Chris Borgia for U.S. Senate

Refresh for America is a collection of solutions to fix what's wrong with politics today. The solutions favor no side, no party, no ideology, no race, no age, and no class. They are designed to reform a system that is rewarding the wrong incentives and electing too many party servants, self servants, and special interest group servants. Why a refresh? Because today's politicians and the two party system they work for are failing us, and we don't deserve failure.

We don't deserve complex laws, distorted markets, or legislative outcomes influenced by big money campaign contributors. Our children don't deserve the burden of this 16 trillion dollar debt. Taxpayers don't deserve unfair tax treatment in the tax code. Big banks don't deserve to be too big to fail. Voters don't deserve fear of a wasted vote because they voted for their favorite candidate.

Our k-12 education system is not providing a quality education to every child who wants one. Our freedoms and liberties are being sacrificed in the name of security. Our health care system is too costly and complicated. Our trade policies are sending jobs overseas. Our nations credit score was lowered because of partisanship. Our leaders are selfish, ineffective, and too often driven by something other than public service. We have no unified energy policy, foreign wars are too easily started, the drug war is not working and is unconstitutional, our immigration policy is inconsistent with our values, our infrastructure is crumbling, and because it bears repeating we are $16,000,000,000,000 dollars in debt.

Election after election, promise after promise, politicians talk a good game about fixing what's wrong, but they never deliver. They can't deliver, the ones who want real reform are too few in numbers and the rest are too friendly with groups benefiting from the status quo. Too many of our leaders serve themselves, their party, and the special interest groups who contribute to their campaigns; the voting system, the election system, the pay to play system we have in Washington right now, that's the problem. Until we address the core reasons for this failure we will keep getting it.

What we need is a refresh. We need to refresh the budget so we have less waste, fraud, deficit spending and debt; we need to refresh the tax code to make it simple, fair, and off limits to politicians who use it as a tool to peddle influence; and we need to refresh the congress by removing the institutional bias and unfair election practices that are preventing competitive elections.

A lot of policies could use a refresh. Our trade policy, our health care policy, our education policy, our drug war policy, our foreign policy, our monetary policy, our immigration policy... but I suggest we focus on the tax code, budget, and our election system, once we address these issues all others will become easier. Refresh for America does just that.