Meet Ben Braver

Ben Braver started teaching at a local middle school directly after graduating from the University of South Florida with a B.A. in Economics. Ben’s classroom didn’t have enough chairs, a working A/C, or microscopes from after 1970, a direct result of under-investment. He looked for his state legislator hoping to advocate for his student’s needs, but this politician voted at every opportunity to hurt Ben’s students, friends, and family. That’s why Ben Braver is running for State Senate - To Invest In Our Community.

Our schools need more teachers, not fewer resources. We need lower insurance / rent prices, not poorly planned urban sprawl. We need leaders to invest in public transportation, not defund it. On every issue Ben’s opponent cowers to his corporate donors. We deserve Braver representatives who represent OUR interests. Vote for Ben Braver on November 5th and join our campaign today!

What I Stand For

  • Supplying our next generation with the exemplary education system they deserve is crucial to building a strong state. Bolstering our children’s future directly benefits everyone in the state. A more educated public means a more skilled workforce. A more skilled workforce means better job opportunities and development, which means less poverty and crime weighing our state down.

    The 4 things we can do to immediately bring our education from the worst in the nation to the best are:

    Reduce class sizes - Extreme class sizes devastate a child’s access to education.

    Increase teacher’s salaries - We have 5,000 teacher vacancies throughout the state because nobody wants to work here. We pay the 2nd worst salary in the country. Let’s hire the best people to educate our youth,

    Stop our over reliance on testing - When students spend months of the year testing rather than learning we know there’s a problem. Testing is not teaching and our kids deserve a real education.

    End privatization - Our state is selling our kids futures to the lowest bidder. That hurts everyone, the diverted funding hurts public school students, and the lost education hurts us all.

    Simply deciding to fix these 4 problems will revitalize our education system and empower our children.

  • The citizens of Florida are tired of spending hundreds of hours in traffic, worsening water quality, and obscene housing costs. And with 8,000 new residents coming in weekly we know this unsupported growth will make these problems worse.

    Building safe, reliable, public transportation to walkable spaces reduces traffic. Efficient development rather than urban sprawl reduces water use and infrastructure costs. And properly applied these methods will cause housing prices to decrease

  • Our state legislators have spent years denying billions of dollars from the federal government that will lower our healthcare costs and add to our economy. We must Expand Medicaid to the 800,000 Floridians that fall through its gap.

  • Everyone in this state can feel their rent, home insurance, or property taxes skyrocketing. Ensuring that there are homes people can afford means young people entering the market those on a fixed income can live in this state. It reduces poverty and crime. It lowers business expenses which lowers prices throughout our economy.

    Corporate Landlords and Venture Capitalists are pricing hard working people out of our state, creating an artificial bubble they know will burst. But we can take back our state and invest in our people.

  • Florida's insurance market is in crisis for the same reason every financial market falls into crisis.

    1) Greed & MIsmanagement; 10 different insurance companies failed in Florida since 2019 in part due to overhead and improper investment. We can restore the Office of Insurance Regulation and actually fix the 18 companies currently in danger and under review.

    2) Speculatory Secondary Markets; Reinsurance companies insure the insurers, buying up the risk/liabilities insurance companies hold. This is similar to how larger banks would buy the debt smaller banks held leading up to 2008, except here the insurers are legally required to over extend their holdings into this system. We must lower the minimum holding requirements that reInsurance Lobbyists have placed on the insurance companies.

    3) Abandoning the Foundation; These companies are literally abandoning their foundations of what their wealth is built on, the foundations of the homes. In 2008 too many homes defaulted so their mortgages became losses. Now too many homes are collapsing so their insurance claims became losses. This is what causes speculative markets to fail, when investment only goes to the product's shadow, not to the product. We must upgrade our building codes to withstand the stronger, more frequent disasters so neither our homes nor our markets will collapse.

    4) Poor Planning; Our cities are unplanned and unable to withstand a crisis. With an extreme over-reliance on single family homes our state also has to build and rebuild ridiculously expensive sewer, water, electrical, and road infrastructure every crisis. Denser, more climate resilient cities will lower the liability insurers face and lower the premiums we pay.

    The problems we face are not new, they are just the new iteration of the elite using financial markets to prey on working people.