A Better Deal for Georgia

Dear Neighbor,

I’ve been hearing a question lately, and I want to answer it straight up: “That all sounds great, Spencer, but who’s gonna pay for it?”

Here’s my answer, and I mean it: It costs less our way.

I know that sounds like a campaign slogan, so let me back it up with real numbers, real places, and real people who are already living proof that the programs I’m talking about work. Other countries aren’t waiting on us to figure this out. Other states aren’t waiting. So neither should Georgia.

What I call “vulture culture” is the system we’ve got right now: where insurance companies skim billions off the top before a doctor sees a patient, where corporations pay poverty wages and stick the taxpayer with the bill, where billionaires write the tax laws, and where the folks who work hardest end up with the least. That system is expensive. It is, in fact, the most expensive way to run a society that anyone has ever invented.

My vision is simpler. You work, you get paid a living wage. You get sick, you can see a doctor whatever your income. Your kids go to a good school, no matter the ZIP code. Your vote counts as much as a billionaire’s. And nobody gets to rig the game by pumping dark money into elections or drawing their own district lines.

That’s not “radicalism,” y’all. The fact is, that’s how most advanced democracies operate right now. Why? Because they can do it for less money than we spend, and get better results.

So read on. I believe you’ll find, the answers to “Who’s gonna pay for it?” are a lot more encouraging than some folks might want us to think.

Spencer Frye
State Representative, District 122

PART ONE: THE ECONOMIC CASE

Before we get into particular policies, let me lay out the basic facts, because everything I’m proposing rests on the same truth:

“Vulture culture” – skimming profit from every human need – is not efficient. It is the most wasteful, expensive, and damaging economic model a society can choose. And the alternative isn’t socialism; it’s common sense.

The Costs We Already Pay, and Don’t See

Here’s the dirty secret of vulture culture: You’re already paying for everything I’m proposing. You’re just paying more than you need to, for worse results, and the excess is going to people who didn’t earn it.

When a corporation pays poverty wages, it’s not saving you money – it’s drawing you in with a price small businesses can’t match, then making you pay it right back on your tax form. So your taxes and mine have helped run family businesses into the ground, and that is a true shame.

Walmart alone costs American taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion a year in Medicaid, SNAP, and other public assistance programs for its employees. Every dollar of corporate welfare the government pays because a company won’t pay a living wage is a dollar coming out of the taxpayer’s pocket, not the corporation’s. So why are we letting the wealthiest people in the world do that?

When an insurance company denies a claim and makes a doctor’s office fight for three hours or three days to get a patient treated, that fight doesn’t disappear. It shows up as overhead in the healthcare system, passed back to you in higher premiums. American healthcare administration costs $812 billion a year. Canada, with its single-payer system, spends a quarter of that per person to do the same job. And if you want to argue about “wait times,” just remember American statistics exclude millions of people whose wait times are literally the rest of their lives because they were denied care or had no way to get to it.

And a lot of folks want to brag about tax cuts, but what they’re not talking about are all the fee hikes they’ve tacked on the other end. That’s why you get a fee slapped on you every time you turn around these days, and half the time there’s no way to know what it’s for. And let me tell you, it’s working folks, fixed-income seniors, and young families just starting out who get hurt a lot more by those fees than the venture capital class does.

What we’ve seen is, when big money floods our elections, too many politicians choose to serve their donors, not their constituents. The result is tax law written for billionaires, healthcare policy written for insurance companies, and labor law written for corporations. You pay for that, too – in higher prices, lower wages, and public services that get cut every time a rich donor needs a tax break, because let me assure you, those “tax cuts” most politicians brag about are going straight to the top income bracket, not to the folks living on a biweekly paycheck.

This is vulture culture. And it is costing you a fortune.

PART TWO: JUSTICE

I was raised to believe that justice isn’t a luxury or a privilege – it is the foundation. You can’t have a wealthy economy without it, because an economy built on a rigged game doesn’t produce prosperity. It produces extraction.

End Gerrymandering

When politicians pick their voters, it can’t be called democracy. When legislators, answerable only to their party, are allowed to draw their own districts, all too often what we get is good ol’ boys (and gals) all the way down. Georgia has some of the most gerrymandered districts in the country. Which is why our laws no longer reflect what Georgians actually want. The people drawing the boxes simply don’t have to care about the people who live in them.

Independent redistricting commissions – like the ones that have been used in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Michigan – produce competitive districts and legislatures that actually have to respond to voters, and I’m ready to see the gerrymander wars come to an end. That’s because fair districts always mean better governance.

Get Big Money out of Elections with Publicly Funded Campaigns

The 2024 election cycle cost over 14 billion dollars. Nearly one dollar in seven of that was “dark money,” spending from sources that don’t have to disclose a single donor. That’s not “free speech,” it’s not any kind of speech, it’s just legalized bribery.

The Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision blew the doors off the system in 2010. What came through those doors was an America where a tiny sliver of ultra-wealthy donors can outspend millions of regular citizens and get the policy they want without a single voter knowing their names.

Fortunately, there’s a proven solution to this problem. New York City’s small-dollar matching program, as one example, gives candidates $8 in public funds for every $1 raised from small donors. The result: more candidates from more walks of life, more competitive races, and politicians who spend their time talking to regular constituents instead of wooing billionaires. Connecticut’s public financing program, up and running since 2008, has made elections a lot less lopsided by removing the toll gate from the ballot. In Europe, they’ve seen the same thing with campaign reimbursements: a more level playing field, more challengers, better representation.

In the US, the 2020 presidential election cost more than 10 billion dollars, with small donors (those giving under $200) making up less than one fourth of contributions. When money talks that loudly, nobody else gets heard. If we want to fix everything else, we have to fix this.

Equal Funding for Public Schools

Right now, what school your kids attend, and what kind of education they get, depends almost entirely on a ZIP code. I hear people talk about meritocracy, and that’s a fine idea, but we will never have it if we allow wealth-sorting in our schools. What comes from that is an oligarchy, and if you take a look around, this country sure looks like it’s aiming to become one. We need to turn that around.

The research is clear here. When states equalize school funding, kids do better across the board. And guess what? The long-term economic return is tremendous! We’re talking lower unemployment, higher wages, and lower poverty rates for more people, just by making sure all our kids have good schools. But just last year, the nonpartisan Learning Policy Institute found (again) that American schools are “among the most inequitably funded of any industrialized nation” while simultaneously having “one of the highest child poverty rates [and] less access to social supports such as universal health care, housing subsidies, and universally available high-quality preschool.”

Does that sounds like a great nation to you? It sure doesn’t to me. It sounds more like something out of Oliver Twist, like a bunch of rich people trying to keep the poor people poor. But the good news is, we already know how to fix this, so I say, let’s do it!

No Public Funds for Private Schools

The Constitution is plain on this. Government isn’t here to fund one religion or worldview over another, including through vouchers, tax deductions, or any other mechanism that routes taxpayer dollars to private religious institutions.

The practical evidence on voucher schemes is damning. A 2019 analysis of Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Program found no academic benefit for students who switched from public to private schools using vouchers. Meanwhile, the public schools those students left behind lost funding. Arizona’s massive voucher expansion blew a $300 million hole in the state budget within a year, benefiting mostly families already sending their children to private school. The answer isn’t to abandon public schools. It’s to fully fund them.

End Private Prisons and Prison Price-Gouging

A private prison makes more money the longer it keeps people locked up. That is a structural incentive for injustice, and it corrupts every part of the system it touches, from sentencing recommendations to parole decisions to lobbying for harsher laws.

The evidence for promised cost savings from privatization just isn’t there. A comprehensive study in Criminology & Public Policy found that private prisons show zero consistent cost savings across similar inmate populations. What they do show is lower staffing levels and worse outcomes. And charging $14 for a 15-minute phone call is nothing more than brazen exploitation of captive people and their families. It must end.

End the Electoral College

In America, we all get an equal vote: That’s supposed to be the deal, right? So how come it takes 700,000 Georgians to get one Electoral College vote, but only 400,000 Nebraskans to get that same vote, and only 200,000 Vermonters? In fact, all but four states get more electoral votes per person than Georgia does. Nobody can say that’s fair. Not honestly, anyway.

But there’s already an alternative. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively elect presidents by popular vote without a constitutional amendment, and it’s already passed in enough states to make up 222 out of 270 electoral college votes needed. Georgia should join and make a true representative democracy within reach. Every vote should count equally.

Ban Surveillance (Discriminatory) Pricing

The price you see for a product online can be different from the price somebody else sees, based on your ZIP code, the brand of computer you’re using, the websites you’ve visited, and personal information about you purchased from a data warehouse you can’t even access. There’s software out there right now that lets stores automatically jack up the price of water during a heatwave or generators during an emergency or anything else they want to gouge you for. And what these companies want to do is scan your face with an in-store camera and charge you the highest price they think you’ll pay based on how you look and what they know about you and how far away you are from another store where you can get the same thing.

That’s not a free market. That’s not competition. That’s exploitation as a business model. Companies use this practice to extract maximum money from the people least able to comparison-shop. It should be illegal. Several EU countries have already moved in this direction. Georgia can and should lead on this in the US.

PART THREE: AUTONOMY

Autonomy means your life is yours to live. Our government’s job is to make sure we all have the safety and security and freedom and basic resources we need to live it.

Stop Insurers from Playing Doctor

Right now in America, insurance companies are practicing medicine without a license. You already know exactly what I’m talking about. It should not be legal for any insurer to override the diagnosis or prescribed treatment of any licensed physician, or refuse to cover it, or demand that any doctor prescribe something that’s more to the insurer’s liking. This is just common sense.

Not only that, but no insurer should be allowed to tell you where you can and cannot get a prescription filled, or what physicians you can and cannot see. There should be no “in network” and “out of network” doctors – just doctors. And insurers should not be allowed to divide their customers into tiny “pools” and adjust the rates so that the folks who need insurance the most are exactly the ones who can’t afford it. That defeats the entire purpose of insurance in the first place, which is to spread the risk, not rig the game so folks end up paying more in insurance than they’d pay out of pocket if they didn’t have it.

Restore Abortion Rights and Protect Contraception

My wife was an emergency room nurse for over 20 years. She’s seen what happens when women can’t access reproductive healthcare. Women die. That is not a political position. That is a medical fact.

The economic data is equally clear. Access to contraception and family planning services is one of the single biggest predictors of women’s economic participation, educational attainment, and lifetime earnings. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that every public dollar invested in family planning saves about $7 in government costs for pregnancy-related care, delivery, and infant care.

That math doesn’t change based on anybody’s politics. Neither does the maternal mortality rate.

Universal Daycare / Pre-K

Oklahoma, not exactly a liberal state, launched universal pre-K in 1998. Today it serves over 90% of four-year-olds in the state. Georgetown University has studied this matter, and they’ve found substantial gains in literacy, language, and math readiness for all kids. Investment in pre-K gets more children reading on grade level, and when kids are reading at or above their grade level in elementary school, high school graduation rates go up like night follows day. So it’s no surprise that Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman’s analysis of early childhood programs has consistently found $7 to $12 in economic return for every dollar invested in pre-K, through better school outcomes, higher adult earnings, and reduced social costs including incarceration. That is the best return on investment available in public education policy, full stop.

Universal Single-Payer Health Insurance

This is the biggest example of “it costs less our way,” and the evidence is overwhelming. The United States spends about $12,500 per person per year on healthcare. Canada spends $5,900. Germany spends $7,300. They cover everybody. We don’t.

The reason for the gap is administrative waste. America’s multi-payer insurance system spends $812 billion a year on administration alone, four times more per person than Canada. A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that switching to a single-payer system could save over $600 billion a year in administrative costs alone.

A systematic review in PLOS Medicine of 22 single-payer proposals, from economists across the political spectrum, found that 86% of them yielded net savings in the very first year of operation. By year ten, every single model showed savings. Yale researchers calculated that “Medicare for All” would save more than $450 billion per year in a non-pandemic year, and could have saved over 335,000 lives during COVID-19.

Here’s how to think about it plainly. A significant chunk of what you pay in premiums, deductibles, and co-pays doesn’t go to your doctor or your medication. It goes to insurance company overhead, executive salaries, shareholder dividends, and the army of billing specialists your doctors have to employ to fight the insurance company on your behalf. Eliminate the middleman and that money stays in the healthcare system or in your pocket.

This is not theoretical. Every other wealthy country on Earth has figured it out. We’re the outlier, and we’re paying a painful price for it, not just in money, but in lives as well.

Basic Necessities Are Not Market Commodities

Safe water. Sufficient food. Decent shelter. Basic healthcare. A fundamental education. Protection from violence.

These are the preconditions for human life. When private equity firms buy up mobile home parks and raise rents 30% overnight, or hedge funds vacuum up single-family homes and turn whole neighborhoods into rental markets, that’s not the free market working. That’s predatory extraction, and it generates enormous public costs in homelessness, health crises, and economic instability. We have a choice — people or profits. I know what my choice is.

Universal Access to Essential Utilities

Power, water, postal mail, telephone, internet: These are the infrastructure of modern life. An American who can’t afford internet access can’t apply for most jobs, can’t access government services, can’t participate in the economy. The USDA has documented that rural communities with broadband access see significant economic growth compared to those without. Georgia has vast rural areas where this infrastructure gap is actively suppressing economic growth. This is an investment that pays for itself.

Fully Decriminalize Marijuana

The war on marijuana has cost Georgia taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in prosecution, incarceration, and the lifetime economic consequences of a drug conviction. It has disproportionately targeted Black Georgians. Colorado, after legalization, has collected over $1.6 billion in marijuana tax revenue, funding public school construction, drug abuse prevention programs, and more. Marijuana-related arrests fell 68%. Georgia is leaving this money on the table while spending money to criminalize it, which doesn’t work anyway.

PART FOUR: PROSPERITY

Here’s what I believe about prosperity: It’s not a zero-sum game. An economy where everybody does well is a bigger, more productive economy than one where a few people have everything and everyone else scrapes by. History proves it. Economics proves it. Common sense proves it.

Ban Junk Fees and Surprise Billing

Junk fees cost American consumers an estimated $90 billion a year, per the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That $35 “convenience fee” on your concert ticket, the $400 “facility fee” on your hospital bill – these aren’t fees for services. They’re hidden prices, designed specifically to make you think you’re paying less than you are. Banning them, and requiring that the displayed price be the whole price, doesn’t raise anyone’s taxes. It puts money back in your pocket.

Oh, and if you’ve paid for a surgery, and months down the road someone decides there’s an expense they didn’t tell you about, well, that’s on them. You shouldn’t be getting a bill for it.

Raise the Minimum Wage to a Living Wage Indexed to Inflation

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 was set in 2009, and it was a poverty wage even then. Today, there is not a single state in America where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford to rent a two-bedroom home.

Every argument against raising the minimum wage has been tested and failed. In 2014, the 13 states that raised their minimum wages added jobs faster than the states that didn’t, and that’s according to the U.S. Department of Labor. San Diego County, which the conservatives claimed would go belly up, saw no job losses and instead had steady employment growth through two consecutive state minimum wage increases.

The economic math makes this a no-brainer: the Federal Reserve tells us that every $1 increase in the minimum wage generates $2,080 in additional consumer spending per affected household per year. That money goes to local businesses. It creates jobs. Consumer spending is 70% of the American economy.

And here’s the taxpayer math: A 10% increase in the minimum wage reduces food stamp enrollment by about 3%, per the Council of Economic Advisors. Using today’s numbers, that’s more than one and a quarter million Americans off food assistance, and a taxpayer savings of over $3 billion every year, from a 73¢ adjustment to the minimum.

The truth is, every dollar that a corporation underpays its workers is a dollar-plus that you and I pay to cover their employees’ SNAP and Medicaid costs and all the overhead those programs require. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t cost you money. Keeping it low costs you money.

“Fair Share” Tax Rates

If you make more, you pay a higher percentage. That was the American tax system for most of the 20th century, the era when we created the interstate highway network, the national parks, the public university system, and the greatest middle class in human history. Today, the richest Americans often pay a lower effective tax rate than teachers and construction workers, because passive investment income is taxed at lower rates than wages for real labor. That’s a rigged game, plain and simple.

A 2% annual wealth tax on billionaires, people with more money than they could physically spend in a lifetime, would generate an estimated $250 billion a year. It would take just 10% of that to end world hunger entirely. It would not change a single billionaire’s lifestyle. Not one iota. So again, why are we allowing the wealthiest people in the world to get away with this?

Link Top Marginal Tax Rates to Wealth Inequality

Here’s one way to stop runaway wealth inequality, where the rich get richer by inertia and nobody else has a shot at getting ahead. Tie the top marginal tax rate – the percentage that only the super-rich pay on their “keeping score” money — to key wealth inequality indicators, like the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay, and the share of national wealth held by the top 1%. When inequality grows, that top rate goes up. When it shrinks, it comes down. So if the ultra-wealthy want lower taxes, all they have to do is make sure they’re not hoarding so much wealth that nobody else can have any. This creates a self-correcting mechanism, like a thermostat.

The most economically productive decades in American history, during the 1950s and 1960s, had top marginal rates of 90%. The economy was booming. The middle class was expanding. Those rates didn’t kill growth. They funded it.

Remember, when big companies get welfare in the form of lower taxes than their workers have to pay, they take those profits and give them to executives and big shareholders. Which means those same people are motivated to raise prices for consumers as much as possible, and pay workers as little as possible. But when excessive profit margins are taxed, well-managed companies invest in their workers and their products instead, to keep their taxes low.

You want to know why “they don’t make ’em like they used to” back in the Eisenhower days? It’s because our tax code pays ’em not to! That has to change.

Repeal “Right to Work” Laws

Let’s call these what they are: “right to work for less” laws. What they actually do is weaken unions by allowing workers to benefit from union contracts without paying dues, starving unions of the resources they need to function. Workers in “right to work” states earn about $1,500 less per year, on average, than comparable workers in states without those laws. And that’s true for non-union workers, too, not just union members. Unions raise wages for everyone. Weakening them hurts everyone.

End Portfolio Ownership of Housing

A family home is not a financial instrument. When hedge funds and investment firms buy up thousands of single-family homes to rent them out at premium prices, they are not creating value but rather extracting it. They are converting homeowners into permanent renters, stripping families of the ability to build generational wealth, and driving up housing costs for everyone. Georgia should lead on restrictions for corporate portfolio ownership of residential housing. The right to buy a home and build wealth shouldn’t require outbidding a hedge fund.

Climate Action – Because It Costs More to Do Nothing

I’m a hunter. I fish. I spend time in Georgia’s woods and waterways, and I have two children who are going to inherit this planet. Climate change is not an abstraction to me.

But here’s the economic argument: the National Bureau of Economic Research has estimated that unmitigated climate change will reduce US GDP by 10% by end of century. The cost of the 2023 wildfire season alone exceeded $100 billion. The cost of Hurricane Katrina was $190 billion. The Texas winter storm of 2021: $200 billion. Meanwhile, renewable energy is now the cheapest source of new electricity generation in American history. Solar and wind are less expensive than coal, oil, or gas in most of the country. The question is not whether we can afford to act on climate. The question is, can we afford not to? (Spoiler: The answer is no.)

Prepopulated Tax Filings

The IRS already has your information. It knows what your employer paid you, what you paid in mortgage interest, what you received in Social Security, and whether or not you have government-subsidized insurance. In dozens of countries like Germany, Denmark, Japan, and the UK, the government simply sends you a prepopulated return, you review it, sign it or opt to file an amended return, and you’re done.

This would save American taxpayers an estimated $11 billion a year in compliance costs, and hundreds of millions of hours of frustration. The only reason we don’t do this is that Intuit and H&R Block have spent millions lobbying against it. This is vulture culture in its purest form: An entire predatory industry exists solely because the government is prevented from doing its job efficiently.

CASE STUDIES: IT’S ALREADY WORKING SOMEWHERE ELSE

I keep hearing “that’s nice in theory, but it would never work.” So let me tell you about some places where it’s working right now, and what Georgia can learn from them.

Healthcare: Every Other Wealthy Country on Earth

The United States spends roughly twice per person what Canada, Germany, France, the UK, Australia, and Japan spend on healthcare, and gets worse outcomes by almost every measure. Our life expectancy is lower. Our infant mortality is higher. Their doctors don’t employ billing departments to fight insurance companies for hours every week. Those savings go to, you know, medicine.

Germany’s regulated multi-payer system, Canada’s single-payer provincial system, and the UK’s National Health Service are three different models that share a fundamental feature: They treat healthcare as essential infrastructure, not as a profit center. The result is universal coverage, better outcomes, and dramatically lower cost.

Taxes, Not Fees: Denmark

Denmark has one of the highest income tax rates around, but it’s constantly among the top three nations on earth for citizens’ happiness. And that is not a contradiction. It’s because their tax system is efficient, one and done. It pays for education, health care, and essential services. In America, we pay taxes plus insurance premiums, plus deductibles, plus co-pays, plus out-of-network costs, plus school tuition, plus daycare, plus elder care, plus fees for everything short of breathing (and I’ll bet some billionaire’s working on that one). Add it all up, and we pay more than Danes pay, a lot more, but we get so much less for it. As Chris Lund has pointed out, Danes aren’t socialists, they’re just better at accounting.

What’s more, the Danish tax system removes so many opportunities for self-dealing that Denmark also enjoys one of the lowest rates of corruption on the planet. And because people can get by, even if they don’t have a high-paying job, crime is also low. Danes have more freedom than most Americans to choose how they live, and they aren’t divided against each other like Americans are now, because everyone feels like they’re all pulling the load together as taxpayers. Less corruption, less crime, less division, and more freedom all sounds good to me.

Minimum Wage: Seattle

Seattle was the first major American city to move toward a $15 minimum wage. Critics predicted mass layoffs, restaurant closures, economic collapse. So what actually happened? Employment in the food service industry rose. Restaurant closures did not increase. The University of Washington tracked the effects carefully and found that low-wage workers saw their annual earnings go up by an average of $1,000. That money went back into the local economy.

Public Campaign Finance: New York City

New York City’s small-dollar matching program has operated since 1988. For every dollar a candidate raises from a donor giving $175 or less, the city contributes $8 in matching funds. Which means candidates who raise most of their money from small donors in their own communities have a real chance of winning, so the real estate developers and financial firms don’t just get to buy their own politicians. The program costs about $40 million per election cycle, which is a rounding error compared to the hundreds of billions in city contracts and decisions those elections determine.

Marijuana: Colorado

Colorado legalized recreational marijuana in 2012. Since then, the state has collected more than $120 million every year in marijuana tax revenue that has funded new schools, public health, law enforcement, and more. Marijuana actually causes fewer problems for the police now than it did before. No economic apocalypse followed, and people in Colorado who didn’t care to use weed still don’t care to use weed, nobody’s forcing it on them. Yet Georgia is leaving this revenue on the table while spending money on prosecution and incarceration.

Housing: Vienna, Austria

About 60% of Vienna’s population lives in subsidized housing and it’s not just for the very poor. Middle-class families, workers, and professionals all participate. And guess what? Vienna consistently ranks among the most livable cities on Earth, with housing costs that are a fraction of comparable places like London, Paris, or New York. When housing is treated as infrastructure rather than a profit center, the entire economy becomes more competitive because workers don’t need to earn a premium just to afford to live.

THE FULL PLATFORM

Justice

• End gerrymandering and establish independent redistricting commissions.
• Get big money out of elections; publicly fund campaigns; work to reverse Citizens United.
• Create equal funding and facilities for public schools, regardless of ZIP code.
• Ban the use of public funds for private schools in any form, including vouchers and tax deductions.
• Ban private prisons; prohibit price-gouging by prison commissaries, telephone providers, and other vendors.
• Support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to make every vote count equally.
• Ban surveillance-pricing discrimination: no using your data, your ZIP code, or your face to charge you more.

Autonomy

• Stop insurers from making medical decisions.
• Restore abortion rights and ensure the right to contraception.
• Fully fund public family planning services.
• Provide comprehensive, fact-based sex education to all students.
• Provide universal daycare and pre-K.
• Provide universal single-payer health insurance not tied to employment.
• Guarantee that basic necessities of life are not market commodities: safe water, sufficient nutrition, decent shelter, essential healthcare, fundamental education, protection from violence.
• Ensure universal access to essential utilities: power, water, postal mail, telephone, internet, available to all, regardless of income.
• Fully decriminalize marijuana.
• Create a legal right to one’s own identity: no deep faking of any person without their permission.
• No public school or library may impose blanket media restrictions based on individual objections.

Prosperity

• Ban junk fees, hidden fees, and surprise billing.
• Raise the minimum wage to a living wage indexed to inflation going forward.
• Establish fair-share tax rates: the wealthy should not pay a lower percentage than working people do.
• Link top marginal tax rates to the rate of wealth inequality.
• Repeal anti-union “right to work” laws.
• End hedge fund and portfolio ownership of residential housing.
• Take immediate, serious action to mitigate climate change and protect Georgia’s environment.
• Require the IRS to send prepopulated tax filings to taxpayers for review and approval.

CLOSING: THE CHOICE IS CLEAR

I know there are folks who’ve been told their whole lives that everything I just laid out is some kind of radical leftism. I’m a Christian, a hunter, a gun owner, a straight white man who drives a dirty old pickup truck and works in construction. My dad was a preacher. None of what I’ve described is radical.

It’s what every other wealthy democracy on Earth is already doing. It’s what the greatest generations of Americans built together. It’s what the evidence says works. And it costs less than the system we’ve got now.

Vulture culture, where non-productive intermediaries skim billions off the top of every human need, is not efficient. It is not prosperous. It is not free. It is a rigged game that extracts wealth from working people and transfers it to those who already have more than they can spend.

My vision is different. And if you read these pages carefully, you’ll find it’s not just better, it’s cheaper. Not cheaper in the way that means you get less. Cheaper in the way that means your money actually goes to what it’s supposed to go to, instead of padding somebody else’s bottom line.

That’s the deal I’m offering Georgia.

Let’s get to work.

Spencer Frye
State Representative, District 122
spencer.frye@house.ga.gov | (404) 656-0265 | spencerfrye.com