Chris Manifold

Practical, Common-Sense Solutions.

Unifying America around solutions most voters agree on.

____________________________________________________________________________________

I am preparing to run for Congress as a common-sense candidate focused on practical solutions and real-world results.

I believe most Americans—and most voters in Maryland’s Third District—want leaders who bring people together, listen to constituents, and focus on what works, not ideology or special interests.

That’s why I will join the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to find common ground and pass policies that reflect the priorities of a broad majority of voters.

I believe elected officials should listen to the people they serve rather than special interest groups, and I want to hear directly from independents, Democrats, and Republicans alike to better understand your concerns and ideas.

In our district, the Democratic primary effectively determines who will represent us in Congress. I hope you will consider voting in the primary so your voice is heard.

A brief overview of my Practical, Common-Sense Solutions is below.

Join my email list to receive Direct Democracy Surveys, giving you a direct way to share your feedback on the policies and issues that matter most to you.

_________________________________________________________________________

Practical, Common-Sense Solutions

• Improve the economy and create jobs by making it easier to start and operate small businesses, including exempting them from onerous regulations that may be appropriate for large companies but are overburdensome for smaller ones.
• Significantly reduce the cost of prescription drugs by negotiating most-favored-nation drug prices with pharmaceutical companies for all Americans.
• Reduce healthcare costs, expand access, and ensure affordable coverage for all Americans through increased competition, efficiency measures, and targeted subsidies for those most in need. Reforms include expanding nurse practitioners’ scope of practice, such as prescribing medications; expanding telemedicine; allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines; reforming Certificate of Need laws that prevent new healthcare providers from entering the market; and making all healthcare costs, including insurance premiums, tax-deductible. Patients should also be able to purchase lower-cost catastrophic coverage for major care while paying directly for routine services—reducing wasted time for patients and doctors and cutting unnecessary insurance overhead.
• Make housing more affordable by reforming permitting processes to make it easier to build more homes in America.
• Drastically reduce the cost of college by streamlining the approval process for fully virtual accredited universities, such as University of the People, where students can earn an accredited bachelor’s degree for $5,660 and an MBA for $4,860. Alternatively, students can earn transferable college credits for $140 per course.
• Fix the border and immigration system, expand the economy, and increase the tax base by making it easier for properly screened immigrants to become documented, legally work in the United States, pay taxes, and pursue the American Dream. To ensure a secure yet humane border system, reform ICE to focus on deporting serious criminals and require ICE agents to wear body cameras when interacting with the public.
• Dramatically reduce poverty, government waste, and crime while strengthening the labor force by emphasizing workfare over welfare through large earned-income supplements for lower-wage workers. Reducing poverty is both a moral imperative and a practical one, as lower poverty rates are associated with reduced crime.
• Unite Americans, reduce division, reject extremism, and strengthen democracy by ending gerrymandering and implementing nonpartisan open primaries and ranked-choice voting. Members of Congress should join the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass common-sense solutions that two-thirds of Americans believe are better than existing policies. Politicians should listen to voters rather than special interests or extremists, obtaining feedback directly from people across the political spectrum through tools such as direct democracy surveys.
• Reduce corruption and strengthen accountability in government by fixing incentives that allow abuse of power. This includes banning or strictly limiting stock trading by members of Congress, lowering campaign contribution limits to reduce dependence on wealthy donors and special interests, requiring real-time transparency in political spending so voters can see who is funding elections,  and closing the revolving door by barring former members of Congress and senior officials from lobbying for at least five years after leaving office.
• Address the national debt and restore long-term fiscal sustainability by creating a bipartisan Fiscal Commission composed of members of Congress from both parties and outside experts. The commission would identify policies to reduce deficits, achieve a sustainable debt-to-GDP ratio, and ensure the solvency of key trust funds such as Social Security and Medicare. Historically, the debt-to-GDP ratio hovered between 40 and 60 percent, but since 2008 it has risen to over 120 percent—an unsustainable trend. The longer action is delayed, the more painful the eventual solution will be.

What other issues and policies are important to you?

__________________________________________________________________