America: The Gold Medal Nation
The Olympic games are the greatest field of international competition, where athletes from every nation compete to win gold, silver, or bronze medals. The gold medal is awarded to the best of the best. The competitor who represents the pinnacle of performance and achievement. Unfortunately, when America is measured against its national competitors in the contests that truly matter, we, too often, do not even earn a place on the medal stand.
In the critical measures of educational outcomes for our children, incidences of violence, individual carbon footprint, likelihood of upward social and economic mobility, and affordable quality healthcare and individual longevity, our country consistently ranks below our global competitors. The glaring statistics on our performance should force all of us to demand better from our elected leaders – and from ourselves. Why shouldn’t America rank as the absolute best example in the world in the outcomes that determine the quality of life of our citizens?
Our political reform movement’s singular goal is to dramatically transform our dysfunctional partisan democracy of extremism into a functional democracy driven by innovative and term-limited political leaders. Unlike the duopoly, our aims are not to move the direction of the country Left or Right, but Forward. We want to create a revitalized, world-leading United States: America 2.0. If we want to be the example for the rest of the world to emulate, we must achieve success by leading our nation towards better outcomes in combating the human challenges we all have in common: climate change, poverty, ignorance, sickness, income inequality, and injustice. We must earn the credibility to lead through superior achievement, because no one wants to emulate a loser. America must truly outperform global standards if we want to be the gold medal winner of nations.
The Alliance Party, and its candidates, believe that we should put our national efforts towards excelling in the critical areas that determine quality of life for all Americans, our global communities, and our planet itself. This requires that at a national level we have a unified vision of what success looks like, as well as unity of effort to achieve our objectives. Universal and equal realization of benefits means that our elected officials must be a voice for all the people that they represent, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identification, sexual orientation, religious preferences, etc. They should embrace various cultures and identities to create an inclusive society representative of our tremendous diversity. The United States has one of the most diverse populations on the planet, which is an incredible advantage and opportunity that we should leverage in our aims to be the Gold Medal Nation.
The Alliance Party believes that we are the nation that can lead the world, because we have done it before and still do in a variety of areas, which means that our success in winning the gold is not a matter of ability, but will. We must immediately set our sights on winning the gold in the critical areas of economic renewal, environmental stewardship, providing quality and affordable healthcare], and educating the future generations of Americans to successfully compete on the world stage. These tasks should begin immediately. Today. Without regard for partisan politics, ideological constraints, or historical limitations.
* We are using the Oxford English Dictionary definition of manifesto as a “public declaration of policy and aims, especially one issued before an election by a political party or candidate.”
A FiscalPrint for the Future: Creating America 2.0 and Winning the Economic Renewal Gold Medal
The coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis has had serious public health, economic, and fiscal implications – including the loss of tens of thousands of lives – setting us on a path to another historic Great Depression. In response to the crisis, the federal government has spent trillions of dollars and the Federal Reserve has engaged in a range of unprecedented actions to try to stabilize the economy and help those who have been adversely affected. But they have been made at a time when the country was already on an imprudent and unsustainable fiscal path.
Our elected officials have abandoned their fiduciary responsibility to be good financial stewards of the public’s finances because the American voter has let them off the hook time and time again. As citizens, we must require change and support a whole-of-government economic transformation that is visionary in its breadth and depth and acted upon with urgency and at a scale that is commensurate with the threats we are facing. It must begin today, for it is always more difficult and costly to solve a problem the longer it goes unaddressed. The whole-of-government transformation to repair and renew our economy, and that it is sustainable and delivers benefits to all Americans, must be rooted in principles of:
Pro-growth
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Socially equity
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Culturally acceptable
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Mathematical integrity
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Politically feasibility
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Meaningful bipartisan support
The Alliance Party Believes that we must:
Structure our budget process and management to promote fiscal responsibility
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Tax individuals and corporations equitably
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Aggressively eliminate tax preferences
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Dramatically increase investment in the critical infrastructure that enables our economy and creates job
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Protect the dignity of work through a job guarantee program and provide a livable income for those who cannot work
More information on the detailed policy proposals can be found HERE.
A GreenPrint for the Future: Winning the Environmental Stewardship Gold Medal
From this moment forward, every decision that we make as a society must be done within the context of combating the existential threat of climate change. All of our scientific insights and evidence regarding the severity and pace of climate change demonstrate that we have only a few years – not decades – to mitigate the most serious of consequences. This is not about a fight to “save the planet.” Earth will continue with or without us. It is a fight to “save us from ourselves,” because our choices have exacerbated conditions to the point where they have become a threat to the foundations of security and prosperity for every nation. It is a problem that our individual and collective decisions have created, and which only our individual and collective decisions can resolve.
The Alliance Party believes that we must:
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Transform to a low-carbon economy by investing in 100 percent clean and renewable energy
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Guarantee the right to clean air and water
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Protect our natural resources
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Strengthen urban sustainability and resilience
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Put a generation to work with the creation of 10 million new public and private industry jobs over the next 10 years
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Prepare the workforce for a just transition to green industry careers
More information on the detailed policy proposals can be found HERE.
A CarePrint for the Future: Winning the Health Care Gold Medal
At its best, our health system is among the most expensive in the world – with over 50% of personal bankruptcies caused by an inability to pay medical debt – yet still delivers quality outputs and health outcomes below that of most developed nations. Addressing the deficiencies and disparities within our medical delivery system must be a top priority to restore our economy and stem the tidal wave of personal medical bankruptcies. The federal government must ensure universal access to basic primary, chronic disease, and psychiatric care for all Americans, as well as in-home and skilled nursing home care for the elderly.
The Alliance Party proposes providing every American with a publicly funded basic single payer health plan. A plan where the patient chooses and employs his personal physician – not a big hospital system or the government. This universal single payer basic health care plan should be administered by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which already pays 70% of America’s health care costs. If citizens want different or more coverage than the basic plan, they could pay for it.
The failure to deliver medical care that is both financially efficient and clinically effective has had a deleterious effect on our individual longevity, the quality of our lives, and our economic well-being. Comprehensive and meaningful reform is required for us to compete on the international stage, but more importantly, it will demonstrate that we understand that the health of our society is directly linked to the physical, psychological, and financial health of every individual and that caring for others is the highest American ideal.
The Alliance Party believes we must:
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Create universal access to basic primary, specialty, and psychiatric care
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Provide public health and emergency medical assistance
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Create a fully funded Pandemic Task Force to proactive plan and respond to future crises
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Care for our most vulnerable and the elderly
More information on the detailed policy proposals can be found HERE.
An EduPrint for the Future: Winning the Education Gold Medal
Our ability to secure the future we want for ourselves – to be the gold medal nation – starts with the quality of the educational opportunities available for every child. It is dependent upon how we educate our population and prepare our children and young adults to success in a globally competitive ecosystem. We were the first modern society to believe and invest in the idea of public education for all. But now, other nations have taken our ideas of universal education and beaten us at our own game.
The American dream was built on the foundation that education was the engine that drove the vehicle of upward social and economic mobility. We were right to identify its underpinning role, but somewhere we lost the fuel and the fire to keep making forward progress. Our society today is one of the least upwardly mobile on the planet.
Economic inequalities are inextricably linked to educational inequalities. Children raised in poverty are two or more years behind their more affluent peers in language proficiency and mathematics by the fourth grade, and a disproportionate percentage either never finish secondary education or never close the gap. We must reopen the doors of opportunity that education provides. We must create an environment where the two greatest determinants of a child’s quality of education – and thus the quality of their life – are not their zip code or the color of their skin.
The Alliance Party believes that we must:
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Elevate and reinvigorate the teaching profession
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Prepare our citizens for global competition
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Remove barriers to access to quality public education
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Develop a choice-driven public-school system
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Incentivize public service among our youth
