The Promise That Doesn't Add Up

I want to tell you about Karen.

Karen is 52 years old and lives in Mission Viejo. She has worked as a dental office manager for fourteen years. Her husband works in logistics. They own their home. They have done everything the right way -- worked steadily, paid their bills, stayed out of debt, raised their kids. By every measure, they are the people this country is supposed to work for.

Karen told me she has voted for candidates from both parties over the years. She voted for candidates who promised to put Americans first. To lower costs. To bring jobs back. To stop sending money everywhere except here. She believed those promises, not because she is naive, but because they sounded right. They still sound right. The problem is that none of them came true.

Her property insurance increased after the fires. Groceries are still running significantly higher than they were four years ago. She told me she and her husband now have a line item in their budget called the register. That is what they call it. The register. Every time they go to the store it feels like a test they are failing, and they cannot figure out what they are doing wrong.

They are not doing anything wrong. That is the honest answer. The system is.

Here are the facts that nobody in Washington seems to want to say out loud together.

Groceries are up more than 30 percent since 2019. The supply chain disruptions ended years ago. The shelves are full. The trucks are running. Why haven’t prices come down? The answer is that in our economy, prices rise fast and fall slow. When costs go up, companies pass them to consumers immediately. When costs stabilize or drop, the savings rarely make it back to the register. Congress has never required any transparency about why. No major legislation from either party has addressed this structural imbalance. Both parties have accepted it.

The average family health insurance premium reached $27,000 in 2025, up 26 percent in five years. ACA marketplace premiums jumped 21.7 percent for 2026 after enhanced tax credits were allowed to expire. These are not acts of nature. They are the result of a healthcare system with too many middlemen, too little price transparency, and drug pricing that operates without real competition. This has been true for decades. Candidates have campaigned on fixing it for decades. The prices keep rising.

Tariffs were promised as the mechanism to bring manufacturing jobs back home. The reality is that steel is up 13 percent, aluminum up nearly 23 percent, and the cost of building an average American home has risen more than $6,000 because of those tariffs. The costs are paid by American contractors, American builders, and ultimately American families. Meanwhile, the manufacturing jobs that left this country were largely displaced not by foreign workers but by automation. That trend is accelerating. McKinsey projects that 30 percent of current work hours could be automated by 2030. No tariff addresses that. No one in Washington has presented a serious plan for what happens to the people whose jobs change.

Now let us talk about the phrase that was supposed to mean something.

America First. When people heard that phrase, most of them heard something real. They heard: my family comes before foreign commitments. My neighbor’s job matters more than a foreign country’s war. The roads in my community should be fixed before we rebuild someone else’s. That is not a radical idea. That is what most Americans believe. Karen believed it. The veteran I met believed it. The question that nobody wants to answer is: did the policies actually deliver it?

Here is where the money went instead. In 2024, Congress passed a $95 billion foreign aid package covering Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The United States sends $3.3 billion annually in military financing abroad, and fast-tracked an additional $4 billion to Israel in March 2025 alone. Then came the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed on July 4, 2025. That law added $156 billion in new military spending, pushing the total defense budget past $1 trillion for the first time in American history. It put $25 billion toward the Golden Dome missile defense project, which the House Appropriations Committee itself admitted the Pentagon had not yet explained or proven feasible. The administration said DOGE was cutting waste. Verified savings came to roughly $2 billion. Federal spending went up. The same law that built a $1 trillion defense budget also cut Medicaid, slashed food assistance, accelerated Social Security insolvency, and ended the one program keeping veterans in their homes. That is not America First. That is a budget that chose weapons over people.

I want to tell you what that choice looked like for one man. He served in one of those overseas commitments. He came home, got a job, bought a home on a VA loan, the promise this country made him in exchange for his service. When disability complications took him out of work, he fell behind on his mortgage. There was a program called VASP designed for exactly this moment. It had already pulled 33,000 veterans back from the edge of foreclosure, restructuring their loans at 2.5 percent interest. On May 1, 2025, the same administration that approved $156 billion in new military spending shut that program down. One week’s notice. No replacement. Nobody called Congress. Nobody called the veterans’ organizations. Nobody called the lenders who were in the middle of processing applications. Experts had warned a House committee just two months earlier that ending VASP without a replacement would lead directly to foreclosures. The warning was ignored. More than 10,000 veterans have since lost their homes. The veteran I met was one of them. His home was sold while he was still sleeping in it. This country sent him to war. It could not keep the program that kept his roof. That is the truth of what America First has meant in practice.

Karen does not know his name. He does not know hers. They have never met. They live in the same district, vote in the same elections, and share the same question: why does this government find the money for everything except the people who are right here asking for help? Karen’s health insurance premium went up $400 a month this year. She has not missed a payment in fourteen years of work. She cannot explain why her premium keeps rising any more than that veteran could explain why his home was sold out from under him. Neither of them is asking for charity. Neither of them is asking for something they did not earn. They are asking for a government that sees them with the same urgency it brings to a $1 trillion defense bill.

That is the promise that did not add up. Not left versus right. Not Democrat versus Republican. The simple, verifiable arithmetic of who this government chose when it had to choose. It chose the defense contractor. It chose the overseas commitment. It did not choose Karen. It did not choose the veteran. It did not choose the family standing at the register trying to make the math work. The question I am going to Washington to ask — loudly, on the record, every single day — is why. Why does the system work this way. Who benefits from the fact that it does. What would actually have to change for Karen to feel it.

The root cause problem is this: no one in power is asking why.

Why do prices rise fast and fall slow? Why does the most expensive healthcare system in the world produce worse average outcomes than countries that spend half as much? Why did we build a manufacturing strategy around tariffs that raised costs for American businesses instead of addressing the automation wave that is the actual driver of job displacement? Why does every budget debate in Washington treat overseas commitments as fixed and domestic needs as negotiable?

These are not partisan questions. They are the questions a constituent services representative would ask on behalf of Karen. They are the questions a good accountant would ask looking at the federal ledger. They are the questions that every family at the register is asking in their own way, without the language or the platform to demand an answer from the people who are supposed to be working for them.

I am running for Congress to ask them. On the record. Without apology. America First should start with Karen.

Ballots arrive May 4th.

With honesty and conviction —
Nina Linh
Independent Candidate, CA-40