Two hundred twenty-seven years ago, democratic insurgents and reformers
came to Philadelphia to forge a new country that would forever change
the course of human events. They gave us a nation and a government based
on immutable, enduring values: work, responsibility, liberty, equal opportunity
for all, special privileges for none.
Now, at the dawn of what ought to be America's greatest century, too
many of our country's leaders are trying to leave behind the values and
aspirations that have made America great. If we continue on the present
course, the promise of America will never be the same.
President Bush has not kept the promises he made America three years
ago in Philadelphia. His administration promised to expand our prosperity,
but has squandered it. The administration has failed to address the real
problems that most Americans face: paying the soaring costs of health
care and college; saving for retirement; balancing work and family. It
has burdened, betrayed, and abandoned the middle class and all who aspire
to join its ranks.
We want more for America. We will ensure that the values, security,
and aspirations of the broad middle class are forgotten no more. President
Bush has no agenda for the forgotten majority. We do. The party that helped
build America's great middle class is determined to save it.
The beliefs we hold are neither liberal nor conservative, but progressive,
and in the vital center of American values and aspirations. They represent
a new and different course for the country that is more important than
any party.
We believe Americans once again face a grave threat to our security,
and we will give top priority to mobilizing the nation's resources to
meet and defeat our nation's enemies. We believe the most fundamental
test of national leadership today is the willingness to stand up and fight
for America.
We believe America must lead the world, not dominate it. The central
mission of our time is to defend America's security and ideals in the
world through progressive internationalism -- the bold exercise of U.S.
leadership to foster peace, prosperity, and democracy. Working with democratic
allies and international institutions makes us stronger, not weaker.
We believe that the United States must maintain a strong, technologically
superior defense to protect our interests and values. We must never be
afraid to use force to keep our people safe or make the world a less dangerous
place. But force is not our only strength. We must also use our might
to earn the world's respect, not mistrust, and to enlist our friends in
a worldwide fight for freedom, not inspire more enemies to thwart the
American cause.
We believe government's first responsibility is to keep its citizens
safe. The Bush administration has asked too little of the American people
and done too little to make them safe, failing to reorganize Washington
bureaucracies around the new demands of domestic security and denying
help to the communities and responders who are America's first defense.
Government should give all Americans a role in their own safety, not tell
them every few months that their only job is to be scared.
We believe in expanding opportunity, not bureaucracy. We believe
our elected leaders have a responsibility to spend every tax dollar as
carefully as their own. Fiscal discipline is fundamental to sustained
economic growth as well as responsible government. America cannot prosper
if we don't live within our means.
We believe in democratic capitalism -- giving all Americans
willing to work for it the chance to do well and share in America's prosperity.
Government's responsibility is to put its own house in order, keep the
private sector honest, expand markets here and abroad, and equip Americans
for economic success and security. We should give people the tools to
get ahead, not promise them the moon on their nickel.
We believe that the best way to increase the economic well being
of working Americans is to spur strong economic growth. To do that, our
economic policies must be designed to boost productivity and employment.
The Bush administration's myopic and backward-looking tax cuts for the
wealthy neither create jobs nor boost productivity.
We believe our economy should favor people who work hard and play
by the rules, not those who are already at the top. The private sector
is the engine of economic growth. But the strength of our economy depends
on corporate leaders living up to their responsibilities to their workers
and their shareholders.
We believe that a progressive tax code is the right way to pay
for government. We will reverse Republican policies that reward wealth,
not work. When so many families' incomes have stopped going up, it is
wrong to increase the middle-class tax burden.
We believe that education must be America's great equalizer, and
we will strengthen our public schools, not abandon them or tolerate their
failure. We should give parents more choices among public schools, pay
teachers better and expect more in return, and give all Americans willing
to work or to serve the chance to earn their way through college and graduate
debt-free -- not shut down a decade's progress on education reform and
access to college by forcing states to cut back or raise tuition bills
and property taxes.
We believe it is our obligation to secure cleaner air and cleaner
water, and to protect and preserve God's green earth for future generations.
We reject the Bush administration's false choice between environmental
protection and economic growth, and offer a new approach that will spur
new jobs and technologies with the power to improve public health and
safety here and around the world.
We believe that national security and energy security go hand
in hand, and support a "clean growth" energy policy that unleashes
our capacity for innovation to improve the way we use energy resources
today and speed development of the cleaner, more efficient technologies
of tomorrow.
We believe that government must ensure all Americans access to
affordable health insurance and require in return that parents take responsibility
for covering their families.
We believe in preventing crime and punishing criminals and that
America's criminal justice system should be rooted in and responsive to
the communities it serves.
We believe in a new social compact that requires and rewards work
in exchange for public assistance and that ensures that no family with
a full-time worker will live in poverty.
We believe the family is the foundation of American life, and
that we cannot truly call ourselves the richest country on earth when
parents don't have enough time with their children. Government and businesses
have a responsibility to help parents balance work and family, and parents
have a responsibility to support their children and spend the time to
raise them right.
We believe in reforming democracy and government to strip away
top-down bureaucracy and give citizens and communities the power to solve
their own problems. We must be willing to reform old programs in order
to preserve our oldest values.
We believe government must combat discrimination on the basis
of race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation; defend civil liberties;
and stay out of our private lives.
We believe that the common civic ideals Americans share transcend
group differences and forge unity from diversity.
We believe that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
We believe that American citizenship entails responsibilities
as well as rights, and we mean not only to call on our citizens to give
something back to their communities and their country but also to expand
the opportunities for them to do so.
Finally, we believe Americans deserve a government that upholds
their values of faith, family, liberty, responsibility, equal opportunity,
and hard work. The time has come for New Democrats to usher in a new era -- where
Americans' safety is paramount, family is honored, hard work is rewarded,
responsibility is a way of life, and our leaders put country first.
A New Agenda for the Next Decade
America is fighting a two-front war against terrorism and the hateful
ideology of holy war that inspires it. To win this war and keep Americans
safe, we must create an effective system of homeland defense and rally
the world's democracies behind a new strategy for extending liberty and
prosperity to the Middle East.
After World War II, America reorganized itself to fight the Cold War.
The National Security Act of 1947 revamped the Armed Services and created
the CIA and the NSA. Today we need equally dramatic and sweeping changes
to protect ourselves against terrorist attacks at home.
To strengthen our domestic defenses, we propose to:
Reform the security and intelligence agencies the current
administration has been too timid to fix: We need to reform
the FBI, by creating a new domestic intelligence capacity that
can detect and prevent terrorist plots on our soil.
Give communities the resources to keep their citizens
safe: Washington needs to give states and cities the funds
to hire more police, firefighters, and first responders, instead of
cutting back vital law enforcement programs and driving up state and local
taxes.
Bolster a homeland defense system that secures our freedom,
and doesn't trade away our civil liberties: Instead of the Ashcroft
Doctrine of unlimited powers and secret arrests, we should take steps
that will actually make America safer, like enhancing the ability of
government at all levels to gather and share intelligence about potential
terrorist activities here at home.
Strengthen our borders: America is a nation of
immigrants, and our social and economic future will be made stronger by
attracting more immigrants, not fewer. But the INS is broken, and this
administration has no idea how to fix it. It is time to adopt new technologies
such as "smart visas" that help authorities keep tabs
on people who have overstayed their visas or have tried to change their
identity. We must also increase cargo inspections to stop dangerous
materials from entering the United States in the first place.
After a decade that brought the longest sustained decline in crime ever
recorded, this administration has sat back and watched the crime and murder
rates rise again. We need more police, not fewer; stronger enforcement
against gun crime, not empty rhetoric; and a national effort to reduce
crime and punish criminals, not a return to the days when politicians
in Washington talked tough but did nothing to help.
To make America's crime rate go down again, we propose to:
Stop the cop crunch: At a time of rising crime
rates and unprecedented threats to our homeland security, this administration
has caused a reckless, dangerous hollowing out of the nation's police
forces. Washington should help communities put more police on the streets,
not fewer.
End the revolving door of crime: We need to stop
the revolving door of probation and parole that looks the other way
while criminals commit crime after crime. We need regular drug testing
and mandatory treatment for those in the criminal justice system.
Probation, parole, and drug violators should receive real, automatic,
and escalating punishment. We need to hire more probation and parole
officers, and get them out of their offices and onto the streets.
Finally, we need to give offenders who are ready to turn their lives around
the chance to do it.
Unleash new technologies in the war on crime: We
need to give police new tools that arm them with the information
they need about criminal suspects to avoid random searches; allow lower-cost
supervision of people on probation or parole; and make it possible to
disable or trace guns used by unauthorized persons.
To win the new war, Americans need to be tough on terrorism and tough
on the conditions that breed terrorism. Those conditions include harsh
political repression, economic stagnation, and fears of cultural decline.
The United States must fight implacable enemies who are willing to give
their lives to take ours. But we must also win friends among the moderate
majority of people in the Muslim world who do not subscribe to hatred
and violence.
The Bush administration has a plan for waging war but no plan for winning
the peace. It invests billions in weapons of destruction and pennies in
the tools of peaceful construction. It has militarized American diplomacy,
even putting the Pentagon in charge of the nation-building it once scorned.
And the president's unilateral bluster has needlessly turned world opinion
against America.
We seek an America that is admired for the enlightened ways it uses its
enormous power, not despised for throwing its weight around and riding
roughshod over the opinions of other countries.
So, as the work of reconstruction begins in Iraq, we need to repair our
damaged relations with our European and other key allies, engage the United
Nations and other key international institutions, and rally the international
community around a new strategy for liberalizing the greater Middle East.
Therefore, we propose to:
Drain the swamp: The United States needs to support
democracy in the Middle East, not stability. There is no excuse for
the old logic that led the first President Bush to leave Saddam Hussein
in power and leads the current administration to stress America's "strategic
partnership" with corrupt autocracies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The United States needs to throw its political and economic weight and
moral prestige firmly behind the true reformers in the region. We also
need to redouble efforts to reduce our dependence on imported oil, to
lessen the leverage that oil-rich Arab states have on our foreign policy.
Seed the garden: We need a Middle East trade
initiative comparable to the African Growth and Opportunity Act to
bring that region into the modern world, and help those countries open
their economies to trade and investment so they can grow and meet the
material needs of their people.
Reward reform: It's time for a radical
change in foreign aid to make it more strategic, more generous and
more selective. Instead of doling out help based on economic need, we
should reward nations that show real commitments to openness and reform,
and give nothing to regimes that don't.
Transform our military for the 21st century: We
must ensure that our Armed Forces have the personnel, weapons, and doctrine
to win conflicts quickly, decisively, and with lasting results whenever
we call our troops into battle. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq showed
that our military forces have already successfully taken the first steps
toward the necessary transformation. They fought both recent conflicts
with lightning speed, precise targeting, total information dominance,
and the kind of adaptability and flexibility to react quickly to changing
realities on the ground. We must now accelerate and complete military
transformation.
Finally, we need a president who understands how to exercise America's
enormous power in a way that makes it easier rather than harder to promote
our interests and values. Here, President Bush has clearly failed to understand
that the growing power gap between America and everyone else is becoming
a central issue in world politics. His belligerent, tone-deaf diplomacy
has needlessly alienated old friends and allies, rattled adversaries and
raised doubts around the world about America's motives.
We need a president who understands the difference between a democratic
republic and an empire. A republic leads by example, not by maladroit
bluster and bullying. A republic shows a "decent Respect to the Opinions
of Mankind," as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence.
A republic understands that its diplomacy must be backed by the credible
use of force. But a republic as strong as America is today also understands
that we must exercise self-restraint and work with allies and through
international institutions to reassure others that our strength is harnessed
to universal values of prosperity and liberty.
There can no longer be any doubt: The Bush administration's economic
strategy has failed. Congress has given the president all the tax cuts
he wanted, and yet on his watch the private sector has lost more than
3 million jobs, the incomes of ordinary Americans have stopped growing,
and the nation is left with staggering bills that will cost us for generations
to come.
America needs a new growth economics that boosts productivity so that
we can raise incomes without ballooning the deficit or cutting key government
services; that invests in knowledge and scientific research as the key
drivers of growth; that promotes robust competition in the private sector
as the best tool to drive innovation and productivity; and that recognizes
fiscal responsibility as a prerequisite of growth. Our economic strategy
will restore fiscal discipline to the government, progressivity to the
tax code, responsibility to the markets, and job and income growth to
the American people.
To put economic policy back in line with America's values, we propose
to:
Stop Washington from spending and giving away money it
doesn't have: We must restore pay-as-you-go rules so Congress
can't enact a new spending program or a new tax cut without offsetting
savings to pay for it. Congress also must restore annual caps on discretionary
spending. Government spending shouldn't grow faster than Americans' incomes.
Invest in the building blocks of the knowledge economy:
We need to significantly enhance the ability of the public sector
to work in partnership with companies and individuals to boost knowledge
and innovation. We must reverse the Bush administration's cuts to key
public investments in science, technology, innovation, education, and
skills, as those investments play a critical role in providing the fuel
to run a high-powered, knowledge economy.
End corporate welfare as we know it: Our
government hands out about $65 billion in subsidies to corporations each
year for such things as advertising V-8 juice and Friskies cat food overseas.
We need an independent commission, modeled after the military base-closing
commission, to scrutinize and eliminate corporate subsidies.
Cut taxes for the middle class, not the wealthy:
Instead of expanding opportunity and rewarding work, the Bush tax cuts
in 2001 and 2003 stifled prosperity, rewarded privilege, and shifted more
of the tax burden onto the middle class. The tax cut windfall for the
very wealthy should be canceled.
This administration believes in ending the taxation of wealth, and pinning
its hopes for economic growth on the wealthy. We have a very different
vision of economic growth: democratic capitalism, the idea that the American
economy will grow faster if every American has the chance to get ahead.
When workers have more of a stake in prosperity, their companies and our
economy will grow faster. When we demand responsibility and punish rather
than ignore those who break the rules, it won't just make our values stronger,
it will strengthen our markets. When we reward hard work, no citizenry
on earth is willing to work harder.
Government's job is to equip working Americans with the tools for economic
success. To fulfill that goal, we propose to:
Reward work, not wealth: The current administration's
economic values are bad for America. It is wrong that a billionaire now
pays a lower tax rate on what he owns than his secretary pays on what
she earns. The very wealthy should not pay lower taxes on the stocks
they trade than middle-class and working Americans pay on the hard work
they do.
Reform the tax code to help families get ahead:
Instead of annual tax giveaways for the wealthy, America needs tax
reform and relief to make our economy stronger, our tax code simpler,
and our families better off -- by helping young people buy a home,
making it easier for families to invest and pay for college, and
giving all Americans the chance to save for retirement.
Give all Americans the chance to own a piece of the rock:
We should give firms incentives to offer stock options to all their
workers, not just top executives. We should use the tax code to make
it easier for poor and middle-class families to accumulate wealth and
savings.
Expand the winners' circle: To make sure every
worker has a stake in the New Economy, we need to overhaul the current
bureaucratic training system, and provide a system of lifelong learning
based on flexible "New Economy Work Scholarships" that
let dislocated workers choose the training and skills they need. We must
also modernize the outdated unemployment insurance system by making
it a trampoline, not a safety net, so that unemployed workers can get
training, and low-wage and part-time workers who lose their jobs through
no fault of their own don't get left behind.
Open new markets: Rising exports sparked 30 percent
of American growth in the 1990s. We will restart this growth engine by
reducing barriers to American goods and services in the Western
Hemisphere and the world at large, and put money in family bank accounts
by eliminating regressive import taxes on clothes, shoes, and other
goods at home.
Give every worker a chance to save in a universal pension
account: We should overhaul the current system to give workers
more control over their investment choices, and fold today's myriad tax-favored
savings accounts into one "universal pension" that workers
would take from job to job.
America deserves a new era of real responsibility and reform. Despite
his promise, the president has delivered neither at a time when Washington
and Wall Street cry out for both. After the greatest corporate scandals
in history, we need to take bold, clear steps to promote competition and
restore confidence in markets. We must break the business culture that
encourages those at the top to look out for themselves at the expense
of their shareholders and workers.
With the largest deficits in history, Washington must stop doling out
special favors to special interests. We need to reform government to make
it work better, not just grow bigger. We need to restore participation
and confidence in our democracy.
At a time when much of the world is emulating American values and institutions,
too many Americans have lost confidence in their political system. They
are turned off by a partisan debate that often seems to revolve not around
opposing philosophies but around contending sets of interest groups. They
believe that our current system for financing campaigns gives disproportionate
power to wealthy individuals and groups and exerts too much influence
over legislative and regulatory outcomes.
It is long past time to launch the most sweeping political and corporate
reform effort since the Progressive Era. We propose to:
Return politics to the people: As campaign costs
soar at every level, we need to move toward public financing of
all general elections and press broadcasters to donate television and
radio time to candidates. We should do away with closed primaries and
caucuses, which take away the voice of the largest group of Americans -- those
who don't affiliate with either party. For the same reason, we should
break up the congressional redistricting monopoly, in which both
parties endlessly gerrymander to protect incumbents and take away voter
choice.
Hold corporations accountable: The future of our
free enterprise system depends on setting and enforcing clear rules of
the road. We need to give stockholders more say over the companies they
own, and stop the scandal of excessive CEO pay. We also need to promote
real competition in every sphere, including ending laws shielding businesses
from online competition.
Replace bureaucracy with network government: Much
of what government does is too bureaucratic, too centralized, and too
inefficient for the 21st century. We need to bring government into
the Information Age by using information technology and the Internet
to allow citizens to conduct all business online; to measure
results and publish information on performance; and to push decisions
down to communities while holding them to high standards of public accountability.
It's time to go beyond reinventing old bureaucracies, and instead replace
them with more agile performance-based organizations. We also support
closer collaboration between government and civic groups, including faith-based
organizations, in tackling public problems.
America's health care system costs too much, asks too little, and fails
to capture the promise of a new era that could offer revolutionary advances
in quality and choice.
Health care costs are increasing by double digits every year, driving
employers to cut back on benefits and making it harder for employees to
afford premiums. While these rising costs are crippling businesses and
workers, the Bush administration has done nothing to make health care
more affordable. The president has proposed a flawed tax credit for health
insurance. But, despite opportunities in many tax bills, he has made virtually
no effort to fight for it in Congress.
But Americans don't want a big government takeover of the health care
system either. We shouldn't spend money we don't have on one-size-fits-all
plans that won't work. Instead, we should work toward one goal -- better
health for all Americans -- through a variety of means: investing in
scientific research to produce cures, improving private health care markets
and public programs, and increasing everyone's capacity to take responsibility
for their health and health care. Our priorities should be to:
Create a National Cure Center: We need a new institute
dedicated to finding the next generation of treatments, medicines, and
vaccines -- complementing the work of NIH by leading a major public-private
push to find cures for major chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's,
Parkinson's, arthritis, diabetes, sickle cell anemia, AIDS, and cystic
fibrosis.
Make health care affordable: Too many Americans
can't find health plans that have affordable premiums or that allow them
to see the doctors they need. We should allow Americans to buy into
the same plan that members of Congress get today and give Americans
more choices for quality affordable health care.
Use tax credits to expand coverage: The best way
to help the millions of working Americans who don't get adequate health
insurance from their employers is to offer them tax credits to buy coverage.
Small businesses and self-employed Americans often have to pay higher
premiums or can't find a plan that meets their needs. We should give them
tax credits to make coverage more affordable.
Inspire responsibility: We should encourage responsibility
by offering a new bargain on health care: We'll ensure all Americans
access to affordable health insurance, and require in return that parents
take responsibility for covering their families.
Modernize the health care system for the 21st century:
As the baby boomers retire, we must not only reform Medicare and expand
access to prescription drugs, we need to modernize health care to manage
chronic diseases, like diabetes and arthritis. We also must reorient health
care to emphasize disease management and prevention and make better use
of 21st-century technology to reduce waste and abuse and improve health
care.
Every day across America, millions of parents do everything in their
power to care for their children and prepare them for a bright future.
But they are often raising their kids while juggling full-time jobs with
long hours. Parents have 22 fewer hours to spend with their children each
week than they did 35 years ago.
This administration has made it even harder to be a good employee and
a good parent. Governments don't raise children, parents do -- but parents
can use a hand, not another set of burdens. We propose a series of initiatives
that will help make America's families stronger:
Expand support for after-school programs, not cuts in
them: The Bush administration wants to cut after-school services,
which used to command enthusiastic bipartisan support. We should give
states and cities the help they need to provide after-school services
for every child who needs them to have more time to learn and a safe
place to stay off the streets and out of trouble.
Give parents more time with children: New parents
deserve the chance to spend time with their newborn children. The administration
has made it harder for states to provide paid parental leave, when we
should be making it easier. We should help more parents take family
leave by offering tax credits and a system of paid leave through the
unemployment insurance system.
Honor the sacrifices parents, especially mothers, make:
We should eliminate the motherhood penalty in Social Security,
and allow parents who take time off work during the first three years
of their child's life to later make up the tax-free retirement contributions
they missed.
Honor our commitment to seniors by ensuring the future
solvency of Social Security and Medicare: We should reverse the
Bush administration's fiscal recklessness, which has dramatically undercut
the nation's ability to prepare for the coming retirement of the baby
boom generation. We should make the necessary reforms to keep costs
from exploding, modernize benefits, and give beneficiaries more choice
and control over their retirement and health security. We also should
create retirement savings accounts to enable low-income Americans
to save for their retirement.
Now more than ever, quality public education is the key to equal opportunity
and upward mobility in the world. Yet our most disadvantaged children
often attend the worst schools. While lifting the performance of all schools,
we must place special emphasis on strengthening those institutions serving,
and too often failing, low-income students.
To close this achievement and opportunity gap, we should demand accountability
and ensure that every school has the resources needed to achieve higher
standards, including safe and modern physical facilities, well-paid teachers
and staff, and opportunities for remedial help after school and during
summers. Accountability comes from parents, too. Parents must accept greater
responsibility for supporting their children's education. We need greater
choice, customization, competition, and accountability within the public
school system, not a diversion of public funds to private schools that
are unaccountable to taxpayers.
This administration promised to invest in reform, but it has broken that
promise. Instead of closing the achievement gap, the White House seems
more intent on closing the gap between the two parties' poll ratings.
We propose real reforms that will make a real difference:
Reform with results: Under-performing public schools
need more resources and real accountability for results. Accountability
means measuring student learning with standards-based assessments, ensuring
that teachers have subject-matter competency, and holding schools accountable
for results. Washington should keep its promise to provide the resources
to make reform work.
Put a qualified teacher in every classroom: We
need a new bargain to pay teachers better, and ask more of them in
return. It's time for an intensive, national effort to encourage more
bright young people to become teachers, persuade good teachers to remain
in teaching, and to hold all educators accountable for student learning.
We need to improve the way we pay teachers, and pay teachers more for
agreeing to teach in communities and subjects where we need them most.
Ensure universal public school choice: We
should let every parent choose which public school their children attend;
provide transportation within the district; encourage the creation
of more charter schools, making sure they meet the same standards
as other schools, and shutting down the ones that don't; and work at all
levels of government to make education funding more portable so that a
student brings money to the school he chooses and takes money from the
school he leaves. If a district, a group of districts, or a state seeks
to provide real universal public school choice for its students,
Washington should help pay for it.
Modernize and shrink high schools: The basic model
for America's high schools is more than a century old. We need to replace
factory-style schools with smaller, more flexible and versatile schools
better suited to equip our children for the knowledge economy. Over the
last 50 years, the average enrollment in high schools has increased five
times over -- while our high school students now lag behind much of
the world in academic performance. Students do better and stay in school
longer in smaller schools. We should strengthen our high schools by making
them smaller and more academically rigorous.
Make it easier to go to college, not harder: This
administration has presided over the steepest rise in public college tuition
in nearly two decades, at a time when a college education is more important
than ever. We need to make it easier for families to afford college. We
should simplify the bewildering array of education tax credits, and
replace them with a single education credit and with a single set
of definitions that every family can use and understand. We also should
dramatically expand opportunities for young people to earn their way through
college through work-study and national service so that students
willing to work or serve can graduate debt free.
Instead of honoring work, the Bush administration has made it harder
to find. Instead of rewarding work, this administration has punished many
who work the hardest. One million Americans fell into poverty in the first
year of the Bush presidency, yet the most recent Bush tax cut deliberately
denied eight million low-income taxpayers any relief whatsoever.
In the 1990s, the Clinton presidency helped lift eight million Americans
out of poverty, and millions of families finally experienced the dignity
of work and self-sufficiency. Today, we have an obligation to help more
poor Americans resume that march to independence. The success of welfare
reform will not be complete until we embrace an even more ambitious social
goal -- helping every working family lift itself from poverty.
Our new social compact must reinforce work, responsibility, and family.
By expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, increasing the supply of affordable
child care, reforming tax policies that hurt working families, making
sure absent parents live up to their financial obligations, promoting
access to home ownership and other wealth-building assets, and refocusing
other social policies on the new goal of rewarding work, we can create
a new progressive bargain: No American family with a full-time worker
will live in poverty.
We propose to:
Finish the job of welfare reform: To make sure
everyone who can work goes to work, we need to raise work requirements
on the states, and give states the resources to succeed by expanding
child care support for working mothers. We should invest in transitional
work projects that give hard-to-employ welfare recipients wage-paying
community service jobs to prepare them for the rigors of the private workforce.
To help the working poor build assets and self-sufficiency, we should
expand Individual Development Accounts that match their savings
toward a home, college, job training, or a small business. We should modernize
food stamps to give working families greater flexibility, and give
states incentives not only to reduce caseloads but to help families move
up the income ladder.
Require absent fathers to go to work and pay child support:
Poor mothers shouldn't have to carry the whole load of welfare reform.
Anyone who fathers a child has a responsibility to help support that child.
We should give poor fathers the skills they need to get a job. But
if they owe child support, we should require fathers to go to work and
pay it.
Launch a national media campaign against teen pregnancy:
We must redouble efforts to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies and
eliminate tax policies that penalize marriage. A national media campaign
will send a simple message to our young people: Kids should not have kids.
Since teen mothers make poor marriage prospects, we believe the best way
to strengthen marriage will be to reduce teen pregnancies.
America's first generation of environmental policies made impressive
progress toward abating pollution of the air, water, and land. But by
posing a false choice between economic growth and sound energy and environmental
policies, the Bush administration has launched a new round in the green
wars and stymied a second generation of progress.
It is time for a new approach that unites sound energy and environmental
policy with our vision for national security and economic growth.
We propose to:
Reward innovation, information, and stewardship:
It is time for a second-generation environmental strategy that
strives for better environmental results. We need to encourage innovation
by setting environmental goals and giving key players the leeway to develop
alternative means of achieving them. We need to provide information to
empower not just bureaucrats, but local communities and citizens, with
reliable environmental data. We need to promote stewardship by encouraging
communities to take responsibility for their environmental quality of
life, and giving them the leeway to devise solutions suitable to their
particular circumstances. We seek a new brand of civic environmentalism
focused on locally designed strategies to achieve high environmental standards
actively encouraged at every level of government, in a partnership for
progress, not a rollback.
Promote clean growth: We propose a clean growth
energy policy that seeks abundant and affordable energy consistent with
economic prosperity and across-the-board improvements in environmental
quality. We reject the "Drain America First" strategy of focusing
the debate on opening Alaska's Arctic Refuge to drilling.
Make use of market forces: We propose regulating
greenhouse gas emissions with a flexible and market-oriented system
that will create incentives for faster progress against emissions than
can be required by law. It's the same system that succeeded brilliantly
in our campaign against acid rain.
Make cars more efficient: We need to improve fuel
economy in the cars consumers want. At the same time, we want to help
our auto industry lead the world in the production of a new generation
of clean, high-performance cars.
America must never forget the spirit of 9/11. Heroes gave their lives
trying to save lives; volunteers lined up to give blood, money, or time.
Once again, we showed the world that at the heart of the American idea
is a deep belief in the dignity and duty of every citizen.
All of us have something to give and each of us has a responsibility
to serve. To protect our nation and meet our potential, we will have to
harness the faith, the energy, and the commitment of people of all ages
in communities across the country.
Instead of challenging America, the Bush administration has embraced
an ethic of every man for himself. Americans want to serve a cause greater
than themselves. Yet the president's main challenge to the citizenry has
been: They also serve who fly and shop.
It is time to renew the spirit of service and citizenship with a higher
politics of national purpose. We should:
Transform the Selective Service System into a new, more
comprehensive, recruitment-oriented National Service System:
By using the draft registration process to challenge young people
to actually serve, connecting this call to service with both military
and civilian programs targeted at our new security needs, and including
both men and women in this new program, we will help bring a whole
new "Greatest Generation" into service tackling causes greater
than self, and give millions of young Americans the chance to earn GI
Bill-type benefits for college.
Expand AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and the new short-term
Citizen Soldier enlistment program: The president promised to
expand AmeriCorps, then cut it instead. We should increase its ranks
tenfold over the next 10 years and connect this expansion to the new
mission of homeland security. We should also expand the Citizen Soldier
enlistment program to bring a greater cross-section of Americans into
our Armed Forces and ease the growing strains on our Reserves.
In addition, we should scale up the Peace Corps so that it is once again
a vital component of U.S. efforts to promote political and economic
freedom abroad.
Enlist Americans in the effort to prepare our country
for the threats we face: Firefighters, police officers, and emergency
response teams are the new GIs in our domestic war on terror -- and
we'll need a lot more of them. We should pass a new GI Bill that
offers college aid to anyone who signs up to defend America at home. One
of the most important defenses against civil attack is to make sure
citizens are ready. Washington needs to understand that changing the
alert color won't do Americans any good without a civil defense corps
to give them solid, reliable information about biological, chemical, or
other terrorist threats.
Ask older Americans to join the call for service:
We should make the most of the aging of America by giving seniors the
chance to serve as positive role models for our children and use their
credibility and compassion to help their infirm or disabled peers in ways
that no one else can.
Make service a condition of high school graduation:
Young people need to understand citizenship and the rights and responsibilities
they have as Americans. Some states already require service before
graduation and Washington should help all states that want to do so.
This agenda, rooted in values that most Americans share, and faithful
to the progressive traditions of our party, offers the country a dramatically
different vision of our future, and a bold, responsible path for realizing
it. On a platform of security, opportunity, responsibility, and reform,
Democrats can confidently go to the country in 2004 and make the case
for replacing a Republican administration that has failed to keep its
promises and failed to provide the leadership we need at a key moment
in American history.
