I spent forty years of my career in accounting and finance leadership, most of it in manufacturing, much of it as a CFO or VP of Finance and Operations, closing books, running capital projects, managing buyouts, and telling boards the truth about what a plan actually costs. That habit does not turn off when you retire. It follows you into every argument you hear about what the country can and cannot afford.
For years I listened to the same debate play out on healthcare, housing, education, and retirement security: one side insisting the country owes its citizens more, the other insisting the country cannot pay for it. Almost nobody on either side was doing the arithmetic. They were arguing about values while skipping the spreadsheet.
So I built the spreadsheet. Not as a thought exercise, but the way I would build a capital project justification for a board: real revenue lines, real cost lines, phased implementation, a financing bridge for the transition years, and a bottom line that has to balance. 8 HARPS, which stands for Eight Human Absolute Rights and Privileges, is what came out of that work. It is a book of 11 Franklin Amendments, each one written in the actual language of a constitutional amendment, each one costed out against a real federal budget model.
Rights, Not Programs
The choice to write these as constitutional amendments rather than as a legislative agenda was deliberate. Programs get funded one year and cut the next. A right written into the Constitution does not depend on which party controls Congress. If healthcare, housing, education, and a basic income floor are genuinely absolute rights, the way we already treat freedom of speech or the right to counsel, then they belong in the document that protects those other rights, not in an appropriations bill that expires every fiscal year.
That is also why 8 HARPS proposes a new, independent branch of government, the Office of Humanity, to administer these guarantees. An executive agency can be starved by the next administration. A fourth branch, structured with the same independence the founders gave the judiciary, cannot be dismantled by a change in political mood.
What This Book Is Not
It is not a partisan document, and I did not write it as one. Readers on the left will find provisions here that frustrate them, term limits on federal judges, a permanently balanced federal budget, work and eligibility standards attached to some benefits. Readers on the right will find provisions that frustrate them too, a constitutional right to healthcare, a national land value tax, universal basic income. I built the numbers to be honest, not to be popular, and I would rather have a critic tell me a figure is wrong than tell me the whole project is naive.
Where This Goes From Here
A book of proposed amendments does not change anything by itself. Amending the Constitution requires either two thirds of Congress or a convention called by two thirds of the states, followed by ratification by three quarters of the states. That is by design an extraordinarily high bar, and it should be. My goal with 8 HARPS is not to skip that process. It is to put a complete, fully priced, good faith proposal on the table so the conversation can start from specifics instead of slogans.
This blog will track that conversation: new chapters and revisions as the book develops, the fiscal model behind it, and honest engagement with the strongest objections readers raise. If you want the full text of any amendment, along with the plain language explanation of why it exists, you can read it in full on this site. I would rather be argued with on the substance than agreed with on the vibe.