Campaign Introduction

A Speech by Fred H. Francis — August 2026

My name is Fred Francis.  I live in a small house in Southern California with my wife Jennifer and children.  I make my living as a technical writer and manufacturing engineer, and my wife works in a hospital.  Like many Americans, we live project to project, paycheck to paycheck, and nobody in Washington knows my name.

I'm running for President anyway, and here's why.

For years now, I have watched American families — mine, yours, our neighbors' — struggle harder and harder to cover the basics.  In many parts of our country, gasoline hit four dollars a gallon this summer,[1] and nearly six here in California.[2,3]  Diesel, which moves every product we buy, is over five.[4]  Heating oil, which many families will need in a few months, is four twenty-eight a gallon right now.[5]  Americans' electricity bills have gone up twenty-six percent in five years.  The average household now pays almost two thousand dollars a year just to keep the lights on.[6]  And homeowner's insurance?  It's up forty-seven percent since 2020![7]  In Florida, for example, the average family pays eighty-three hundred dollars a year.[8]  Across the country, one in seven homes has no coverage at all.

Twenty-eight million Americans have no health insurance at all.[9]  My oldest daughter works at a local amusement park.  She came home one evening and told me that two of her coworkers had dropped their coverage.  Not because they didn't want it, but because they found they had to choose between paying for coverage, and paying for food and rent.

They chose food.  What choice did they have?

That is the country we are living in, and our finances have been getting worse, slowly but steadily, every year since 1973, when wages stopped keeping up with the economy.[12]

Most of us have never seen a clear accounting of where our tax dollars actually go.  Here's a summary, and there's more detail under “Show Us Where the Money Goes” on the website.  These numbers come from the Congressional Budget Office's final accounting of fiscal year 2025.[14]

Twenty-three cents on every tax dollar go to Social Security.  Fourteen to Medicare.[13]  Almost another fourteen — nine hundred and seventy billion dollars a year — goes to interest on the national debt.  Thirteen cents to national defense, so we're now paying more to service our old debts than we spend on keeping the country safe.  Ten cents goes to health programs like Medicaid.  Nine cents to income security — food assistance, unemployment insurance, housing programs.  Five cents to our veterans.  Four to education.  And the remaining seven cents covers everything else the federal government does: transportation, science, agriculture, the courts, and other, smaller programs.[15,16]

What about foreign aid?  Survey after survey shows that most Americans believe foreign aid consumes twenty or twenty-five cents out of every dollar.[17]  It's actually just one penny.  All the shouting about foreign aid ruining our budgets?  It's a flat-out lie, just horsefeathers!  And as long as we believe it, our anger about that one penny distracts us from asking hard questions about the other ninety-nine.  In the most recent complete fiscal year, it was less than one penny — about two-thirds of a cent.[18]  And so far this year, it's dropped to barely a tenth of a penny.[18]

We deserve better than that.  We deserve an honest accounting, real numbers, and the respect of being trusted to make our own decisions about what the priorities ought to be.

I know that many of you have spent years pushing for exactly these kinds of changes.  So why haven't they been fixed?  Two reasons.  One is, of course, that there are indeed issues about which we disagree as a matter of principle, and sometimes we've allowed fighting about them to overwhelm everything else on the agenda.  Worthwhile fights, to be sure, but not to the point of causing legislative paralysis.

The other is tactics.  When either party passes legislation in a way that shuts the other side out, they might win a vote but lose the country — because that approach gives the opposition no stake in making it work and every reason to tear it down.  I want to build things so well, so transparently, and so obviously in the interest of every American, that legislators on both sides can go home as heroes to their constituents, and be able to say with pride: I helped build this.  That is how you create change that lasts.  Not by beating the other side, but by making the work so good that claiming credit for it becomes the smart move for everyone.

I have sat on the sidelines long enough.  I am asking that we, as Americans, push our parties and our representatives to refocus on the things which all of us need them to address.

I know — when a man nobody has heard of says he wants to change the way this works, skepticism is the right response.  Good.  Be skeptical.  That is exactly why this campaign is built on transparency and verifiability, not on faith in me.  Every position on my website is sourced.  Every number is cited.  Every claim can be checked.  I am not asking anyone to make a leap of faith for an unknown.  I am asking all of you to look at the facts, verify them for yourselves, and if they hold up: vote for the candidate who did his homework.  If they don't, flag it in the comments or email me so that we can fix it together, then vote for the candidate who listened, because he cared enough to try to get it right.  Instead of believing anything I say, verify what's true, and help me build from that.

As we face the problems of our era, we can take heart by remembering that we are not the first Americans to face problems like these.  We're a country of everyday heroes: people who fought and won two World Wars and saved our enemies from starvation afterwards, who put a man on the moon with computers simpler than a smartwatch, and who've invented almost every major thing in the last hundred and fifty years.  Every generation before us has confronted its own version of these same struggles — prices they couldn't afford, systems that didn't serve them, a government that had drifted away from its founding purposes.  Yet every time, when ordinary Americans worked together, even sometimes when they were still shouting at each other, they found the answers.  They solved the problems.

Social Security.  Major vaccines.  Rural electrification.  The GI Bill.  The Interstate Highway System.  Medicare.  Paramedics.  Voting rights for women.  The end of slavery.  The electric light.  The invention of powered flight — on two planets, no less!  The right to an attorney in a criminal case.

Each one was built by Americans who disagreed about nearly everything — except that their neighbors deserved a fair shake.

That is the tradition we inherit.  Not perfection, but the stubborn, practical, American tradition of working on, and solving, our problems together.  We can each pull up a chair, look at the numbers, and work together on what is actually broken — and agree on practical things we can do to improve things for ourselves and our posterity.

That is what this campaign stands for: transparency, accountability, practicality, and the sure and certain knowledge that we can make progress, as we always have, together.

Come to the website.  Read the proposals.  Tell me where I'm wrong.  I will listen, and we will fix things together.

Because this is not my campaign.  It is ours.