same measured standard, we can justifiably ask states to treat those children as partners in one nation — not to penalize them for having been born outside a randomly chosen line. A student who is academically qualified should be able to earn in-state tuition at another state's public colleges. A student from Sacramento who attends school in Los Angeles still needs a dorm room; being from out of state costs the school nothing real. Leaving qualified, demonstrably capable students priced out while seats sit open — reserved by residency rather than merit — keeps talented people from earning the education they would carry home to help their own neighbors. That is not what this country is for. America is all of us helping each other as best we can. Everyone who is able gets a shot.

VII. What This Is Really About

The Americans with Disabilities Act should never have required a statute to discover what a decent society already knew. Equal access for a citizen who uses a wheelchair means a ramp. That is the whole of it. Look at a soldier in a wheelchair and tell him he can climb the stairs like everyone else, and you have said something about the country, not about the soldier.

So the question answers itself. If that is not how we would treat our own veterans — not how we would treat our own families — then what gives us the right to treat anyone else's child that way? Special education is not a line item. It is the measure of whether the promise of equal protection means anything at all once it reaches the people who need it most.

The measure of a republic is not how it serves its highest achievers, but how it honors the dignity of every learner.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

A plain talk about what we owe, what we pay, and how we get out from under it

Let me talk with you the way I'd talk with you at my own kitchen table, because that's where this kind of thing belongs. Not from a podium. Across a table, with the coffee getting cold, about money — yours and the country's. And I mean talk with you, not at you. You get to push back, ask the hard question, tell me where you think I've got it wrong. That's the whole point of sitting down together.

First, the honest part

The debt is real. I'm not going to sit here and tell you it isn't. As of this month the country owes just about thirty-nine point eight trillion dollars all told, and we're knocking on the door of forty trillion — we're expected to cross it before the month is out. Roughly thirty-two trillion of that is money we owe out to the public: people, pension funds, other countries who bought our debt. It's a big number. It's supposed to feel big.

But here's the thing I want you to hear: big is not the same as hopeless. The United States is still the most resilient economy on the face of the earth. What's hurting us is not that we cannot pay. It's that the whole system has been built cloudy on purpose — hidden taxes, moving targets, a tax code you'd need a lawyer to read. The problem is not the mountain. The problem is that nobody has been willing to hand you an honest map of it.

We don't need to fear the debt. We need to defeat it.

What that debt actually costs you

Here's the part that ought to make you a little angry. Just paying the interest on what we already owe — not paying it down, just paying the interest so it doesn't grow — runs over a trillion dollars a year now. Let me do that division right here at the table, out loud, so you can check me. Take that trillion-plus, and spread it across every man, woman, and child in the country — and I'm going to use a bigger population number than the real one, so if anything I'm understating this. It comes to more than three thousand dollars a year for every single person. Around two hundred seventy-three dollars a month. For a family of four, that is over a thousand dollars a month — better than twelve thousand dollars a year — gone, to pay rent on money we already spent. In a lot of places, that is the rent on a one-bedroom apartment. And every dollar of it buys nothing, builds nothing. That has become one of the single biggest things the government spends money on, right up there with the biggest programs we've got.

Think about that at your own table. Right now we are doing the thing everybody knows not to do — paying the minimum on the credit card and watching the balance sit there anyway. Every dollar going to interest is a dollar that is not building a road, not backing up a hospital, not doing one useful thing except paying rent on money we already spent, years ago. I will not pretend that is acceptable. It is not.

How we dig out — and it's not magic

Here's how you get out from under a debt like this, and it's the same way you'd do it at home: you stop the bleeding, you pay it down in a disciplined order, and you don't let anybody raid the progress you make along the way.

When the country runs a surplus — when more comes in than goes out — that surplus goes to work in a set order, not wherever the wind is blowing that year. The large majority of it goes straight at the principal, the actual balance we owe. And here's the quiet miracle of it. The average interest rate on our debt sits around three and a half percent, which means every trillion dollars of principal we pay off saves us somewhere around thirty-three or thirty-four billion dollars a year in interest we never have to pay again. That saved interest becomes next year's surplus, which pays down more, which saves more. It compounds. Here's the part every homeowner already knows in their bones: a debt can work against you or for you, depending on how you carry it. Carry it the way we've been carrying it — minimum payments, interest forever — and it bleeds you like a credit card. Attack the principal early, the way you'd pay down a mortgage, and it turns: every dollar of principal you knock out today is a stack of interest you never pay tomorrow. That is what we are going to do to the national debt.

A smaller share of that surplus goes to seed a national fund — think of it as the country finally opening a savings account. Money set aside in steady, low-risk ways, to steady us in a crisis and to leave something for the folks coming up behind us.

We will stop paying interest to the past, and start earning something for the future.

Now, the taxes — and this is where honesty lives or dies

Everything I just told you only works if the money coming in is honest and steady. So here's the shape of the tax idea, and I'll give it to you straight, no fine print.

Below a certain line, you pay no federal income tax at all. That line is tied to what it actually costs to live where you live — we call it the District Poverty Level, because the cost of getting by in one part of the country is not the cost of getting by in another. When the debt is heavy, that no-tax line sits at one times that local cost-of-living number. As we pay the debt down and the country gets healthier, that line rises — to two times, and capped at three times the local cost of living. More of your money protected, the healthier we get. That is the deal: discipline doesn't just retire the debt, it earns you a bigger tax-free floor.

Above that line, one rate. It opens at forty-five percent, and it's the same rate on every kind of income — a wage, a dividend, money made overseas, all of it — because a dollar is a dollar, and the person who earns it with her hands should not be taxed harder than the person who earns it in his sleep. And as the debt comes down, that rate is written to come down with it, falling toward about thirty percent over time.

And the hidden stuff — the payroll bite, the gas tax, the little nicks you never see — that comes out. Every dollar the government takes, you'll be able to see. I think you have earned the dignity of knowing exactly what you pay, and exactly why.

No more hidden taxes. No more games. Just the plain arithmetic of what we owe and how we're paying it off.

Why I'm telling you this at the table and not from a stage

Because this is not a stunt, and it is not a slogan. It's a structure — one you can check, one that doesn't change every time the politics change. The rate, the floor, the order the surplus gets spent in: written down, predictable, the same from one administration to the next. You should not have to re-learn how your own government takes and spends your money every four years.

And because the real reason to do any of this fits in one sentence. We will not hand our kids a bill they never voted for. We built this debt; it is on us to retire it — so the ones coming up behind us start from zero, and not from behind.

This isn't about paying less tomorrow. It's about clearing the debt today, so our kids start clean.

That's the whole of it. No mystery, no magic — just an honest map, a disciplined climb, and a refusal to pass the bill down the table to people who never got a vote on it. Now tell me where you think I've got it wrong. That's what the table is for.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RNsolutins, instead of complaints, please visit: https://www.presrun2028.net/blog

Policy Papers and Legislation Recommendations Coming Soon.

August 14, 2026

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

I. Equal Protection Does Not Have an Exception for Children

Special education is not a supplemental benefit. It is a civil right — one that lives inside the plainest promise the Constitution makes: equal treatment under the law for every citizen. That promise does not pause at the schoolhouse door, and it does not carry an exception for the students who need the most help to learn.

The logic is not complicated. If children are not educated equally, they cannot grow into citizens who are treated equally. And their parents are already, by definition, not being treated equally — because their children do not receive what everyone else's children receive. Unequal education is an equal-protection failure that lands on two generations at once. Answering it is not federal charity. It is the federal government discharging the responsibility it already owes: to ensure equal treatment under law to all citizens, including those being educated.

If equal opportunity is the promise of a republic, then access to education must be shaped not by circumstance, but by the certainty of support.

II. The Law Is Already on the Books

Special education was federally recognized as a right through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), but its roots trace back to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Courts have affirmed that students with disabilities cannot be separated from the broader promise of educational equality. The protections already exist:

• Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE)

• Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)

• Individualized Education Programs (IEPs)

• Due process rights for families

The problem is not that the law is missing. The problem is that it is unevenly kept — and that the money promised to keep it was never delivered.

III. A Promise Made and Never Kept

When IDEA was enacted, the federal government promised to cover 40% of the excess cost of educating students with disabilities. It has never come close. Districts have been left to carry the gap, and the students who need the most have too often received the least. In some districts, resources fall to less than 15% of what a special-education student actually requires. Black and Indigenous children are placed in restrictive environments at disproportionate rates. And access too frequently depends on whether a parent can afford a lawyer or decipher a legal document.

When a child's educational future depends on a parent's ability to afford a lawyer or decipher a legal document, we have already failed the Constitution.

IV. How We Keep the Promise Without Spending New Money

This campaign has one operating philosophy above all others: nobody gets hurt — but when they do, we are prepared. Special education is where that philosophy meets the ground. We will keep the promise IDEA made. We will not do it by asking taxpayers for new money.

The Department of Education has grown the way bureaucracies grow — through inertia, and through the quiet splitting of single missions into two smaller ones that each expand until they cost more than the whole once did. With the same efficiency discipline this campaign applies everywhere else in government, we will go into that growth, curtail it, and reallocate. The dollars to fund special-education parity already exist inside the department. They are simply being spent on structure instead of on children. We will move them.

Alongside reallocation, the fixes that matter most cost little or nothing, because they are about access and honesty rather than appropriations:

• Establish Family Rights Navigators in every state — independent of school districts — to guide parents through IEP development and appeals.

• Simplify due process procedures and make them available in multiple languages.

• Publish a Special Education Bill of Rights, distributed annually to every family receiving services, so that no right depends on a family's ability to hire someone to explain it.

The federal role is not to run the classroom. States bear the entire weight of education — their departments define what education is within their borders. The federal government sets one thing: a minimum standard for how students are treated. And the standard is equal treatment.

V. Verifying the Standard — Without Taking Over the Classroom

A minimum standard means nothing if no one confirms it is being met. So Washington sets a recommended minimum standard and verifies it — through a graduation exam that becomes a federal credential. The exam is generated and paid for federally, through the Department of Education, so that its effectiveness can actually be measured. It is not a private company's test sold back to the public. It is a public standard, held to a public account.

This does not touch a single state diploma. States may issue high school diplomas to whomever they choose, and those diplomas carry exactly the weight they carry today. The federal credential is additional — a thing a student earns and can use to sit higher on an admissions list and lower on a cost list at the colleges of states that choose to participate. State sovereignty over education is preserved completely. What changes is that a student's equal treatment no longer stops at a state line. (The credential has its own dedicated briefing; here it matters only as proof that when Washington sets a standard, Washington verifies it.)

VI. Partners in a Nation, Not Strangers Across a Line

There is a fair way to think about who pays for what. If one state asks the citizens of another to help fund its schools, the citizens doing the funding get a say in how their money is spent. If Arkansas needs New York's help, New Yorkers get a voice; if California wants Oklahoma's help, Oklahomans get a voice. That is not overreach. That is what equality means — no one spends another's money without that person having a vote in it. Help for states that demonstrably cannot afford to meet the standard is real and available. It simply comes with partnership, not instead of it.

And when we have prepared every child to the same measured standard, we can justifiably ask states to treat those children as partners in one nation — not to penalize them for having been born outside a randomly chosen line. A student who is academically qualified should be able to earn in-state tuition at another state's public colleges. A student from Sacramento who attends school in Los Angeles still needs a dorm room; being from out of state costs the school nothing real. Leaving qualified, demonstrably capable students priced out while seats sit open — reserved by residency rather than merit — keeps talented people from earning the education they would carry home to help their own neighbors. That is not what this country is for. America is all of us helping each other as best we can. Everyone who is able gets a shot.

VII. What This Is Really About

The Americans with Disabilities Act should never have required a statute to discover what a decent society already knew. Equal access for a citizen who uses a wheelchair means a ramp. That is the whole of it. Look at a soldier in a wheelchair and tell him he can climb the stairs like everyone else, and you have said something about the country, not about the soldier.

So the question answers itself. If that is not how we would treat our own veterans — not how we would treat our own families — then what gives us the right to treat anyone else's child that way? Special education is not a line item. It is the measure of whether the promise of equal protection means anything at all once it reaches the people who need it most.

The measure of a republic is not how it serves its highest achievers, but how it honors the dignity of every learner.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

August 14, 2026

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

I. Equal Protection Does Not Have an Exception for Children

Special education is not a supplemental benefit. It is a civil right — one that lives inside the plainest promise the Constitution makes: equal treatment under the law for every citizen. That promise does not pause at the schoolhouse door, and it does not carry an exception for the students who need the most help to learn.

The logic is not complicated. If children are not educated equally, they cannot grow into citizens who are treated equally. And their parents are already, by definition, not being treated equally — because their children do not receive what everyone else's children receive. Unequal education is an equal-protection failure that lands on two generations at once. Answering it is not federal charity. It is the federal government discharging the responsibility it already owes: to ensure equal treatment under law to all citizens, including those being educated.

If equal opportunity is the promise of a republic, then access to education must be shaped not by circumstance, but by the certainty of support.

II. The Law Is Already on the Books

Special education was federally recognized as a right through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), but its roots trace back to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Courts have affirmed that students with disabilities cannot be separated from the broader promise of educational equality. The protections already exist:

• Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE)

• Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)

• Individualized Education Programs (IEPs)

• Due process rights for families

The problem is not that the law is missing. The problem is that it is unevenly kept — and that the money promised to keep it was never delivered.

III. A Promise Made and Never Kept

When IDE was enacted, the federal government promised to cover 40% of the excess cost of educating students with disabilities. It has never come close. Districts have been left to carry the gap, and the students who need the most have too often received the least. In some districts, resources fall to less than 15% of what a special-education student actually requires. Black and Indigenous children are placed in restrictive environments at disproportionate rates. And access too frequently depends on whether a parent can afford a lawyer or decipher a legal document.

When a child's educational future depends on a parent's ability to afford a lawyer or decipher a legal document, we have already failed the Constitution.

IV. How We Keep the Promise Without Spending New Money

This campaign has one operating philosophy above all others: nobody gets hurt — but when they do, we are prepared. Special education is where that philosophy meets the ground. We will keep the promise IDEA made. We will not do it by asking taxpayers for new money.

The Department of Education has grown the way bureaucracies grow — through inertia, and through the quiet splitting of single missions into two smaller ones that each expand until they cost more than the whole once did. With the same efficiency discipline this campaign applies everywhere else in government, we will go into that growth, curtail it, and reallocate. The dollars to fund special-education parity already exist inside the department. They are simply being spent on structure instead of on children. We will move them.

Alongside reallocation, the fixes that matter most cost little or nothing, because they are about access and honesty rather than appropriations:

• Establish Family Rights Navigators in every state — independent of school districts — to guide parents through IEP development and appeals.

• Simplify due process procedures and make them available in multiple languages.

• Publish a Special Education Bill of Rights, distributed annually to every family receiving services, so that no right depends on a family's ability to hire someone to explain it.

The federal role is not to run the classroom. States bear the entire weight of education — their departments define what education is within their borders. The federal government sets one thing: a minimum standard for how students are treated. And the standard is equal treatment.

V. Verifying the Standard — Without Taking Over the Classroom

A minimum standard means nothing if no one confirms it is being met. So Washington sets a recommended minimum standard and verifies it — through a graduation exam that becomes a federal credential. The exam is generated and paid for federally, through the Department of Education, so that its effectiveness can actually be measured. It is not a private company's test sold back to the public. It is a public standard, held to a public account.

This does not touch a single state diploma. States may issue high school diplomas to whomever they choose, and those diplomas carry exactly the weight they carry today. The federal credential is additional — a thing a student earns and can use to sit higher on an admissions list and lower on a cost list at the colleges of states that choose to participate. State sovereignty over education is preserved completely. What changes is that a student's equal treatment no longer stops at a state line. (The credential has its own dedicated briefing; here it matters only as proof that when Washington sets a standard, Washington verifies it.)

VI. Partners in a Nation, Not Strangers Across a Line

There is a fair way to think about who pays for what. If one state asks the citizens of another to help fund its schools, the citizens doing the funding get a say in how their money is spent. If Arkansas needs New York's help, New Yorkers get a voice; if California wants Oklahoma's help, Oklahomans get a voice. That is not overreach. That is what equality means — no one spends another's money without that person having a vote in it. Help for states that demonstrably cannot afford to meet the standard is real and available. It simply comes with partnership, not instead of it.

And when we have prepared every child to the same measured standard, we can justifiably ask states to treat those children as partners in one nation — not to penalize them for having been born outside a randomly chosen line. A student who is academically qualified should be able to earn in-state tuition at another state's public colleges. A student from Sacramento who attends school in Los Angeles still needs a dorm room; being from out of state costs the school nothing real. Leaving qualified, demonstrably capable students priced out while seats sit open — reserved by residency rather than merit — keeps talented people from earning the education they would carry home to help their own neighbors. That is not what this country is for. America is all of us helping each other as best we can. Everyone who is able gets a shot.

VII. What This Is Really About

The Americans with Disabilities Act should never have required a statute to discover what a decent society already knew. Equal access for a citizen who uses a wheelchair means a ramp. That is the whole of it. Look at a soldier in a wheelchair and tell him he can climb the stairs like everyone else, and you have said something about the country, not about the soldier.

So the question answers itself. If that is not how we would treat our own veterans — not how we would treat our own families — then what gives us the right to treat anyone else's child that way? Special education is not a line item. It is the measure of whether the promise of equal protection means anything at all once it reaches the people who need it most.

The measure of a republic is not how it serves its highest achievers, but how it honors the dignity of every learner.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN