Bernie Sanders makes $174,000 a year. He owns three houses and keeps telling YOU to give up more. So I wrote a rule for every socialist candidate: live like the median voter you claim to speak for. Everything over the line goes to the national debt. Bernie will hate rule three. I call it the Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is Standard. It applies to anyone running as a socialist, a democratic socialist, or with a DSA endorsement on the yard sign. No committee. No 1,400-page bill. Three rules. o Rule one: your taxable income cannot exceed the median American household. The Census Bureau put that at $87,460 for 2025. A record high, by the way. Under capitalism. Write that down, it will be on the quiz. o Rule two: your house cannot be bigger than the typical American home, roughly 1,800 square feet. I'm told that is about the size of a walk-in closet in certain zip codes. o Rule three: you cannot own more homes or cars than the average household. One house. About two vehicles. And no, the lake house does not count as a vehicle. I asked. It has a dock, not wheels. Everything over the line goes to the national debt. Not to a charity or your foundation, and not to a nonprofit run by your campaign manager's cousin. To the debt. By your own logic, the federal government is the most deserving outfit in the country, and it is certainly the most broke. So send the money where it's needed most. Somebody in the replies is already typing "that's not how it works." Sit down. It already is. Since 1961, the Treasury has accepted Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt through Pay.gov. Credit card, debit card, bank account, PayPal. They even take Venmo now. Nobody has to pass a bill first. Every "please tax me more" millionaire in America could do it before lunch. Want to guess how much came in from 1996 to mid-2025? About $67 million. Total. From the entire country. Against a debt measured in trillions. Strange how that line is always empty. All that talk about a fair share turns out to be about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Let me show you how this works in a classroom, since that's where I live. Picture my new Equitable Lunch Initiative. Every kid with two cookies hands one to a kid with none. Fair is fair. Meanwhile, the teacher who announced the policy keeps a full tray of cookies in her desk drawer, because somebody has to oversee the cookies. That is the entire DSA platform on a lunch tray. It's just common sense. So let's grade the two most famous volunteers. @SenSanders, a Senate salary is $174,000. That's roughly double the median household. Under my standard, about half of every paycheck goes to the debt, starting with the next one. Then the houses. A home in Burlington. A rowhouse in D.C. A lakefront camp in North Hero on Lake Champlain, the one he and Jane paid cash for in 2016. The government sells two, and you get to pick which one you keep. I'm not a monster. The book royalties count too. Back in 2019, when someone asked how a socialist became a millionaire, Bernie said he wrote a bestselling book, and anyone who does that can be a millionaire too. Agreed! That's called capitalism. You made a product, people bought it of their own free will, and you kept the profit. Congratulations, Senator. You found the system that works. You've just spent your whole career trying to make sure nobody else gets to use it. "But Mike, he's fighting the SYSTEM. One man can't fix it alone." That dog won't hunt. A man who says the system is rigged can still decline to cash the winnings. Nobody is stopping him. The Pay.gov page is open right now. If the system is the problem, why is he always the exception? Ms. Pelosi, you've never called yourself a socialist. You just voted for their spending for 39 years, so you've earned honorary enrollment. I know, I know, the trades are Paul's. Rule one is household income. Same kitchen table, same household. Every gain over the line this year goes to the debt. Nobody is accusing anybody of anything. The national debt would simply like its share of the luck. I'll stop joking for a minute. I know exactly what $87,000 looks like from the inside. It looks like a teacher's paycheck and an Army retirement check stretched across a family. Wait. I take that back. I don't actually know what an Army retirement check looks like, because the government is stealing mine. That's the wounded veteran tax, and it's why we need to pass the Major Richard Star Act, H.R. 2102 and S. 1032. Where was I? Right. It looks like a grocery list that gets edited at the register. It looks like driving the car with 200,000 miles on it because a new payment would eat a month of groceries. It looks like telling your kid "maybe next year" and meaning it. Millions of families live right there, every single month, and never once ask the government to rescue them. THAT is the life you want everyone else to pay for. Come live in it. Just for one term. Jesus spoke to this in Matthew 23. Talking to the crowds and His disciples about the scribes and Pharisees, He told them to do what those leaders taught but not what they did, because they preached and didn't practice. Then verse 4: they tie up heavy burdens, lay them on other people's shoulders, and won't lift a finger to move them. Swap the robes for a Senate pin and you have the same problem. If you can't live by the standard you're selling, why on earth would anyone believe you'd govern by it? A politician who won't take his own medicine but keeps writing you prescriptions is all hat and no cattle. For the ones already sitting in Congress, I didn't stop at a rule. I wrote the bill that puts their own skin in the game. It's in the first reply. So here's my offer to every DSA candidate on a ballot this November. Sign the standard. Post a screenshot of your first Pay.gov receipt. I'll share it myself. No rush, though. But what do I know, I'm only a physics teacher, and in my lab you don't get credit for the experiment until you actually run it.