The Promethean Candidate

Core Disposition

• Deliberator, not delegate (per Burke). Willing to disagree with constituents when the evidence demands it, and willing to explain why.
• Signals less, builds more. Comfortable being boring on cable news.
• Organic, not imposed. Comes from the community they represent; not parachuted in.

Trade

• Believes in regulatory parity on imports — foreign producers shouldn't enjoy lower compliance costs than domestic ones.
• Open to strategic tariffs where they target genuine national-security or parity issues; skeptical of blanket protectionism.
• Willing to say openly that some trade deals have losers and that the losers deserve real transition support, not empty retraining rhetoric.
• Standing bilateral institutions over ad-hoc escalation. Supports a permanent US-China bicameral trade body (or equivalent G2 forum) as the venue for trade-and-security dispute resolution — explicitly designed to replace the "trade agreements by tweet" status quo. The proposed Trump-Xi trade council from the Anchorage summit is the proof-of-concept template; the question is whether to formalize it and what binding authority to give it. Accepts the implicit `bipolar-world-admission`: the UN's load-bearing function has eroded; institutionalize what's actually happening rather than pretend otherwise.

Tax Code

• Wants radical simplification — fewer brackets, fewer deductions, shorter forms.
• Supports closing the carried-interest loophole and taxing wealth transfers meaningfully.
• Hostile to rent-seeking by tax-preparation intermediaries (see: Intuit, H&R Block).
• Willing to raise revenue where math demands it, not just cut.
• Federal sales tax as a candidate consumption-based architecture. Tiered rates (0% on staples / food / essentials; escalating to as much as 100% on conspicuous luxury) that tax *consumption* rather than *production*. Accepts the regressiveness tradeoff up front and addresses it via the tiering itself — staples carry zero rate, the very wealthy pay through the luxury-tier mechanism. Acknowledges consumption-arbitrage edge cases (cross-border purchases, ultra-luxury flying to Hong Kong) as real but manageable.
• One-pillar digital tax administration (the Estonia model). A single federal software portal where businesses upload transaction data with shipping addresses; the system disburses revenue to localities according to jurisdictional rules updated centrally. Pre-filled returns ("send me the bill") replace the H&R Block / Intuit rent-seeking layer for individuals.
• Compliance-burden reduction is itself a policy goal. Per `compliance-as-american-tax`: the current architecture is a hidden tax on American businesses that funds growth in offshore compliance-labor markets. Simplification reduces this leak, with the honest tradeoff that some compliance-industry jobs disappear.
• Legal architecture shapes capital mobility. Inheritance, taxation, and corporate-governance frameworks together determine whether capital can move to its highest-value holder. France's *réserve héréditaire* (50%/66%/75% mandatory bequests scaled by number of children) is the show's preferred negative example: capital that cannot reassign loses optionality at a generational scale. The candidate is comfortable saying — explicitly — that American capital flexibility is itself a productive feature, not just a libertarian preference. (Anchor: Dan, Gone Building ~21:59.)

Safety Net

• Believes in a real floor, with fewer strings. Simpler programs, less means-testing theater, more direct support.
• Ties the safety net to work and mobility where possible, but doesn't use work requirements as a cudgel.
• Takes housing supply seriously as a safety-net issue, not just a market issue.

Government Structure

• Wants fewer but better-staffed agencies.
• Favors performance-based accountability over process-based accountability.
• Believes the federal government is doing too many things badly and should do fewer things well.
• Term limits, applied across all three branches. Six-year single-term presidency; a 12-year cap on cumulative congressional service across both chambers; no lifetime appointments without periodic verification (see judiciary item below). The principle: institutional knowledge has real value, but so does turnover — the design problem is calibrating the exchange rate, not refusing one or the other.
• Industrial-policy continuity as the six-year-term rationale. The single six-year term isn't only about anti-incumbency — it's the implementation mechanism for direction-setting. Voters select the policy direction in the election year; year-1 of the term decides the specifics; years 2–5 build it. Pairs structurally with the Atom Economy chapter below: long-horizon infrastructure work requires longer policy-continuity than the two-year midterm cycle currently allows.
• Cognitive-testing rather than hard age caps for the federal judiciary. A blanket age cap loses high-performing senior jurists; a meaningful cognitive baseline ("if they're scoring 125 out of 100, choose the 82-year-old") admits seniority while filtering for capacity. The same principle should be considered for the executive.
• Asset air-gapping for sitting officeholders. Existing holdings move into a blind trust at oath-of-office; no single-stock ownership while in office; meaningful penalty teeth on STOCK Act disclosure violations (the current $200 fine, never collected, is theater). Dan's caveat — divestment requirements may push competent operators out of public service — is a real constraint, not a deal-breaker; structure the blind trust to grandfather concentrated positions while ending forward decision-making capability.
• "No incumbents" as a default voter disposition when oversight bodies are demonstrably failing to police themselves. Not a permanent stance; a corrective-action default during periods of structural incumbency capture.
• Sunset rules by default on new programs and offices. Every initiative ships with an expiration date; renewal is the affirmative act, not termination. (DOGE, Apr 2025–Jul 2026 statutory window, is the show's negative case study — a defensible idea hobbled by execution and saved partially by its own sunset.)
• Stronger lobbying restrictions and post-office cooling-off periods for staff and members.
• Transparency as a structural property of the office, not a personality trait of the officeholder. The candidate is comfortable with maximally legible operations — published meeting calendars, decision logs, raw budget data — without committing to a side on the hidden-vs-flood-the-zone axis (see `hidden-vs-flood-the-zone`). The principle is that trust requires demonstrability: a citizen should be able to audit a representative's decisions from the comfort of their couch (per `ground-up-audit`). The honest position is "trust requires demonstrability," not "Wizard of Oz is fine when our team holds the curtain."

Atom Economy / Public Infrastructure

New chapter, introduced in v0.3.

• Treats public infrastructure as the next-CapEx-wave industrial-policy priority. The bits / software era's productivity gains have largely accrued to private actors; the next regime — the *atom economy* — is grid, sensor network, smart-building integration, and physical-world transport efficiency. Per Dan: "a lot of inflation if we don't build in the atom economy." The market alone won't fund this; it's a tragedy-of-the-commons problem that requires policy direction.
• Energy grid as the binding constraint. Modernization is non-negotiable — stable or falling electricity prices are the precondition for everything else. Failure mode is the `electricity-protests-2026` prediction (per Predictions.md).
• Sensor and connectivity backbone as the second-order layer. Distributed sensors (Nest-class smart thermostats, transport telemetry, civil-infrastructure monitoring) make grid-efficiency gains compoundable rather than one-time. The public-infrastructure side is the network; private actors build the applications on top.
• Smart-cooling and HVAC integration as the demonstrative pilot. Cities and the residential stock are massive cooling-energy sinks; coordinated grid-side optimization here is the most legible early-win for atom-economy infrastructure investment.
• Texas Triangle (Houston / Dallas / San Antonio) as the positive case study. Sean: "look south not west." Texas is showing what coordinated infrastructure CapEx looks like in practice; California is the negative case study of "absolute crazy abundance" coexisting with "absolute crazy waste."
• Skilled-trades labor supply as the binding operational bottleneck. The atom-economy buildout's most visible constraint is not capital or permits but trades workers — electricians, welders, HVAC, structural, data-center fitouts. Indianapolis-to-Minneapolis wage migrations ($55/hr → $80/hr inside two years) are the legible signal. The candidate explicitly treats trade-school funding, apprenticeship-pipeline support, and credential-portability across states as part of the energy-grid plank rather than as a separate workforce-development plank. Dan, Gone Building ~10:50: "at least into 2030, but I imagine this goes out to 2040… outside of people making bad decisions."
• Tax-policy connection. Atom-economy CapEx scale requires either revenue-side reform (see Tax Code chapter) or willingness to deficit-finance long-horizon infrastructure. The candidate is comfortable being explicit that the bill comes due.
• Connects to Government Structure. The six-year single-term presidency is the proposed implementation vehicle: atom-economy buildout doesn't fit a 2-year political cycle.

Civic & Communal Fabric

• Takes the decline of third places seriously as a civic crisis, not nostalgia.
• Supports policy that rebuilds community infrastructure — libraries, parks, trade associations, civic clubs, local journalism.
• Believes in civic education reform and takes it personally.
• Willing to say on record that people need to be members of things, not just consumers of them.
• Reducing compliance friction on local small business is itself civic infrastructure. Per the Tax Code chapter: small businesses anchor community life, and the current 48-jurisdictional-filings-per-month sales-tax burden falls heaviest on them. The federal-tax-simplification plank is also a civic-fabric plank.

What the Profile Is Not

• Not a platform of purity tests.
• Not a single-issue candidate.
• Not someone who thinks the answer is more viral moments.