PROTECT OUR PAYCHECKS, SOCIAL SECURITY, AND HEALTHCARE

Working Americans deserve to keep more of what they earn. I support a real middle class tax cut that lowers rates on wage income, expands credits that put money back in people's pockets, and makes the tax code work for people who punch a clock rather than people who punch a number into a brokerage account.

The reason this has not happened is simple. The people who benefit most from the current system spend more on lobbying than any other industry in America. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have paid $0 in federal income taxes in certain years while you pay your rate on every dollar you earn.

Close the loopholes at the top. Cut taxes at the bottom and middle. Reward work, not just wealth.

Working people put in the hours day in and day out to keep this country running. We deserve to keep more of what we earn. I’ve been talking about no tax on tips and overtime before it was in any bill.

But let's be honest about the Big Beautiful Bill. “No Tax on Tips” and “No Tax on Overtime” is a marketing trick. 

1. First, it's a tax deduction, not an elimination. Second, these deductions can only be applied to federal income tax. Local, state, and other federal taxes still apply.

2. For overtime, you can only deduct the "half" portion of your time-and-a-half pay on your federal income tax. This is capped at $12,500 a year. For tips, the lowest-paid workers, the ones already below the standard deduction, get nothing at all because they don't owe federal income tax to begin with.

3. Worst of all: no tax on tips and overtime is temporary – it expires in 2028 while the tax cuts that went to corporations and the wealthy are permanent. The relief for working people came with an expiration date.

4. And there's one more thing we have to get right. This benefit needs to go to the waitress and the bartender and the hotel housekeeper. Not to hedge fund managers and lawyers who restructure their compensation to look like tips on paper. Any real no-tax-on-tips bill needs ironclad guardrails to make sure the people gaming the system aren't the same ones who always game the system.

I support making no federal income tax on overtime permanent and applicable to all overtime hours. I support making no tax on tips permanent.

Canceling a subscription shouldn't require sitting on hold for hours or navigating a deliberately confusing website. That's not a business model. That's a trap. I support the bipartisan Unsubscribe Act of 2025 (S.2253), to require that canceling any subscription be as simple as signing up for it – one click.

Every time you swipe your card, Visa and Mastercard skim 2 to 3% off the top. It's a private sales tax that costs the average Nebraska family $1,200 a year and is most small businesses' highest operating cost after labor and rent. I support the bipartisan and Trump endorsed Credit Card Competition Act (S.3623) to break up the Visa-Mastercard duopoly and force real competition into the market to bring down prices for small businesses and consumers.

The idea of right to repair is simple: if you own something, you should have the right to repair it yourself or bring it to a technician of your choice who can. Instead, consumers and independent repair shops face manufacturer restrictions on diagnostic software, tools, and repair information in nearly every industry – consumer electronics, home appliances, smartphones, cars, tractors, the list goes on.

We need to hold corporations accountable who engage in planned obsolescence, use software locks to shut out independent repair shops, and design products to fail so you have to buy new ones. This isn't just a consumer issue. It's a property rights issue. If you bought it, you own it and you should be able to fix it.

Shrinkflation occurs when corporations quietly put less product in the same size package and charge you the same price. When I worked at Kellogg's, I did this. I retrofitted packing machines to make them make smaller bags put into smaller boxes. They knew customers would notice a price increase, but they bet you wouldn't notice getting less.

We deserve full transparency in the marketplace. I support the Shrinkflation Prevention Act of 2024 (S.3819), which would direct the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to issue regulations to establish shrinkflation as an unfair or deceptive act or practice. If a company reduces the size of a product, they should be required to clearly label that change on the package and prominently display the new quantity. You deserve to know exactly what you're buying. If you're selling less, say so.

Every year, on April 14th at 10:00 p.m., my wife and I sit at the kitchen table and file our taxes. And like 40 million other Americans we pay TurboTax to do so. In fiscal year 2025, Intuit reported $4.9 billion in revenue from TurboTax alone. Estimates vary, but taxpayers spend about $150 billion out-of-pocket to file our taxes every year.

The government knows exactly how much we owe them or (hopefully) how much they owe us. In the early 2000s, through intense lobbying by tax preparation companies like TurboTax, the government – across administrations – has allowed middlemen to step in and make a profit off of us doing something that could be done for free.

For the 2024 tax season, the IRS piloted a free direct file system in 12 states. It had 140,803 users who saved about $5.6 million in tax preparation fees. That’s about $40 a person. For the 2026 season, the program has been canned, allowing massive corporations to yet again squeeze more money out of us.

Imagine paying the restaurant you're eating at a fee to tell you what the bill is! This is the biggest scam that no one knows about. I’ll support restarting the IRS Direct File program with the eventual goal to make this available to every American who wants to use it.

Surveillance pricing is when companies collect your personal data and use algorithms to charge you more based on what they know about you. Your location. Your browsing history. Your income level.

Imagine you just had a death in the family and need to fly home for a funeral. An airline knows this because they have access to your search history, your emails, your social media. So they charge you more. Because they know you are stuck and have no choice.Test prep companies have already been caught charging more based on the demographics of your zip code. Ridesharing apps have been found charging different prices for the same exact ride based on personal data.

This is immoral and wrong. Our personal data should not be weaponized against us to extract every last dollar corporations think they can get. I support strong consumer privacy protections to prevent companies from using our personal data to charge us more.

Tariffs, when used strategically, can be a great tool for protecting American jobs and workers. Targeted tariffs are the reason that most of the trucks you see on American streets are American trucks. Those trucks are assembled here, supporting American jobs.

Blanket tariffs raise everyday costs for small businesses and families like mine. The current tariff strategy has been unfocused and guided by politics, not economics. The average American family is paying nearly $1,800 a year because of it. That is a tax on the people.

I work in the steamfitting and plumbing industry. Did you know a domestic water heater for your home is now $600 more than it was before our blanket tariff policy?

I support a smart, America-first tariff policy. Targeted. Strategic. Designed to bring jobs home and lower costs for consumers. Not a blanket approach that punishes Nebraska's farmers, small businesses, and working families while corporate middlemen pass every cost straight to you. On tariffs, one size does not fit all.

Non-compete agreements are predatory contracts that corporations force onto workers to prevent them from leaving for a better job. We are not talking about executives with access to genuine trade secrets. We are talking about hairstylists, warehouse workers, nurses, and fast food employees – ordinary working people being told by a company that they cannot pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.

About 30 million American workers are currently bound by these agreements. They suppress wages, kill economic mobility, and stifle new business formation. The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty. When a corporation can trap a worker in a job simply because it can, that is not a free market. That is a rigged one.

I support taking the FTC’s proposed November 2024 rule and making it a legislative ban on non-compete agreements for working people.

AI data centers need a boatload of power to operate and all of us are picking up the tab. Residential electricity prices jumped more than 7% in 2025 while Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg made billions. Big tech is cutting secret deals with utilities to get discounted power while the infrastructure costs get quietly spread to every other ratepayer. We keep hearing about companies cutting jobs because of AI. We never hear about them cutting prices because of it. If these corporations want to consume the power of entire cities to train their models, they should pay for it themselves, not stick it to your electric bill.

Being in a union taught me that it’s important to take care of our retirees because we all want to be one some day. We pay into Social Security and Medicare our entire working lives. It’s not charity. It’s a promise this country made to working people, and I intend to keep it.

I will never vote to cut Social Security or Medicare benefits. I will never vote to raise the retirement age. And I will never let Wall Street get its hands on our retirement. The moment we hand Social Security over to the stock market, the guarantee is gone. Ask anyone who retired in 2008 how that would have felt.

Right now, millionaires and billionaires stop paying into Social Security after their first $176,100 in income. For some, this happens within just minutes every new year. After that, they don’t pay another penny. The rest of us pay our rate on every dollar we earn. That’s a fairness problem.

Raising or eliminating that cap so the wealthy pay the same rate as everyone else would extend Social Security's solvency for decades without cutting a single benefit for a single retiree. No benefit cuts. No retirement age increase. No privatization. Just making sure the people at the top pay the same rate as the people at the bottom.

This is the fix. It is simple, it is fair, and the only reason it hasn't happened is because the people who would have to pay more are the same people funding the campaigns of the people who would have to vote for it.

Politicians talk all the time about supporting our troops and veterans, but too often that just means funneling money to incredibly profitable defense contractors. I served in the Navy and the Nebraska Army National Guard. I’m not going to just talk about supporting our troops and veterans. I will support policies that actually move the needle for our nation’s heroes. We must:

• Pass the Major Richard Star Act
  Under current law, veterans forced to medically retire due to combat or combat-related injuries do not receive their full retirement pay from the Department of Defense and their full disability compensation from the VA. Their retirement pay is offset dollar-for-dollar by the amount of disability pay they receive. Some end up with no retirement benefits at all. I support the Major Richard Star Act (S.1032) which would end this offset, giving service members the full benefits they deserve.

• Stop the Privatization of the VA
  Our veterans deserve the best healthcare we can provide, period, full stop.  Not the cheapest. Not the most profitable. The best.Privatization was sold as a solution for rural veterans who live far from VA facilities. The reality is that veterans in private systems face longer wait times, less coordinated care, and providers who are not trained in the unique health needs of those who served. The private sector is not equipped to handle the mental health challenges, burn pit exposure, and service-related conditions that our veterans carry home with them.And while care gets worse, corporate profits get better. Companies like UnitedHealth are lobbying aggressively to steer veterans and their healthcare dollars into private hands. That is not support for our veterans. That is exploitation of them.In 2024, veteran trust in VA healthcare reached a record 92%. The system works when we invest in it. I will fight to protect and strengthen the VA, not dismantle it for the benefit of Wall Street.

• Raise Serviceman Pay
  Sometimes it seems the military overpays for everything – except soldiers, sailors and airmen. I handled inventory on the USS Constellation. I saw things like forty dollar hammers that cost ten bucks at the hardware store or $10,000 switches that cost a couple hundred dollars to manufacture. Price gouging is draining our military of the resources to defend this country. How? Defense contractors spend millions of dollars annually lobbying Washington. It’s no surprise that hundreds of billions of dollars are siphoned out of our military on overpays. Meanwhile, military families struggle to put food on the table. We must pay servicemen and women a competitive wage. Military families are on food stamps, and we wonder why there’s a recruitment crisis.

We spend $15,474 per person on healthcare – significantly more than any other developed nation, but we get worse results. The reason isn't that Americans are sicker or go to the doctor too much. The reason is because our healthcare is dominated by monopolies that have the power to gouge us.

One company now owns your insurance, your doctor's practice, your pharmacy, and the middleman deciding which drugs you can have. For example, UnitedHealth Group owns UnitedHealthcare, 90,000 doctors through Optum Health, and OptumRx, one of the three companies that controls 80% of all prescriptions in America. They negotiate with themselves. They pay themselves. They profit at every single step of our care.

This is called vertical integration, and it is the same racket John D. Rockefeller ran with Standard Oil until Teddy Roosevelt broke it up. An insurance company should not own the doctors providing the care, the pharmacy filling the prescriptions, and the middleman deciding what gets approved. That is not a free market. That is a monopoly dressed up as one.

I support the bipartisan Break Up Big Medicine Act (S.3822) – a Glass-Steagall approach to healthcare. One company, one business. Insurance or providers. Insurance or pharmacies. Not all of the above. Break up the conflicts of interest, restore competition, and watch costs come down.

There was a time when your doctor owned their practice and your pharmacist knew your name. That Nebraska is disappearing. Independent doctors are being swallowed by corporate hospital systems and insurance conglomerates. Independent pharmacies are closing at a rate of more than one per day, replaced by CVS mail-order and pharmacy chains owned by the same insurance companies deciding what drugs you can have.

This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a system rigged against small, independent operators. PBMs reimburse independent pharmacies below the cost of the drugs they dispense. Corporate health systems use their market power to starve independent physician practices of patients. The little guy cannot compete when the referee owns the other team.

I support requiring equal reimbursement for independent pharmacies and physicians. I support any willing provider laws that let patients choose their own doctor and pharmacy rather than being steered to whatever corporation owns their insurance. And I support banning the non-compete agreements that trap doctors inside corporate systems long after they want to leave.

The doctor who knows your name and the pharmacist who knows your family are worth fighting for.

The VA negotiates drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. That is why a veteran pays a fraction of what a Medicare patient pays for the exact same pill made by the exact same company.

For decades, drug companies spent millions lobbying Congress to make sure Medicare and Medicaid could not do the same thing. They succeeded. The result is that the United States government, the largest purchaser of prescription drugs on Earth, is legally prohibited from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower prices. Every other developed country does this. We do not. And we pay two to five times more than they do because of it.

I support giving Medicaid the full authority to negotiate drug prices directly with manufacturers, the same way the VA does, the same way every other wealthy country does. No middlemen. No PBM taking a cut. No pharmaceutical lobbyist veto. Just the government negotiating on behalf of the people it serves.

This is not complicated. It is just common sense that has been blocked by an industry that spends more on lobbying than any other in America.

When a rural hospital closes, it does not just affect sick people. It affects everyone. Young families will not move somewhere without a hospital. Businesses will not either. The whole community starts to die.

My opponent voted for a bill that cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade. It’s estimated that $137 billion of that will affect rural hospitals specifically. Pete’s solution? A $50 billion rural health fund split across all 50 states over five years. I’m no math whiz, but you can’t take $3 dollars away from us, give $1 back and tell us to be thankful.

I will fight to restore rural hospital funding and protect the communities that depend on them.

Through Medicaid, Age and Disabled (AD) Waivers reimburse caregivers so eligible seniors (65+) and people under 65 with disabilities can receive care at home instead of in institutions like nursing homes. It’s more comfortable for patients, cheaper for families, and cheaper for tax payers in the long run. Cuts to Medicaid have threatened this program. I will support it.

In 2024, 71% of Nebraska voters voted to legalize medical marijuana but Pete Ricketts has sabotaged the will of the people at every turn. He spent $500,000 on ads lying about medical marijuana. He said it would "kill your kids." He lobbied against legislation that would have properly regulated it. I will stand up for patients and caregivers to make sure people can get the medicine that helps them. I will not only stop the obstruction, I will actively work to support the adoption of medical marijuana in our state.

The relationship between a patient and their doctor is one of the most personal and private relationships that exists. Politicians in Washington should not be inserting themselves into it.

I believe in personal freedom. I do not believe the government should be involved in our private lives. What happens between you and your doctor is your business, not the government's.

I will fight to keep the government out of your most personal healthcare decisions and protect the right of every Nebraskan to make those decisions privately, with their family and their doctor.