THE MADISON INSTITUTE
presents
A PROGRESSIVE AGENDA FOR THE NATION
June 2006
representing six months of discussions at TMI’s Progressive Round Table.
For more detailed information, go to www.themadisoninstitute.org.
International Relations The Economy Social Security Health Care Environment Education
International Relations
· Abandon efforts to force U.S. will on other nations.
· Conduct U.S. international relations with a commitment to diplomacy, international law, human rights, racial equality, and full participation in the United Nations.
· Join those nations that have abandoned the death penalty.
· Lead in measures to strengthen the world economy and reduce inequalities between rich and poor nations.
· Join in and lead efforts to preserve the environment and climates essential to human survival and prosperity.
· Require fair labor standards and life-sustaining environmental protections in negotiating international agreements.
· Stop practicing and condoning torture.
The Economy
· Insist that Congress avoid wasteful spending, assure resources adequate for the government to meet its responsibilities to its people, and exercise fiscal discipline.
· Improve government regulation of the private economy to prevent corruption and assure that investment opportunities are honest, conditions for workers safe, and wages adequate to support families.
· Increase government expenditures for maintaining and enhancing the nation’s infrastructure as well as for social programs like education, health-care, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits.
· Adopt a genuinely progressive tax system based largely on income from both capital and wages.
· Continue to tax very large estates to limit wealth being passed to heirs.
· End massive government borrowing except for large capital projects, national emergencies, and countering economic recessions.
· Wean the economy away from dependence on military appropriations.
· Engage in serious efforts to achieve energy independence.
Social Security
· Strengthen Social Security and oppose all efforts to privatize or incorporate commercial components into social insurance programs.
Health Care
· Create one universal single-payer health-care financing system to assure better health for all in the most effective and efficient manner.
· Relieve U.S. businesses from the burden of paying for the nation’s health care.
· Support through public financing the expansion of medical research on stem cells, fertility, and contraception.
· Intensify efforts to expand reproductive choice and improve patient safety.
Environmental Protection
· Return to policies that conserve and restore the environment and protect it from private or public interests that degrade it through ignorance or for economic gain.
· Base environmental policy on sound objective science and open public discussion.
· Protect all species and promote biodiversity.
· Assure that all government agencies cooperate with each other and other nations to protect the environment.
· Promote resource conservation rather than resource consumption.
· Provide all citizens with equal access to clean air and water and a quality environment.
· Adopt land-use policies that emphasize the development and enhancement of existing urban areas and protect undeveloped natural resources and farmlands.
· Restrict the production and use of hazardous agricultural and industrial chemicals.
Education
· Maintain local control of school systems even while equalizing funding, resources, and teacher excellence.
· Hold state and federal governments responsible to equalize educational outcomes for public schools throughout the country.
· Guarantee to all students a rich and varied curriculum and teachers who have been educated in intellectually challenging and exciting university programs.
· Recruit teachers from the top graduates of our universities.
· Assure small class size appropriate to students’ ages.
· Oppose the use of vouchers that disadvantage public schools.
· Oppose reducing funds for under-performing schools.
· Oppose privatization of state universities.
Democratic Government (indispensable for the PROGRESSIVE AGENDA’s implementation)
· Defend the balance of power between the executive, judiciary, and legislative branches of government.
· Re-establish Congress’s constitutionally-mandated war-making powers.
· Protect the freedom of the media so that the media can provide citizens with accurate, wide-ranging information necessary for intelligent citizen-participation in self-government.
· Reduce or eliminate media monopolies.
· Implement the separation of church and state.
· Expand public financing of elections.
· Support campaign-finance reform to reduce campaign costs and level candidates’ financial playing fields.
· Require free television and radio time for candidates for state and federal offices.
· Support electoral redistricting by an impartial body, based on population distribution, designed to equalize each person’s vote.
· Require transparent voting procedures that leave a paper trail whereby electoral outcomes can be verified.Endorse updating voter-registration lists
and voting procedures so that on election days.
Links to Position Papers: