39 Grand Bargain Reforms...83% of Voters Want
- Create incentives for community colleges, employers, unions and other providers to constantly improve and expand programs that train workers for higher paying jobs, especially in fast growing industries.
- Reduce regulations that restrict construction of new affordable housing and infrastructure.
- Support rural and low-income urban areas with education, training, universal broadband access, and investment incentives to promote entrepreneurship and job creation
- Establish an independent agency to evaluate how each Artificial Intelligence initiative is promoting overall progress for ordinary Americans, such as improvements in skills, health, jobs, and job quality.
- Expand earning subsidies for low-wage workers with children.
- Support workers' rights to form, join, and contribute to unions -- and their rights not to.
- Boost federal spending on basic research, and improve the pipeline from publicly funded research to commercialization.
Economic Mobility & Growth
- Revise educational goals and standards to include life skills, such as teamwork and resilience.
- Reform teacher training and professional development to boost teachers performance.
- Hold teachers and administrators to account for students' progress.
- Significantly increase pay for more effective teachers.
- Promote more instruction time, high expectations, frequent teacher feedback, tailoring instructions to students' performance & tutoring as needed.
- Develop programs to help lower income parents support their children's learning.
- Expand families' opportunities to choose among public and charter schools.
- Increase per-student support for under-resourced schools.
- Help state and local education agencies build up their evaluation and research capabilities.
K-12 Education
- Expand support for overall community health, especially in areas where providers lack incentives to go -- rural and distressed communities.
- Coordinate public education and increase funding for healthier lifestyles, nutrition, and prevention, especially about obesity.
- Require each Medicare and Medicaid plan to - measurably - reduce costs and improve their patients' health outcomes. And stop paying providers for each test and procedure they perform.
- Support public and private providers that focus on producing the best health outcomes at the lowest cost (such as Kaiser Permanente).
- Expand free meals to low-income schools year round to ensure that poor children have access to nutritious foods.
- Prevent any business from buying up a monopoly of health care providers in any region.
- Expand federal price negotiations to manage the cost of pharmaceuticals and prescription drugs.
Healthcare
Energy Policy
- Repeal energy subsidies, regulations, and legislation whose costs exceed the benefits.
- Place a price on carbon emissions of at least $51 per ton. And cut income taxes accordingly on low-income and rural families.
- To level the playing field with countries that do not put a price on carbon emissions, create $51 per ton tariff on their products.
- To reduce methane emissions, support resuse technologies and hold current and former owners of abandoned fossil fuel wells liable for capping those wells.
- To move energy across state lines efficiently, increase Federal agencies' authority to plan and issue permits for energy infrastructure, including transmission lines.
- Sharply reduce deductions, exclusions and credits that mostly help high-income families.
- To encourage investment, allow businesses to deduct all expenses, including capital assets, but excluding interest, in the year paid.
- To reduce evasion and promote exports, place a 6% value added tax (VAT) on goods and services at each point in the supply chain -- and rebate the amount to low-income consumers.
- Boost Social Security's cost-effectiveness by raising benefits for low earners, while slowing growth of benefits for high earners, and raise the retirement age for those who can still work.
- End taxation distinctions between corporate and non-corporate businesses.
- Tax the gains on capital assets when they are inherited, ending the ability to avoid such taxes.
- Lower the size of estates exempt from tax (currently $30 million per couple).
Taxes
Federal Spending & Debt
PARTIAL SOLUTION
To push the debt below 100% of GDP by 2030 -- while also paying for improvements in economic mobility, health, and education - the following ideas from earlier sections would , overall, yield $1 trillion annually in savings and revenue.
The Healthcare productivy reforms ending fossil fuel subsidies and putting a price on carbon slashing tax deductions for the well-of the value added tax.
Additional proposal:
To potentially save another $100 billion a year, invite former Secretaries of Defense from both parties to develop a plan for simultaneously increasing defense preparedness while cutting costs -- and require Congress to vote the plan up-or-down.
-Replace congressional committees divided along partisan lines with task forces designed to resolve problems by:
- Asking each group of lawmakers who share priorities on the task forece's topic to choose a spokesperson.
- Any spokesperson who wants to advance their group's priorities would need to hash out differences with the others.
- If the spokespeople reach an agreement, each can pitch it to their colleagues.
-Enact legislation to open up primaries, so that every voter has a voice, and cnadidates across the spectrum compete on a level playing field.
-Enact legislation to prohibit either party from drawing congressional districts to boost its odds of winning elections.
Congressional Reform