Let's Build a David vs. Goliath Economy

Run by Small Business Owners, Not the Corporations Who Are Ruining America for Profit

There is an extraordinarily powerful idea in economics from a winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics. Any investment in systemically undervalued American small businesses will grow faster than investments in the largest corporations on Earth. Economists call this the small-cap value premium. I call it the American Dream. But it's not looking so good for the small-cap value premium these days. Many economists are starting to ask:

Is the small-cap value premium dead? Is the American Dream dead?

Today's largest corporations are no longer engines of innovation or prosperity, but of exploitation — destroying jobs through outsourcing, automation, and layoffs. They inflate prices, shrink the sizes of their products while charging the same amount, erode local economies, and treat workers as liabilities instead of assets. The result is a society hollowed out by corporate cost-cutting — a system where it is more profitable for corporations to damage our society than to serve the American public. It's not personal; it's just business.

But in a functioning capitalist society, it should be possible and encouraged for businesses to profit by better serving the community. Luckily, there is a good alternative. Small businesses tend to increase profits from increased revenues, not reduced costs. Small businesses scale up, serve more customers, improve their products, and foster a sense of community.

So there's no excuse why our government keeps on acting on behalf of corporate America while crushing the dreams of small business owners. If we invest in undervalued small businesses, not only will our economy grow faster than before, but we will create jobs, empower local communities, and restore the economy as a free-market engine for social mobility and public service that serve the people, not just the powerful.

Let's Protect Jobs with German Engineering — with an American Twist

During a National Emergency, Wall Street Should Bail Out Main Street, Not the Other Way Around

During the pandemic, employers laid off thousands of workers, sending the national unemployment rate soaring to its highest level since the Great Depression. And the truth is, it didn't need to happen. Many of these employers could have kept their teams intact, but chose instead to slash labor costs to protect their bottom line. In other words, corporate America profited by plunging thousands of families into chaos — many of whom relied on employment for their health insurance — during the worst public health emergency in a century.

The best solution to prevent mass layoffs during the next national emergency is a policy known as short-time work, or Kurzarbeit, pioneered in Germany with remarkable success. The idea is simple: employers will try to cut labor costs anyway. But instead of laying off workers, they are allowed to temporarily reduce the working hours of their full-time staff. The government then steps in to subsidize the reduced wages. Read more about this policy here.

In the American version I'm proposing, we take the same core principle, but we do it in a way that empowers workers directly. Rather than reimbursing employers for the lost wages, the government would send direct Andrew-Yang-style stimulus checks to affected workers, just like the payments issued under President Trump's COVID relief bill or President Biden's American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. This way, families stay afloat, employers stay flexible, and the economy keeps running — without funneling funds through corporate gatekeepers.

To fund the stimulus checks, I propose we enact a tax on unrealized capital gains, not income.

Let's Supercharge Investments into a Small Business Economy

By Aggregating Small Business Loans into a High-Yield Bond Fund

To empower local economies and strengthen the foundation of American entrepreneurship, I propose aggregating government-backed small business loans into a new class of high-yield fixed-income instruments — all held within the Great Societal Bond Fund.

Here's how it would work: The federal government already supports thousands of small businesses through loan guarantees administered by the Small Business Administration (SBA), including programs like 7(a), 504, and microloans. While these loans are underwritten on an individual basis, we can pool thousands of them into securitized bundles that resemble high-yield corporate bonds — but with one key difference: their proceeds directly finance real businesses in American communities.

It is noteworthy to state that this is not public ownership of small businesses — bonds are loans, not stocks; they don't confer ownership, control, or voting rights. In other words, small business loans would increase corporate competition, not corporate communism.

These bonds would be designed to offer competitive returns for investors worldwide, while remaining anchored in the productive real economy. Unlike junk bonds that fuel corporate buybacks or speculative acquisitions, these high-yield societal bonds would generate income from main street businesses that hire workers, provide services, and reinvest in their local regions.

The fund would be professionally managed and transparently disclosed, with strict creditworthiness thresholds and regulatory oversight. If successful, it would stimulate grassroots economic growth and strengthen the asset base of the Great Societal Bond Fund.

This is capitalism that works for everyone. Not just for hedge funds and large corporations — but for corner stores, startup founders, immigrant-owned bakeries, and small-town manufacturers. It's a bottom-up investment in the real American economy, powered by the same financial tools that Wall Street already uses every day.

Let's Invest in the Millionaires of Tomorrow with Zero-Interest Loans

Let's increase funding to the Small Business Administration to offer microloans to aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners at a 0% interest rate. I'm a really big fan of the zero-interest loans administered by Kiva, and I think that the federal government should do this on a much larger scale.

Let's fund this entirely through a targeted increase in corporate taxes for only large corporations, whether that be a 15% minimum corporate tax similar to the one passed in the Inflation Reduction Act, or even better, capital gains taxes.