A “Project 2025”-style program that would, at last, establish democracy in the U.S., replacing the wallpaper-thin veneer of “democracy” we’ve been fed & told we should love.

This platform includes many lines of savings to the federal coffers. It includes many lines of spending. These might come close to cancelling each other out. In short, it is a re-thinking of where public funds should be spent.

Folks will call this “socialism”; they are welcome, because socialism is good, but this is not yet socialism, because it does not feature forcible collectivization of all productive property. It only nationalizes a few key industries necessary to human survival, and otherwise, attempts to give a true seat at the table to all, regardless of background.

Protect dissent

• Prohibit social media companies from suppressing certain ideologies or political content. (And nearly everything is political.) These companies are now effectively public services in the communication sector, and need to be regulated as such. Not just the future of free speech and dissent is on the line, but the future of everything else we discuss here; the future of humanity. Social media algorithms, including especially how non-chronological feeds are composed, need to be made open source, fully visible to regulators and the public. The regulators need to evaluate them for first amendment protections and baked-in civil rights/discrimination issues. Government needs to prohibit anyone’s ability to put their thumb on the scales of, let alone direct, what DC insiders commonly call “the narrative.” And because our cognitive futures are on the line, government should force the removal of “psychological hooks” designed solely to keep people on apps, or keep people doing certain things on them. Last but not least, we would force divestment of any person or entity owning more than a 1% stake in a social media company.

• Truly protect protest. Prohibit employers from dismissing workers due to taking time off to attend protests or protest actions. Provide federal funding for up to 15 work days per year, at 100% of typical pay, to attend protests/protest actions. Most people likely wouldn’t want to camp out in front of the White House or Congress for three weeks a year, but if something was so important to them that they wanted to, they shouldn’t have to be wealthy to be able to express their desires to those in power.

• Dismantle the domestic surveillance apparatus, including FISA courts and the NSA, and repeal the Patriot Act. These things have not saved us from attack in 23 years and likely will not do so going forward. Pass new law ensuring that neither whistleblowing nor journalism can be prosecuted under the espionage act, nor as terms of service violations or violations of the DMCA.

• Prohibit the banning of books or other disagreeable content by states, counties, towns, or publicly accessible libraries no matter how they are funded. Prohibit the kinds of state discrimination against academic pursuits we have seen in recent years.

Reverse the human tragedy that is military spending

• Disband the CIA, human history’s most violent, most anti-peace, most anti-democracy organization. With whatever minor foreign clandestine service arises to replace it (allowing no one who had been involved with the CIA to participate), we intend to ensure publicly-auditable budgets and publicly-available standards of conduct both individual and organization-wide—such as no assistance of foreign coups of democratically-elected leaders, to name just one thing. In ending the CIA, we also end the Pentagon’s and CIA’s influence on 400+ films and 800+ script approvals (and counting each year).

• “It’s actually obscene for minimum wage workers to pay 25% of their paycheck to taxes and never receive a damn thing for it except for war.” This party is explicitly anti-war and explicitly against more military spending than is needed. We will reduce the U.S. military budget to 3x China’s budget—we’re currently at about 10x China’s—while comparing apples to apples. (By this we mean, comparing clear war spending that isn’t within DOD, as described below.) This would likely necessitate shutting down most of our 800+ military bases abroad. We would immediately replace that spending, and those jobs, with the other items in this document, including (but certainly not limited to) jobs building high speed rail and renewable energy independence. We are dead serious about this massive reduction; we believe our future as a sovereign nation depends on it. About four-fifths of this reduction will go to funding the new expenditures outlined in this document. The final fifth will be allocated to increasing the dignity of life elsewhere on earth, starting with the areas and people who suffer the most and lead the least-dignified lives. (Likely this is areas of historic western extraction.) This is a mission of love and hope, which will increase our national security at least as much, and likely far more, than the full former military expenditure.

• A main precept of being anti-war is that the president should no longer have the power to send any military personnel, or disruptive agents directed by a clandestine service, on military-style missions. We believe that the constitution meant this when it gave Congress alone the power to “declare war,” and we will ensure it is this way again.

• The U.S. military should be forced, at threat of its existence, to be audit-able. It is currently not auditable, meaning, we do not and cannot know how much it actually spends. (This is possible because technically, money comes into existence when federal agencies write checks. If an agency can’t pass an audit, it can write as many checks as it wants.) This is the most basic means of accountability and needs to be met. We will also, when referring to/discussing/debating military spending, mandate including in this discussion spending outside DOD nonetheless necessary to maintain the military, such as the VA, nuclear programs at DOE, warmaking parts of clandestine service, spending on any actual war operations (which have never come from DOD budgets), and interest on national debt due to all of these things and the DOD itself.

• We will mandate no more foreign military assistance. No more propping up dictatorships or assisting coups of democratically-elected leaderships. No more interfering internationally for the benefit of American companies. No more propping up apartheid regimes, such as Israel’s, nor those attempting ethnic cleaning. Any decision with any international scope must be evaluated based on these prohibitions. When we stop all “military aid,” Palestine is a one-time exception, as it needs the ability to defend itself from a genocidal Israel. We will also provide sufficient funds directly to locals (the previous residents) to rebuild Gaza as they see fit, since we supplied the weaponry that destroyed their homes.

• Conduct a Nuremberg-style tribunal to discover and prosecute those who ordered and supported the genocide in Gaza. “I was just following orders” will not be an excuse. This includes members and past members of our own government, to the highest rank. It also includes members of the Israeli Defense Force and Mossad who have settled in the U.S.; members of the press who clearly did bad-faith reporting; managers at weapons manufacturers who knew what they were facilitating; lobbyists at AIPAC and affiliated organizations who corrupted our political process in support of a genocide; “law enforcement” who persecuted anti-genocide protesters; and politicians who attacked their freedom to speak out, providing political cover for fascists.

• Ban nonprofits, including universities, hospitals, and churches, from owning investments in military contractors if they want to keep their tax-exempt status. (And force divestment of the same.)

• Ban creation of new nuclear warheads. Work with other nuclear powers to reduce warheads to ~100 per country to start, then 10, en route to none over the next 10-20 years.

• Nullify the absurd law that says the U.S. military can invade The Hague if U.S. interests are harmed by the actions of the International Court. Instead, pass a law that U.S. presidents, cabinet members and other directors of Executive Branch agencies, and the leadership of both houses of Congress, are subject to arrest warrants from The Hague, and if charged, *must* report there to face trial or lose their leadership position domestically.

• Negotiate with the other “P5” nations in the UN Security Council to end the veto within the Security Council. We have abused this more than enough. Do the same to modify voting and “structural adjustments” in the IMF and World Bank. We have extracted enough from the Global South through this process. Forgive the debts to the U.S. of the global south. We have exploited them enough.

Institute real democracy and governance changes that flow from it

• Policy changes we’ll make will help us come as close as statistically possible to the standard of “one person, one vote,” where everyone’s vote matters as much as everyone else’s. This means, at minimum, the following:
  1. abolishing the electoral college
  2. ranked choice voting in *every* state to help foster new and better parties
  3. establishing simple and rational nationwide standards for redistricting that can’t be influenced by politicians
  4. no more corporate, PAC, lobbying, or otherwise collective money in politics—the only contributions to political candidates allowed will be from *individual* voters, with a $500-per-person limit
  5. public election funding which will, among other things, allow people of all walks of life to run
  6. changing the Senate into a body from which the two members per state are *randomly* selected from among voters of that state, and hold a voting stake in the body equal to the number of U.S. representatives from their state
  7. an expanded and *elected* Supreme Court with term limits and a strict and enforceable ethics policy
  8. mandated open primaries
  9. no more giant omnibus bills, or bills with so-called “poison pills,” combining different subject matter, so the public can know where their reps stand on things
  10. eliminating the filibuster
  11. mandating election day as a paid holiday
  12. reforming the *internal rules* of Congress to be pro-democracy

We will also investigate what the country could look like without political parties at all, as was George Washington’s explicit will.

• Make Washington, DC a state with full voting rights. It’s been too long that these people have been taxed without representation.

• Ban lobbying, completely and forever. Other countries call it bribery, and thus it is simply illegal. Create a commission to investigate the *appearance* of insider trading of assets, the result of which will be immediate removal from Congress, with special elections to be held to replace them. Obviously, no more trading of stocks or bonds by yourself or anyone in your family while in office and for five years after you exit it. We will also work to eliminate the “revolving door,” a practice of influencing politicians by promising them or their staff (explicitly or implicitly) lucrative employment upon leaving public service. To do so, we will create an office that investigates any job, or work, an ex-member or their staff takes, up to a decade after leaving office. Any organization employing former Congress members or staffers, or any other organization that one is fiscally connected to or sharing board members, cannot have had business with any Congress a former member or staffer served in.

• All-paper, and all-human-verified, elections, counted locally and funded by federal funds. Our approach to various common practices won’t be well-received by the establishment, which stands to lose many trillions per year in grift. We can’t take any chances that someone might want to, and have the power to, rig an election with the current digital state of many voting machines. Computer security experts have said there is no way to totally secure digital voting machines, and as such, essentially all security experts advocate for paper elections. We will mandate that all federal, state, and local elections are to be conducted on paper, and that they all be counted by hand.

• Reverse many key recent SCOTUS decisions, like the one that guts the Executive branch’s ability to regulate, the one granting presidential immunity, and the one maintaining the criminalization of those who would sleep outside on public land. We will embrace regulation as a key component and function of governance in a system with private ownership and vast income/wealth inequality.

• In this new era of fast-mutating diseases: Require the government listen to public health experts in matters of public health, and change policy accordingly. (We would establish a board of public health experts who share the political beliefs herein, but would otherwise be able to control spending on public health matters by themselves.) This would likely mean air filtration in all public indoor spaces; strict testing protocols for even minor illness; and masking protocols like for those public indoor spaces with >100 expected occupants. (Government would provide adequate masks to households, and adequate time off if mandating people stay home.) We will also ensure the adequate funding of vaccine development and disease monitoring and prevention programs.

• Institute a properly progressive tax system. Including not just an income tax but a wealth tax, including on stock shares. Lower taxes on work such that the majority of revenue is from wealth taxes in the first year, and 75% of revenue is from wealth taxes in the second year. We will impose a 99.5% tax for wealth over $100 million, including value of stock shares, and the same for over $20 million in annual income. See this essay on how it can happen. The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%; from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. It is possible but not guaranteed that owners of stock will be able to keep the same percentage of *voting* share they previously had (so, continued control of their companies) despite no longer having the same *value* share. Stocks taxed away would be re-sold on the open market, to benefit the U.S. treasury, will be considered “publicly reclaimed” value. Sales of these “reclaimed” stocks might be spread over 10 years, 10% per year, to mitigate the effects of putting large portions of companies up for sale all at once. Regarding general taxes, we will endeavor to eliminate all “loopholes,” especially for corporations. Corporate profits to be taxed at 40% with no loopholes. This will incentivize massive reinvestment in innovation and wages, because companies would rather do these things than be light on these things and have their “profits” taxed away. (Also see ban on stock buybacks listed below.)

• Decriminalize migration in this era of climate catastrophe. Making migrants into second class citizens is the domain of fascism, and migrants’ taxes and labor have built our country up, not taken from it.

• Start charging tax on church and nonprofit holdings of property, especially real property.

• Meaningfully increase the estate tax to hobble the perpetual aristocratic dynasties we’ve long had but are increasingly empowering as the top-down class war continues apace.

• Fund the IRS white collar crime unit, searching for wealthy people evading taxes. Fund this perhaps 10x, or even 50x, what it gets now, if that money is well spent. For normal taxpayers, direct the IRS to present to you what it knows you’ve earned, having you simply sign off, like other countries do. This will eliminate hundreds of millions of hours of uselessly-spent taxpayer labor every spring.

• Establish a commission that investigates solutions from around the world for societal areas in which the U.S. is lagging behind (a la the documentary “Where to Invade Next”). This commission would then bring these ideas back, rework them as needed to fit our society without removing the key ingredients from elsewhere, and make recommendations to Congress. These could include how to do drug enforcement (see: Portugal) or prisons (see: Sweden) or K-12 education (see: Finland) or healthcare (see: Japan).

Reign in corporatism

• Anti-monopoly: ramp up enforcement of existing antitrust law and remodel this law for present day problems. Give Lina Khan her position back, and fund her office to whatever it needs to nearly perfectly enforce antitrust law on the books, including what looks like collusion (whether they technically colluded or not), such as airlines carving up the country so they don’t have to compete.

• Fund the CFPB at several times its budget under Biden and brainstorm what it would be most valuable to expand its reach into. Perhaps they can oversee regulation at USDA and other places which have become captured by industry. Worker safety and human health are paramount; foods regulated in Europe for known toxic qualities should become regulated here. 

• We believe “Homelessness should be illegal and the wrong people are going to jail for it.” In other words, those who make the policies that result in the current state of affairs; those who have 4 homes and leave 2 or 3 almost entirely unoccupied; those who run companies that buy residential property as investments and leave them vacant; might all be considered criminals in the future we are building. With somewhere between 17 and 32 vacant units of housing for each person without housing (according to different ways of counting), no one will be without housing any longer. No longer will threat of homelessness be the primary motivation to work pointless jobs for corporate overlords or people who fancy themselves capitalists. So-called progressive politicians have said “housing is a right,” but have not acted accordingly. On the contrary, we will fix the housing crisis, which is really a crisis of corporatism, with dramatic new rules:
  1. National rental registry, just cause eviction, and rent stabilization nationwide, pegged to a percentage of minimum wage (now living wage) of the area. 
  2. Government to nationalize massive companies that bought up so much housing, and make their housing into public housing. 
  3. For mid-size and small holding companies, like family rental dynasties, we will force divestiture. 
  4. We will prevent companies from owning housing moving forward, as housing is a right, not a commodity. 
  5. We will set a maximum number of housing units an individual/family can own. An individual (who does not exist as a household) or a family unit may own only one “vacation” home (aside from their primary residence) for personal use. That same individual or family may also own, at maximum, two additional units of housing as investment to be rented. A family unit is defined as a family that lives in a single household.
  6. Since the forced divestiture might saturate the housing market with sales, ensure that 15-year mortgages are accessible to all with regulated low mortgage rates, ignoring credit/FICO scores and focusing instead on current employment.
  7. Bring back the construction of public housing to at least the levels we had in its boom around 1970, in part by repealing the Faircloth Amendment, with the goal of 0 people without homes in 3 years. 
  8. Eliminate pet prohibitions in rentals so long as the pet is “fixed.”
  9. Anyone without a place to live in their area will be able to apply and be matched with vacant/requisitioned houses in their area.

• “Strikes will put people out of business” is just another way of saying that workers put people ‘in business’ in the first place. “Strikes will ruin Christmas” is another way of saying workers make Christmas happen. As such, this party will repeal the Taft-Hartley act that bans general strikes, and will automatically create unions at every workplace. Non-management workers are all eligible for these unions. (“Non-management” being defined as any employee who cannot unilaterally hire or fire anyone. This will certainly include many workers in “middle management.”) Existing unions will remain in place, but if any non-management workers are unable to join the existing union(s), then those workers will automatically be enrolled in a government-created one. Workers in the new publicly-created unions can choose to join any large national union, or they can be independent if they would like. These local unions wouldn’t have to do anything if they didn’t want to. But there would automatically be a body of all non-management workers, from which leaders are nominated, and motions can be proposed such that the entire body of workers can vote on them. 

• Require 20% of every company board of directors to be non-management workers (as defined above) in that business.

• Ensure that every new chemical a business attempts to put on the market undergoes full human health tests before being admitted into the marketplace. Ensure strict penalties (such as prison time) for noncompliance. The testing is to be conducted by the U.S. government but funded by businesses, via a new fee per dollar of sales of unfinished goods.

• Eliminate the fiduciary duty of C-suite executives, and boards of directors, to ensure every action of theirs increases value for shareholders. Sometimes they need the ability to do things that do the opposite, for either the long-term health of the company; for ethics generally; or for the health of the economy in which the business operates, which indirectly affects the long-term health of the business.

• CEOs and their executive counterparts are to be restricted to a complete payment package of no more than 30x that company’s median employee. This is how it was in the 1950s, a time of roaring corporate success, so to this we will return. No more of this 400x the median employee. And to be clear: this is the compromise position. It could be far lower, as it currently is in Japan, around 12x median salary.

• Ban corporate bailouts. Establish policy that, over the course of ~3 years, determines which businesses are so big that they would be significantly harmful if they failed. Then, break them up into smaller units that would allow us to let them fail if they did. We frankly must allow businesses to fail if they harm society enough. This absolutely includes large investment operations like Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street, which, if dissolved, would disappear significant portions of the country’s retirement savings. We will consider nationalizing these three in particular due to their size.

• Prohibit the financial industry from treating peoples’ savings like a casino. Bring back Glass-Steagall, which separated consumer banking from investment banking. Any new instrument must be evaluated and approved in advance by the government, and existing instruments re-evaluated under this standard. Banking should be boring.

• Most of the current practices of “private equity,” which simply suck up the real value of a company for already-wealthy investors and leave the company as a barely-functioning husk, will be unceremoniously banned.

• Fines for companies should not be a slap on the wrist. They should not be able to be considered a “cost of doing business.” If the act, or harm, is sufficiently heinous, then the fine should near the point that would implode the company. (Similarly, we intend to change all fines for personal misbehavior to prison time or other real-life consequences.) Companies need to be made an example of. Their peers should be afraid to commit crimes against humanity. Corporate executives will also be made *personally* and *criminally* liable for heinous-enough acts of their companies. (See the book “The Chickenshit Club.”) This means that we will personally prosecute those who were found to have contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, and those auto executives who directed emissions cheating schemes, to name just two examples.

• Ban stock buybacks, which weren’t common until the last 30 years or so. They only serve to siphon excess value away from workers and to shareholders.

• Remove forced arbitration, noncompete agreements, and the banning/forced exemption of class action suits.

• We will break up Boeing, being that it’s now the only builder of large passenger, and most military, airplanes in the U.S. and it’s been so financialized as to not be able to do that properly. We will require that all small aircraft engines be retooled to accept non-leaded fuel, and will ban leaded aircraft fuel due to health risks.

• Abolish credit ratings and individual credit scores, as they have only been around since 1989 and are designed to exploit poor people.

• Drastically reduce, by 80% or more, the fees that credit card companies and “payment processors” charge. We will also investigate the books of these companies and ensure they only profit so much; perhaps a margin of around 1%, which should reduce processing fees by 95% or more.

• We will investigate the financial books of providers of “data,” like cell companies and internet service providers. Because they effectively have monopolies, they have been able to charge what the market will bear while investing as little as possible into the service, meaning astronomical profits. We will force payment processors and data providers both to lower the cost of service far nearer to the cost to provide it—at threat of nationalization—and to expand service to reach less-populated areas. Again, this is the compromise: nationalization is on the table because electronic payments and data access is a necessity of modern life, like water.

• Due to hazardous (and sometimes nuclear) chemicals and waste traveling over rail, we will implement much more strict safety evaluations and regulations for freight rail, to bring the frequent derailments we’ve been seeing to zero. This includes mandated better working conditions for employees, including mandated staffing levels, paid sick time, and rest times like we have for airline pilots.

• Microplastics in our bodies is becoming a more important issue than any of us ever realized. We will ban the use of single-use plastics except in medical care contexts, and attempt to reduce those. That includes plastic-cardboard-sandwich packaging like Tetra-Pak. Provide all households with laundry wash bags in which they are required to wash anything with synthetic fibers, like polyester. Plastics in all our cells, including reproductive cells, is too big a health issue to ignore. Force the fishing industry to keep track of every net it uses, and to turn in each net to a government body at the end of its useful life. Use the Coast Guard and Navy to enforce this even for fishers from other countries that are near enough to the U.S.

• Ban plastics that cannot be recycled, outside the medical field. Since most plastic is not recycled due to its unprofitability, create government-funded plastic recyclers (one for each coast and one for the middle of the country, say) and force plastic producers to pay for the end-of-life disposal, which they would have to charge for in selling their products. Then these products become naturally more rare, and their true cost to society is “internalized” in the product rather than “externalized” onto all of us.

• Ban evaporative cooling of data centers, whether by corporations or government, unless all fresh water is collected again and not allowed to evaporate into the atmosphere. Data centers used for “AI” are only to be cooled with heat pumps/the refrigeration cycle, not evaporative cooling.

• Repeal the so-called “SUV loophole” that artificially pushes automakers to build SUVs and crossovers to skirt fuel efficiency and/or emissions requirements we impose on cars. (SUVs are usually classified as light trucks.)

Dismantle systemic racism

• Immediately release 90%+ of the current populations of prisons and jails and 95%+ of juvenile lockup facilities, because 80% have not been convicted of any crime, and the incarceration of the last 10% is almost entirely due to racism and classism rather than anything else, and is a key tenet of modern fascism. These people will not be detriments to society if released, but rather, will bolster society. Grant them large-enough stipends to get on their feet, and as recompense for the cruel and unusual treatment they have received. Establish commissions to release further portions of the populations, down to whatever populations are truly dangers and need to be kept out of society—whether 5,000 or 30,000 people. Reduce the personnel of the punitive carceral pipeline we call a “justice system” by at least 70% to start to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Re-write Bill Clinton’s horrific “crime bill.” Immediately force the shuttering of all private businesses in the “justice” system, whether prisons, contractors, or otherwise. All services necessary for a dignified life under incarceration need to be provided by the public, because nearly every incarceration is a failure of public policy.

• Eliminate the loophole that allows imprisoned people to be forced to work, known elsewhere as enslavement. Force employees who are imprisoned to be paid the minimum wage.

• Eliminate cash bail, everywhere and for all time.

• Eliminate all voting restrictions for people convicted of felonies, as this system was unjust when it was in place.

• Policing has mostly been a tool to maintain the current class structure, but its deleterious effects are mostly racist in nature. And we don’t compromise with racists or fascists. We will restrict police in all the ways outlined in the 8-page “better police” document here. While the institution of police cannot be “reformed,” it can be restrained. Police will be required to start investigating various assaults on the working class from the ownership class, and test every rape kit within 24 hours, with funding from the federal government to test the kits. We will also limit the ability of police unions to act (as they have amassed undue power). We will spend our first year in power reviewing all police union contracts and nullifying provisions as necessary.

• This party recognizes the data showing families of color have far smaller net worths than white families because the infrastructure of this country was built on their uncompensated, or under-compensated, labor. As an economic booster, and attempt to get those families closer to where they would have been had they not faced oppression from systems created to benefit white people at the expense of people of color, we support substantial reparations to American indigenous peoples and people of color through either small business grants; funded private undergraduate or graduate education; or contributions to mortgages, the value of which is to be placed at two years’ median U.S. wages per individual. We recognize this is a pittance compared to the actual value stolen from *today’s* families because it was stolen from their lineage. Our debt to North America’s indigenous and people of color can never be repaid, but this payment begins a national conversation about how much we owe them.

• As part of working with the “land back” movement, we will identify those most high-profile and well-documented requests/demands for land to be returned to indigenous communities, and literally just give the land back. If privately owned, this land will face eminent domain and then will be given back to tribes that claim ownership. Between 2.6% and 2.9% of the U.S. population identifies as having some Native American heritage. But Europeans committed genocide of these populations: within just two lifetimes prior to present day. We will decree that all local, state, and national legislative bodies should have at least 11% Native American representation: about four times the percentage of Native Americans in the U.S. today, making them about four times as likely as any non-native to land on those seats. If a body already has 11% or more native representation, that body will be required to expand its representation to at least 15%.

• We will dismantle border walls and deportation systems that presidents of both main parties have built and expanded, for decades. We will prepare for an influx of climate migrants, which our ruling class (generally, ten-millionaires and up) caused through excessive greed + denialism, and excessive consumption.

Enact real climate change policy

• Immediately stop the investigation of new sources of fossil fuels, and stop setting up production of new fossil fuel sources and ways to transport them—pipelines and the like. This prohibition includes cooperation with any other country to do the same. We will implement a 4-year plan to draw down *to zero* burning of fossil fuels on an individual level, and 6-year plan to stop burning on a company/organizational level. We will attempt to front-weight this draw-down, making more than 25% reduction per year in personal use, 18% reduction per year in corporate use in the first year or two. While the corporate use could theoretically go faster because they tend to have more capital to work with, the corporate sector will have to produce things for the individual sector to make its own transition, so it must lag behind somewhat. We will nationalize the manufacture of heat pumps for home heating and cooling, and dramatically ramp up production.

• Ban public pension fund (including state funds) investment in companies that produce or transport fossil fuels, and force their divestment from what is already there. Do the same for nonprofits (including colleges, churches) with investments in fossil fuels if they want to keep their tax-exempt status.

• Institute a carbon dioxide tax, and carbon-equivalent-proportional tax on all other greenhouse gases, that funds climate mitigation efforts, including the degrowth restructuring described below. It’s a simple “internalizing” of the costs of greenhouse pollution that is currently “externalized” by companies onto all of us. In other words, we’re all currently paying the costs of greenhouse gas pollution, and until we enact a policy like a CO2-equivalent fee, only company executives and shareholders reap the benefits of the pollution.

• Commit to climate *reversal* and degrowth, right now, to stave off catastrophe. This would have to be billed as an “all-in” societal change, like “total war.” While this would require many new jobs in various sectors, it would crucially require eliminating “bullshit jobs,” the largest contributor to climate woes aside from the military. Bullshit jobs are those that society doesn’t need if it were functioning correctly, which is to say, with some modicum of efficiency. The people who work bullshit jobs generally know they are bullshit and do them anyway, for the money and/or because of the sunk entry cost or switching cost of doing something more meaningful.

• A big part of this degrowth strategy would be a general prohibition against building new buildings in places that can’t be accessed without a car, i.e., inaccessible via public transit (or public transit in planning but confirmed in those locations.) To build in non-transit-accessible areas would require a federal permit that evaluates how much that structure is required to facilitate the larger strategy of degrowth. We will also require divestiture of *vacant* structures in areas that *can* be easily accessed via public transit, to promote building and occupancy there. We will requisition (eminent domain) most if not all golf courses that are on or near public transit or planned public transit, for land to build new, car-free housing. Last but not least, we would administer grants to communities to fund their own public transit, whether rail, light rail, or electric streetcars.

• Eliminate government subsidies to fossil fuel production/storage/distribution, corn production, and all food-animal production save for eggs and dairy. Eliminate large-factory meat farming, egg farming, and dairy farming on ethical grounds. Re-evaluate all other government subsidies. Establish policies that, over ~5 years, transition farms from their current consolidated sizes back to the average size for each commodity in ~1980. Create subsidies for growing human-edible vegetables, and increase that subsidy for growing on former lawn area. (Create programs to test lawns for heavy metals and rehabilitate them if someone wants to grow there.)

• We will seriously investigate universal basic income (UBI) and in what ways it could be implemented where it doesn’t just mean a trickle-up to those who charge us for life’s provisions. Instituting a UBI would likely require price controls on categories of basic necessities. (Elsewhere in this document describes a new office to monitor and institute these.) A UBI could be necessary if so-called “bullshit jobs” are eliminated, due to the number of sudden unemployed.

Social Programs

• We will stop publicly reporting the “national debt,” and replace this with a body that watches the economy keenly for inflation (the actual threat of a larger “debt”). This body will have the power to reverse and punish corporate price-gouging, and to create temporary fixed prices for essential goods and services if needed. Otherwise, it will regularly report on the status of inflation to the public and representatives, as we implement the programs outlined herein.

• Free childcare for all. Many parents are paying as much or more for childcare than they are paying for rent. This service helps level the playing field between men and women in society, since the high cost of childcare disproportionately prevents women from working as they wish.

• Free healthcare for all, including dental, vision, mental health, prevention, testing, reproductive care, substance abuse rehabilitation, home health for the infirm, and end of life care. Abolish “health insurance” as a concept. (This necessarily unties healthcare from employment.) All lost jobs in this transition can be replaced either providing health care, which we’re in need of more of, or in other newly-created programs described here.

• Eliminate the anti-kickback carve-out in the Social Security Act for group purchasing organizations (GPOs), which has grossly inflated the cost of goods in healthcare.

• Forgive “medical debt” and “student debt.” These never should have happened in the first place, and studies show dispensing with them will have only positive effects on the economy, and zero negative effects.

• Restore the Child Tax Credit and start directly paying people for various things associated with having and raising children. Starting with a simple $10,000 grant to anyone who has birthed or adopted a child in the last 5 years. This should also be available to anyone who will have a child in the next 5 years. This, like other things here, should be a direct cash payment, not some kind of tax credit; and not means-tested.

• Free education through university level. All public universities to be made tuition-free; to have administrative staff dramatically reduced; to have professorships made largely tenure-track versus adjunct; and to have all professors including adjuncts paid properly, according with minimum wage laws outlined elsewhere here, including for preparation and grading.

• For those who want to specialize in a manual trade rather than a knowledge-only profession, the government will pay for this education as well, and offer a monthly stipend to boost income to a respectable level during the first several years of trade apprenticeship. In case demand for learning trades increases amid all the changes in this document, government should be prepared to fund the construction and operation of new trade schools.

• Funding of K-12 education is to be standardized across the country, per pupil per year, with extra cost-of-living grants for teachers whose schools are in areas with high costs of living, and extra funding for districts where the families who use the school are of low incomes. Currently most K-12 funding is based on the tax base in that district, or even worse, that neighborhood. This means richer neighborhoods have more money for schools than poor neighborhoods. We will effectively reverse this, as many other countries have successfully done, recognizing that poorer families need *more* school resources, not less.

• Mandate safe staffing levels of doctors, nurses, and PA’s per patient at every healthcare provider. (Since Covid, many providers are down near 1/10 of levels considered safe.) Would likely require a ramp up of trainees in these programs, so make this a multi-year goal to gradually attain, and, like trade schools, be prepared to establish and run new schools for medical professionals.

• Create a rigorous auditing process for the profit margins of all drugs and medical technologies developed in the U.S., including government inspection of their ledgers. Set strict limits on what can be charged for those things based on what it took to develop them and what it takes to produce them. We do not believe that the industry will dry up with simply good margins as opposed to nearly-infinite margins. The drug industries elsewhere in the world already clearly prove this.

• Properly fund SNAP with whatever it needs. No one in the richest nation in history should go hungry, ever.

• Fund all school lunch programs so they are free to all at point of service, due to a high rate of child poverty; social implications of some accepting free lunch and some not; and the absurdity of school lunch “debt.” Make these meals as nutritious as those in France, and give them the same amount of time to eat it, because kids are built from what they eat.

• Reverse the DeJoy-era changes to USPS. Repeal the pointless rules that hamstring the USPS, like its requirement to fund its pension fund to an extravagant degree.

• Fund all libraries to expand their space and selection to include commonly-used household tools, and in population centers, also include the creation of “maker spaces” with stationary tools that can be used while there at the facility. If “maker spaces” already exist in the given community, these funds can be given to the existing makerspace instead, provided they allow free use of the tools to anyone who says they can’t afford a standard membership.

• Use the Defense Production Act to manufacture high quality designs of electric bicycles, such as those made of lightweight but durable alloys like chromoly, and with belt drives, internally-geared hubs, integrated lighting, and shock absorbers. Grant these bikes for free to anyone who will pledge to use them for the majority of their trips under 5 miles. (The vast majority of trips in the U.S. are under 5 miles.) Endeavor to produce them at such a rate where one doesn’t have to wait longer than a year for their granted bike.

Infrastructure programs

• Fund eliminating lead from all potable water distribution. Fund projects to separate wastewater and stormwater systems to prevent “combined sewage overflows” of untreated effluent. Nationalize these two industries so we can spend on it what we need and eliminate the inefficiency of profit. Otherwise protect the water supply by reinstating the EPA’s former authority including to regulate “forever chemicals”; regulate the evaporative cooling of data centers including those used for “AI”; and more thoroughly regulate the distribution of fossil fuels to bring chance of contamination to near zero.

• Build true high speed rail at the standards of China, connecting eastern seaboard to south to Midwest to mountain west to west coast. Ensure long-distance runs are done at higher speed (not just 200 mph), and ban flights between the cities that connect with this extra-high-speed rail. Ban all private air travel, which is the greatest contributor to climate change on a personal scale. The high speed rail system might build luxury rail cars that wealthy people can rent all to themselves and their staff, with high profit margins that feed back into public coffers.

• Fund large-scale “migration of tree species” programs, where we know climate change will move faster than forests of certain species can migrate toward the poles. We must move these forests ourselves with new planting programs. Ensure the programs are evaluated by climate scientists who focus on forests, as some reforestation can, strangely, be bad for the climate. You can do this wrong.

• Build 4x more campsites than we currently have on National Parks and in National Forests

• In addition to heat pump heating and cooling, provide government funding for HEPA filtration and energy recovery ventilation, for every household and public building, within a 5-year timespan. Nationalize the production facilities that build these and expand them. This is a proper use of the Defense Production Act. This will also require a beefing-up of the electrical grid.

Create a just world of work

• Set minimum wage everywhere to the living wage *with one dependent* in that area, and tie it to that. Currently in Norwich, Vermont that is $31/hour. In some other places it could be less, or more. Employers must re-adjust this wage quarterly to reflect updates to living wage.

• Dismantle all monetary policy that makes assets inflate at far greater rates than goods and services. The effect this has had—and make no mistake, it has been encouraged by U.S. monetary policy—is to allow for de facto cutting of wages relative to other things. (Wages can be effectively cut without cutting the number of dollars that someone gets paid.) This status quo has also inflated the value of the holdings of the very wealthy, thus consolidating their political power and further perpetuating the cycle. We will establish policy that seeks to reverse the last several decades of this unequal, unfair inflation. It has prioritized those who have over those who work. Part of this is hobbling the scheme of fractional reserve banking. We will direct the Federal Reserve to make a bank account for every resident (and a simple and good app to manage it), giving them the same overnight interest rate as commercial banks get, which is much better than that offered by consumer banks. By virtue of this interest rate and the guarantee of security, people will shift their money to this better banking system, effectively halting their typical business of turning $1 of yours into $30 or $40 of theirs. (See idea by economist Yanis Varoufakis.) We will also investigate the implications of a possible new system of currency based on hours of labor: with one hour of a person’s labor equaling one hour of every other person’s labor.

• Move overtime rules to indicate that 32+ hours is now considered overtime and must be compensated at time-and-a-half. Mandate that employers only schedule four, 8-hour days in a row, in other words, require three contiguous weekend days. There are to be no exceptions to this rule other than those approved by an office in the Department of Labor. These exceptions are to be sought jointly by employee (or employee union) and employer, and exceptions are to be compensated at 2x that employee’s normal wage.

• We will set minimum paid vacation days (currently zero) to the 10 federal holidays plus five more PTO days to start, and in two years, adding five more PTO days, for a total of 20 paid days per year incumbent on all businesses regardless of size. This is still on the extreme low end of developed economies. For businesses with more employees, they may be required to provide more PTO days.

• Government to fund 20 paid days for parental leave: 20 paid days each for two parents per household, if those parents wish to have it. This is to increase to 30 paid days after 2 years. Require that no business can discriminate against someone using this leave, and ensure enforcement is adequate.

• Repurpose the FBI and local police to largely search out white collar crime and other forms of top-down class war, such as wage theft, which is proven to happen much more often than the “crimes” that are currently enforced against. These tend to be crimes of poverty; institutionalized racism; or bottom-up attempts to reclaim value.