Mark Piperfor Florida's 23rd Congressional District
Hello, and thank you for visiting the Making Sure website. The mission of Making Sure is to preserve the American values and culture that have made our nation the world’s leading example of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity today.
I’m Mark Piper, volunteering to represent our community in the United States Congress. Running as Mark Piper for Florida’s 23rd Congressional District, my mission is simple and urgent: protect everyday Americans from rising costs by restoring fiscal responsibility in Washington.
With the national debt approaching $40 trillion, household budgets are already strained. If we do not act, personal debt — credit cards, auto loans, subscriptions — will force families to make painful spending cuts. I will fight to reduce unnecessary federal spending, audit wasteful programs, and prioritize policies that protect working families’ purchasing power.
About Mark Piper
I am a business owner and employer with decades of hands-on experience solving practical problems. I hold an MBA and bring a master’s-level grounding in applied mathematics and management to public service. I believe real wealth is built through growth, savings, smart investment, hard work, innovation, and disciplined stewardship, not by expanded government spending or short-term fixes.
Fiscal Responsibility:
The Problem
Washington too often votes to increase the cost of living through unchecked appropriations. Voting “yes” on omnibus spending is voting for inflation. Inflation functions like a regressive tax: it erodes the value of every dollar, disproportionately harming families and retirees.
Debt growing at 5% cannot be sustained by growth of 2%. Meanwhile, wars and open-ended foreign commitments — Iraq, Afghanistan, and the current conflict — consume taxpayer resources that could be deployed at home to address homelessness and other urgent needs.
Policy Solutions:
What I Will Do
- Introduce targeted amendments to appropriations bills to cut wasteful spending and reduce specific projects, agency budgets, and overseas accounts.
- Lead audits and rigorous reviews of regularly scheduled spending authorizations.
- Work on budget reconciliation to find responsible, durable savings.
- Require USAID and other large programs to reapply and justify their budgets.
- Promote alternatives to standard entitlement expansion: adjust budgets for current obligations (Social Security and Medicare), and research supplemental savings options like Disaster Savings Accounts, HSAs, and other future-self planning tools.
Governance Reform:
How We Can Do Better
Our representatives must produce forward-looking ideas that deliver a real cost of living decrease, not symbolic bills that clog the legislative calendar. I will:
- End routine renaming of post offices and make such symbolic moves rare and efficient.
- Oppose omnibus bills that hide spending; prefer transparent, value-driven legislation.
- Champion term limits and stronger checks on concentrated power: enforce 30-year limits on political careers, caps on congressional terms, and strict limits on emergency central-bank funding.
- Promote decision-making grounded in statistics, probability, and empirical research, not emotion. My votes will reflect careful reading, reasoned analysis, and a commitment to the best available evidence.
Economic Renewal:
Rebuild, Manufacture, Prosper
We must re-industrialize America: expand responsible mining, manufacturing, and marketing to create real jobs and durable wealth. Combat financial illiteracy so Americans can protect retirement accounts and plan for the future. Stop socializing losses for large corporations and banks that distort markets and undermine fairness.
If elected, I will put productivity, restraint, and real solutions ahead of spectacle. Right POV, Left POV — I will always seek the Best POV for our country.
Fighting the Cost-of-Living Increase
Why Prices Keep Rising
Cost-of-living increases are often the direct result of too much government. Contrary to popular belief, government is constrained by limits that differ from those facing families and businesses. When government reaches those limits, it has financial options unavailable to the average American. Unlike a household or a company, government cannot file for bankruptcy; instead, it can devalue its currency — a choice that translates into higher everyday prices for taxpayers.
Inflation:
A Hidden, Regressive Tax
Inflation functions like a regressive tax: it hits everyone, but it hurts those with the least disposable income the most. Because it is applied universally, inflation is one of the most intrusive and unfair burdens on working families.
How Different Accounts Matter to You
Personal accounting, business finance, and government accounting operate under distinct rules, and what matters most to the average American is personal finance. But business and government actions shape the environment in which families manage their budgets, save, and plan for the future.
Our Plan:
Reduce the Burden of Government
- Fewer regulations that stifle growth and raise costs
- Fewer taxes that reduce take-home pay
- Stronger accountability to restore fiscal discipline and protect taxpayers
We stand for individual rights, limited government, free market capitalism, and the rule of law to keep costs down and opportunity high.
Cost of Living Decreases
Preserving the American Advantage
The goal of this website is to preserve the culture and institutions that made the United States the world leader it is today. In gross national product, as the global reserve currency, in military strength, and across many measures of human progress, America leads the way. For the last 250 years, our country prospered through innovation and industry. Americans built this nation on freedom, protection of property, and law and order.
The Problem: Reckless Borrowing and Gradual Inflation
When governments, like dictators or monarchs, overburden their people with taxes and debt, prosperity falters. Today we borrow recklessly from our children and from generations yet unborn. Living beyond our means carries consequences. Inflation, when it creeps up slowly, is often ignored until it is too late. Early accountability can reduce these harms before they become irreversible.
Re-industrialize America: Mining, Manufacturing, Marketing
To restore real growth, we must re-industrialize the United States: focus on mining, manufacturing, and marketing. Government interference—through excessive spending, red tape, tariffs, and misguided programs—cripples output and diverts resources. Truth and competence must not be sacrificed to the priorities of political correctness.
Reduce the size of government. Reduce spending, regulations, taxes, and inflation. Let honest production and fair wages drive real growth rather than nominal figures inflated by government policy.
Return to Core Government Responsibilities
Government should return to the basics: provide security, maintain a reliable currency, uphold an impartial court system, and enable free trade. Real work, real sacrifice (savings), and real investment are being crowded out by crushing public spending. Nominal growth too often reflects government intervention; real growth is measured by production, wages, and opportunity.
Economic Principles and Practical Facts
- Inflation results from creating money and credit beyond the rate of saving.
- Bonds: nominal rates are the stated rates; real rates = nominal rates − inflation.
- “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
- Error should be punished; success, truth, and competence should be rewarded.
- Declining marginal utility of debt is real.
- Dow-to-gold ratio example: 200117 = 18.8.
- Without a profit motive, there is no incentive for growth. Everyone is a capitalist—the primary asset people sell is their time, typically by the hour or by the week.
Principles, Local Responsibility, and Entrepreneurship
Principles, rules, and laws are greater than dictators, kings, or strongmen. Local obligations and practical responsibilities should not be subordinated to abstract universalist ideologies. Entrepreneurs embody the American spirit of risk, innovation, and opportunity.
21st century
Accountability, Reform, and Unconventional Ideas
Since 2000, our elected leaders have taken us from a country of relative fiscal strength to one that now owes roughly $40 trillion to the world, with another estimated $70 trillion in unfunded obligations to our own people. That fiscal reality calls for accountability.
An amendment requiring a balanced budget would bind those tempted by financial grift more closely to the truth. Even unconventional ideas—such as selecting citizens by national lottery to serve in government—are worth debating; randomly chosen people might produce less intrusive results. Inflation, and the creation of “fake money,” distorts prices, skews income distribution, harms Main Street, and ultimately forces debt repayment through default or inflation.
For Today’s Families and Future Generations
The American ideals of hard work and innovation are being eroded by government handouts to businesses and runaway spending—contributing to a rising cost of living. Generation X faces retirement pressures; millennials struggle to raise families; future generations inherit the tax burdens created by today’s choices. We must act now to restore fiscal sanity, reward competence, and protect opportunity for every American.
Support Mark Piper for Florida