Policy Agenda of Bread and Roses Socialism, National and State*
1. LEVELING
Vision:
Flattening the income and wealth pyramids.
Going beyond “everyone should have an equal opportunity to make it” towards greater actual equality of material condition.
Policies:
· Eliminating the income cap on payment of payroll taxes.
· Increasing marginal tax rates in the upper brackets.
· Enacting a progressive consumption tax.
· Increasing both the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
· Tax Elimination: Eliminating all taxation on those with incomes below a health and decency standard, including sales taxes, employment taxes and property taxes.
· A 2% wealth tax on great fortunes.
· Introducing progressive property taxes.
· Higher estate taxes, and closing loop hole for transfer of capital gains.
· Consideration of a modest basic income guarantee.
· Tax incentives to promote widespread stock ownership.
Additional Revenue to fund our agenda will come from:
· Reversing the Trump corporate tax cut.
· Enacting a “no-exemptions” minimum tax on corporate profits.
2. CREATING A SIMPLER LIVING OPTION.
Vision:
A society with:
- Adequate income levels through all life stages and health conditions.
- Expanded Leisure.
- Passion-work as part of all work lives.
- Reduced cost of meeting basic needs.
- Year by year reduction in Need Required Labor Time (NRLT) at both the minimum wage and the median wage level.
- Enhancing security for those with modest incomes and assets.
Policies:
To Ensure Employment of all:
Federal and State Guaranteed Basic Employment: An enforceable governmental guarantee of a job with at least 32 hours of work per week, or paid re-training to enable such employment.
· Government incentives to employees and employers to promote job sharing if needed to ensure that everyone has at least 32 hours.
· If necessary, legislation to require overtime pay for those working over 32 hours/week.
· A major expansion of the non-profit sector through refundable tax credits for donations.
To Guarantee Health and Decency Income:
- Integrate a rising minimum wage with a rising earned income tax credit (EITC) to enable a health and decency standard of living.
- Raise minimum social security retirement payments from present $11,000 to $18,000/year.
To Lower the Costs of Meeting Needs in Housing, Health, Transportation, Child Care, Education, Taxes and Retirement Security:
- A Unified Medicaid/Medicare national system that provides public option for all, includes long-term care, determines costs on a sliding scale, free at the bottom, with highest level of total personal costs capped at 10% of income.
- Free education for each new generation, day care through college.
- Promote home ownership for almost all families, with the objective of debt-free ownership of simple homes; reform zoning restrictions to allow tiny homes on tiny lots; build low-income condos instead of public housing.
- Universal one-time entitlement to a zero-interest mortgage for new construction of simple homes to first-time home buyers with modest incomes.
- Zoning reform to end exclusion of modest and tiny homes from desirable neighborhoods.
- Reducing Automobile Dependence and its crunch on the household budget -- through free public transportation; engaging with Detroit in developing very small inexpensive electric vehicles, subsidized rentals of full sized cars for that occasional trip, subsidized Uber-like taxi service.
3. RE-INVENTING WORK
Vision:
A world in which everyone has some realm of productive activity which draws on their deepest potentials, expresses their deepest values and passions, provides value-added to the lives of others, and sustains self-esteem, and social respect.
A realm of passion-work (deeply authentic work one would do even if not paid to do it) in everyone life.
New Work-life Options such as a 1/3 – 1/3 -1/3 model with income derived: 1/3 from instrumental labor, 1/3 from passion-work, 1/3 from small group self-providing.
Improving the Job System:
- Gaining leverage over the Job Creators – In the current Job System the design of jobs is largely in the hands of those who do the hiring. The job seekers are faced with “take it or leave it” choices. It is possible to turn this around, to have labor markets in which the job creators in order to attract workers have to design jobs that are more deeply fulfilling.
Central Mechanism of this transition – Because all forms of work will provide an income sufficient to meet core needs, and because of a cultural transition in which people will value meaning and leisure over higher consumption, job creators will have to re-design jobs to meet the deeper needs of those they seek to hire.
- Reconceptualizing retirement as the end of need-required employment, but not the end of a meaningful productive work; expanding part-time opportunities in the non-profit sector that would be prioritized according to age with oldest job-seekers first.
Policies:
- Through Guaranteed Basic Employment and other policies, ensuring that basic needs can be met with no more than 30 hours a week of job-system employment.
- Time Liberty legislation providing the right to opt for a shorter work week of 4 eight hour days, or 5 six hour days.
- Through the Social Security System, opportunity to take work sabbaticals once every 15 years – allowing for re-invention, with three or four or more different careers in a productive life, within (we expect) an ever-lengthening healthy life span.
- Developing multiple skill patterns, thus enabling people to do many different things at any given point in time, and thus not be defined by a narrow work-based identity.
- Sub-dividing the best jobs so that vastly more people have access to employment-fulfillment and employment diversity.
Policies that enhance the freedom to say “No” to work that is not inherently valuable:
· Guaranteed employment
· Living Wage levels of income/public provision and subsidization of key services
· Retraining and relocation assistance that enables new starts
· Option to join Medicare thus de-linking health benefits from employment.
Expanding Employment outside the Job System:
- New ways of working that allow people the option to create their own jobs as self-employed individuals or small groups of worker-owners:
· Broad based training in start-up, including becoming your own non-profit.
· Technical Support for self-run micro-enterprises.
· Benefits and protection for gig-workers.
Limiting how much of life we spend at our jobs:
- Time-liberty rights that allow workers to limit their hours.
- Guaranteed paid vacations of six weeks.
- Adding two new holidays with pay, every year for the next decade.
- Paid family and sick leave.
A Retirement-Right to Retain Your Job at reduced hours. After 10 years on a job, starting at age 50 a legal right to reduce your weekly hours.
4. RE-PURPOSING SCHOOLS
Vision:
Education for its Own Sake & Education for the Alternative American Dream/ Lightening Childhood and Youth.
Accessing the inherited wealth of human culture, both across cultures and history.
Policies:
· Repurposing schools away from catering to the needs of the “job creators” and towards history, civics, and the arts and humanities.
· Education that expands self-knowledge and helps each to find that authentic work-activity that will bring one most to life.
· Making love of books, access to the wealth of our cultural heritage, and attaining the ability to produce something of beauty as key measures of schooling success, and curriculum redesign.
· Providing courses in personal finance, budget management, micro-business and non-profit start-up, as part of life-skills training for all high school students.
· All young people gaining some experience in manual labor, crafts, personal care-giving, and the arts.
Using lotteries to determine 50% of the admissions to elite colleges for students that meet the schools qualifying bar, based on grades/tests.
5. A BEAUTY-FOR-ALL RENAISSANCE FOR AMERICA
Vision:
- The elevation of Beauty and Creative Expression throughout all aspects of life.
Policies:
- Establishing as a required curriculum element, the attainment of an ability, in some domain, to add to the beauty of our natural or social landscape.
- Patron of the Arts Program: Providing each year, 10,000 5-yr grants at $30,000/yr., in the arts and humanities for creative endeavors, at an annual cost of $1.5 billion. Widely distributed geographically.
- Preserving and promoting our natural beauty by expanding national parks and strengthening protections from commercial encroachment. Eliminating entry fees to America’s national parks.
- Establish Birthright Trips whereby every young person, sometime, would be entitled to a two-week guided stay in our national parks.
- Dedicating a percentage of property taxes to the enhancement of public spaces (lakes, parks, streets, cultural centers, open air markets). Including beautiful design as a decision criteria in awarding contracts for major infrastructure projects.
- Planting 300 million trees throughout American towns and cities; requiring trees in all outdoor parking lots.
- Building public squares and urban mini-gardens.
- Stimulating small-shop urban complexity. Aid to micro-businesses.
- Enhancing restaurant quality through including support for culinary institutes, restaurant management and start up training and finance, creating a cooking-extension service that would operate nationwide.
- Fostering small libraries in every town and neighborhood, and expanding the role of librarians as directors of cultural services.
6. THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST: A MARSHALL PLAN FOR THE BOTTOM
Vision:
Radically transforming the quality of life in the worst places to live by leaping beyond the middle
- Inner-City Utopianism
- Leap Frogging to Graceful Simplicity
Policies:
Immediately focus on the 100 WORST PLACES TO LIVE IN THE UNITED STATES – (defined in terms of crime, poverty, child mortality) Undertake holistic transformation: jobs, safety, schools, housing, culture, beauty, small business, summer camp --- with HOME OWNERSHIP and urban beautification as the anchor.
- Urban homesteading which provides first time buyers 30 year zero interest loans for construction of modest homes.
- Turning public housing into condominiums owned by low income families, and facilitating the buy-out of rental housing.
- Free sleep-away camp for all children from low income households. Counselor-in-training roles for older children.
- Emulate the most elite neighborhoods with the planting of tens of thousands of flowering dogwood and cherry trees. Providing financial stipends to young persons who adopt a tree.
- Promoting quality restaurants and supermarkets in low income areas.
- Creation of inner-city projects to promote urban beautification including murals and training in fine arts and performing arts for urban youth.
- Making inner-cities cultural hubs, centers for music, theatre, dance and museums. Draw on local creativity.
7. EXPANDING THE NUMBER OF GREAT PLACES TO LIVE
Vision: Revitalizing Rural America and small towns and cities
Policies:
- Enhancing rural life by reducing the scope of agribusiness, including all subsidies for large corporate farming, and subsidizing instead small family or cooperative, organic, sustainable and regenerative faming.
- Training thousands of young Americans in sustainable farming practices and providing them with low-interest access to farmland.
- Price supports to make small-scale farming profitable and provide quality foods for all of us.
- Encouraging re-vitalization of rural communities, by supporting rural health services and education.
- Promoting reparatory theatres and other performing arts companies in small towns and cities. Enhanced funding for the arts, especially away from the established cultural centers.
- Using colleges to culturally enrich the communities around them. And franchising our best liberal arts colleges so as to provide high quality stay-at-home colleges in small cities and towns.
8. FRIENDING THE EARTH
Vision: A New Harmony Between Our Species and the Planet, One in Which We Do No Harm
Policies:
Most fundamentally, by establishing a new kind of advanced economy, one that uses productivity growth to sustain material-sufficiency and expand leisure, rather than ever-expanding consumption.
By treating climate change as a national security emergency, with willingness to undertake war-like mobilization to reach zero carbon emissions. Taking those steps which will produce the greatest change in the shortest time, including:
· Carbon emissions taxes, including a new gasoline tax that will ratchet up yearly, with new millage requirements and subsidized electric cars, with goal of national gasoline consumption cut in half in ten years. Funds will flow back to the public in the form of free or highly subsidized public transportation and alternatives to ownership of second and even first cars.
· Mandatory “emissions testing” of all homes and business over the next two years, with required conservation steps aided by a National Service Corps.
· Massive subsidization of solar and wind technologies to promote rapid transition to non-carbon electric power nationwide.
· Phased in zero-carbon requirements for all new construction.
· Phasing out all extraction of carbon based fuel sources.
INTERNATIONALLY:
· Making transition to zero-emissions world a national security objective that is part of US trade policy, investment and development strategies and policy dialogue with every country. Including massive solar promotion and conversion.
· Moving towards stronger international incentives and sanctions for planet-offenders.
9. GLOBAL HUMANIZATION
Vision:
A World that is free from war, poverty, abuse and tyranny. A world open to alternative forms of human flourishing.
Policies:
-- A foreign policy that prioritizes a dialogue of civilizations, pursuit of conflict resolution, international mechanisms of humanitarian intervention, fuller development of international law, human rights, global stewardship, and cultural tolerance.
SPECIFICS:
- Reconciling the three Abrahamic religions around a Peace of Jerusalem; immediate recognition of the State of Palestine with an East Jerusalem capital; using aid to Israel only in support of two-states and forcing an end to settlement expansion.
- Re-establishment of the 1947 United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) and tasking UNSCOP-2 to draft a full end-of-conflict treaty consistent with the Arab Peace Initiative (API) -- to be put to referenda in both Israel and Palestine.
- Returning to the Iran nuclear agreement.
- Seeking a fundamental change in Iranian-Israeli relations and US-Iranian relations based on an Iranian commitment to treat as legitimate any Israeli-Palestinian agreement approved by a referendum of the Palestinian people, and to not support any effort or organization that seeks to undermine such peace accord.
- US support for strengthening International organizations, in particular providing the international criminal court with a vibrant arrest capability, and increasing the authority of the UN Trusteeship Council to engage with failed states.
- Developing, through international organizations, a humanitarian intervention capacity: really, really, meaning it when we say: Never Again -- Not To Anyone -- Not Anywhere.
- Developing an “open society” community with other democracies to work together in bringing an end to the most glaring human rights abuses around the world, and to protect democratic institutions from cyber-undermining.
- Vast economic development and personal safety program for Central America, and shifting to a Statue of Liberty orientation towards immigration and asylum. Big-gate approach to borders. Citizenship for dreamers. Tenfold increase in judicial resources for evaluating asylum requests.
- Budgetary Tithing – Allocating 10% of the Federal budget to programs to assist the poorer countries of the world in overcoming poverty, overcoming crime and corruption, enhancing human rights, and transitioning to global environmental solutions.
- Creating a Maryland Peace Corps – For people of all ages, including high school graduates and people in retirement, an opportunity to spend a year or more, working in overseas development projects to assist the poor in meeting their basic needs.
Note: Though this is a primary for Governor, I include policy elements on the Federal level as well. I do this for a variety of reasons. First, Bread and Roses is national in scope, and in asking for your vote, I am asking for your support for a comprehensive movement of cultural transformation. Secondly, exactly what needs to be taken up on the State level, depends enormously on what does or does not happen on the Federal level. For instance, if we get highly subsidized day care as a national program, then that is one big element that need not be pursued on the State agenda. And third, we need to be constantly aware that the distinction between domestic issues and international issues is not clear cut. Certainly the second if not the number one threat of Global Warming is possible nuclear war. And the invasion of Iraq sucked trillions of dollars from taxpayers, money that could have transformed our economy. And if we go to war with Iran?