Lowering Costs: Rebuilding a livable country

America is supposed to be a land of opportunity. But right now, families across New Jersey's 7th District are getting squeezed by the cost of nearly everything: groceries, rent, childcare, gas, energy bills. Wages have not kept up. This is not bad luck. It is the result of corporate price-gouging, decades of policy that put billionaires and big donors ahead of working families, and a Congress too compromised by corporate PAC money to push back. As the son of Colombian immigrants who built a life in this country one paycheck at a time, and as someone who built a small business employing over 100 people across New Jersey providing affordable childcare, I know what these costs feel like at the kitchen table. We cannot wait any longer for Congress to act.

The childcare system must simultaneously be affordable for families, sustainable for providers, and fair to workers, and right now it is not. Our plan proposes five reforms: capping childcare costs at $10 a day for middle-class Americans by phasing federal spending up to 1.5% of GDP and financing it with a 2% Worker Investment Fund tax on individuals earning over $50 million, eliminating childcare deserts by 2030 through a $1 billion annual grant program for construction in underserved areas and a federal reinsurance backstop modeled on the National Flood Insurance Program, subsidizing early childhood educator wages to 150% of the local minimum wage (paid for by reversing parts of the Trump/Kean tax cuts), establishing 6 months of paid maternity leave on a sliding scale between 67% and 90% of income, and expanding the CHIPS Act childcare model so that large place-based federal grants over $150 million direct at least 10% of project value toward childcare supply in surrounding communities, with clawbacks for noncompliance.

Gas prices are hitting record highs because of an entirely preventable war in Iran. Since Trump launched his war, prices at the pump have jumped 50%, and they will keep climbing the longer this conflict drags on. Every family filling up their tank in NJ-07 is paying the price for reckless decisions made in Washington. One of my first priorities in Congress will be to vote to end this war and push for diplomatic agreements that protect safe passage for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. I will also advocate for a windfall profits tax on the major oil companies that are posting record earnings while families pay more at the pump, with the revenue rebated directly back to working families. Over the long term, the only way to permanently insulate American families from these shocks is to break our dependence on oil, which is why I support major federal investment in electric vehicles, public transit, and clean energy manufacturing so that the next foreign crisis does not show up as a 50% increase at the gas station. Working families in New Jersey should not be bearing the cost of a war they never asked for, and they should not be at the mercy of an industry that profits every time prices spike.

Grocery prices keep climbing because Trump's tariffs are taxing every family that buys food, and a handful of consolidated corporations are exploiting the chaos to pad their margins. Tariffs on imported goods are passed directly to consumers at the checkout line, raising the price of everything from coffee to produce to the packaging that holds it. At the same time, four companies control 85% of the beef market, two companies control most of the baby formula supply, and similar consolidation runs through poultry, dairy, and grains. When competition disappears, prices go up and stay up. I will vote to repeal Trump's tariffs that are driving up the cost of groceries, restore aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up the agricultural monopolies squeezing both farmers and shoppers, and pass a federal price-gouging law that gives the FTC real authority to act when corporations exploit a crisis to jack up the price of food.

Utility bills in New Jersey are surging, and the two biggest drivers are a power grid that depends too heavily on volatile fossil fuels and an explosion of unregulated data center construction that is straining the system in ways residential customers are being forced to pay for. PJM, the regional grid operator that serves New Jersey, approved a capacity auction last year that added hundreds of dollars to the average household's annual electric bill, with data center demand cited as a primary cause. AI and crypto facilities consume as much electricity as small cities, and right now they are being plugged into the grid without paying their fair share of the infrastructure costs they create. I will fight to require data centers to cover the full cost of the grid upgrades their operations demand, so the burden does not fall on working families and seniors on fixed incomes. I will also push for major federal investment in solar, offshore wind, battery storage, and grid modernization so that New Jersey is generating more of its own clean, affordable power instead of buying expensive electricity from out of state. Clean energy is the cheapest electricity humans have ever produced, and the faster we build it, the faster utility bills come down for everyone.

Owning a home is a central part of the American dream, and for too many families in NJ-07 it is slipping out of reach. Housing prices are up roughly 60% since 2019. As your congressman, I will crack down on the investment firms and private equity speculators buying up single-family homes and pricing working families out of the market by banning private equity firms from hoarding single-family homes. I will also fight for renters, nearly half of whom now spend more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities, by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit to accelerate the construction of affordable rental units. Every family in this district deserves a real shot at a stable, affordable place to live.