THE JOE G MANIFESTO
These quotes are drawn from an interview conducted in late 2025, before Joe decided to run for Congress.
Listen instead, see the link.
Not Actually
“For 12 years we’ve waited for our growing city of a million-plus people to be treated like the metropolis it is. Instead, we’ve found selective trinkets of investment from the federal government in specific areas our political representatives are connected to, while every other day-to-day issue we face goes unaddressed. The biggest issues are health care and the cost of living. And corporate money is the primary cause of all of these.”
The Pitch, iN 60 Seconds
“Transparency, trust, accountability. Everyone says that. And then they go and take money from someone and then go vote to do the opposite thing. I don’t really have any reason to lie to people. People say politics is hard. I don’t think the politics part of it is hard. The funding allocations and the legalese, that’s all complicated. But if you don’t have to constantly defend a bad decision, then what’s the difficult part?
I never viewed myself as someone who would enter into politics. But I’ve seen my district really be left behind. We’re not treated like a city of a million people. We’re treated like the center of a flyover state. We’re the economic and logistics hub of the region. We’re halfway between New York and Chicago. We are a growing city, an incredibly diverse and well-educated city. And we have an incredible amount of existing resources here, especially when it comes to health care, that we should be utilizing more effectively.
If someone else were to throw their hat in this campaign on these same principles, I would happily support them.”
WHAT ARE YOUR CORE VALUES?
“THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A DONATION AND A BRIBE IS TERMS”
“When you allow a class of wealthy and affluent individuals to buy votes in elections, what you end up with is a system where the average person’s vote doesn’t matter.
The only difference between a donation and a bribe is terms. But terms can be implied. If I own a cigarette company and I give you a million bucks, what do you think I want you to do the next time there’s a vote to ban smoking at school? And what’s the implication if you do vote to ban it? It’s that I’m not going to give you a million bucks next election. So you better not.
Now replace smoking at school with funding a third airport, instead of the road that 10,000 people take to work every day. Or instead of rebuilding the interchange that’s operating at literally double capacity and is twenty-five years behind schedule, where Ohio has been forced to kick in over half the bill because the federal government won’t cover the interstate interchange.
The only sort of campaign that can win against this sort of corruption is one that is the literal antithesis of it. One that does not take corporate money in any way, shape, or form.”
“It’s not that she’s wrong. It’s that she’s a fiery lecturer and a very skilled orator, and at the end of the day, saying I’m going to fight for this thing or talking about what’s at stake — that only goes so far when I’ve got to pay rent every month.
We came from an economic period, even in the past 10 years, where things were a little better. We didn’t really care too much collectively as a society about the commute being longer, the rent going up another year. Now that things are economically precarious, we’re forced to confront this reality. And we’re seeing that sentiment is shallow.
People are tired of being angry. People are tired of being told, I need you to be upset about this, I need you to fight for this thing, I need you to stand up. How about the people that are paid $174,000 a year, plus, in Joyce Beatty’s case, another quarter million for a pension, maybe they could start being pragmatic in Washington in the jobs they actually have, instead of telling me I need to be upset about something back at home while my rent is going up. I live in a city of a million people with no passenger rail and four airports. The funding does exist. It’s just not for the things I need, not for the places I live, not for the communities I frequent.
She has a $3 million bank account, and the bank is her top donor. A literal nine-year-old could see the issues here.
Her entire premise of electability is getting 45,000-some odd votes every May in the primary. That’s it. She gets that, then she coasts to the general. To do this, she still has to raise a million dollars. She ends up paying $5.60 a vote.
If someone tries to challenge you, you throw a million dollars of corporate money at them until they go away. That’s what she did to Morgan Harper. That’s what she did to the challenger before. That’s what she’ll try to do to the next one.”
ON JOYCE BEATTY
“We’re one of the only countries in the world that operates our healthcare system this way. As medicine has gotten more complex, we’ve followed the same model and scaled up the same system. With it, we’ve carried every single inefficiency at every level. Every cardiologist has a biller and a coder, a front desk person, an insurance interface. They have to make sure you’re covered, in network, all of that.
Central Ohio is home to some of the most robust care delivery networks in the United States. We have OSU Medical Center as our flagship state hospital, two other hospital health systems, two separate primary care systems, and a robust network of providers with strong connectivity across all of them. If we were a private company right now and our board said, ‘we have all these resources, let’s create our own branded health plan,’ and they didn’t do it — the investors would take that board out back and beat them. It would be the most stupid decision they could possibly make.
A can of Coca-Cola only costs a dollar, not eighteen, because you can go to Aldi and get a can of cola for a third of that price. So Pepsi and Coke can only charge about a dollar. Imagine if it were illegal for Aldi, Kroger, and Walmart to make their own versions. Coke could charge whatever they wanted. That’s where our healthcare market is.
Insurance, at its core, isn’t evil. It’s pooled risk. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you’re the insurance company and your role is to collect premiums and pay out for care, but instead you decide we’re just going to buy the care delivery organization so every dollar we pay to deliver care is actually still revenue for us — and you create a closed loop where premiums get funneled into yourself and you absorb them right back up — the incentive to actually provide care is gone. The value-add is gone. You’re a middleman.
There’s nothing inherently profitable about pooled risk. You don’t need profit to have a pooled risk system.
My model uses Section 1332 of the Affordable Care Act. It allows the federal government to reallocate the spending it’s currently making on Affordable Care Act marketplace plans directly to the states. Vermont set up a global budgets platform with this. When you walk into the doctor’s office, they treat you, they chart what happened to you clinically. They don’t chart for billing. They don’t pick ICD-10 codes. You leave. The program is free under a certain poverty threshold, then there’s a sliding scale, and you can buy in or keep private insurance, or both.
The real power is that providers get funded on a years-long basis. They can forecast their needs. They’re not boxed into a fee-for-service model where they have to schedule everything back to back, with no time for walk-ins or non-revenue-generating activities — like calling you to make sure your parents are taking their medication. In a fee-for-service model, that’s not billable. In this model, where you’re paid for the health of individuals rather than fees for individual services, there’s an incentive to do that.
I hope, five years from now, that the government program isn’t the lowest-cost one. That someone in the private sector found a way to do this with consistent care quality, cheaper. We want that. That’s the goal. Right now, there’s no market driver keeping costs low.”
HEALTHCARE
“The solution is that we need to build more housing. From an economics perspective, it doesn’t take much more housing to keep prices stable. You only need enough housing so that the option to leave is there. If you think about most people in their apartments right now, if they wanted to find another place near where they are, their only options are more expensive or more expensive. You can stay where you are or you can go somewhere that costs more.
If that market dynamic shifts, even simply having the option of an apartment for less forces the market to drive costs down. You don’t need enough housing to house every person in Ohio twice over. You just need enough that the market sustains the people who need to be there.
The federal government would not directly do any of that. The federal government would create an incentive structure that rewards housing dollars to cities that do the work to address the root causes. We can’t rely on the federal government to dip its fingers into every single pot of every single housing decision in every district. That would be a nightmare. But we can say: if you rezone to allow ADUs in a specific area, you become eligible for certain grant programs. Same with single-family to multi-family. Same with allowing more commercial development.
First-time homebuyer programs and rate subsidies don’t address the underlying problem. They pump money into people’s pockets so they can pour more money at the housing problem, which is the cause of the issue. We’re exacerbating the cause.
Roughly one in ten houses in central Ohio is owned by corporate landlords or corporate rental agencies. We shouldn’t be handing real estate development to corporations that have shown, time and time again, that they can’t deliver on budget and on schedule. They’re capable partners. They have a role. But giving them unfettered authority to make affordable housing is how we got here. The same home is being built 1,500 times across eight neighborhoods in four different states. We need to work with local developers, in coordination with local communities, who actually know what their area needs.”
HOUSING
“I think the Ukraine war should have been over in 2022…three consecutive administrations have failed to stand up to Russian aggression. This isn’t a new thing. This isn’t the first time America has been involved in a proxy conflict with a nuclear-armed Russian state. That’s defined most of the past 70 years.
There’s a playbook for dealing with this, and it’s straightforward: support your ally when called upon. We failed. They asked for 500 tanks. We said yeah, but we’ll send you a dozen, and another country will send you a dozen, and that’ll be in six months — and they use different gas, different ammo, the instruction manuals are in different languages, and you need different crews to operate all of them. Good luck.
What we should have done was take them to the mothball yard, put a gold tag on anything we were already going to pay to have destroyed — because it costs money to dismantle military equipment — and we should have let them take anything with a gold tag. We should have asked: what do you want? Instead of pushing defense contracts onto them, paid for by the American taxpayer, we should have given them the stuff we were going to pay money to destroy. We didn’t, because of practical failures in Washington and a lack of political leadership. And that cost us $100 billion as a country.
The pro-Israel lobby shouldn’t be able to give millions of dollars to U.S. politicians so they can vote to give billions to Israel. We’re not going to get rid of every misuse of taxpayer funds. But there’s some low-hanging fruit.”