POLICY

Energy:

Nuclear

  • Retain existing nuclear power plants
  • Expand nuclear engineering programs at public universities
  • Provide funding for advanced nuclear reactor research that use different fuels like thorium and different coolants like molten salt
  • Deploy small modular nuclear reactors

Natural Gas

  • Require safer, more efficient methods of fracking that results in less wastewater. 
  • Require natural gas companies prevent methane gas leaks
  • Invest in developing cheaper methods of natural gas extraction, refining, and shipping. 
  • Begin exploring future uses for natural gas and other fossil fuels within a carbon neutral, sustainable framework

Wind and Solar

  • Expand solar cell production even further
  • Build rooftop solar arrays, no solar farms
  • Expand wind farming in western Ohio
  • Mitigate damage of wind farms
  • Invest in wind turbine improvements to reduce footprint, increase efficiency

Electric Grid

  • Smart grid
  • Incorporate smart grid into broadband expansion
  • Secure the grid
  • Limit disruptions

Battery Storage

  • Develop utility scale battery technologies.
  • Develop Fuel Cells
  • Invest in lithium battery production to help dominate electric vehicle industry

Agriculture

Crop Diversity

  • Popularize more foods
  • Education of preferred farming techniques, different system of crop rotation
  • Develop techniques for farming greater variety of crops
  • Seek out and develop new crops
  • Restore eastern agricultural complex
  • Prepare for a post-corn world

Precision Farming

  • Develop precision farming tools/sensors/software
  • Create program to incorporate precision farming techniques into Ohio farming

Genetic Modification

  • GMOs good
  • Reduce red tape wherever possible
  • Open source GMOs

Industrial Farming and Automation

  • Explore paths for more efficient, more sustainable industrial scale farming
  • Invest in technologies to increase automation of harvesting

Forestry

  • Cross laminated timber products
  • Forestry as carbon sinks
  • Government managed reforesting of disused farmland if the collapse of ethanol proves so damaging to land prices. 

Unconventional Farming Techniques

  • Aquaponics
  • Algae Farming
  • Hydroponics
  • Vertical Farming

Housing and Construction

Public Works/Infrastructure 

  • Modular
  • Better examination of cost/benefit estimations
  • Don’t always settle for lowest bid, examine bids carefully
  • Penalties for contracts that exceed a certain percentage of estimated costs
  • More flood prevention
  • Integration of Ohio’s state infrastructure bank into new Ohio government banking system

Housing

  • Cross laminated timber products for taller wooden structures
  • Modular 
  • Preservation and restoration of existing housing
  • Transition from property tax to land value tax
  • Rezoning to allow denser housing and mixture of residential and commercial 

Healthcare

  • Decouple healthcare from health insurance.
  • Decouple health insurance from employment.
  • Create an interstate healthcare standards compact to simplify operation of healthcare providers across state lines.
  • Explore how Ohio can pursue a Direct Care model while working within the stringent requirements of federal law and the ACA.
  • Transparent pricing
  • Invest in new hospitals, targeting rural Ohio first, through a broad infrastructure program.
  • Reduce exhaustive paperwork, tort reform
  • Expand medical school openings and reduce costs. 
  • Repeal Ohio’s Certificate of Need laws. 
  • Raise awareness of the value and importance of timely vaccination 
  • Greater access to medicine through telemedicine
  • Greater development of remote health monitoring technologies
  • Greater emphasis on both preventative care and general quality of life/health improvement

Education

Post-Secondary

  • Open source textbooks and course materials
  • Open source online education programs created and provided jointly by Ohio’s public universities, community colleges, and high schools
  • More directly linking community colleges and technical schools with local high schools for more seamless transition 
  • Make public universities partially liable for unpaid student loans
  • Eliminate obstacles for students seeking transcripts
  • Expand and modify programs of vital economic importance (nuclear engineering, medical, teaching, aerospace engineering, programming)
  • Consider alternative approaches for assessing student performance beyond basic GPA (weighting courses, for instance)

Primary and Secondary Education

  • Eliminate 12th grade
  • Universal pre-k
  • Support internal diversity and innovation in education by providing multiple styles and paths within schools (this is my compromise with pro and anti-charter school folks)
  • Universal vouchers
  • Centralize funding a little more (maybe with universal vouchers in a horrifying market experiment) 
  • More integration of web enabled and self-paced education
  • Really need to eliminate lead and asbestos in school
  • Good lord, we desperately need to upgrade ventilation and airflow in schools
  • We’re going to teach my version of economics from now on, so Tim decrees! 

Aerospace

  • Space mining
  • Satellites 
  • New propulsion and rocketry

Transportation

  • Never give up on autonomous vehicles
  • Ohio centric high speed rail (acceleration is much more important than max velocity here)
  • Electric vehicle production
  • Build out train connections from Ohio’s small cities to the tri-C route 
  • Why are highways so expensive to build? I blame people
  • Make subways cheap by doing the opposite of whatever NYC does

Communication

  • Rural broadband
  • 5G
  • Domestic competition in internet provision
  • Link with rollout of smartgrid 
  • Enshrine the right of individuals to the data they produce 

Resource Management

  • Space mining
  • Developing techniques for the harvesting of rare earth elements from disused coal mines
  • Natural gas and oil sustainability
  • See if we can making mining in Ohio a thing again but cheap and clean
  • Cleaning up after ourselves
  • Figure out something to do with carbon: nanotubes, graphene, carbon fiber

Innovation and Industrial Policy

  • The importance of standard setting to market dominance
  • The American system forever! Interoperability, modularity.
  • Clusters
  • Establish Bank of Ohio for Ohio government funds, roll in Ohio infrastructure bank 
  • Foster a culture of innovation and self-improvement

Ohio Investment Bank (an idea I just won’t let die)

  • Large state controlled venture capital fund
  • Tied into university technology transfer offices 
  • Small business services (paperwork, accounting)
  • Export, import, and supply chain management assistance
  • The means by which most technological growth and industry investment will be achieved

Government

  • Experimental policy 
  • State government as standard setter and centralizer of information
  • Local governments for implementation, tailor local policy to meet state targets
  • Digital government, every interaction with the government should reasonably be done online and in a simplified format. Never stand in line! 

Democratic Reforms

  • Democracy dollars
  • Unicameralism
  • 225 person general assembly 
    • Salaries cut to $20,000/yr
    • 6 year terms, 75 up every two years
  • Eliminate self funding (you can contribute as much to your own campaign as anyone else can) 
  • Automatic voter registration
  • Same day voter registration
  • Lower voting age to 17
  • Independent Redistricting
  • Ranked Choice or Approval Voting
  • More transparency from 501c4 or a ban on political spending

Taxation

  • Eliminate the Ohio Commercial Activity Tax
  • Return of the Inheritance tax
  • Sales tax to value added tax
  • Property tax to land value tax
  • Increase taxes on incomes above $150,000 individual a year
  • The Independent Commission on Taxation

Criminal Justice

  • Judicial discretion, eliminate mandatory minimums on a lot of things
  • Decriminalize drugs (and start trying to release drug offenders from prisons)
  • Legalize marijuana and really liberalize that market, none of these state sponsored monopolies
  • No private prisons
  • Increases educational resources and skills training within prisons

Abortion

  • What is broadly viewed as the socially desirable amount of regulation would happen without said regulation and regulation can have hard to mitigate, harmful consequences so the official position of this campaign is that all restrictions on abortion should be repealed from Ohio law.
  • But returning to the status quo that Roe provided is acceptable but not optimal.
  • Abortions can be reduced through:
    • Comprehensive sex education.
    • Access to contraceptives.
    • Financial security.
    • Access to healthcare.